DRYDEN and his SATIRE

DRYDEN and his SATIRE

 The English satirist who used the sharp edge of praise to attack his victims was
(A) Ben Jonson
(B) John Donne
(C) John Dryden
(D) Samuel Butler
As poet laureate, Dryden could not stand aside, and in November 1681 he came to the support of the king(Whig) with his Absalom and Achitophel, Adopting as his framework the Old Testament story of King David (Charles II), his favourite son Absalom (Monmouth), and the false Achitophel (Shaftesbury), who persuaded Absalom to revolt against his father. As anti-Whig propaganda,  as pro-Tory propaganda it is equally remarkable for its serene and persuasive affirmation. When a London grand jury refused to indict Shaftesbury for treason, his fellow Whigs voted him a medal. In response Dryden published early in 1682 The Medall, a work full of unsparing invective against the Whigs, prefaced by a vigorous and plainspoken prose “Epistle to the Whigs.” In the same year,  in Mac Flecknoe Shadwell’s abilities as a literary artist and critic are ridiculed so ludicrously and with such good-humoured contempt that his reputation has suffered ever since. The basis of the satire, which represents Shadwell as a literary dunce, is the disagreement between him and Dryden over the quality of Ben Jonson’s wit. Dryden thinks Jonson deficient in this quality, while Shadwell regards the Elizabethan playwright with uncritical reverence. This hilarious comic lampoon was both the first English mock-heroic poem and the immediate ancestor of Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad.

In his longest poem, the beast fable The Hind and the Panther (1687), he argued the case for his adopted church against the Church of England and the sects. His earlier Religio Laici (1682) had argued in eloquent couplets for the consolations of Anglicanism and against unbelievers, Protestant dissenters, and Roman Catholics.