SOURCE: "Aborting the 'Mother Plot': Politics and Generation in Absalom and Achitophel," in ELH, Vol. 62, No. 2, Summer 1995, pp. 267-93.

In the following excerpt, Greenfield observes that a marked ambiguity in Dryden's poem Absalom and Achitophel reflects the confusion and changing attitudes toward sexual biology, succession, and the monarchy which occurred during his era.

Although critics have discussed the connections between fatherhood and kingship in Absalom and Achitophel, nobody has yet attended to the poem's less obvious, but equally important and politically-charged representations of maternity. Absalom and Achitophel begins and ends with references to mothers: the opening describes how, despite the queen's infertility, the lustful David has still managed to create "several Mothers" (13), and the poem concludes with David's stunning image of a "Viper-like" destruction of the "Mother Plot" against him (1013). Indeed, the shift between these framing images of maternity is a central mechanism in the poem's royalist resolution...