21 John Dryden

Mr. Saidul Haque

About the Module:

This module provides a critical overview of Dryden’s literary genius. Dryden, an influential figure of the Restoration period in English literature encounters negotiates his allegiance to diverse political and religious factions of the time. This module will then critically locate Dryden’s literary output in such a turbulent historical time frame. Focusing on Dryden’s political verse satire, mock-heroic poems, restoration comedies, heroic dramas, religious polemics, lyrics, translations, and critical writings, this module will give an idea about Dryden’s literary genius along with providing a primary sketch of the Restoration period in English literature.

“I confess my chief endeavours are to delight the age in which I live” (Defense of An Essay on Dramatic Poesy 116)

Introduction

John Dryden (1631-1700), a leading writer of the Restoration Age in English literature, mastered the art of traversing a variety of literary expressions- heroic tragedy, comedy, verse satire, translations and literary criticism. Similar to his literary career, he changed his allegiance and views several times in his personal life too. Being allied to the Puritan party, he wrote his impressive ‘Heroic Stanzas’ (1659) on the death of Cromwell, the Lord Protector, but he readily adjusted himself with the Royalist climate of the Restoration. He wrote Astrae Redux in 1660 to welcome back the monarch, followed by the Panegyric to His Sacred Majesty. Again, in his later years Dryden shifted his religious allegiance from an Anglicism to Catholicism.

The poet who wrote poems like Religio Laici (1682) defining the king’s religion in Anglican terms changed his views when James II, a Catholic supporter , had occupied the throne in 1685 after Charles II’s death. He wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687) supporting Catholic views. Dryden was then not a writer segregated from the realpolitik of the time but very much rooted in the real historical, political and religious conflicts of the time. The fact that he adapted himself to the varying modes of his time, has led to many controversies and speculations about his sycophantic and opportunist nature. He was even blamed as nothing more than a political propagandist. But beyond all this debates about his shifting allegiance, Dryden was just negotiating with several conflicts that politics and history imposed on the writer’s function.

Paul J. Korshin has rightly summed up the predicament of Dryden’s literature. According to Korshin, Dryden’s ‘public’ poems are produced on thorny issues of political, theological and literary ideology and therefore there is a constant play of dispute, dissent and contestation leading to the ‘poetics of concord’ (qtd. in Grover xxviii). It is on the literary plane that several historical and political issues of the time is debated and discussed. Dryden’s contribution in this discursive domain of literature is beyond doubt here. Amidst this concordant scenario, Dryden denied extremism and fixity of any kind and became flexible both in his public life as well as in his movement across different genres of literature. He became an exponent of the golden mean in art, politics and morality.

Dryden’s Early Career

Dryden’s literary career started at a significant political moment in England. His first important poem with Puritan inclinations, which he called Heroic Stanzas, was written in 1659 on the death of Oliver Cromwell. But the very next year he aligned himself with Royalist and wrote Astrea Redux (The Return of Justice, 1660) celebrating Charles II’s restoration to the throne. In 1661 Dryden wrote To his Sacred Majesty, a Panegyric on his Coronation followed by Annus Mirabilis: The Year of Wonders (1666). “The latter poem defends the year of the Great Fire and Great Plague against the fatalist notions of divine retribution by exalting England’s King, navy, Royal Society and future progress in epic quatrains” (Grover xxix). This poem also celebrates English naval victories over the Dutch. These early poems were basically eulogy of certain Royal figures in heroic couplets. According to Grover, most of Dryden’s early poems “helped in shaping and disseminating the ideology of the Court through the use of a clear monarchist typology which represents the monarchist heroic ideal as morally normative, bounteous, stable, restorative, patriarchal and divinely ordained” (xxix).

Grover further argues that Dryden’s subject of panegyric revolved around diverse personalities like Cromwell, Charles, Augustus, and King David (from the Old Testament), but the “typological framework” of using “scriptural or classical analogy” and “a prophetic, messianic sort of vision” (xxix) remained constant. This vision was not abstract as such; rather this was rooted in the contemporaneity and historicity of the time. This vision also dismissed “sedition, fanaticism” and excess of any kind as anarchist threat to political and social stability (Grover xxix). This view goes well also with his later poems like verse satires.

