GradeSaver has individual ClassicNotes on many of John Dryden's poems and plays, including Absalom and Achitophel, "Alexander's Feast, or The Power of Music," All For Love, "Happy the Man," Mac Flecknoe, Marriage a-la-Mode, "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," and "To The Memory of Mr. Oldham."
John Dryden was prolific across genres. While today his satires, translations, and critical works are perhaps his most widely read works, over the course of his lifetime Dryden was also a successful and celebrated writer of lyric poetry—excelling especially in the writing of elegies—and of dramas. It was in the writing of lyric poetry, especially about public figures and current events, that Dryden found his early success.
In 1659 he established himself as an up-and-coming poet with the publication of a poem commemorating Oliver Cromwell. While this first success is not considered one of Dryden's technically finest works, it did offer an early glimpse at some of his stylistic trademarks, such as the use of the heroic couplet. The heroic couplet also appeared in another of Dryden's early lyrics, the Astraea Redux, which celebrated King Charles II's restoration to the throne in 1660 and represented the beginning of Dryden's lifelong commitment to monarchism. However, 1667's celebrated Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders, 1666 departs from these predecessors with its use of quatrains rather than couplets. This poem, a tribute to England's military victory over the Dutch and its recovery from the Great Fire of London, illustrates Dryden's investment in military power and English national glory.
These early poems focused on decisive national events, but Dryden's elegies are more intimate and personal in tone and content. His 1684 poem "To the Memory of Mr. Oldham" is considered his best elegy, with its roving, touching tribute to a friend's poetic wit. Among his other famous elegies is the 1686 To The Pious Memory of the Accomplish'd Young Lady Mrs. Anne Killigrew, in which he uses classical allusion—a favored technique for Dryden—to praise a fellow poet, comparing her to the Greek poet Sappho. At times, however, elegiac writing and public commentary converged, as with Dryden's elegy to King Charles II, Threnodia Augustalis: A Funeral-Pindarique Poem Sacred to the Happy Memory of King Charles II. Written in Dryden's public capacity as poet laureate, this work offered a passionate defense of royal succession and tradition. Indeed, even Dryden's very first work of published poetry, "Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings" (1649), hints at sympathies towards the monarchy, well before the publication of his more explicitly and uncompromisingly political poetry.
Meanwhile, a series of poems primarily focused on religion shed light on Dryden's own dramatic swings between Anglican Protestantism and Roman Catholicism. A staunch Anglican earlier in his life, Dryden penned Religio Laici in 1682, defending the Anglican church and Protestantism in general in a response to the French clergyman Richard Simon's 1680 Histoire critique du Vieux Testament. This work, foundational to a literary tradition of biblical criticism, approached the Bible using new methods of literary and historical interrogation. Dryden's response is an endorsement of faith and of laypeople's relationship to the biblical text. However, later in his life, Dryden would convert to Catholicism, requiring him to recant and respond to his earlier pro-Anglican poem. The Hind and the Panther (1687) is just such a response. The poem, which prompted enormous controversy in its time, used the allegorical figures of animals to represent various religious traditions, with a hind (or deer) symbolizing the Catholic Church and a panther symbolizing Anglicanism. In the poem, Dryden makes the case that the Catholic Church, with its unbroken line of succession and adherence to tradition, offers a truer and less corrupted path than the Anglican Church. Today, this work provides what most scholars consider the most convincing evidence of Dryden's sincerity in converting to Catholicism. Other poems, notably 1687's "A Song for St. Cecilia's Day," celebrate what Dryden viewed as the rich and unaltered traditions and beliefs of the Church.
While Dryden's dramatic works are perhaps the most widely dismissed, and the least popular, today, the theater was an essential part of his career—and an exercise in poetic writing, since these works, like most in the period, were written in verse. He would write almost thirty plays over the course of his life, ranging from drama to comedy to dramatic opera. After the return of the monarchy to power in 1664 and the subsequent reopening of the theaters (which had been closed under Puritan leadership), plays gave Dryden a lucrative commercial arena in which to publish, brought him a wider audience, and connected him to important cultural and literary figures of the period. His first commercially successful play, the tragedy The Indian Queen, was written as a 1664 collaboration with his brother-in-law. This play and the other plays of his early career, including 1667's Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, and 1669's Tyrannick Love, consisted of rhymed heroic couplets. Later on, he would abandon this form when writing for the stage and instead write instead in unrhymed blank verse, beginning with the 1675 Aureng-Zebe. His shift to blank verse was accompanied by a shift from heroic dramas to subtler content inspired by French neoclassicism. Among these later plays were some of his most enduring dramas: the comic Marriage a-la-mode, in 1672, and his Shakespearian adaptation All For Love in 1667.
