John Dryden | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom | |
| In office 13 April 1668 – January 1688 | |
| Monarch | Charles II |
| Preceded by | Inaugural holder |
| Succeeded by | Thomas Shadwell |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 19 August 1631 Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, England |
| Died | 12 May 1700 (aged 68) London, England |
| Spouse(s) | Lady Elizabeth Howard |
| Children | Charles, John, and Erasmus Henry |
| Alma mater | Westminster School Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Occupation | Poet, literary critic, playwright, librettist |
John Dryden (/ˈdraɪdən/; 19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England's first Poet Laureate in 1668.[1]
He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".[2]
Early life[edit]
Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School as a King's Scholar where his headmaster was Dr. Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian.[3] Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden's response to this was, he clearly respected the headmaster and would later send two of his sons to school at Westminster.
As a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained pupils in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue. This is a skill which would remain with Dryden and influence his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical patterns. The Westminster curriculum included weekly translation assignments which developed Dryden's capacity for assimilation. This was also to be exhibited in his later works. His years at Westminster were not uneventful, and his first published poem, an elegy with a strong royalist feel on the death of his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings from smallpox, alludes to the execution of King Charles I, which took place on 30 January 1649, very near the school where Dr. Busby had first prayed for the King and then locked in his schoolboys to prevent their attending the spectacle.
In 1650 Dryden went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.[4] Here he would have experienced a return to the religious and political ethos of his childhood: the Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher by the name of Thomas Hill who had been a rector in Dryden's home village.[5] Though there is little specific information on Dryden's undergraduate years, he would most certainly have followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. In 1654 he obtained his BA, graduating top of the list for Trinity that year. In June of the same year Dryden's father died, leaving him some land which generated a little income, but not enough to live on.[6]
Returning to London during the Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Oliver Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe. This appointment may have been the result of influence exercised on his behalf by his cousin the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering. At Cromwell's funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed with the Puritan poets John Miltonand Andrew Marvell. Shortly thereafter he published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas (1659), a eulogy on Cromwell's death which is cautious and prudent in its emotional display. In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the interregnum is illustrated as a time of chaos, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.
Later life and career[edit]
After the Restoration, as Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day, he transferred his allegiances to the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more panegyrics: To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662) and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public. These, and his other nondramatic poems, are occasional—that is, they celebrate public events. Thus they are written for the nation rather than the self, and the Poet Laureate(as he would later become) is obliged to write a certain number of these per annum.[7] In November 1662 Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled for non-payment of his dues.
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On 1 December 1663 Dryden married the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady Elizabeth. Dryden's works occasionally contain outbursts against the married state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate side of his marriage. Lady Elizabeth bore three sons and outlived her husband.
With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was not successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670).
When the Great Plague of London closed the theatres in 1665, Dryden retreated to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), arguably the best of his unsystematic prefaces and essays. Dryden constantly defended his own literary practice, and Of Dramatick Poesie, the longest of his critical works, takes the form of a dialogue in which four characters—each based on a prominent contemporary, with Dryden himself as 'Neander'—debate the merits of classical, French and English drama. The greater part of his critical works introduce problems which he is eager to discuss, and show the work of a writer of independent mind who feels strongly about his own ideas, ideas which demonstrate the breadth of his reading. He felt strongly about the relation of the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675) has a prologue which denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama. His play All for Love (1678) was written in blank verse, and was to immediately follow Aureng-Zebe.
At around 8pm on 18 December 1679, Dryden was attacked in Rose Alley behind the Lamb & Flag pub, near his home in Covent Garden, by thugs hired by the Earl of Rochester,[8][9] with whom he had a long-standing conflict.[10] The pub was notorious for staging bare-knuckle prize fights, earning the nickname "The Bucket of Blood."[11] Dryden's poem, "An Essay upon Satire," contained a number of attacks on King Charles II, his mistresses and courtiers, but most pointedly on the Earl of Rochester, a notorious womaniser.[12] Rochester responded by hiring thugs who attacked Dryden whilst walking back from Will's Coffee House (a popular London coffee house where the Wits gathered to gossip, drink and conduct their business) back to his house on Gerrard Street.[13] Dryden survived the attack, offering £50 for the identity of the thugs placed in the London Gazette, and a Royal Pardon if one of them would confess. No one claimed the reward.[12]
Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, a more personal product of his laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden's main goal in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offenses against literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of him on the stage and in print."[14] It is not a belittling form of satire, but rather one which makes his object great in ways which are unexpected, transferring the ridiculous into poetry.[15] This line of satire continued with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). His other major works from this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word biography to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.
