John Dryden portrait, courtesy of the Yorck Project.

Dryden was a great admirer of Shakespeare and imitated his Antony and Cleopatra in All for Love.DrydenÂ’s Essay of Dramatick Poesie (1668) noted that Shakespeare's plays were performed only half as often as those of Beaumont and Fletcher, but still argued for Shakespeare's artistic superiority. Shakespeare does not follow Aristotelian conventions, Dryden wrote, but Ben Jonson does, and thus Jonson lands in second place to "the incomparable Shakespeare", the follower of nature, the great realist of human character (image & data partly from Wikipedia , under Creative Commons Attribution-Share- Alike License).