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Religion and Politics in Dryden's Poetry and Plays

The exacting labors of the editors of the California Dryden proceed at a pace which may be unique among twentieth-century editions. The first volume of Dryden's poetry for that edition (1649-80) was fifteen years in preparation; nearly as long an interval elapsed before the recent appearance of the next volume of his poetry (1685-92),' and we must still await the volume of poems for the intervening years, 1681-84. Perhaps only the editors themselves can appreciate the magnitude of their task, however, and the general editor of the present volume, Earl Miner, has profited from the most frequent criticism raised by reviewers of the first. The excessive illustrative quotations which swelled the commentary of that volume are happily missing from this one, and while Professor Miner's commentary is certainly very long (about 250 pages for as many pages of text), it is so pertinent to the poems that no student of Dryden will wish it shorter. One advantage of the long delay in the appearance of this volume has been the opportunity it has afforded the editor to publish elsewhere a number of more specialized studies to which he can refer the reader without adding needlessly to the length of his commentary. The text of the poems in this volume, for which Vinton A. Dearing is responsible as in all the others of the California Dryden, follows the first printed edition of each poem as to accidentals, in keeping with modern practice, and incorporates substantive changes from later editions for which the poet was responsible. The volume offers a thoroughly dependable text, therefore, but since James Kinsley followed the same editorial practice in his edition of The Poems of John Dryden for the "Oxford English Texts" series in 1958, the modern reader's needs were already provided for in this respect. Kinsley's commentary, on the other hand, was rather sparse-less than 300 pages for the entire body of Dryden's poetry-and it is Miner's incomparably fuller commentary to which all students of the poet will turn with greatest interest. Their expectations will not be disappointed. Textual cruxes are solved, archaic words and seventeenthcentury usage explained, cross-references to Dryden's other poems supplied, and helpful analogues provided from other writers. Without attempting a variorum edition, Miner has included, with scrupulous acknowledgment, the suggestions of a great many earlier editors; yet the amount of original research revealed by his notes is impressive. Dryden's poems for the seven-year period represented by this volume are enormously varied: they include classical translations, panegyrics, odes, short lyrics, complimentary epistles, prologues and epilogues, as well as his longest and most ambitious polemical poem. Miner handles all these poetic genres with equal facility, discussing the literary antecedents of each in his headnotes to the individual poems and offering many rewarding general comments. His discussion of Dryden's translations of Lucretius and Horace included in Sylvae is particularly fine. He makes us aware of the originality and creative imagination Dryden habitually brings to the difficult task of rendering an earlier poet in another language and a later idiom. Miner's discussion of the ode "To the Pious Memory of Mrs. Anne Killigrew" supplies a sensible redress to the recent attempt to make of the poem an ironic and mildly satiric comment on the dead woman's achievements. "Like 1 The Works of John Dryden. Vol. 3: Poems, 1685-1692. Edited by Earl Miner and Vinton A. Dearing. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969. Pp. xv+ 581.