Introduction: A Tercentenary Tribute

Abstract

T hree hundred years after Dryden's death nothing could be more obvious than the breadth and authority of his career. He is the most important poet of the late seventeenth century. He perfected the heroic couplet and deployed the idioms of literary mockery with unprecedented skill and originality; he fashioned masterful pindarics and commemorative verse; he wrote the greatest political satire in the language, and he absorbed and translated the idioms of Latin poetry over an entire lifetime, creating an English Virgil that for some, even now, has no rival. If we add Dryden's work as playwright and literary theorist to his accomplishments as poet and translator, we might wonder if there is, in the early modern period, another career so rich and various. Dryden invented, perhaps not quite from whole cloth, the heroic drama; together with Purcell he fashioned an English opera; after Sidney's Defence, the Essay of Dramatic Poesy is the defining text of the early modern literary imagination. And no one-not Milton or Marvell, not Burton or Browne, perhaps not even Clarendon-could touch the subtlety and mastery of Dryden's prose. The essays and reviews gathered here are intended as a tribute to this remarkable career. Individually, these pieces help us to rethink Dryden's encounter with the full range of political and cultural issues of his age: with the intricacies of court alliance, the temptations and dangers of empire, the dynamics of patronage and literary polemic, the frustrations ofloyalism, and the twilight world of Roman Catholic recusancy he entered near the close of his century. Collectively these essays also urge us to reflect on the breadth and varied circumstances of Dryden's work and thereby on the chronology and character of early modernity, a category that often elides the Restoration and obscures its art. Dryden grew up in a Caroline culture, he began to write in a republic, he served two Stuart courts, and he lived through a revolution that changed the structure not only of politics but also of the life of letters. Dryden inhabited the world of Virgil and Horace, but as well that of Rochester, Buckingham, and Congreve; he was at his ease in the exercises of commonplacing and translation, but he also knew how to negotiate publishing contracts and literary fees. Dryden wrote as a