Dryden’s Comedies

Dryden was made Poet Laureate in 1668 on the death of Sir William Davenant. In 1670 he was appointed Historiographer Royal also. During the period between 1668 and 1680, Dryden turned to play writing. He popularized the Restoration genre of the ‘heroic tragedy’ as well as the comedies of manners. After a long Puritan ban on theatre productions, theatres were reopened with restoration of monarchy and drama became popular with the aristocracy and populace. According to David Daiches, “Dryden’s early comedies were modeled on the Spanish comedies of intrigue, sometimes with serious or melodramatic scenes in rhyming couplets in addition to Jonsonian humours and love-disputes and wit-combats” (545). Dryden’s comedies include The Wild Gallant (1663), The Rival Ladies (1664), Secret Love (1667) and Sir Martin Mar-all. Marriage a la Mode (1672) is the most durable of his earlier comedies. Here the plot humorously explores the Restoration attitude to morality, marriage, sex and virtue. The play portrays a situation where A’s wife is B’s mistress and B’s fiancée is A’s mistress; but by continuous cunning contrivance, everyone turns virtuous in the end and through mutual agreement they subscribe to conventional morality. Dryden also tried his hand in the reproduction of Shakespeare’s plays and dramatized a section of Milton’s Paradise Lost (as ‘The State of Innocence’). In 1668 appeared An Evening’s Love, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Again in 1679 Dryden came up with two other reworking of Shakespeare- Troilus and Cressida and Oedipus with Nathaniel Lee. Dryden’s career as comedy writer was not very fruitful and he himself proclaimed: “I know I am not so fitted by nature to write comedy…Reputation in them is the last thing in which I shall pretend” (Defense of An Essay on Dramatic Poesy 116)

Dryden’s Heroic Plays

David Daiches claims that “the Restoration was an unheroic age, and perhaps that is why its conception of heroism was so artificial and inflated” (549-550). But in spite of the artificiality and extravagance, rhymed heroic play reigned supreme during this period. The form was introduced by Sir William Davenant and popularized by Dryden. In his Essay on Heroic Plays which Dryden wrote as a preface to The Conquest of Granada, defends heroic play by asserting that “an heroic poet is not tied to a bare representation of what is true, or exceeding probable; but…he might let himself loose to visionary objects, and to the representation of such things, as depending not on sense, and therefore not to be comprehended by knowledge, may give him a freer scope for imagination” (qtd. in Daiches 550). The heroic plays banked on an exalted heroic figure having a loud and declamatory style sometimes rising to passionate extravaganza. These plays employ the bombastic rhetoric of rhymed couplet. Dryden’s The Indian Emperor (1665), Tyrannick Love, or, The Royal Martyr (1669), The Conquest of Granada (in two parts, 1669, and 1670), and Aurengzebe (1675), exhibit his huge contribution to Restoration heroic play. In Tyrannick Love, Dryden is excessively theatrical while portraying the lust of Emperor Maximin and the martyrdom of St. Catherine.

In The Conquest of Granada, Almanzor, a noble stranger, arrives to fight for the Moorish ruler Boabdelin. Almahide, betrothed to Boabdelin, falls in love with the stranger, Almanzor, but repulses his advance. Boabdelin is jealous of Almanzor but needs his heroic power. Finally the Spaniards invade the Moorish kingdom and kill Boabdelin. It is revealed that Almanzor is of noble Spanish birth and he marries Almahide. Theme of love, lust, valour and honour run through these plays. Aureng-Zebe is interesting because of its setting in Oriental land like the previous one. An air of exoticism prevails in these plays by Dryden.

