The Politics of Affectivity in Early Modern England

Summary

IF the Body Politique have any Analogy to the Natural, in my weak judgment, an Act of Oblivion were as necessary in a Hot, Distemper’d State, as an Opiate woud be in a Raging Fever.’ So Dryden wrote in the preface to that masterpiece of bodily politics, Absalom and Achitophel. I would postpone, for a moment, an inquiry into the strategies of this analogy, or of the whole of that superb essay on body politics that constitutes the poem itself; but I want to register here both the analogy and the hypothetical mood into which Dryden has cast that most common and commonplace of political figures. The year is 1681 and the occasion is the defeat of Exclusion: Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarcha, the cornerstone of late Stuart divine right theory, has just been published; the Earl of Shaftesbury has been put to trial on charges of high treason; and Charles II would now begin his rule without parliaments. But Absalom and Achitophel, the text that proved the most enduring and most entertaining of patriarchal arguments, begins with diffidence and caution:

’Tis not my intention to make an Apology for my Poem: Some will think it needs no Excuse; and others will receive none. The Design, I am sure, is honest: but he who draws his Pen for one Party, must expect to make Enemies of the other. (The Poems, I.215, 1–4)

Far from an exultant celebration of Tory fundamentals, or a trumpeting of divine right authority, far even from a nostalgic invocation of the organic wholeness of the commonweal, the Preface seems to propose not the logic or likelihood but the mere possibility that an organic way of thinking about the state might allow the prescription of political remedies.

It had not always been so. In James I’s addresses to his parliaments, in Donne’s sermons at Whitehall, in Jonson’s hymn to the Sidneys at Penshurst, in the emblematic theatre of the court masque, the body politic had been figured as the certain centre of civic relations, and its idioms were invariably love and desire. By the close of the seventeenth century desire still haunted politics, but its forms and practices came closer to pornography than to Platonism, and not only in the scurrilous satires or elegant and scandalous verse that circulated at Charles II’s court.