Search results for ""author r e pritchard""

Captain John Smith is best remembered for his association with Pocahontas, but this was only a small part of an extraordinary life filled with danger and adventure. As a soldier, he fought the Turks in Eastern Europe, where he beheaded three Turkish adversaries in duels. He was sold into slavery, then murdered his master to escape. He sailed under a pirate flag, was shipwrecked and marched to the gallows to be hanged, only to be reprieved at the eleventh hour. All this before he was thirty years old. He was one of the founders of the English settlement at Jamestown, where he faced considerable danger from the natives as well as from within the faction-ridden settlement itself. In fact, were it not for Smith's leadership, the Jamestown colony would surely have failed. Yet Smith was a far more ambitious explorer and soldier of fortune than these tales suggest. This swashbuckling Elizabethan adventurer was resourceful, intelligent and outspoken, with a vision of what America could become. In this riveting book, R.E. Pritchard tells the rip-roaring story of a remarkable man who refused to give in.

Read more less

Scandalous Liaisons tells the story of the most hedonistic, loose-living court in English history, from Charles II’s youthful years and mistresses in France, to his tempestuous relationship with the hot-tempered, sexually and financially voracious Barbara Villiers. Of Charles’s mistresses, everybody’s favourite was the perky Cockney actress, Nell Gwyn. Nell and the French aristocrat (and not-so-very secret agent) Louise de Keroualle were the two women he would remember on his deathbed. The court, a world of extravagant displays of wealth, was also a sexual merry-go-round of flirtation, cuckoldry and betrayals, occasional unwanted pregnancies and fierce duels, as ordinary people looked on, fascinated and appalled. Filled with flamboyant men and women and astonishing incidents, this book draws on a wealth of writing by contemporary observers, such as diaries and memoirs (from Pepys and the French Comte de Gramont), letters, gossip, biting satires and bawdy lampoons directed at everyone from bishops to promiscuous court beauties and poxed swaggerers. All this is set in the context of Restoration libertinism and political events such as Charles’s secret deals with Louis XIV, the wars with the Dutch, court political intrigues and popular anti-Catholic feeling. Based on contemporary sources and modern historical studies, Scandalous Liaisons provides a richly varied and entertaining picture of a most extraordinary time.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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'.

Read more less