THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

denied to Oldham. As much of his criticism suggests, Dryden also seems to have seen himself as the heir to Milton’s
laurels. Nevertheless, his vision of Britain under the restored Stuarts is conditioned not by the idea of a stern republic
outbraving the Roman, but by the example of the Imperial Rome of Augustus. In both periods the rule of an
enlightened monarch could be seen as eclipsing the divisions of a preceding civil war. In the title of his elegy to
Charles II, Threnodia Augustalis (1685), he glances at the parallel between the Emperor and the King while stressing
the ‘healing balm’ of the Restoration and the maintenance of a distinctive brand of English liberty under the Stuart
Crown (‘Freedom which in no other Land will thrive | Freedom an English Subject’s sole Prerogative’). This singular
modern kingdom, Dryden maintained in the dedication to his tragedy All For Love (1678), required a disciplined
poetry worthy of its heroic destiny and of its exalted place amongst the nations of Europe. The proper models for this
poetry could only be Augustan. If his translation of The Works of Virgil (1697) - appearing at a time when Dryden’s
hopes for the Stuart dynasty had been dashed by the defeat and exile of James II - no longer exhibits a confidence in
parallels between a dubious then and a triumphant now, his dedicatory essay still infers that patriotism demands
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an appropriate modern prosody and that ‘A Heroick Poem, truly such’, was ‘undoubtedly the greatest Work which the
Soul of Man is capable to perform’.
Though Dryden produced no heroic poem of his own, his quest for an English equivalent to Virgilian ‘majesty in
the midst of plainness’ remained central to his patriotic mission as a poet. He continually strove for a Latinate
precision, control, and clarity, but if his supreme poetic models were classical, his response to a select band of English
writers suggests the degree to which he also saw himself as standing in a vernacular apostolic line. The Preface to his
volume of translations - Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700) - stresses, for example, that he saw Chaucer as the prime
figure in this canon (though his attempts at ‘translating’ certain of The Canterbury Tales into English ‘as it is now
refined’ are far from distinguished tributes). This same Preface also declares a larger affinity in its assertion that poets
have ‘lineal descents and clans as well as families’. Spenser, he believes, ‘insinuates that the soul of Chaucer was
transfus’d into his body’, while Milton ‘has acknowledg’d to me that Spencer was his original’. Much of Dryden’s
most strenuous criticism appeared as prefaces to his own work but his most shapely critical manifesto, Of Dramatic
Poesie, An Essay (1668), is a set piece written at a time of enforced theatrical inactivity during the Plague of 1665. It
takes the form of a conversation between four characters in which the assertion of one is answered by the response of
another; each character is allotted a formal speech, one defending ancient drama, another the modern; one
proclaiming the virtues of French practice, another (Dryden’s patriotic mouthpiece) the English. There is no real
dialogue in the Platonic sense though there is a good deal of name-dropping and, latterly, of weighing the respective
merits of Jonson, Fletcher, and Shakespeare. Jonson (‘the most learned and judicious Writer which any Theater ever
had’) stands throughout as a touchstone of theatrical ‘regularity’, while the more ‘natural’ Shakespeare (‘the man
who of all Modern and perhaps Ancient Poets, had the largest and most comprehensive soul’) is approvingly allowed
the rank of an English Homer ‘or Father of our Dramatick Poets’.
Three of the four disputants of Of Dramatic Poesie are typed as ‘persons whom their witt and Quality have made
known to all the Town’. The fourth, who seems to stand for Dryden himself, is clearly their social and intellectual
equal. All are members of a court which the essay’s dedication confidently proclaims to be ‘the best and surest judge
of writing’. This was possibly the last point in English history at which such a flattering observation might be
regarded as having a ring of authenticity. Dryden was also amongst the last influential writers to have sought and won
discriminating court patronage and advantageous royal promotion. On the death of his erstwhile dramatic
collaborator, Sir William Davenant, in April 1668, he was appointed Poet Laureate and in 1670 he also obtained the
post of Historiographer Royal. Throughout his career he seems to have projected himself as an official spokesman in
poetry. His early public verse-the grotesque schoolboy elegy ‘Upon the death of Lord Hastings’ (1649), the maturer
tribute to the dead Cromwell (the Heroique
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Stanzas Consecrated to the Glorious Memory of his Most Serene and Renowned Highness Oliver) of 1659, and the
two fulsome panegyrics addressed to Charles II (Astraea Redux of 1660 and To His Sacred Majesty of 1661 - testifies
to a desire to be a representative voice. The nimble ‘historical’ poem, Annus Mirabilis, The Year of Wonders, 1666
(1667), is floridly dedicated ‘to the Metropolis of Great Britain’ both as a tribute to London’s ordeal during the Great
Fire and as a patriotic and emphatically royalist statement in the face of metropolitan resentment of the restored
monarchy. In the poem it is the King’s policies that serve to defeat the Dutch in war and the King’s prayers that
persuade Heaven to quell the flames.
Fourteen years elapsed between the composition of Annus Mirabilis and the publication in 1681 of the political
satire Absalom and Achitophel. They were years spent actively in writing for the theatre, an experience which helped