DRYDEN, JOHN (1631-1700), English poet, born on or about 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 connexions 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 summoned to Cromwell’s House of Lords in 1657. A trustworthy tradition asserts that John Dryden was born at the rectory of Aldwinkle All Saints, of which his maternal grandfather, Henry Pickering, was rector.
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, was not large, procured for the poet, who was the eldest of fourteen children, 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 schoolfellow, Henry, Lord Hastings, son of the earl of Huntingdon, in 1649, were published in 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 volume of Epigrams in 1650. Dryden’s contribution is signed “John Dryden of Trinity C.,” as he had 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 disobedience to the vice-master, for which he was “put out of commons” and “gated” for a fortnight. 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. In any case they were spent 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, who was chamberlain to Cromwell; and nothing is more likely than that he obtained some employment under his powerful cousin when he came to London. He is said to have lived at first in the house of his first publisher, Herringman, with whom he was connected till 1679, when Jacob Tonson began to publish his books. He first emerged from obscurity with his Heroic Stanzas (1659) to the memory of the Protector. 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 under-current 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.
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 Astraea Redux (1660), deploring his long absence, and proclaiming the despair with which he had seen “the rebel thrive, the loyal crost.” A Panegyric on the Coronation followed in 1661. From a literary point of view also, Astraea Redux is inferior to the Heroic Stanzas.
Dryden was compelled to supplement his slender income by his writings. He naturally first thought of tragedy,—his own genius, as he has informed us, inclining him rather to that species of composition; and in the first year of the Restoration he wrote a tragedy on the fate of Henry, 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. “I confess,” he said, in a short essay in his own defence, printed before The 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.” 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 1663, by Thomas Killigrew’s company in Vere Street. It was not a success, and Pepys showed good judgment in pronouncing the play “so poor a thing as ever I saw in my life.” Dryden never learned moderation in his humour; there is a student’s clumsiness and extravagance in his indecency; the plays of Etheredge, 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 Rival Ladies, also founded on a Spanish plot, produced before the end of 1663, and printed in the next year, 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, The Kind Keeper, or Mr Limberham 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. He married Lady Elizabeth Howard, Sir Robert’s sister and daughter of the 1st earl of Berkshire, on the 1st of December 1663. Lady Elizabeth’s reputation was somewhat compromised before this union, which was not a happy one, and there is some evidence for the scandal in a letter written by her before her marriage to Philip, 2nd earl of Chesterfield. 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 spirits 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. Dryden was tempted to return to tragedy; he followed up The Indian Queen with The Indian Emperor, or the Conquest of Mexico by the Spaniards, which was acted in 1665, and also proved a success.
But Dryden was not content with writing tragedies in rhymed verse. He took up the question of the propriety of rhyme in serious plays immediately after the success of The Indian Queen, in the preface to an edition (1664) 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 at Charlton, Wiltshire, at the seat 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 conclusions into the form of a dialogue, which he called an Essay of Dramatick Poesie and published in 1668. The essay takes the form of a dialogue between Neander (Dryden), Eugenius (Charles, Lord Buckhurst, afterwards earl of Dorset), Crites (Sir R. Howard), and Lisideius (Sir C. Sedley), who is made responsible for the famous definition of 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.” Dryden’s form is of course borrowed from the ancients, and his main source is the critical work of Corneille in the prefaces and discourses contained in the edition of 1660, but he was well acquainted with the whole body of contemporary French and Spanish criticism. Crites maintains the superiority of the classical drama; Lisideius supports the exacting rules of French dramatic writing; Neander defends the English drama of the preceding generations, including, in a long speech, an examination of Ben Jonson’s Silent Woman. Neander argues, however, that English drama has much to gain by the observance of exact methods of construction without abandoning entirely the liberty which English writers had always claimed. He then goes on to defend the use of rhyme in serious drama. Howard had argued against the use of rhyme in a “preface” to Four New Plays (1665), which had furnished the excuse for Dryden’s essay. Howard replied to Dryden’s essay in a preface to The Duke of Lerma (1668). Dryden at once replied in a masterpiece of sarcastic retort and vigorous reasoning, A Defence of an Essay of Dramatique Poesie, prefixed to the second edition (1668) of The Indian Emperor. It is the ablest and most complete statement of his views about the employment of rhymed couplets in tragedy.