John Dryden

John Dryden (1631-1700), English poet, dramatist, and critic, who was the leading literary figure of the Restoration.

Dryden was born to a Puritan family in Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, and was educated at Westminster School and at the University of Cambridge. Around 1657 he went to London as clerk to the chamberlain to the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. Dryden’s first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), was written in memory of Cromwell. After the Restoration, however, Dryden became a Royalist and celebrated the return of King Charles II in two poems, Astraea Redux (1660) and Panegyric on the Coronation (1661). In 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth Howard, sister of his patron, the courtier and playwright Sir Robert Howard.

In 1662 Dryden began to write plays as a source of income. His first attempts, including the comedy The Wild Gallant (1663), failed, but The Rival Ladies, a tragicomedy written in 1664, was a success. During the next 20 years, Dryden became the most prominent dramatist in England. His comedies, including An Evening’s Love; or, the Mock Astrologer (1668), Ladies à la Mode (1668), and Marriage à la Mode (1672), are broad and bawdy; one of them, The Kind Keeper; or, Mr Limberham (1678), was banned as indecent, an unusual penalty during the morally permissive period of Restoration theatre. His early heroic plays, written in rhymed couplets, are extravagant and full of pageantry. Among them are the semi-opera The Indian Queen (written with Sir Robert Howard in 1664); this work contains some of the most famous music of his contemporary, the English composer Henry Purcell. Other works of this period are The Indian Emperor; or, the Conquest of Mexico by the Spanish (1665) and The Conquest of Granada (1670). One of his later tragedies in blank verse, All for Love; or, the World Well Lost (1678), a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is considered his greatest play and one of the masterpieces of Restoration tragedy.

In his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden wrote of the events in the “Wonderful Year” of 1666, chiefly of the English naval victory over the Dutch in July and of the Great Fire of London in September. In 1668 he wrote his most important prose work, Essay Of Dramatick Poesie, the basis for his reputation as the founder of English literary criticism (see Literary Criticism).

Dryden was appointed Poet Laureate in 1668 and historiographer royal in 1670. In 1681 he wrote his first and greatest political satire, Absalom and Achitophel; a masterful parable in heroic couplets, it employs biblical characters and incidents to ridicule the Whig attempt to make the Duke of Monmouth, rather than the Duke of York (the future King James II), successor to King Charles II. Reworking Milton’s great poem of religion and politics, Paradise Lost, Dryden explores ideas of anarchy and order, monarchy and popular discontent: “Religion and redress of grievances: / Two names that always cheat and always please.” His other major verse satires, all written in or about 1682, are The Medall; the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written in collaboration with the poet and playwright Nahum Tate; and MacFlecknoe, a vigorous attack on the English playwright Thomas Shadwell (“Who stands confirmed in full stupidity”), which later influenced Alexander Pope to pen his mock-heroic poem The Dunciad.

Although Dryden had defended his adherence to Protestantism in the poem Religio Laici (1682), he became a Roman Catholic in 1685, and because James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, came to the throne in that year his motive was assumed to be self-interest. The poet then wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687), a metrical allegory in defence of his new faith. The Glorious Revolution (1688) and the resulting succession of the Protestant king William III did not change Dryden’s religious views, but he lost his laureateship and his pension because of them.

Dryden returned to writing for the stage but without much success. He then began a new career as a translator, the most important of his translations being The Works of Virgil (1697). During the same period he wrote one of his greatest odes, “Alexander’s Feast” (1697), which, like an earlier ode, “A Song for Saint Cecilia’s Day” (1687), was written for a London musical society and set to music by Purcell. In 1699 Dryden wrote the last of his published works, metrical paraphrases of Homer, the Latin poet Ovid, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, under the title Fables Ancient and Modern; its preface is one of his most important essays.