John Dryden
born Aug. 9 [Aug. 19, New Style], 1631,
Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, Eng.
died May 1 [May 12], 1700, London
English poet, dramatist, and literary critic
who so dominated the literary scene of his day
that it came to be known as the Age of Dryden.
Youth and education
The son of a country gentleman, Dryden grew
up in the country. When he was 11 years old the
Civil War broke out. Both his father’s and
mother’s families sided with Parliament against
the king, but Dryden’s own sympathies in his
youth are unknown.
About 1644 Dryden was admitted to Westminster
School, where he received a predominantly
classical education under the celebrated Richard
Busby. His easy and lifelong familiarity with
classical literature begun at Westminster later
resulted in idiomatic English translations.
In 1650 he entered Trinity College,
Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in
1654. What Dryden did between leaving the
university in 1654 and the Restoration of
Charles II in 1660 is not known with certainty.
In 1659 his contribution to a memorial volume
for Oliver Cromwell marked him as a poet worth
watching. His “heroic stanzas” were mature,
considered, sonorous, and sprinkled with those
classical and scientific allusions that
characterized his later verse. This kind of
public poetry was always one of the things
Dryden did best.
When in May 1660 Charles II was restored to
the throne, Dryden joined the poets of the day
in welcoming him, publishing in June Astraea
Redux, a poem of more than 300 lines in rhymed
couplets. For the coronation in 1661, he wrote
To His Sacred Majesty. These two poems were
designed to dignify and strengthen the monarchy
and to invest the young monarch with an aura of
majesty, permanence, and even divinity.
Thereafter, Dryden’s ambitions and fortunes as a
writer were shaped by his relationship with the
monarchy. On Dec. 1, 1663, he married Elizabeth
Howard, the youngest daughter of Thomas Howard,
1st earl of Berkshire. In due course she bore
him three sons.
Dryden’s longest poem to date, Annus
Mirabilis (1667), was a celebration of two
victories by the English fleet over the Dutch
and the Londoners’ survival of the Great Fire of
1666. In this work Dryden was once again gilding
the royal image and reinforcing the concept of a
loyal nation united under the best of kings. It
was hardly surprising that when the poet
laureate, Sir William Davenant, died in 1668,
Dryden was appointed poet laureate in his place
and two years later was appointed royal
historiographer.
Writing for the stage
Soon after his restoration to the throne in
1660, Charles II granted two patents for
theatres, which had been closed by the Puritans
in 1642. Dryden soon joined the little band of
dramatists who were writing new plays for the
revived English theatre. His first play, The
Wild Gallant, a farcical comedy with some
strokes of humour and a good deal of licentious
dialogue, was produced in 1663. It was a
comparative failure, but in January 1664 he had
some share in the success of The Indian Queen, a
heroic tragedy in rhymed couplets in which he
had collaborated with Sir Robert Howard, his
brother-in-law. Dryden was soon to successfully
exploit this new and popular genre, with its
conflicts between love and honour and its lovely
heroines before whose charms the blustering
heroes sank down in awed submission. In the
spring of 1665 Dryden had his own first
outstanding success with The Indian Emperour, a
play that was a sequel to The Indian Queen.
In 1667 Dryden had another remarkable hit
with a tragicomedy, Secret Love, or the Maiden
Queen, which appealed particularly to the king.
The part of Florimel, a gay and witty maid of
honour, was played to perfection by the king’s
latest mistress, Nell Gwynn. In Florimel’s
rattling exchanges with Celadon, the Restoration
aptitude for witty repartee reached a new level
of accomplishment. In 1667 Dryden also reworked
for the stage Molière’s comedy L’Étourdi
(translated by William Cavendish, duke of
Newcastle) under the title Sir Martin Mar-all.
