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
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…
“If you be not reasonably assured of your knowledge in this kind of poem, lay down the book, or read this, which I would wish had been the prologue.”
Neighbourhood:
Dramatic Poets, Elizabethan Poets, Love Poets, Renaissance Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Peace, Despair
