Contents: Introduction 2

The actuality of the course paper is to introduce problems which he is eager to discuss, and show the work of a writer of independent mind who feels strongly about his own ideas and ideas which demonstrate the breadth of his reading. He chooses factual subject matters to write about, and wanted to express his ideas in a simple, precise and concentrated manner.
Dryden uses formal structures in his poetic writing, yet also manages to recreate the natural rhythm of speech, relying on patterns of everyday speech. He also knew that different subjects need different kinds of verse.
The aim of the course paper is to analyze Dryden’s purpose which was to encourage readers that the source of England’s woes lay in the past, in the country’s enemies, and even in human nature. This proved important when speaking to a certain faction who blamed the war and the fire on divine retribution. They conceived history as a combination of God’s acts and those of nature, and many believed a natural disaster, such as the fire that devastated London, was the result of God’s displeasure with the restoration of the king to the throne. Portents also proved important, and Dryden combines these ideas in Stanza 16 to suggest that God approved of the English action against the Dutch.
The practical value of the course paper is giving thorough data about specific features of writing of poet with its phases and typology.
The structure of the work consists of introduction, three plans, conclusion, glossary and bibliography.

Chapter I. Information about John Dryden’s biography

1.1. John Dryden’s life and career

Born in Northamptonshire, England, on August 9, 1631, John Dryden came from a landowning family with connections to Parliament and the Church of England. He studied as a King's Scholar at the prestigious Westminster School of London, where he later sent two of his own children. There, Dryden was trained in the art of rhetorical argument, which remained a strong influence on the poet's writing and critical thought throughout his life.
Dryden published his first poem in 1649. He enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge the following year, where he likely studied the classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. He obtained his BA in 1654, graduating first in his class. In June of that year, Dryden's father died.
After graduation, Dryden found work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe, marking a radical shift in the poet's political views. Alongside Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell, Dryden was present at Cromwell's funeral in 1658, and one year later published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas, eulogizing the leader.
In 1660, Dryden celebrated the regime of King Charles II with Astraea Redux, a royalist panegyric in praise of the new king. In that poem, Dryden apologizes for his allegiance with the Cromwellian government. Though Samuel Johnson excused Dryden for this, writing in his Lives of the Poets (1779) that "if he changed, he changed with the nation," he also notes that the earlier work was "not totally forgotten" and in fact "rased him enemies."
Despite this, Dryden quickly established himself after the Restoration as the leading poet and literary critic of his day. He published To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662), and To My Lord Chancellor (1662), possibly to court aristocratic patrons. That year, Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and was elected an early fellow. In 1663, he married Lady Elizabeth, the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard.
Following the death of William Davenant in April 1668, Dryden became the first official Poet Laureate of England, conferred by a letters patent from the king. The royal office carried the responsibility of composing occasional works in celebration of public events. Dryden, having exhibited that particular dexterity with his earlier panegyrics, was a natural choice. Though the position was most often held for life (until 1999), Dryden was the lone exception. He was dismissed by William III and Mary II in 1688 after he refused to swear an oath of allegiance, remaining loyal to James II.
As a playwright, Dryden published The Wild Gallant in 1663. Though it was not financially successful, he was commissioned to produce three plays for the King's Company, in which he later became a shareholder. His best known dramatic works are Marriage á la Mode (1672) and All for Love (1678), which was written in blank verse.
When the bubonic plague swept through London in 1665, Dryden moved to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668). The longest of his critical works, the piece takes the form of a dialogue among characters debating and defending international dramatic works and practices. In 1678, Dryden wrote Mac Flecknoe (1682), a work of satiric verse attacking Thomas Shadwell, one of Dryden's prominent contemporaries, for his "offenses against literature." Other works of satire, a genre for which Dryden has received significant praise, include Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682).
Though his early work was reminiscent of the late metaphysical work of Abraham Cowley, Dryden developed a style closer to natural speech which remained the dominant poetic mode for more than a century. He is credited with standardizing the heroic couplet in English poetry by applying it as a convention in a range of works, including satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, prologues, and plays.
