Is there a writer in the history of English letters who more completely defines an age than John Dryden? His writing life coincides exactly with the second half of the seventeenth century: he was eighteen in 1649 when he published his first poem; his last work was finished a few weeks before his death in May 1700. Between the elegy for Lord Hastings and The Secular Masque, Dryden created what we have come to know as Restoration literature. He wrote in every mode and genre that thrived in these years; in most cases, Dryden's contributions outgo all rivals. The creation of the poetry and drama, the translations and literary criticism, what we have come to know as The Works of John Dryden, is an incomparable achievement from a writer whose early verse gave little indication of incomparability and whose career was variously driven by partisanship and faction, by professional alliance and literary rivalry, and by the incursion of something like a modern commercial market into the aristocratic precincts of literary patronage.

A poor Northern English gentlewoman, Mary Astell was born in 1666 of a mother from an old Newcastle Catholic gentry family, and of a father who had barely completed his apprenticeship with the company of Hostman of Newcastle upon Tyne, before he died leaving the family debt-ridden when Mary was twelve. With customary spiritedness Mary Astell moved to London when she was twenty, making her literary debut by presenting to the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft, a collection of her girlhood poems, dedicated to him, accompanied by a request for financial assistance. Whether or not the Archbishop, who numbered among the prominent members of the clergy who had refused to swear allegiance to William and Mary, became Astell's patron in fact, we do not know. But Astell entered a circle of High Church prelates and intellectual and aristocratic women, including Lady Anne Coventry, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and Lady Catherine Jones. To Lady Catherine Jones Astell dedicated the Letters Concerning the Love of God (1695) andher magnum opus, The Christian Religion as Profess'd by a Daughter of the Church (1705).

In what respects is Andrew Marvell's “Horatian Ode” an Horatian ode? Marvell and his contemporaries gathered their ideas of Horace and of Horatian odes from a variety of sources. They would have read the Latin text of Horace's poetry in editions which surrounded it with glosses, notes, parallel passages, and perhaps a prose paraphrase; they would have practiced translating and imitating Horace's poetry at school; they would have read English translations and imitations of Horace by writers such as Jonson or Milton. Horace, therefore, was already a complex text for readers of Marvell's poem, a text which they fashioned for themselves out of all these interpretative materials. Horace's odes spoke of private and domestic experiences - love and desire, both homosexual and heterosexual; friendship and the pleasures of conviviality; the passage of time and the poignant delight which may attend an awareness of life's passing.

The personal lyric, conceived as the expression of a highly individualized voice and subjective feeling, was not a major form between the early seventeenth-century flowering of the “metaphysical” lyric and the lyric resurgence of the late eighteenth century and Romanticism. From 1650 to 1740, England witnessed great social and political change, from the successive upheavals and reactions of the Interregnum, Restoration, and Glorious Revolution to the stabilizing consolidation of Whig constitutionalism, oligarchy, and bureaucracy. Profound economic and cultural transformations also occurred: a financial revolution, a growing commercial empire, and the increasing hegemony of a middle-class culture commercial in background and “polite” in aspiration. Traditional martial values (still crucial for England's foreign relations but tarnished by associations with civil war) clashed with aristocratic libertinism and middle-class ideals of civility. Men and women renegotiated their relations within the context of an increasingly prosperous, pacific, “feminized” domestic culture. Aggressively modern scientific and philosophical trends challenged the classics' still potent authority.

To consider the writings of John Milton and Andrew Marvell in a collection on Restoration and Augustan literature is to focus on the last part of the careers of two men who had been friends and both employed by the Cromwellian regime. With Milton this is potentially to consider all three major poems, Paradise Lost (1667, second edition 1674), Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes (1671), and a small number of prose pamphlets, chiefly Of True Religion (1674), and some printings of earlier work issued before his death at age nearly sixty-six in late 1674. With Marvell it is to consider a range of political writing connected with his parliamentary experience until his sudden death at age fifty-seven in 1678, that is, a number of satirical poems (with many others of uncertain attribution), a few occasional poems, and some influential prose works. It is also to look at the way their oppositional roles were interpreted in the politics of the 1660s and 1670s. That was influenced in turn by their earlier activities and in the case of Milton by a lot of previous well-known political writing.

