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
John Webster, born around 1580 and probably dead by about 1632, occupies a singular place in English Renaissance drama. He is remembered above all as the author of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, tragedies whose violent plots, dense imagery, and moral unease have made them enduring fixtures of the theatrical canon. Yet the familiar image of Webster as a solitary poet of skulls, stranglings, poison, and corr…
“A great part of the grace of this, I confess, lay in action; yet can no action ever be gracious, where the decency of the language, and ingenious structure of the scene, arrive not to make up a perfect harmony.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
