Title:  His Majesties Declaration Defended

Author:  John Dryden

Release Date:  February 15, 2005 [EBook #15074]

Language:  English

Character set encoding:  ASCII

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The Augustan Reprint Society

John Dryden
His Majesties Declaration Defended
(1681)

With an Introduction by Godfrey Davies

Publication Number 23 (Series IV, No. 4)

Los Angeles
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1950

General editors
H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library
Richard C. Boys, University Of Michigan
Edward Niles Hooker, University Of California, Los Angeles
H.T.  Swedenberg, Jr., University Of California, Los Angeles

Assistant editors
W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan
John Loftis, University of California, Los Angeles

Advisory editors
Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, University of Nebraska
Louis I. Bredvold, University of Michigan
Cleanth Brooks, Yale University
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago
Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota
Ernest Mossner, University of Texas
James Sutherland, Queen Mary College, London

INTRODUCTION

Wherever English literature is studied, John Dryden is recognized as the author of some of the greatest political satires in the language.  Until recently the fact has been overlooked that before he wrote the first of these satires, Absalom and Achitophel, he had entered the political arena with the prose tract here reproduced.  The proof that the Historiographer Royal contributed to the anti-Whig propaganda of the spring of 1681 depends partly on contemporary or near-contemporary statements but principally on internal evidence.  An article by Professor Roswell G. Ham (The Review of English Studies, XI (1935), 284-98; Hugh Macdonald, John Dryden, A Bibliography, p. 167) demonstrated Dryden’s authorship so satisfactorily that it is unnecessary to set forth here the arguments that established this thesis.  The time when Dryden was composing his defence of the royal Declaration is approximately fixed from the reference to it on June 22, 1681, in The Observator, which had noted the Whig pamphlet Dryden was answering under the date of May 26.