A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 12

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

a. Etherege, Wyeherley, Congreve, Vanbrugh and Farquhar contributed a great deal to the development of the comedy of manners.

b. The society mirrored in the comedy of manners was the society of the court of Charles II. It was careless, intend only on pleasure and intrigue.The comedy which depicted this society had an air of abandon and immorality.

c. “All human things are subject to decay.” This is the beginnings of John Dryden's poem, Mac Flecknoe.
d. Dryden was the greatest popularized of the heroic tragedy – related to love and honour. Between 1664 and 1677 he wrote five heroic tragedies.

e. The rule of commonwealth which lasted for 18 years from 1642 – 1660 had excessive puritanical control. It stiffened art and theatre. The return of Charles II to England from France eased the life and theatre was opened for public by the king.

f. Edmund Waller and John Denhanq were the pioneer of the restoration poetry.

g. Mac Flecknoe by Dryden is a personal satire and a vigorous attack on the English playwright Thomas Shadwell, which influenced Alexander Pope's mock-heroic poem Dunciad.

h. Dryden’s Absalom and Achitophel is a political satire. It was written to defend the king’s policy against the Earl of Shaftsbury.

i. Alexander’s Feast a cecilian ode by John Dryden has the native title ‘The power of Majic’. It refers to the occasion when Timotheus tried to inspire a mood of revenge in Alexander.

j. John Dryden‘s The Rival Ladies, a tragicomedy written in 1664, was a success.

k. John Dryden‘s comedies, including An Evening's Love; or, the Mock Astrologer (1668), Ladies à la Mode (1668), and Marriage à la Mode (1672), are broad and bawdy.

l. John Dryden (1631-1700) ‘s The Kind Keeper; or, Mr. Limberham (1678), was banned as indecent, an unusual penalty during the morally permissive period of Restoration theater.

m. In his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667), Dryden wrote of the events in the “Wonderful Year” , chiefly of the English naval victory over the Dutch in July and of the Great Fire of London in September.

n. Dryden was appointed poet laureate in 1668 and royal historiographer in 1670.

o. In 1681 he wrote his first and greatest political satire, Absalom and Achitophel; a masterful parable in heroic couplets, it employs biblical characters and incidents to ridicule the Whig attempt to make the duke of Monmouth, rather than the duke of York (the future King James II), successor to King Charles II.

p.  The second part of Absalom and Achitophel,written in collaboration with the poet and playwright Nahum Tate.  

q. Although Dryden had defended his adherence to Protestantism in the poem Religio Laici (1682), he became a Roman Catholic in 1685, presumably because James II, an avowed Roman Catholic, came to the throne in that year.

r. The poet then wrote The Hind and the Panther (1687), a metrical allegory in defense of Dryden's new faith in Catholicism.

s. All for Love; or, the World Well Lost (1678), a version of the story of Antony and Cleopatra, is considered his greatest play and one of the masterpieces of Restoration tragedy.

t.  Mac Flecknoe’s stage-like setting in the city confirms the presence of a public audience.

u. The full title of  Mac Flecknoe was ,"Mac Flecknoe OR a Satyr Upon The True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S."

v. Dryden dominated the Restoration as dramatist, poet, and critic.

w. Dryden’s All for love is an adaptations of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in which Dryden “improves” Shakespeare’s original by making it fit the classical “rules” (time, place, etc.).

x. Dryden confesses of himself and his contemporaries that they fall below Donne in wit.

y.  Dryden, at near seventy, wrote Fables, a collection of ten thousand verses.

z. "It is sufficient to say, according to the proverb, that here is God's plenty.": Dryden's  comment upon The Canterbury Tales.

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