91-) English Literature
John Dryden
After
John Donne and John Milton, John Dryden was the greatest English poet of the
17th century. After William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, he was the greatest
playwright. And he has no peer as a writer of prose, especially literary
criticism, and as a translator. Other figures, such as George Herbert or Andrew
Marvell or William Wycherley or William Congreve, may figure more prominently
in anthologies and literary histories, but Dryden’s sustained output in both
poetry and drama ranks him higher. After Shakespeare, he wrote the greatest
heroic play of the century, The Conquest of Granada (1670, 1671), and the
greatest tragicomedy, Marriage A-la-Mode
(1671). He wrote the greatest tragedy of the Restoration, All for Love
(1677), the greatest tragicomedy, Don Sebastian (1689), and one of the greatest
comedies, Amphitryon (1690). As a writer of prose he developed a lucid
professional style, relying on patterns and rhythms of everyday speech. As a
critic he developed a combination of methods—historical, analytical,
evaluative, dialogic—that helped grow the neoclassical theory of literary
criticism. As a translator he developed an easy manner of what he called
paraphrase that produced brilliant versions of Homer, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid,
Juvenal, Persius, Giovanni Boccaccio, Geoffrey Chaucer, and above all Virgil.
His translation of The Aeneid remains the best ever produced in English. As a
poet he perfected the heroic couplet, sprinkling it with judicious enjambments,
triplets, and metric variations and bequeathing it to Alexander Pope to work
upon it his own magic.
Dryden
the poet is best known today as a satirist, although he wrote only two great
original satires: Mac Flecknoe (1682) and The Medall (1682). His most famous
poem, Absalom and Achitophel (1681) contains several brilliant satiric
portraits. But unlike satire, it comes to a final, tragic resolution. Dryden’s
other great poems—Annus Mirabilis (1667), Religio Laici (1682), The Hind and
the Panther (1687), Anne Killigrew (1686), Alexander’s Feast (1697), and “To My
Honour’d Kinsman” (1700)—are not satires either. And he contributed a wonderful
body of occasional poems: panegyrics, odes, elegies, prologues, and epilogues.
Youth and education
Early life
The
son of a country gentleman, Dryden grew up in the country. When he was 11 years
old the Civil War broke out. Both his father’s and mother’s families sided with
Parliament against the king, but Dryden’s own sympathies in his youth are
unknown.
Dryden
was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in
Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints.
He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary
Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–1632),
and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan
cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As
a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely
that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School
as a King's Scholar to be trained as a King’s Scholar by the brilliant Royalist
headmaster Richard Busby , a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian.
Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced
a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high
Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden's response to this was, he clearly respected the
headmaster and would later send two of his sons to school at Westminster.
Dryden’s
family sided with the Commonwealth; however, in his first published poem, the
elegy “Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings"—included in a volume (1649) of
verses upon this young aristocrat’s untimely death from smallpox—Dryden
revealed Royalist sympathies.
As
a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained
pupils in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides
of a given issue. This is a skill which would remain with Dryden and influence
his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical
patterns. The Westminster curriculum included weekly translation assignments
which developed Dryden's capacity for assimilation. This was also to be
exhibited in his later works. His years at Westminster were not uneventful, and
his first published poem, an elegy with a strong royalist feel on the death of
his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings from smallpox, alludes to the execution of
King Charles I, which took place on 30 January 1649, very near the school where
Dr. Busby had first prayed for the King and then locked in his schoolboys to
prevent their attending the spectacle.
About
1644 Dryden was admitted to Westminster School, where he received a
predominantly classical education under the celebrated Richard Busby. His easy
and lifelong familiarity with classical literature begun at Westminster later
resulted in idiomatic English translations.
In
1650 he entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took his B.A. degree in
1654. Here he would have experienced a return to the religious and political
ethos of his childhood: the Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher by the
name of Thomas Hill who had been a rector in Dryden's home village. Though
there is little specific information on Dryden's undergraduate years, he would
most certainly have followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and
mathematics. In 1654 he obtained his BA, graduating top of the list for Trinity
that year. In June of the same year Dryden's father died, leaving him some land
which generated a little income, but not enough to live on.What Dryden did
between leaving the university in 1654 and the Restoration of Charles II in
1660 is not known with certainty. In 1659 his contribution to a memorial volume
for Oliver Cromwell marked him as a poet worth watching. His “heroic stanzas”
were mature, considered, sonorous, and sprinkled with those classical and
scientific allusions that characterized his later verse. This kind of public
poetry was always one of the things Dryden did best.