In 1668 Dryden published Of Dramatick Poesie,
an Essay, a leisurely discussion between four
contemporary writers of whom Dryden (as Neander)
is one. This work is a defense of English drama
against the champions of both ancient Classical
drama and the Neoclassical French theatre; it is
also an attempt to discover general principles
of dramatic criticism. By deploying his
disputants so as to break down the conventional
oppositions of ancient and modern, French and
English, Elizabethan and Restoration, Dryden
deepens and complicates the discussion. This is
the first substantial piece of modern dramatic
criticism; it is sensible, judicious, and
exploratory and combines general principles and
analysis in a gracefully informal style.
Dryden’s approach in this and all his best
criticism is characteristically speculative and
shows the influence of detached scientific
inquiry. The prefaces to his plays and
translations over the next three decades were to
constitute a substantial body of critical
writing and reflection.
In 1668 Dryden agreed to write exclusively
for Thomas Killigrew’s company at the rate of
three plays a year and became a shareholder
entitled to one-tenth of the profits. Although
Dryden averaged only a play a year, the contract
apparently was mutually profitable. In June 1669
he gave the company Tyrannick Love, with its
blustering and blaspheming hero Maximin. In
December of the next year came the first part of
The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards,
followed by the second part about a month later.
All three plays were highly successful; and in
the character Almanzor, the intrepid hero of The
Conquest of Granada, the theme of love and
honour reached its climax. But the vein had now
been almost worked out, as seen in the 1671
production of that witty burlesque of heroic
drama The Rehearsal, by George Villiers, 2nd
duke of Buckingham, in which Dryden (Mr. Bayes)
was the main satirical victim. The Rehearsal did
not kill the heroic play, however; as late as
November 1675, Dryden staged his last and most
intelligent example of the genre, Aureng-Zebe.
In this play he abandoned the use of rhymed
couplets for that of blank verse.
In writing those heroic plays, Dryden had
been catering to an audience that was prepared
to be stunned into admiration by drums and
trumpets, rant and extravagance, stage battles,
rich costumes, and exotic scenes. His
abandonment of crowd-pleasing rant and bombast
was symbolized in 1672 with his brilliant comedy
Marriage A-la-Mode, in which the Restoration
battle of the sexes was given a sophisticated
and civilized expression that only Sir George
Etherege and William Congreve at their best
would equal. Equally fine in a different mode
was his tragedy All for Love (1677), based on
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra and written
in a flowing but controlled blank verse. He had
earlier adapted The Tempest (1667), and later he
reworked yet another Shakespeare play, Troilus
and Cressida (1679). Dryden had now entered what
may be called his Neoclassical period, and, if
his new tragedy was not without some echoes of
the old extravagance, it was admirably
constructed, with the action developing
naturally from situation and character.
By 1678 Dryden was at loggerheads with his
fellow shareholders in the Killigrew company,
which was in grave difficulties owing to
mismanagement. Dryden offered his tragedy
Oedipus, a collaboration with Nathaniel Lee, to
a rival theatre company and ceased to be a
Killigrew shareholder.
Verse satires
Since the publication of Annus Mirabilis 12
years earlier, Dryden had given almost all his
time to playwriting. If he had died in 1680, it
is as a dramatist that he would be chiefly
remembered. Now, in the short space of two
years, he was to make his name as the greatest
verse satirist that England had so far produced.
In 1681 the king’s difficulties—arising from
political misgivings that his brother, James,
the Roman Catholic duke of York, might succeed
him—had come to a head. Led by the earl of
Shaftesbury, the Whig Party leaders had used the
Popish Plot to try to exclude James in favour of
Charles’s illegitimate Protestant son, the duke
of Monmouth. But the king’s shrewd maneuvers
eventually turned public opinion against the
Whigs, and Shaftesbury was imprisoned on a
charge of high treason.