Set in Mogul India, it displays the love of Aureng-Zebe for Indamora, a captive queen. Their love becomes entangled with the politics of the court. The Mogul emperor, Shah Jehan (Aureng-Zebe’s father) and Morat, another son by his second wife Nourmahal also start pursuing Indamora. Despite this, Aureng-Zebe remains loyal to his father and when the struggle for throne led to the deaths of both Morat and Nourmahal, Shah Jehan rewards Aureng-Zebe by abandoning his feelings for Indamora. According to Daiches, “ Though there is much extravagant ranting in Dryden’s heroic plays, and though his heroic situations often tremble on the brink of the absurd and sometimes fall over, the plays are put together with cunning, showing, it might perhaps be said, a first-rate craftsman working in a dubious mood” (551). The protagonists of the plays were elevated to such romantic and superhuman heights that they appeared nonsensically unrealistic, but at the same time the heroic and grand theme of valour and honour becomes consonant with the extravagance. According to Arthur C. Kirsch, “Aureng- Zebe is like no other hero in Dryden’s previous plays.

Before Aureng-Zebe Dryden’s heroes had been distinguished by their capacity for passion, frequently expressed in rant, by their primitivistic if not primitive natures (both Montezuma and Almanzor are characterized as children of nature), and by their constant desire to prove their worth in love as well as in war. None of them were temperate men:…as Almanzor made clear, “because I dare.” (Conquest of Granada, Part 2, sig. N2) They lived not by virtue, in any conventional sense, but by their pride. They conformed only to their own most extravagant conceptions of individual power, to what Corneille and other French writers termed la gloire, and like the Cornelian heroes, they sought not approval but admiration” (162). But Dryden takes a slight turn in this kind of conceptualization of the hero while writing Aureng-Zebe. “In Morat’s case even the antinomy of love and honor itself begins to be sapped at its roots, for he gives up an honor which, though corrupted, still bears the marks of the old heroic grandeur; and he gives it up for love. This is the first time in all of Dryden’s drama that love and honor constitute a real antithesis, and the victory of love in this context spells the end of the heroic play” (Kirsch 167).

Dryden had gradually begun to be dissatisfied with extravaganza of heroic plays. He was satirized by Rochester and his heroic style was also mocked in The Rehearsal (1671), a burlesque play by Buckingham. Dryden attempted writing in blank verse first in All for Love, or The World Well Lost (1678). This is a rewriting of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra. Dryden has mellowed down heroic extravaganza by this time. Everett H. Emerson, Harold E. Davis and Ira Johnson in their essay, “Intention and Achievement in All for Love” have argued that “The theme of All for Love is the conflict of reason and honor with passion in the form of illicit love. From the preface it seems that Dryden wished to show how Antony, torn between these two, chooses unreasonable, passionate love and is consequently punished for his denial of reason” (84).

Verse Satires

By the year 1681, Dryden turned towards writing his most popular and well known political verse satires. Absalom and Achitophel (1681) contributed to the public debate of the time in the form of verse satire. Adhering to his allegiance for Charles II and a legitimized and settled government, he countered the Whig plot of excluding Charles II’s heir and brother James from succession to the throne on the ground that he was a Roman catholic and replacing Charles’s illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth to assert his claims. Protestant Whig agitation in favour of Duke of Monmouth was led by the Earl of Shaftesbury and the Duke of Buckingham. Dryden capitalized on the biblical story of the rebellion of Absalom against his father King David and applied to the contemporary events. Charles II is compared to King David, Monmouth is represented as Absalom, the evil Counselor Achitophel is here Shaftesbury and Buckingham as Zimri. Dryden appropriated the Old Testament story to establish sacred truth in the whole political event. This kind of revolt is also parallel to Adam’s revolt against God as a consequence of his surrender to temptations of Devil. Dryden elevated  the  poignancy   of   the  satire   by  bringing   parallels   between  divine   and  royal personages. In Dryden’s hand a political satire like Absalom and Achitophel banking on the temporal theme of party politics became a poetic and universal piece of art.  Moreover, Dryden raised the political satire from its usual plane of coarseness to the epical grandeur by incorporating the medium of allegory.

It is often claimed that when Shaftesbury was brought before the Grand Jury for his conspiracy against the monarch, Dryden was asked, probably by the King himself, to write a poem in opposition to the flood of pamphlets favoring the Whig side. The picture Dryden presents in the poem is then official side of the scenario. The political intention of the poem is clear when the concluding speech from the throne presents the constitutional position to the readers very artfully:

Would they impose an heir upon the throne?

