John Dryden Biography Quotes 49 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
John Dryden was born on 9 August 1631 at Aldwincle in Northamptonshire, into a family connected with the country gentry and inclined toward Puritan sympathies. He was schooled at Westminster School in London under the formidable headmaster Richard Busby, who drilled his pupils in classical languages and rhetoric. While at Westminster he wrote a notable elegy on the death of Lord Hastings, showing early control of poetic decorum and classical imitation. Dryden entered Trinity College, Cambridge, where he continued classical study and graduated before moving toward a career in letters. The civil upheavals of the 1640s and 1650s formed the background of his youth, and he learned to navigate both the cultural fractures of the period and the demands of public expression.

From Commonwealth to Restoration
Dryden's first major publication, Heroic Stanzas on the Death of Oliver Cromwell (1659), commemorated the Protector in a grave, measured style. With the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, he turned to poems of welcome such as Astraea Redux and To His Sacred Majesty, helping to define the language of reconciliation and royal praise for a regime eager to signal stability. This shift was less mere opportunism than an early sign of Dryden's sense that poetry and public life were intertwined, and that a poet's role was to find forms adequate to the state's changing needs.

Marriage, Theaters, and Collaborations
In 1663 Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard, daughter of Thomas Howard, Earl of Berkshire, linking him to a family active in letters and on the stage. He collaborated with her brother, Sir Robert Howard, on The Indian Queen, and soon established himself as a principal dramatist for the Restoration theaters, writing for companies managed by Thomas Killigrew and William D'Avenant and working with actors such as Thomas Betterton. His early comedies and heroic tragedies, The Wild Gallant, The Rival Ladies, The Indian Emperour, and the two-part Conquest of Granada, shaped the heroic couplet as the dominant measure of high drama. With Nathaniel Lee he coauthored Oedipus and The Duke of Guise, and with D'Avenant he helped adapt Shakespeare in The Tempest. All for Love, written in blank verse, reimagined Antony and Cleopatra with classical restraint, showing Dryden's flexibility beyond rhymed heroic drama.

Laureateship and Criticism
By the later 1660s Dryden had become the era's foremost man of letters. Annus Mirabilis (1667) narrated the Second Anglo-Dutch War and the Great Fire with vigorous couplets. In An Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) he staged a lively debate on classical rules, French neoclassicism, and English practice, giving English criticism a lucid, conversational prose. Appointed Poet Laureate in 1668 and later Historiographer Royal, he wrote prologues, epilogues, and prefaces that blended theory with practical judgment. His dealings with the publisher Jacob Tonson professionalized authorship, establishing the subscription model for large translation projects.

Satire and Public Controversy
Dryden's satires made him central to political culture. Mac Flecknoe ridiculed Thomas Shadwell, sharpening a quarrel about dramatic taste into a fable of cultural succession. In Absalom and Achitophel (1681) he allegorized the Exclusion Crisis, casting the Duke of Monmouth as Absalom and Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, as Achitophel, while the portrait of Zimri skewered George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. The Medal (1682) and the reply-epode added further polemical fire. At times this visibility was hazardous: in the Rose Alley ambuscade of 1679 he was assaulted in the street, an attack widely rumored, though not proven, to have been connected to courtly enmities involving John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, and a circulating satire by John Sheffield. Yet the episodes only enhanced his authority as the age's satirist.

Religion and Royal Change
Religio Laici (1682) set out a measured Anglican defense of scripture and tradition. Around the accession of James II, Dryden converted to Roman Catholicism and, in The Hind and the Panther (1687), framed a complex allegory arguing for the claims of the Catholic Church amid Protestant sects. After the Glorious Revolution he refused to take the oaths to the new regime and consequently lost the laureateship, which went to Shadwell. Excluded from court preferment, he turned his energies to translation and occasional verse, sustaining himself through the book trade and private patronage.

Translation and Late Mastery
Dryden's late career is a monument of English translation and adaptation. His versions of Juvenal and Persius (1693) clarified knotty Latin satire with idiomatic vigor. The Works of Virgil (1697), produced with Tonson's support and a large subscription list, became the standard English Virgil for generations, balancing fidelity with the cadence of the English heroic couplet. He modernized Chaucer and translated Boccaccio in Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), including Palamon and Arcite, The Wife of Bath's Tale, and Sigismonda and Guiscardo, thereby linking medieval narrative to Augustan polish. His two odes for St. Cecilia's Day, notably Alexander's Feast (1697), showed late-style magnificence in lyric form and helped define the English ode's musical ambitions.

Style, Influence, and Circle
Dryden shaped the heroic couplet into a supple instrument for argument, narrative, and praise, and perfected a prose critical idiom at once urbane and exact. He influenced a rising generation, William Congreve counted him a mentor, and later poets such as Alexander Pope learned from his balance and clarity. His rivalries, whether with Shadwell or Buckingham, were part of a broader conversation about national taste, French influence, and classical authority. Through collaborations with figures like Sir Robert Howard and Nathaniel Lee, and through the practical world of managers, actors, and publishers, Killigrew, D'Avenant, Betterton, and Tonson, he helped professionalize English literary life.

Final Years and Death
In his final years Dryden continued to preface, revise, and refine his work, bringing together practice and principle in essays that framed his translations and plays. He died in London on 1 May 1700 and was buried in Westminster Abbey's Poets' Corner. His career, spanning Commonwealth austerity, Restoration display, and post-Revolution recalibration, mapped the possibilities and perils of writing at the center of public culture. By the time of his death he had become, in Samuel Johnson's later phrase, the father of English criticism and, for his own age, a lawgiver in poetry whose measures set the cadence of the Restoration and shaped the eighteenth century to come.

Our collection contains 49 quotes who is written by John, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth.

Other people realated to John: Matthew Prior (Poet), Abraham Cowley (Poet), William Congreve (Poet), Edmund Waller (Poet), John Denham (Politician), Jeremy Collier (Clergyman), Aphra Behn (Dramatist), Thomas Otway (Dramatist), Richard Blackmore (Poet), George Etherege (Dramatist)

• 1682 Mac Flecknoe (Poem)
• 1681 Absalom and Achitophel (Poem)
• 1678 All for Love (Play)
• 1675 Aureng-Zebe (Play)
• 1667 Annus Mirabilis (Poem)

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