John Dryden was not only the leading writer of the Restoration period, but also one of those rare major authors equally adept and accomplished in several literary genres. He began as a playwright, creating comedies, tragedies, operas, and adaptations so free as to qualify as original plays--for instance, All for Love (performed in 1677), Dryden's version of Antony and Cleopatra, was so highly regarded that it displaced the Shakespearean original from the English stage for a century. After establishing himself as a dramatist, and helping reestablish the English theater, which had been thoroughly stifled by the Puritans during the Interregnum, Dryden turned increasingly toward poetry, producing an impressively wide range of verse--dedicatory poems, panegyrics, elegies, songs, sharp verse satires on politics and on literature, straight, exploratory poems (usually with a touch of satire) on science, religion, philosophy, music, painting. If that were not range enough, he gradually expanded into...