Marriage and Children. On 1 December 1663, Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard, sister of Sir Robert Howard who was living with at the time. The marriage was at St. Swithin’s, London, and the consent of the parents is noted on the licence, though Lady Elizabeth was then about twenty-five. She was the object of some scandals and it was said that Dryden had been bullied into the marriage by her playwright brothers.
Little is known about the intimate side of his marriage, but the couple had three sons: Charles (1666–1704), John (1668–1701), and Erasmus Henry (1669–1710). Lady Elizabeth outlived her husband but went insane soon after their death. They did not have any grandchildren.
Poetry and Other Writing
Following the Restoration and the publishing of his poems for Cromwell and Charles II, Dryden moved his career in the direction of a professional writer and began to establish himself as the poet and writer he is remembered as today.
With little money left from his father, Dryden lived with and wrote prefaces for the bookseller Henry Herringman in the late 1650s, and by the early 1660s he had moved into lodgings with Sir Robert Howard, a younger son of Thomas Howard, first Earl of Berkshire, with impeccable Royalist credentials and a budding literary career.
Dryden helped prepare Howard’s first volume of poems for the press in 1660, for which he wrote the first of many panegyrics to prominent individuals, “To My Honored Friend, Sir Robert Howard,” and in 1664 they collaborated on The Indian-Queen, a drama that contributed significantly to the Restoration fashion of rhymed heroic play.
Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden also wrote two more panegyrics: To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662) and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). In November 1662, Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and, in 1666, was expelled for non-payment of his dues.
Playwriting
After the Puritan ban, when theatres reopened in 1660, Dryden began writing plays. His first, a comedy entitled The Wild Gallant (1663), despite being a failure, won the support of another influential aristocrat, Barbara Villiers Palmer, Countess of Castelmaine, to whom Dryden addressed another verse epistle.
Dryden also collaborated with Howard and soon became a stable writer for the King’s Company under Sir Thomas Killigrew. He began to succeed on his own with his first tragicomedy, The Rival Ladies (late 1663), and with a sequel to The Indian-Queen, The Indian Emperour (early 1665).
Throughout 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known works being Marriage à la Mode (1673), his heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675), as well as in heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678).
Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences, and wanted poetic fame off-stage.
In 1665, the Great Plague of London closed the theatres and Dryden and his family relocated to his wife’s estate in Charlton, Wiltshire. It was here that he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay (1667), the first great sustained work in English dramatic theory and Secret-Love (1667), a tragicomedy.
Of Dramatick Poesie: An Essay takes the form of a dialogue in which four characters debate the merits of classical, French and English drama.
In 1667, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. This was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation. It was also this poem crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate and historiographer royal.
Because it was published in 1667, Annus Mirabilis invites comparison with Milton’s great epic Paradise Lost, first published in its ten-book format that same year. It has been argued that the poem is essentially political propaganda designed to stifle domestic dissent by rallying the nation around the common causes of war abroad and disaster at home.
Poet Laureate
Dryden returned to London in the winter of 1666-1667, and his years were fruitful. Several of his plays were staged, the Essay was published, the King’s Company signed Dryden to a contract in which he became a shareholder and agreed to give them three new plays per year, and he became Poet Laureate in 1668.
He produced four more plays by the end of 1671, including two masterpieces, The Conquest of Granada, a rhymed heroic play in ten acts, and Marriage A-la-Mode, a split-plot tragicomedy. He also published Tyrannic Love (1669).
However, things starting going downhill for Dryden when a fire destroyed Dryden’s company’s theatre at the inopportune time of the rival company’s moving into an extravagant new theatre in Dorset Garden. Furthermore, the Duke’s Company was attracting new and successful playwrights: Thomas Shadwell, Edward Ravenscroft, and Elkanah Settle.
Dryden’s own new comedy, The Assignation (1672), failed and, when their new theatre in Drury Lane opened in 1674, Dryden, in an attempt to rival the extravaganzas of the Duke’s Company, tried to turn his great admiration for Milton’s Paradise Lost to account by creating an operatic version, The State of Innocence. However, the company could not afford to produce the opera, and it was never performed. Dryden began severing ties with the King’s Company in 1677.
Later Writings
In the 1680s, Dryden wrote in satiric verse, with one of his greatest achievements being the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, which was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. He also wrote Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682).
Dryden’s other major works from this time were religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England, his 1683 edition of Plutarch’s Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word biography to English readers, and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.