Search results for ""Author R E Pritchard""
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Shakespeare's Other Son?: William Davenant, Playwright, Civil War Gun Runner and Restoration Theatre Manager
Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was in his time widely known as 'Davenant the Poet'. The son of an Oxford vintner (or quite possibly the natural son of his godfather, William Shakespeare), he wrote poems for and about the Court of Charles I, and, despite losing his nose to mercury treatment for the clap, which other people thought funny, went on to replace Ben Jonson as Poet Laureate and collaborate with Inigo Jones in composing spectacular Court masques, as well as writing many successful plays -- a few fashionably blood-thirsty, most showing a real comic gift, humanity and sympathy with 'ordinary life'. In the Civil War, he earned a knighthood as an especially successful gun-runner for the Royalists, before escaping to Paris, where he worked on an epic poem. Then sent off by Charles II to colonize Virginia but captured by the Parliamentarians, he escaped execution but was imprisoned for five years. With the Restoration, he practically re-invented English theatre, with the first English opera, women actors, movable scenery and the proscenium arch, as well as reviving interest in Shakespeare with inventive adaptations. Energetic, affable and resilient, he was an appealing and well-liked character. Celebrated and important in his day, Davenant is now surprisingly little known. This enterprising study introduces modern readers to his wit, poetry, and growing scepticism as to Court and aristocratic values, and his developing feminist sympathies. Here, select excerpts and summaries bring this entertaining writer to a new, wider audience.
£20.00
Pen & Sword Books Ltd Sex, Love and Marriage in the Elizabethan Age
Most people have always been interested in sex, love and marriage. Now, this entertaining and informative book explores the surprisingly varied and energetic sex and love lives of the women and men of Queen Elizabeth's England. A range of writers, from the famous, such as Shakespeare, John Donne and Ben Jonson, and lesser-known figures popular in their time, provide, in their witty stories, poems and plays, vivid pictures of Elizabethan sexual attitudes and experiences, while sober reports from the church courts tell of seductions, adulteries and rapes. Here we also encounter private journals and scenes from ordinary marriages, with complaints of women's fashions, bossy wives and domineering husbands. Besides this, there are accounts of the busy whores of London brothels, homosexual activity and the Court's amorous carousel of predatory aristocrats, promiscuous ladies and hopeful maids of honour. We conclude with the frustrations of The Virgin Queen herself. This lively review of Elizabethan sexuality, in its various forms, much of it brought together for the first time, should intrigue and amuse anyone with an interest in history, and how love used to be lived, 'in good Queen Bess's golden days'.
£19.99