William Cartwright was born on 1 September 1611 at Northway, near Tewkesbury in Gloucestershire, and died at Oxford on 29 November 1643. His life was brief even by the precarious standards of the seventeenth century, but it was remarkably crowded: he was a poet, playwright, scholar, university teacher, Anglican clergyman, royalist, and celebrated preacher. To his contemporaries he seemed a figure of unusual promise,…
“it was his happiness that he neither heard nor read any thing vulgar, weak or raw, till his mind was fixed to notions exact as reason and as high as fancy”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
In the vast and glittering tapestry of Renaissance music, where names like Palestrina, Byrd, and Dowland shimmer with canonical brilliance, there strides a figure less polished by posterity, yet no less compelling — Tobias Hume. Born in 1579, likely in the shadowed alleys of London or perhaps the rolling countryside of northern England, Hume emerges not as a cloistered churchman or courtly favorite, but as a man of t…
“My studies are far from servile imitations, I robbe no others inventions... These are mine own Phansies expressed by my proper Genius, which if thou dost dislike, let me see thine.”
Neighbourhood:
Elizabethan Poets, Lute-Song Composers
Emotional landscape: Irony, Joy, Sensuality
