Although better known today for his poetic satires, classical translations, and critical prose, John Dryden was the dominant dramatist of his generation. His twenty-seven plays include farces, comedies, tragicomedies, operas, and heroic tragedies in rhyme and blank verse. More than any other figure, he shaped the emerging style of the English drama after the eighteen-year hiatus enforced by the civil wars and the Interregnum. His theoretical writings on the drama, which began with the dedication to his first published play (1664) and continued into the last years of his life, are the first sustained body of serious dramatic criticism in English. In this as in other aspects of his career Dryden was a restless thinker, changing his positions in response to the development of his own talents and a rapidly changing political and intellectual world.

Dryden's parents came from prominent Northamptonshire families linked by landholding, Puritanism, intermarriage, and opposition...