No More Learning

John Dryden (he wrote his name thus, though, before him, the
spelling was varied both by his kinsmen and by his parents) was
born 9 August 1631, in the parsonage house of Aldwinkle All
Saints, near Oundle in Northamptonshire, of which his maternal
grandfather, Henry Pickering, was rector! . His parents were of
good county descent; but his father, Erasmus Dryden, was a
younger son with many brothers and sisters, and his estate at
Blakesley, on the other side of the county (near Canons-Ashby,
the family seat), which afterwards descended to the poet, con-
siderably burdened, was valued at sixty pounds a year in the
money of the time. He appears to have resided generally at
Tichmarsh, the chief seat of his wife's family, near Oundle. On
both the father's and the mother's side, the future laureate of the
Stewarts was connected with the parliamentary side; his mother's
cousin-german, Sir Gilbert Pickering, was one of the judges of
Charles I (though he did not sit on the final day), and, afterwards,
became chamberlain at the protector Oliver's court and a member
a
of his House of Lords? . After receiving his early education either
at Tichmarsh or (as is the more usual tradition) at Oundle grammar
school, Dryden—at what precise date is unknown-was admitted
as a king's scholar at Westminster, where he was trained under
the redoubtable Busby. In a note to a translation of the Third
Satire of Persius, published by Dryden in 16933, Dryden states
that he remembered translating this satire at Westminster school
'for a Thursday-night's exercise. ' The direct influence which
exercises of this kind, vigilantly supervised, must have had upon
the formation of his style as a writer of English verse is obvious ;
but, though Dryden surmises that copies of his translations were
preserved by Busby, none is extant, and the sole poetical relic of
his Westminster days is his contribution to Lachrymae Musarum
(1649), in memory of his schoolfellow, Henry Lord Hastings-
a small volume, whose black-bordered title-page heralds not less
See a valuable article in The Saturday Review, 17 April 1875, entitled “The
Birthplace of Dryden,' which, besides summarising what is known as to the localities
of his birth and childhood, gives an account of most of what remains on record
concerning his kith and kin.
? It would seem to be this Sir Gilbert, who, in The Medal of John Bayes, and else-
where, is held up to scorn as a committee-man or sequestrator.
8 The translation of the Fifth Satire is inscribed to Busby.


## p. 3 (#25) ###############################################

School and College Years
3
than thirty-three elegiac pieces, by Herrick, Denham, Marvell and
others. About Dryden's juvenile elegy, much that is superfluous
has been written; it was not wonderful that a schoolboy poet
should exaggerate the bad taste into which the followers of an
artificial school of poetry frequently lapsed"; but the verses also
give proof of that rapidity in connecting thoughts (the very
essence of wit) and that felicity in expressing them which were
among the chief characteristics of the formed style of Dryden,
In May 1650, he was admitted as a Westminster scholar at
Trinity college, Cambridge, whence he matriculated in the follow-
ing July. Of his college career, nothing is known, except that,
quite early in his third year of residence, he underwent a not
very serious disciplinary punishment. He took his B. A. degree
in January 1654, but did not proceed to M. A. , which degree he
only obtained in 1668, when it was conferred on him at the king's
request by the archbishop of Canterbury (Sheldon). It appears,
probably on his own authority 3, that he continued in residence at
Cambridge till 1657; but there is no evidence as to the date when
he began his life in London, though he may be concluded to have
done so before the death of the protector Oliver (September
1658).
Cambridge would not seem to have fascinated the imagination,
or to have enchained the sympathies, of an alumnus destined to
hold a prominent place in her long list of poets. In the earliest
years of the second half of the century, the university had
much to suffer from the ascendancy of the army, and may even
momentarily have trembled for its existence. During Oliver's
protectorate, however, when the university was represented in
parliament by his son Richard, it began to revive under a more
tolerant régime. Dryden's family connection was, as has been
seen, with the party in power; nor was his a nature into which
the iron of political tyranny was likely to enter very deeply. But
it is quite unnecessary to seek for explanations of the preference
which, a quarter of a century later, in one of the several prologues
1 See, besides the notorious allusions to the small-pox, the concluding apostrophe
to the young lord's betrothed.
9 There is no evidence to support the assertion of Shadwell (in The Medal of John
Bayes) that Dryden, having traduced a nobleman'and suffered castigation, narrowly
escaped expulsion from his college in consequence.
In Notes and Observations on The Empress of Morocco (1674), oited by Malone,
Life of Dryden, p. 27, Dryden is spoken of as 'a man of seven years' standing at
Cambridge. ' He had himself a band in this pamphlet.
4 The date of the particular Prologue, first printed in 1684, is safely conjectured
by Christie to have been 1681.
1-2


## p. 4 (#26) ###############################################

4
Dryden
6
6
addressed by him to the university of Oxford, he avowed for it, as
‘Athens,' over his own mother-university, 'Thebes'-nor need this
preference be taken very seriously? And, in any case, it is quite
out of keeping with his usual indifference to such attacks to sup-
pose that his coldness towards Cambridge was due to a captious
'Cambridge' pamphlet (which, by the way, was published at
Oxford), The Censure of the Rota on Mr Dryden's Conquest
of Granada (1673); while equally little importance attaches, in
this connection, to the statement of Dennis (a Caius man) that,
about the same time, not only the town (London), but, also, the
university of Cambridge, was very much divided as between
Settle and Dryden, 'the younger fry,' in both places, 'inclining
to Elkanah 2
In 1654, soon after Dryden had taken his bachelor's degree,
his father died, and he became the owner of the small paternal
estate. From the time of his residence at Cambridge, either
before or after this event, hardly any literary remains have come
down to us. Dryden, as Malone points out, had no share in any
of the collections of contemporary Cambridge verse printed during
his period of residence. On the other hand, from the first year
of his undergraduateship date the pleasing lines, proudly signed
'J. Dryden of Trin. C. ,' prefixed to a volume of Epigrams (1650)
put forth by his friend John Hoddesdon, who, unlike Dryden
himself, was moved to seek reputation as a poet
before the down begin
To peep, as yet, upon [his] smoother skin.
And a more personal interest attached to a copy of verses
forming part of a letter written by him, in acknowledgment of
the gift of a silver inkstand, to his cousin Honor, the daughter
of Sir John Dryden, the head of the family. They are, as Scott
points out, in Cowley's fantastic and farfetched style, and are not
altogether pleasing. For the superstructure of a supposed attach-
ment and blighted hopes which has been raised upon the evidence
of this letter, there is not a tittle of proof 3.
1 As Christie points out, the poet, in transmitting to Rochester another Prologue
addressed to · Athenian judges' six months earlier, and asserting, inter alia, that
poetry which is in Oxford made
An art, in London only is a trade,
observed to his patron 'how easy 'tis to pass anything upon a University. '
2 Cited by Saintsbury, G. , Dryden (English Men of Letters), p. 65.
3 To be sure, one of the two heiresses of Dryden's second acted play, The Rival-
Ladies, is named Honoria, and one of the stories included by Dryden in his last
important work is Boccaccio's tale of Theodore and Honoria. To be sure, too, Honor
Dryden, though she inherited a large portion, never married.


