Dryden As Writer Of Comedy

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Summery of Dryden Source:(A book) Restoration Comedy 1660-1720, Bonamy Dobree Dryden, born in 1631 and died in 1700, was a great satirist, popular for it. He wrote five plays ; The Wild Gallant, Sir Martin Mar-all, Marriage a la Mode and Amphitryon He was the forerunner and equal to Pop. He didn’t care much for life, e.g. politics and religion, he only wanted to be left alone to pursue his dominating unique interest, literature. Jonson considered him as the father of English criticism. And that is because he criticizes as an attempt to approach the artist, or even the work of art by penetrating the mysteries of art itself structurally. His criticism was valuable, but his mistake was, from the modern point of view, that he didn’t consider a work of art so much as it ought to be. But still, we love his work for the manner of it’s doing, which is incomparable, and itself a great art. He was misunderstood because of his passion to correct in poetic language. Dryden, like the people of his age did not like what Shakespeare was trying to do; but yet he is the author of the finest panegyrics upon him. His epistle dedicatory to Amphitryon reveals his steady sense of proportion. For If Dryden’s mind was not profound, it was extraordinarily acute and well-balanced, and for all his “improvements” of the language, for all his vast learning, which he wore so easily and distributed with so little pedantry, he realized that in his own works and in those of his contemporaries, something was missing; although his was “a much better age than the last. He confessed that playwriting was hard even on him but because of his critical skill and his high creative capacity he was able to create work of very pure metal. We can say about Dryden that “everything which he does, becomes him..”.Everything he did he did very well, and so when he came to writing comedy he knew exactly
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