John Dryden

John Dryden
Portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1693
Poet Laureate of England
In office 13 April 1668 – 1688
Monarchs	Charles II (until 1685) James II
Preceded by	Position established
Succeeded by	Thomas Shadwell
Personal details
Born	19 August 1631 Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, England
Died	12 May 1700 (aged 68) London, England
Spouse	Lady Elizabeth Howard (m. 1663)
Children	Charles, John, and Erasmus Henry
Education	Trinity College, Cambridge
Occupation	Poet literary critic playwright librettist
Writing career
Language	English
Period	1659–1700
Genres	Satire playwright fable poetry essay libretto translation
Movement	Classicism
Signature

John Dryden (/ˈdraɪdən/; 19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".

Early life

Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering. His father was paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent as a King's Scholar to Westminster School where his headmaster was Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and a severe disciplinarian. Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit, encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden's response to this was, he clearly respected the headmaster and would later send two of his sons to school at Westminster.

As a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained pupils in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue. This is a skill which would remain with Dryden and influence his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical patterns. The Westminster curriculum included weekly translation assignments which developed Dryden's capacity for assimilation. This was also to be exhibited in his later works. His years at Westminster were eventful, and his first published poem, an elegy with a strong royalist feel on the death of his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings, from smallpox, alludes to the execution of King Charles I, which took place on 30 January 1649, very near the school, where Busby had first prayed for the king and then locked in his schoolboys to prevent their attending the spectacle.

In 1650 Dryden went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he would have experienced a return to the religious and political ethos of his childhood: the Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher by the name of Thomas Hill who had been a rector in Dryden's home village. Though there is little specific information on Dryden's undergraduate years, he would probably have followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. In 1654 he graduated as a BA, at the top of the list for Trinity that year. In June of the same year Dryden's father died, leaving him some land which generated a little income, but not enough to live on.

Returning to London during the Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe. This appointment may have been the result of influence exercised on his behalf by his cousin the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering. At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed with the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Soon afterwards he published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), a eulogy on Cromwell's death which is cautious and prudent in its emotional display. In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the Interregnum is illustrated as a time of chaos, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.

Later life and career

After the Restoration, as Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day, he transferred his allegiances to the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more panegyrics: To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662) and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public. These, and his other nondramatic poems, are occasional—that is, they celebrate public events. Thus they are written for the nation rather than the self, and the Poet Laureate (as he would later become) is obliged to write a certain number of these per annum. In November 1662, Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled for non-payment of his dues.

On 1 December 1663, Dryden married the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady Elizabeth. Dryden's works occasionally contain outbursts against the married state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate side of his marriage. Lady Elizabeth bore three sons, one of whom (Erasmus Henry) became a Roman Catholic priest.

With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was not successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678).

Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670).

When the Great Plague of London closed the theatres in 1665, Dryden retreated to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), arguably the best of his unsystematic prefaces and essays. Dryden constantly defended his own literary practice, and Of Dramatick Poesie, the longest of his critical works, takes the form of a dialogue in which four characters—each based on a prominent contemporary, with Dryden himself as 'Neander'—debate the merits of classical, French and English drama. The greater part of his critical works introduce problems which he is eager to discuss, and show the work of a writer of independent mind who feels strongly about his own ideas, ideas which demonstrate the breadth of his reading. He felt strongly about the relation of the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675) has a prologue which denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama. His play All for Love (1678) was written in blank verse, and was to immediately follow Aureng-Zebe.

Dryden's poem "An Essay upon Satire" contained a number of attacks on King Charles II, his mistresses and courtiers, but most pointedly on the Earl of Rochester, a notorious womaniser. Rochester responded by hiring thugs who attacked Dryden whilst walking back from Will's Coffee House (a popular London coffee house where the Wits gathered to gossip, drink and conduct their business) to his house on Gerrard Street. At around 8 pm on 18 December 1679, Dryden was attacked in Rose Alley behind the Lamb & Flag pub, near his home in Covent Garden. Dryden survived the attack, offering £50 for the identity of the thugs placed in the London Gazette, and a Royal Pardon if one of them would confess. No one claimed the reward.

Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, a more personal product of his laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden's main goal in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offenses against literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of him on the stage and in print." It is not a belittling form of satire, but rather one which makes his object great in ways which are unexpected, transferring the ridiculous into poetry. This line of satire continued with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). His other major works from this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England [against catholicism]; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word 'biography' to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

He wrote Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the Catholic King and Queen on 10 June 1688.

When, later in the same year, James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, Dryden's refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary, left him out of favour at court. Thomas Shadwell succeeded him as Poet Laureate, and he was forced to give up his public offices and live by the proceeds of his pen. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than writing for the stage. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil (1697), which was published by subscription. The publication of the translation of Virgil was a national event and brought Dryden the sum of £1,400. Dryden translated the Aeneid into couplets, turning Virgil's almost 10,000 lines into 13,700 lines; Joseph Addison wrote the (prose) prefaces for each book, and William Congreve checked the translation against the Latin original. His final translations appeared in the volume Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a series of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernised adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden's own poems. As a translator, he made great literary works in the older languages available to readers of English.

Death

Dryden died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later. He was the subject of poetic eulogies, such as Luctus Brittannici: or the Tears of the British Muses; for the Death of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700), and The Nine Muses. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque commemorates Dryden at 43 Gerrard Street in London's Chinatown. He lived at 137 Long Acre from 1682 to 1686 and at 43 Gerrard Street from 1686 until his death.

In his will, he left The George Inn at Northampton to trustees, to form a school for the children of the poor of the town. This became John Dryden's School, later The Orange School.

Reputation and influence

Dryden was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age. He established the heroic couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrine and triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet—Auden referred to him as "the master of the middle style"—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident in the elegies written about him. Dryden's heroic couplet became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. Alexander Pope was heavily influenced by Dryden and often borrowed from him; other writers were equally influenced by Dryden and Pope. Pope famously praised Dryden's versification in his imitation of Horace's Epistle II.i: "Dryden taught to join / The varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine." Samuel Johnson summed up the general attitude with his remark that "the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry." His poems were very widely read, and are often quoted, for instance, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's essays.

Johnson also noted, however, that "He is, therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often pathetic; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions purely natural, that he did not esteem them in others. Simplicity gave him no pleasure." Readers in the first half of the 18th century did not mind this too much, but later generations considered Dryden's absence of sensibility a fault.

One of the first attacks on Dryden's reputation was by William Wordsworth, who complained that Dryden's descriptions of natural objects in his translations from Virgil were much inferior to the originals. However, several of Wordsworth's contemporaries, such as George Crabbe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott (who edited Dryden's works), were still keen admirers of Dryden. Besides, Wordsworth did admire many of Dryden's poems, and his famous "Intimations of Immortality" ode owes something stylistically to Dryden's "Alexander's Feast". John Keats admired the Fables, and imitated them in his poem Lamia. Later 19th-century writers had little use for verse satire, Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed them as "classics of our prose". He did have a committed admirer in George Saintsbury, and was a prominent figure in quotation books such as Bartlett's, but the next major poet to take an interest in Dryden was T. S. Eliot, who wrote that he was "the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth century", and that "we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden." However, in the same essay, Eliot accused Dryden of having a "commonplace mind". Critical interest in Dryden has increased recently, but, as a relatively straightforward writer (William Empson, another modern admirer of Dryden, compared his "flat" use of language with Donne's interest in the "echoes and recesses of words"), his work has not occasioned as much interest as Andrew Marvell's, John Donne's or Pope's.

Dryden is believed to be the first person to assert that English sentences should not end in prepositions because Latin sentences cannot end in prepositions. Dryden created the proscription against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase, 'The bodies that those souls were frighted from.' However, he did not provide the rationale for his preference. Dryden often translated his writing into Latin, to check whether his writing was concise and elegant, Latin being considered an elegant and long-lived language with which to compare; then Dryden translated his writing back to English according to Latin-grammar usage. As Latin does not have sentences ending in prepositions, Dryden may have applied Latin grammar to English, thus forming the rule of no sentence-ending prepositions, subsequently adopted by other writers.