## p. 5 (#27) ###############################################

Heroick Stanzas on Cromwell
5
When, in 1657 or 1658, Dryden took up his abode in London,
to which, with the exception of occasional visits to Northampton-
shire and other easily accessible parts of the country, he remained
faithful during the rest of his life, Cromwell's rule had, for some
years, been firmly established, and Sir Gilbert Pickering was in full
possession of the great man's favour. That the young Dryden
actually became 'clerk' or secretary to his influential kinsman
rests only on the late evidence of Shadwell's lampoon? But no
special connection of the kind with the protector's court or person
is needed to account for Dryden's first public appearance as a
writer with A Poem upon the Death of His Late Highness,
Oliver, Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland, first
published separately early in 1659, and reprinted in the same year,
in company with an ode on the same subject by Thomas Sprat
(afterwards dean of Westminster and bishop of Rochester) and
some lines by Waller Upon the late Storme and Death of the
Protector. Sprat's is a not undignified effort in a style in which
he acquitted himself so well as to become known as “Pindaric
Sprat,' and contains a daring figure afterwards appropriated by
the master of the species, “the incomparable Dr Cowley? . ' Waller's
> lines, as usual with him, beat out the gold of a single thought into
very thin leaf. Dryden, on the contrary, whose poem was again
reprinted in 1659, revised, and under the title of Heroick Stanzas
consecrated to the Memory, etc. , surveyed his theme with not less
circumspection than ardour, and chose his topics of eulogy not
only, as Scott says, with attention to truth, but, also, with a
manifest desire to avoid hyperbole. Even the fine passage
Such was our Prince, yet owned a soul above
The highest acts it could produce to show
cannot be censured as an exaggeration, except by those who deny
that Cromwell was a great man and, as such, necessarily greater
than his deeds. The poem, though still studded with farfetched
and not always appropriate conceits (e. g. War, our consumption,'
st. XII; “Bolognia’s walls,” st. XVI; the death of Tarpeia,
st. XXXIV), shows Dryden already controlling the form chosen
by him with a certainty not to be found in his juvenile efforts,
and master of an overpowering directness which was to become
6
>
2
1 In The Medal of John Bayes (1682).
He brought them to the Borders, but a Second hand
Did settle and secure them, in the promis'd Land.
The passage shows that Sprat's tribute, like Dryden's, was intended to meet the eye
of Oliver's successor.


## p. 6 (#28) ###############################################

6
Dryden
.
+
one of his most notable characteristics? . Thus, the Heroick
Stanzas, though, necessarily, they attracted little attention at
a time when the immediate future absorbed public interest, and
though their author, naturally, was willing to allow them to be
forgotten, hold a permanent place among his poetical achieve-
ments.
Dryden's working days in the service of the muses had now
begun. With his very modest income, and without any family
interest that could be of use to him, he can have looked the world
in the face in no very sanguine mood; and, indeed, a certain
reserve and lack of satisfaction in life and in the work which
he had to do in it is noticeable in his writings, as it seems to have
been in his personal bearing. Shadwell's sneer that Dryden had
‘turn'd journeyman to a bookseller' probably applies to a rather
later period of his career, and may be an illnatured perversion of
an insignificant fact? But, in any case, Dryden, till he had studied
his brief and taken up his pen, was devoid of the political, and,
still more, of the religious, enthusiasm which might have sufficed
to inspire him as a writer; and few poets have ever been less
manifestly moved by spontaneous lyric impulse. What he wrote
in the earlier part of his literary career was, as it were, auto-
matically suggested by the great changes in contemporary public
life, to which his literary powers, growing surer of themselves in
each successive trial, responded without any apparent hesitation,
As there had not been any signs of ardour or strong personal
conviction in the Heroick Stanzas, so, when the restoration of the
Stewart monarchy had been accomplished as the only feasible
termination of the crisis, and when Dryden, once more, went with
the times, he went with them in his own temperate and reasoning
way. This may certainly be averred with regard to the substance
of the paean sounded by him on the occasion of the return of
- Charles II. For, although, in Astraea Redux (1660), he did not
shrink from any extravagance in picturing the popular joy, and the
hopes in which, now Time's whiter series is begun,' the subjects of
Charles II indulged, yet, the royal qualities on which he enlarged
as warranting these emotions were those which the king actually
His grandeur he derived from heaven alone. (St. vi. )
When absent, yet we conquered in his right. (St. xxiv. )
He made us freemen of the continent. (St. XXIX. )
• The bookseller is stated, in a note, to have been H. Herringman, who kept him
at his house for the purpose. ' Dryden seems to have lodged over Herringman's shop
in the New Exchange, Strand, and Herringman was the publisher of the poems of Sir
Robert Howard, Dryden's future brother-in-law. The combination was irresistible.
6