Returning
to London during the Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Oliver Cromwell's
Secretary of State, John Thurloe. This appointment may have been the result of
influence exercised on his behalf by his cousin the Lord Chamberlain, Sir
Gilbert Pickering. At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed
with the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Shortly thereafter he
published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), a eulogy on
Cromwell's death which is cautious and prudent in its emotional display. In
1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of
Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work
the Interregnum is illustrated as a time of chaos, and Charles is seen as the
restorer of peace and order.
When
in May 1660 Charles II was restored to the throne, Dryden joined the poets of
the day in welcoming him, publishing in June Astraea Redux, a poem of more than
300 lines in rhymed couplets. For the coronation in 1661, he wrote To His
Sacred Majesty. These two poems were designed to dignify and strengthen the
monarchy and to invest the young monarch with an aura of majesty, permanence,
and even divinity. Thereafter, Dryden’s ambitions and fortunes as a writer were
shaped by his relationship with the monarchy. On December 1, 1663, he married
Elizabeth Howard, the youngest daughter of Thomas Howard, 1st earl of
Berkshire. In due course she bore him three sons.
Dryden’s
longest poem to date, Annus Mirabilis (1667), was a celebration of two
victories by the English fleet over the Dutch and the Londoners’ survival of
the Great Fire of 1666. In this work Dryden was once again gilding the royal
image and reinforcing the concept of a loyal nation united under the best of
kings. It was hardly surprising that when the poet laureate, Sir William
Davenant, died in 1668, Dryden was appointed poet laureate in his place and two
years later was appointed royal historiographer.
Personal life
On
1 December 1663, Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard (died 1714)] at St
Swithin's, London, and the consent of the parents is noted on the licence,
although Lady Elizabeth was then about twenty-five.
The
couple met after 1660, when Dryden began lodging in London with her brother,
Sir Robert Howard, son of the earl of Berkshire. The marriage lasted until his
death, but there is little evidence about how they lived as a couple. A small
estate in Wiltshire was settled upon them by her father. The lady's intellect
and temper were apparently not good; her husband was treated as an inferior by
those of her social status.
Both
Dryden and his wife were warmly attached to their children. They had three
sons: Charles (1666–1704), John (1668–1701), and Erasmus Henry (1669–1710).
Lady Elizabeth Dryden survived her husband, but reportedly lost her wits after
becoming a widow. Although some have historically claimed to be from the
lineage of John Dryden, his three children, one of whom became a Roman Catholic
priest, had no children themselves.
Writing
for the stage
Soon
after his restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles II granted two patents for
theatres, which had been closed by the Puritans in 1642. Dryden soon joined the
little band of dramatists who were writing new plays for the revived English
theatre. His first play, The Wild Gallant, a farcical comedy with some strokes
of humour and a good deal of licentious dialogue, was produced in 1663. It was
a comparative failure, but in January 1664 he had some share in the success of
The Indian Queen, a heroic tragedy in rhymed couplets in which he had
collaborated with Sir Robert Howard, his brother-in-law. Dryden was soon to
successfully exploit this new and popular genre, with its conflicts between
love and honour and its lovely heroines before whose charms the blustering
heroes sank down in awed submission. In the spring of 1665 Dryden had his own
first outstanding success with The Indian Emperour, a play that was a sequel to
The Indian Queen.
In
1667 Dryden had another remarkable hit with a tragicomedy, Secret Love, or the
Maiden Queen, which appealed particularly to the king. The part of Florimel, a
gay and witty maid of honour, was played to perfection by the king’s latest
mistress, Nell Gwynn. In Florimel’s rattling exchanges with Celadon, the
Restoration aptitude for witty repartee reached a new level of accomplishment.
In 1667 Dryden also reworked for the stage Molière’s comedy L’Étourdi
(translated by William Cavendish, duke of Newcastle) under the title Sir Martin
Mar-all.
In
1668 Dryden published Of Dramatick Poesie, an Essay, a leisurely discussion
between four contemporary writers of whom Dryden (as Neander) is one. This work
is a defense of English drama against the champions of both ancient Classical
drama and the Neoclassical French theatre; it is also an attempt to discover
general principles of dramatic criticism. By deploying his disputants so as to
break down the conventional oppositions of ancient and modern, French and
English, Elizabethan and Restoration, Dryden deepens and complicates the
discussion. This is the first substantial piece of modern dramatic criticism;
it is sensible, judicious, and exploratory and combines general principles and
analysis in a gracefully informal style. Dryden’s approach in this and all his
best criticism is characteristically speculative and shows the influence of
detached scientific inquiry. The prefaces to his plays and translations over
the next three decades were to constitute a substantial body of critical
writing and reflection.
