John Fletcher, baptized on 20 December 1579 and buried on 29 August 1625, was one of the most successful, inventive, and influential dramatists of England’s Jacobean age. Though he is now less familiar to general readers than William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, or Christopher Marlowe, Fletcher was for generations among the most frequently performed writers in the English language. In the decades after his death, audienc…
“Understand a pastoral to be a representation of shepherds and shepherdesses with their actions and passions, which must be such as may agree with their natures.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Peace, Despair
In the tumultuous landscape of seventeenth-century English literature, few figures shine with such early brilliance yet fade with such puzzling rapidity as Abraham Cowley. Born in 1618 in London, this prodigious poet who published his first collection at fifteen, who dazzled the cavalier court and influenced an entire generation of writers, who was buried in Westminster Abbey beside Chaucer and Spenser, somehow slipp…
“Ambition is at the bottom of all great actions, though it often leads to ruin.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Restoration Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Wonder
