Dryden found a patron in most of the powerful figures of his day. The list of those to whom he dedicated works includes members of the royal family (the king, the queen, the Duke and Duchess of York, and the Duke of Monmouth), political leaders in office from Danby, Sunderland, and Clarendon to Clifford and Lawrence Hyde, statesmen out of place (Leicester, Chesterfield, and Halifax), and peers of some literary ability (Orrery, Newcastle, Rochester, Mulgrave, and Dorset), both Tories and (especially after 1688) Whigs, both Protestants (like Lord Haughton) and Catholics (Radcliffe, Salisbury, Clifford). For more than thirty-five years, from his early plays to the Fables in 1700 Dryden wrote dedications in which he heaped lavish praise on one patron after another.

Johnson thought Dryden's dedications were deplorable exercises in nauseous flattery. The State of Innocence, he says, is dedicated to the Duchess of York “in a strain of flattery which disgraces genius, and which it was wonderful that any man that knew the meaning of his own words could use without self-detestation.” The nineteenth century inherited Johnson's judgment. Macaulay thought patronage led to a degrading “traffic in praise,” and left a writer “in morals something between a pandar and a beggar.” Beljame writes of Dryden's “humiliating moral dependence”: Dryden's dedication to Rochester is said to be remarkable for its “long-windedness,” “insistent flatteries,” and the “pains the poet takes to humble himself.” Wheatley thought Dryden “one of the greatest sinners” among dedicators who “sold their lying praises for money.”