Let Sanhedrins be taught to give their own.

A King’s at least a part of government,

And mine as requisite as their consent;

Without my leave a future king to choose,

Infers a right the present to depose…

The law shall still direct my peaceful sway,

And the same law teach rebels to obey:

Votes shall no more established power control-

Such votes as make a part exceed the whole:…(Absalom and Achitophel 975-980,991-994)

It is also interesting to note that the King’s enemies are represented in an unfavorable light and the Royal party is sympathetically portrayed. The king is portrayed as a benign figure who is being harmed by some mischievous subjects and he is determined to protect his faithful followers. His justification for having a bastard son is also presented very tactfully:

In pious times, ere priest-craft did begin,

Before polygamy was made a sin;

When man on many multiplied his kind,

Ere one to one was cursedly confined;

When nature prompted, and no law denied

Promiscuous use of concubine and bride;

Then Israel’s monarch after heaven’s own heart,

His vigorous warmth did variously impart

To wives and slaves; and, wide as his command,

Scattered his maker’s image through the land. (Absalom and Achitophel 1-10)

Some critics would also argue that Dryden is here defending the King’s sexual promiscuity but with an ironical tone. Dryden’s argumentative movement in the satire taking cues from Biblical sources is characteristic of his poetic art. Dryden is quite successful in elevating the local issues into a universal satire. Absalom and Achitophel is then sprinkled with mixed traditions-part history and propaganda, part satire, part heroic and part eulogy.

A trail of satires followed over this incident. When Shaftesbury was acquitted from the charge of high treason, the Whigs struck a medal to celebrate the victory. This gave Dryden impetus to write his next satire, The Medal (1682) which was a savage attack on Shaftesbury, “where the couplets lash and sting” (Daiches 567):

But thou, the pander of the people’s hearts

(O crooked soul and serpentine in arts!)

Whose blandishments a loyal land have whored,

And broke the bonds she plighted to her lord,…(Qtd in Daiches 567)

This poem again provoked a spate of counter-attacks of which Thomas Shadwell’s The Medal of John Bayes was the sharpest. Dryden retaliated with his next satire, MacFlecknoe (1682). Dryden here lampoons his literary rival and arch-enemy, Thomas Shadwell in a mock-heroic manner. The ‘Succession of the State’ is a common theme in both Absalom and Achitophel and MacFlecknoe. But while the monarchy in the first one was the real world of kingship, here it is it is the monarchy of bad poetry and nonsense literature. “Alan Roper locates the use of this analogy ‘between affairs in the kingdom of letters and affairs in the kingdom of England’ to a humanistic concept arising in an old tradition of the commonwealth of poets and the republic of letters. Thus the ‘vocabulary of politics provide[s] a rich source of metaphor for literary discussion’, especially in a period of such political debate” (Grover xxx). The aged Richard Flecknoe, a Catholic priest and a dull writer, has long ruled the literary Empire of absolute nonsense. Seeking a successor, Flecknoe chooses the perfect heir, the playwright Shadwell:

Sh- alone my perfect image bears,

Mature in dullness from his tender years:

Sh-alone, of all my sons, is he

Who stands confirm’d in full stupidity.

The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,

But Sh-never deviates into sense…. (MacFlecknoe 15-20)

Drawing allusions from classical, Christian, literary and historical sources, Dryden shatters Shadwell’s image. As Ascanius was Rome’s other hope, Shadwell is the hope of the empire of dullness. As Hannibal swore eternal enmity with Rome, similarly Shadwell waged eternal war against wit. While Greek musician, Arion was saved by dolphins in the sea with his celestial music, Shadwell’s monstrous playing of flutes attracted only puny fishes. Just as Elijah’s mantle falling on Elisha gave him prophetic bliss, so the mantle of Flecknoe shrouding Shadwell, bestowed on him twice the stupidity of Flecknoe. Whereas Eijah ascends to heaven by a whirlwind, Flecknoe’s descent produces a ‘subterranean’ wind implying scatological humour. Every heroic couplet draws on a pattern of inflation and deflation to bring out Shadwell’s stupidity. Dryden imagines a grotesque coronation ceremony in which Shadwell takes over the charge of the kingdom of nonsense. Shadwell holds ‘potent ale’ instead of ‘Ball’ and in his other hand Flecknoe’s “Love’s Kingdom” instead of the Sceptre.

