JOHN DRYDEN. - The most representative poet of Restoration England, born at Aldwinkle, in Northamptonshire, in the latter half of 1631, died in London on 19 May 1700.
An opportunist in politics, he sang the death of Cromwell in *Heroic Stanzas* (1658) and the return of Charles II in *Astra Redux* (1660). He then turned to the theatre, which was then in vogue and a weapon of reaction against Puritanism: notable works include *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 style: *Absalom and Achitophel*, directed against the Duke of Monmouth, is well known; *Mac Flecknoe* is even more biting. In 1681 he wrote the work later repudiated, *Religio Laici*, in which he affirms that religion alone offers man the possibility of escaping from anguish, of 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 the Panther* (1687): an allegorical poem in the form of a fairy tale, in which the hind, representing the Catholic Church, is assailed by other animals (the hare: Quakers; the monkey: free-thinkers; the boar: Anabaptists; etc.) and disputes with the panther (the Anglican Church) on the religious problems of the day.
Of great interest is the adaptation *The Fall of Man*, in which D., having obtained permission from Milton to dramatize *Paradise Lost* to defend it from hostile criticism, treated the same religious problem but in a sense contrary to that of the author of the poem: «To the dogma he opposes doubt; to Milton’s materialized infinite, which circumscribes the universe within the narrowest anthropomorphism, he opposes scepticism, which reduces the life of the individual to a dream and a fleeting phenomenon in time and space; finally, to the divine, he opposes «man and man»» (G. Fornelli, *La restaurazione inglese nell’opera di J. D.*, Florence 1932, p. 46).
In a time of troubled events, D., a humanist and a Catholic, wished and knew how to rise above discord and faction, for a higher and serener view of ideas and events.
D. W. Van Doren, *The Poetry of J. D.*, Cambridge 1920, new ed. 1931; Th. S. Eliot, *J. D.: the Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic*, New York 1932; C. Hollis, *D.*, London 1933. For further bibliography: L. I. Bredvold-H. Macdonald, s.V. in *The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature*, ed. F. W. Bateson, II, Cambridge 1940, pp. 262-75. Franco Costabile