## p. 7 (#29) ###############################################

Astraea Redux and Other Panegyrics 7
7
possessed, or, at least, was anxious to display-prudence in adversity,
and clemency in the day of success. At the same time, he abstained
from personal abuse, either of Cromwell (for the comparison to
the bold Typhoeus' cannot be set down as abuse) or of any other
leader of the rebellion. There is, of course, much audacious misuse
of the classical and Scriptural illustrations in which this poem
abounds; but that was part of the 'noble' style which is essential
to courtly panegyric. The general spirit of the poem is merely that
of frank timeservice; though the shameless apostrophising of the
rechristened Naseby, which had earned some of the naval laurels
celebrated in the Heroick Stanzas, as 'now no longer England's
shame,' must be allowed to call for severe censure. The genius of
the poet shows itself not only in magnificent aberrations, like the
comparison to the star of Bethlehem of the star that had shone at
Charles II's birth and now shone again,
Guiding our eyes to find and worship you;
but, also, in exquisitely graceful turns of expression, to which the
metre suits its music with inimitable ease, such as the tribute to
May, the month in which the king was born :
You and the flowers are its peculiar care 1.
Nor are characteristic strokes of wit wanting, like that on the
grief inflicted by Charles II's departure to the Dutch (against whom
Dryden was beginning to cultivate an irrepressible dislike? ):
True sorrow-Holland to regret a King!
On the occasion of Charles II's coronation (1661), Dryden was
ready with another panegyric,' again in heroic couplets, To His
Sacred Majesty, congratulating him on his pacific intentions in
convoking the Savoy conference (not yet a declared failure), and
on his improvements in St James's park, where
the mistrustful fowl no harm suspects,
So safe are all things which our King protects,
as well as on his approaching marriage. With this piece of pure
adulation-merum mel-may be mentioned the lines To My Lord
Chancellor, offered to Clarendon on New Year's day 1662, in
which the conceptions of derived greatness and original merit are
skilfully mixed, but, as is perhaps explicable, without any great
· The emphasised use of the pronoun you became one of the notes of Dryden's
verse.
2 See Satire on the Dutch written in the year 1662, which, ten years later, Dryden
frugally utilised for the prologue and epilogue to Amboyna.


## p. 8 (#30) ###############################################

8
Dryden
expenditure of personal sympathy? The Verses to Her Royal
Highness the Duchess (Clarendon's daughter) belong to a later
date (1665) and, apparently, were not known till printed with the
preface to Annus Mirabilis, in which poem are sung the praises
of victorious York. ' As might be expected, they show a marked
advance in concentrated vigour of phrase, though not rising any-
where to the beauty of the passage, justly singled out for praise
by Saintsbury, which then seemed to summarise the fortunes of
Clarendon?
The whole of the first group of Dryden's poems may be said to
be brought to a close by Annus Mirabilis, or The Year of Wonders
(1666); but, before the production of this work, he had already
brought out several plays. It was, not improbably, in this way
that he was brought into contact with Sir Robert Howard, a
younger son of the earl of Berkshire, who had long been connected
with the Stewart court and whose wife was a daughter of the
great lord Burghley. On 1 December 1663, Dryden married lord
Berkshire's daughter Elizabeth, then twenty-five years of age.
The marriage took place with her father's consent, and lady
Elizabeth seems, sooner or later, to have brought her husband
some addition to his estate. She was, no doubt, his superior in
rank, but not in any unusual measure. That Dryden was not, at
this time, leading the life of a bookseller's hack is shown, inter
alia, by his election, in November 1662, as a fellow of the Royal
Society, in its early days often as much of a social as of a
scientific honour. The circumstances of Dryden's marriage and
wedded life, whether actual or fictitious, were an inexhaustible
fund of scandal to the malevolent. One story ran that lady
Elizabeth's brothers had bullied Dryden into the match; another,
that it was made up to cover a faux pas on the part of the lady
with another man. It is clear that she had led no cloistered life;
but Dryden seems to have been throughout on easy terms with
Sir Robert Howard, even during their literary controversy, and
sufficiently acknowledges his personal goodwill*. The general
1 Clarendon's ' early courtship of the Muges' is mentioned at the outset of these
lines; but there is no reason for suspecting a reference to poetical compositions,
of which we have no knowledge.
3. Our setting sun from his declining seat,' eto.
3 The immediate cause of Dryden's election may have been the lines addressed by
him in this year, To my Honoured Friend Dr Charleton, on his learned and useful
Works, and more particularly this of Stone-heng, by him Restored to the true
Founders, which may be summed up as a rather shallow eulogy of Bacon and some
later English scientific luminaries at the expense of Aristotle.
• See letter prefixed to Annus Mirabilis.


## p. 9 (#31) ###############################################

Annus Mirabilis
9
>
character of Dryden's long married life remains obscure; it has
been freely described as unhappy, and, in its last period, cannot
but have been darkened by his wife's mental decay ; on the other
hand, there are indications in their correspondence of pleasant
relations between them. That the husband provoked or requited
.
the wife's infirmities of mind or temper by infidelities is a con-
jecture resting on an assumption; for the assertion that 'Dryden
was a libertine' remains unproved".
Annus Mirabilis, though not written in the heroic couplet
with which Dryden had already familiarised himself in both
dramatic and non-dramatic composition, offers unmistakable proof
of the ease and self-confidence which by this time he had already
acquired as a writer of verse. The stanza form of decasyllabic
quatrains here adopted had already been used by Sir John Davies
in his philosophical poem Nosce Teipsum (1599), where it well
suits both theme and treatment, and had been revived by
D'Avenant in Gondibert (1656), where the poet, in order to satisfy
his principle that each quatrain ‘should contain a period,' often
becomes prosy in consequence. For the rest, Gondibert, though
composed under the critical eye of Hobbes, and compared by him
to the Aeneid and the Iliad, notwithstanding the advantage which
accrued to these as dating from 'what is called old time, but is
young time,' contained little that invited imitation; while the long
and not uninteresting critical Preface, though it may have helped
to suggest the writing of those critical essays of which Dryden
composed the earliest in the year before that in which Annus
Mirabilis appeared, clearly did not serve as a model for them.
Like Gondibert, Annus Mirabilis was the fruit of exile; but,
while part of the former was written at the Louvre, Dryden had
been driven from London, by the great plague and the great fire
commemorated in his poem, to take refuge at his father-in-
law's country seat at Charlton in Wiltshire. In An Account of
the Ensuing Poem, in a letter to Sir Robert Howard, dated
>
6
1 The unknown ·W. G. ,' whose letter in vol. av of The Gentleman's Magazine for
February 1795 (p. 99), mentioning that he remembered seeing Dryden with the actress
Anne Reeve at the Mulberry gardens, has been repeatedly cited, makes the further
observation that in company' he was the modestest man that ever conversed'-not
& common characteristio of libertines in general, or of those of Charles's days in
particular.
? See vol. iv, pp. 162—3. As to the metre, cf. post, chap. IX.
3 As to Gondibert, see ante, vol. VII, chap. III. Hobbes's praise of the story of
Gondibert and Birtha, the great magician's daughter, as an incomparable description
of. Love,' is discounted by its resemblance, in its opening passages at all events, to the
scenes in The Tempest between Prospero, Miranda and Ferdinand.


