John dryden (1631-1700)

Dryden is the commanding literary figure of the last four decades of the 17th century. He is an author in whose work the image of an age can be discerned. Every important aspect of the life of his times—political, religious, philosophical, artistic—finds expression in his writings.

Although John Dryden's parents sided with Parliament against the king, there is no evidence that the poet grew up in a strict Puritan family. His father, a country gentleman of moderate fortune, gave his son a gentleman's education at Westminster School. From Westminster, Dryden went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. in 1654. His first important and impressive poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), was written to commemorate the death of Cromwell. The next year, however, in Astraea Redux, Dryden joined his countrymen in celebrating the return of Charles II to his throne. During the rest of his life Dryden remained entirely loyal to Charles and to his successor, James II.

From the beginning to the end of his literary career, Dryden’s poems are most typically occasional poems, which celebrate particular events of a public character—a coronation, a military victory, a death, or a political crisis. Such poems are social and ceremonial, written not for the self but for the nation. Between 1678 and 1681, when he was nearing fifty, Dryden the playwright discovered his great gift for writing formal verse satire. His major political satires are Absalom and Achitophel (1681), MacFlecknoe (1682), which mocks his fellow playwright Shadwell, and The Medal. His Ode on St Cecilia’s Day (1687) is one of the finest lyrics of the Restoration.

Two months before his death, came the Fables Ancient and Modern, prefaced by one of the finest of his critical essays and made up of translations from Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer.

Between 1664 and 1681, however, Dryden was mainly a playwright. The newly chartered theatres needed a modern repertory. Dryden wrote his plays, as he frankly confessed, to please his audiences, which were not heterogeneous like Shakespeare's but were largely drawn from the court and from people of fashion. In the style of the time, he produced rhymed heroic plays, in which noble heroes and heroines face difficult choices between love and honour; comedies, in which male and female rakes engage in intrigue and bright repartee; and later, libretti for the newly introduced dramatic form, the opera. His one great tragedy, All for Love (1677), in blank verse, adapts Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra to the unities of time, place, and action. As his An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) shows, Dryden had studied the works of the great playwrights of Greece and Rome, of the English Renaissance, and of contemporary France, seeking sound theoretical principles on which to construct the new drama that the age demanded. Samuel Johnson called him “the father of English criticism.” The king made him poet laureate in 1668 and two years later historiographer royal.

Dryden's drama belongs entirely to his age, though its influence persisted into the next century. His critical writings established canons of taste and theoretical principles that determined the character of neoclassic literature in the next century. He helped establish a new sort of prose — easy, lucid and plain, prose that is called “modern.” His satire exerted a fruitful influence on the most brilliant verse satirist of the next century, Alexander Pope. The vigour and variety of his metrics made inevitable the long-enduring vogue of the heroic couplet among his successors. He created a poetic language that remained the basic language of poetry until the early 19th century and that even the Romantic Movement did not wholly destroy.