Book Description
Dryden's last three years of published works begin with Alexander's Feast and end with Fables, his largest miscellany of poetical translations. Alexander's Feast, like the earlier Song for St. Cecilia's Day (Works, III), was commissioned by the Musical Society for performance at its annual tribute to sacred music. The Fables included selections from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Extensive and detailed notes to these translations show readers how well Dryden succeeded in transmitting the styles and the very sounds of his originals. Volume VII ends with a section of miscellaneous pieces published at other times, including Dryden's only known Latin work. The presentation of the writings in this volume, like that of the entire twenty-volume series, is a tribute not only to Dryden but also to the editors who have guided it through five decades. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

A Good Introduction to Dryden
When I was a child, I was a fan of a series of books that offered portable versions of the great works of the leading poets. One can imagine "The Portable Keats" or "The Portable Browning." One can not imagine "The Portable Dryden." That would be like "The Portable Thomas Wolfe." Some writers simply can not be captured in a small cage.

The Wordsworth edition serves as an excellent start to Dryden, covering his political poems, his plays and his translations. While one could argue that some plays were left out of the anthology and should have been included, the basics are there. When finished, the reader can claim to know Dryden's work fairly well.

Two minor quibbles. The text is small and hard to read. I often had to resort to using a magnifying glass. The introduction, while solid, was not exactly satisfying. Dryden's reputation has continued to ebb over the decades (despite the best efforts of say T.S. Eliot or Samuel Johnson or Mark van Doren) and there remains much that is obscure in his life and his work. Footnotes or endnotes would have been appreciated.Still, this book remains the place to start to understand and appreciate this forgotten poet. ... Read more

Book Description
In the last decade of Dryden's life, he brought four new works before the theatre-going public: a dramatic opera, a tragedy, a tragicomedy, and a number of appendages to an old comedy by John Fletcher, which was revived partly so that Dryden might have the author's third-night profits. He died that night, but his family received the money. The dramatic opera, King Arthur, benefited from a fine score by Henry Purcell and has remained in the operatic repertoire to this day. Cleomenes, the tragedy, was banned until Dryden was able to convince Queen Mary that it did not reflect any seditious sympathy with the exiled James II, after which it was successful. The fate of Love Triumphant, the tragicomedy, was different; possibly because of a growing swell of moral reform, the play was universally damned, even though its themes of incest and miscellaneous fornication had never brought rejection to Dryden in the past. The Secular Masque, Dryden's principal contribution to The Pilgrim by Fletcher, had undistinguished music, but its lively verse and broad review of the previous century kept the piece on the stage for the next fifty years, and in anthologies up to the present. ... Read more

Book Description
Cleopatra. I Am No Queen: Is This To Be A Queen, To Be Besieged By Yon Insulting Roman, And To Wait Each Hour The Victor's Chain? These Ills Are Small: For Antony Is Lost, And I Can Mourn For Nothing Else But Him. Now Come, Ctavius, I Have No More To Lose! Prepare Thy Bands.Download Description
Cleopatra. I Am No Queen: Is This To Be A Queen, To Be Besieged By Yon Insulting Roman, And To Wait Each Hour The Victor's Chain? These Ills Are Small: For Antony Is Lost, And I Can Mourn For Nothing Else But Him. Now Come, Ctavius, I Have No More To Lose! Prepare Thy Bands. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

All For Love is a great retwelling of a classic story.
Dryden's reworking of Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra" is a great read, especially if you didn't fully comprehend Shakespeare's work. Dryden's language is concise, and his portrayal of historical characters isexcellent; especially considering that he had to follow Shakespeare's lead. ... Read more

Book Description

Modern, fully annotated, and covering the period of 1686 through 1693, this is Volume Three of the works of the greatest writer in Restoration England, John Dryden!

• This is the result of a complete reappraisal of the canon, text and context of John Dryden's poetry!
• Features The Hind and the Panther and Discourse Concerning Satire.
• Modernized text, headnotes and extensive annotations make Dryden's poetry more understandable and puts it in contemporary context, explaining motive and style.