## p. 10 (#32) ##############################################

ΙΟ
Dryden
November 1666, Dryden, although he utters some heterodox
opinions about Vergil, declares that he has been my master in
this poem,' which, indeed, is distinguished by a masculinity of tone
and a richness of imagery that lend force to the assertion. The
admirably chosen title was not original, though the application
seems to have been new! Dryden describes Annus Mirabilis as a
historical poem, apparently implying that it does not make any
pretensions to being an epos, for which it lacks both the requisite
unity and the requisite length of action. On the other hand, it
treats its twofold theme, the Dutch war and the fire of London,
with great skill, both in the selection of topics, and in the manage-
ment of the transitions which give coherency to the whole. As for
the war, its final cause lay in the commercial jealousy between the
two nations, which made itself felt wherever English mercantile
enterprise was seeking to compete with that of a more successful
rival, and which, of course, came home most nearly to the city of
London. But it was also due to a general antipathy on the part of
the English against the Dutch, as of the naturally stronger, to the
actually wealthier, community. Dryden, accordingly, takes care to
dwell on the strength of England, as contrasted with the meanness,
baseness and so forth, of Holland. Moreover, the upper class of
English society was offended by Dutch burgherism and re-
publicanism, while the court resented the act excluding the
house of Orange from the stadholdership. When, therefore, war
was declared, a good deal of enthusiasm (of a kind), especially
among the gentry, hailed the event; and Evelyn gives an amusing
description of the outbreak of a universal passion for taking service
in the fleet. Dryden, in his preface, describes that part of his poem
which treats of the war as 'but a due expiation' on his part for
‘not serving his King and country in it. The navy, as the favourite
service of both the king and his brother the duke of York, was, at
i See Somers Tracts, vol. vrt, pp. 644—5, for a notice of pretended prophecies as to
the fire of London, stated to have been printed in 1661 or 1662, in the nonconformist
interest, under the title Annus Mirabilis primus et secundus. For a full account of the
proceedings against Francis Smith and others, supposed to be concerned in the
printing of Mirabilis Annus, or the Year of Prodigies and Wonders, printed 1661, see
Index Expurgatorius Anglicanus, pp. 183–8. The expression 'The Wonderful Yeere'
had, however, been used more than half a century earlier, and, curiously enough, of
the plague year 1602, when more than 30,000 persons were said to have fallen victims
to the epidemio in London. See Dekker's The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London
(Arber's edition), p. 5. Burnet, in his Life and Death of Sir Matthew Hale (1682),
p. 102, mentions that, 'in the year 1666, an Opinion did run through the Nation, that
the end of the world would come that year. ' Though Burnet says that this belief was
possibly 'set on by Astrologers,' and Dryden had a penchant for astrology, he does not
seem to make any reference to it in his poem.
>


## p. 11 (#33) ##############################################

Annus Mirabilis
II
this time, extremely popular; and Dryden's confessed anxiety to
have his sea terms correct was pedantry in season.
Altogether, his account of the progress of the war-from the
dearly-bought victory of Solebay to the barren triumph off the
North Foreland is full of fire and spirit; and it was not any
part of the poet's business to expound how, when the campaign of
1666 came to an end, the feeling began to spread that, with or
without further naval victories, the situation of the country, against
which France was intriguing in every part of the king's dominions,
would, before long, become untenable. Thus, when Dryden repre-
sents the terrible visitation of September 1666—the destruction of
the far greater part of London by fire-as having befallen England
at a season of undiminished confidence, and as a nemesis of this
national pride—he is putting a gloss of his own upon the actual
sequence of affairs. He had, moreover, omitted any account of the
plague, whose ravages were at their height at a date considerably
earlier than that of the events described in the introductory part
of his poem, and had thus made it easier to represent the fire as a
calamity which overtook the nation when 'palled' with the long
succession of its 'joys. The fury of the fire at its height is depicted
with splendid energy, and the daring figure of the witches' sabbath,
danced by the ghosts of traitors who have descended from London
Bridge, is not less apposite to the wild scene than that of the divine
extinguisher by which the fire is put out is preposterous. The
poet's prophecy that a greater and more august’ London would
arise from her fires' was fulfilled; but the companion political
prophecy had a lamer ending in the peace of 1667, which was all
that England gained from the glories of the wonderful year. '
Yet the literary achievement itself was wonderful. Without the
assurance to be derived from any great previous success, Dryden
had undertaken a task so full of pitfalls that nothing but a most
extraordinary impetus could have carried his course past these to
its goal—and this, though he had hampered himself with a metrical
form which, as he knew and confessed, had made a far more
exacting claim upon his ingenuity and skill than the couplet
6
1 The laments of sea-green Sirens' for the death of admiral Sir John Lawson are
of a piece with the mermaid's song' at the end of The Battle of the Baltic, and must
be censured or extolled in its company.
This was the occasion on which de Ruyter (whom Dryden compares to Varro at
Cannae) saved his ships, as has been observed, in order to sail up the Medway with
them another day. '
3 That they then seated themselves on the roof of Whitehall is a supposition due
to a persistent misprint in st. 224, pointed out and corrected in Sargeaunt's edition of
Dryden's Poems (1910).
6