The phrase "blaze of glory" is believed to have originated in Dryden's 1686 poem The Hind and the Panther, referring to the throne of God as a "blaze of glory that forbids the sight."

Poetic style

What Dryden achieved in his poetry was neither the emotional excitement of the early nineteenth-century romantics nor the intellectual complexities of the metaphysicals. His subject matter was often factual, and he aimed at expressing his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated manner. Although he uses formal structures such as heroic couplets, he tried to recreate the natural rhythm of speech, and he knew that different subjects need different kinds of verse. In his preface to Religio Laici he says that "the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic... The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion.... A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth."

Translation style

While Dryden had many admirers, he also had his share of critics, Mark Van Doren among them. Van Doren complained that in translating Virgil's Aeneid, Dryden had added "a fund of phrases with which he could expand any passage that seemed to him curt." Dryden did not feel such expansion was a fault, arguing that as Latin is a naturally concise language it cannot be duly represented by a comparable number of words in English. "He...recognized that Virgil 'had the advantage of a language wherein much may be comprehended in a little space' (5:329–30). The 'way to please the best Judges...is not to Translate a Poet literally; and Virgil least of any other' (5:329)."

For example, take lines 789–795 of Book 2 when Aeneas sees and receives a message from the ghost of his wife, Creusa.

iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem.’
haec ubi dicta dedit, lacrimantem et multa volentem
dicere deseruit, tenuisque recessit in auras.
ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;
ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.
sic demum socios consumpta nocte reviso

Dryden translates it like this:

I trust our common issue to your care.'
She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air.
I strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue;
And thrice about her neck my arms I flung,
And, thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung.
Light as an empty dream at break of day,
Or as a blast of wind, she rush'd away.
Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain,
I to my longing friends return again

Dryden's translation is based on presumed authorial intent and smooth English. In line 790 the literal translation of haec ubi dicta dedit is "when she gave these words." But "she said" gets the point across, uses half the words, and makes for better English. A few lines later, with ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago, he alters the literal translation "Thrice trying to give arms around her neck; thrice the image grasped in vain fled the hands," in order to fit it into the metre and the emotion of the scene.

In his own words,

The way I have taken, is not so streight as Metaphrase, nor so loose as Paraphrase: Some things too I have omitted, and sometimes added of my own. Yet the omissions I hope, are but of Circumstances, and such as wou'd have no grace in English; and the Addition, I also hope, are easily deduc'd from Virgil's Sense. They will seem (at least I have the Vanity to think so), not struck into him, but growing out of him. (5:529)

In a similar vein, Dryden writes in his Preface to the translation anthology Sylvae:

Where I have taken away some of [the original authors'] Expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarg’d them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or may be fairly deduc’d from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he wou’d probably have written.

Personal life

On 1 December 1663, Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard (died 1714) at St Swithin's, London, and the consent of the parents is noted on the licence, although Lady Elizabeth was then about twenty-five.

The couple met after 1660, when Dryden began lodging in London with her brother, Sir Robert Howard, son of the earl of Berkshire. The marriage lasted until his death, but there is little evidence about how they lived as a couple. A small estate in Wiltshire was settled upon them by her father. The lady's intellect and temper were apparently not good; her husband was treated as an inferior by those of her social status.

Both Dryden and his wife were warmly attached to their children. They had three sons: Charles (1666–1704), John (1668–1701), and Erasmus Henry (1669–1710). Lady Elizabeth Dryden survived her husband, but reportedly lost her wits after becoming a widow. Although some have historically claimed to be from the lineage of John Dryden, his three children, one of whom became a Roman Catholic priest, had no children themselves.

Selected works

Plays

Dates given are (acted/published) and unless otherwise noted are taken from Scott's edition.

