Series:

Works of John Dryden

20 primary works

Book 1

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume I
This volume contains the poems of Dryden extending from 1649 to 1680. Along with the poems of Dryden and associated extensive commentaries and textual notes from the editors, this volume contains the dramatic prologues and epilogues Dryden wrote for the plays of other writers from this period of time.

Book 2

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume II
This volume contains the poems of Dryden extending from 1681 to 1684. Along with the poems of Dryden and associated extensive commentaries and textual notes from the editors, this volume contains the dramatic prologues and epilogues Dryden wrote for the plays of other writers from this period of time.

Book 3

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume III
This volume contains the poems of Dryden extending from1685 to 1692. Along with the poems of Dryden and associated extensive commentaries and textual notes from the editors, this volume contains the dramatic prologues and epilogues Dryden wrote for the plays of other writers from this period of time.

Book 4

Cover of The Works of John Dryden - Volume IV
This volume contains the poems of Dryden extending from 1693 to 1696. Mostly these are translations of Roman poetry, specifically the satires of Juvenal and Persius, sections of Ovid's Metamorphoses, Amours, and Art of Love, passages from Homer and Virgil--as well as some elegies of contemporaries composed in his later years. Also included is Dryden's influential essay on the nature of satire entitled "A Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire."

Book 5

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume V
Volumes V and VI concern Dryden's most involved labor: the complete translation of Virgil into English. Volume V contains The Pastorals and The Georgics in their entirety; the first six books of The Aeneid is contained as well.

Book 6

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume VI
Volumes V and VI concern Dryden's most involved labor: the complete translation of Virgil into English. Volume VI contains books 7-12 of The Aeneid, as well as commentary and textual notes to the full works of Virgil translated in these two volumes.

Book 7

Cover of The Works of John Dryden - Volume VII
Dryden's last three years of published works begin with Alexander's Feast and end with Fables, his largest miscellany of poetical translations. Alexander's Feast, like the earlier Song for St. Cecilia's Day (Works, III), was commissioned by the Musical Society for performance at its annual tribute to sacred music. The Fables included selections from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Extensive and detailed notes to these translations show readers how well Dryden succeeded in transmitting the styles and the very sounds of his originals. Volume VII ends with a section of miscellaneous pieces published at other times, including Dryden's only known Latin work. The presentation of the writings in this volume, like that of the entire twenty-volume series, is a tribute not only to Dryden but also to the editors who have guided it through five decades.

Book 8

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume VIII
Volume VIII contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: Wild Gallant, Rival Ladies, and Indian Queen.

Book 9

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume IX
Volume IX contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: Indian Emperour, Secret Love, and Sir Martin Mar-All.

Book 10

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume X
Volume X contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: The Tempest, Tyrannick Love, and An Evening's Love.

Book 11

Cover of Works of John Dryden, Volume XI
Volume XI contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: The Conquest of Granada, Marriage A-la-Mode, and The Assignation.

Book 12

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XII
The three plays in this volume, composed between 1672 or 1673 and 1675, demonstrate Dryden's versatility and inventiveness as a dramatist. "Amboyna", a tragedy written to stir the English to prosecute the Third Dutch War, describes the destruction by the Dutch of English trading posts on two Indonesian islands. Regarded in its time as sensationalist, it is really a dignified drama that decries violence. "The State of Innocence", termed an opera, is a rhymed version of Milton's "Paradise Lost". Though never performed or set to music, it became one of Dryden's most widely read dramas. "Aureng-Zebe", the last and generally considered the best of Dryden's rhymed heroic plays, portrays the rise to power of Mogul emperor Aureng-Zebe (1618-1707).

Book 13

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XIII
Volume XIII contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: "All for Love", "Oedipus", and "Troilus and Cressida".

Book 14

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XIV
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 "crying sin" 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.

Book 15

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XV

The Works of John Dryden, Volume XV

by John Dryden

Published 29 September 1976
Volume XV contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: Albion and Albanius, Don Sebastian, and Amphitryon.

Book 16

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XVI
In the last decade of Dryden's life, he brought four new works before the theatre-going public: a dramatic opera, a tragedy, a tragicomedy, and a number of appendages to an old comedy by John Fletcher, which was revived partly so that Dryden might have the author's third-night profits. He died that night, but his family received the money. The dramatic opera, King Arthur, benefited from a fine score by Henry Purcell and has remained in the operatic repertoire to this day. Cleomenes, the tragedy, was banned until Dryden was able to convince Queen Mary that it did not reflect any seditious sympathy with the exiled James II, after which it was successful. The fate of Love Triumphant, the tragicomedy, was different; possibly because of a growing swell of moral reform, the play was universally damned, even though its themes of incest and miscellaneous fornication had never brought rejection to Dryden in the past. The Secular Masque, Dryden's principal contribution to The Pilgrim by Fletcher, had undistinguished music, but its lively verse and broad review of the previous century kept the piece on the stage for the next fifty years, and in anthologies up to the present.

Book 17

Cover of Works of John Dryden, Volume XVII
This collection of prose writing from the pen of Dryden dates from 1668 to 1691, and contains work that the editors describe as "a sampler of Dryden as biographer-historian, political commentator, religious controversialist, literary polemicist, literary theorist, and practical critic. Among the works contained here is his "Essay of Dramatick Poesie."

Book 18

Cover of Works of John Dryden, Volume XVIII
This volume contains Dryden's 1684 translation of Louis Maimbourg's "The History of the League," 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.

Book 19

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XIX
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.

Book 20

Cover of The Works of John Dryden, Volume XX
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.