Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden ed. by Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine

Abstract

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden ed. by Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine David Alff Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine. New York: MLA, 2013. Pp. x + 197. [End Page 87] $37.50; $19.75. This incisive essay collection sets out to tackle the greatest challenges confronting teachers of Dryden. Some of his most popular works presume familiarity with the cultural and partisan complexities of the Late Stuart Era. Dryden’s indebtedness to classical literary forms can baffle and bore students unversed in Homer and Virgil. Finally, the spread of Romantic aesthetic criteria that value poetry for its organic self-expression has done little to flatter the Stuart laureate and historiographer royal who used imaginative writing to announce political positions, gratify patrons, and libel opponents. Whose Dryden do we inherit? What do we enlist him to do? “Part One: Materials” reports on the state of Dryden in college curricula, drawing its data from a survey that asked twenty-two instructors to identify the editions they use, in what kinds of courses, and alongside what forms of secondary criticism and supplementary material. The bulk of this book belongs to “Part Two: Approaches.” Its twenty-one essays fall within overlapping sections: Poetry, Drama, and Prose and Translation. Foremost is the need for relevant historical context. One work-around entails using Dryden’s most user-friendly texts that are able to signify in the absence of scrupulous framing. Blair Hoxby suggests that All for Love can be “readily enjoyed even by students who have scant knowledge of the classics and have never heard of the Second Triumvirate.” Adam Potkay likewise endorses Dryden’s editions of Lucretius and Virgil, “perennially accessible and compelling” texts that introduce students to England’s “incandescent silver age” of classical translation. Dryden is most accessible in Fables, Ancient and Modern, according to Philip Smallwood, who uses these stories to teach the “values of Augustan poetry” (a welcome call for sound historical reading practices later marred by his tendentious scolding of undergraduates for knowing more about “feminist lore” and “domination subversion” than close reading). History is unavoidable in most works. Kirstin R. Wilcox approaches Absalom and Achitophel, where context “easily swamps . . . literary dimensions,” counterintuitively as a labor of close reading. “The goal,” she says, is to draw students into the poem “so that they actively experience its political significance” from inside. Her class reads the poem first without historical background, paraphrasing it “sentence by sentence” to clarify surface meaning. She divulges allegorical correspondences (“Jews/English,” “Jebusite /Catholic” for example) only when students have enough of an investment to hunger for them. Will Pritchard uses Marriage à la Mode to get students to “think about the ways in which works of art . . . do or do not take a position in a larger cultural debate,” in this case, over the virtue of marriage. He shows how Dryden’s interphilandering couples, Rhodophil and Doralice, Palamede and Melantha, upstage more earnest polemics. I wondered how the patently unmodish pastoral romance of Leonidas and Palmyra, not discussed, might complicate Dryden’s satire and imply new position-taking. Many contributors encourage students to see Dryden ambiguously, as a complex and self-revising thinker whose works often bucked the demands of Stuart panegyric and Catholic apologia. Anna Battigelli teaches Dryden’s Religio Laici as a covert attempt to deflate “polarized polemical combat” about religion, reminding her class that “[p]aradox and contradiction, not consistency, confessional alignment, or orthodoxy, are the hallmarks of his style.” [End Page 88] Christopher Johnson alerts students to moments in Absalom and Achitophel where the Monmouth plot diverges from 2 Samuel, and Dryden “problematically associates royal sexual aggression with rape and fratricide.” Pedagogical techniques can make physical the experience of reading Dryden. Though few essays explicitly credit performance studies as methodological inspiration, many present poetry as the work of lungs and tongues, and plays as creations that, as Thomas F. Bonnell and Katie Sullivan put it, “must be physically realized in three-dimensional space.” John Richetti performs “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” from memory, walking around his class while “reciting it—or, as it were, talking it—to convey a sense...