John Dryden

John Dryden was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright born on 19 August 1631, old style 9 August, in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire. He died on 12 May 1700, old style 1 May. In 1668 he was appointed England’s first Poet Laureate, and his command of Restoration literary life was so great that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Sir Walter Scott later called him “Glorious John.”

Dryden grew up between strong and competing religious and political currents. He was the eldest of fourteen children of Erasmus Dryden and Mary Pickering. His family belonged to landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. As a boy he lived in Titchmarsh, where he likely received his first education. In 1644 he was sent as a King’s Scholar to Westminster School, led by Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian. Westminster encouraged royalism and high Anglicanism, quite different from the Puritan atmosphere of Dryden’s childhood, yet Dryden clearly respected Busby and later sent two of his sons there.

Westminster shaped Dryden’s mind as much as his opinions. Its humanist curriculum trained pupils in rhetoric and in arguing both sides of a question, a habit that later appeared throughout his writing and criticism. Weekly translation assignments also strengthened his gift for assimilation. His first published poem was an elegy on the death from smallpox of his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings, with a strong royalist feel and an allusion to the execution of King Charles I, which took place near the school in 1649.

In 1650 Dryden went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where the master was Thomas Hill, a Puritan preacher who had once been rector in Dryden’s home village. Dryden likely followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and mathematics, and in 1654 graduated BA at the top of the list for Trinity that year. After his father died, leaving him some land but not enough income to live on, Dryden returned to London during the Protectorate and worked with Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe. He processed at Cromwell’s funeral in 1658 with John Milton and Andrew Marvell, then published Heroic Stanzas in 1659, a cautious eulogy on Cromwell’s death.

The Restoration of the monarchy changed Dryden’s public direction. In 1660 he welcomed Charles II in Astraea Redux, presenting the Interregnum as chaos and Charles as a restorer of peace and order. He followed with To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation and To My Lord Chancellor in 1662. In 1663 he married Lady Elizabeth, sister of Sir Robert Howard; she bore three sons, one of whom, Erasmus Henry, became a Roman Catholic priest. After the theatres reopened in 1660, Dryden began writing for the stage. His first play, The Wild Gallant, appeared in 1663 and was not successful, but from 1668 he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King’s Company, in which he became a shareholder.

Dryden’s best-known dramatic work included the Restoration comedy Marriage à la Mode in 1673 and the tragedy All for Love in 1678. Yet he often suggested that his talents were wasted on the theatre. In 1667 he published Annus Mirabilis, a long historical poem on the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It helped establish him as the leading poet of his generation and led to his posts as Poet Laureate in 1668 and historiographer royal in 1670. During the Great Plague, when London theatres closed, he retreated to Wiltshire and wrote Of Dramatick Poesie, a dialogue that debates classical, French, and English drama. Dryden’s words still matter because they come from a writer trained to test arguments, answer public events, and turn the conflicts of his age into clear, forceful English.