• The Wild Gallant, a Comedy (1663/1669)
• The Rival Ladies, a Tragi-Comedy (1663/1664)
• The Indian Queen, a Tragedy (1664/1665), with Robert Howard
• The Indian Emperour, or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards (1665/1667)
• The Maiden Queen (1667/1668)
• Sir Martin Mar-all, or the Feigned Innocence, a Comedy (1667/1668)
• The Tempest, or the Enchanted Island, a Comedy (1667/1670), with William D'Avenant
• An Evening's Love, or the Mock Astrologer, a Comedy (1668/1668)
• Tyrannick Love, or the Royal Martyr, a Tragedy (1668 or 1669/1670)
• The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, a Tragedy, Part I & Part II (1669 or 1670/1672)
• Marriage à la mode, a Comedy (1673/1673)
• The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, a Comedy (1672/1673)
• Amboyna; or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, a Tragedy (1673/1673)
• The Mistaken Husband, a Comedy (1674/1675)
• Aureng-zebe, a Tragedy (1676/1676)
• All for Love, or the World Well Lost, a Tragedy (1678/1678)
• Mr. Limberham; or, the Kind Keeper, or Mr. Limberham, a Comedy (1678/1680)
• Oedipus, a Tragedy (1678 or 1679/1679), with Nathaniel Lee
• Troilus and Cressida, or Truth found too Late, a Tragedy (1679/1679)
• The Spanish Friar, or the Double Discovery (1681/1681)
• The Duke of Guise, a Tragedy (1682/1683), with Nathaniel Lee
• Don Sebastian, a Tragedy (1690/1690)
• Amphitryon, or the Two Sosias, a Comedy (1690/1690)
• Cleomenes, the Spartan Hero, a Tragedy (1692/1692)
• Love Triumphant, or Nature will Prevail, a Tragedy (1693 or 1694/1693 or 1694)

Poetry

• Astraea Redux, 1660
• Annus Mirabilis, 1667
• Absalom and Achitophel, 1681
• Mac Flecknoe, 1682
• Religio Laici, 1682
• To the Memory of Mr. Oldham, 1684
• Threnodia Augustalis, 1685
• The Hind and the Panther, 1687
• A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687
• Alexander's Feast, 1697

Operas

• The State of Innocence, and Fall of Man, an Opera (/1674)
• Albion and Albanius, an Opera (1685/1685)
• King Arthur, or the British Worthy, a Dramatic Opera (1691/1691)

Essay

• Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668

Translation

• Fables, Ancient and Modern, 1700 (including Palamon and Arcite)

From the 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia

John Dryden — Poet, dramatist, critic, and translator; b. 9 August, 1631, at Oldwinkle All Saints, Northamptonshire, England; d. at London, 30 April, 1700. He was the son of Erasmus Dryden (or Driden) and Mary Pickering, daughter of the Rev. Henry Pickering. Erasmus Dryden was the son of Sir Erasmus Dryden, and was a justice of the peace under Cromwell. On both sides Dryden's family were of the Parliamentary party. He received his early education as a king's scholar at Westminster and while there his first published work appeared. This was an elegy contributed in 1649 to the "Lachrymæ Musarum", a collection of tributes in memory of Henry, Lord Hastings. He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, 18 May, 1650, being elected to a scholarship on 2 October. He graduated as Bachelor of Arts, January, 1653-4, and after inheriting from his father a small estate worth £60 annually, he returned to Cambridge, living there until 1655. The "Heroic Stanzas" on the death of Oliver Cromwell, his first important work (1658), are smooth and vigorous, and while laudatory, are not meanly so. There is no attack on royalty and no mention of Cromwell's religion. Dryden always was in favour of authority and of peace from civil strife, and consequently when disorders broke out upon Cromwell's death, he, with the rest of the nation, welcomed the return of Charles II. He celebrated the king's return with his poem of "Astræa Redux" (1660), in which he already showed his mastery of the rhymed couplet. Then followed his poems on the "Coronation" (1661); "To Lord Clarendon" (1662); "To Dr. Charleton" (1663); "To the Duchess of York" (1665); and "Annus Mirabilis" (1667). His great prose "Essay on Dramatick Poesie" appeared in 1668. Meantime, in 1662, Dryden had been elected to the Royal Society, and on 1 December, 1663, he was married to Lady Elizabeth Howard, eldest daughter of the Earl of Berkshire.

