The Cambridge Companion to John Dryden

Dr. Johnson's scornful equation of imprisonment and dependence on a patron (“Commonly a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid with flattery”) is shared by the modern reader, even though patronage takes different forms today. Dryden's grandiose and extended praise of patrons in his dedications appears to be egregiously dishonest (if ingenious) flattery, a view forcibly supported by Johnson. “When once he has undertaken the task of praise he no longer retains shame in himself, nor supposes it in his patron,” and is “more delighted with the fertility of his invention than mortified by the prostitution of his judgement”: his dedication to The State of Innocence is written “in a strain of flattery which disgraces genius, and . . . it was wonderful that any man that knew the meanings of his own words could use without self-detestation.”

Johnson’s own hard-won independence, however, was only possible because by the mid-eighteenth century the book trade was beginning to support professional authors. That was not the case in Dryden’s day. Although as a professional playwright and from 1668 a shareholder in the King’s Company, Dryden on occasions made as much as £300 a year from his contract, poetry was another matter altogether: for most of Dryden’s working life any reward for poetry could only come, in one way or another, from patronage.