Deprived now of royal patronage and pensions, Dryden turned again to the stage, his old-time purse-filler; and he produced two of his best plays, Don Sebastian and Amphitryon. The rest of his life, however, was to be spent, not with the drama, but in translation and paraphrase. Since 1684 he had several times published Miscellanies, collections of verse in which had appeared fragments of translations. With that indefatigable energy which characterized him, he now devoted himself to sustained effort. In 1693 he published a translation of Juvenal, and in the same year began his translation of Virgil, which was published in 1697. The work was sold by subscription, and the poet was fairly well paid. Dryden's translations are by no means exact; but he caught the spirit of his poet, and carried something of it into his own effective verse.
Dryden was not great in original work, but he was particularly happy in adaptation; and so it happened that his best play, All for Love, was modeled on Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, and his best poem, Palamon and Arcite, was a paraphrase of the Knight's Tale of Chaucer. Contrary to the general taste of his age, he had long felt and often expressed great admiration for the fourteenth-century poet. His work on Ovid had first turned his thought to Chaucer, he tells us, and by association he linked with him Boccaccio. As his life drew near its close he turned to those famous old story-tellers, and in the Fables gave us paraphrases in verse of eight of their most delightful tales, with translations from Homer and Ovid, a verse letter to his kinsman John Driden, his second St. Cedlia's Ode, entitled Alexander's Feast, and an Epitaph.
The Fables were published in 1700. They were his last work. Friends of the poet, and they were legion, busied themselves at the beginning of that year in the arrangement of an elaborate benefit performance for him at the Duke's Theater; but Dryden did not live to enjoy the compliment. He suffered severely from gout; a lack of proper treatment induced mortification, which spread rapidly, and in the early morning of the first of May, 1700, he died.
He had been the literary figurehead of his generation, and the elaborate pomp of his funeral attested his great popularity. His body lay in state for several days and then with a great procession was borne, on the 13th of May, to the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. The last years of his life had been spent in fond study of the work of Chaucer, and so it happened that just three hundred years after the death of elder bard Dryden was laid to rest by the side of his great master.
PALAMON AND ARCITE
The Fables, in which this poem appears, were published in 1700. The word fable as here used by Dryden holds its original meaning of story or tale. Besides the Palamon and Arcite, he paraphrased from Chaucer the Cock and the Fox, the Flower and the Leaf, the Wife of Bath's Tale, the Character of the Good Parson. From Boccaccio he gave us Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria, and Cymon and Iphigenia, while he completed the volume with the first book of the Iliad, certain of Ovid's Metamorphoses, the Epistle to John Driden, Alexander's Feast, and an Epitaph. The Fables were dedicated to the Duke of Ormond, whose father and grandfather Dryden had previously honored in a prose epistle, full of the rather excessive compliment then in vogue. Palamon and Arcite is itself preceded by a dedication in verse to the Duchess of Ormond. In the graceful flattery of this inscription Dryden excelled himself, and he was easily grand master of the art in that age of superlative gallantry. The Duke acknowledged the compliment by a gift of five hundred pounds. The preface to the volume is one of Dryden's best efforts in prose. It is mainly concerned with critical comment on Chaucer and Boccaccio; and, though it lacks the accuracy of modern scholarship, it is full of a keen appreciation of his great forerunners.
The work of Dryden in Palamon and Arcite may seem to us superfluous, for a well-educated man in the nineteenth century is familiar with his Chaucer in the original; but in the sixteenth century our early poets were regarded as little better than barbarians, and their language was quite unintelligible. It was, therefore, a distinct addition to the literature of his age when he rescued from oblivion the Knight's Tale, the first of the Canterbury Tales, and gave it to his world as Palamon and Arcite.
Here, as in his translations, Dryden catches the spirit of his original and follows it; but he does not track slavishly in its footprints. In this particular poem he follows his leader more closely than in some of his other paraphrases, and the three books in which he divides his Palamon and Arcite scarcely exceed in length the original Knight's Tale. The tendency toward diffuse expansion, an excess of diluting epithets, which became a feature of eighteenth-century poetry, Dryden has sensibly shunned, and has stuck close to the brisk narrative and pithy descriptions of Chaucer. If the subject in hand be concrete description, as in the Temple of Mars, Dryden is at his best, and surpasses his original; but if the abstract enters, as in the portraiture on the walls, he expands, and when he expands he weakens. To illustrate: