Abstract
On May 13, 1700, John Dryden’s remains were interred in Westminster Abbey, and the mourners attending the funeral agreed that the event bordered on catastrophe. Dryden’s admirer, Elizabeth Thomas, recorded the disrespectful treatment supposedly given to Dryden’s corpse (she claims the body was left to rot when the Lord Jeffreys, son of the lord chief justice, reneged on his promise to pay for a lavish burial), while Tom Brown, a long-time antagonist of Dryden, described the scene of the internment with gleeful irreverence. Led by Jacob Tonson (“the Muses Midwife”), the “Rhyming Trade” and its motley attendants (fiddlers, cutpurses, whores, pimps, bullies, and beaux) accompanied the funeral procession with a cacophony of noise:
The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning.
Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self (1988)
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Thomas Shadwell, The Medal of John Bayes (London, 1682), 4.
Julie Stone Peters, Congreve, the Drama, and the Printed Word ( Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990 ), 13.
Terry Belanger, “Publishers and Writers in Eighteenth-Century England,” in Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England, ed. Isabel Rivers (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1982 ), 18.
Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-Theatricality and Effeminization,1579–1642 ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ), 19.
Charles Blount, Mr. Dryden Vindicated (1673), reprinted in Dryden: The Critical Heritage, ed. James Kinsley and Helen Kinsley ( New York: Barnes and Noble, 1971 ), 80.
Terry Castle, “Lab’ring Bards: Birth Topoi and English Poetics 1660–1820,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology 78 (1979): 193–208.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word ( New York: Methuen, 1982 ), 132.
Charles Brome, To the Memory of Mr. Dryden (London, 1700), 9.
Copyright information
© 2001 Linda Zionkowski
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Zionkowski, L. (2001). From the Stage to the Closet: Dryden’s Journey Into Print, Manhood, and Poetic Authority. In: Men’s Work. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299743_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299743_3
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-38645-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-312-29974-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)