'He that can rail at one he calls his Friend, /Or hear him absent wrong'd, and not defend; /Who for the sake of some ill natur'd Jeast, /Tells what he shou'd conceal, Invents the rest; /To fatal Mid-night quarrels, can betray, /His brave Companion, and then run away; /Leaving him to be murder'd in the Street, /Then put it off, with some Buffoone Conceit; /This, this is he, you shou'd beware of all, /Yet him a pleasant, witty Man, you call /To whet your dull Debauches up, and down, /You seek him as top Fidler of the Town.' Carr Scroope, frequent object of Rochester's scorn, here summarizes the character that has been handed down to posterity: rake-hell, misanthropist, fantasist, orchestrator and recorder of the “dull Debauches” of Restoration London. These dramatic roles, which Rochester himself both contributed to and colluded in, have for some time obscured the writer.

At least until very recent times no literary era has been as conscious of what we call “gender” as the period we call “the Restoration.” It is impossible to deal with literature of this period (not excluding Milton) without encountering observations upon masculinity and femininity, statements about the male and the female and the androgyne. These elements or attributes, if often represented in terms of opposition and conflict, are also represented as essential.Yet if these attributes are essences, they lack Aristotelian fixity. They are not fixed but mutable, iridescent and flickering like Pope's airy sylphs in The Rape of the Lock. Why was the Restoration so peculiarly gender-conscious? There may be no absolute answer, but some important factors should be considered. The Civil War was an event of the utmost importance to the English, an instance of very open and certainly not imaginary conflict raging over questions of power and authority (including the authority of interpretation).

“Aphra Behn has always been an enigma,”Paul Salzman observes at the outset of his introduction to a new edition of her novella Oroonoko. The wild fluctuations in her literary reputation, tied to changing sexual mores, changing views of women writers, and changing moral and political judgments of the Restoration period itself, comprise one part of this enigma. Another (and related) part is comprised of the problem of her biography. This problem arises from the many shady moments in her life story, moments that have teased readers from her own time to ours to fill in and thus to “master” the gaps. The problem this poses for the critic has both theoretical and strategic implications: how much and what kind of attention should the serious student of her writing expend on the story (or rather, competing stories) of her life?

I walk'd about on the Shore, lifting up my Hands, and my whole Being, as I may say, wrapt up in the Contemplation of my Deliverance, making a Thousand Gestures and Motions which I cannot describe, reflecting upon all my Comerades that were drown'd, and that there should be not one Soul sav'd but my self; for, as for them, I never saw them afterwards, or any Sign of them, except three of their Hats, one Cap, and two Shoes that were not Fellows. What became of my Companions in the Boat, as well as of those who escaped on the Rock, or were left in the Vessel, I cannot tell; but conclude they were all lost. For my own Part, I swam as Fortune directed me, and was pushed forward by Wind and Tide. I often let my Legs drop; and could feel no Bottom: But when I was almost gone, and able to struggle no longer, I found myself within my Depth; and this Time the Storm was much abated. The Declivity was so small, that I walked near a Mile before I got to the Shore, which I conjectured was about Eight o'Clock in the Evening.

Alexander Pope and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu were both born in the year of the Glorious Revolution, 1688-89. Divided by family circumstance and political allegiance, they have been coupled by literary history. Pope was a Catholic linen merchant's son, born in the City of London, who had to make his own fortune in the literary marketplace by means of such ventures as translating Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English for a distinguished list of wealthy subscribers, who paid in installments to receive their multi-volumed sets over several years. Pope earned about £5000 each from these translations, or, at a “conservative estimate,” the equivalent in today's money of about £100,000 from each. Lady Mary Pierrepont, daughter of the Earl (later Duke) of Kingston, married in 1712 a fellow Whig, Edward Wortley Montagu, who would soon become ambassador to Constantinople. “A strong sense of propriety led her, as a woman and an aristocrat, not to publish any of her writings under her own name.” Pope was a Tory with Jacobite leanings; Montagu supported Sir Robert Walpole.

