After the deposition of his patron
James II in 1688, Dryden turned to translation to provide himself with a steady income. Dryden’s education at the
Westminster School had provided him with an excellent grounding in translation, which was a conventional exercise at the time.
Fables, Ancient and Modern contains translations of the First Book of
Homer's
Iliad, eight selections from
Ovid's
Metamorphoses, three of
Geoffrey Chaucer's
Canterbury Tales (and an imitation from the Prologue on "The Character of a Good Parson"), the later medieval poem
The Flower and the Leaf, which he thought was by Chaucer, and three stories from
Boccaccio. The volume also contains a number of Dryden's own works, including "Alexander's Feast" and a preface in which he lauds Chaucer, calling him "the Father of English poetry". All the translations are in his characteristic
heroic couplet, which uses
alexandrines and triplets to vary the movement. Dryden aimed to increase the English people's literary reputation by appropriating the greatest traditions in literature and developing them into new genres. An interesting feature of the preface is that Dryden did not understand Chaucer's
Middle English prosody and dismissed his versification as irregular, because Middle English pronunciation was not properly understood at the time. In fact, since Dryden was working with
Thomas Speght's extremely corrupt edition of Chaucer (printed overleaf from the translations in the California edition), and "The Flower and the Leaf" is prosodically unlike the poems by Chaucer, he could not possibly have scanned Chaucer even if he had assigned the correct Middle English values. ==Reception==