Figuring the laureate: John Dryden in paint and print

Abstract This is a paper about perception and representation: the ways in which poet laureate John Dryden was seen, painted, and written; and, in turn, Dryden’s response to this field of representation. Over the course of his long career, Dryden was painted as laureate seven times; over these same years he was sized up and often sent up many times. Together the portrait images and the satiric imaginings form an archive that reveals not only the perceptions of Dryden as laureate but the ways in which those perceptions came to be resident within and resisted by the poet. Dryden’s fashioning of himself, his formation of satire, and, more broadly, Dryden’s engagement with representation can be newly understood from within this field of painted and printed representations.