DRYDEN, JOHN. — The most representative poet of Restoration England, b. at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, in the second half of 1631, d. in London on 1 May 1700.
An opportunist in politics, he celebrated the death of Cromwell in Heroic Stanzas (1658) and the return of Charles II in Astraea Redux (1660). He then turned to the theater, then in vogue and an instrument of reaction against Puritanism: notable are The Indian Emperor (1665), Annus mirabilis (1666) and The Conquest of Granada (1670). In 1681 he turned to satire, historical in content and aristocratic in manner: Absalom and Achitophel, against the Duke of Monmouth, is well known; Mac Flecknoe is more violent. In 1681 he wrote the work, later repudiated, Religio laici, in which he affirms that religion alone offers man the possibility of escaping from earthly anguish and attaining the divine, and proclaims the sovereignty of the Anglican Church. When, during the reign of James II, he converted to Catholicism, he wrote The Hind and Panther (1687): an allegorical poem in the form of a fable, in which the hind, representing the Catholic Church, withdraws from the other animals (the hare: Quakers; the monkey: freethinkers; the boar: Anabaptists; etc.) and discusses with the panther (Anglican Church) the religious problems of the time.
Very interesting is the adaptation: The Fall of Man, in which D., having obtained from Milton permission to dramatize Paradise Lost in order to defend it from hostile criticism, treated the same religious problem, but in a sense contrary to that of the poem's author: «To dogma he opposes doubt; to Milton's materialized infinite, which circumscribes the universe within the most clear-cut anthropomorphism, he opposes skepticism, which reduces the life of the individual to a dream and to a passing phenomenon in time and space; finally, to the Πάντα καλά λίγο of the Old Testament, his profound pessimism and the undisputed reality of universal sorrow» (G. Fornelli, La restaurazione inglese nell'opera di J. D., Florence 1932, p. 46).
In a time of troubled events, D., humanist and Catholic, willed and knew how to raise himself above discords and factions, for a higher and more serene view of ideas and events.
Bibliography3 works
Franco Costabile