Books by John Dryden

Portrays the motives high and low that make marriage the pivotal institution of a nation.

In this play, the author deploys verbal and theatrical wit in his combination of two plots - a complex exploration of of the language of social exchange and personal feeling between typically well-born men and women of late-17th-century England.

A scholarly edition of poems by John Dryden. The edition presents an authoritative text, together with an introduction, commentary notes, and scholarly apparatus.

In the last decade of Dryden's life, he wrote four new works: a dramatic opera; a tragedy; a tragicomedy; and appendages to an old comedy by John Fletcher. The plays are presented in this volume: "King Arthur", "Love Triumphant", "The Secular Masque" and "The Pilgrim".

The three plays in this volume, composed between 1672 or 1673 and 1675, demonstrate Dryden's versatility and inventiveness as a dramatist.

Kept women, comic clerics, and political schemers enliven the four plays in this volume of the California Dryden. Dryden asserted that The Kind Keeper was a moral play, dedicated to exposing the "e;crying sin"e; of keeping a mistress. The production was closed after three nights, but whether because of the play's success in moralizing, or in exposing, is hard to know.

For the first time since 1695, a complete text of De Arte Graphica as Dryden himself wrote it is available to readers. In all, Volume XX presents six pieces written during Dryden's final decade, each of them either requested by a friend or commissioned by a publisher. Two are translations, three introduce translations made by others, and the sixth introduces an original work by one of Dryden's friends.The most recent version of De Arte Graphica, Saintsbury's late nineteenth-century reissue of Scott's edition, based the text of the translated matter on an edition that was heavily revised by someone other than Dryden. In fact, only one of the pieces offered here, the brief Character of Saint-Evremond, has appeared complete in a twentieth-century edition. The commentary in this volume supplies biographical and bibliographical contexts for these pieces and draws attention to the views on history and historians, poetry and painting, Virgil and translation, which Dryden expresses in them.Many other volumes of prose, poetry, and plays are available in the California Edition of The Works of John Dryden.

This volume contains Dryden's 1688 translation of Dominiques Bouhours "The Life of St. Francis Xavier," a sixteenth century Jesuit and missionary to the Far East.

This volume contains Dryden's 1684 translation of Louis Maimbourg's "e;The History of the League,"e; a work relating to the religious wars of France in the preceding century, and which Dryden used as a commentary on the religious persecutions of his own time in England.