John Dryden

• 1. Introduction

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  John Dryden was attacked at around 8 pm on the 18th of December 1679, beaten by hired thugs in Rose Alley behind the Lamb and Flag pub in Covent Garden. He had been walking home from Will's Coffee House, where London's literary wits gathered to argue, drink, and do business. The man who ordered the attack was the Earl of Rochester, a courtier Dryden had lampooned in print. Dryden survived, placed an advertisement offering fifty pounds for the identity of his assailants in the London Gazette, and promised a Royal Pardon to any one of them who would confess. No one claimed the reward.

  This moment of violence on a London street captures something essential about Dryden's world: a writer so central to the literary culture of his age that insulting the wrong nobleman in verse could get you beaten in an alley. The era itself would come to carry his name. Romantic writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He became England's first Poet Laureate in 1668, and when he died on the 12th of May 1700, the English literary community mourned with a flood of elegies. The questions worth asking are how a boy from a village rectory in Northamptonshire climbed to that position, what he made while he was there, and why the shape of English poetry for the entire century that followed him bears his fingerprints.

• 2. Aldwincle to Westminster

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  Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle, near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather served as rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children. His paternal great-grandfather, Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet, had been a landowning gentleman who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. The family's political loyalties were, in short, emphatically not royalist.

  In 1644 Dryden was sent as a King's Scholar to Westminster School, where the headmaster was Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and a severe disciplinarian. Westminster had been re-founded by Elizabeth I, and during this period it cultivated a spirit that ran directly counter to Dryden's family background: royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever the internal friction this created, Dryden clearly respected Busby. He later sent two of his own sons to study there.

  The curriculum at Westminster did more than expose Dryden to a different politics. As a humanist school it trained pupils in rhetoric and in arguing both sides of any question. Weekly translation assignments sharpened his capacity for absorbing other writers' styles. Both skills, the dialectical habit of mind and the translator's gift for assimilation, would leave deep marks on everything he wrote afterward. His first published poem appeared during those Westminster years: an elegy on the death of his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings, who died of smallpox. The poem carried a strong royalist feeling and alluded to the execution of King Charles I, which had taken place on the 30th of January 1649, very near the school. Busby had prayed for the king that day, then locked his schoolboys inside to stop them from witnessing the spectacle.

• 3. Cambridge, Cromwell, and the Monarchy

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  In 1650 Dryden went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. The Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher named Thomas Hill, who had previously been a rector in Dryden's home village. After the royalist atmosphere of Westminster, Cambridge represented a return to the religious and political world of his childhood. Dryden graduated as a Bachelor of Arts in 1654, placing at the top of the list for Trinity that year. In June of the same year his father died, leaving him a small parcel of land that generated some income but not enough to live on.

  Returning to London during the Protectorate, Dryden found work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe. The appointment may have been arranged through his cousin Sir Gilbert Pickering, who served as Lord Chamberlain. At Cromwell's funeral on the 23rd of November 1658, Dryden processed in the official cortege alongside the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Shortly afterward, he published Heroic Stanzas, a cautious and emotionally restrained elegy on Cromwell's death.

  Then the political ground shifted entirely. When the monarchy was restored and Charles II returned, Dryden celebrated with Astraea Redux in 1660, an authentic royalist panegyric that cast the Interregnum as an age of chaos and the king as the restorer of order. The speed of this pivot has drawn notice ever since, but it accurately reflected the pragmatic intelligence that would define Dryden's career. He wrote what the moment required, and he wrote it exceptionally well. Two more panegyrics followed in 1662: To His Sacred Majesty, marking the coronation, and To My Lord Chancellor. These poems were designed to attract a patron, but Dryden would ultimately make his living writing for publishers and, through them, for the reading public.

• 4. The Stage and the Laureate

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  With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden turned to playwriting. His first play, The Wild Gallant, appeared in 1663. It was not successful, but it showed enough promise that from 1668 onward he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company, in which he also held a share. Through the 1660s and 1670s, the theatre was his primary income.

  He led the way in Restoration comedy, with Marriage a la Mode in 1673 standing as his best-known work in that vein. His greatest success in tragedy was All for Love in 1678, which he wrote in blank verse immediately after Aureng-zebe, a heroic play whose prologue openly denounced the use of rhyme in serious drama. Dryden was consistent in his restlessness about form: he criticized the conventions he himself had mastered.

  He was never satisfied with what the stage produced. He felt his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. The work he valued more was the poem he published in 1667, around the same time his dramatic career was gaining momentum: Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem describing the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London of 1666. He wrote it in pentameter quatrains, a modern epic that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation. It was decisive in his appointment as Poet Laureate in 1668 and as historiographer royal in 1670. He had been proposed for membership in the Royal Society in November 1662 and was elected an early fellow, though he was expelled in 1666 for non-payment of dues, a small comedy of inattention at odds with his public eminence.

