Volume XV contains three of Dryden's Plays, along with accompanying scholarly appartus: Albion and Albanius, Don Sebastian, and Amphitryon.

This is the final volume in The Works of John Dryden and the last volume of poetry written by Dryden before he died in 1700.

Dryden's last three years of published works begin with Alexander's Feast and end with Fables, his largest miscellany of poetical translations. Alexander's Feast, like the earlier Song for St. Cecilia's Day (Works, III), was commissioned by the Musical Society for performance at its annual tribute to sacred music. The Fables included selections from Homer, Ovid, Boccaccio, and Chaucer. Extensive and detailed notes to these translations show readers how well Dryden succeeded in transmitting the styles and the very sounds of his originals. Volume VII ends with a section of miscellaneous pieces published at other times, including Dryden's only known Latin work. The presentation of the writings in this volume, like that of the entire twenty-volume series, is a tribute not only to Dryden but also to the editors who have guided it through five decades.

In the last decade of Dryden's life, he brought four new works before the theatre-going public: a dramatic opera, a tragedy, a tragicomedy, and a number of appendages to an old comedy by John Fletcher, which was revived partly so that Dryden might have the author's third-night profits. He died that night, but his family received the money. The dramatic opera, King Arthur, benefited from a fine score by Henry Purcell and has remained in the operatic repertoire to this day. Cleomenes, the tragedy, was banned until Dryden was able to convince Queen Mary that it did not reflect any seditious sympathy with the exiled James II, after which it was successful. The fate of Love Triumphant, the tragicomedy, was different; possibly because of a growing swell of moral reform, the play was universally damned, even though its themes of incest and miscellaneous fornication had never brought rejection to Dryden in the past. The Secular Masque, Dryden's principal contribution to The Pilgrim by Fletcher, had undistinguished music, but its lively verse and broad review of the previous century kept the piece on the stage for the next fifty years, and in anthologies up to the present.