David Hopkins is in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. ... Read more

Book Description

Modern, fully annotated, and covering the period of 1693 through 1696, this is Volume Four of the works of the greatest writer in Restoration England, John Dryden!

• This is the result of a complete reappraisal of the canon, text and context of John Dryden's poetry!
• Features Dryden's translations fromJuvenal, Persius and those from Ovid and Homer included in the miscellanyExamen Poeticum .
• Modernized text, headnotes and extensive annotations make Dryden's poetry more understandable and puts it in contemporary context, explaining motive and style.

David Hopkins is in the Department of English at the University of Bristol. ... Read more

Book Description
This volume is designed to celebrate and re-assess the work of John Dryden (1631-1700) in the tercentenary year of his death. It assembles specially-commissioned essays by an international team of scholars who address Dryden's political writing, drama, and translations, his literary collaborations, contemporary reputation, and posthumous reception. Much of Dryden's work was written in response to contemporary events and issues, and several of the essays in this volume discuss the personal and public circumstances in which his works were composed and received, exploring his responses to popular politics, and his relations with Congreve, Milton, Purcell, and Shadwell. But Dryden's intellectual and imaginative world was also shaped by the work of his literary predecessors, and so the collection charts his creative engagement with classical poetry, especially Homer and Virgil. Other essays attend to his poetic self-representation, his philosophical vision, and the problem of editing Dryden's poetry for a modern readership. The collection as a whole presents him as a writer not only for an age, but for all time. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Sympathetic Dryden
Highly engaging and emminently readable; almost a mini-resource for the non-scholar; and a true page-turner for the Drydenophile. I originally found this book at Amazon.com by performing a subject search, and lately it has received review attention in the scholarly journals. Thanks Amazon for the first notice! Mr Gelber has brought all phases of Mr Dryden's personal and literary biography vividly to life. Although both the scholarship and detail are immediate and wide-ranging, I was most pleased by Mr Gelber's justifiably genuine and unreservedly sympathetic view of his subject. Mr Dryden's reputation has been too much subject to petty carping and unjustifiable criticsm among scholars, whose views of this great man are sometimes both vicious and pernicious. Certainly the Father of Modern Literary Criticism deserves enduring and universal respect and esteem. He has received suitably respectful and sympathetic treatment from Mr Gelber; and I enjoyed having a favorite of mine so well praised. Thank you Mr Gelber; and I wish your book was lengthier; the last page made me wish for more! ... Read more

Book Description
A perceptive inquiry into Dryden's controversial religious masterpiece.

John Dryden (1631-1700) is one of the handful of writers who form the first rank of England's literary pantheon. His works are characterized by intellectual daring and vigor, as well as by imaginative splendor and stylistic polish. In addition to his celebrated works, Dryden wrote what is arguably the greatest poem of all times about the Catholic Church-The Hind and the Panther (1687). The result of his conversion to Catholicism, Dryden's poem honors his newfound church as the immortal Bride of the heavenly Bridegroom. Though his longest original poem, it remains the least understood of all his major works.

Ridiculed because of its unprecedented representation of the different churches in England as animals-in particular, for its portrayal of the Catholic and the Anglican Churches as the Hind and the Panther, respectively-the poem was dismissed as a failure. The exact political context also eluded scholars. In this volume, Anne Barbeau Gardiner offers a compelling analysis of Dryden's masterpiece and, for the first time, convincingly argues that his poem was a unified defense of ancient faith and a plea for modern religious freedom.

In Part I of the book, Gardiner reveals the ancient source of Dryden's design: the biblical book that celebrates the love of Yahweh for his Bride Israel, Solomon's Canticle of Canticles. In Part II, she explains how Dryden's poem participated in the campaign to repeal the Test Act against Catholics and Dissenters in England. Gardiner illustrates how the issues of the political-religious debate drive Dryden's poem, and reveals Dryden's call for modern civil rights and freedom of worship.