• 5. Satire, Religion, and the Fall from Favour

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  Mac Flecknoe, Dryden's mock-heroic lampoon of the playwright Thomas Shadwell, circulated in manuscript before it was published. Dryden's stated goal was to satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for offenses against literature but more immediately, as the source puts it, for his habitual badgering of Dryden on the stage and in print. The satire did not diminish its target through belittlement; instead, it made Shadwell great in unexpected and ridiculous ways, transferring the comic into poetry. The same vein of satiric verse produced Absalom and Achitophel in 1681 and The Medal in 1682.

  Alongside the satire, Dryden's 1680s were years of conspicuous religious movement. Religio Laici in 1682 was written from the position of an Anglican defending the Church of England against Catholic claims. His 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives was the occasion on which he introduced the word "biography" to English readers. Then in 1687 he published The Hind and the Panther, celebrating his conversion to Roman Catholicism. The phrase "blaze of glory" is believed to have originated in this poem, in a description of the throne of God as "a blaze of glory that forbids the sight."

  He wrote Britannia Rediviva in 1688, celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the Catholic King James II on the 10th of June. Then James was deposed in the Glorious Revolution. Dryden refused to swear the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary. His rival Thomas Shadwell took his place as Poet Laureate. He lost his public offices and was left to live entirely by his pen.

• 6. Translation as Vocation

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  Stripped of his court positions after 1688, Dryden turned to translation as his primary work and found it far more satisfying than writing for the stage. He translated Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus. In 1694 he began what would become his most ambitious undertaking as a translator: The Works of Virgil, published in 1697 by subscription. Its publication was treated as a national event and earned Dryden the sum of fourteen hundred pounds.

  The Virgil translation was a serious act of literary engineering. Dryden turned Virgil's nearly ten thousand lines of the Aeneid into thirteen thousand seven hundred lines of English couplets. Joseph Addison wrote the prose prefaces for each book, and William Congreve checked the translation against the Latin original. Dryden's method was neither strict word-for-word translation nor loose paraphrase. He described it in his own words as a middle path: "not so streight as Metaphrase, nor so loose as Paraphrase." Where he added to Virgil, he argued the additions were already latent in the Latin or could be fairly derived from it.

  His critic Mark Van Doren complained that Dryden had expanded Virgil with a fund of convenient phrases wherever the original seemed curt. Dryden did not consider this a fault. He argued that Latin is a naturally concise language and cannot be represented in an equal number of English words without losing something. His translation philosophy rested on a claim about authorial intent: that the goal was not to reproduce the words but to give English readers what Virgil would have written had he been alive and writing in English.

  His final volume of translations, Fables Ancient and Modern in 1700, gathered episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio alongside modernised adaptations of Geoffrey Chaucer, interspersed with Dryden's own poems. It appeared in the year of his death.

• 7. Legacy and the Shape of English Poetry

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  Alexander Pope borrowed heavily from Dryden and praised him directly in his imitation of Horace's Epistle II.i: "Dryden taught to join / The varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine." Samuel Johnson wrote that the veneration with which Dryden's name was spoken by every student of English literature reflected the way he refined the language, improved its sentiments, and tuned its rhythms. Johnson also noted, however, that Dryden was rarely pathetic, and had so little feeling for natural emotional simplicity that he did not esteem it in others. Readers in the first half of the eighteenth century did not mind this absence; later generations considered it a flaw.

  Wordsworth attacked Dryden's handling of natural objects in his translations from Virgil as inferior to the originals. But several of Wordsworth's own contemporaries, including Lord Byron, George Crabbe, and Walter Scott, who edited Dryden's collected works, remained devoted admirers. Wordsworth's own "Intimations of Immortality" ode owes something stylistically to Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." John Keats admired the Fables and imitated them in his poem Lamia. Matthew Arnold dismissed Dryden and Pope together as "classics of our prose."

  T. S. Eliot revived serious critical attention to Dryden in the twentieth century, calling him "the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth century" and writing that no one can fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry without fully enjoying Dryden. In the same essay, Eliot accused him of having a "commonplace mind." William Empson, another modern admirer, compared Dryden's flat use of language with John Donne's interest in the echoes and recesses of words.

  Dryden's influence extended into the rules of the language itself. He is believed to be the first person to assert that English sentences should not end in prepositions, a rule he formulated in 1672 by objecting to a phrase in Ben Jonson's 1611 writing. He applied Latin grammar to English because he used Latin as a private test of his own prose: translating his writing into Latin to check whether it was concise and elegant, then translating it back into English according to Latin usage. The rule he created, though disputed ever since, became one of the most frequently cited prescriptions in the language. After his death on the 12th of May 1700, he was buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, then exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later, ending where his literary education had begun.