John Dryden

(Aldwinkle All Saints, currently United Kingdom, 1613-London, 1700) Poet, playwright and English critic. Belonging to a Puritan family, dropped out before completion and settled in London. He became known in the literary world of the Restoration with a verse play by reason of the death of Cromwell, Heroic Stanzas (Heroic Stanzas, 1659). In 1663 he married the daughter of the Earl of Berkshire, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and that same year he published his first piece of drama, The Wild Gallant (The Gallant will) start of a fruitful career as a playwright that would last until 1693, and resulted in with about thirty dramas in which managed to combine the spirit of Corneille and the French classics with English idiosyncrasies, among them Conquest of Granada (The Conquest of Granada, 1666), Aurengzebe (1675) and All for Love ( All for Love, 1678).