He wrote Britannia Rediviva celebrating the birth of a son and heir to the Catholic King and Queen on 10 June 1688.[16] When later in the same year James II was deposed in the Glorious Revolution, Dryden's refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new monarchs, William and Mary, left him out of favour at court. Thomas Shadwell succeeded him as Poet Laureate, and he was forced to give up his public offices and live by the proceeds of his pen. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than writing for the stage. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil(1697), which was published by subscription. The publication of the translation of Virgil was a national event and brought Dryden the sum of £1,400.[17] His final translations appeared in the volume Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a series of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernised adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden's own poems. As a translator, he made great literary works in the older languages available to readers of English.
Dryden died on 12 May 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later.[18] He was the subject of poetic eulogies, such as Luctus Brittannici: or the Tears of the British Muses; for the Death of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700), and The Nine Muses. A Royal Society of Arts blue plaque commemorates Dryden at 43 Gerrard Street in London's Chinatown.[19] He lived at 137 Long Acre from 1682 to 1686 and at 43 Gerrard Street from 1686 until his death.[20]
In his will, he left The George Inn at Northampton to trustees, to form a school for the children of the poor of the town. This became John Dryden's School, later The Orange School.[21]
Reputation and influence[edit]
Dryden was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age. He established the heroic couplet as a standard form of English poetry by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he also introduced the alexandrineand triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet—Audenreferred to him as "the master of the middle style"[22]—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident in the elegies written about him.[23] Dryden's heroic couplet became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. Alexander Pope was heavily influenced by Dryden and often borrowed from him; other writers were equally influenced by Dryden and Pope. Pope famously praised Dryden's versification in his imitation of Horace's Epistle II.i: "Dryden taught to join / The varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine." Samuel Johnson[24]summed up the general attitude with his remark that "the veneration with which his name is pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry." His poems were very widely read, and are often quoted, for instance, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's essays.
Johnson also noted, however, that "He is, therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often pathetic; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions purely natural, that he did not esteem them in others. Simplicity gave him no pleasure." Readers in the first half of the 18th century did not mind this too much, but later generations considered Dryden's absence of sensibility a fault.
One of the first attacks on Dryden's reputation was by William Wordsworth, who complained that Dryden's descriptions of natural objects in his translations from Virgil were much inferior to the originals. However, several of Wordsworth's contemporaries, such as George Crabbe, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott (who edited Dryden's works), were still keen admirers of Dryden. Besides, Wordsworth did admire many of Dryden's poems, and his famous "Intimations of Immortality" ode owes something stylistically to Dryden's "Alexander's Feast." John Keats admired the "Fables," and imitated them in his poem Lamia. Later 19th-century writers had little use for verse satire, Pope, or Dryden; Matthew Arnold famously dismissed them as "classics of our prose." He did have a committed admirer in George Saintsbury, and was a prominent figure in quotation books such as Bartlett's, but the next major poet to take an interest in Dryden was T. S. Eliot, who wrote that he was "the ancestor of nearly all that is best in the poetry of the eighteenth century," and that "we cannot fully enjoy or rightly estimate a hundred years of English poetry unless we fully enjoy Dryden."[25] However, in the same essay, Eliot accused Dryden of having a "commonplace mind." Critical interest in Dryden has increased recently, but, as a relatively straightforward writer (William Empson, another modern admirer of Dryden, compared his "flat" use of language with Donne's interest in the "echoes and recesses of words"[26]), his work has not occasioned as much interest as Andrew Marvell's, John Donne's or Pope's.[27]
Dryden is believed to be the first person to posit that English sentences should not end in prepositions because Latin sentences cannot end in prepositions.[28][29] Dryden created the proscription against preposition stranding in 1672 when he objected to Ben Jonson's 1611 phrase, "the bodies that those souls were frighted from," though he did not provide the rationale for his preference.[30] Dryden often translated his writing into Latin, to check whether his writing was concise and elegant, Latin being considered an elegant and long-lived language with which to compare; then Dryden translated his writing back to English according to Latin-grammar usage. As Latin does not have sentences ending in prepositions, Dryden may have applied Latin grammar to English, thus forming the rule of no sentence-ending prepositions, subsequently adopted by other writers.[31]
Francis Cleyn
Francis Cleyn (or Francesco Cleyn or Clein; also Frantz or Franz Klein) (c. 1582 – 1658) was a German-born painter and tapestry designer who lived and worked in England.
