Well in advance of Calvin's entry into his vocation as a reformer of the church in Geneva and Strasbourg, the sixteenth century had already displayed a remarkable preoccupation with biblical interpretation and, as a consequence, an unprecedented eruption of exegetical publications. Factors contributing to this eruption are not difficult to identify, and Calvin's career and character as a biblical interpreter would recapitulate most of them.

To begin with, the medium of intellectual exchange was forever altered by the dissemination of the printing press throughout Europe. As the costs of printing fell, books ceased to be a luxury item. Coupled to the growth of printing was a rising tide of scholarship that both consumed and produced those books. The humanist cry: Ad fontes - “back to the sources” - fueled scholars' appetites for these same sources as they emerged from the presses. Scholarship itself, along with scholarly standards, kept pace. A mastery of Latin alone was no longer enough to make one a respectable scholar: Greek and Hebrew were also required, and the growing competence of sixteenth-century scholars nourished, in turn, keener critical skills. For example, if these burgeoning sources, editions, and tools reminded scholars and preachers that there were new discoveries to be made in their old Bibles, Erasmus' early textual criticism of the New Testament undermined the magisterium of the Latin Vulgate and warned his readers they could not take even the wording of the Bible for granted, much less its theological content.

'Trieste - Zurich - Paris, 1914-1921'; 'Paris, 1922-1939'. Anyone who has read Joyce will recognize the famous dates and place names which link the writing of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake to a particular context, to circumstances whose importance is not merely anecdotal but, if only to judge from the recurrence of these very names in Joyce's last book, structural. Joyce's exile, recaptured by the three cities which, each in its turn, saw the inception of new developments in the writing of Ulysses, was to end in Paris. Does this make him a 'Parisian'? If we speak of Joyce as a 'Parisian', two images, two contrasting clichés, immediately come to mind: Joyce as part of the Bohemian crowd of the 'Expatriates', the Irish genius adding his own tenor voice to the hoarse chorus of drunken American 'Pilgrims' wandering between Odeonia and the cafés of Montparnasse; or the secretive writer, living only with his family and a small group of devotees, pent up in an ivory tower, completely indifferent to his surroundings, absorbed by the drawn out tour de force of having to finish his universal history before the real apocalypse of the century comes... If both clichés indeed contain an element of truth, I shall try to show first that they correspond to different phases of Joyce's Parisian life, and then, that they misconstrue the very organic relationship he had established with his elected Ithaca. Neither, say, Hemingway's version, nor Arthur Power's, can manage to convey the specific role of Paris for Joyce, who may well be called, as Finnegans Wake coins it, a 'paleoparisien' (FW 151.9) - that is, first of all, an 'arch-parisian'.

The fates of Irish Artists: Wilde, Joyce, aestheticism, and nationalism

Early readers of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) aware of the recent history of Irish writing would probably have heard an echo of Oscar Wilde (1856-1900) in Joyce's title. Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) concerns an artist, the painter Basil Hallward, who produces a portrait of the young Dorian Gray that, like Joyce's work, portrays and reveals the artist himself. Hallward's painting of a young man is 'a portrait of the artist', as Hallward declares in the first chapter of Wilde's book. The Greek names given to the central characters in both works invite the association, which yields a difference: Stephen Dedalus's story of intended escape from Ireland's limitations contrasts with Dorian Gray's self-destruction in England. Dorian murders the artist and kills himself, while Stephen tries to bring himself into being as an artist. Wilde is never mentioned in A Portrait, as he is in Ulysses (1922), perhaps because Joyce was more at ease later in his career about acknowledging his precursor's place in his work. He may also have felt that the similarity of the titles was sufficiently evident to conjure Wilde's book and his life as important contexts for reading A Portrait.

It can safely be assumed that John Calvin had an enormous impact on the world of the sixteenth century. From language, to models of community life, to habits of mind, to ideals of interpretation of religious texts - in these and numerous other areas, Calvin's effect can only be calculated, it cannot be argued. However, if that historical heritage of the Genevan reformer can be presumed, we are left with the question of the present. Certainly Calvin had great achievements in his own time. But what of his legacy? Where does Calvin's thought live today? This is not an easy question. How can one consider where the influence of John Calvin still lives today?

The difficulties are somewhat daunting. Some may deny Calvin the lion's share of influence, noting that he is not the most original thinker in the broad Reformed tradition. Others might attempt a Calvinistic “maximalism,” which seeks, for good or for ill, to see Calvin's influence almost everywhere. Neither approach is correct. When John Calvin died in 1564, he left a tremendous literary corpus, which might alone have secured his heritage.

