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By David Hopkins |
Jan 1, 2008
John Dryden (1631 -- 1700), poet, dramatist, literary critic, and translator, was born in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, the eldest son of a Puritan gentry family. Around 1644 he entered Westminster School, where he received a first-rate classical education under Westminster's charismatic but severe headmaster, Richard
Busby. There he wrote his first surviving poem, “Upon the Death of Lord Hastings,” an extravagant elegy in the late metaphysical style published in Lacrymae Musarum (1649), a volume that also contains contributions by Robert
Herrick, Sir
John
Denham, Charles
Cotton, and Andrew
Marvell. In 1650 Dryden proceeded to Trinity College, Cambridge. Although he graduated at the top of his college list in 1654, “his head” was, in the words of a contemporary, “too roving and active … to confine himself to a College Life,” so he “left it &went to London into gayer company, & setup for a Poet.” During the late 1650s Dryden supplemented his modest patrimony by working for the Cromwellian civil service, where he served as one of the secretaries of the French and Latin tongues, and where his senior colleagues included John
Milton and Andrew Marvell. In 1659 he published “Heroique Stanza’s” on Oliver Cromwell's death, a poem that, though muted in its emotional tone, and largely restricted to praise of Cromwell's achievements as a peacemaker, was later to be raked up by his enemies as a source of embarrassment. At the time of Charles II's restoration to the throne, Dryden probably worked briefly as a publisher's preface writer. He soon proclaimed his allegiance to Charles and began to seek patronage from influential members of the new establishment, addressing poems to Sir
Robert
Howard (with whom he lodged and whose sister, Lady
Elizabeth, he married in 1663), the earl of Clarendon, the antiquary Walter
Charleton, and King Charles himself. These poems deploy the stock conventions of royalist panegyric and attempt to stake the claim for poetry within the new political order. Dryden apologizes for his complicity with the Cromwellian regime and hails Charles as a merciful peacemaker and the inaugurator of a new “Augustan” age. Charleton is praised for his embodiment of the intellectually progressive spirit of the new era. Although such work clearly reveals Dryden's hopes for preferment as a poet, his main source of income for the first twenty years of his literary career was as a writer for the stage. His first play, The Wild Gallant, was performed in 1663, and from 1668 he was contracted to produce three plays per annum for the King's Company, in which he also became a shareholder. By 1682, when the King's Company foundered and was effectively taken over by the rival Duke's Company, Dryden had written (sometimes with collaborators) twenty-one plays. These show him deftly exploiting and extending the various styles and modes fashionable in the highly competitive theatrical market of Restoration England. In such plays as Tyrannick Love (performed in 1669, published in 1670) and The Conquest of Granada (in two parts, performed in 1670 -- 1671, published in 1672), Dryden contributed to the vogue for “heroic drama,” a genre blending epic and romance, in which larger-than-life protagonists strive in the pursuit of impossible ideals. In Marriage A-la-Mode (performed in 1671, published in 1673), he sought to invest the language of stage comedy with the polite conversational style of the court. In All for Love (performed 1677, published 1678—the only play he admitted to writing for himself) and Troilus and Cressida (performed and published in 1679), he attempted to reinvigorate serious drama by integrating features of Shakespearian and neoclassical tragedy. In The State of Innocence (published in 1677), he recast Paradise Lost (with its author's permission) as an opera that subjects Milton's epic presentation of divine providence and human free will to a skeptical, Hobbesian irony. From his own times to the early twenty-first century, Dryden's comedies have been pilloried for their smutty innuendo, and his serious plays for their inflated bombast, diagrammatic characterization, and unconvincing plots. Much must be frankly conceded to such charges: few of Dryden's plays would feature on a short list of works designed to whet the appetites of new readers. But it was in his dramas that Dryden first began to explore some of the searching philosophical questions that were to become the main focus of his best writing. How can the individual preserve mental tranquillity when beset by capricious and malign forces from within and without? Are humans merely the playthings of fate, fortune, or the gods? What are the capacities and limitations of human reason? Are human laws “naturally” sanctioned, or are they artificial