Dryden, John (1631–1700)

DRYDEN, JOHN (1631–1700)

DRYDEN, JOHN (1631–1700), English poet, playwright, critic, and translator. Dryden was born on 9 August 1631 at Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, the son of Erasmus Dryden and Mary (nee Pickering). He was educated at Westminster School, London, and Trinity College, Cambridge. His first poem was an elegy published in Lachrymae Musarum (1649), a collection mourning the death of Henry, Lord Hastings. Although his family had Parliamentarian allegiances, Dryden was taught at Westminster by the charismatic Royalist Richard Busby, whose influence is evident in this early elegy.

The death of his father in 1654 left Dryden in need of a regular income to maintain himself in London. From 1658 he was employed by Cromwell's government; he also worked for the publisher Henry Herringman. On Cromwell's death he published "Heroic Stanzas" in Three Poems upon the Death of his Late Highness Oliver (1659), but he was probably more comfortable with Astraea Redux (1660) and To his Sacred Majesty, A Panegyric on his Coronation (1661), written after the return of Charles II. In 1662 Dryden was elected a fellow of the Royal Society, and in 1663 he married Elizabeth Howard, daughter of the earl of Berkshire and sister of Sir Robert Howard, with whom he lodged in the early 1660s.

Howard probably introduced his brother-inlaw to the King's Company, who produced Dryden's first comedy, The Wild Gallant, at the Theatre Royal, Vere Street, on 5 February 1663. Although this play failed, The Indian Queen (1664), a collaboration with Howard, was a success, and Dryden began to write regularly for the King's Company, of whom he became a shareholder in 1668. Of his twenty-seven plays, the best known include the two-part heroic play The Conquest of Granada (December 1670/January 1671), the sparkling Marriage A-la-Mode (1671), the heroic tragedy Aureng-Zebe (1675), All For Love (1677), the finest neoclassical tragedy of its day, and the late tragicomedy Don Sebastian (1689). He also wrote in collaboration with Sir William Davenant a highly popular adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest (1667). Less successful was The State of Innocence, his 1674 attempt to adapt his former colleague John Milton's Paradise Lost as an opera, which the King's Company could not afford to stage. Dryden also wrote substantial works of poetic and dramatic theory, notably Of Dramatic Poesy: An Essay (1667).

Following the publication of his mythologizing account of King Charles in Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666 (1667), Dryden was appointed poet laureate on 13 April 1668. On 18 August 1670 he was appointed historiographer royal. He kept both offices until the accession of William and Mary in January 1689. Despite his public honors, Dryden's career was rarely free from aesthetic, political, or religious controversy. He squabbled with Howard over the merits of rhyme, was satirized as Mr. Bayes in the duke of Buckingham's play The Rehearsal (1671), and was physically assaulted by unknown assailants in 1679, perhaps as a result of an exchange with the earl of Rochester. His feud with Thomas Shadwell over the theory of comedy escalated into personal abuse. Lampooned in Shadwell's comedy The Virtuoso (1676), Dryden responded with the mock panegyric Mac Flecknoe, which satirized Shadwell and Richard Flecknoe (printed 1682).

Absalom and Achitophel (1681) is one of the greatest political poems of the period. It was inspired by the Exclusion Crisis, a period of political and religious turmoil seemingly sparked by a parliamentary attempt, led by the earl of Shaftesbury, to exclude Charles's Catholic brother James, duke of York, from the succession in favor of the king's illegitimate son, James, duke of Monmouth, who was Protestant. Dryden depicts Monmouth as Absalom, the rebellious son of David (King Charles) and satirizes Shaftesbury as the evil counselor Achitophel. The Medal (1682) was a further attack on Shaftesbury, and Dryden mined similar themes in The Duke of Guise (1682), a collaboration with Nathaniel Lee. His conversion to Catholicism in 1685 occasioned a number of attacks; Dryden defended himself and his coreligionists in The Hind and the Panther (1687). Following the revolution of December 1688, plays such as King Arthur (1691) and Love Triumphant (1694) are marked by a covert Jacobinism.

In his later years Dryden wrote fine occasional verse and a number of pindaric odes, notably Threnodia Augustalis (1685), To the Pious Memory. . . of Mrs Ann Killigrew (1686), and Alexander's Feast; Or the Power of Music (1697). He also turned increasingly to translation, notably The Satires of Juvenal and Persius (1693), The Works of Virgil (1697), and Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), which also included original works such as "The Secular Masque." Dryden died on 1 May 1700, and was at first buried in St Anne's, Soho; he was reinterred in Westminster Abbey on 13 May.

See also Drama: English ; English Literature and Language .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Source

Hooker, Edward Niles, H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., and Vinton A. Dearing, gen. eds., The Works of John Dryden. 20 vols. Berkeley, 1956–2000.

Secondary Sources

Hammond, Paul. John Dryden: A Literary Life. New York, 1991.

Hammond, Paul, and David Hopkins, eds., John Dryden: Tercentenary Essays. Oxford and New York, 2000.

Winn, James Anderson. John Dryden and his World. New Haven and London, 1987.

Zwicker, Steven N. Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise. Princeton, 1984.

Lucy Munro