LIFE AND LITERATURE

Daniel Defoe   Author , Journalist ( c. 1660–1731 ) English novelist, pamphleteer and journalist Daniel Defoe is best known for his novels Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders. Daniel Defoe: Daniel Defoe was born in 1660 in London, England. He became a merchant and participated in several failing businesses, facing bankruptcy and aggressive creditors. He was also a prolific political pamphleteer which landed him in prison for slander. Late in life he turned his pen to fiction and wrote Robinson Crusoe , one of the most widely read and influential novels of all time. Defoe died in 1731. Early Life Daniel Foe, born circa 1660, was the son of James Foe, a London butcher. Daniel later changed his name to Daniel Defoe, wanting to sound more gentlemanly. Defoe graduated from an academy at Newington Green, run by the Reverend Charles Morton. Not long after, in 1683, he went into business, having given up an earlier intent on becoming a dissenting minister. He travel...

JOHN WEBSTER Born sometime around 1580, John Webster was to be the last of the great Elizabethan playwrights. Much like many of his contemporaries, little is known of the poet himself. There was a John Webster admitted to the Middle Temple on August 1, 1598. If this Webster and the dramatist were one and the same, it would explain the many legal allusions in his plays and the inclusion of trial scenes in The White Devil, The Devil's Law Case, and Appius and Virginia . The earliest known records of Webster's employment as a playwright are found in the diary of theatre manager Phillip Henslowe at the beginning of the new century. Among the payments which Henslowe noted in his diary in 1602 were those made to Webster, Anthony Munday, Thomas Middleton, Michael Drayton "and the rest" for a play entitled Caesar's Fall . Over the next decade or so, Henslowe's records show Webster collaborating with Dekker and Heywood, writing a prologue to Marston...

Thomas Kyd   Thomas Kyd was born in 1558, six years before Shakespeare and Marlowe. Parish records indicate that he lived in London with his parents and two other siblings-of which one died in 1602. His father, Francis Kyd, was a scrivener. Eminent biographer Arthur Freeman observes that while scriveners garnered little respect from contemporary writers, they profited considerably from their monopoly on many official documents. Francis Kyd's official title read "Writer of the Court Letter" (3). As a member of a comfortable middle-class household, Thomas was enrolled in the Merchant Taylors' School at the age of seven. As opposed to St. Paul's or Eton, Merchant Taylors' was a decidedly middle-class school. Nevertheless, even the admission requirements speak to the school's educational capabilities: as Freeman notes, the young Kyd was required to know the "the catechism in English or Latyn," and be able to "read perfectly ...

John Dryden (1631–1700) Born in Northamptonshire, England, on August 9, 1631, John Dryden came from a landowning family with connections to Parliament and the Church of England. He studied as a King’s Scholar at the prestigious Westminster School of London, where he later sent two of his own children. There, Dryden was trained in the art of rhetorical argument, which remained a strong influence on the poet’s writing and critical thought throughout his life. Dryden published his first poem in 1649. He enrolled at Trinity College in Cambridge the following year, where he likely studied the classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. He obtained his BA in 1654, graduating first in his class. In June of that year, Dryden’s father died. After graduation, Dryden found work with Oliver Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe, marking a radical shift in the poet’s political views. Alongside Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell, Dryden was present at Cromwell’s funera...