Dryden wrote not only for the stage, but also about it, in the works of criticism that would prove not only fundamental to his legacy but foundational for the literary-critical tradition in English as a whole. The most famous of these works was Of Dramatick Poesie, An Essay, published in 1668. This is considered to be the first work of modern drama criticism, and it displays the quality for which Dryden was most admired as a critic: even-handed, cool, and rational inquiry into a topic. This essay, like much of Dryden's critical work, takes the form of a dialogue in which various characters debate a topic—in this case, the virtues of various theatrical traditions, from ancient to modern, and from English to French. While Of Dramatick Poesie is the best-known of his standalone critical works, Dryden produced a great deal of critical commentary on his own writing in the form of accompanying texts such as prologues and epilogues. As a whole, his critical oeuvre is concerned with the reconciliation of two theatrical traditions—the English and the French. These traditions came with their associated sets of values and virtues—in general the English tradition was linked to extravagance and passion, and the French to neoclassical restraint, accuracy, and rationality. In both his own dramatic and poetic writing and in the critical commentary that accompanied it, Dryden expressed a desire to justify and combine the best of each tradition.
Meanwhile, though he produced relatively few satirical works during his career, the ones he did write remain some of Dryden's most famous and memorable to this day. These three famous satirical works, known for their pitiless parodying of politicians, public figures, and fellow artists, were produced relatively late in Dryden's career, beginning in the 1880s. The first two of these offered commentary on the same series of events: a political conflict between the King and the Earl of Shaftesbury. Shaftesbury, with his Whig allies, attempted to insert the king's illegitimate Protestant son the Duke of Monmouth as the successor to the throne in 1681. Shortly thereafter, Shaftesbury was acquitted on charges of treason and awarded a medal by his fellow Whigs. Dryden's first satire on this series of events, Absalom and Achitophel, mocks Shaftesbury and Monmouth through a biblical allegory in which they are depicted as seditious sons of King David. In 1682, Dryden published The Medall. The satirical verse uses the medal as an imaginative metaphor to mock the Whig dissenters, but Dryden supplemented the work with a more straightforward prose essay, "Epistle to the Whigs." These two satires, with their response to contemporary events, have played a role in Dryden's lasting reputation as a writer of timely commentary, rather than as a timeless or universal one. However, his third famous satire takes on an altogether different set of concerns. Written as a lampoon of Dryden's contemporary and fellow playwright Thomas Shadwell, Mac Flecknoe is widely considered the most brutal and unsparing of his satires. Likely written in the late 1670s, this satire was published in 1682, without Dryden's own permission. In Mac Flecknoe, Dryden attacks Shadwell as a playwright using the metaphor of royal succession. He depicts Shadwell as the successor to a literary lineage, albeit an unworthy and ridiculous one: while Shadwell admired the Elizabethan playwright Ben Jonson, Dryden depicts him instead as the heir to the largely forgotten dramatist Richard Flecknoe.
Finally, especially in the later years of his career, Dryden turned his focus to translation and adaptation. The objects of his translation were classical texts, including the writings of Virgil, Ovid, and Horace. Translation during this period carried a connotation of English imperial might and global influence. Dryden, a consistent advocate for English military and cultural expansion, accompanied his translations with critical texts and analyses in which he portrayed the act of translation as a patriotic one wherein English speakers borrowed from and reappropriated other cultures' artistic heritage. At the same time, translation produced some degree of equalization in the period. Generally speaking women, in particular, were denied the educational opportunities that allowed them to access classical texts in their original language. Thus translations like Dryden's widened the potential audience for these celebrated works. However, Dryden's translations tended to be more inventive than literal, in some cases coming to be considered original poetic works in their own right. His later translations are known for their playful experimentation with meter and form: Dryden fills them with unexpected rhythmic turns, and at times injects wholly original lines of his own.
Despite this range of genres and approaches, certain themes and concerns anchor the entire array of Dryden's work. His criticism not only accompanies his poetic work, but very often comments directly upon it. Meanwhile, the political twists and turns of the seventeenth century offer fodder for Dryden's satires, elegies, and lyrics alike. Throughout his work, he is concerned with the reconciliation of feuding poetic traditions—the neoclassical and the Elizabethan, the ancient and the modern—while displaying a consistent belief in the virtues of stability, tradition, and ritual. While he has primarily been known as a sharp commentator on the lives and politics of his contemporaries, Dryden is increasingly regarded as a literary innovator relevant beyond the mere historical context of his time, and as an essential shaper of English criticism, satire, and poetic verse.