But he also had endeavored, through an extensive network of acquaintancesand a widespread correspondence, to influence the world outside ofGeneva.

Dryden's Fables Ancient and Modern; Translated into Verse, From Homer, Ovid, Boccacce, & Chaucer: with Original Poems appeared less than two months before his death on 1 May 1700. This personal miscellany closed a prolific career shaped by contention and contest in what Dryden had come increasingly to call “this bad Age.” The volume also marked the end of a decade, and of a century, of intense print quarrels. The two central debates of the 1690s, to which Fables responds, are the controversy between the ancients and the moderns and, more urgently and the subject of this chapter, the Collier controversy over the morals and purposes of theatre. The nonjuring clergyman Jeremy Collier and Sir Richard Blackmore, the physician-poet, were two of a wave of controversialists attacking Restoration theatre as libertine and atheistic. Their critique of the theatre of Dryden and his satanic “fraternity” and their defense of home, marriage, and Christian sensibility were part of a public campaign against vice and in defense of the sanctity of family, a campaign led by the government of the Dutch-speaking king who himself had seemed to abandon home for war. In this his final work, Dryden appears to be elevated above the fray, absorbed by new literary interests, by frail health, and at home among literary friends and relations. Yet in Fables he refuses to sidestep the print quarrels; rather, Dryden complicates their dichotomies and underscores the constant round of battle, predation, and judgment.

Near the beginning of his elegy for Yeats, Auden imagines the poet now “scattered among a hundred cities / And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections.” The image wonderfully conjures the transformation of the poet in the lives of readers far beyond original geographies, intentions, and ways of feeling. So it has been for Dryden, except that in Dryden's case it has not been only “unfamiliar affections” to which the poet was given over. There was the immediate and there has been the lasting affection of poets - Congreve, Pope, Scott, Byron, and Hopkins; T. S. Eliot, Auden himself, and most recently Geoffrey Hill. But in his own time, and thereafter, Dryden was also “given over” to enmity, rivalry, and suspicion. And there has been a related question, from his time to ours, of location: to whom and in whose company does Dryden belong?

Should we, for example, see him among the ancients or the moderns? For us this hardly seems a question at all. On first impression, and on many subsequent visits, Dryden’s classicism overwhelms our attention: his indebtedness to Latin literature; his ability to see and hear in Restoration London the images and idioms of Rome; and the absorbing project of his last decade, The Works of Virgil in English. He is the great classicist standing midway in the line of poets that reaches from Ben Jonson to Alexander Pope. Nor is classicism only the effect of our distance; no theme was sounded more often or more eloquently in the elegies that commemorated Dryden’s death than his intimacy with the ancients. He is the living Virgil, the British Ovid, the English Homer; he improved on Lucretius, revived Juvenal, made clear the crabbed Persius, weaving ancient wit “richer in the British Loom,” refining antiquity in verse that joins “manly strength with Modern softness.”

Dryden had good reason to know that it could be dangerous to be recognized as an author. On 18 December 1679 the Poet Laureate was attacked in Rose Alley, Covent Garden by several men and badly beaten. Accounts soon appeared in newssheets:

Dryden advertised for information about the identity of those responsible, promising any informer fifty pounds and, if necessary, immunity from prosecution. There is no evidence that he ever found a culprit. Four private accounts of the time record that the assault was provoked by Dryden’s supposed authorship of An Essay upon Satire, an anonymous poem recently circulated in manuscript. This had attacked a whole gallery of courtiers, including the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of Charles II’s mistresses (“False, foolish, old, ill-natur’d and ill-bred”). One of the newssheet accounts concurs, reporting that Dryden’s assailants “designed not to rob him but to execute on him some Feminine, if not Popish vengeance” (the duchess was a Roman Catholic).

Dryden's literary life would have been completely different had it not been for the coffee houses of Restoration London. Indeed, coffee houses came to occupy a pivotal position in a series of overlapping literary spheres that swept from the elite culture of the Restoration court to the popular life of the town. Coffee houses were a new type of urban space that first appeared in Oxford in 1650 and then in London in 1652. Dryden early acknowledged as much when he addressed the audience “of Court, of Coffee-houses, or Town” in the “Epilogue” to The Indian Emperor (1667) (Works ix: 112), and Pepys records Dryden's presence in Will's Coffee House even earlier, in 1664:

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.