While the ball and the scepter might have represented power and authority and while potent ball might have procreated, he has in his hand ‘potent ale’ which causes sleep and produces neither offspring nor literature. The coronation ceremony is shifted to a location known as Grub Street associated with poor poets and publishers, hack writers, prostitutes, poor actors and asylums. Instead of Persian carpet the path to the throne was covered with torn and unsold works of worthless writers including Shadwell’s own works. Dryden here portrays Shadwell as the ultimate epitome of bad poetry. Shadwell is the great monarch of thoughtless majesty who never deviates into sense and whose rationality is fogged by foolishness. Dryden makes Shadwell’s existence a complete non-entity in this mock-heroic satire. Dryden through his satire has created a history of inferior literature and geography of folly. The poem moves from a personal attack on Shadwell to a prototype of an absolute dullness and barrenness. By associating Shadwell’s lineage to Norwich and Newcastle, both of which are peripheral parts of England and also ascribing his heredity to Flecnoe, a poet from Ireland and finally measuring Shadwell’s kingdom till Barbadoes, a distant uncivilized colonized territory, Dryden is constructing a powerful binary between the centre and the periphery; between himself and his point of attack; between high culture and popular culture.

Dryden’s Religious Polemic

Dryden also wrote two poems with contradictory approach involving theological discussion. In 1682 he wrote Religio Laici or A Layman’s Faith: A Poem defending king’s religion in Anglican terms. According to William Myers, this poem negotiates “between the Church as an institution, the Bible as an inspiration, and reason and grace as mutually supporting divine gifts” (104). This poem favors Christian religion over any belief in Deism and emphasizes the primary importance of the Bible as a guide to salvation. His another theological poem, The Hind and the Panther (1687) was written under very different circumstances and a changed faith. When James II acceded to the throne after Charles II’s death, he supported Catholicism and marginalized the Anglicans. Dryden like many others became Roman Catholic sometime in 1685 or 1686. “This act has been regarded as gross time-serving, and it has been defended as a natural development of Dryden’s earlier quest for “unsuspected ancients” and an “omniscient” or infallible church” (Baugh 728).

It is undisputed that he remained a devout Catholic till his death and stuck to his faith in William III’s reign, a time of anti-Catholicism at the cost of his material disadvantages. Dryden writes The Hind and the Panther in the mode of allegorical beast fable justifying his way into Catholicism. The Milk-white Hind symbolizes the Roman Church; the Panther is the Anglican Church and other dissenting sects are also in the form of animals. The first part presents discursive reflections on the problems faced by these allegorical persons. “The Lion (the King) commands the fiercer beasts to allow the timid Hind to approach the watering place-an allegory of the recent Declaration of Indulgence (April, 1687)” and thereafter the Hind’s timidity lessens (Baugh 728). The second part is a polemical dialogue between the Hind and the Panther representing the views of the two different sects. In Part Three of the poem, “the Panther relates the story of the Swallows who were destroyed because they followed the ill counsels of the Martins (the extremists in the Roman clergy, whose influence on James II Dryden perhaps feared), and the Hind retorts with the fable of the Buzzard (Bishop Burnet), which shows the savageness of the extreme Anglican party” (Baugh 728).

Dryden’s Lyrics

Dryden was also a lyric poet of considerable ability. Some of his famous odes include To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew, On the Death of Mr Henry Purcell, Song for St Cecilia’s Day, Alexander’s Feast. Some of these lyrical odes were also set to music.