constructs with merely temporary validity? Is language a wellhead of truth or a source of lies and deceptions? How does wise rule differ from brutal tyranny? Should humankind be delighted or appalled to realize that it is animated by forces similar to those operative in the animal and inanimate world? Can one hope for an afterlife, or is death the end of all? Can human achievements ever survive the vicissitudes of time and change? Although he was later to explore such questions in greater depth and with greater subtlety, the theater afforded Dryden a valuable opportunity to give them a preliminary airing—and, moreover, in the dialogic and dialectical form that he found most congenial. Dryden's plays generated by-products with their own significance. He composed prologues and epilogues (for his own plays and those of others) in which the speaker engages in witty banter with the audience on matters of current political, social, and theatrical controversy. His published play texts included dedications and prefaces, written in an elegantly relaxed conversational prose, that debate issues of current critical concern, such as the respective advantages of blank verse and rhyme and the relative merits of classical, French, and English drama. In these essays and the separately published Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), Dryden effectively established the English tradition of descriptive literary criticism as we know it. Dryden's theatrical work also involved him in periodic controversy. His brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard attacked his views on rhymed drama. His heroic plays were burlesqued in the popular skit The Rehearsal (1671), and his fellow dramatist Thomas
Shadwell accused him of slighting his own dramatist hero, Ben
Jonson. Dryden responded with Mac Flecknoe, a poetic satire (circulating in manuscript in 1676) that depicted, in mock heroic style, the coronation of Shadwell as monarch “Through all the Realms of Non-sense absolute.” In this poem, Dryden's writing is often impelled by energies and interests that go beyond his immediate satirical purpose. On one level, Mac Flecknoe can be viewed as a topical and ephemeral lampoon, packed with dense allusions not only to the deeds and writings of Shadwell but also to those of the hack poet Richard
Flecknoe, Shadwell's alleged predecessor as Monarch of Dullness. Dryden's treatment, however, metamorphoses such local and contingent concerns into an absurdist fantasy of larger imaginative import, in which the “genuine night” of Shadwell's mind is invested with a quasi-heroic grandeur: “The rest to some faint meaning make pretence, / But Sh—never deviates into sense.” Shadwell is comically aggrandized in the very act of being belittled, and abuse is transformed into delight. Dryden's comic coronation scene, moreover, incorporates wickedly subversive insinuations about the institution of monarchy itself. Flecknoe, the reader notes, is “blest with issue of a large increase” and “Worn out with business”—sly digs at Charles II's celebrated idleness and sexual indulgence. And Shadwell's “Majesty” is “thoughtless as Monarch Oakes, that shade the plain, / And, spread in solemn state, supinely reign”—a glance at the Boscobel Oak in which Charles hid after the battle of Worcester and that had been featured on one of the triumphal arches erected at his coronation.
Public Poetry, 1667–1688
Such subversive irreverence might seem to go further than the normal advice and criticism that the court's poetic spokesman was allowed, even expected, to offer his monarch. In 1667 Dryden had published Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666, an exuberantly patriotic poem depicting events in the Second Dutch War (1665 -- 1667) and the Great Fire of London (1666), which had been crucial in securing him the positions of poet laureate (1668) and Historiographer Royal (1670). The most celebrated products of Dryden's laureateship came during the period of the Popish Plot (1678 -- 1679) and Exclusion Crisis (1680 -- 1683), when he championed the royal cause against the parliamentary Whigs who, under the leadership of the earl of Shaftesbury, sought to exclude James, King Charles's Roman Catholic brother, from the succession. In Absalom and Achitophel (1681), Dryden drew a parallel between contemporary events and the Old Testament story of Absalom's rebellion against King David. Charles is figured as David, his illegitimate son, the duke of Monmouth, as Absalom, and Shaftesbury as Absalom's wicked counsellor, Achitophel. (A second part, written in collaboration with Nahum Tate, was published in 1682, with a further, more savage satire on Shaftesbury, The Medall: A Satyre against Sedition, appearing the same year.) As in Mac Flecknoe, poetry that at first sight might seem merely polemical and propagandist in intent glows, at the local