In
1668 Dryden agreed to write exclusively for Thomas Killigrew’s company at the
rate of three plays a year and became a shareholder entitled to one-tenth of
the profits. Although Dryden averaged only a play a year, the contract
apparently was mutually profitable. In June 1669 he gave the company Tyrannick
Love, with its blustering and blaspheming hero Maximin. In December of the next
year came the first part of The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards, followed
by the second part about a month later. All three plays were highly successful;
and in the character Almanzor, the intrepid hero of The Conquest of Granada,
the theme of love and honour reached its climax. But the vein had now been
almost worked out, as seen in the 1671 production of that witty burlesque of
heroic drama The Rehearsal, by George Villiers, 2nd duke of Buckingham, in
which Dryden (Mr. Bayes) was the main satirical victim. The Rehearsal did not
kill the heroic play, however; as late as November 1675, Dryden staged his last
and most intelligent example of the genre, Aureng-Zebe. In this play he
abandoned the use of rhymed couplets for that of blank verse.
In
writing those heroic plays, Dryden had been catering to an audience that was
prepared to be stunned into admiration by drums and trumpets, rant and
extravagance, stage battles, rich costumes, and exotic scenes. His abandonment
of crowd-pleasing rant and bombast was symbolized in 1672 with his brilliant
comedy Marriage A-la-Mode, in which the Restoration battle of the sexes was
given a sophisticated and civilized expression that only Sir George Etherege
and William Congreve at their best would equal. Equally fine in a different
mode was his tragedy All for Love (1677), based on Shakespeare’s Antony and
Cleopatra and written in a flowing but controlled blank verse. He had earlier
adapted The Tempest (1667), and later he reworked yet another Shakespeare play,
Troilus and Cressida (1679). Dryden had now entered what may be called his
Neoclassical period, and, if his new tragedy was not without some echoes of the
old extravagance, it was admirably constructed, with the action developing
naturally from situation and character.
By
1678 Dryden was at loggerheads with his fellow shareholders in the Killigrew
company, which was in grave difficulties owing to mismanagement. Dryden offered
his tragedy Oedipus, a collaboration with Nathaniel Lee, to a rival theatre
company and ceased to be a Killigrew shareholder.
Later
life and career
After
the Restoration, as Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and
literary critic of his day, he transferred his allegiances to the new
government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two
more panegyrics: To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662)
and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking
to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for
publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading
public. These, and his other nondramatic poems, are occasional—that is, they
celebrate public events. Thus they are written for the nation rather than the
self, and the Poet Laureate (as he would later become) is obliged to write a
certain number of these per annum. In November 1662, Dryden was proposed for membership
in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was
inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled for non-payment of his
dues.
On
1 December 1663, Dryden married the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady
Elizabeth. Dryden's works occasionally contain outbursts against the married
state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate
side of his marriage. Lady Elizabeth bore three sons, one of whom (Erasmus
Henry) became a Roman Catholic priest.
With
the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began
writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was not
successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to
produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he became a
shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source
of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being
Marriage à la Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in
which his greatest success was All for Love (1678).
Dryden
was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that
his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for
poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began,
he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the
English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666.
It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the
preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts
of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670).
When
the Great Plague of London closed the theatres in 1665, Dryden retreated to
Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), arguably the best of his
unsystematic prefaces and essays. Dryden constantly defended his own literary
practice, and Of Dramatick Poesie, the longest of his critical works, takes the
form of a dialogue in which four characters — each based on a prominent
contemporary, with Dryden himself as 'Neander' — debate the merits of
classical, French and English drama. The greater part of his critical works
introduce problems which he is eager to discuss, and show the work of a writer
of independent mind who feels strongly about his own ideas, ideas which
demonstrate the breadth of his reading. He felt strongly about the relation of
the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe
(1675) has a prologue which denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama. His
play All for Love (1678) was written in blank verse, and was to immediately
follow Aureng-Zebe.
Dryden's
poem, "An Essay upon Satire", contained a number of attacks on King
Charles II, his mistresses and courtiers, but most pointedly on the Earl of
Rochester, a notorious womaniser. Rochester responded by hiring thugs who
attacked Dryden whilst walking back from Will's Coffee House (a popular London
coffee house where the Wits gathered to gossip, drink and conduct their
business) to his house on Gerrard Street. At around 8 pm on 18 December 1679,
Dryden was attacked in Rose Alley behind the Lamb & Flag pub, near his home
in Covent Garden. Dryden survived the attack, offering £50 for the identity of
the thugs placed in the London Gazette, and a Royal Pardon if one of them would
confess. No one claimed the reward.
