Poet of the Month 100: JOHN DONNE

 

JOHN DONNE

1572 – 1631

 

 

 

 

LOVE'S DIET

 

 

To what a cumbersome unwieldiness

And burdensome corpulence my love had grown,

    But that I did, to make it less,

    And keep it in proportion,

Give it a diet, made it feed upon

That which love worst endures, discretion.

 

Above one sigh a day I allowed him not,

Of which my fortune, and my faults had part;

    And if sometimes by stealth he got

    A she sigh from my mistress' heart,

And thought to feast on that, I let him see

'Twas neither very sound, nor meant to me.

 

If he wrung from me a tear, I brined it so

With scorn or shame, that him it nourished not;

    If he sucked hers, I let him know

    'Twas not a tear, which he had got,

His drink was counterfeit, as was his meat;

For, eyes which roll towards all, weep not, but sweat.

 

What ever he would dictate, I writ that,

But burnt my letters; When she writ to me,

    And that favour made him fat

    I said, if any title be

Conveyed by this, Ah, what doth it avail,

To be the fortieth name in an entail?

 

Thus I reclaimed my buzzard love, to fly

At what, and when, and how, and where I choose;

    Now negligent of sport I lie,

    And now as other Fawkners use,

I spring a mistress, swear, write, sigh and weep;

And the game killed, or lost, go talk, and sleep.

 

 

 

 

Written c 1592 – 1600

Published 1633

 

 

 

 

 

entail = legal term describing the bequeathing 

of property to a specified group rather than an individual inheritor

 

Fawkners = archaic form of 'Falconers'

 

spring = term describing a game bird rising from cover

 

 

 

 

 

John Donne is arguably the most fascinating and most contradictory figure in the history of English poetry.  His Songs and Sonnets are among the most passionate, erotic, witty and engaging love poems ever written, their subject matter vastly at odds, or so it would seem, with his later career as a respected theologian and the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in London.  It is from one of Donne's sermons that the phrase 'No man is an island' derives — an eternally relevant reminder of the fact that the lives of all human beings are intertwined, no matter what their sex, religion, ethnicity or social status.

Donne (his surname is pronounced 'Dunn' to rhyme with 'fun' by most scholars) was born in his parents' home in Bread Street in the city of London some time in the first half of 1572.  His maternal grandfather John Heywood was a singer, musician and creator of short dramatic skits, referred to as 'interludes,' that were performed in the presence of Elizabeth I and in the metropolitan legal colleges and chambers collectively known as the Inns of Court.  The Heywood family was directly related to the English Catholic martyr Sir Thomas More, a highly-ranked statesman whose defiance of Henry VIII and subsequent execution for refusing to sign the 1534 Oath of Succession because it repudiated the authority of the Pope saw him canonised by the Church in 1886.

Donne's father could boast of no such noble connections.  An ironmonger by trade, he prospered in his business but died in his early forties, leaving behind six surviving children and an estate valued at approximately £3500.  Six months after his death, his thirty year old widow Elizabeth married the fifty year old physician and widower John Symynges, a fellow Catholic whom it was likely she and her deceased husband had been acquainted with for several years.  In 1583 the reconfigured Symynges family moved to a house located close to London's St Bartholomew's Hospital where, within two years, Donne's younger sisters both fell ill and died.

Donne was originally educated by a Catholic tutor hired by his wealthy stepfather, a risky move in a country where 'the old religion,' as it was known, had been more or less outlawed by then in all but name.  One of Donne's maternal uncles was the exiled Jesuit priest Jasper Heywood who re-entered England via the Continent and conducted masses in secret until he was arrested in 1583 and tried for the crime of treason.  As Donne would recall in his 1610 anti-Catholic polemical work Pseudo-Martyr: 'I had my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death and hungry of an imagined martyrdom…'.

In 1584 Donne and his younger brother Henry were sent to Oxford University to further their education, lodging in Hart Hall (now known as Hertford College) which was home to many fellow Catholics including Henry Wotton, someone who was to remain Donne's close friend until his death.  Donne spent three years at Oxford before leaving — without obtaining a degree because he would have been expected to sign the Oath of Supremacy that denied Papal power and acknowledged Elizabeth I as head of the Church of England — for Cambridge where he did not seek admittance to a college but was able to study rhetoric, history, philosophy, French, Italian, science and mathematics and immerse himself in the literary life of the city and the works of its rising poet-dramatists including Robert Greene and Christopher Marlowe. 

