1 - The Dryden Myth

Summary

Of all those writers who have ever been classed among the greatest English poets, John Dryden is today perhaps the least known and least loved. While high-quality scholarship continues to be devoted to his work, it seems to have little impact outside specialist circles. Dryden's writing consequently receives little attention from most ordinary students, teachers, and educated general readers. The distinguished critic and teacher Barbara Everett has recently affirmed her experience during ‘decades of teaching’ that ‘only the rarest of able pupils has agreed to try Dryden, has indeed (it sometimes seems) heard of him’. Dryden's work is now hardly ever studied in schools, and is increasingly marginalized or bypassed on university courses. It is, moreover, frequently represented in anthologies and described in literary textbooks in ways that have changed little for decades, and that almost seem calculated to make Dryden appear offputting and unattractive to newcomers. One recent compiler of a substantial classroom anthology of seventeenthand eighteenth-century British literature has even expressed ‘pleasure’ in his devotion of space that would formerly have been reserved for Dryden to the work of the poet's contemporary and ‘competitor’, Aphra Behn.

How is it that a writer whom Sir Walter Scott considered to have left ‘to English literature a name, second only to those of Milton and of Shakespeare’ (CH 379) should now be so little studied and so scantly regarded? In the spirit of George Santayana's celebrated observation that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it ’, the present chapter will offer a brief survey of Dryden's reputation from his own lifetime to the present, in an attempt to determine the origins of the current distaste for the poet. It will trace the emergence, fairly late in the poet's three centuries of posthumous life, of an influential Dryden Myth, a received view of the poet that, though seriously misleading in most of its underlying assumptions and main tenets, has come to act as a powerful deterrent to those who might potentially derive pleasure and profit from reading his work. To trace the genesis of this Myth and to understand some of the historical and aesthetic developments that lie behind it, is, I believe, to take some necessary first steps towards liberating onself from the more malign aspects of its influence.