Preface to the Fables by John Dryden Presented by: Rabeya Sultana

Department of English, Uttara University

1. Preface to the Fables By John Dryden (1631-1700) WELCOME TO MY PRESENTATION

2. Rabeya Sultana Dolan ID-F21533111016 Batch-38 th

3. SHORT BIOGRAPHY John Dryden  was an English  poet ,  literary critic ,  translator , and  playwright  who was made England's first  Poet Laureate  in 1668 . Dryden was born at the vicarage of Aldwinkle in Northampshire on August 9, 1631 to a family of rising Puritan gentry. His parents name is Erasmus Dryden and Mary Pickering. He Graduating with a BA in 1654 at Trinity College, Cambridge. On 1 December 1663 Dryden married Lady Elizabeth Howard & He had three sons. Died on 12 May in 1700.

4. CAREER H is father’s death in June 1654, he moved to London to acquire work with Cromwell's Secretary of State, John Thurloe .  His first play  The Wild Gallant  appeared in 1663, wich was not successful.  During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in  Restoration comedy , his best-known work being  Marriage à la Mode  (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy.  his dramatic career began when he published  Annus Mirabilis . He wrote almost 30 plays and was one of the great dramatists of his time . All for Love, A Mphitryon , Secret Love, The Indian Emperor, The Indian Queen, The Rival Ladies, Fables: Ancient and Modern are some of his great plays . As a translator, he made great literary works in the older languages available to readers of English.

5. Philosophy of Dryden Dryden was the dominant literary figure and influence of his age In his poems, translations, and criticism, he established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet. Criticizes the then society through his writings His writing style was unique, mostly employing daily patterns and rhythms used in everyday speech.

6. AGE OF DRYDEN The  period  from 1660 to 1700 is designated as the  Age  of Restoration or the  Age of Dryden In that time, his poetry set the tone of the new age in achieving a new clarity and in establishing a self-limiting, somewhat impersonal canon of moderation and good taste.  Dryden defined the stylistic restraint, compression, clarity, and common sense that he exemplified in his own poetry and that he showed to be lacking in much of the poetry of the preceding age, particularly in the exuberant.  In his heroic tragedies The Conquest of Granada (1670) and All for Love; or, The World Well Lost (1678), a rewriting of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra in the new taste, Dryden showed a different and not always satisfying side of his talent and exemplified the dominant quality of all Restoration tragedy .

7. ANALYSIS OF FABLES Fable :  A fable is a brief tale conveying a moral.  Usually, in fables beast and birds are made to act and speak like human beings.  But Dryden’s Fables are in no sense fables, but rather tales in verse.  They are verse paraphrases of tales by Chaucer, Boccaccio and Ovid. The Background :  In the Preface to the Fables, Dryden explains the background and project of the Fables.  He explains how the project was taken up on a very modest scale which however expanded to the full size of a book.  Metaphorically, Dryden says that he had only planned to build a lodge, but ended up with a house.   Dryden began with a translation of the first book of Homer’s Iliad. This was done as an experiment.  However it was a great success.  The success gave him confidence and he soon turned to another writer,Ovid .  He translated into simple English Ovid’s  ‘Metamorphoses ’.  These experiments and the success he got, encouraged him to choose five tales from Chaucer’s famous work “ Canterbury Tales ”.  Later he translated three of Boccaccio’s Tales.  At the end of the preface Dryden says that he makes no claims as to the merits of his translation.  He leaves it to the readers to decide.