Between 1667 and 1679 the Restoration playwright John Dryden adapted three plays by Shakespeare: The Tempest, Antony and Cleopatra, and Troilus and Cressida. Where earlier accounts have framed Dryden’s complex relationship with Shakespeare within the Freudian paradigm of Oedipal parricide, this chapter re-examines Dryden’s critical writing (including essays, prefaces, and prologues) to argue instead that he understood this relationship in pedagogical rather than familial terms. Drawing on the language of early modern humanist pedagogy, particularly the rhetoric of imitation and emulation, Dryden sets out in his dramatic paratexts to self-fashion himself as a student of Shakespeare, whom he consistently presents as a literary authority – a classic text – to be studied, copied, and finally surpassed. In doing so, the younger playwright uses his periodic engagements with Shakespeare as a way of charting his own progression from student-apprentice to established professional. With each adaptation, Dryden claims that his inclination to stick closely to his Shakespearean source diminished, until finally he overcame his schoolboy predisposition to imitate and began instead to trust in his own creative abilities. The chapter thus reveals how Dryden seeks in his critical writing to link his development as a playwright directly to his careful study of Shakespeare.