Life and career[edit]
Francis Cleyn was born in Rostock in Germany, and while a youth displayed such abilities that he was retained in the service of Christian IV of Denmark. During this time he painted, in 1611, a half-length portrait of Christian, now in the gallery of Copenhagen, and executed decorative works in the castle of Rosenborg and other places. Here, too, he met Sir Robert Anstruther, then ambassador extraordinary from England to the court of Denmark.[1]
He was sent to Italy to study, and remained there four years, studying at Rome and Venice; at Venice he was introduced to Sir Henry Wotton, then English ambassador to the republic. After returning to Denmark, he proceeded to England with letters of introduction from Anstruther and Wotton to Charles, prince of Wales. He found Charles away on his expedition with Buckingham to Spain, but was warmly received by James I, who saw in him the very man he wanted for the Mortlake Tapestry Works, the new tapestry manufactory which he had recently set up under Sir Francis Crane at Mortlake, London.[1]
So anxious was he to obtain Cleyn's services that he wrote in person to the king of Denmark, requesting that Cleyn, who had to return to Denmark to finish some work for the king, might be allowed to return to England, and offering to pay all expenses. The request was granted, and Cleyn returned to England to enter the service of Prince Charles, and was immediately employed at Mortlake.[1]
On the accession of Charles I to the throne in 1625, he rewarded Cleyn by granting him denization and a pension for life of £100 per annum. He also built for him at Mortlake a residence near the tapestry manufactory. Here Cleyn settled with his family, and superintended the copying of cartoons, and designed the frames in which the subjects were enclosed in the tapestry.[1]
Charles sent down five out of the seven original cartoons of Raphael from the Acts of the Apostles, then recently acquired, to be copied and reproduced in tapestry under Cleyn's direction. Copies of these were made by Cleyn's sons, Francis and John, and they were worked into tapestry at Mortlake. These and the other productions of the Mortlake manufactory were held in high estimation, especially in France, and dispersed over the continent.[1]
A set of six pieces, representing the history of Hero and Leander from Cleyn's designs were at the Louvre in Paris; and there are some fine pieces of grotesque at Petworth House. The grotesques and other ornaments in these works, a line in which Cleyn appears to have been unrivalled, have always been greatly admired, and some modern authorities have had no hesitation in ascribing them to the hand of Anthony van Dyck or some more famous painter, ignoring the fact that Cleyn was spoken of at the time as a second Titian, and as "il famosissimo pittore, miracolo del secolo". Cleyn was also largely employed by the nobility to decorate their mansions. Samples of his work in this line were to be seen at Somerset House, Carew House, Parson's Green, Hanworth Palace, Wimbledon Palace, Stone Park, Northamptonshire, Bolsover Castle, and the Gilt Room at Holland House, London.[1]
With the civil war there came a check to Cleyn's prosperity, and he was chiefly employed in etching and designing illustrations for books; in 1632 he had already provided the illustrations (engraved by Pierre Lombart and S. Savery) to Sandys's edition of Ovid's Metamorphoses, of which an edition was published in Paris in 1637. He designed the illustrations, ornamental head-pieces, and so on, to the editions of the classics published by John Ogilby, namely Æsop's Fables (1651), Virgil (English edition 1654, Latin 1658), and Homer, (1660). His designs were engraved by Pierre Lombart, William Faithorne, and Wenceslaus Hollar, and were so much admired that the king of France had those for Virgil copied in a special edition of his own. Cleyn etched title-pages for E. Montagu's Lacrymæ Musarum (1650), Thomas Fuller's A Pisgah-sight of Palestine (1650), a frontispiece to Lysis, or the Extravagant Shepherd, and perhaps the etchings in the 1654 and 1660 editions of that work. He published in the form of grotesques some sets of original etchings, namely Septem Liberates Artes (1645), Varii Zophori Figuris Animalium ornati (1645), Quinque Sensuum Descriptio (1646); and a friend and contemporary artist, a Mr. English, etched some grotesques (1654), and a humorous piece from Cleyn's designs.[1]
There are other etchings in the print room at the British Museum, attributed with great probability to Cleyn. Although he retained his house at Mortlake, he resided for some time in Covent Garden, and died in London in 1658 at an advanced age.[1]
Family[edit]
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On his death, Cleyn left three sons, Francis, John (both mentioned above), and Charles; and three daughters, Sarah, Magdalen, and Penelope. Francis Cleyn the younger was born in 1625, and was buried at Covent Garden on 21 October 1650. With his brother John he followed his father's profession, and they both attained repute as draughtsmen and miniature painters.[1]