As poet laureate in those critical months
Dryden could not stand aside, and in November
1681 he came to the support of the king with his
Absalom and Achitophel, so drawing upon himself
the wrath of the Whigs. Adopting as his
framework the Old Testament story of King David
(Charles II), his favourite son Absalom
(Monmouth), and the false Achitophel
(Shaftesbury), who persuaded Absalom to revolt
against his father, Dryden gave a satirical
version of the events of the past few years as
seen from the point of view of the king and his
Tory ministers and yet succeeded in maintaining
the heroic tone suitable to the king and to the
seriousness of the political situation. As
anti-Whig propaganda, ridiculing their leaders
in a succession of ludicrous satirical
portraits, Dryden’s poem is a masterpiece of
confident denunciation; as pro-Tory propaganda
it is equally remarkable for its serene and
persuasive affirmation. When a London grand jury
refused to indict Shaftesbury for treason, his
fellow Whigs voted him a medal. In response
Dryden published early in 1682 The Medall, a
work full of unsparing invective against the
Whigs, prefaced by a vigorous and plainspoken
prose “Epistle to the Whigs.” In the same year,
anonymously and apparently without Dryden’s
authority, there also appeared in print his
famous extended lampoon, Mac Flecknoe, written
about four years earlier. What triggered this
devastating attack on the Whig playwright Thomas
Shadwell has never been satisfactorily
explained; all that can be said is that in Mac
Flecknoe Shadwell’s abilities as a literary
artist and critic are ridiculed so ludicrously
and with such good-humoured contempt that his
reputation has suffered ever since. The basis of
the satire, which represents Shadwell as a
literary dunce, is the disagreement between him
and Dryden over the quality of Ben Jonson’s wit.
Dryden thinks Jonson deficient in this quality,
while Shadwell regards the Elizabethan
playwright with uncritical reverence. This
hilarious comic lampoon was both the first
English mock-heroic poem and the immediate
ancestor of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.
Late works
In 1685, after the newly acceded king James
II seemed to be moving to Catholic toleration,
Dryden was received into the Roman Catholic
church. In his longest poem, the beast fable The
Hind and the Panther (1687), he argued the case
for his adopted church against the Church of
England and the sects. His earlier Religio Laici
(1682) had argued in eloquent couplets for the
consolations of Anglicanism and against
unbelievers, Protestant dissenters, and Roman
Catholics. Biographical debate about Dryden has
often focused on his shifts of political and
religious allegiance; critics, like his hostile
contemporaries, have sometimes charged him with
opportunism.
The abdication of James II in 1688 destroyed
Dryden’s political prospects, and he lost his
laureateship to Shadwell. He turned to the
theatre again. The tragedy Don Sebastian (1689)
failed, but Amphitryon (1690) succeeded, helped
by the music of Henry Purcell. Dryden
collaborated with Purcell in a dramatic opera,
King Arthur (1691), which also succeeded. His
tragedy Cleomenes was long refused a license
because of what was thought to be the
politically dangerous material in it, and with
the failure of the tragicomedy Love Triumphant
in 1694, Dryden stopped writing for the stage.
In the 1680s and ’90s Dryden supervised
poetical miscellanies and translated the works
of Juvenal and Persius for the publisher Jacob
Tonson with success. In 1692 he published
Eleonora, a long memorial poem commissioned for
a handsome fee by the husband of the Countess of
Abingdon. But his great late work was his
complete translation of Virgil, contracted by
Tonson in 1694 and published in 1697. Dryden was
now the grand old man of English letters and was
often seen at Will’s Coffee-House chatting with
younger writers. His last work for Tonson was
Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which were
mainly verse adaptations from the works of Ovid,
Geoffrey Chaucer, and Giovanni Boccaccio,
introduced with a critical preface. He died in
1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey between
Chaucer and Abraham Cowley in the Poets’ Corner.
Besides being the greatest English poet of
the later 17th century, Dryden wrote almost 30
tragedies, comedies, and dramatic operas. He
also made a valuable contribution in his
commentaries on poetry and drama, which are
sufficiently extensive and original to entitle
him to be considered, in the words of Dr. Samuel
Johnson, as “the father of English criticism.”
After Dryden’s death his reputation remained
high for the next 100 years, and even in the
Romantic period the reaction against him was
never so great as that against Alexander Pope.
In the 20th century there was a notable revival
of interest in his poems, plays, and criticism,
and much scholarly work was done on them. In the
late 20th century his reputation stood almost as
high as at any time since his death.
Sir James R. Sutherland
Ed.