## p. 12 (#34) ##############################################

I 2
Dryden
>
already familiar to him. The courage and dash of the whole
performance, which cast into the shade its lesser features, its far-
fetched conceits and other reminiscences of poetic schools that
were nearing their end, could not but apprise the critical world,
including king and court, that a combatant had descended into the
arena who was unlikely to find an equal there.
Meanwhile, like most of his would-be rivals, he had formed a
connection with the theatre, and continued to maintain it. In his
thirtieth year, on the very morrow of the restoration, Dryden
made his earliest known attempt as a playwright. His dramatic
productivity slackened very much during the latter half of his
literary life; but he cannot be said to have ever wholly abandoned
this form of production; indeed, in his very last year, he contri-
buted some new matter on the occasion of the revival, for his
benefit, of one of Fletcher's plays. Within this period, he tried his
hand at most dramatic forms in actual use, and, for a time, iden-
tified himself with the most conspicuous new development. In
view, however, of the assertion deliberately made by him in his
later days, that his genius never much inclined him to the stage,'
and of the general course of his literary career, which shows him
rather falling back from time to time on play-writing than steadily
attracted by it, the fact that he was the author, in whole or in
part, of nearly a score and a half of plays, would be surprising,
were it not for the extraordinary promptitude and adaptability of
his powers. It will be most convenient, before returning to his
other literary labours, to survey briefly his dramatic work as a
whole. Its fluctuations were largely determined by influences
which he could, indeed, sustain and develop, but into which, except
in the instance of one transitory species, he can hardly be said to
have infused any fresh life; so that his plays, as a whole, remain,
after all, only a subsidiary section of his literary achievements.
The principal currents in what, according to a rather loose
terminology, it has been customary to call the restoration drama,
will be discussed in other chapters of the present volume; and
what is said here is only so much as is necessary to make the
general course of Dryden's productivity as a dramatist intelligible.
Anasmuch as the primary object of the London stage, when re-
established with the monarchy, was to please the king, his court
and its surroundings, and, inasmuch as, in that court, many besides
the king himself had acquired a personal familiarity with the
1 See A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (1693) (Essays,
ed. Ker, W. P. , vol. 11, p. 37).


## p. 13 (#35) ##############################################

Influence of French Tragicomedy
13
xx
French stage and its literature which, at all events in his case,
dated back to the earlier years of his exile, French influence upon
the English drama in the restoration age was, almost as a matter
of course, both strong and enduring. But it is equally certain that
the basis from which the English drama started on the reopening
of the theatres was no other than the old English drama, at the
point which it had reached at the time of their closing.
Beaumont
and Fletcher, and the drama of tragicomic romance which, through
them, had, for a generation before the closing of the theatres,
established their supremacy on the English stage', were the
favourites there when the theatres reopened; nor had either
Jonson or Shakespeare been forgotten, and the former was still,
though the flow of humour among his followers had begun to
run dry, regarded as the acknowledged master of comedy. The
dominant power on the French stage down to about the middle of
the fourth decade of the seventeenth century had been that of
Hardy, whose most celebrated play, Mariamne, dates from 1610,
and whose vogue did not begin to give way till after his death in
1631? . Now, Hardy, like the dramatists who gave the tone to
English dramatic literature in the generation before the closing of
the theatres, kept the French stage popular by means of the mixed
species of tragicomedy, and thus prevented it from falling back on
the academical lines of Senecan tragedy represented by Garnier.
It is true that he was warming in his bosom the great reformer of
both French tragedy and French comedy, who said of himself that,
in his earlier plays, he had no guidance 'but a little commonsense
and the examples supplied to him by Hardy’; but Corneille's
epochal production of Le Cid did not take place till 1636 (Médée
appeared only a year earlier); and Le Menteur, which stands in
much the same relation to the development of French comedy as
that held by Le Cid to the progress of French tragedy, was not
produced till 1642. Thus, though Part I of Le Cid was brought
out in an English translation (by Joseph Rutter) in 1637 and
Part II (in a version in which Richard Sackville, afterwards earl of
Dorset, is said to have had a share) in 1640, both being republished
in 1650, it seems clear that the main influence exercised by the
French upon the English drama was due to Hardy and tragicomedy,
which dominated all the French dramatists—including Rotrou,
1 As to the long life of romantic tragicomedy, and its survival after the restora-
tion, see the lucid exposition in Ristine, F. E. , English Tragi-Comedy, its Origin and
History (New York, 1910), chaps. V and vi.
? See Rigal, E. , Alexandre Hardy et le Théâtre. Français à la fin du XVIe et
au commencement du XVIIme siècle, Paris, 1889.
a
18


## p. 14 (#36) ##############################################

14
Dryden
whose work synchronised with Corneille's earlier dramatic labours
-rather than to Corneille in the maturity of his creative genius.
When, however, the perennial conflict was renewed under new
conditions and on reasoned principles by Corneille, a loftier and
more logical conception of tragedy approved itself to the French
critical public; and, perfected in practice by the singularly refined
and sensitive genius of Racine, French classical tragedy reached its
consummation as a distinct species of dramatic literature. The
beginnings of Molière (though more than one of his plays have an
earlier date) may, for our present purpose, be placed in 1658, when,
both as actor and writer, he first appeared before Louis XIV and
his court. It was not long before the English drama, in the hands
of Dryden and others, revealed the impression made on it by these
new developments, the effects of which, whether direct or indirect,
will be summarised in later chapters'; but they should not be
regarded as what in no sense they were, the starting-points of our
post-restoration drama.
Of special importance for the progress of the English drama,
both before and after the closing of the theatres, was the influence
of prose fiction, operating either directly or through plays for
which it had furnished material. The two literatures which here
particularly come into question are the Spanish and the French
--of popular Italian fiction, the heyday seemed to have passed
away, as, in the seventeenth century, artificiality of taste estab-
lished its rule. Concerning Spanish influence, more will be said
below? ; while it is not unfrequently difficult to substantiate a
traditional derivation from a Spanish play, the direct indebtedness
of English dramatists to Spanish prose fiction was, beyond doubt,
considerable in extent, both before and after the restoration.
French prose fiction, on the other hand, in the course of the
seventeenth century, passed through an entirely new phase in its
history; and, inasmuch as this very directly influenced an English
dramatic species with which Dryden was, for a time, identified,
reference must be made to it here. With the Astrée of Honoré
d'Urfé (1610—2) began a literary movement representing, in the
first instance, a reaction towards a refinement of sentiment and
expression which had been incompatible with the turbulence of a
long epoch of civil war. This movement culminated in the school
See post, chap8. V, VII, and xvII.
See post, chap. v.
8 See also post, chap. XVII ; and of. Ward, Hist. of Engl. Dr. Lit. vol. I, pp. 307 ff.
For other authorities, see Hill, H. W. , 'La Calprenede's Romances and the Restoration
Drama' in University of Nevada Studies, vol. 11 (1910), p. 3.
9


