John Dryden (August 19, 1631 – May 12, 1700) was an influential English poet, literary critic, and playwright.

Early Life

Dryden was natural in the village rectory of Aldwinkle near Oundle in Northamptonshire and educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was the agency writer throughout his life. His early plays, typically heroic tragedy, met by having extremely variable profits however served to promote his title & his Royalist sentiments. Arriving inside London during the Protectorate, he attempted to capitalise on a Parliamentarian sympathies of his family (his cousin-german was the judge in the period of the test of Charles I), but failing to produce great deal impact until a Restoration of King Charles II. His verse form, Astrea Redux, inside honour of this event, mass produced him the title.

Later Life and Career

By 1663, the season he was mass produced the fellow of the Royal Society, he was prominent plenty to exist as accepted as a suitable married man for Lady Elizabeth Howard, however his reputation was non really processed until Annus Mirabilis, the celebration of the cases of 1666 in pentameter quatrains. Around 1668, he was appointed to succeed William Davenant as Poet Laureate, a post which he wasted once King James II was deposed twenty years later.

For the next tenner years, his output was chiefly for the stage. He led a way around Restoration comedy, his best known function existence Marriage A-la-Mode, (1672), when well as heroic tragedy & regular tragedy, where his greatest profits was All For Love (1677). His more works of major importance from either this cycle come his foreword & essays in drama, of which a Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) is a longest & arguably the right. Around these essays, Dryden expressed his belief that a Elizabethan playwright experienced surpassed victims of Greece; argued for a utilize of riming verse in the drama; & examined & likened the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson and John Fletcher.

From either a 1680s Dryden concentrated on poetry, where his utilise of the riming couplet is considered brilliant, although he continued to write plays & composed many librettoes. His greatest accomplishment were inside satirical verse: a mock-heroic MacFlecknoe, an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell, and Absalom and Achitophel, a political irony against a Whigs. His more major works from either this time period come a religious verse form Religio Laici (1682) and The Hind and the Panther (1687). A foremost one was written prior to, a 2nd shortly when, Dryden's conversion to Catholicism. Fallowing a Glorious Revolution of 1688, Dryden's politics & religion left him away from either favor at court, & he was forced to write plays & translate poetry from Latin and Greek for the residing. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, in addition to his ii major efforts, a complete works of Virgil in 1697 and Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), a collection of translations of Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, when well as modernized adaptations from either Geoffrey Chaucer. A Prolusion to Fables is considered to become each a major function of criticism & one of the finest essays inside English.

Dryden is buried within Westminster Abbey. His firstborn boy, Charles Dryden, became chamberlain to Pope Innocent XII. Dryden's influence when a poet was huge within his life-time & in the 18th century; his verse form were utilized as system by poets like Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson. A attitude of the 18th century may be summed higher around Johnson's remark that Dryden "refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English Poetry." In a 19th century his reputation waned, &, despite the interest of numbers like T.S. Eliot, it has not yet recovered completely. Although the brilliance of his versification & a vigour of his expression come typically acknowledged, there hwhen been a feeling that, as Eliot wrote around Homage to John Dryden, Dryden "had a commonplace mind" & "lacked insight."

Bibliography

Astraea Redux, 1660 The Indian Emperor (tragedy), 1665 Annus Mirabilis (poem), 1667 The Tempest (comedy), 1667, an adaptation with William D'Avenant of Shakespeare's The Tempest An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, 1668 ''An Evening's Love (comedy), 1669 Tyrannick Love (tragedy), 1669 Marriage A-la-Mode, 1672 The Conquest of Granada, 1670 All for Love, 1677 Oedipus, 1679 Absalom and Achitophel, 1681 The Medal, 1682 Religio Laici, 1682 The Hind and the Panther, 1687 Amphitryon, 1690 Don Sebastian, 1690 Amboyna The Works of Virgil, 1697 Fables, Ancient and Modern'' 1700