"Gardiner's reading of Dryden's strangely baffling fable on animal rights (and wrongs) gets it right. . . . It is the timeliest of cases for 'Glorious John.' "-Professor George McFadden, Temple University

Anne Barbeau Gardiner is professor emeritus of English at John Jay College, C.U.N.Y.She is the author of The Intellectual Design of John Dryden's Heroic Plays.

"At last a learned commentary on The Hind and the Panther from Dryden's point of view."-Professor Frank H. Ellis, Smith College

"Gardiner's combination of keen intellect and profound Roman Catholic belief makes her uniquely qualified to interpret The Hind and the Panther. Her reading of Dryden's poem will not soon be superseded."-Professor Emeritus David Vieth, Southern Illinois University ... Read more

Book Description

At the time of his death in 1700, John Dryden was acknowledged as England's greatest writer, his reputation even rivaling that of Shakespeare. Certainly, whether considered as a poet, a dramatist, or as a critic, Dryden far outstripped his contemporaries in the sheer scope and variety of his literary production. The amazing versatility of his pen was matched only by the transformational energy that shapes individual works, from heroic dramas to great satires.

For Enchanted Ground, Jayne Lewis and Maximillian E. Novak have brought together many of the world's experts on Dryden, and their essays reflect a range of new, uniquely twenty-first-century views of him. The book is divided into two sections. The first explores Dryden's role as a public poet who had made himself the voice of the restored Stuart court. The second considers Dryden's relationship to the arts and particularly to the past and to Shakespeare.

Dryden was a poet for all ages. These essays provide fresh readings of Dryden and bring scholarship on him fully up-to-date.

Book Description
This collection of essays offers a variety of perspectives on John Dryden's work and its contexts. A towering literary figure in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Dryden authored a series of highly successful plays and poems, in addition to influential essays of literary criticism. ... Read more

Book Description
This book examines the uses which Dryden makes of Latin in his poetry and his critical writing, firstly through quotation and allusion, and secondly through formal translation. The first half explores the paradox that Dryden's sense of himself as a modern English writer is often articulated by means of a turn to classical Latin, while the contemporary English nation is conceptualized through references to ancient Rome. The second half offers readings of Dryden's translations from Horace, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, and Virgil, culminating in a long essay on Dryden's Aeneis. Dryden used translation from the Latin poets as a way of exploring new territory: in the public sphere, to engage with empire and its loss, and in the private world, to contemplate selfhood and its dissolution. In following the varied traces of Rome in the texture of Dryden's writing, and by emphasizing his continual engagement with mutability and metamorphosis, this book argues the case for Dryden as a thoughtful, humanistic poet. ... Read more

Book Description
John Dryden was the most illustrious poet of his day; the publication of his Works of Virgil was nothing less than a national event.He was in the public eye for some forty years, holding positions at court for a long period.Dryden wrote more, and in more genres than any of his
contemporaries, was praised for his bold, straightforward, and energetic style, and produced the first body of what we now call "criticism" in English.
This new selection, prepared by the eminent Dryden scholar Keith Walker, represents the full range of Dryden's poetic talent, and pays particular attention to his translations, which formed the backbone of his poetic output. These translations more than anything re-energized English verse and
pointed to new possiblities for later poets. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Basically Boring!
I had to read this book for school, which always makes reading it more difficult because I knew I would have to write about it.The story of Antony and Cleopatra is a tragic one and better then fiction but Drydenmakes it uninteresting and in blank verse which makes the writing dull andprolonged. In fact, I would've stopped reading half way through if I wasn'trequired to read the whole thing.Trust me, there are better "classicbooks" out there! Dont pick this one! ... Read more

Book Description
In this revisionary study of Dryden`s thought, Haley argues that Dryden was the first English poet after Shakespeare to engage in historical reflection upon his own culture. Addressing an audience for whom literature was bound up with religion and politics, Dryden exercised the moral integrity of a public poet and brought home to his readers the meaning of their historical experience. ... Read more