## p. 15 (#37) ##############################################

Influence of French Romance
15
of romance associated with the name of La Calprenède and, still
more largely, with that of Madeleine de Scudéry, the authoress of
Le Grand Cyrus. Gomberville and the comtesse de La Fayette
belong to the same group, but that lady's last and most celebrated
novel, La Princesse de Clèves, is already differentiated from the
creations of Mlle de Scudéry by being, to some extent, based upon
historical fact, towards which, as a writer of memoirs, the authoress
had a leaning. The romances of this school invariably turned on
the pivot of heroic' love, or love in more than the usual number
of dimensions, and, though dealing with the deepest of human
emotions, they never fell out of the tone of elaborate conventional
formality. They were, in some instances, translated into English or
imitated by English writers, from the commonwealth times onwards,
when, no doubt, they had been welcomed, in many quarters, as
alternatives to the drab dulness of everyday life? ; and, after the
restoration, as will be seen, they supplied themes to dramatic.
writers whose object it was to heighten and intensify the charac-
teristics of stage romance. While prose fiction, of this class, con-
tinued to attract English readers to within the last quarter of the
century, in France, a reaction had already set in towards simplicity,
on the one hand, and satire, on the other; but, in these directions,
English dramatists were not, at all events at this time, prepared to
follow.
It was, then, under these influences, that Dryden gradually
settled down to the particular forms of dramatic composition
which he chose from time to time, and in no regular succession,
to make his own, and which he frequently illustrated by signally
suggestive prose commentaries, written with consummate grace
and ease in the form of dedications, prefaces or essays, thus
bringing his dramatic productions into harmony with rules of good
sense and good taste evolved from established theory and, still
more largely, from approved practice. Dryden's plays would often
lose much, if not most, of their interest if read without reference
to their prefaces and other critical apparatus; neither, however, is
it advisable, except in a few special instances, to detach these from
the texts which gave rise to them.
In the actual year of the restoration, or, at all events, within a
few months from that date, Dryden, perhaps stimulated by the use
1 See Dorothy Osborne's Letters (chap. In), 1653, from Chicksands, where La Cléo-
pâtre and Le Grand Cyrus appear to have been her habitual companions, and Pepyss
Diary, 7 December 1660 (when he sat up till midnight reading Fuller's Abbeys, while
his wife, whose devotion to these romances he did not share, was immersed in Great
Cyrus') et al. As to the chief English translations and imitations of these French
romances, see post, chap. XVI.
+


## p. 16 (#38) ##############################################

16
Dryden
made in the commonwealth period of quasi-dramatic dialogue as
a vehicle of political satire or invective-, proposed to himself to
read a political lesson to the public by means of a historical
tragedy, The Duke of Guise, applying the doubtful parallel of the
Catholic league to the recent memories of puritan ascendancy.
But the attempt was not thought successful by judicious advisers,
and what had been written of the play was left over to be utilised
by the author in the tragedy which, many years later, in 1682, be
produced in conjunction with Lee. Thus, the first play by Dryden
produced on the stage was The Wild Gallant, first acted in
February 1663. It has no further claim to be singled out among
the comedies, at the same time extravagant and coarse, in which
the period of dramatic decline abounds; though there are some
traces of the witty dialogue, often carried on by a flirting couple,
in which Dryden came to excel. The statement in the prologue
that the author was ‘endangered by a Spanish plot' (i. e. a rival
'Spanish' play) has been perverted to the direct opposite of
its meaning, and the most humorous incident in the piece is
conveyed straight from Ben Jonson. The play did not find favour,
except, apparently, with lady Castlemaine; and, in the sequel,
Dryden only intermittently returned to comedy proper. He wrote
of himself, early in his dramatic career, that he was 'not so fitted
by nature to write comedy' as certain other kinds of drama; ‘he
wanted,' he confesses, 'that gaiety of humour which is required to
it''; and he also wanted, as he might have added, the facility of
invention-whether of situations or of characters—which relieves
the productions of a comic dramatist from the sameness which is
noticeable in this class of Dryden's plays. He consoled himself
with the notion that a reputation gained from comedy' was hardly
worth the seeking; 'for I think it is, in its own nature, inferior to
all sorts of dramatic writing5. ' Thus, he only returned to it from
time to time, and wholly eschewed 'farce, which consists principally
of grimacese,' and from which he naturally shrank, devoid as he
6
1 As to these political squibs in dramatic form, cf. Ristine, F. H. , u. 8. pp. 151–3.
2 Cf. post, chap. v. The Spanish plot' in question was that of Tuke's Adventures
of Five Hours. Cf. Modern Language Notes, vol. XIX (1904), p. 166. Fitzmaurice-
Kelly, History of Spanish Literature, p. 263, had already pointed out that El Galán
escarmentado, which was supposed to have suggested Dryden's plot, could hardly have
reached Dryden before it was published. The borrowing from Jonson's Every Man
out of His Humour is in act 1, sc. 3.
3 A Defence of an Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 116).
'
4 See, also, the dedication to Aureng-Zebe, where he freely confesses that some of
his contemporaries have, even in his own partial judgment, outdone him in comedy.
5 See preface to An Evening's Love (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. 1, p. 135).
6 Ibid.


