History of English literature

John DrydenM. Fauzan

121073030

John DrydenBorn in Northamptonshire, England,

on August 9, 1631, John Dryden came from a landowning family with connections to Parliament and the Church of England. He studied as a King’s Scholar at the prestigious Westminster School of London, where he later sent two of his own children. There, Dryden was trained in the art of rhetorical argument, which remained a strong influence on the poet’s writing and critical thought throughout his life.

Early lifeDryden 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, Northamptonshire where it is likely that he received his first education.

Family

On 1 December 1663 Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard (died 1714). The marriage was at St. Swithin's, London, and the consent of the parents is noted on the license, though Lady Elizabeth was then about twenty-five. She was the object of some scandals, well or ill founded; it was said that Dryden had been bullied into the marriage by her brothers. A small estate in Wiltshire was settled upon them by her father. The lady's intellect and temper were apparently not good; her husband was treated as an inferior by her social equals. Both Dryden and his wife were warmly attached to their children. They had three sons Charles, (1666–1704), John (1668–1701) and Erasmus Henry (1669–1710). Lady Elizabeth Dryden survived her husband, but became insane soon after his death.

Alma materIn 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. Having recently 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. In the late twentieth century a house at Westminster was founded in his name.

In 1650 Dryden went up to Trinity College, Cambridge. 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. 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.

works• After graduation, Dryden found work with

Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, marking a radical shift in the poet’s political views. Alongside Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell, Dryden was present at Cromwell’s funeral in 1658, and one year later published his first important poem, Heroic Stanzas, eulogizing the leader.

Dryden died on May 1, 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne’s Cemetery. In 1710, he was moved to the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, where a memorial has been erected.

THANKS