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INTRODUCTORY NOTE________________
The age of Elizabeth, memorable for so many reasons in the history of England,
was especially brilliant in literature, and, within literature, in the drama. With
some falling off in spontaneity, the impulse to great dramatic production lasted
till the Long Parliament closed the theaters in 1642; and when they were
reopened at the Restoration, in 1660, the stage only too faithfully reflected the
debased moral tone of the court society of Charles II.
John Dryden (1631-1700), the great representative figure in the literature of the
latter part of the seventeenth century, exemplifies in his work most of the main
tendencies of the time. He came into notice with a poem on the death of
Cromwell in 1658, and two years later was composing couplets expressing his
loyalty to the returned king.
He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, the daughter of
a royalist house, and for practically all the rest of his life remained an adherent
of the Tory Party. In 1663 he began writing for the stage, and during the next
thirty years he attempted nearly all the current forms of drama. His “Annus
Mirabilis” (1666), celebrating the English naval victories over the Dutch,
brought him in 1670 the Poet Laureateship. He had, meantime, begun the writing
of those admirable critical essays, represented in the present series by his Preface
to the “Fables” and his Dedication to the translation of Virgil. In these he shows
himself not only a critic of sound and penetrating judgment, but the first master
of modern English prose style.
With “Absalom and Achitophel,” a satire on the Whig leader, Shaftesbury,
Dryden entered a new phase, and achieved what is regarded as “the finest of all
political satires.” This was followed by “The Medal,” again directed against the
Whigs, and this by “Mac Flecknoe,” a fierce attack on his enemy and rival
Shadwell. The Government rewarded his services by a lucrative appointment.
After triumphing in the three fields of
drama, criticism, and satire, Dryden
appears next as a religious poet in his “Religio Laici,” an exposition of the
doctrines of the Church of England from a layman’s point of view. In the same
year that the Catholic James II. ascended the throne, Dryden joined the Roman
Church, and two years later defended his new religion in “The Hind and the
Panther,” an allegorical debate between two animals standing respectively for
Catholicism and Anglicanism.
The Revolution of 1688 put an end to Dryden’s prosperity; and after a short
return to dramatic composition, he turned to translation as a means of supporting
himself. He had already done something in this line; and after a series of
translations from Juvenal, Persius, and Ovid, he undertook, at the age of sixty-
three, the enormous task of turning the entire works of Virgil into English verse.
How he succeeded in this, readers of the “Aeneid” in a companion volume of
these classics can judge for themselves. Dryden’s production closes with the
collection of narrative poems called “Fables,” published in 1700, in which year
he died and was buried in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
Dryden lived in an age of reaction against excessive religious idealism, and both
his character and his works are marked by the somewhat unheroic traits of such a
period. But he was, on the whole, an honest man, open minded, genial, candid,
and modest; the wielder of a style, both in verse and prose, unmatched for
clearness, vigor, and sanity.
Three types of comedy appeared in England in the time of Dryden— the comedy
of humors, the comedy of intrigue, and the comedy of manners—and in all he
did work that classed him with the ablest of his contemporaries. He developed
the somewhat bombastic type of drama known as the heroic play, and brought it
to its height in his “Conquest of Granada”;
then, becoming dissatisfied with this
form, he cultivated the French classic tragedy on the model of Racine. This he
modified by combining with the regularity of the French treatment of dramatic
action a richness of characterization in which he showed himself a disciple of
Shakespeare, and of this mixed type his best example is “All for Love.” Here he
has the daring to challenge comparison with his master, and the greatest
testimony to his achievement is the fact that, as Professor Noyes has said, “fresh
from Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra,’ we can still read with intense
pleasure Dryden’s version of the story.”
DEDICATION________________________
To the Right Honourable, Thomas, Earl of Danby, Viscount Latimer, and Baron
Osborne of Kiveton, in Yorkshire; Lord High Treasurer of England, one of His
Majesty’s Most Honourable Privy Council, and Knight of the Most Noble Order
of the Garter.
My Lord,
The gratitude of poets is so troublesome a virtue to great men, that you are often
in danger of your own benefits: for you are threatened with some epistle, and not
suffered to do good in quiet, or to compound for their silence whom you have
obliged. Yet, I confess, I neither am or ought to be surprised at this indulgence;
for your lordship has the same right to favour poetry, which the great and noble
have ever had—
Carmen amat, quisquis carmine digna gerit.
There is somewhat of a tie in nature betwixt those who are born for worthy
actions, and those who can transmit them to posterity; and though ours be much
the inferior part, it comes at least within the verge of alliance; nor are we
unprofitable members of the commonwealth, when we animate others to those
virtues, which we copy and describe from you.
It is indeed their interest, who endeavour the subversion of governments, to
discourage poets and historians; for the best which can happen to them, is to be
forgotten. But such who, under kings, are the fathers of their country, and by a
just and prudent ordering of affairs preserve it, have the same reason to cherish
the chroniclers of their actions, as they have to lay up in safety the deeds and
evidences of their estates; for such records are their undoubted titles to the love
and reverence of after ages. Your lordship’s administration has already taken up
a considerable part of the English annals; and many of its most happy years are
owing to it. His Majesty, the most knowing judge of men, and the best master,
has acknowledged the ease and benefit he receives in the incomes of his treasury,
which you found not only disordered, but exhausted. All things were in the
confusion of a chaos, without form or method, if not reduced beyond it, even to
annihilation; so that you had not only to separate the jarring elements, but (if that
boldness of expression might be allowed me) to create them. Your enemies had
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