The Type of a Kind; or, The Lives of Dryden

In 1868, it seems, James Russell Lowell was reading all of Dryden: the Dramatick Works, assembled by Congreve and first published by Jacob Tonson in 1717; the Aldine edition of his poetry, edited by the Reverend John Mitford in 1832; and Edmund Malone's Critical and Miscellaneous Prose Works of 1800. On each of these ramparts of Dryden's vast oeuvre, the American scion and man of letters encountered another public poet writing in and for a world that civil war had just turned upside down; and it is perhaps partly for this reason that Dryden could sometimes strike Lowell as a strangely familiar figure. While reading Annus Mirabilis, Lowell even speculated that the budding English laureate "might have served as a type of the kind of poet America would have produced by the biggest-river-and-tallest-mountain recipe: longitude and latitude in plenty, with marks of culture scattered here and there like the carets on a proof sheet." ¹ In Lowell's estimation, Dryden tightened up over the years, but stayed interestingly exemplary. If he was not always the "type of [a] kind" of American poet, he remained "the earliest complete type of a literary man," and Lowell ultimately read him as "a curious example of what we often remark of the living, but rarely of the dead--that they get credit for what they might be as much as for what they are" (p. 190).

So inclined to see Dryden as typical of several different--and potentially incompatible--kinds of writer, Lowell prompts the question I'd like to raise here: Just what has Dryden, historically, stood for, and how has he stood for it? As Samuel Johnson was the first to complain in the 1779 Life of Dryden, "Nothing [of its subject] can be known beyond what casual mention and uncertain tradition have supplied." ² Over one hundred years later Dryden's readers were still marveling at "how vague and shadowy our personal knowledge of [him] is"; ³ and when Leonard and Virginia Woolf's Hogarth Press published a monograph on the poet in 1925, its author confessed that "Dryden, considering his stature, his simplicity, and the satisfactory nature of everything he wrote, is surprisingly elusive." ⁴

Something similar, of course, is habitually observed of Shakespeare; but Dryden has less excuse, having lived at a time when authorial character had begun to matter in its modern sense, and having not, after all, been Shakespeare. ⁵ What's more, at least since the turn of the eighteenth century, we have never actually wanted for details of Dryden's life. From the vast biography that Malone prefaced to the 1800 Prose Works to James Winn's John Dryden and His World (1987), most of the facts have been registered with reasonable confidence. What they haven't been is amalgamated into anything from which we might extract even a coherent fiction of who Dryden actually was; here, the thirst for a sense of "personal knowledge" that drives modern biography goes singularly unslaked. And so, perhaps by default, Dryden's posthumous audiences have been more comfortable seeing him as (in some of Lowell's words) a type and a kind, an example and a representative. This is still principally how and why he is read and taught today. His most assured place, for instance, is presently in anthologies of Restoration literature, and no epithet could be more common than the one that (pace Winn's title) he stands for an age.

As Lowell's now classic assessment suggests, however, Dryden's typicality has long been of a rather peculiar kind. For one thing, Dryden himself is infamous for having stood for little all that firmly, or that long. He seems not to have given Cromwell's republic a backward glance; his defection from Canterbury to Rome is notorious; the heroes of his tragedies awkwardly straddle incompatible domains of value and even meaning. In his later...