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.
Early life
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.<sup id="ref_<1>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><1> Westminster 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 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.<sup id="ref_<2>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><2> 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.<sup id="ref_<3>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><3>
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.
Later Life and Career
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.<sup id="ref_<4>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><4> 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 – 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.<sup id="ref_<5>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><5> 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 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.<sup id="ref_<6>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><6> 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 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.<sup id="ref_<7>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><7> 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.’<sup id="ref_<8>" class="plainlinksneverexpand"><8>
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
1<cite id="endnote_<1>" style="font-style: normal;">^ Hopkins, David, John Dryden, ed. by Isobel Armstrong, (Tavistock: Northcote House Publishers, 2004), 22
2<cite id="endnote_<2>" style="font-style: normal;">^ John Dryden The Major Works, ed. by Keith Walker, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987),ix-x
3<cite id="endnote_<3>" style="font-style: normal;">^ Ibid, x
4<cite id="endnote_<4>" style="font-style: normal;">^ Abrams, M.H., and Stephen Greenblatt eds. ‘John Dryden’ in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 7th ed., (New York: Norton & Co, 2000), 2071
5<cite id="endnote_<5>" style="font-style: normal;">^ Eliot, T.S., ‘John Dryden’, in Selected Essays, (London: Faber and Faber, 1932), 308
6<cite id="endnote_<6>" style="font-style: normal;">^ John Dryden The Major Works, ed. by Keith Walker, xiv
7<cite id="endnote_<7>" style="font-style: normal;">^ John Dryden The Major Works, 37
8<cite id="endnote_<8>" style="font-style: normal;">^ Eliot, T.S., ‘John Dryden’, 305-6
Major works
- Astraea Redux, 1660
- The Indian Emperor (tragedy), 1665
- Annus Mirabilis (poem), 1667
- The Tempest (comedy), 1667, an adaptation with William D'Avenant of Shakespeare's The Tempest
- An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668
- An Evening's Love (comedy), 1669
- Tyrannick Love (tragedy), 1669
- Marriage A-la-Mode, 1672
- The Conquest of Granada, 1670
- All for Love, 1677
- Oedipus, 1679
- Absalom and Achitophel, 1681
- MacFlecknoe
- The Medal, 1682
- Religio Laici, 1682
- The Hind and the Panther, 1687
- Amphitryon, 1690
- Don Sebastian, 1690
- Amboyna
- The Works of Virgil, 1697
- Fables, Ancient and Modern 1700
Select Bibliography
Editions
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
Drabble, Margaret, and Jenny Stringer, eds. The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996)
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)
External links
- John Dryden Quotes
- World of Quotes
- Works by John Dryden. Project Gutenberg
| Preceded by: William Davenant |
English Poet Laureate 1668–1689 |
Succeeded by: Thomas Shadwell |
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