The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden

The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden
Author: Steven N. Zwicker
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2004-05-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780521531443

John Dryden, Poet Laureate to Charles II and James II, was one of the great literary figures of the late seventeenth century. This Companion provides a fresh look at Dryden s tactics and triumphs in negotiating the extraordinary political and cultural revolutions of his time. The newly commissioned essays introduce readers to the full range of his work as a poet, as a writer of innovative plays and operas, as a purveyor of contemporary notions of empire, and most of all as a man intimate with the opportunities of aristocratic patronage as well as the emerging market for literary gossip, slander and polemic. Dryden s works are examined in the context of seventeenth-century politics, publishing and ideas of authorship. A valuable resource for students and scholars, the Companion includes a full chronology of Dryden s life and times and a detailed guide to further reading.

The Major Works

The Major Works
Author: John Dryden
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 1024
Release: 2003
Genre: English literature
ISBN: 9780192840776

This authoritative edition was originally published in the acclaimed Oxford Authors series under the general editorship of Frank Kermode. It brings together a unique combination of Dryden's poetry and prose - all the major poems in full, literary criticism, and translations - to give theessence of his work and thinking.John Dryden (1631-1700) was the leading writer of his day and a major cultural spokesman following the restoration of Charles II in 1660. His work includes political poems, satire, religious apologias, translations, critical essays and plays. This anthology includes all the major poems such asMacFlecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel as well as Dryden's classical translations; his versions of Homer, Horace, and Ovid are reproduced in full. There are also substantial selections from Dryden's Virgil, Juvenal, and other classical writers. Fables, Ancient and Modern, taken from Chaucer, Ovid,Boccaccio, and Homer, his last and possibly greatest work, also appears in full.

All For Love

All For Love
Author: Dryden
Publisher: The Anglo Egyptian Bookshop
Total Pages: 181
Release: 1957
Genre: Drama
ISBN:

Marriage A-La-Mode

Marriage A-La-Mode
Author: John Dryden
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2014-06-13
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 1408144263

Dryden's audiences in 1671, both aristocratic and middle-class, would have been quick to respond to the themes of disputed royal succession, Francophilia and loyalty among subjects in his most successful tragicomedy. In the tragic plot, written in verse, young Leonidas has to struggle to assert his place as the rightful heir to the throne of Sicily and to the hand of the usurper's daughter. In the comic plot, written in prose, two fashionable couples (much more at home in London drawing-rooms than at the Sicilian court) play at switching partners in the 'modern' style. The introduction of this edition argues that Dryden's own ambivalence about King Charles and his entourage, on whom he came to rely more on more for patronage, manifests itself in both plots; most of all perhaps in the excessively Francophile Melantha, whose affectation cannot quite hide her endearing joie-de-vivre.