John Dryden (1631-1700) was one of seventeenth-century England's best-known writers. Known for poetry, prose, drama, criticism, and translation, Dryden today remains beloved as a writer of satire in particular. He is also remembered for developing the heroic couplet, a stanzaic form that would come to dominate English poetry even after his death. Dryden was remarkably prolific and wide-ranging in his work, causing him to be remembered alongside foundational poets like John Milton, John Donne, and Alexander Pope. At the same time, his life and work offer a fascinating glimpse at the tumultuous politics of Restoration England. Dryden's own transition from Puritan Republicanism to Catholic Royalism, reflected in his published work, is a window into seventeenth-century English society at large.
The technical skill that would come to mark Dryden's later work, as well as the political themes that drove it, were visible even in his first published poems. The first of these was the elegy "Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings," written in 1649. In the elegy Dryden hints at a Royalist worldview, valorizing "the Honour of [Hastings'] ancient family." This first poem has been criticized for technical clumsiness, but scholars have suggested that the poem reveals a nascent control over tone and structure that would characterize Dryden's work later on. Ten years after the publication of this first poem, Dryden published another work, this time in his signature heroic stanzas. This poem, written in memory of parliamentary general Oliver Cromwell, represented a political about-face for Dryden (perhaps, some have speculated, driven by his Puritan family and upbringing). At the same time, the work contained sophisticated references to classical literature, which would be a preoccupation of Dryden's throughout his career.
The 1660 restoration of Charles II to the British monarchy prompted one of Dryden's best works, the Astraea Redux. The poem, consisting of rhymed couplets over 300 lines, is an impassioned tribute to monarchy. In it, Dryden depicts the monarch/subject relationship as a romance, a metaphor to which he would return in later works. He positions Charles as a long-awaited bearer of peace following a time of chaos. The poem, with its rhetorical intensity, is notably passionate relative to the earlier elegy for Cromwell. Critics have noted that the cautiousness and awkwardness of Dryden's first poem relative to his second may be a reflection of his Royalist beliefs, and indeed, in Astraea Redux, he explicitly apologizes for his earlier pro-Cromwell work. Meanwhile, Dryden's social situation was improving, placing him advantageously within a system of literary patronage that made it financially possible for him to write: he was supported by the nobleman Thomas Howard, who even collaborated with him on the 1664 play The Indian-Queen, and in 1663 married Howard's sister Elizabeth. These connections freed Dryden to pursue literature at a new level over the course of the 1660s, as did a contract writing for the theater company of Thomas Killigrew starting in 1668. This was an extremely productive period, marked by the publication of an array of dramas and several well-known panegyrics. In fact, Dryden became the most celebrated of English poets in the period, producing works such as the blank-verse All for Love (1678) and Marriage A-la-Mode (1672). He gained the favor of not only the reading and theatergoing public but also of the powerful, becoming poet laureate and royal historiographer, as well as a shareholder in the King's theater company. Dryden's fame brought him into contact, and sometimes into conflict, with some of his most influential contemporaries.
Despite his success as a dramatist, however, it is as a poet, a critic, and most of all a satirist that Dryden is most remembered today. In 1667, having retreated to the countryside during an outbreak of the plague in London, Dryden produced the epic Annus Mirabilis. The poem pays tribute to English nationhood and to the king by describing two events: a military victory against the Dutch, and a recovery after the devastating Great Fire of London. Like Astraea Redux, Annus Mirabilis is focused on the restoration of not only glory but also natural order following tumult and disaster. This reflects a political stance and, to an extent, a scientific one: the scientists and poets of the seventeenth century existed in a shared social orbit, and Dryden's work engages with scientific notions of natural, inviolable laws. For Dryden, poetry was a tool of political persuasion, and this poem skillfully urges patriotic unity (and conformity) while celebrating the king as a figure of near-divine authority. At the same time, he speaks to the king and other figures of political power, urging them to increase British imperial might abroad. Dryden's most lasting critical work, 1668's Of Dramatick Poesie, followed on the heels of Annus Mirabilis. In its engagement with classical motifs and classical literature, as well as its measured, scientific assessment of dramatic writing, it bears a strong relationship to his poetic and dramatic works. Framed as a conversation between writers of different national backgrounds, the work argues in a nuanced fashion for the worthiness of English drama compared to both classical and continental drama.