## p. 17 (#39) ##############################################

Comedies
17
Lo
may generally be asserted to have been of any inclination to what
was grotesque, or even merely odd or quaint. And, in the critical
essays and excursuses which illustrated his practice, he discusses
the comic drama with comparative rarity?
The Wild Gallant was written in prose, as was Sir Martin
Mar-Al, or The Feigned Innocence (1667, printed 1668), an
adaptation by Dryden, whose name was not attached to it till
thirty years later, of the duke of Newcastle's translation of Molière's
early comedy L'Étourdi, with certain touches suggested by two
plays by Quinault. The translation is not close, nor the treatment
refined; but the play was very successful. In prose is also the
main portion of The Assignation or Love in a Nunnery (1672,
printed 1673), worthless, except where in some blank verse passages
it rises to a higher literary level. Marriage-à-la-Mode (produced at
the same dates), which, unlike The Assignation, greatly pleased the
town, thanks to the admirably drawn coquette Melantha, presents
the same mixture of prose and blank verse. Of Dryden's remaining
comedies, Limberham, or The Kind Keeper (acted in 1678), which
is entirely in prose, has unmistakable dramatic merits; but it was
speedily withdrawn, having been judged a gross libel on a well
known public personage, generally supposed to be Lauderdale? .
Dryden's last comedy, Amphitryon (produced so late as 1690), for
which both Plautus and Molière were put under contribution, is,
again, a mixture of prose and blank verse; none of Dryden's plays
more brilliantly attest his literary gift, and none have more of the
wantonness to which he afterwards pleaded guilty.
In Dryden's second acted play, The Rival-Ladies (acted 1664),
he had already passed from comedy into tragicomedy, where his
genius was more at home. Its complicated plot (two ladies disguise
themselves as pages in order to take service with a gallant whose
affections are set on a third) caused it to be supposed, rightly or
wrongly, to have a Spanish origin; its dialogue falls into the stagey
antithesis which, though it was as old as Shakespeare, The Rehearsal
and Butlers were to ridicule without mercy. What, however, is
most noticeable in this play is the first, though still tentative, use of
* See, however, a Defence of the Epilogue (Essays, ed. Ker, vol. I, pp. 172 ff. ),
where Dryden criticises Jonson, not without a certain severity; the comparison between
French and English comedy in An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, passim; and preface to
An Evening's Love, already cited.
* Scandal was very busy with Lauderdale's private as well as his public morals; but
there is nothing . convincing' in the caricature. Others thought it intended for
Shaftesbury, who was attacked in similar fashion by Otway.
3 Repartees between Cat and Puss at a Caterwauling.
2
به سوریه نیاز
E, L. VIII.
CH. I.


## p. 18 (#40) ##############################################

18.
Dryden
rime as a proper feature of dramatic verse. This use is defended
in a dedication to lord Orrery—the earliest of Dryden's critical
excursions. It should be remembered that, since Fletcher's short
preface to his Faithfull Shepheardesse (printed 1609 or 1610), such
discussions of dramatic problems as these had fallen out of use,
and that the public was now neither 'railed into approbation,' as
it had formerly been by Ben Jonson, nor gently led on to acquies-
cence in the precepts of its critical guides. Following the example
of Corneille? , Dryden took advantage of the revived interest in the
stage to address its patrons, as it were ex cathedra, but without any
assumption of academical solemnity or rigour. To the subject of
the dramatic use of the heroic couplet which he here broached, he
afterwards returned at greater length, both in his Essay of
Dramatick Poesie and in his Essay of Heroick Plays; but he did
not claim the innovation as primarily his own, and he recalled the
fact that the rimed five foot couplet, in a form approaching as near
as possible to that which it owed to Waller, had been first applied
to its 'noblest use' by D'Avenant in the quasi-dramatic Siege of
Rhodes (1656, enlarged 1662). Dryden, however, was the first to
employ the rimed couplet in the dialogue of an ordinary stage
play, though he, too, only introduced the innovation tentatively.
Etherege went a step further, and, in The Comical Revenge, or
Love in a Tub (acted and printed 1664), put the whole serious
part of the play into heroic couplets. Inasmuch, however, as, in
the same year 1664, lord Orrery's Henry V, which is entirely in
heroic couplets, was performed, Etherege and he must be left to
divide the crown' of having introduced the innovation with
Dryden and D'Avenant. If it could be proved that Orrery’s ‘first
play,' mentioned in king Charles's letter of 22 February 1662 was
Henry V, there would be no doubt as to Orrery's priority over
Etherege.
It does not seem to be necessary here to enter into a re-
examination of the question of the suitableness, or unsuitableness,
6
6
1 See post, p. 23.
i
* See Siegert, E. , Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery u. seine Dramen (Wiener Beiträge
zur Engl. Philologie), Vienna and Leipzig, 1906, p. 19. Orrery claimed to have
written his tragedy The Black Prince 'in a new way,' by which he means the rimed
couplet ; but this play was not acted till 1667, or printed till 1669. Henry V, how-
ever, and Mustapha, which were likewise in rime, were first performed in 1664 and
1665 respectively. See post, p. 22, note. As to Etherege, for whom Gosse (Seventeenth-
Century Studies, ed. 1883, p. 238) claims that he was the first to carry out, though
Dryden was the first to propose, the experiment of writing ordinary plays in rime,
see post, chap. v.


## p. 19 (#41) ##############################################

The Heroic Couplet in the Drama 19
of the heroic couplet as a form of dramatic verse. Not only in
certain kinds of romantic comedy, for which it has been claimed
as a suitable vehicle, but, also, for various eccentric species which
have been or may be invented-such as pantomime, burlesque or
extravaganza-it may readily be allowed to be both well fitted
and effective. As to its use, however, for the purposes of the
regular tragic or comic drama, the case is altered. Partly, of
course, the objection lies in the tendency of the couplet, as treated
by Dryden and his successors, to make against continuity of flow,
to shut up the sense within fixed limits and, because of the con-
sequent demand for precision of statement, to impart to dialogue or
soliloquy a didactic rather than dramatic colouring. And, further,
with regard to the use of rime itself in English dramatic verse, the
caveat of Taine cannot be put aside, that'rime is a different thin
for different races': the Englishman being transported by it into
a world remote from the actual, whereas, for the Frenchman, it is
nothing more than a conventional costume? The heroic couplet,
as used in Dryden's plays and those which followed their example,
therefore, operates against, rather than in favour of, theatrical
illusion and the sway of the imagination on the stage, and helps
to urge the dramatist who employs it in the direction of con-
ventionalism and artificiality. Against this general result, it is
useless to argue that passion, and even mere eloquence, at times
gets the better of the outward form, and, by its driving force,
moves and disturbs the hearer in spite of himself.
No sooner had Dryden, in The Rival-Ladies, produced a tragi-
comedy, containing an element of rimed verse, in which he had
made successful use of his gift of poetical rhetoric, than he was
characteristically ready to take a leading part in evolving an
ulterior dramatic species not precisely new, but with features of
its own so marked as to differentiate it from tragicomedy proper.
The tragicomedy bequeathed to him and the restoration dramatists
in general by their predecessors was wont to possess a double plot,
consisting, to use Dryden's own phraseology? , of one main design,'
serious in kind, executed in verse, and 'an underplot or second
walk of comical characters and adventures subservient to the chief
fable, yet carried along under it and helping to it'; although, in
point of fact, the connection between the two was frequently very
slight. At different stages of his career, he produced three more
1 Hist. de la Littérature Anglaise, bk, i, chap. II, sec. IV,
? A Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire (Essays, ed. Ker,
vol. 11, pp. 102 f. ).
242


