John Dryden

M. G. Lewis is a more complicated case, treated with some nuance. SG admires The Monk but feels that after that Lewis's real talent was obscured by the baneful influence of German fiction: she agrees...

She praised Creech's version (the first available in English) as making ancient learning available to women, whose education (according to the scanted Customs of the Nation) keeps women from reading great writers...

She notes that poets have lived difficult and unappreciated lives, and that many have been forgotten. Quoting a remark by Pope (that time, which has made Chaucer unintelligible, will one day do the same with...

Its boldness in argument—seeking to lift women to an Equallity [sic] with men—may stem from its anonymity. It is also interesting as literary criticism, notably on Dryden , Wycherley , Congreve , and Locke

Her poetry as a whole is conspicuous for its versatility. Her major early influences (Katherine Philips and Abraham Cowley ) were succeeded by Dryden . (She always denied any influence from Pope .) But...

The elderly lady, Lady Arabella, represents a chilly view of the English aristocracy. She opens her story with a paean in praise of past times and in dispraise of the present: How interminably long the...

Lucretius , as a pagan philosopher and theologian (and, as LH and her contemporaries believed, insane much of the time and sexually promiscuous), was a daring choice for one of her religious opinions.

In some sense, therefore, she dictated the terms of the anthology. Its full title was The Virgin Muse: Being a Collection of Poems from our Most Celebrated English Poets, designed for the use of...

This was not the first dictionary of English, but its predecessors had remained more or less close to the model of a word-list, omitting common words or any attempt to distinguish one idiomatic usage from...

An Argument explains the poem's source in Plutarch. AF 's hero, whose father was an associate of Alexander the Great , is dead after many vicissitudes. His ashes make a triumphal progress by sea from...

Her title is a near-quotation from the lyric by Dryden which closes The Secular Masque; NL both quotes Dryden and thanks him. Her preface says Madeline Smith—may the earth lie lightly upon her—gave...

AB 's comedy The Widdow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia, the first play to be set in British North America, had a posthumous performance at Drury Lane which may have been...

On the death of John Dryden , DM edited The Nine Muses, an all-female collection of elegies on him.

MW has adapted two German plays for English productions: Heinrich von Kleist 's Penthesilea, about the Amazons (1977), and Ernst Toller 's The Blind Goddess (1981). She also adapted Githa Sowerby 's Rutherford and...

The title is a complex allusion to traditional gender roles, specifically to the sex appeal of male martial prowess. John Dryden 's line None but the brave deserve the fair (itself in context a propaganda...