DRYDEN, John (1631-1700), the poet, born on the 9th of August 1631, at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, was of Cumberland stock, though his family had been settled for three generations in Northamptonshire, had acquired estates and a baronetcy, and intermarried with landed families in that county. His great-grandfather, who first carried the name south, and acquired by marriage the estate of Canons Ashby, is said to have known Erasmus, and to have been so proud of the great scholar’s friendship that he gave the name of Erasmus to his eldest son. The name Erasmus was borne by the poet’s father, the third son of Sir Erasmus Dryden. The leanings and connections of the family were Puritan and anti-monarchical. Sir Erasmus Dryden went to prison rather than pay loan money to Charles I.; the poet’s uncle, Sir John Dryden, and his father Erasmus, served on Government commissions during the Commonwealth. His mother’s family, the Pickerings, were still more prominent on the Puritan side. Sir Gilbert Pickering, his cousin, was chamberlain to the Protector, and was made a peer in 1658....
Dryden’s education was such as became a scion of these respectable families of squires and rectors, among whom the chance contact with Erasmus had left a certain tradition of scholarship. His father, whose own fortune, added to his wife’s, the daughter of the rector of Aidwinkle All Saints, was not large, and whose family, of whom the poet was the eldest, amounted to fourteen, procured him admission to Westminster School as a king’s scholar, under the famous Dr Busby. Some elegiac verses which Dryden wrote there on the death of a young Lord Hastings, in 1649, had the distinction of being published in a volume called Lacrymae Musarum, among other elegies by “divers persons of nobility and worth” in commemoration of the same event. He appeared soon after again in print, among writers of commendatory verses to a friend of his, John Hoddesdon, who published a little volume of religious poetry in 1650. Dryden’s contribution is signed “John Dryden of Trinity C.,” he having gone up from Westminster to Cambridge in May 1650. He was elected a scholar of Trinity on the Westminster foundation in October of the same year, and took his degree of B.A. in 1654. The only recorded incident of his college residence is some unexplained act of contumacy to the vice-master, for which he was “put out of commons” and “gated” for a fortnight. No inference can be built upon this as to Dryden’s habits at the university. Contumacy to authorities was not a feature in his later life. His father died in 1654, leaving him master of two-thirds of a small estate near Blakesley, worth about £60 a year. The next three years he is said to have spent at Cambridge. It was then probably that he laid the foundation of that habit of learned discussion of literary methods which is so remarkable a feature in the prefaces to his plays and poems. Not content with doing a thing, like writers who are suddenly placed under the necessity of writing, Dryden must always be arguing as to how it ought to be done, pushing on argumentative justification in advance of execution. Whether or not he spent the three years before 1657 at Cambridge, there can be little doubt, judging from internal evidence, that he spent them somewhere in study; for his first considerable poem bears indisputable marks of scholarly habits, as well as of a command of verse that could not have been acquired without practice.
The middle of 1657 is given as the date of his leaving the university to take up his residence in London. In one of his many subsequent literary quarrels, it was said by Shadwell that he had been clerk to Sir Gilbert Pickering, his cousin, the favourite of Cromwell; and nothing could be more likely than that he obtained some employment under his powerful cousin when he came to London. He first emerged from obscurity with his Heroic Stanzas to the memory of the Protector, who died September 3, 1658. That these stanzas should have made him a name as a poet does not appear surprising when we compare them with Waller’s verses on the same occasion. Dryden took some time to consider them, and it was impossible that they should not give an impression of his intellectual strength. Donne was his model; it is obvious that both his ear and his imagination were saturated with Donne’s elegiac strains when he wrote; yet when we look beneath the surface, we find unmistakable traces that the pupil was not without decided theories that ran counter to the practice of the master. It is plainly not by accident that each stanza contains one clear-cut brilliant point. The poem is an academic exercise, and it seems to be animated by an undercurrent of strong contumacious protest against the irregularities tolerated by the authorities. Dryden had studied the ancient classics for himself, and their method of uniformity and elaborate finish commended itself to his robust and orderly mind. In itself the poem is a magnificent tribute to the memory of Cromwell. Now that the glittering style of the so-called “metaphysical poets” has gone very far out of fashion, it requires an effort, a deliberate dismissal of prejudice, to enjoy such a poem. A poet writing now on such a man would present his grandeur in a much more direct and simple way. Yet judged in the spirit of its own style, Dryden’s is a noble poem. The recognition of Cromwell’s greatness is full and ample. The thought in each stanza, the inclosing design of each of the parts of the edifice, is massive and imposing, although the massiveness is not presented in its naked simplicity, so as to hold the foremost place in the eye—the gaze being arrested by glittering accidents, so that the essential grandeur of the mass is disguised and diminished. We are not invited to dwell upon the grand outline; we are not called upon to surrender ourselves to its simple impressiveness; but it is there, although the author does not insist upon it, and rather deprecates it, waves it off, and challenges our admiration of some artificial centre of attraction. It is the ornamental centre upon which the art of the poet has laboured, not the effect of the massive whole; still there is loftiness and nobility in the scope of the work, if our prejudices in favour of a less adorned workmanship permit us to feel it.
