Introduction

Summary

John Dryden was a professional writer, substantially dependent for most of his life on the proceeds of his pen. His official posts as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal to Charles II and James II brought him prestige and some financial rewards. And he received occasional largesse from aristocratic patrons. But the bulk of his income was derived, in his earlier years, from his theatrical work, and, in later life, from the volumes of miscellany poems and classical translations published by his ‘bookseller’, Jacob Tonson. Most of Dryden's writing may thus be described as ‘occasional’ in nature, having been written in direct reponse to contemporary events, circumstances, and commissions, or to meet urgent performance or publication deadlines.

But Dryden's earlier critics and anthologists, while never underestimating the effect of local contingency on his work, believed that Dryden's mental and imaginative ‘world’ was never straightforwardly identifiable with the world of events, personalities, and allegiances in which he conducted his daily life. Nor were his conceptual, aesthetic, or emotional assumptions limited to those of Restoration England. Dryden was a writer of wide reading, broad cultural sympathies, and large philosophical and imaginative capacities. Within a largely bespoke literary œuvre he had managed to address questions of extensive and permanent concern, in ways that spoke far beyond his immediate polemical or commercial purposes. And he had done this in verse and prose that was remarkable for its rhythmical energy, argumentative subtlety, and imaginative vividness.

Much of the best recent scholarship on Dryden has been primarily contextual in its emphasis, mapping in great detail the relations between his work and the political, religious, and literary events, personalities, and ideas of his time. Such commentary has substantially enhanced our knowledge of the circumstances in which Dryden's work was composed and received, and deserves the gratitude of every student of the poet. Its focus, however, has sometimes obscured the ways in which Dryden was far more than merely a ‘man of his times’, and his imaginative sympathies far more widely ranging than his public career might suggest. Dryden's responses to the world around him constantly overlapped and intersected in complex ways with the imaginative worlds that he encountered in his reading and inner reflection.