Dryden’s Debts

2021 ◽  
pp. 219-231
Author(s):  
Sophie Read
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Dryden

This essay considers the ways in which the late seventeenth-century critic John Dryden uses the metaphor of coinage, and the related ideas of commerce and debt, trade and empire, to think about past writers. It argues that the figure of the coin, as something of both intrinsic and contingent value, allows Dryden to isolate the ‘wit’ of works he admires—by Virgil, Shakespeare, and Donne—and translate it, in his own writing, for his own time. The essay argues that this trope is both fundamental to the development of Dryden’s critical voice and a creative stimulus, particularly when he comes to think about the sound of verse in his late career as a translator of the classics.

From koine to standard: the early modern origin of a key linguistic term

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-302
Author(s):  
Raf Van Rooy
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
Early History ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Common Language ◽  
Regional Dialects ◽  
Language Studies ◽  
Linguistic Term ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Impact

Abstract In this paper, I explore the early history of the word standard as a linguistic term, arguing that it came to compete with the designation common language in the seventeenth century. The latter phrase was, in turn, formed by ideas on the Greek koine during the Renaissance and appears to have been the first widely used collocation referring to a standard language-like entity. In order to sketch this evolution, I first discuss premodern ideas on the koine. Then, I attempt to outline how the intuitive comparison of the koine with vernacular norms that were being increasingly regulated resulted in the development of the concept of common language, termed lingua communis in Latin (a calque of Greek hē koinḕ diálektos), in the sixteenth century. This phrase highlighted the communicative functionality of the vernaculars, which were being codified in grammars and dictionaries. Scholars contrasted these common languages with regional dialects, which had a limited reach in terms of communication. This distinction received a social and evaluative connotation during the seventeenth century, which created a need for terminological alternatives; an increasingly popular option competing with common language was standard, which was variously combined with language and tongue by English authors from about 1650 onwards, especially in Protestant circles, where the vernaculars tended to play a more prominent role than in Catholic areas. Of major importance for this evolution was the work and linguistic usage of the poet John Dryden (1631–1700). This essay uncovers the early history of standard as a key linguistic term, while also presenting a case study which shows the impact of the rediscovery of the Greek heritage on language studies in Western Europe, especially through the term common language.

Thinking with Ferrar Papers 1422: A c. 1681 Verse Miscellany

The Library ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 192-215
Author(s):  
Adam Smyth
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Katherine Philips

Abstract This article explores a late seventeenth-century manuscript verse miscellany held amongst the Ferrar Papers in Magdalene College, Cambridge, not previously discussed by critics. By attending to both the specific features of this manuscript miscellany (including poems by John Dryden, Katherine Philips. and others), and the larger Ferrar archive, the article considers broader questions about how to read and interpret manuscript miscellanies.

“Would India had beene never knowne”

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Bross
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Archival Material ◽  
East Indies ◽  
Representations Of Women

This chapter analyzes two representations of women based on the print record of a 1623 incident in which English traders were tortured and killed by their Dutch rivals on the island of Amboyna in the East Indies. William Sanderson imagined the reaction of one “Amboyna widow” in a pair of publications in the 1650s, and John Dryden created characters for his 1673 play Amboyna based on reports published years earlier. If we consider these works as early modern examples of historical fiction we can see that the writers construct the role of colonial women in the seventeenth-century English imagination as a symbol of the righteousness of English imperial actions and colonizing claims. Taken together, the “wives’ tales” of this chapter suggest that the reach of the East India Companies—both English and Dutch—and of their governments into people’s lives was powerful. Yet the stories of these women suggested by their traces in the archives indicate the limits of that power and the limits of the archival function to control the stories of marginalized people. Dryden’s play in particular points readers back to the archives and suggests what they tell us (or fail to tell us) about the subjects of the English global fantasies inscribed in the literature and other print records of the seventeenth century. The coda pieces together contextual and archival material to speculate on the experiences of a woman, held as a slave by the Dutch, who was intimately connected to the Amboyna incident.

Introduction: remapping early modern literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-37
Author(s):  
Matthew C. Augustine
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
Early Modern Literature ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Modern Literature ◽  
High Definition ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
History Of ◽  
Century Literature

The argument of this book follows two main themes: the first has to do with periodicity; the second with politics, especially as a framework within which to view seventeenth-century literature. This chapter maps the disciplinary paradigms which have long produced a view of the seventeenth century saturated by high-definition contrasts: between the earlier and later Stuart periods, but also between factions and ideologies. It then asks what it would look like to write the history of seventeenth-century literature anew, to tell a story about imaginative and polemical writing in this age that remained open to accident and unevenness, to contradiction and uncertainty. Giving illustrative consideration to John Dryden, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, the chapter begins to suggest some new ways of conceiving how these writers might relate to one other and to the politics and aesthetics of a long seventeenth century.

