Bredvold, Louis I. The Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden: Studies in Some Aspects of
Seventeenth-Century Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1934. [Despite its age,
Bredvold's study remains a useful introduction to intellectual background. Bredvold argues that
Dryden's political and religious shifts are consistent with his basic skepticism.]
Dryden, John. The Poems of John Dryden, ed. James Kinsley. 4 vols. Oxford, 1958. [A standard, reliable edition of the poems and translations.]
---. The Works of John Dryden, ed. E. N. Hooker, et al. 20 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1956-2002. [The primary scholarly edition of Dryden's complete works, including the poems, translations, plays, and prose.]
Eliot, T. S. John Dryden, The Poet, the Dramatist, the Critic. New York: Holliday, 1932. [Eliot's short but classic study did much to restore the appreciation of Dryden in the twentieth century. Eliot credits Dryden with establishing a normal speech, valid for both prose and poetry, and claims him as "the first master of English criticism."]
Hall, James M. John Dryden: A Reference Guide. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984. [A usefully annotated bibliography of critical and scholarly works on Dryden, from 1668 to 1981. The works are grouped chronologically by year.]
Hammond, Paul. John Dryden: A Literary Life. 1991. [A clearly written but relatively brief study, more concerned with criticism and historical context than with personal biography. The chapters, arranged in roughly chronological order, focus on kinds of writing and suggest both the scope and the shape of Dryden's career: Dryden as apprentice, new writer, dramatist, critic, political writer, religious writer, and translator.]
Hammond, Paul and David Hopkins, eds. The Poems of John Dryden. 4 vols. London: Longman, 1995-200. [Volumes 1 and 2 (1995) were edited by Hammond; volumes 3 and 4 (2000) by Hammond and Hopkins. Volume 1, covering the poetry written between 1649 and 1681, contains both Mac Flecknoe and Absalom and Achitophel. The texts of the poems are modernized; the main value of the edition lies in its extensive and vastly informative annotation.]
Harth, Philip. Contexts of Dryden's Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. [Argues, against Bredvold's view, that Dryden was not a skeptic, that Religio Laici is in the mainstream of Anglican (Latitudinarian) thought and that The Hind and the Panther in the mainstream of Catholic apologetics.]
---. Pen for a Party: Dryden's Tory Propaganda in its Contexts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. [Harth's careful examination concentrates on the cluster of poems that Dryden wrote regarding the exclusion crisis, particularly Absalom and Achitophel; Harth argues that the significant context for the poems is not the events of the crisis itself as much as the propaganda on both sides.]
Latt, David J. and Samuel Holt Monk. John Dryden: Survey and Bibliography of Critical Studies 1895-1974. Minneapolis, 1976. [An indispensable bibliography of earlier scholarship. Its scope is broader than Hall's, but its annotations less thorough.]
McFadden, George. Dryden the Public Writer, 1660-1685. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978. [Argues that Dryden "worked with the poet's gifts of language and fictive power to put the life of his time before the imagination of his contemporaries. The chapter on Absalom and Achitophel argues that Dryden's purpose is less to influence the outcome of Shaftesbury's trial than to make the general case for the King, and that his most telling point is that the Whig "rebels" would be irresponsible custodians of the nation's property.]
McHenry, Robert W., Jr. Contexts 3: Absalom and Achitophel. Hamden, CT: Archon, 1986. [Reprints contemporary material on the Popish Plot and its aftermath, including material by or about the characters of Dryden's poem.]
Oden, Richard L., ed. Dryden and Shadwell: The Literary Controversy and Mac Flecknoe. Delmay, NY: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1977. [Reprints material by Dryden and Shadwell relevant to their quarrel. The introduction argues that Mac Flecknoe was written in 1676 and occasioned by Shadwell's The Virtuoso.]
Selden, Raman. John Dryden, Absalom and Achitophel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. [A short introduction to the poem: a section-by-section commentary, followed by chapters on contexts, on satire, on the use of the Bible, and on the heroic couplet.]
Schilling, Bernard N. Dryden and the Conservative Myth: A Reading of Absalom and Achitophel. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961. [Sees Dryden as believing in a myth of order ("the control of energy") and Absalom and Achitophel as "a statement of what order in society has to mean." Considers the myth in relation to Dryden's personality and his period, and reads the poem in terms of the issues, as they emerge.]