It is difficult to distinguish their work from that of their father. A series of drawings of the cartoons of Raphael were found at Kensington Palace; they bear the dates 1640–1646, are executed on a large scale, and highly finished; some are signed by John Cleyn, and were evidently executed by him and his brother at Mortlake. They were seen by John Evelyn, who states that the brothers were then both dead. Penelope Cleyn appears to have been also a miniature painter, and to her have been ascribed two miniatures of Cecil, Lord Roos (1677), and Dorothea, daughter of Richard Cromwell (1668), signed P.C.[1]
Francis Cleyn | |
|---|---|
Frantz or Franz Klein | |
_by_Thomas_Chambars.jpg) Cleyn in an 18th-century (1762?) etching by Thomas Chambars | |
| Born | c. 1582 Rostock, Germany |
| Died | 1658 (aged 75–76) London, England |
| Known for | designing tapestries at the Mortlake Tapestry Works, Mortlake, London |
| Patron(s) | Christian IV of Denmark, Charles I of England |
Joseph Jekyll
Sir Joseph Jekyll | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Chief Justice of Cheshire | |
| In office 1697–1717 | |
| Preceded by | John Coombe |
| Succeeded by | Spencer Cowper |
| Master of the Rolls | |
| In office 13 July 1717 – 19 August 1738 | |
| Preceded by | Sir John Trevor |
| Succeeded by | Sir John Verney |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1663 |
| Died | 19 August 1738 |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Whig |
| Relations | Thomas Jekyll, John Jekyll |
| Profession | Barrister, judge, politician |
Sir Joseph Jekyll KS (1663 – 19 August 1738), of Westminster, was a British barrister, judge and Whig politician who sat in the English and British House of Commons for 40 years from 1697 to 1738. He became Master of the Rolls in 1717.
Early life and career as a barrister[edit]
Jekyll was born in 1663 to John Jekyll of the Fishmonger's Company and alderman, of St Stephen Walbrook, London, and his second wife Tryphena. He was the half-brother of Thomas Jekyll. He attended a non-conformist seminary in Islington before being admitted to the Middle Temple in 1680. He was called to the Bar in 1687.[1] Thanks to his connections with Middle Temple he became an associate of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Somers, and later married Somers' sister, Elizabeth. With Somers' support he became Chief Justice of Cheshire in June 1697, succeeding John Coombe, and was knighted on 12 December of that year. In 1699 he became a Reader of Middle Temple.[2] In 1700 he became a Serjeant-at-Law, in 1702 a King's Serjeant and finally Prime Serjeant in 1714. Jekyll was very active in bringing cases before the House of Lords, acting in 14 cases in 1706 alone.[1]
Political career[edit]
Jekyll was returned as a Whig Member of Parliament for Eye at a by-election on 14 December 1697 and was returned again in the following year at the 1698 English general election. He was seen as part of the Whig Junto . He was extremely active in parliament and an excellent speaker. He played a role in drafting various bills and acts. Occasionally he voted against the party, mainly because he supported greater reform of the electoral system and the removal of bribery and corruption. He was returned unopposed for Eye in the two general elections of 1701 and in 1702 and 1705. Returned again at the 1708 British general election he was involved in the impeachment of Henry Sacheverell in 1709 and 1710. He was returned again for Eye at the 1710 British general election but at the 1713 British general election was returned instead for Lymington.[3]
At the 1715 British general election Jekyll was returned again for Lymington. He was asked to participate in the secret committee tasked with preparing the impeachment of the Earl of Oxford and the Duke of Ormonde, which he refused to support.[2] He persuaded the government to open an investigation into the collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720.[4] At the 1722 British general election he was returned as MP for Reigate where he was returned again in 1727 and 1734.[4] He sponsored the Mortmain Act and the Gin Act 1736, and was noted for his opposition to intoxication, which annoyed the public so much that he was forced to have a guard at his house at all times.[5] Under Robert Walpole he remained independent of the government in terms of how he voted, and was described by Alexander Pope as "an odd old Whig, who never change his principles or wig".[2]
Outside Parliament, Jekyll provided £600 to fund the colony at Jekyll Island,[6] and as a result James Oglethorpe named the island in the Province of Georgia after him.[7]
Master of the Rolls[edit]
On 13 July 1717, Jekyll was appointed Master of the Rolls,[5] and the same year became a Privy Councillor.[4] His time as Master "was distinguished by legal ability, integrity and despatch", and during this period he helped write The Judicial Authority of the Master of the Rolls. He was given the Great Seal on 7 January 1725, and held it until 1 June.[5]
Death and legacy[edit]
On 19 August 1738 he died of "a mortification in the bowels",[5] and was buried in the Rolls Chapel. He had no children. In his will he left £20,000 to help pay off the national debt, something Lord Mansfield described as "a very foolish bequest.. he might as well have attempted to stop the middle arch of Blackfriars Bridge with his full-bottomed wig".[5]