From a moral point of view, Dryden’s next appearance as a poet is not creditable. To those who regard the poet as a seer with a sacred mission, and refuse the name altogether to a literary manufacturer to order, it comes with a certain shock to find Dryden, the hereditary Puritan, the panegyrist of Cromwell, hailing the return of King Charles in Âstroea Redux, deploring his long absence, and proclaiming the despair with which he had seen “the rebel thrive, the loyal crost.” From a literary point of view also, Àstroea Redux is very inferior to the Heroic Stanzas; Dryden had need of Waller’s clever excuse that it is easier to praise a bad man than a good, because the essence of poetry is fiction. And it was not merely in thus hastening to welcome the coming guest, and recant all praise of his rival, that Dryden showed a shamelessly accommodating spirit, and placed himself in such unpleasant contrast to the greater poet who was waiting his fate in all but friendless blindness. It might have been expected of one with his Puritan connections and scholarly training that, if he purposed making a living by the stage, which was restored with Charles, his literary as well as his moral conscience would have required him to make some effort to raise or at least not to lower its tone. But Dryden seems to have had no higher ambition than to make some money by his pen. He naturally first thought of tragedy,—his own genius, as he has informed ns, inclining him rather to that species of composition; and in the first year of the Restoration he wrote a tragedy on the fate of the duke of Guise. But some friends advised him that its construction was not suited to the requirements of the stage, so he put it aside, and used only one scene of the original play later on, when he again attempted the subject with a more practised hand. Having failed to write a suitable tragedy, he next turned his attention to comedy, although, as he admitted, he had little natural turn for it. He was very frank afterwards in explaining his reasons for writing comedy. “I confess,” he said, in a short essay in his own defence, printed before Tlιe Indian Emperor, “my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live. If the humour of this be for low comedy, small accidents, and raillery, I will force my genius to obey it, though with more reputation I could write in verse. I know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy; I want that gaiety of humour which is required to it. My conversation is slow and dull; my humour saturnine and reserved; in short, I am none of those who endeavour to break jests in company or make repartees. So that those who decry my comedies do me no injury, except it be in point of profit; reputation in them is the last thing to which I shall pretend.” This, of course, was said by Dryden standing at bay; there was some bravado, but also a great deal of frank truth in it. He was really as well as ostentatiously a playwright; the age demanded comedies, and he endeavoured to supply the kind of comedy that the age demanded. His first attempt was unsuccessful. Bustle, intrigue, and coarsely humorous dialogue seemed to him to be part of the popular demand; and, looking about for a plot, he found something to suit him in a Spanish source, and wrote The Wild Gallant. The play was acted in February 1C63, by Killigrew’s company in, Vere Street. It was not a success, although the most farcical incident received a certain interest and probability from a story which was current at the time. That a student, fresh from his library, trying to hit the taste of the groundlings with ribald farce, should make the ingredients too strong even for their palates, was but natural. Pepys showed good judgment in pronouncing the play “so poor a thing as ever I saw in my life.” That such a play should be written by Dryden, and acted in by one of the daughters of Stephen Marshall, must have been a bitter thought for Puritanism at the time. Dryden never learned moderation in his humour; there is a student’s clumsiness and extravagance in his indecency; the plays of Etherege, a man of the world, have not the uncouth riotousness of Dryden’s. Of this he seems to have been conscious, for when the play was revived, in 1667, he complained in the epilogue of the difficulty of comic wit, and admitted the right of a common audience to judge of the wit’s success. Dryden, indeed, took a lesson from the failure of The Wild Gallant; his next comedy, The liival Ladies, also founded on a Spanish plot, produced before the end of 1663, was correctly described by Pepys as “a very innocent and most pretty witty play,” though there was much in it which the taste of our time