John Dryden
 |
John Dryden |
John Dryden (
August 9,
1631 –
May 12,
1700) was an influential
English poet,
literary critic and
playwright, who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known as the Age of Dryden.
Dryden was born in the village
rectory of
Aldwinkle near
Oundle in
Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was Rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus and Mary Dryden, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. As a boy Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh where it is also likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to
Westminster School as a King's Scholar where his headmaster was Dr
Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian.
[Hopkins, David, John Dryden, ed. by Isobel Armstrong, (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2004), 22] Recently re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster at this time embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism, not yet having absorbed the moderating influence of Dryden's contemporary
John Locke . Whatever Dryden's response to this was, he clearly respected the Headmaster and would later send two of his own sons to school at Westminster.
As a humanist grammar 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 also 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 not uneventful, 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.
In 1650 Dryden went up to
Trinity College, Cambridge where 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.
[John Dryden The Major Works, ed. by Keith Walker, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),ix-x] Though there is little specific information on Dryden's undergraduate years, he would have followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. In 1654 he obtained his BA, graduating 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.
[Ibid, x] Arriving in
London during
The Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe. This appointment may have been the result of influence exercised on his behalf by the Lord Chamberlain Sir Gilbert Pickering, Dryden's cousin. Dryden was present on
23 November 1658 at Cromwell's funeral where he processed with the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Shortly thereafter he published his first important poem,
Heroique Stanzas (1658), 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 anarchy, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.
After the Restoration Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day and 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 amount of these per annum.
[Abrams, M.H., and Stephen Greenblatt eds. ‘John Dryden' in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., (New York: Norton & Co, 2000), 2071] 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
December 1 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 however, was to bear him three sons and outlive him.
With the reopening of the theatres after the Puritan ban, Dryden busied himself with the composition of plays. His first play,
The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663 and was not successful, but he was to have more success, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he was also to become a shareholder. During the 1660s and 70s theatrical writing was to be his main source of income. He led the way in
Restoration comedy, his best known work being
Marriage A-la-Mode (
1672), 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 events of
1666; the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. 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 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 â€" 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 incredible 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 greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic
MacFlecknoe, a more personal product of his Laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright
Thomas Shadwell. 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.
[Eliot, T.S., ‘John Dryden', in Selected Essays, (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 308] 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, he also introduced the word
biography to English readers in his 1683 edition of Plutarch's
Parallel Lives, and
The Hind and the Panther (
1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
When in 1688 James was deposed, Dryden's political and religious ethos 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.
[John Dryden The Major Works, ed. by Keith Walker, xiv] His final translations appeared in the volume
Fables Ancient and Modern (
1700), a series of episodes from
Homer,
Ovid, and
Boccaccio, as well as modernized adaptations from
Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden's own poems. The
Preface to
Fables is considered to be both a major work of criticism and one of the finest essays in English. As a critic and translator he was essential in making accessible to the reading English public literary works in the classical languages.
|
Dryden memorial in Westminster Abbey |
Dryden died in 1700 and is buried in
Westminster Abbey. Dryden's influence as a poet was immense in his lifetime, and the considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident from the elegies which it inspired.
[John Dryden The Major Works, 37] In the 18th century his poems were used as models by poets such as
Alexander Pope and
Samuel Johnson. In the 19th century his reputation waned, and it has yet to fully recover outside of specialist circles. One of his greatest champions,
T.S. Eliot, 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.'
[Eliot, T.S., ‘John Dryden', 305-6]Astraea Redux,
1660The Indian Emperor (tragedy),
1665Annus Mirabilis (poem),
1667The Tempest (comedy),
1667, an adaptation with
William D'Avenant of
Shakespeare's The TempestAn Essay of Dramatick Poesie,
1668An Evening's Love (comedy),
1669Tyrannick Love (tragedy),
1669Marriage A-la-Mode,
1672The Conquest of Granada,
1670All for Love,
1677Oedipus,
1679Absalom and Achitophel,
1681MacFlecknoeThe Medal,
1682Religio Laici,
1682The Hind and the Panther,
1687Amphitryon,
1690Don Sebastian,
1690*
AmboynaThe Works of Virgil,
1697Fables, Ancient and Modern 1700EditionsThe 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)
Biography*Winn, James Anderson.
John Dryden and His World, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987)
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)
*
Luminarium: John Dryden*
John Dryden Quotes*
World of Quotes*
Free ebook of John Dryden at
Project Gutenberg