The Vocal Wit of John Dryden

2006 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-402 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tina Skouen
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Mother Tongue ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Literary Critic ◽  
Keen Interest ◽  
English Poet

Abstract The English poet-critic John Dryden (1631–1700) took a keen interest in refining the mother tongue. As a literary critic, he was particularly concerned with the contrast between the sound of the vernacular and that of Latin. This study establishes a connection between Dryden's observations on sound and the recommendations concerning elocution found in such seventeenth-century rhetorics as Some Instructions Concerning the Art of Oratory (1659) by Obadiah Walker. In order to appreciate Dryden's use of sound in his own poems, I argue that one should also take into account the phonetic theory provided by contemporary grammars. The study thus pays tribute to the fact that in the age of Dryden the concerns of rhetoric and grammar were closely interwoven.

Texts and readers in the Age of Marvell

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Milton ◽  
British Literature ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Andrew Marvell ◽  
New Formalism ◽  
Postgraduate Students ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Literature Culture

Texts and Readers in the Age of Marvell offers fresh perspectives from leading and emerging scholars of seventeenth-century British literature, focusing on the surprising ways that texts interacted with writers and readers at precise cultural moments. With particular interest in how texts entered the seventeenth-century public world, some of these essays emphasise the variety of motivations – from generic distaste to personal frustration – that explain how ideology and form fuse together in various works. Others offer fine-grained and multi-sided contextualisations of familiar texts and cruxes. With an eye to the elusive and complicated Andrew Marvell as tutelary figure of the age, the contributors provide novel readings of a range of seventeenth-century authors, often foregrounding the complexities these writers faced as the remarkable events of the century moved swiftly around them. The essays make important contributions, both methodological and critical, to the field of early modern studies and include examinations of prominent seventeenth-century figures such as John Milton, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, and Edmund Waller. New work appears here by Nigel Smith and Michael McKeon on Marvell, Michael Schoenfeldt on new formalism, Derek Hirst on child abuse in the seventeenth century, and Joad Raymond on print politics. Because of their relevance to contemporary critical debates, the studies here will be of interest to postgraduate students and scholars working on seventeenth-century British literature, culture, and history.

scholarly journals TABLEAUX AND SPECTACLES: APPRECIATION OF SENECAN TRAGEDY BY EUROPEAN DRAMATISTS OF THE SIXTEENTH AND SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Ramus ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 135-152
Author(s):  
Susanna Braund
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
First Century ◽  
Renaissance Drama ◽  
Present Essay ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Previous Scholarship

Did Sophocles or Seneca exercise a greater influence on Renaissance drama? While the twenty-first century public might assume the Greek dramatist, in recent decades literary scholars have come to appreciate that the model of tragedy for the Renaissance was the plays of the Roman Seneca rather than those of the Athenian tragedians. In his important essay on Seneca and Shakespeare written in 1932, T.S. Eliot wrote that Senecan sensibility was ‘the most completely absorbed and transmogrified, because it was already the most diffused’ in Shakespeare's world. Tony Boyle, one of the leading rehabilitators of Seneca in recent years, has rightly said, building on the work of Robert Miola and Gordon Braden in particular, that ‘Seneca encodes Renaissance theatre’ from the time that Albertino Mussato wrote his neo-Latin tragedy Ecerinis in 1315 on into the seventeenth century. The present essay offers a complement and supplement to previous scholarship arguing that Seneca enjoyed a status at least equal to that of the Athenian tragedians for European dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My method will be to examine two plays, one in French and one in English, where the authors have combined dramatic elements taken from Seneca with elements taken from Sophocles. My examples are Robert Garnier's play, staged and published in 1580, entitled Antigone ou La Piété (Antigone or Piety), and the highly popular play by John Dryden and Nathaniel Lee entitled Oedipus, A Tragedy, staged in 1678 and published the following year.

Papists’ Horses and the Privy Council 1689–1720

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75
Author(s):  
Anthony R. J. S. Adolph
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Dryden ◽  
Alexander Pope ◽  
Privy Council

Horses by Papists are not to be ridden,But sure the Muses horse was ne’er forbidden.For in no rate-book was it ever found,That Pegasus was valued at five pound.John DrydenThese lines, written at the end of the seventeenth century, were a wry comment on the ban on the ownership of horses valued at over five pounds which was imposed upon Catholics from 1689 by the Whig ministry of William and Mary and which remained in force, in theory, until the abolition of the penal laws in 1844. Like most of the penal laws its application had all but ceased by the middle of the eighteenth century but in the period under consideration the Privy Council made considerable efforts to ensure the enforcement of the ban. It did so sometimes through a genuine fear of Jacobite uprising and subversion, on other occasions to stir up a renewed paranoia about popery (and thus encourage loyalty from all Protestants) and always to try to weaken the resolve of Catholics to retain their faith. Alexander Pope tells the story of Thomas Gage of Shirburn who had his team of Flemish coach horses seized by the authorities in 1715. Visiting London, he became so jealous of the sight of other people’s coach horses passing by that he apostatised then and there and took the Oath of Abjuration.

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