Dryden's greatest subject, which occupied him all his professional life, was the emergence into history of the modern city. Much of his conduct as a writer - the forms he chose or invented, the kinds of human behavior he examined, and his choice of a poetic rhetoric - were responses to the challenges posed by that subject. Even politics, though national in its terms of reference, was generated, as he saw it, along an axis between Whitehall and Cornhill. In reflecting on the momentous changes in metropolitan organization that were taking place around him and the new kinds of sociability to which they were giving birth, he was also helping to mold and direct these things, never merely an observer. We will look first at his experience of the old metropolis, which came to a spectacular end in September 1666, then his engagement, beginning with Annus Mirabilis, with the new metropolis, and finally his concern, in the last decade of his life, with the relationship of the metropolis to the nation at large.

John Dryden's reticence about religion is one of the most surprising and perplexing of the many ways in which he challenges readers and scholars. As a public poet, Dryden offered weighty statements of religious principle on several occasions, but the variety of voices that he used and his own literary and public persona, as ironic, witty, anti-clerical, and detached, often played against the gravity of his claims. And Dryden's very public path as an individual from scion of the Puritan gentry via sardonic Anglican apologist to Roman Catholic convert was mysterious. This, plainly, was no pilgrim's progress. Although his writings on religion frequently deploy images of travel and trouble, of walking, wandering, of being foot-sore and weary, lost or plodding on, there is little evidence to suggest that Dryden's own journey to the Church of Rome was protracted or difficult. Indeed religion was perhaps of only intermittent interest to Dryden, and then only on his own terms. Yet this is precisely what makes his writings on religion and his own piety so intriguing. To explore them in their historical context is to grapple with an exceptional case, with a writer, thinker, and individual who could see further than the confines of the bitter religious divisions of the seventeenth century and who could marshal imaginative and cultural resources that were beyond the grasp of many of his contemporaries.

The facts are these: Dryden opened his career as a writer by defining himself as a supporter of Oliver Cromwell, in a volume of poems honoring the Protector after his death in September 1658. A short time later, he reappeared on the literary scene as a celebrant of the Restoration. At the time of the Second Dutch War, when the first enthusiasm for Charles II had been considerably tarnished by events and his own behavior, Dryden came to the king's defense indirectly. By 1672, however, in expectation of the Third Dutch War, Dryden could be seen in print as a devoted servant of James, Duke of York, a loyalty he retained long past the point where it ceased to be helpful to him. After the Glorious Revolution, and the arrival of William III, Dryden remained a Jacobite, refusing to dedicate his great translation of Virgil to the new king.

The facts have involved generations of Dryden commentators in an evaluative struggle over whether Dryden was a turn-coat, a time-server, or a man who finally found the leader whose laureate he could sincerely be, in good fortune and bad. The point of this chapter is not, however, to renew the old arguments about principle versus interest, conviction versus prudential adaptability, which can never be resolved to the satisfaction of all of Dryden’s readers, who are not themselves unbiased. I begin instead with the observation that it was scarcely necessary for Dryden to advertise his political allegiances, and their shifts, in such a definitive way. Having done it once, however, he had to keep doing it. History, having pushed him into the public sphere, would change its own direction so many times during his lifetime that he was constantly playing catch-up. Secondly, I want to reconsider the relation between Dryden’s positioning of himself on the political spectrum, and his theories of language and genre. One could see this two ways. Having to restate his allegiances meant having to recast his literary theory so that it seemed to support, if not to require, the larger political change. Alternatively, one could argue a more bizarre thesis: that the literary theory, and the ambitions behind it, drove the political affiliations.

The idea that between the Restoration and the middle of the eighteenth century England enjoyed an “Augustan age” may soon be a thing of the past. Historians were the first to jettison the concept, and by and large literary critics have now followed suit: twenty years ago there would have been a Cambridge Companion to Augustan Literature; today we have the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1650-1740. Some have flung off the term Augustan like a straitjacket, delighted to be free at last to stress tendencies in the culture of Restoration and early eighteenth-century England which might be thought of as un- or even anti-Augustan: the persistence of a republican idiom; the development of a rhetoric of sublimity; the rise of British literature (though, as we shall see, the first two of these fall within the pale of what Dryden understood by Augustanism). Others have abandoned it more reluctantly like a favorite item of clothing now sadly rather moth-eaten and unpresentable, knowing it to be true that the careers of a number of the central writers of the period were shaped by their engagements with the culture of Augustan Rome, but fearing that to point out as much may be to give these writers the kiss of death where modern readers are concerned. First, there is the sheer look of the word: “august” is something only the headmasters of old-fashioned boarding-schools want to be. Then there are the pejorative connotations which have attached themselves to it like foul-smelling fungus: of dreary backward-lookingness; of aesthetic conservatism; of toadying to royalty.