A Stingless Bee: the Glorious Revolution in John Dryden’s Translations of Virgil

Abstract

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was an unprecedented event in the history of England which led to the dethronement of King James II and the coronation of a Dutch Protestant, William of Orange, and his wife Mary, James’s daughter, as new monarchs. Because the deposition of a Catholic King was conducted with general public consent, writers of that period did not consider the event worth commenting on, and hence there was a tangible air of silence and passivity around the Glorious Revolution. John Dryden, a convert Catholic, lost his title of Poet Laureate as a result of the revolution but did not entirely retire from writing. He turned to playwriting and translating Virgil, Juvenal and other classics, not only to make a living but also to be able to convey implicit messages to the new king and his reign. The aim of the present article is to analyse Dryden’s allusions towards the political circumstances of post-revolutionary England, hidden between the lines of his translations of Virgil, against the background of the literary passivity in that period as one of the reasons which made Dryden decide to make political comments in an implicit and disguised manner.