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,…
“For this assertion was Dr Featley brought upon his knees before Wm. Laud A-Bp of Canterbury.”
Neighbourhood:
Cavalier Poets, Death & Mortality, Devotional Poets, Dramatic Poets, Love Poets, Metaphysical Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Sorrow, Despair
William Shakespeare was baptized on 26 April 1564 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and tradition places his birth three days earlier, on about 23 April. He died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in the same church where he had been baptized. Between those dates lies a life that is at once unusually well documented for a non-nobleman of the Elizabethan age and persistently elusive in its inward…
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair
