The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden (review)

Dryden studies are in a particularly robust state at present. The conferences in England and the United States in 2000 commemorating Dryden's tercentenary have led to several distinguished collections of essays. Another index of the resurgence of interest in Dryden is The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden, whose editor, Steven Zwicker, has brought together an illustrious group of British and American scholars to consider from various perspectives Dryden's long public career as a man of letters in Stuart and Williamite England. "Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, apologist for the great, dramatic theorist, and theatrical innovator" (6) in the first decades of the Restoration, Dryden was embroiled in the partisan political debates surrounding the Exclusion Crisis; after the Glorious Revolution, the deposed laureate, a Roman Catholic convert and Jacobite stripped of his government posts, "was no longer the official mouthpiece of Stuart power but a kind of internal émigré from Williamite England" (76), working principally in the field of translation and living long enough to see his Fables published in 1700 to popular acclaim.

Zwicker's compact and elegant introduction emphasizes the disparity between Dryden's monumentalizing in the twenty-volume California edition and the works' original daring, pointing to "the contingent, combative, and improvisatory atmosphere in which a good deal of the work was first imagined and written" (4). Dryden's emergence as the premier writer of his generation was not assured or certain. Dryden wrote An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, his first major bid for acclaim, in his thirties during the 1665 plague when the theaters were closed; it is, Zwicker argues, a masterpiece "in its range of learning, its contrapuntal form, its mastery of vernacular dramatic traditions, and its ability to articulate and balance contradictory points of view" (5). For Stuart Sherman, too, Dramatic Poesy is an important harbinger of Dryden's talents as a dramatist. Dryden's capacity to represent "opposite probabilities" (15) compellingly in his Essay is mirrored in his heroic plays' dense and compressed plots, where the "rapid-fire backtalk between contending characters" (18), the doubling of characters, and the sudden conversions orchestrated for them by the playwright reflect his mastery of opposed perspectives. For many of the contributors to this volume, Dramatic Poesy is the foundational text of Dryden's career. Laura Brown discusses the significance of the narrative frame of the Essay for understanding the interpenetration of culture, politics, and aesthetics in his work, ultimately crediting Dryden with projecting "a national imperial destiny that was to become a nearly unanimous topic of literary celebra- tion in the first half of the eighteenth century" (61). Turning to the four fictional speakers of Dramatic Poesy, who exemplify in their relations an ideal of gentlemanly civility and candor, Katsuhiro Engetsu highlights Dryden's "commitment to the emerging idea of urban sociability" (181) in an essay that treats his close association with Will's Coffee-House. Steven Zwicker has, with reason, called the Essay of Dramatic Poesy "the defining text of the early modern literary imagination" ("Introduction: A Tercentenary Tribute" [2001]). It is a model of comparatist criticism, a vital contribution to authorial studies, the first example of a sustained formalist critique of a single play, a guide to early modern playcraft, and an influential instance of literary history being fashioned, promulgated, and debated, a subject that would preoccupy Dryden throughout his career, up to Fables, with its elaborate literary genealogies.

The organization of The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden proceeds less by chronology (though it includes a six-page chronology of Dryden's life and career), genre (though most are covered), or chronological development than by topic: Dryden's patronage relations, his religious beliefs, political allegiances, relation to print culture and to anonymous publication, his connections to London. Harold Love identifies Dryden as a member of the provincial gentry who migrated to "the Town," forming essentially a new leisure class of consumers distinct...