And Time to Begin Anew: The New Oxford Dryden

Like most Dryden scholars, I rely on the authoritative, twenty-volume California Dryden, a complete, variorum edition (1956–2000), as well as on the four-volume Longman edition of the poetry, edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (1995–2000), which is especially useful, because it is more up-to-date: there has been an enormous amount of Dryden scholarship since the early volumes of the California Dryden were published.1 But my go-to Dryden text, the one I turn to first, the one that contains my marginal notes, the one I assign when I'm teaching a graduate course that contains a substantial amount of Dryden, is Poems and Fables of John Dryden, edited by James Kinsley (Oxford, 1962), which reproduces the poetry from Kinsley's 1958 four-volume edition of Dryden's poetry, but without headnotes or annotations—just the texts. This has been enormously handy, but alas, somewhere back in the 1990s, it went out of print (so, when I taught Dryden at the graduate level, I bought about a dozen used copies and loaned them out to students). Thus, I am delighted that a new one-volume Oxford Dryden is now available.Dryden has been enormously kind to his editors: unlike Pope, who kept revising his poems, both by producing new, expanded versions over a period of years, and by tinkering with the poems every time they reappeared, in a miscellany, or in one of the many editions of his collected works, Dryden tended to publish, and then, just move on. Modern editors generally need only the first editions of Dryden, which is what Zwicker uses, with “instabilities” corrected following the collations in the California Dryden. A spot check against the California Dryden indicates that Zwicker's texts are completely reliable (although he occasionally differs from the California editors in his choice of a variant, so the texts aren't identical).This volume has a different coverage than my handy, one-volume Kinsley, and is the better for it, because it provides a greater variety of genres. Kinsley included just Dryden's poems (as did the Longman Dryden); the new Oxford Dryden includes a good selection of major poems, naturally—Mac Flecknoe, Absalom and Achitophel, The Medall, both Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther, A Song for St. Cecilia's Day, Alexander's Feast—but it also includes a tragedy and a comedy (All for Love and Marriage A-la-Mode), as well as samples of Dryden's critical prose: An Essay of Dramatick Poesie, Of Heroick Plays (which appeared as the front matter for Conquest of Granada), and the preface to Fables. It even contains seven Dryden letters, which give us a glimpse of Dryden in his private moments, buttering up a patron (the Duchess of Ormond), gossiping with a friend (his young cousin, Elizabeth Steward), negotiating, testily, with his publisher (Jacob Tonson).Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel, of course, are the two most frequently anthologized Dryden poems; if an undergraduate were to read anything by Dryden in an English lit survey class, it would undoubtedly be these two poems. However, we have been caught in a strange time warp. How many mock-heroic poems did Dryden write? One: Mac Flecknoe. How many political satires staged inside a biblical story? One: Absalom and Achitopel. These are, in fact, atypical Dryden poems, yet they remain fixed in the canon primarily because of the influence of Ian Jack's Augustan Satire (1952), which traced the English satiric tradition from Butler's Hudibras, to Mac Flecknoe, to Absalom and Achitophel, to Rape of the Lock, and so on. But although these two satires were frequently reprinted in the eighteenth century, and were consistently regarded as brilliant, the Dryden known and admired in the years after he died is primarily the Dryden of the translations—he did an incredible number of them—and the shorter occasional poems, especially the tributes to friends and patrons, as well as poems in memory of people who had died. There are over a dozen Tonson anthologies of poetry containing Dryden published in the eighteenth century, both collections of Dryden alone, and miscellanies “by many hands”; they contain mostly translations and occasional poems.2 We have overlooked the translations, in part, because scholars have long assumed translation to be a mechanical exercise, unoriginal, uninteresting; only recently have they come to regard translations as creative in their own right, and worth studying.3 And Dryden's final collection, Fables (1700), which contains translations from Ovid (eight), Chaucer (four), Boccaccio (three), and Homer (one), was, arguably, the most popular Dryden work for the next century—I have found thirteen editions across the century, running through 1797—and everybody praised it: Pope, Sheridan, Byron, Scott, and even Wordsworth (!). Fables may well have been Dryden's Paradise Lost, or better still, since it consists of an assortment of borrowed tales that seem to comment on one another, it may have been Dryden's Canterbury Tales.4Consequently, I am glad to see that the Zwicker volume contains a significant number of Dryden translations, from Lucretius, Horace, Ovid, Juvenal, Virgil, and Chaucer—we have all of Juvenal's third satire, which will allow students to compare it to Johnson's translation (“London”), and the complete book 6 of the Aeneid (Aeneis's journey to the Underworld). We also have all of what I would consider the most important occasional poems addressed to people, including the poems to Oldham, Congreve, Anne Killigrew, the Countess of Abingdon (Eleonora), Congreve, Sir Godfrey Kneller, his patron the Duchess of Ormond, and his kinsman, cousin John Driden of Chesterton. In all, what we have is a more representative, broader sampling of Dryden, a sampling that displays his wide range.Here, I think, is where the volume really shines. Zwicker's introduction (about twenty pages) is, basically, a “literary biography” of Dryden, much like a modern version of one of Johnson's lives. For Zwicker, Dryden is elusive, hidden in his ironies, producing unstable texts, that answer, refute, transverse, quarrel. He sees Dryden as a ventriloquist, shifting his voice so that he can “see himself both within and outside of his own writing,” using “his own art to objectify himself” (725). The ventriloquist metaphor, to which Zwicker returns repeatedly, is apt. We see Dryden trying out different positions, for instance, in his Essay of Dramatick Poesie, where, instead of simply defending the English stage, he spreads the topics out over four speakers, who argue both sides of the case, ancients vs. moderns, French rules vs. English freedoms, blank verse vs rhyme in drama, or in Religio Laici, where we only arrive at a via media Anglican position after considering Catholic infallibility, Deism, self-reliance on the Bible, inspiration, with Dryden offering possible arguments for access to “Sacred Truth,” and then countering them. In a collection filled with translations, where we can watch Dryden nimbly trying out different voices, the ventriloquist metaphor is especially apropos (a word, incidentally, that Dryden introduced into the English language).It is more or less standard in scholarly editions for the editors to provide all the historical and contextual information necessary, along with the sources and analogues, but to remain neutral, objective, as suggested by the sections of the headnotes in the Longman Dryden: “Date and Publication,” “Context,” “Authorship,” “Sources,” and “Reception.” While Zwicker certainly provides the necessary background, he leans toward interpreting rather than just explaining, with a biography of Dryden seeming to underlie the commentary, thereby tying disparate works together. We are always learning not just about how a given work reflects what is going on in Dryden's life at the time, but also about how his experiences at that specific moment relate to the events throughout his career. For example, one recurrent topic is Dryden's scuffles, arguments, literary attacks and counterattacks, battles with rivals, enemies, and, sometimes, with friends, including the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Duke of Buckingham, Thomas Shadwell, and Dryden's brother-in-law, Sir Robert Howard. Many of the relationships were mixed, starting out well (Howard and Shadwell had collaborated with Dryden), but turning sour. In reading Zwicker's commentary on the Mac Flecknoe (ca. 1676), we get a thorough account of Dryden's on-again-off-again relationship with Rochester. When we move forward to All for Love (1678), we visit Rochester again, “once a favourite patron, but now a mere blank,” but we also hearken back to rosier moments, when Dryden “lavished praise on Rochester” (729) in his dedication to Marriage A-la-Mode (1673). While we move from one work to another, reading each commentary as a self-sufficient entity, the tale of Rochester vs. Dryden runs along continuously underneath.Zwicker, departing from scholarly neutrality, also consistently identifies what he regards as key issues informing Dryden's works. He mentions that Absalom and Achitophel (1681) could be thought blasphemous, that Dryden could be libeling God, that he is articulating a theory of government, that in so doing, he is not at all original (Robert Filmer, Algernon Sydney, James Tyrell, and John Locke are all mentioned). We are told that Mac Flecknoe is a regal coronation, a mock-heroic, and a theatrical scene (724). Alexander's Feast is not known so much for the “intricacies of its musical and metrical effect,” as for it being “a screen, half expressing, half hiding Dryden's convictions about the political revolution that displaced Stuart rule and installed on the English throne that war-faring Dutchman, the prince of Orange” (837). Some might find this liberal supply of thematic material inappropriate—shouldn't a scholarly editor just stick to the facts?—but I regard it as one of the great strengths of this edition. Readers have now been given three possible topics to consider in Absalom and Achitophel, three different ways of organizing Mac Flecknoe, and some possible leads to potential political issues that could be implied in a poem that, at first glance, seems to be just about music. This should help teachers not familiar, and probably not comfortable, with Dryden, and it will certainly help students. And today's students, who struggle mightily to deal with an author from a distant time and culture, can generally use all the help they can get. (Remember, my old, reliable, one-volume Kinsley, by contrast, has no notes whatsoever).The dust jacket for this new Oxford Dryden features a portrait of the author painted by John Michael Wright, which only came to light in 2009. Painted around 1668, the year Dryden became Poet Laureate, it gives us a distinctly different picture of Dryden from the one we are familiar with from the well-known Kneller portraits, a somewhat imperious Dryden of the 1690s. In the Wright painting, a younger Dryden, just launching his career, appears confident, satisfied, maybe a little smug, but he is looking at us, not past us or through us, and he looks accessible; he even has a slight smile. This is fitting, because the Dryden represented in this volume is not just the satirist and political controversialist of the 1950s, or the religious disputant of the 1960s, and not just a poet.5 Thanks to recent scholarship, we are now looking at a different Dryden, a more capacious Dryden, a master of many genres, and, as Zwicker reminds us, a man of many voices.