## p. 20 (#42) ##############################################

20
Dryden
X
plays', of various merit, which belonged to this class. Secret Love,
or The Maiden Queen (acted 1667), of which probably because of
the frank gaiety of Nell Gwynn's scenes in it-Charles II approved
so greatly as to dub it ‘his play,' is founded, as to its main plot, on
Le Grand Cyrus, and, as to its comic underplot, partly on that
romance and partly on the same novelist's Ibrahim, ou L'illustre
Bassa. The interest in the serious plot is impaired by the quite
unheroic character of Philocles intended, as Dryden says, to
represent queen Christina of Sweden's favourite Magnus de la
Gardie); and the chief attraction of the play consists in the
'discoursive' passages between Celadon and Florimel. In The
Spanish Fryar, or The Double Discovery, again (acted and printed
1681), which seems certainly to have been designed as a tragi-
comedy by Dryden, the comic effect preponderates over that of
the serious plot, though the latter cannot be said to be without
interest. The interweaving of the two has been praised-perhaps
overpraised—by more than one eminent critic? . The comic
dialogue of this play is excellent, and the character of the friar
by no means a replica of Fletcher's Spanish Curate (though there
are points of resemblance in the two plays), but a new variety of
an unctuous type which, from Chaucer to Dickens, has afforded
unfailing delight to the public, and which it must have given
Dryden, who hated priests and parsons with a consistent hatred,
much satisfaction to elaborate. His last tragicomedy, Love
Triumphant, or Nature will Prevail (acted 1694), in which
there is a large admixture of rime, merely repeated in its main
plot that of Marriage-à-la-Mode, and the play justly proved a
failure.
Dryden, as already noted, had not brought out more than two
plays, in the second of which he had made occasional use of the
rimed five foot couplet, when he was found ready to assist his
brother-in-law Sir Robert Howard in the composition of what may
be described as the first heroic play? The shortcomings in the
1 Marriage-a-la-Mode, of which the main interest lies in the comic action, has been
reckoned above among the comedies. Scott suggests that it may have been at first
designed as a heroic play, but that one effect of The Rehearsal was to induce the
author to recast the piece.
2 Dryden himself, in A Parallel of Poetry and Painting (1695), refuses to defend The
Spanish Fryar on this score, and declares its faults to be those of its genre, which is
of an unnatural mingle' (Ker, vol. II, p. 147).
3 Sir Robert Howard, who was also a politician and a placeman, figured both as a
historical and political writer, and among the poets and playwrights of the age. His
comedy The Committee (1662) satirised ex post facto the doings of the puritan party
whon in power. Of the tragedies for which he was solely responsible, the most
>


## p. 21 (#43) ##############################################

Dryden and the Heroic Play 21
versification of part of this play, which was printed as Howard's,
suggest that it was submitted by him for revision to Dryden, whose
superior skill in the handling of the couplet he freely confessed.
Though devoid of any kind of interest except that which this and
later heroic plays sought in the remoteness and consequent
strangeness of scene, The Indian Queen was successful; and
Dryden was thus encouraged to write a 'sequel' to it under the
title The Indian Emperor, or The Conquest of Mexico by the
Spaniards (acted 1665), by which the success of the new species
was established and his own reputation as a playwright defini-
tively assured. His other plays, which, both in form of verse and
in treatment of subject, fall under the same designation, were
Tyrannick Love, or The Royal Martyr (acted in 1668 or 1669), the
two parts of Almanzor and Almahide, or The Conquest of Granada
(1669 and 1670) and Aureng-Zebe (1676). It will thus be seen
that the number of heroic plays by Dryden was small, and written
at considerable intervals. The earlier of these breaks (1665—8)
was largely due to the closing of the playhouses in consequence of
the plague and the great fire. The later (1670–6) interruption
was, no doubt, partly caused by the appearance of The Rehearsal
(1670). Although that celebrated burlesque cannot be said to have
killed heroic plays, there can be no doubt that, notwithstanding
the brilliant features which some of these plays displayed, the
elements of vitality were wanting in the species. The list of plays
which, as written partly or wholly in the rimed couplet, have any
claim at all to be reckoned as heroic, is small in itself, and, if
reduced by certain obvious omissions, contains, with the exception
of Dryden’s, few works of even secondary significance? . In a word,
Dryden completely dominates the English heroic play.
interesting is The Great Favourite, or The Duke of Lerma (1668), of which the matter
was taken from recent historians. Sir Robert Howard, who had kept himself as
prominent as he could in life, was buried in Westminster abbey. He is the Crites of
An Essay of Dramatick Poesie ; Shadwell ridiculed him under the less courteous
appellation Sir Positive Atall. His brothers Edward and James likewise wrote plays;
the former was author of The Usurper (1668), a tragedy in which Oliver Cromwell
was represented in the character of Damocles, and Hugh Peters appeared as Hugo de
Petra ; the latter perpetrated a version of Romeo and Juliet (1662), with a happy
ending,' which was performed on alternate nights with the catastrophe. James
Howard's comedy Au Mistaken (printed 1672) was acted before Charles II at Trinity
college, Cambridge, in October 1667.