Dryden's
greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, a
more personal product of his laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in
manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden's main goal
in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offenses against
literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of
him on the stage and in print." It is not a belittling form of satire, but
rather one which makes his object great in ways which are unexpected,
transferring the ridiculous into poetry. This line of satire continued with
Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). His other major works from
this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the
position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's
Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the
word 'biography' to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which
celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
He
wrote Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the
Catholic King and Queen on 10 June 1688.
When,
later in the same year, James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution,
Dryden's refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William
and Mary, left him out of favour at court. Thomas Shadwell succeeded him as
Poet Laureate, and he was forced to give up his public offices and live by the
proceeds of his pen. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid,
Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than
writing for the stage. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most
ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil (1697), which
was published by subscription. The publication of the translation of Virgil was
a national event and brought Dryden the sum of £1,400. Dryden translated the
Aeneid into couplets, turning Virgil's almost 10,000 lines into 13,700 lines;
Joseph Addison wrote the (prose) prefaces for each book, and William Congreve
checked the translation against the Latin original. His final translations
appeared in the volume Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a series of episodes
from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernised adaptations from
Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden's own poems. As a translator, he made
great literary works in the older languages available to readers of English.
Poetic
style
What
Dryden achieved in his poetry was neither the emotional excitement of the early
nineteenth-century romantics nor the intellectual complexities of the
metaphysicals. His subject matter was often factual, and he aimed at expressing
his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated manner. Although he uses
formal structures such as heroic couplets, he tried to recreate the natural
rhythm of speech, and he knew that different subjects need different kinds of
verse. In his preface to Religio Laici he says that "the expressions of a
poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet
majestic... The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for
(these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true
proportion.... A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into
truth."
Translation
style
While
Dryden had many admirers, he also had his share of critics, Mark Van Doren
among them. Van Doren complained that in translating Virgil's Aeneid, Dryden
had added "a fund of phrases with which he could expand any passage that
seemed to him curt." Dryden did not feel such expansion was a fault,
arguing that as Latin is a naturally concise language it cannot be duly
represented by a comparable number of words in English. "He...recognized
that Virgil 'had the advantage of a language wherein much may be comprehended
in a little space' (5:329–30). The 'way to please the best Judges...is not to
Translate a Poet literally; and Virgil least of any other' (5:329)."
For
example, take lines 789–795 of Book 2 when Aeneas sees and receives a message
from the ghost of his wife, Creusa.
iamque
vale et nati serva communis amorem.'
haec
ubi dicta dedit, lacrimantem et multa volentem
dicere
deseruit, tenuisque recessit in auras.
ter
conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;
ter
frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,
par
levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.
sic
demum socios consumpta nocte reviso
Dryden
translates it like this:
I
trust our common issue to your care.'
She
said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air.
I
strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue;
And
thrice about her neck my arms I flung,
And,
thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung.
Light
as an empty dream at break of day,
Or
as a blast of wind, she rush'd away.
Thus
having pass'd the night in fruitless pain,
I
to my longing friends return again
Dryden's
translation is based on presumed authorial intent and smooth English. In line
790 the literal translation of haec ubi dicta dedit is "when she gave
these words." But "she said" gets the point across, uses half
the words, and makes for better English.[according to whom?] A few lines later,
with ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; ter frustra comprensa manus
effugit imago, he alters the literal translation "Thrice trying to give
arms around her neck; thrice the image grasped in vain fled the hands," in
order to fit it into the metre and the emotion of the scene.
In
his own words,
The
way I have taken, is not so streight as Metaphrase, nor so loose as Paraphrase:
Some things too I have omitted, and sometimes added of my own. Yet the
omissions I hope, are but of Circumstances, and such as wou'd have no grace in
English; and the Addition, I also hope, are easily deduc'd from Virgil's Sense.
They will seem (at least I have the Vanity to think so), not struck into him,
but growing out of him. (5:529)
In
a similar vein, Dryden writes in his Preface to the translation anthology
Sylvae:
Where
I have taken away some of [the original authors'] Expressions, and cut them
shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in
the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I
have enlarg’d them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that
those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet,
or may be fairly deduc’d from him; or at least, if both those considerations
should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living,
and an Englishman, they are such as he wou’d probably have written.
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