An outbreak of conflict between the Whig party and the King of England in 1681 prompted a flurry of political turmoil, and Dryden emerged as a sharp satirist of these events, unequivocally taking the side of the monarchy. His 1681 satire Absalom and Achitophel uses biblical narrative to structure political discourse. Allegorizing King Charles II as the biblical King David, and the Whig rebels Shaftesbury and Monmouth as his disloyal sons, Dryden pokes fun at his Whig contemporaries while mounting a defense of monarchism as a stable, reasoned form of government. Dryden's subsequent and well-known satire, The Medall, is focused on the aftermath of this conflict between Whigs and Tories—this time, Dryden satirizes and condemns the Whigs' choice to award a medal to the Lord of Shaftesbury. This work is structured using a depiction of a two-sided medal, one side containing a picture of London, the other of Shaftesbury himself. Absalom and Achitophel, as well as The Medall, offer examples of Dryden's skill at employing cutting, timely metaphor, as well as his ability to balance searing satire with measured reasoning. While these two famous satirical works address the broader political climate, the other of Dryden's most well-known satires, Mac Flecknoe, is equally concerned with artistic rivalry. In this work, published seemingly without Dryden's own consent in 1682, Dryden takes aim at the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden and Shadwell had had a series of literary disagreements primarily about the quality of the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson. However, politics were not absent from this satire: Shadwell's Whig sympathies represented a point of stark contrast with Dryden's own conservative alignment. Using the extended metaphor of monarchical succession, Dryden here mercilessly mocks Shadwell as successor to an unworthy and ridiculous poetic kingdom. The poem's blend of the earthy and the lofty—in both metaphorical content and language—creates a compelling, humorous contrast that imparts deep disdain for Shadwell. In the same year, Dryden published the pro-Anglican religious poem Religio Laici.
As the 1680s and 90s wore on, Dryden's best work increasingly was in the area of translating classical texts—most famously Virgil's work. Many of his translations took substantial liberties with their source material, resulting in poems that lie in a territory between original work and translation. Works such as "Happy the Man," Dryden's 1685 translation of Horace's "Ode 29," have become known in their own right quite separately from their classical sources. He also returned to the elegies that had marked the beginning of his career, with poems such as "Anne Killigrew" (1686). The elegiac "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham," published in 1684, became one of his most lasting works.
In 1685, meanwhile, Dryden converted to Catholicism following King Charles II's own conversion and the succession of the Catholic King James II. In a period where religious affiliations were strongly linked to political ones, this marked a sharp turn from Dryden's earlier, pro-Anglican stance. In response to his earlier work Religio Laici, with its defense of Anglicanism, Dryden published The Hind and the Panther in 1687. This poem, Dryden's longest, defends the poet's sincere religious beliefs against charges of opportunism and disingenuousness. Meanwhile, the 1687 "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day" paid tribute to Catholic tradition and to the religious figure of St. Cecilia. Since Dryden's time, readers and scholars have debated the real roots of his multiple dramatic shifts in religious and political belief. Some argue that these changes betray opportunistic striving. Others point out a consistent preference for tradition and stability, arguing that these many shifts represented only superficial changes in service of a consistent underlying belief system.
In 1668, Dryden was appointed England's first poet laureate. In the final years of his life, he continued to write poetry and produce translations, as well as to write for the stage with works such as 1691's King Arthur. Dryden died in 1700, and at the time of his death was one of the most well-respected poets in England. Buried in the poet's corner in Westminster Abbey, he would prove one of the foundational writers of the English canon, especially in the areas of criticism, translation, and satire. Sir Walter Scott argued that Dryden was, within the English canon, inferior to Milton and Shakespeare. Samuel Johnson, meanwhile, praised him as "the father of English criticism." Unparalleled in his influence on Enlightenment writers, and beloved throughout the Romantic and Victorian eras, Dryden's reputation sank in the twentieth century. In this period, many readers came to see him as intolerably conservative or outdated. However, more recent scholarship has played a role in reviving his reputation by pointing out nuance and open-mindedness even within some of his more apparently orthodox writings.
