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…
“The ancientest nobility being but a relic of time past, and the truest honour indeed being for a man to confer honour on himself.”
Neighbourhood:
Death & Mortality, Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Irony
Giles Fletcher the Younger, born about 1586 and dead by November 1623, occupies a distinctive, if sometimes underappreciated, place in English Renaissance poetry. He was a poet of the generation after Edmund Spenser and before John Milton: too late to belong wholly to the Elizabethan flowering, too early to participate in the Civil War’s political and religious literary struggles, yet deeply connected to both periods…
Neighbourhood:
Devotional Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Wonder, Spirituality, Joy
