John Dryden And His Readers 1700

Dryden at the end of his life was admired, perhaps even beloved, by many in England, and his greatest skill over his long career—his controlled detachment—uniquely positioned him to write of both history and politics in 1700. His narrative poetry was popular among Whigs and Tories, women and men, Ancients and Moderns, and his imitations suggest historical connections between the War of the Roses, the Civil War, and the Revolution of 1688. All of these events combined easily in the minds of Dryden’s contemporaries, and his fables, fraught with conflicted loyalties and family strife not unlike a nation divided, may have caught and compelled his readers in a way that was different from other miscellanies: Dryden may have articulated in beautiful verse the emotions of many in the midst of enormous historical change. Fables is a pivotal cultural text urging national unity through its embrace of competing voices.

This is the final volume in The Works of John Dryden and the last volume of poetry written by Dryden before he died in 1700.

For the first time since 1695, a complete text of De Arte Graphica as Dryden himself wrote it is available to readers. In all, Volume XX presents six pieces written during Dryden's final decade, each of them either requested by a friend or commissioned by a publisher. Two are translations, three introduce translations made by others, and the sixth introduces an original work by one of Dryden's friends. The most recent version of De Arte Graphica, Saintsbury's late nineteenth-century reissue of Scott's edition, based the text of the translated matter on an edition that was heavily revised by someone other than Dryden. In fact, only one of the pieces offered here, the brief Character of Saint-Evremond, has appeared complete in a twentieth-century edition. The commentary in this volume supplies biographical and bibliographical contexts for these pieces and draws attention to the views on history and historians, poetry and painting, Virgil and translation, which Dryden expresses in them. Many other volumes of prose, poetry, and plays are available in the California Edition of The Works of John Dryden.

Kept women, comic clerics, and political schemers enliven the four plays in this volume of the California Dryden. Dryden asserted that The Kind Keeper was a moral play, dedicated to exposing the "crying sin" of keeping a mistress. The production was closed after three nights, but whether because of the play's success in moralizing, or in exposing, is hard to know.

Dryden's last three years of published works begin with Alexander's Feast and end with Fables, his largest miscellany of poetical translations. Alexander's Feast, like the earlier Song for St. Cecilia's Day (Works, III), was commissioned by the Musical Society for performance at its annual tribute to sacred music. The Fables included selections from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Extensive and detailed notes to these translations show readers how well Dryden succeeded in transmitting the styles and the very sounds of his originals. Volume VII ends with a section of miscellaneous pieces published at other times, including Dryden's only known Latin work. The presentation of the writings in this volume, like that of the entire twenty-volume series, is a tribute not only to Dryden but also to the editors who have guided it through five decades.

This collection of prose writing from the pen of Dryden dates from 1668 to 1691, and contains work that the editors describe as "a sampler of Dryden as biographer-historian, political commentator, religious controversialist, literary polemicist, literary theorist, and practical critic. Among the works contained here is his "Essay of Dramatick Poesie."

American, British, and Australian scholars of English gathered at Yale University in October 2000 to mark the tercentenary of the British writer's death. Their 14 essays explore such aspects as modernity and exclusion in his The Spanish Fryar, his translation of Juvenal's Sixth Satire, and his Hamlet as an unwritten masterpiece. Distributed by Associated University Presses. Annotation c2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com).