Dryden's Virgil

Abstract

T HE YEAR 1982-1983 marked, and was celebrated as, the twothousandth anniversary of Virgil's death in 19 B.C.; the year 1984 marks another Virgilian anniversary, the first partial appearance of the most read English translation ever made of his work. Dryden began publishing his Virgil translation in 1684-two eclogues only-and finished with his second (revised) edition of Virgil's complete works fourteen years later, in 1698. He began, that is, at age fifty-two or -three, and finished at age sixty-six or -seven-one way of looking at it. Or you could say he began in the last year of the reign of Charles II, for whom he had served, on occasion, as poetic spokesman; and finished in the tenth year of the reign of William III, to whom he refused to dedicate his Virgil despite his publisher's wish that he do so, but whose likeness he nevertheless could not prevent his publisher from building into the lavishly illustrated volume by an alteration of Aeneas's appearance in the plates inherited from Ogilby's 1668 Virgil-a blatant nose-job to make the profile of the hero instantly recognizable as the well-known physiognomy of the king. Virgil was thus part of Dryden's life; and part, too, of the life of late seventeenth-century England. Part of Dryden's life. When he began translating Virgil in 1684, a beginning he followed up next year with some Aeneid extracts in the miscellany Sylvae, Dryden had completed all the work-or almost allfor which he is now most remembered: I mean by this his satires MacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, his Essay of Dramatic Poesy, and his play All for Love. That play was one of almost twenty he had authored or co-authored by 1684; there were to be only three more from his pen, plus two operas long unremembered today. 1684 was also the year of his elegy to Mr. Oldham, now regarded by some as his finest single poem; and at least since the death of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, in 1680, Dryden had obviously lacked any possible rival for the title of the best living poet writing in English. He had in fact, in 1684, been officially the poet laureate for sixteen years. As an author,