Skip to main content

How Dryden Created an Abomination that Would Haunt the Next Century

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Allegory in Enlightenment Britain
  • 33 Accesses

Abstract

John Dryden experimented with allegory at the same time as Bunyan. Yet his experiments looked very different. This chapter argues that Dryden’s “Absalom and Achitophel” sets the stage for his later poem “The Hind and the Panther.” “Hind and the Panther” is one of the most ambitious, most perplexing, and most telling Enlightenment experiments with allegory. It is a literary abomination, a rare reification of the phantom threat beginning to dominate the Enlightenment. What future writers would go out of their way to avoid, Dryden does with full force.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 49.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Anderson, Judith H. 1970. “‘Nor Man It is’: The Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene.” PMLA 85: 65-77.

    Google Scholar 

  • Auerbach, Erich. 1984. “Figura.” Scenes from the Drama of European Literature. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. (Original work published 1938)

    Google Scholar 

  • Bible, The. 2008. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Christie, W.D. 1926. Dryden: Select Poems. Ed. C.H. Firth. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clark, Ira. 1982. Christ Revealed: The History of the Neotypological Lyric in the English Renaissance. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Doody, Margaret Anne. 1985. The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dryden, John. 1972. The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1681-1684. Ed. H.T. Swedenberg, Jr. Vol. 2. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dryden, John. 1969. The Works of John Dryden: Poems 1685-1692. Ed. Earl Miner. Vol III. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Franzius, Wolfgang. 1672. The History of Brutes; Or, a Description of Living Creatures. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fujimura, Thomas. 1961. “Dryden’s Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem.” PMLA 76: 205- 17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Johnson, Samuel. 2010. The Lives of the Poets. Ed. John H. Middendorf. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kantorowicz, Ernest H. 1997. The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. (Original work published 1957)

    Google Scholar 

  • Korshin, Paul J. 1982. Typologies in England, 1650-1820. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewalski, Barbara. 1979. Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century English Lyric. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, C.S. 1939. “Shelley, Dryden, and Mr. Eliot.” Rehabilitations and Other Essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • McKeon, Michael. 1987. “Historicizing Absalom and Achitophel.” The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, edited by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown. New York, NY: Methuen, Inc.

    Google Scholar 

  • McKeon, Michael. 2015. “Civil and Religious Liberty in Seventeenth-Century England: A Case Study in Secularization.” Representation, Heterodoxy, and Aesthetics: Essays in Honor of Ronald Paulson. Ed. Ashley Marshall. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Montagu, Charles and Matthew Prior. 1687. The hind and the panther transvers’d to the story of The country-mouse and the city-mouse. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ness, Christopher. 1680. A Key (with the whip) to open the mystery & iniquity of the poem called, Absalom & Achitophel shewing its scurrilous reflections upon both king and kingdom. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ogilby, John. 1651. The Fables of Æsop, Paraphras’d in Verse, and adorn’d with Sculpture. London.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parker, Brent E. 2017. “Typology and Allegory: Is There a Distinction? A Brief Examination of Figural Reading,” Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 21.1: 58-83.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pinnock, Andrew. 2010. “A Double Vision of Albion: Allegorical Re-Alignments in the Dryden-Purcell Semi-Opera King Arthur.” Restoration 34: 55-81.

    Google Scholar 

  • Roper, Alan. 2002. “Absalom’s Issue: Parallel Poems in the Restoration.” Studies in Philology 99: 268-94.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stump, Donald V. 1988. “The Two Deaths of Mary Stuart: Historical Allegory in Spenser’s Book of Justice.” Spenser Studies 9: 81-105.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wallace, John M. 1969. “Dryden and History: A Problem in Allegorical Reading.” ELH 36: 265-90.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Jason J. Gulya .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Gulya, J.J. (2022). How Dryden Created an Abomination that Would Haunt the Next Century. In: Allegory in Enlightenment Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19036-0_3

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics