Palamon and Arcite | Page 7

Dryden, too,
turned Romanist, and in 1687 supported his new faith in the long
poetical allegory, the Hind and the Panther. Of course his enemies
cried turncoat; and it certainly looked like it. Dryden was well into
manhood before the religious instinct stirred in him, and then, once
waking, he naturally walked in the beaten track. But these instincts,
though roused late, possessed the poet's impetuosity; and it was merely
a natural intensifying of the same impulse that had brought him into the
Church of England, which carried him to a more pronounced religious
manifestation, and landed him in the Church of Rome. His sincerity is
certainly backed by his acts, for when James had fled, and the staunch
Protestants William and Mary held the throne, he absolutely refused to
recant, and sacrificed his positions and emoluments. He was stripped of
his royal offices and pensions, and, bitter humiliation, the laurel, torn
from his brow, was placed on the head of that scorned jangler in verse,
Shadwell.
Deprived now of royal patronage and pensions, Dryden turned again to
the stage, his old-time purse-filler; and he produced two of his best
plays, Don Sebastian_ and _Amphitryon. The rest of his life, however,
was to be spent, not with the drama, but in translation and paraphrase.
Since 1684 he had several times published Miscellanies, collections of
verse in which had appeared fragments of translations. With that
indefatigable energy which characterized him, he now devoted himself
to sustained effort. In 1693 he published a translation of Juvenal, and in
the same year began his translation of Virgil, which was published in
1697. The work was sold by subscription, and the poet was fairly well
paid. Dryden's translations are by no means exact; but he caught the
spirit of his poet, and carried something of it into his own effective
verse.
Dryden was not great in original work, but he was particularly happy in
adaptation; and so it happened that his best play, All for Love, was
modeled on Shakspere's Antony and Cleopatra, and his best poem,
Palamon and Arcite_, was a paraphrase of the _Knight's Tale of
Chaucer. Contrary to the general taste of his age, he had long felt and

often expressed great admiration for the fourteenth-century poet. His
work on Ovid had first turned his thought to Chaucer, he tells us, and
by association he linked with him Boccaccio. As his life drew near its
close he turned to those famous old story-tellers, and in the Fables gave
us paraphrases in verse of eight of their most delightful tales, with
translations from Homer and Ovid, a verse letter to his kinsman John
Driden, his second St. Cedlia's Ode_, entitled Alexander's Feast_, and
an Epitaph.
The Fables were published in 1700. They were his last work. Friends
of the poet, and they were legion, busied themselves at the beginning of
that year in the arrangement of an elaborate benefit performance for
him at the Duke's Theater; but Dryden did not live to enjoy the
compliment. He suffered severely from gout; a lack of proper treatment
induced mortification, which spread rapidly, and in the early morning
of the first of May, 1700, he died.
He had been the literary figurehead of his generation, and the elaborate
pomp of his funeral attested his great popularity. His body lay in state
for several days and then with a great procession was borne, on the
13th of May, to the Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey. The last years
of his life had been spent in fond study of the work of Chaucer, and so
it happened that just three hundred years after the death of elder bard
Dryden was laid to rest by the side of his great master.
PALAMON AND ARCITE
The Fables, in which this poem appears, were published in 1700. The
word fable as here used by Dryden holds its original meaning of story
or tale. Besides the Palamon and Arcite, he paraphrased from Chaucer
the Cock and the Fox_, the _Flower and the Leaf_, the Wife of Bath's
Tale_, the Character of the Good Parson. From Boccaccio he gave us
Sigismonda and Guiscardo, Theodore and Honoria_, and Cymon and
Iphigenia_, while he completed the volume with the first book of the
Iliad_, certain of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_, the Epistle to John Driden,
Alexander's Feast_, and an Epitaph_. The _Fables were dedicated to
the Duke of Ormond, whose father and grandfather Dryden had
previously honored in a prose epistle, full of the rather excessive

compliment then in vogue. Palamon and Arcite is itself preceded by a
dedication in verse to the Duchess of Ormond. In the graceful flattery
of this inscription Dryden excelled himself, and he was easily grand
master of the art in that age of superlative gallantry. The Duke
acknowledged the compliment by a