In the sun-dappled fields and ancient cathedral shadows of Kent, England, around the year 1553 or 1554, a boy named John Lyly entered the world. He would grow to become one of the most dazzling literary innovators of the Elizabethan age, a wordsmith whose elegant prose and witty comedies lit up the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and helped shape the very foundations of English drama and fiction. Though his birth date is…
“Though the camomile, the more it is trodden, the more it spreadeth, yet the violet, the oftener it is handled, the sooner it withereth.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Tenderness, Wonder, Sensuality
Ben Jonson, baptized on 11 June 1572 and probably born on or very near that date, entered the world in Westminster at a moment when London’s theatrical culture was beginning to assume the force and richness that would make the English Renaissance famous. He died on 6 August 1637, having become, in the course of sixty-five turbulent years, England’s most formidable classical dramatist, one of its finest lyric poets, a…
“Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Tenderness, Sensuality