level, with a richer and less predictable imaginative life. Absalom and Achitophel’s famous opening depiction of “King David,” for example, looks back to a time “Before Polygamy was made a sin,” when David,after Heaven's own heart, His vigorous warmth did, variously, impart To Wives and Slaves: And, wide as his Command, Scatter’d his Maker's Image through the Land.These lines, on one level, fulfill a strategic function in the poem's satirical design: Dryden wittily and breezily dispenses with the awkward matter of Charles's promiscuity so that he can focus on the king's divinely sanctioned role as the upholder of a beneficent order. But the sly ironies of the passage resound more complicatedly, raising sensitive questions to which Dryden provides no simple answers. Is Charles's promiscuity seriously to be considered as “after Heaven's own heart”? If so, what does that imply about God's nature and conduct, and about the divine right of kings, the cornerstone of Charles's claim on his subjects’ obedience? Is polygamy inherently a sin, or was it merely “made a Sin” by “Priest-craft”? Such questions could hardly be pursued in a propagandist poem released at a moment of political crisis, but they continued to reverberate in Dryden's mind whenever he returned to the topic of human and divine sexuality and to the competing claims of custom and natural law. Although Dryden discharged his laureate duties faithfully for another six years, lamenting the death of King Charles in Threnodia Augustalis (1685), hailing James's II's accession in Albion and Albanius (1685), and celebrating the birth of James's son in Britannia Rediviva (1688), there are signs that he was already beginning to entertain misgivings about his career as a fashionable dramatist and court writer, and to suspect that his deepest imaginative concerns might find more satisfactory expression in another form. In a key prose work, the Dedication to Aureng-Zebe (1676), Dryden had written scornfully of those who “in all Courts … make it their business to ruine Wit,” had voiced his desire “to be no longer the Sisyphus of the Stage,” and had praised the “Easiness and Quiet of Retirement” celebrated by such poets as Horace, Lucretius, and Abraham Cowley. A few years later, in an elegy on the young poet Anne Killigrew (1685), he expressed his disgust at the “fat Pollutions” with which he had increased “the steaming Ordures of the Stage,” thereby profaning the “Heav’nly Gift of Poesy.” Such reflections were, it seems, part of a complex process of midlife spiritual self-questioning. In 1682 Dryden's work had taken a significant new direction with the publication of Religio Laici, or A Layman's Faith, a sustained set of reflections on religious authority in which Anglicanism (with its emphasis on the mutually restraining effects of reason, private judgment, and Church tradition) is defended against the extremes of Deism, Nonconformism, and Catholicism. Dryden's growing awareness of the fragility of life and the precariousness of literary fame found moving expression in an elegy (1684) on the talented young poet John Oldham. His religious self-scrutiny eventually resulted (probably in 1685) in his conversion to Catholicism, a faith to which his commitment remained steadfast—at considerable personal cost—for the rest of his life. He defended his new religion in The Hind and the Panther (1687), an extended beast fable in which a “milk-white Hind” (the Roman Catholic Church) debates questions of theological doctrine and Church authority with the beautiful but dangerous “spotted Panther” (the Church of England). The Hind and the Panther blends the skeptical, exploratory mode of Religio Laici with passages of direct, visionary affirmation and moments of near-autobiographical remorse, all shadowed with dark forebodings about the violent potential of political and religious faction—including the extreme Catholicism favored by King James himself. During the Glorious Revolution of 1688 -- 1689 Dryden lost his court positions, and he was forced to live by his pen for the last twelve years of his life. He initially—and with some reluctance—returned to the stage, producing five new dramatic works between 1689 -- 1694, including Don Sebastian (performed in 1689, published in 1690), considered by some his finest play. He also published a number of important personal poems, including addresses to the playwright William Congreve (1693) and the painter Sir Godfrey Kneller (1694), and an elegiac ode on the death of the composer Henry Purcell (1696). In 1697 he was commissioned to write an ode for the annual London Saint Cecilia's Day feast. The result was Alexander's Feast; or the Power of Musique, a poem that long remained his single most popular and widely echoed work, particularly admired for its seductive evocation and enactment of the affective powers of music and poetry.
