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John Dryden Wiki
Name: John Dryden.
Born: 19 August 1631, Aldwincle, Northamptonshire, England.
Father: Erasmus Dryden.
Mother: Mary Pickering.
Wife / Husband: Tao Li, Liu Xia.
John Dryden Early Life:
Dryden was born in the village of Aldwincle near Thropton, Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints. He was the eldest child of the Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, the paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, the First Baronet (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, the Puritan zoning Puri, who supported the Puritan cause and the Parliament. He was once removed to cousin Jonathan Swift.
Dryden lived as a boy in the nearby village of Teachmarsch, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to the Westminster School as King’s Scholar where his headmaster, Dr.
There was Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and a serious disciplinarian. After being re-established by Elizabeth I, Westminster adopted a very different religious and political sentiment during this period, encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden’s response was to this, he clearly respected the headmaster and later sent his two sons to Westminster School.
As a humanitarian public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum in which students were trained in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue.
When Charles II was restored to the throne in May 1660, Dryden joined the poets of the day in welcoming him, published in the June Astra Redux, a poem of more than 300 lines in the poetic couplet. For the coronation in 1661, he wrote his sacred glory.
Both these poems were designed to establish and strengthen the monarchy and invest the young emperor with an aura of royalty, permanence and even divinity. Subsequently, Dryden’s ambitions and fortunes as a writer were shaped by his relationship with the monarchy.
On December 1, 1663, he married Elizabeth Howard, the youngest daughter of Thomas Howard, the first Karna of Berkshire. In due time she gave him three sons.
Dryden’s longest poem, Enus Mirabilis (1667), was a celebration of the Dutch and Londoners’ fleet’s two victories over the Great Fire’s survival in 1666. In this work Dryden once again reinforced and strengthened the royal image. United the concept of a loyal nation under the best of kings.
It is hardly surprising that when the poet Laureate, Sir William Davenant, died in 1668, Dryden was appointed poet laureate in his place and a royal historian two years later.
Dryden ended his life with his publisher and bitterness over his fate and worked so hard to defend not only his king but also the principle of succession. He ended his career with his new friend, Sir John VanBrugh, contributing to Pilgrim’s revision of John Fletcher.
Their attack, which began in their proponents, Sir Richard Blackmore and Luke Milborne, the poet and Quake Doctor’s latest “My Honorable Kinsman, John Dryden,” continues, and the epilogue continues against the self-righteous Puritans. Who normally attack stage and age. But his best contribution is a fitting epitaph, both for himself and his century.