Dryden of course neither wrote nor adapted a Hamlet. But sometimes negatives, or questions, can say as much as positives. And Dryden is perhaps an odder, a more involved figure than might be surmised from his enormous productivity - from his energy, his directness, his mass and variety of achievement. This first of our great professional poets may have understood very fully the oxymoron in that phrase, 'professional poet': may have known, even beyond the withdrawals of his own temperament, how many silences went into being so formidably articulate. Biographers don't forget the history of himself that Dryden was to have given John Aubrey, but that he never gave.

LRB 4 January 2001 | PDF Download