'Sacred Bonds of Amity': Dryden and Male Friendship

Male friendship, as a motif, pervades John Dryden's works. Through it he confronts problems of stability and continuity that he would ameliorate by means of his poetic powers and the revered institutions behind them. The sexual element of the relationships, which critics invariably treat anachronistically, is crucial to the succour Dryden finds in them. It derives from the traditions he evokes — real or imagined — of male aristocratic bonds (in which the poet has a share) that he revivified in order to negotiate contemporary politics and curtail the disintegration, as he perceived it, of the monarchy. The problem for Dryden and his contemporaries lay in manipulating existing paradigms in the face of Charles II's profligacy and its attendant chaos, the increase in popular power in the Restoration, and the Glorious Revolution. For Dryden, who closely associated poetic and monarchic continuity, the bonds he presented and the institution they perpetuated offered a fortifying power in the face of assaults upon sacrosanct traditions.