In 1662 he began his dramatic career with "The Wild Gallant", a comedy of humours, influenced by Spanish sources. In 1663 appeared "The Rival Ladies", a tragi-comedy, also from a Spanish model. To this Dryden prefixed the first of the famous prefaces in which he laid down his principles of dramatic criticism. "The Indian Emperor", a heroic play, his first original drama, appeared in 1665. In 1667 he produced "The Maiden Queen", a comedy in which some blank verse us seen alongside of the rhymed couplet and prose; "Sir Martin Marall", a prose comedy based on "L'Etourdi" of Molière; and an adaptation of "The Tempest" with Davenant. "The Mock Astrologer" (1668) was an imitation of "Le feint astrologue" of Thomas Corneille, influenced by Molière's "Dépit amoureux". About this time Dryden entered into an agreement with the King's Theatre Company. According to this he was to produce three plays a year, for which he was to receive one and one-quarter shares out of a total of twelve and three-quarters. In the winter of 1668-9, "Tyrannic Love, or the Royal Martyr", a rhymed heroic tragedy, was played, and in 1670 his greatest heroic tragedy, the first and second parts of "Almanzor and Almahide, or the Conquest of Granada".

Dryden was given the degree of M. A. by the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1668; in 1670 he was made poet laureate and royal historiographer, which brought him an annual income of £200. In 1671 he was satirized in "The Rehearsal", a play written by Buckingham, Butler, and others. "Marriage à la Mode", a comedy in prose and rhyme, was played in 1672, as well as "The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery", a prose comedy, interspersed with a little blank verse. "Amboyna" (1673) was a prose tragedy on the subject of the Dutch outrages, and "The State of Innocence" (1674) was an unsuccessful attempt to treat the theme of Paradise Lost. "Aurengzebe" (1676) is a rhymed tragedy in which the run-on lines show a tendency toward blank verse, which becomes triumphant in the next play, "All for Love" (1678). This is Dryden's masterpiece, a play based on the story of Anthony and Cleopatra which he wrote to satisfy his own standards. It is a play worthy of comparison with Shakespeare's "Anthony and Cleopatra", surpassing it in unity of time and motive, and in the part of Ventidius adding one of the great characters of the English drama. "Limberham" (1678), a prose comedy, was unsuccessful and was withdrawn after three nights. After the production of "Oedipus", a tragedy in blank verse written in collaboration with Lee in 1679, Dryden seems to have quarrelled with the King's Company, and his next play, "Troilus and Cressida", (1679), an adaptation in blank verse of Shakespeare's play, was produced by the Duke's Company. With the "Spanish Friar" (1681) he closed for a time his dramatic career. He had in the meantime suffered as well as profited by his fame. The Earl of Rochester, suspecting that Dryden had aided Lord Mulgrave in his attack of Rochester in the "Essay on Satire", caused Dryden to be beaten by hired ruffians as he passed through Rose Street, Covent Garden, while returning from Will's coffee house to his own house in Gerrard Street. It is characteristic of the unfair attitude taken by Dryden's enemies that this cowardly assault was held by them to reflect upon his character.

