SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT
(1606-1668) |
ENGLISH
poet and dramatist, SIR WILLIAM DAVENANT, was baptized on the
3rd of March, 1606; he was born at the Crown Inn, Oxford, of
which his father, a wealthy vintner, was proprietor. It was stated
that Shakespeare
always stopped at this house in passing through the city of Oxford,
and out of his known or rumoured admiration of the hostess, a
very fine woman, there sprang a scandalous story which attributed
Davenant's paternity to Shakespeare, a legend which there is
reason to believe Davenant himself encouraged, but which later
criticism has cast aside as spurious. In 1621 the vintner was
made mayor of Oxford, and in the same year his son left the grammar
school of All Saints, where his master had been Edward Sylvester,
and was entered an undergraduate of Lincoln College, Oxford.
He did not stay at the university, however, long enough to take
a degree, but was hurried away to appear at court as a page,
in the retinue of the gorgeous duchess of Richmond. From her
service he passed into that of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, in
whose house he remained until the murder of that eminent man
in 1628. This blow threw him upon the world, not altogether without
private means, but greatly in need of a profitable employment.
He turned to the stage for subsistence,
and in 1629 produced his first play, the tragedy of Albovine.
It was not a very brilliant performance, but it pleased the town,
and decided the poet to pursue a dramatic career. The next year
saw the production at Blackfriars of The Cruel Brother,
a tragedy, and The Just Italian, a tragi-comedy. Inigo
Jones, the court architect, for whom Ben
Jonson has long supplied the words of masques and complimentary
pieces, quarrelled with his great colleague in the year 1634,
and applied to William Davenant for verses. The result was The
Temple of Love, performed by the queen and her ladies at
Whitehall on Shrove Tuesday, 1634, and printed in that year.
Another masque, The Triumphs of the Prince D'Amour, followed
in 1636. The poet returned to legitimate drama by the publication
of the tragi-comedy of The Platonic Lovers, and the famous
comedy of The Wits, in 1636, the latter of which, however,
had been licensed in 1633. The masque of Britannica Triumphans
(1637) brought him into some trouble, for it was suppressed as
a punishment for its first performance having been arranged for
a Sunday. By this time Davenant had, however, thoroughly ingratiated
himself with the court; and on the death of Ben Jonson in 1637
he was rewarded with the office of poet-laureate, to the exclusion
of Thomas May, who considered himself entitled to the honour.
It was shortly after this event that Davenant collected his minor
lyrical pieces in a volume entitled Madagascar and other Poems
(1638); and in 1639 he became manager of the new theatre in Drury
Lane. The civil war, however, put a check upon this prosperous
career; and he was among the most active partisans of royalty
through the whole of that struggle for supremacy.
As early as May 1642, Davenant was accused
before the Long Parliament of being mainly concerned in a scheme
to seduce the army to overthrow the Commons. He was accordingly
apprehended at Faversham, and imprisoned for two months in London;
he then attempted to escape to France, and succeeded in reaching
Canterbury, where he was recaptured. Escaping a second time,
he made good his way to the queen, with whom he remained in France
until he volunteered to carry over to England some military stores
for the army of his old friend the earl of Newcastle, by whom
he was induced to enter the service as lieutenant-general of
ordnance. He acquitted himself with so much bravery and skill
that, after the siege of Gloucester, in 1643, he was knighted
by the king. After the battle of Naseby he retired to Paris,
where he became a Roman Catholic, and spent some months in the
composition of his epic poem of Gondibert. In 1646 he
was sent by the queen on a mission to Charles I, then at Newcastle,
to advise him to "part with the church for his peace and
security." The king dismissed him with some sharpness, and
Davenant returned to Paris, where he was the guest of Lord Jermyn.
In 1650 he took the command of a colonizing expedition that set
sail from France to Virginia, but was captured in the Channel
by a parliamentary man-of-war, which took him back to the Isle
of Wight. Imprisoned in Cowes castle until 1651, he tempered
the discomfort and suspense of his condition by continuing the
composition of Gondibert. He was sent up to the Tower
to await his trial for high treason, but just as the storm was
about to break over his head, all cleared away. It is believed
that the personal intercession of Milton led to this result.
Another account is that he was released by the desire of two
aldermen of York, once his prisoners, whom he had allowed to
escape. Davenant, released from prison, immediately published
Gondibert, the work on which his fame mainly rests, a
chivalric epic in the four-line stanza which Sir John Davies
had made popular by his Cosce teipsum, the influence of
which is strongly marked in the philosophical passages of Gondibert.
It is a cumbrous, dull production, but is relieved with a multitude
of fine and felicitous passages, and lends itself most happily
to quotation.
During the civil war one of his plays had
been printed, the tragedy of The Unfortunate Lovers, in
1643. One of his best plays, Love and Honour, was published
in 1649, but appears to have been acted long before. He found
that there were many who desired him to recommence his theatrical
career. Such a step, however, was absolutely forbidden by Puritan
law. Davenant, therefore, by the help of some influential friends,
obtained permission to open a sort of theatre at Rutland House,
in Charterhouse Yard, where, on the 21st of May 1656, he began
a series of representations, which he called operas, as
an inoffensive term. This word was then first introduced into
the English language. The opening piece was a kind of dialogue
defending the drama in the abstract. This was followed by his
own Siege of Rhodes, printed the same year, which was
performed with stage decorations and machinery of a king hitherto
quite unthought of in England. Two other innovations in its production
were the introduction of recitative and the appearance of a woman,
Mrs. Coleman, on the stage. He continued until the Restoration
to produce ephemeral works of this kind, only one of which, The
Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, in 1658, was of sufficient
literary merit to survive. In 1660 he had the infinite satisfaction
of being able to preserve the life of that glorious poet who
had, nine years before, saved his own from a not less imminent
danger. The mutual relations of Milton and Davenant do honour
to the generosity of two men who, sincerely opposed in politics,
knew how to forget their personal anger in their common love
of letters. In 1659 Davenant suffered a short imprisonment for
complicity in Sir George Booth's revolt. Under Charles II, Davenant
flourished in the dramatic world; he opened a new theatre in
Lincoln's Inn Fields, which he called the Duke's; and he introduced
a luxury and polish into the theatrical life which it had never
before known in England. Under his management, the great actors
of the Restoration, Betterton
and his coevals, took their peculiar French style and appearance;
and the ancient simplicity of the English stage was completely
buried under the tinsel of decoration and splendid scenery. Davenant
brought out six new plays in the Duke's Theatre, The Rivals
(1668), an adaptation of The Two Noble Kinsmen, which
Davenant never owned, The Man's the Master (1669), comedies
translated from Scarron, News from Plymouth, The Distresses,
The Siege, The Fair Favourite, tragi-comedies, all of which
were printed after his death, and only one of which survived
their author on the stage. He died at his house in Lincoln's
Inn Fields on the night of the 7th of April 1668, and two days
afterwards was buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, with
the inscription "O rare Sir William Davenant!" In 1672
his writings were collected in folio. His last work had been
to travesty Shakespeare's Tempest in company with Dryden.
The personal character, adventures and
fame of Davenant, and more especially his position as a leading
reformer, or rather debaser, of the stage, have always given
him a prominence in the history of literature which his writings
hardly justify. His plays are utterly unreadable, and his poems
are usually stilted and unnatural. With Cowley he marks the process
of transition from the poetry of the imagination to the poetry
of the intelligence; but he had far less genius than Cowley,
and his influence on English drama must be condemned as wholly
deplorable.
This article was originally
published in Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume
VII. Anonymous. Cambridge: University Press, 1910. p. 851-2.
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