Dryden’S Milton and the Theatre of Imagination

Abstract Among the many satires deploring Dryden’s conversion to Rome, one of the more obscure describes him as hanging ‘(like Mecha’s tomb) I Twixt Malmsbury and Helicon’. If Dryden had been long thus suspended between Hobbesian and classicizing thought, his conversion in the mid-1680s must have brought him relif Unlike the satirist, we may view his choice of faith more sympathetically, as Dryden’s attempt to free himself from the pains this suspension had caused—pains we may see as almost existentialist, except that they were also shaded by the often punitive cast of seventeenth-century soteriology. In the mid-168os, then, Dryden had converted less from Protestantism to Catholicism, or from scepticism to fideism, than from an almost Hobbesian determinism to a more traditional Christian voluntarism. I am interested in the poetic consequences of the shift, with reference to his changing reaction to that epic of choice, Paradise Lost.