In November, 1681, Dryden began, in the first part of "Absalom and Achitophel", the series of satires in the rhymed couplet which placed him at the head of English satirical poets. "Absalom and Achitophel" was the most important literary expression of the party which prevented the exclusion of the Duke of York from the succession to the throne. It is also one of the greatest of English satires, especially in its portraiture of the characters of the Duke of Monmouth and the Earl of Shaftesbury, both of whom the author has represented allegorically in the title of the poem. Then followed, in March, 1682, "The Medal", an assault upon Shaftesbury. These poems occasioned many attacks on Dryden, and to one of them, the "Medal of John Bayes" by Thomas Shadwell, Dryden replied, in October, 1682, by "MacFlecknoe", a vigorous satire which dismissed Shadwell as the "last great prophet of tautology". In November, 1682, appeared the second part of "Absalom and Achitophel", in which Nahum Tate collaborated. In "Religio Laici" (1682) Dryden presented an argument for the faith of the Church of England, and in 1685, on the death of Charles II, he wrote an ode called "Threnodia Angustalis". In 1684 at Charles' request he had also translated "The History of the League" from the French of Maimbourg. Dryden's position at the death of Charles was not an enviable one. His income from play-writing had ceased, his pensions were not regularly paid, though they were continued by James II, and in answer to his appeal for some of the arrears, which amounted to £1000 in 1683, he had received £75 and an appointment as collector of customs of the port of London, the emoluments of which office are not known. He was converted to Catholicism in 1686. This step was the natural outcome of his investigation into theology, the first result of which had been "Religio Laici". This poem, while a defence of the Church of England, showed a desire for an infallible guide in religious matters and indicates the direction in which Dryden's thoughts were turning. The accession of James gave him the additional incentive of belonging to the king's religion, a powerful motive in Dryden's case, for he was a devoted adherent to authority in Church and State. Dryden was accused of time-serving by his enemies, but this charge is easily disproved by his perseverance in his conversion during the next reign, when he refused even to dedicate his translation of Virgil to William III, lest he should be suspected of denying his religious or political principles.

Dryden published in April, 1687, "The Hind and the Panther", in some ways his most important work. It is divided into three parts; the first describes the different sects in England under the allegorical figures of beasts; the second deals with a controversy between the Hind (the Catholic Church) and the Panther (the Church of England); the third continues this dialogue and develops personal and doctrinal satire. In this poem Dryden succeeded in the difficult task of rendering argument in verse interesting. Especially noteworthy are lines 499-555 (second part), in which he describes the foundation and the authority of the Church, and lines 235-50 (third part), in which he defends his own course of action. In 1688 Dryden translated the "Life of St. Francis Zavier" from the French (1682) of Père Dominique Bouhours, S. J., and when an heir to the throne was born he celebrated the event in his poem of "Britannia Rediviva". The Revolution of 1688 deprived him of his laureateship, and other lucrative posts, on account of his refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new government, and left him practically dependent upon his own literary exertions. He turned once more to the stage and produced in 1690 "Don Sebastian", a tragi-comedy in blank verse and prose which rivals "All for Love" for the supreme place among his plays, and in the same year "Amphitryon", a comedy, based on Molière, though with several original situations. In 1691 followed "King Arthur", an opera-masque; in 1692 "Cleomenes", in which Dryden in the course of the blank verse relapses into rhyme; in 1694 "Love Triumphant", a tragi-comedy in blank verse and prose, the last of his plays. In 1693 he published another of his great critical essays, "A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire", and in 1695 "A Parallel of Poetry and Painting", prefixed to his translation of Du Fresnoy's "Art of Painting".

With his remarkable power of adaptation Dryden now gave his attention to another literary form, that of translation. He had before this, in 1680, made some translations of Ovid; and in the "Miscellanies" of 1684 and 1685, and of 1693 and 1694 there are specimens of Ovid, Horace, Homer, Theocritus and Lucretius, which, together with his more complete translations of Virgil and Juvenal, make a total of about 30,000 lines. In July, 1697, the "Pastorals", the "Georgics", and the "Æneid" of Virgil were published, and the edition was sold off in about six months. Meanwhile, in 1692, Dryden had composed an elegy on Eleonora, Countess of Abingdon, for which he received 500 guineas. About this time, also, he wrote his famous address to Congreve on the failure of the "Double Dealer". In 1699, at the close of his life, he published his "Fables". This volume contained five paraphrases of Chaucer, three of Boccaccio, besides the first book of the "Iliad", and "Alexander's Feast", perhaps his greatest lyrical poem, written in 1697 for a musical society in London which celebrated St. Cecilia's day. Dryden had also written the ode for the celebration in 1687 by the same society. Dryden did not long survive the publication of his last book. He died of inflammation caused by gout, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Dryden's position in the history of English literature is one of supreme importance. He brought the rhymed couplet as a means of satire to a brilliancy and a point never surpassed before or since his time; as a close and logical reasoner in verse he has never been equalled. As a dramatist he did much good work and in some cases, as in "All for Love" or "Don Sebastian", he achieved supreme distinction as a lyrist. He has left many exquisite songs and at least two of the finest odes in the language. As a translator and adaptor he ranks high, while as a prose writer he not only produced a body of criticism which established him as one of the greatest of English critics, but he also clarified English prose and marked the way for future development. As a man, he shared the faults of his time, but the scandals heaped upon him by his enemies have fallen away under critical examination, and the impression remains of a brave, honest Englishman, earnest in every cause he championed, who loved to praise who befriended him, and who could suffer reverses in silence and dignity. The standard edition of Dryden's works is that edited by Walter Scott in 18 volumes in 1808 and re-edited by George Saintsbury (Edinburgh, 1882-93).

