John Dryden (9 August 1631 – 1 May 1700) was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Walter Scott called him "Glorious John." He was made Poet Laureate in 1668.
Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was Rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–1632) and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was also a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire where it is also likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar where his headmaster was Dr Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian. Having recently been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden’s response to this was, he clearly respected the Headmaster and would later send two of his own sons to school at Westminster. In the late twentieth century a house at Westminster was founded in his name.
Dr. Spratt: You will give all the money to Mr. Needham, sir, or in default you will lose your place, Master Purcell!
Charles II: For love has more power and less mercy than fate.
Charles II: Do excuse me for taking such a long time in dying.
Charles II: Doomsday, my lord Shaftesbury, we shall see whose ass is blackest.
Tony Palmer: You know what this country has become? Once we had a church built upon a rock. Now the rock has been bulldozed and with it our fame. What we're left with is a crawling underside of expediency and dishonour beholden to Brussels wherein the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain. England, my England, is shuffling about like an old tramp begging for a pair of boots at the tradesmen's entrances of Europe
Young Harry: I hate the viol!
Captain Henry Cooke: This is a music factory.
Colonel Wharton: Opera is a danger you would do best to avoid.
Charles II: I do believe the devil shits Dutchmen.