Thomas, W. K. The Crafting of Absalom and Achitophel: Dryden's "Pen for a Party." Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1978. [A clear, if somewhat mechanical reading of the poem as a response to the Exclusion Crisis. Looks at the characters of the poem and sees it as a Varronian satire that follows the structure of classical rhetoric.]
Winn, James. Critical Essays on John Dryden. New York: G. K. Hall, 1997. [A collection of essays, mostly republished, by major scholars covers a wide range of Dryden's writing and a variety of approaches to it. Phillip Harth compares Dryden's political poems of the late 1660s to those of the early 1680s and argues that they reflect different poetic stances in response to different contexts rather than significant changes in Dryden's views. A. E. Wallace Maurer caustically surveys various efforts to read Absalom and Achitophel in terms of a particular genres and finds that although Dryden used elements of many, none satisfactorily describes the whole poem; the poem's consisting force derives from its verse form and from its dialectic effort to get readers to think comprehensively about the issues. Howard Weinbrot treats the poem as political and moral satire, and he reads it in terms of the father-son relationship between David/Charles and Absalom/Monmouth.]
---. John Dryden and his World. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987. [A compendious and detailed life, with considerable attention to historical and cultural contexts. Analyzes most of Dryden's major works (over twenty pages on Absalom and Achitophel). Sees Dryden as "not only a fascinating individual talent, but a man whose associations illuminate the crucial ideas and events of his time." A major and now indispensable work.]
Zwicker, Steven N. Dryden's Political Poetry: The Typology of King and Nation. Providence: Brown University Press, 1972. [Opening chapters on typology and on "sacred historiography" in the Stuart period introduce discussion of seven poems on the King. Analyzes the characters of Absalom and Achitophel and their metaphorical significance; argues that the poem "demonstrates both Dryden's increased satiric and imaginative energy and his growing awareness that the unregenerated English Israelites might simply refuse to be saved by the Stuart patriarchs."]
---. Politics and Language in Dryden's Poetry: The Arts of Disguise. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. [Language is a prime tool of politics, and disguise is characteristic of both Dryden's voice and his material. Absalom and Achitophel is not a moderate poem but threatens severe (but justified) monarchical authority. The poem adopts a moderate disguise, however, in its mixture of genres, its various audiences, and its crafty use of its source. Dryden eliminates other alternatives than rebellion and loyalty. Discussions of the political and religious poems, the fables, the translations, but not Mac Flecknoe.]
---, ed. The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. [A selection of essays by major scholars; the selection covers the broad spectrum of Dryden's works. Particularly relevant to his satire are the introduction and conclusion by Zwicker, Paul Davis on Augustan culture, Harold Love on Dryden's London, and Ronald Paulson on Dryden's satire. Paulson looks at the two major satires in the context of the Preface to Juvenal and argues that Dryden's satires are characterized by similes, by wit, and by a Varronian mixture of styles.
Rochester
Burns, Edward, ed. Reading Rochester. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995. [Includes ten mostly new essays by British scholars, arranged in three sections: "text and gender," "form and intellect," and "Rochester and others." The first section discusses the naughty poems in a variety of ways; the second and most useful considers the philosophical poems; the third traces Rochester's relations to Pope, Jonson, Oldham, and Dryden.]
Burnet, Gilbert. Some Passages in the Life and Death of John, Earl of Rochester, 1680. Menston, Eng.: Scolar Press, 1972. [Burnet was the clergyman who counseled Rochester during his final illness and his late conversion to Christianity; his account of their conversations, although not completely reliable, is a classic case of the Christian converting the skeptic and an interesting source for Rochester's earlier opinions.]
Combe, Kirk. A Martyr for Sin: Rochester's Critique of Polity, Sexuality, and Society. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999. [Argues that Rochester's writings "apprehend, expose, and censor the general politics of truth contrived by the ultimately privileged power broker of the day-the court of Charles." Looks at contemporary views of Rochester as courtier, intellectual, and satirist writing against courtly fops and their imitators and at the "neo-Epicurean" intellectual, linguistic, and political climate of Restoration culture. The central chapters analyze "the qualities of narrative alienation and textual/linguistic chaos in the major satires," and "the previously underappreciated political project in Rochester's sexual lyrics."]