The century between the Civil War and the reign of George II saw the transformation of English political, social, and religious life. The scale of these changes may become apparent if we put our late twentieth-century selves into the picture for a moment. We would surely find mid seventeenth- century England strange and alien, violent, authoritarian, credulous, poverty-stricken; confident that virtue and responsibility were inherited by gentlemen and monarchs; cowering in the face of a hostile environment and universe; absorbed in a religious fundamentalism which included hairraising beliefs about salvation, other denominations, and the cosmic purpose of history. Mid eighteenth-century England, on the other hand, although not “modern,” would be full of familiar sights and institutions. For all its inexplicable addiction to the periwig, this was a world comfortingly like our own in many ways: with newspapers and tea-tables, concerts and public parks, insurance policies and sales taxes, a post office and bureaucrats; a world which held a place for “the ladies,” “the consumer,” “the citizen,” and “the middle class.” This society of shopkeepers and professional people valued diversity and regarded competition and social mobility as natural, yet it also respected politeness and restraint and feared “enthusiasm.”

The political turmoil that drove English theatre underground between 1641 and 1660 had a similarly devastating effect on English music. Puritan reformers disbanded cathedral choirs; Parliamentary soldiers smashed priceless organs; foreign court musicians, fearful of reprisals against Roman Catholics, returned to the Continent. But music was not utterly silenced. Oliver Cromwell's court, mindful of the need for pomp, maintained a reduced version of the royal band; at the wedding of Frances Cromwell on 11 November 1657, forty-eight violins accompanied “mixt dancing (a thing heretofore accounted profane) till 5 of the clock.” There was even one occasion involving musical theatre: the Protector presented Cupid and Death, a masque by James Shirley, as an entertainment for the Portuguese ambassador in 1653.2 Matthew Locke, who may have written the music for that performance and certainly wrote the music for a second performance in Leicester Fields in 1659, lost his position as a boy chorister at Exeter Cathedral in 1641, but managed to continue his musical development during the Interregnum, traveling abroad and seizing what limited opportunities were available in England; he became one of the most important theatre composers of the Restoration period.

Parliament's first ordinance against stage plays in 1642 did not entirely suspend theatrical activity in England during the Civil War and Interregnum. Companies played before the Cavalier court at Oxford, and in London illicit performances continued to be staged at the Fortune, the Red Bull, and other locations, including the great London fairs. The reissuing of ordinances against stage playing and the frequency with which Parliamentary soldiers were sent to close down performances indicate that though often harassed, theatre was not dead. Masques were performed for state occasions at Cromwell's court and Sir William Davenant (1606-68) played a major role in the revival of professional theatre during the last years of the Protectorate. The influence of Davenant's dramas with their use of moveable scenery, dance, and music cannot be doubted, least of all given that Davenant was one of the two men subsequently granted royal permission to run theatre companies in London. However, this was not a period during which many new plays were written: older plays were recycled, often as popular episodes stitched together.

According to Samuel Johnson's great eighteenth-century Dictionary, satire is a censorious poem, properly distinguished by the generality of its reflections but all too often confused with a lesser form, lampoon, distinguished by the particularity of its reflections. Libel is an actionable defamation, but the term was often used synonymously with lampoon. Slander is libel with a casual or callous disregard for truth. In the Restoration and early eighteenth century, satire, libel, lampoon, and slander were inextricably mixed, whether the specific forms they took were poetic, dramatic, narrative, or expository. But when commentators wished to separate good vilification from bad the distinction was one of style. “Loose-writ”libels were never as effective as “shining satire,” according to John Dry den and the Earl of Mulgrave in their joint effort, “An Essay Upon Satire” (1679). Perhaps “shining” does not take us very far conceptually in distinguishing satire from libel, lampoon, or slander as an embodiment of the literary spirit of opposition, but Dryden and Mulgrave have in mind the way effective satire always combines abuse with wit and imagination.

James composed The Golden Bowl during 1903, the year when he was planning his extended return trip to America, and writing to American friends of his great curiosity, his eagerness to see the country after two decades of living abroad: “The idea of seeing American life again and tasting the American air, that is a vision, a possibility, an impossibility, positively romantic.” Although the direct impressions from the trip would later go into The American Scene, the indistinct anticipatory vision corresponds to the vagueness of the place called America in The Golden Bowl.