Approaches to Teaching John Dryden ed. by Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine (review)

Approaches to Teaching John Dryden is organized into Parts One (Materials) and Two (Approaches), and comprises the thoughtful articles and survey results of 26 contributors who teach Dryden in diverse institutions and across a variety of course settings. In Part One, Jayne Lewis offers a thorough examination of the following practical concerns: primary works available as textbooks (and the advantages and disadvantages of each); online resources, recordings, and artwork (ever changing and ever in need of assessment); background materials, criticism and further reading (a solid review of foundational criticism intended for specialists and generalists alike); and a summary of teacher insights based on the survey responses. In Part Two, the contributors persuasively assert Dryden’s rightful place in many course syllabi: “adventure, peril, the fall of great cities, the allure and terrible cost of empire; sex and passionate obsession; . . . recollections of the dead, the meaning of life, atoms and the void. How could a twenty-year-old not be interested?” (15). This enthusiasm is counterbalanced by the challenge of supplying undergraduates with the requisite context—whether political, historical, literary or biblical. They meet this challenge in forthright terms, and they provide provocative and compelling ideas for expanding the syllabus beyond Dryden’s best-known satires. “Their syllabi at once echo the plaintive question posed in Religio Laici—‘[M]ust all tradition then be set aside?’—and mobilize a common commitment to pedagogical adventure. Above all, the results of our survey affirm Dryden’s fitness for an age skeptical of disciplinary boundaries, one surely as transitional as his own” (13).

Lewis speculates on a future where professors curate their own online sources exclusively: “one loss would surely be the collective sense of the writer and his work” (10). It seems to me that Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden protects precisely this sort of collaboration and “collective sense.” For example, Cedric Reverand, John Richetti, and Deborah Kennedy each address “To Oldham” and “To Killigrew.” To have three talented writers speak to the same works differently but collegially—sometimes providing distinct but equally attractive approaches even to the same lines—creates a dialogue that feels participative and authentic. Richetti eloquently leads us through his version of teaching these poems, packing with purpose every moment he is with his students, and it becomes evident that his class will arrive at a very different place intellectually once the hour concludes. This incisive applicability is a common characteristic not only for the three essays on Dryden’s elegies, but for the design of the book overall. Anna Batigelli, Christopher Johnson, Kirstin Wilcox, Ann Huse and Scott Mackenzie reinforce the roundtable tone by adding to scholarly opinion on Dryden’s most anthologized poems: Absalom and Achitophel, MacFlecknoe, and Religio Laici. Anna Battigelli suggests that Religio Laici’s “attention to outlawed Catholic arguments functions as a kind of Trojan horse, injecting forbidden arguments into the public sphere, thereby allowing a fuller consideration of the problem of determining the rule of faith” (31). She takes care, however, to demonstrate where her argument extends beyond the standard interpretation that highlights Anglicanism as the via media, thereby providing within her own article the principle she believes is behind Religio Laici: “a response to the need for a more ‘open field’ of debate than the public sphere permitted in the early 1680s” (34).

As to Dryden the dramatist, Margaret Anne Doody’s lively prose covers the most important points at the heart of Conquest of Granada (liberty and power among them), all the while inserting gems such as the comparison of Almanzor to Ayn Rand—the perfect connection for an undergraduate. She also treats Absalom and Achitophel as “one of Dryden’s greatest dramas” (87)—this seems right to me and recalls to mind the reasons for my own first attraction to the poem. Her approach undoubtedly draws in another generation. Will Pritchard follows with a meaningful essay on “Marriage a la Mode,” and the rest of the...