JOHN DRYDEN. Macmillan Literary Lives General Editor: Richard Dutton, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Lancaster

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1 JOHN DRYDEN Macmillan Literary Lives General Editor: Richard Dutton, Senior Lecturer in English, University of Lancaster This series offers stimulating accounts of the literary careers of the most widely read British and Irish authors. Volumes follow the outline of writers' working lives, not in the spirit of traditional biography, but aiming to trace the professional, publishing and social contexts which shaped their writing. The role and status of 'the author' as the creator of literary texts is a vexed issue in current critical theory, where a variety of social, linguistic and psychological approaches have challenged the old concentration on writers as specially gifted individuals. Yet reports of 'the death of the author' in literary studies are (as Mark Twain said of a premature obituary) an exaggeration. This series aims to demonstrate how an understanding of writers' careers can promote, for students and general readers alike, a more informed historical reading of their works.

2 Published titles Richard Dutton WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Paul Hammond JOHN DRYDEN Joseph McMinn JONATHAN SWIFf Michael O'Neill PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY Felicity Rosslyn ALEXANDER POPE Cedric Watts JOSEPH CONRAD Tom Winnifrith and Edward Chitham CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTE John Worthen D. H. LAWRENCE George Parfitt JOHN DONNE Forthcoming titles MorrisBeja JAMES JOYCE Cedric Brown JOHN MILTON Peter Davison GEORGE ORWELL Jan Fergus JANE AUSTEN James Gibson THOMAS HARDY Kenneth Graham HENRY JAMES Keith Hanley WILLIAM WORDSWORTH David Kay BEN JONSON Alastair MacRae W.B. YEATS Kerry McSweeney GEORGE ELIOT JohnMepham VIRGINIA WOOLF Leonee Ormond ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON David B. Pirie JOHN KEATS A.E. Sharpe T.S. ELIOT Gary Waller EDMUND SPENSER Barry Windeatt GEOFFREY CHAUCER

3 John Dryden A Literary Life Paul Hammond Senior Lecturer in English University of Leeds M MACMILLAN

4 Paul Hammond 1991 Softcover reprint of the hardcover lst edition All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 3J...4 Alfred Place, London WClE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL LTD HoundmiIls, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world Filmset by Wearside Tradespools, Fulweli, Sunderland British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hammond, Paul John Dryden : a literary life. - Macmillan literary lives 1. English literature. Dryden, John, I. Title. Series ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI / ISBN (paperback) Series Standing Order If you would like to receive future titles in this series as they are published, you can make use of our standing order facility. To place a standing order please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address and the name of the series. Please state with which title you wish to begin your standing order. (If you live outside the UK we may not have the rights for your area, in which case we will forward your order to the publisher concerned.) Standing Order Service, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, RG212XS, England.

5 For Martin

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7 Contents Prologue ix 1 The Apprentice: The New Writer: The Dramatist: The Critic: The Political Writer: The Religious Writer: The Translator: Epilogue 169 Select Bibliography 171 Notes 173 Index 181 vii

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9 Prologue Sometimes I give my soule one visage and sometimes another... If I speake diversly of my selfe it is because I looke diversly upon my selfe... I have nothing to say entirely, simply, and with soliditie of my selfe, without confusion, disorder, blending, mingling, and in one word. Montaigne 1 Among the manuscripts of John Aubrey in the Bodleian Library are his lives of notable contemporaries. One page is headed 'John Dryden, Esq. Poet Laureate. He will write it for me himselfe'. The remainder of the page is blank. Whatever the circumstances which deprived us of Dryden's autobiography, the silence is altogether appropriate. Dryden was a prolific writer whose contribution to the culture of Restoration England is unrivalled, and yet that copious writing eschewed autobiographical revelation. There are many statements of his critical opinions, and some of his political and religious beliefs, but it is rare to come across any disclosure of what the twentieth century (with unacknowledged irony) likes to call'private life'. There are few intimate letters and no diary. His mode of writing often prefers several voices instead of the single voice which might be construed as authorial: he writes plays, prologues and epilogues which are spoken by actors; critical essays and religious poems in which different voices contend for mastery; translations where the voice of the translator has an ultimately indecipherable relation to the voice of the original poet. This penchant for rhetorical play is the expression of a critical and sceptical intellect which stood resolutely by certain beliefs but was always ready to probe, test and explore alternatives; it is also the self-defensive mode of the professional writer earning his living in dangerous times. Many commentators on Dryden, from his day to ours, have traduced him with both stubborn conservatism and mercenary opportunism. In so doing they have inadequately imagined the precariousness of public life and public speech in the late seventeenth century, and neglected to consider that in any age there is no secure and privileged position outside the structures of language where a man's private self may reside. Freedom and ix

10 X Prologue integrity come only through a continual wrestling with and within language. The consequence of this for anyone who would write Dryden's life is that we can have no access to a secret or even stable self; there are only texts, and the interpretations which we make of them. We may make inferences about what Dryden felt and thought, but only if we acknowledge that these are simply further rewritings of our own. The present study of Dryden's life examines the texts which he produced, considering how they engaged with their society and what notions of text and society, writer and reader they are proposing. It therefore consists of chapters on different aspects of Dryden's work; they are arranged approximately chronologically to suggest the shape of his career and to explore his own developing sense of his role as the premier writer of Restoration England, at once dominating and detached from the world in which he moved.