Charles Dryden

Eldest son of John Dryden the poet, b. at Charlton, in Wiltshire, England, in 1665 or 1666; d. in 1704. He was educated at Westminster, and elected to Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1683, but could not enter, being a Catholic. He contributed to the second volume of his father's "Miscellany" of 1685, and turned into English the seventh satire for the translation of Juvenal in 1692. He then went to Italy and became chamberlain to Pope Innocent XII, coming back to England in 1697 or 1698. He was drowned in the Thames and was buried at Windsor, 10 August, 1704. GILLOW, Bibl. Dict. Eng. Cath., s. v.; Dict. Nat. Biog., s. v.

For lives of Dryden, see SAINTSBURY, Dryden in English Men of Letters Series (1881); CHRISTIE, Memoir in Globe Edition of Dryden's Poems (London, 1870); IDEM in Dryden's Satires (Oxford, 1871, 5th ed., 1893); COLLINS, Memoir in The Satires of Dryden (London, 1893). See also KER in Introduction to the Essays of John Dryden (Oxford, 1900), II; ROOT, Dryden's Conversion to the Roman Catholic Faith in Publications of the Modern Language Association of America (June, 1907), new series, XV, Pt. II; BELJAME, Le public et les hommes de lettres en Angleterre au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1883).

Further reading

Editions

• The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols., ed. H.T. Swedenberg Jr. et al. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956–2002)
• John Dryden The Major Works, ed. by Keith Walker, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987)
• The Works of John Dryden, ed. by David Marriott (Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1995)
• John Dryden Selected Poems, ed. by David Hopkins (London: Everyman Paperbacks, 1998)
• John Dryden Selected Poems, ed. by Steven N. Zwicker and David Bywaters (London: Penguin Books, 2001) ISBN 978-0140439144

Biography

• Winn, James Anderson. John Dryden and His World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)

Correspondence

• Dryden, John. Eds. Stephen Bernard and John McTague. 2022. The Correspondence of John Dryden. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
• Dryden, John. Eds. Charles Eugene. Ward, and Charles Eugene Ward. The Letters of John Dryden, with Letters Addressed to Him. New York: AMS Press, 1965.

Modern criticism

• Eliot, T. S., "John Dryden," in Selected Essays (London: Faber and Faber, 1932)
• Hopkins, David, John Dryden, ed. by Isobel Armstrong (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2004)
• Minto, William; Bryant, Margaret (1911). "Dryden, John". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 8 (11th ed.). pp. 609–613.
• Oden, Richard, L. Dryden and Shadwell, The Literary Controversy and 'Mac Flecknoe (1668–1679) (Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, Inc., Delmar, New York, 1977)
• Stark, Ryan. "John Dryden, New Philosophy, and Rhetoric," in Rhetoric, Science, and Magic in Seventeenth-Century England (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 2009)
• Van Doren, Mark (2007). John Dryden: A Study of His Poetry. Read Books. ISBN 978-1406724882.
• Wilding, Michael, 'Allusion and Innuendo in MacFlecknoe', Essays in Criticism, 19 (1969) 355–70

External links

• Works by John Dryden at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about John Dryden at the Internet Archive
• Works by John Dryden at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
• Poems by John Dryden at PoetryFoundation.org
• John Dryden at the National Portrait Gallery, London