This satire offers an amazingly vivid panorama of Restoration England: the out-of-power Puritans, the rakes and favorites of the court, Titus Oates, the Popish Plot, and the birth of true Parliamentary government. Told from a reactionary royalist point of view, this is conservative propaganda of genius, as though Shakespeare were writing copy for Fox News.The Kraken Series offers the only editions of Dryden's plays that fully explain all the archaic language, slang, historical references, as well as the perplexing syntax employed by Dryden, who wrote in English but often thought in Latin. Kraken does for Dryden what Folger did for Shakespeare. This volume contains a detailed historical preface.