Farley-Hills, David. Rochester's Poetry. London: Bell and Hyman; Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. [Sees Rochester as both a rebellious and conventional poet, and looks at his poetry in the context of Restoration literary conventions. Of particular interest to satire scholars are his chapters on seventeenth-century satire and on Rochester's satires, which he classifies as "philosophical satires" (Upon Nothing, Satyr against Mankind) and "social satires" (Timon, Allusion to Horace, Tunbridge Wells, and Artemisia to Chloe). Argues that Rochester's innovation as a satirist was his controlled and orderly style and meter, which he learned from the French. Sees Artemisia to Chloe as uniting Rochester's philosophical skepticism and his social observation. It is "the summit of Rochester's poetic achievement."]
Fisher, Nicholas, ed. That Second Bottle: Essays on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. [Many of the essays in this collection are rather narrow and specialized, but exceptions are Warren Chernaik on friendship (and hate), Marianne Thormählen on love, Paul Hammond on homoeroticism, and Gillian Manning on Artemiza to Chloe.]
Griffin, Dustin H. Satires Against Man: The Poems of Rochester. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973. [Griffin's study is one of the earliest to treat Rochester's poems from a serious and sophisticated critical point of view. Sound readings of the poems are grouped in chapters on skepticism, libertinism, sex, the Satyr against Mankind, and the age.]
Love, Harold, ed. The Works of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. [The best and most recent edition of Rochester's works; it now replaces the editions by Vieth, Walker,and Ellis. (But since it is quite expensive, you will probably want to check it in the library, especially for passages you want to cite. Of the less expensive editions, Walker's is probably the most satisfactory.)]
Thormählen, Marianne. Rochester: The Poems in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. [A particularly fine critical treatment of the range of Rochester's works that sees the in their intellectual as well as historical and literary contexts. Readings of the poems are grouped under the headings "Cupid and Bacchus" (primarily on drinking), "Men and Women," "Pride and Philosophy," "Court and Social," and "Craft and Art."]
Treglown, Jeremy, ed. The Letters of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. Oxford: Basil Blackwood, 1980. [Rochester's letters, most often to his close friends, his wife, and his mistress Elizabeth Barry, manifest what Treglown calls his "manic energy," but they also show his thoughtfulness and even tenderness. Thus they reveal a full picture of a complicated man. The edition includes letters to and from Rochester, a good introduction, useful headnotes, and full annotation.]
---, ed. Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1982. [Among the nine essays in this collection, the most useful seem to be Barbara Everett's somewhat rambling treatment of Rochester's negativism, Jeremy Treglown on his opportunistic and allusive style and approach, David Trotter on the cultural background of Rochester's satiric paradoxes (with a useful discussion of Dryden on satire), and Sarah Wintle on the complex implications of the libertine poems for sexual politics.]
Vieth, David M. Attribution in Restoration Poetry: A Study of Rochester's Poems of 1680 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. [A crucial problem in Rochester scholarship, not yet fully resolved, is what he actually wrote and how we know it. Vieth's pioneering work in establishing Rochester's canon discusses general methods in attribution and the specific (often problematic) evidence for attributing Rochester's poems.]
---, ed. John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester: Critical Essays. New York: Garland, 1988. [A collection of previously published essays. Particularly noteworthy are Anne Righter on Rochester's disguises, John Sitter on Rochester's audience, Ronald Paulson on the relation of obscenity to politics, Reba Wilcoxon on Rochester's sexual politics, John O'Neill on "The Imperfect Enjoyment," essays on "Satyr Against Mankind" by Thomas Fujimara, C. F. Main, and Charles Knight, David Vieth on the "Anti-Aristolelian" character of several satires by Rochester (and others), and David Sheehan on "Artemisia to Chloe."
---. Rochester Studies, 1925-1982: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1984. [A thorough but now outdated bibliography of earlier studies of Rochester. The comments on each work are informative and useful, if somewhat opinionated.]