would consider indelicate. But he never quite conquered his tendency to extravagance. The Wild Gallant was not the only victim. The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery, produced in 1673, shared the same fate; and even as late as 1680, when he had had twenty years’ experience to guide him, Limberham, or the. Kind Keeper, was prohibited, after three representations, as being too indecent for the stage. Dislike to indecency we are apt to think a somewhat ludicrous pretext to be made by Restoration playgoers, and probably there was some other reason for the sacrifice of Limberham; still there is a certain savageness in the spirit of Dryden’s indecency which we do not find in his most licentious contemporaries. The undisciplined force of the man carried him to an excess from which more dexterous writers held back.
After the production of The Rival Ladies in 1663, Dryden assisted Sir Robert Howard in the composition of a tragedy in heroic verse, The Indian Queen, produced with great splendour in January 1664. It was probably through this collaboration that Dryden made the acquaintance of Lady Elizabeth Howard, Sir Robert’s sister, whom he married on the 1st of December 1663. Lady Elizabeth’s reputation was somewhat compromised before this union, and, though she brought some small addition to the poet’s income, she does not seem to have added to his happiness. The Indian Queen was a great success, one of the greatest since the reopening of the theatres. This was in all likelihood due much less to the heroic verse and the exclusion of comic scenes from the tragedy than to the magnificent scenic accessories—the battles and sacrifices on the stage, the aerial demons singing in the air, and the god of dreams ascending through a trap. The novelty of these Indian spectacles, as well as of the Indian characters, with the splendid Queen Zempoalla, acted by Mrs Marshall in a real Indian dress of feathers presented to her by Mrs Aphra Behn, as the centre of the play, was the chief secret of the success of The Indian Queen. These melodramatic properties were so marked a novelty that they could not fail to draw the town. The heroic verse formed but a small ingredient in the play; still, being also a novelty which had just been introduced by Davenant in The Siege of Rhodes, it interested the scholarly part of the audience, and so helped to consolidate the success of the stage carpenter. Dryden was tempted to return to tragedy: he followed up The Indian Queen with The Indian Emperor, which was acted in 1665, and also proved a success.
But Dryden was not content with writing tragedies in rhymed verse. Taking it up with enthusiasm as the only thing which the Elizabethan dramatists had left for their successors to excel in, he propounded the propriety of rhyme in serious plays as a thesis for discussion, and made it the prominent question of the day among men of letters. He took up the question immediately after the success of The Indian Queen, in the preface to an edition of The Rival Ladies. In that first statement of his case, he considered the chief objection to the use of rhyme, and urged his chief argument in its favour. Rhyme was not natural, some people had said; to which he answers that it is as natural as blank verse, and that much of its unnaturalness is not the fault of the rhyme but of the writer, who has not sufficient command of language to rhyme easily. In favour of rhyme he has to say that it at once stimulates the imagination, and prevents it from being too discursive in its flights. During the Great Plague, when the theatres were closed, and Dryden was living in the country at the house of his father-in-law, the earl of Berkshire, he occupied a considerable part of his time in thinking over the principles of dramatic composition, and threw his meditations and conclusions into the form of a dialogue, which he called an Essay of Dramatic Poetry, and published in 1668. One of the main topics of the essay was the admissibility of rhyme in serious plays, Dryden making Neander, the interlocutor who represents himself, repeat with fresh illustrations all that he had said in its favour. By this time, however, Sir R. Howard, his brother-in-law, whom he had joined in writing the rhymed Indian Queen, had changed his mind about the heroic couplet, and made some offensive comments on Dryden’s essay in a hoity-toity preface to The Duke of Lerma. Dryden at once replied to his brother-in-law in a master-piece of sarcastic retort and vigorous reasoning, publishing his reply as a preface to The Indian Emperor. It is the ablest and most complete statement of his views about the employment of rhymed couplets in tragedy.