Dryden’s Art of Translations

With the 1688 revolution, Dryden’s Poet Laureateship ended and he devoted himself primarily on translations of Juvenal, Horace, Virgil, Plutarch, Ovid and others. In Sylvae, he attempted Lucretius, Theocritus and some small pieces of Horace. While commenting upon Dryden’s translation skill, A.C. Baugh writes, “He was in all this drudgery industrious, conscientious, and, thanks to long practice, usually apt, elegant, vigorous, and spirited in his renditions” (731).

Dryden’s Contribution to Literary Criticism:

The masterpiece in Dryden’s oeuvre of critical prose is the Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668). It is written as a debate on drama voiced by four speakers, Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander. “In form it is a Ciceronian dialogue” (Baugh 716). The four speakers identified as Dryden’s contemporaries present diverse points of view. The first speaker, Crites (Greek for “judge” or “critic”) defends the ancients; Eugenius (meaning well-born) defends the superiority of contemporary English drama; Lisideius prefers French drama to English and glorifies Elizabethan drama to that of the early Restoration period; and Neander (“new man”), who most nearly is Dryden himself defends the English as opposed to the French and defends the use of rhyme in plays. For Dryden, rhyme is more natural and effective than blank verse in serious plays, where the subjects and characters are great.

The essay was occasioned by a public dispute with Sir Robert Howard over the use of rhyme in drama. This essay is a also critical intervention in the debate between the claims of the ancient authority and exigencies of the modern writer. As Lisideius defines a play as “A just and lively image of human nature, representing its passions and humours, and the changes of fortune to which it is subject, for the delight and instruction of mankind” (36).This is a clear divergence from classical model as Aristotle said nothing about “passions and humours” and there was no point of “delighting” the audience. While defending the excellence of English drama over the French drama Neander or Dryden comments that a play should be “lively imitation of nature” (68) but the French drama’s aesthetics lies in “the beauties of a statue, but not of a man, because not animated with the soul of poesy, which is imitation of humour and passions” (68). Dryden also provides a favorable account of English dramatic tradition in the hands of Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Dryden’s discourses on classical “unities”, classical distinction between various genres, on satires and his ideas of modernity are scattered in the prefaces and epilogues of most of his writings ranging from The Conquest of Granada to The Spanish Friar.

Conclusion

Dryden belonged to an age which was troubled with controversies and different kind of factions. Dryden’s lifelong involvement with literature and culture of the period made him qualified to comment upon the general state of the arts and letters of the time as well as on the contemporary historical conditions. His long literary life is a commentary on his time-a time of class, party, faction. He was scorned by several of his contemporaries. His reply to them sharpened into brilliant satires. He changed allegiances again and again but this fluctuation made him skilled to air his voice from different approaches and formed diverse polemics. Dr. Johnson’s comment aptly evaluates Dryden’s literary contributions : “What was said of Rome, adorned by Augustus, may be applied by an easy metaphor to English poetry embellished by Dryden, ‘lateritiam invenit, marmoream reliquit,’ he found it brick, and he left it marble”(155). Dryden lived through an age when monarchical succession had twice been broken and restored and therefore Dryden’s literary output demands a critical engagement with the aesthetics and politics of the Restoration period in England.

Reference

• Baugh, Albert C, et al. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 2003. Print.
• Daiches, David. A Critical History of English Literature. Vol.II. New Delhi: Random House India, 2007. Print.
• Dryden, John. “Defense  of  An Essay of Dramatic Poesy.” Essays of John Dryden. Ed. W.P.Ker. Vol. I. New York: Russell and Russell, 1961.Print.
• Emerson, E.H.,et al. “Intention and Achievement in All for Love.” College English 17.2 (Nov., 1955): 84-87.Web. JSTOR.15 Oct 2017.
• Grover,Madhu, ed. MacFlecknoe. By John Dryden. Delhi: Worldview, 2008. Print.
• Johnson, Samuel. Lives of the Poets. Ed. Roger Lonsdale. Vol II. New York: OUP, 2006.Print.
• Kirsch, A.C. “The Significance of Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe.” ELH 29.2 (Jun., 1962): 160-174. Web. JSTOR.15 Oct 2017.
• Walker, Keith, ed. John Dryden: The Major Works. New York: OUP, 2003. Print.