Translations, 1680–1700
The main activity of Dryden's last years, however, was translation, a mode in which his contemporaries thought his gifts found their most mature, sustained, and vivid expression. Dryden was by inclination an occasional translator who preferred to select poems and passages that had particularly affected him “in the reading,” and in whose authors he felt he had found a “soul congenial.” Translation was thus, for him, simultaneously an encounter with the imaginings of others and an act of self-discovery and self-exploration, in which he was, in T. S. Eliot's words, “giving the original through himself, and finding himself through the original.” Dryden had begun his translating career in 1680, when he contributed to a version of Ovid's Heroides compiled by the enterprising young publisher Jacob Tonson. He continued to collaborate with Tonson throughout the later 1680s and 1690s, helping to plan a series of verse miscellanies that included original and translated work, and to edit, execute, and contribute to major collections of translated verse and prose. Tonson's second miscellany, Sylvae (1685), contained Dryden's first masterpieces in the genre, versions of five extracts from Lucretius's De Rerum Natura and of three odes and an epode by Horace. In these poems Dryden found a convincing English voice both for the “Dogmatical way” in which Lucretius had denounced the vain desires and false hopes of mankind, and for the “Briskness,” “Jollity,” and “good Humour” with which Horace had affirmed his relish of “the present hour” and his determination to “put it out of Fortune's pow’r.” A collaborative version of The Satires of Juvenal and Persius, edited by Dryden, followed in 1692. Here Dryden provided a vivid recreation of the scurrilously hyperbolic wit that, he thought, characterized Juvenal's scornful castigation of human folly and vanity, and that gave Juvenalian satire its exhilaratingly cathartic effect (“Juvenal,” Dryden wrote, “gives me as much Pleasure as I can bear”). In Tonson's third miscellany, Examen Poeticum (1693), Dryden directed his attention to Ovid and Homer, poets to whom he was to return after his single most ambitious translating venture: The Works of Virgil (1697). This was published as a handsome subscription folio supported by many of the most eminent persons and institutions in the land. Dryden's rendering of the Aeneid, a poem imbued with melancholy reflections on succession, inheritance, exile, dispossession, usurpation, civil war, and the fragility of political institutions, is constantly colored by the English poet's awareness of his own situation as the dispossessed laureate of a defeated and exiled king. But Dryden did not transform the Aeneid into a Jacobite tract or allegory; he used contemporary allusions to bring Virgil's imaginings into complex dialogue, but never simple identification, with his own concerns. Dryden's rendering of Virgil's Georgics, a poem that he found in some ways more congenial than the Aeneid, afforded him his most sustained opportunity to pursue his longstanding interest in the delightful and disconcerting overlaps between the human, animal, and inanimate worlds. Dryden's final translations appeared in Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a volume whose preface contains the poet's most mature reflections on poetic tradition, inheritance, and renewal. In Fables the voices of Ovid and Homer are blended and contrasted with those of Chaucer and Boccaccio in a sequence of interconnected narratives that treat some of Dryden's favorite subjects: the ennobling and demeaning power of love; the deceitfulness of political debate; the conflict between human and natural law; the glory and absurdity of martial heroism; the nature of true nobility; and the destructive and restorative effects of time and change. Dryden shows himself equally responsive to the turbulent wrath of the Homeric Achilles, to the paradoxical feelings of Ovid's incestuous heroine Myrrha, to the antics of Chaucer's farmyard cock Chanticleer, and to the sexual defiance of Boccaccio's Sigismonda. In his re-creations of the speeches of Ovid's Pythagoras and Chaucer's Theseus, Dryden offers a memorable celebration of the processes of natural flux and renewal embodied and enacted in Fables itself. In this volume, long regarded as the culmination of his literary career, Dryden was thought to have fused, miraculously, the fiery vitality of youth with the sober wisdom of old age, and to have combined a profound interpretive insight into his originals with the ease and flow of original composition.Death and Posthumous Reputation
Dryden's death on 1 May 1700 meant that his plans for a complete translation of Homer's Iliad were never to come to fruition. His last work was published posthumously: The Secular Masque, designed to accompany Sir John Vanbrugh's adaptation of John Fletcher's The Pilgrim, and containing piquant reflections on the turbulent century through which he had lived. Dryden's death was lamented in elegies that praised his fusion of Italian musicality with Germanic vigor, celebrated the spellbinding immediacy of his characters, scenes, and events, and hailed his recreation, in a modern English idiom, of some of the greatest poetry of the classical and medieval past. Such praise was repeated throughout the eighteenth century. Alexander Pope celebrated the “energy divine” of Dryden's versification. Joseph Warton noted the “alive, sublime, and animated” nature of his imagery. Samuel Johnson described Dryden's genius as “acute, argumentative, comprehensive and sublime,” praising the “comprehensive speculation” that had enabled the poet to make such profoundly “penetrating remarks on human nature.” Admiration for Dryden continued well into the nineteenth century, when his champions included Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. However, in the late Victorian and Edwardian period a reaction set in. Dryden came to be seen (on the strength of a severely curtailed selection from his oeuvre) as a mere “journalist in verse” whose vision, sensibility, and artistic judgment were fatally compromised by the cultural and political prejudices of his age, party, class, and sex. His verse was regarded as a prosaic “poetry of statement,” and his translations as presumptuous accommodations of ancient and medieval wisdom to the assumptions and tastes of the Age of Reason. It was only in the later twentieth century that something of the old appreciation of Dryden's intellectual power, vibrant poetic creativity, and breadth of cultural and imaginative sympathies began to revive. See also The Coffeehouse; Neoclassicism; Poet Laureate; and Restoration Drama.
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