A man known only to ghosts and scholars
David Nokes
JOHN DRYDEN AND HIS WORLD by James Anderson Winn
Yale University Press, £19.95
Among the acknowledgements in this new biography of Dryden, James A. Winn extends his special thanks to John Field, archivist of Westminster school, who `acted as a medium through whom I could communicate with the ghost of Dr Busby', the school's headmaster in Dryden's day. Any biographer of Dryden might be grate- ful for a little paranormal assistance since, as George Saintsbury observed 85 years ago, `the chief difficulty of writing a life of Dryden is the almost entire absence of materials'. For a man with such high public visibility — he was simultaneously Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal Dryden maintained a surprisingly low per- sonal profile. We catch glimpses of him now and again in the ciphered pages of Pepys's Diary. He can be dimly detected under the guise of 'Wm. Dayton, a poet in Gerrard Street' in an official round-up of papists in 1689. But despite all the efforts of the Lit Crit industry in recent decades, our only insight into the home life of one of England's greatest poets comes from an unreliable anecdote published almost a century after his death. This relates how his wife Elizabeth was jealous of the amount of time he spent among his books. `I wish I was a book, and then I should have more of your company', she com- plained. 'Well, my dear,' replied the poet, `When you do become a book, pray let it be an almanack; for then, at the end of the year, I shall lay you quietly on the shelf, and shall be able to pursue my studies without interruption'.
Actually Winn's presentation of Dryden's character and career relies less on ghostly inspiration than on scholarly detective work with his verses. This is a splendid book whose chief quality lies in Winn's patient unravelling of the complex skein of personal and political allusions contained in Dryden's poetry. The deduc- tion of biographical facts from fictional sources is always a chancy business, but in this case Winn's sensitivity to the complex- ities of Restoration politics and to the intricacies of Dryden's art, makes his arguments persuasive. The main charge levelled against Dryden has always been that of shameless political opportunism. Working as a literary under- strapper in Cromwell's government he eulogised the Lord Protector in heroic stanzas full of such gushing sentiments as `His Grandeur he deriv'd from Heav'n alone.' But no sooner was Charles II restored to the throne than Dryden was transformed into a flag-waving royalist, promptly addressing his new sovereign in these fulsome terms: ‘. . you, whose goodness your descent doth show/Your Heav'nly parentage and earthly too. . Towards the end of the merry monarch's reign Dryden published a polemical de- fence of the established Anglican church in his poem Religio Laici. But with the accession of the Catholic James II Dryden quickly switched sides again to become a Catholic, thereby retaining his posts as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal. Winn analyses the twists and turns of Dryden's career, providing a detailed con- text for each shift of allegiance. Such fair-weather loyalties were, he shows, by no means unique to Dryden, but symp- tomatic of a period of see-sawing political changes. And beneath the variable senti- ments of his public• polemics, Winn finds a consistent ecumenical irony, and a fond- ness for playing off the antithetical rhetoric of Protestant and Catholic, Roundhead and Cavalier. In his Catholic poem The Hind and the Panther Dryden deliberately imitates the language of the arch-puritan Milton. He gives an ironic edge to his eulogy of Cromwell by insinuating the palm-tree imagery from the frontispiece of Charles I's Eikon Basilike. In his Corona- tion Ode to Charles II he makes particular mention of the king's care for the ducks in St James's Park. As Winn comments, merchants seeking the protection of a strong navy would hardly be impressed by a monarch whose main aquatic concern was for ducks on a pond.
As a professional writer with a contract obliging him to turn out plays at the rate of three a year Dryden was always more of a realist than an ideologue. Even in the matter of literary feuds he was often prepared to put profit before pride. Buck- ingham's play The Rehearsal contains a sharp satiric attack on Dryden in the character of Mr Bayes, but as a sharehol- der in the company producing the play Dryden was content to benefit from his own discomfiture and cry all the way to the bank. When approaching the elderly Mil- ton with a crack-brained schenie for a musical version of Paradise Lost, Dryden cheerfully put politics aside. Dryden's Adam is a card-carrying Cartesian, mutter- ing such lines as `For that I am, I know, because I think. . .'. Winn sees this traves- ty too as an ecumenical olive branch: 'The Anglican Dryden was adapting the work of the Puritan Milton, and would dedicate the results to the Catholic princess Maria Beatrice'.
For the most part Winn maintains a tone of scholarly impartiality, but there are times when his writing slips from analysis to apologia. When he draws an analogy between Williamite England and a modern military dictatorship his language seems to echo Dryden's own attack upon the 'stupid military state'. But the real delight of this book lies in its detail. The 500 pages of text are supplemented by over 100 pages of appendices and notes, and every page is richly stored with analytical insights. When in Mac Flecknoe Dryden comments on the poet Shadwell's 'mountain belly', the phrase, Winn notes, `is an allusion as well as an insult'. Ben Jonson, Shadwell's hero, had referred to his own `mountaine belly' in a poem to a friend. It is a tiny though typical instance of Dryden's style that even a belly-laugh should be a piece of literary gamesmanship.
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