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). In due course she bore him three sons. Throughout his lengthy, varied career, Dryden fashioned a vital, concise, and refined language that served as a foundation for the writers of English prose and verse who followed him. 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. 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. 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." "The Lamb & Flag - Fuller's Pub and Restaurant London", Britannia Rediviva: a Poem on the Birth of the Prince. : Flecknoe was contemporary poet of John Dryden. At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed with the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." Articles from Britannica Encyclopedias for elementary and high school students. Dryden’s approach in this and all his best criticism is characteristically speculative and shows the influence of detached scientific inquiry. "[11] 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. Ans. Whatever Dryden's response to this was, he clearly respected the headmaster and would later send two of his sons to school at Westminster. The English author John Dryden (1631-1700) is best known as a poet and critic. [38] The marriage was at St. Swithin's, London, and the consent of the parents is noted on the licence, though Lady Elizabeth was then about twenty-five. The Westminster curriculum included weekly translation assignments which developed Dryden's capacity for assimilation. John Dryden. 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. Alexander Pope was heavily influenced by Dryden and often borrowed from him; other writers were equally influenced by Dryden and Pope. haec ubi dicta dedit, lacrimantem et multa volentem 7a–11a, "Three Books for the Grammar Lover in Your Life : NPR", Poems by John Dryden at PoetryFoundation.org, Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Dryden&oldid=992420107, 17th-century English dramatists and playwrights, Converts to Roman Catholicism from Anglicanism, People educated at Westminster School, London, Articles incorporating DNB text with Wikisource reference, Short description is different from Wikidata, Wikipedia articles with CANTIC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with CINII identifiers, Wikipedia articles with MusicBrainz identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SELIBR identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SNAC-ID identifiers, Wikipedia articles with SUDOC identifiers, Wikipedia articles with Trove identifiers, Wikipedia articles with WORLDCATID identifiers, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, Poet, literary critic, playwright, librettist, Wilding, Michael, 'Allusion and Innuendo in MacFlecknoe', Essays in Criticism, 19 (1969) 355-70, Stark, Ryan. [28][29] Dryden created the proscription against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase, "the bodies that those souls were frighted from," though he did not provide the rationale for his preference. She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air. It is an acknowledged imitation of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, and focuses on the last hours of the lives of its hero and heroine. In 1654 he obtained his BA, graduating top of the list for Trinity that year. The prefaces to his plays and translations over the next three decades were to constitute a substantial body of critical writing and reflection. iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem.' 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). I to my longing friends return again[35]. John Dryden was born in Aldwinkle, Northamptonshire, England, the eldest of fourteen children of Erasmus Dryden (c.1602–1654) and Mary Pickering (d. 1676). [4] 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. 1.0 Introduction • John Dryden (9 August 1631 – 1 May 1700) was a prominent English poet, critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of the Restoration Age; therefore, the age is known as the Age of Dryden. He created the popular podcast series, Passenger List, and has written and directed many audio drama series for the BBC. [13] 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. 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. Be on the lookout for your Britannica newsletter to get trusted stories delivered right to your inbox. 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 lady's intellect and temper were apparently not good; her husband was treated as an inferior by those of her social status. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than writing for the stage. Navigate parenthood with the help of the Raising Curious Learners podcast. [17] 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. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. [42] Though some have historically claimed to be from the lineage of John Dryden, his three children had no children themselves. 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. His works are known for their dullness and stupidity. 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. His poems were very widely read, and are often quoted, for instance, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's essays. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la Mode (1672), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). His most famous poem is Absalom and Achitophel (1681). 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. He was one of the greatest poets and often compared to playwrights such as William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. This became John Dryden's School, later The Orange School.[21]. 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. The flexibility in his forms of writing marked him as a legend of the 17th century. Although initially famous for his plays, Dryden is today highly regarded for his critical writings as well as his satirical and didactic poems. It is a tragedy written in empty verse and is an attempt by Dryden to revive serious drama. 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. Later 19th-century writers had little use for verse satire, Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed them as "classics of our prose." ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum; Dryden had a very poor opinion of Flecknoe. This appointment may have been the result of influence exercised on his behalf by his cousin the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering. 1913. [3] Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. 627ff. See if your mental notes are pitch-perfect or off-key in this study of music. But "she said" gets the point across, uses half the words, and makes for better English. 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. Lady Elizabeth bore three sons and outlived her husband. In this play he abandoned the use of rhymed couplets for that of blank verse. Quotations by John Dryden, English Poet, Born August 19, 1631. [19] He lived at 137 Long Acre from 1682 to 1686 and at 43 Gerrard Street from 1686 until his death. His subject matter was often factual, and he aimed at expressing his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated manner. : Merriam-Webster, pp. In addition to satires, Dryden wrote elegies, prologues, epilogues, odes, and panegyrics. 1989. He also wrote almost 30 plays and was one of the great dramatists of his time. 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. 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. 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. [7] In November 1662 Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. Authorship is unresolved; not included in Scott. 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. 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. Samuel Johnson[24] summed up the general attitude with his remark that "the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry." His work had no literary merit. https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Dryden, Poetry Foundation - Biography of John Dryden, Westminster Abbey - Biography of John Dryden, Academy of American Poets - Biography of John Dryden, John Dryden - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up), “The Conquest of Granada of the Spaniards”. 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. John Dryden was born on Aug. 9, 1631, in Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire, in the parsonage of All Saints Church, where his … 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. All for Love or, the World Well Lost, is a 1677 heroic drama by John Dryden … John Dryden was born August 19 (New Style), 1631, probably in the rectory of his maternal grandfather, in Aldwinckle, Northamptonshire. [39] Both Dryden and his wife were warmly attached to their children. 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. Though it was not financially successful, he was commissioned to produce three plays for the King's Company, in which he later became a shareholder. He also worked as a literary critic, translator and playwright. With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. "[14] 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. [16] 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. And thrice about her neck my arms I flung, In 1659 his contribution to a memorial volume for Oliver Cromwell marked him as a poet worth watching. Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. At around 8pm on 18 December 1679, Dryden was attacked in Rose Alley behind the Lamb & Flag pub, near his home in Covent Garden, by thugs hired by the Earl of Rochester,[8][9] with whom he had a long-standing conflict. This is a skill which would remain with Dryden and influence his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical patterns. [23] Dryden's heroic couplet became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. dicere deseruit, tenuisque recessit in auras. [31], The phrase "blaze of glory" is believed to have originated in Dryden's 1686 poem The Hind and the Panther, referring to the throne of God as a "blaze of glory that forbids the sight. In this work the interregnum is illustrated as a time of chaos, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order. In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".[2]. Readers in the first half of the 18th century did not mind this too much, but later generations considered Dryden's absence of sensibility a fault. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. 1686 until his death was evident in the same Essay, Eliot accused Dryden of having a `` commonplace.... 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