Before his return to town at the end of 1666, when the theatres were reopened, Dryden wrote a poem on the Dutch war and the Great Fire, entitled Annus Mirabilis. The poem is in quatrains, the metre of his Heroic Stanzas in praise of Cromwell, which Dryden chose, he tells us, “because he had ever judged it more noble and of greater dignity both for the sound and number than any other verse in use amongst us.” The preface to the poem contains an interesting discussion of what he calls “wit-writing,” introduced by the remark that “the composition of all poems is or ought to be of wit.” His description of the Fire is a famous specimen of this wit-writing, much more careless and daring, and much more difficult to sympathize with, than the graver conceits in his panegyric of the Protector. In Annus Mirabilis the poet apostrophizes the newly founded Royal Society, of which he had been elected a member in 1662, more probably through personal connection than on the ground of scientific attainments.
From the reopening of the theatres in 1666, till November 1681, the date of his Absalom and Achitophel, Dryden produced nothing but plays. The stage was his chief source of income. Secret Love, or the Maiden Queen, a tragicomedy, produced in March 1667, does not come up to our expectations as the first-fruit of the author’s rest from composition and prolonged study of dramatic art. The prologue claims that it is written with pains and thought, by the exactest rules, with strict observance of the unities, and “a mingled chime of Jonson’s humour and of Corneille’s rhyme;” but it owed its success chiefly to the charm of Nell Gwynne’s acting in the part of Florimel. It is noticeable that only the more passionate parts of the dialogue are rhymed, Dryden’s theory apparently being that rhyme is then demanded for the elevation of the style. His next play, Sir Martin Marall, an adaptation from Molière’s H Etourdi, was produced at the Duke’s Theatre, in the name of the duke of Newcastle. It was about this time that Dryden became a retained writer under contract for the King’s Theatre, receiving from it £300 or £400 a year, till it was burnt down in 1672, and about £200 for six years more till the beginning of 1678 If Sir Martin Μarall was written but not produced before this contract was entered into, one can understand -why it was announced as the duke of Newcastle’s. His co-operation with Davenant in a new version of Shakespeare’s Tempest— for his share in which Dryden can hardly be pardoned on the ground that the chief alterations were happy thoughts of Davenant’s, seeing that he affirms he never worked at anything with more delight—must also be supposed to be anterior to the completion of his contract with the Theatre Royal. The existence of the contract came to light from Dryden’s non-fulfilment of its terms. He was engaged to write three plays a year, and he contributed only ten plays during the ten years of his engagement, finally exhausting the patience of his partners by joining in the composition of a play for the rival house. In adapting H Etourdi, Dryden did not catch Molière’s lightness of touch; his alterations go towards making the comedy into a farce. Perhaps all the more on this account Sir Martin Μarall had a great run at the theatre in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. As we have said, there is always a certain coarseness in Dryden’s humour, apart from the coarseness of his age,—a certain forcible roughness of touch which belongs to the character of the man. His An Evening’s Love, or the Mock Astrologer, an adaptation from the younger Corneille, produced at the King’s Theatre in 1668, seemed to Pepys “very smutty, and nothing so good as The Maiden Queen or The Indian Emperor of Dryden’s making.” Evelyn thought it foolish and profane, and was grieved “to see how the stage was degenerated and polluted by the licentious times.” Ladies à la Mode, another of Dryden’s contract comedies, produced in 1668, was so mean a thing,” Pepys says, that it was only once acted, and Dryden never published it. Of his other comedies, Marnage à la Mode (produced 1672), Lσve in a Nunnery (1672), Limberham, or the Kind Keeper, only the first was moderately successful. The failure was not due to want of ribaldry.
While Dryden met with such indifferent success in his willing efforts to supply the demand of the age for low comedy, he...
