Thy sword within the scabbard keep,
And let mankind agree;
Better the world were fast asleep,
Than kept awake by thee.
John Dryden
Absalom and AchitophelAlexander's FeastMac FlecknoeThe Secular MasqueReligio LaiciVeni, Creator SpiritusSong to a Fair Young Lady, going out of the Town in the SpringA Song for St. Cecilia's Day, 1687Of Dramatic Poesie
In 1662 Dryden began to write plays as a source of income. His first attempts, including the comedy The Wild Gallant (1663), failed, but The Rival Ladies, a comedy written in 1664, was a success. During the next 20 years, he became the most prominent dramatist in England. His comedies, including An Evening's Love; or, The Mock Astrologer (1668), Ladies à la Mode (1668), and Marriage à la Mode (1672), are broad and bawdy; one of them, The Kind Keeper; or, Mr. Limberham (1678), was banned as indecent. His early heroic plays, written in rhymed couplets, are extravagant and full of pageantry. Among them are the semiopera The Indian Queen (written with Sir Robert Howard in 1664); this work contains some of the most famous music of his contemporary, the English composer Henry Purcell. Other works of this period are The Indian Emperour; or, The Conquest of Mexico by the Spanish (1665) and The Conquest of Granada (1670). One of his later tragedies in blank verse, All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1678), a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is considered his greatest play and one of the masterpieces of Restoration tragedy. Dryden was appointed poet laureate and royal historiographer in 1670.
In 1681 he wrote his first and greatest political satire, Absalom and Achitophel; a masterful parable in heroic couplets, it employs biblical characters and incidents to ridicule the Whig attempt to make the duke of Monmouth, rather than the duke of York (the future King James II), successor to King Charles II. His other great verse satires, all written in or about 1682, are The Medall; the second part of Absalom and Achitophel, written in collaboration with the poet and playwright Nahum Tate; and Mac Flecknoe, a vigorous attack on the English playwright Thomas Shadwell, which influenced Alexander Pope's mock-heroic poem The Dunciad.
Although Dryden had defended his adherence to Protestantism in the poem Religio Laici (1682), he became a Roman Catholic in 1685, presumably because James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, came to the throne in that year. The poet then wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687), a metrical allegory in defense of his new faith. The Glorious Revolution (1688) and the resulting succession of the Protestant King William III did not change Dryden's religious views, but he lost his laureateship and his pension because of them.
Dryden returned to writing for the stage but without much success. He then began a new career as a translator, the most important of his translations being The Works of Virgil (1697). During the same period he wrote one of his greatest odes, Alexander's Feast (1697), which, like an earlier ode, A Song for Saint Cecilia's Day (1687), was written for a London musical society and set to music by Purcell. In 1699 Dryden wrote the last of his published works, metrical paraphrases of Homer, the Latin poet Ovid, the Italian poet Giovanni Boccaccio, and the English poet Geoffrey Chaucer, under the title Fables Ancient and Modern; its preface is one of his most important essays.
Dryden is, however, still best known for his poetry, which Samuel Johnson compared metaphorically to the accomplishments of Rome under the emperor Augustus, when Horace, Ovid, and Virgil flourished. Dryden, in Johnson's metaphor, "embellished" English poetry: "he found it brick, and he left it marble." The metaphor rightly identifies Dryden with the Auguston Age of English literature. It evokes the largeness -- even the monumentality -- of his poems, as well as their strength and polished elegance and, above all, their assured public character. Such qualities were undervalued by 19th-century writers, but his reputation has revived in the 20th century.
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