Sir William Davenant, baptized on 3 March 1606 and buried on 9 April 1668 after his death on 7 April, was one of the great survivors and reinvigorators of seventeenth-century English literary culture. Poet, playwright, court servant, royalist officer, prisoner, theatrical entrepreneur, and eventually the leading architect of Restoration stage practice, he lived through an age in which a writer’s career could be trans…
“How much pleasure they lose (and even the pleasures of heroic poesy are not unprofitable) who take away the liberty of a poet, and fetter his feet in the shackles of a historian.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Wonder, Tenderness
In the shadowed corridors of Elizabethan and Jacobean literature, where the towering figures of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson stride with immortal grace, there walks a quieter, more elusive figure — Nicholas Breton. Born around 1554 and vanishing from historical record by approximately 1625, Breton was a prolific poet, pamphleteer, and prose writer whose voice shimmered with pastoral charm, devotional fervor, and…
“We rise with the lark and go to bed with the lamb.”
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Nature Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Joy, Tenderness, Wonder
