Dryden, John

Dryden, John (1631–1700). English poet, playwright, and critic. Dryden's influence on contemporary political poetry was marked. Educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, Dryden came from a ‘middling’ landed family, but made a living from his writing. After commemorating Oliver Cromwell's death in Heroic Stanzas (1658), Dryden turned to celebration of the Restoration of Charles II and the early successes of his reign in a series of poems, Astraea Redux (1660), To His Sacred Majesty (1661), and Annus Mirabilis (1667), as well as writing numerous important and popular tragedies, comedies, and tragi-comedies, and seminal critical works such as Of Dramatick Poesie (1668). Appointed poet laureate in 1668 and historiographer-royal in 1670, Dryden continued to support the king, most notably at the height of the Exclusion crisis with Absalom and Achitophel (1681). Other significant poems of this period include the first English mock-heroic, Mac Flecknoe (1682), a witty and malicious demolition of his fellow-playwright Thomas Shadwell, and Religio Laici (1682), a defence of Anglicanism. However, Dryden converted to catholicism on the accession of James II, writing a religious allegory, The Hind and the Panther (1687), as a sort of justification. Stripped of his offices in 1688, he returned with success to the theatre, and began a brilliant series of translations from the classics, particularly Virgil's Aeneid and The Georgics. Scarcely surprisingly, given his political position, critics have discerned hidden Jacobite meanings in most of Dryden's later writings, including the magnificent Fables Ancient and Modern, published in the year of his death.

J. A. Downie