 

Donne left Cambridge around the age of seventeen but did not return to the house of his mother who, following the death of Dr Symynges in 1588, had become the wife of another Catholic gentleman named Richard Rainsford.  Elizabeth Rainsford and her new husband soon relocated to Antwerp in the Spanish-controlled Netherlands where, they hoped, they would be free to practice their religion without falling foul of the government or an emerging and increasingly militant group of Protestant extremists known as the Puritans.

Little is known about the next phase of Donne's life.  Some scholars believe he may have spent time on the Continent, perhaps as a soldier fighting in Sir Francis Drake's 1589 Spanish campaign, while others conjecture that he visited the Low Countries and France before travelling to Italy to spend time with his exiled Jesuit uncle Jasper Heywood.  The next definite mention of him occurs in 1591 when he was accepted at Thavies Inn, one of the London Courts of Chancery, as a law student.  In May 1592 he entered nearby Lincoln's Inn to further his legal studies, a move that introduced him to life at the royal Court and placed in him the orbit of high profile Protestant students such as Thomas Egerton, son of Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Seal.  

 

The Inns of Court were also hotbeds of literary activity, with poet/playwrights including John Davies, Thomas Lodge and John Marston regularly displaying their satirical wit at the Revels that were a common feature of life as a footloose young male law student.  It was during this time that Donne himself probably began to write, producing epigrams and satires in the prevailing literary fashion before going on to create his Elegies and some of his earliest and, for their time, most scandalous love poetry (some of which would not be deemed 'decent' enough to publish until the late nineteenth century).  

 

But Donne's time at Lincoln's Inn was not without its tragedies.  In the spring of 1593 his brother Henry, now a student at his former alma mater Thavies Inn, was arrested after a Catholic priest was discovered in his room. The priest, whose name was William Harrington, was subsequently tried for sedition and executed, by which time Henry himself, long since confined to the dank and disease ridden prison at Newgate, was dead of the plague.  It was probably after these traumatic events that Donne began to seriously contemplate abandoning the religion of his forefathers and converting to Protestantism, a change inspired as much by self-preservation and his hopes of obtaining some sort of paid position at the Court of Elizabeth I as it was by his growing disillusion with the insularity, pedantry and obsession with martyrdom which had become intrinsic components of the faith he had been raised in.

The desire to distance himself from the activities of his brother and their Catholic background were no doubt critical in persuading Donne to join the English expeditionary force being assembled by Lord General Robert Devereux, otherwise known as the Earl of Essex, to attack the Spanish port city of Cadiz.  Henry Wotton was employed as Essex's secretary at the time, a fact that aided Donne's cause and saw him granted permission to join the other young men of good (if not noble) birth as a member of the invading Protestant forces.  Donne and his fellow adventurers left Plymouth on 3 June 1596, with the poet personally witnessing the sinking of the Spanish flagship the San Felipe by Walter Ralegh thirteen days later, a horrifying sight he was later to memorialize in an epigram titled The Burnt Ship:

 

Out of a fired ship, which, by no way

But drowning, could be rescued from the flame,

Some men leap'd forth, and ever as they came

Near the foe's ships, did by their shot decay;

So all were lost, which in the ship were found,

    They in the sea being burnt, they in the burnt ship

         drown'd.

 

 

 

Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex

 

 

Donne's return to England and to his temporarily abandoned legal studies proved to be short-lived.  A little over one year later he joined a new expedition, led again by Essex and Ralegh, which had been assembled to wipe out was left of the Spanish fleet in the Azores archipelago and seize the treasure that these ships were transporting back to Spain from its colonies in South America and the West Indies.  Luck was not with the English this time, with a lack of wind hampering their progress and frustrating Ralegh who, after attacking the island of Fayal and enduring the loss of many men, returned to Plymouth battered, depleted and empty-handed in late October 1597.  

 

This time Donne did not return to Lincoln's Inn to resume his legal studies.  Now twenty-five years old, the veteran of two royally sanctioned expeditionary campaigns and a fluent speaker of the Spanish, French and Italian languages, he was appointed Chief Secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton who, in addition to his position as Lord Keeper of the Seal, also presided over the House of Lords and the Court of the Star Chamber and served as the senior judge in the perpetually busy Court of Chancery.  Egerton was a supremely powerful figure in Elizabethan England, a former Catholic who had renounced his now suspicious faith as a means of furthering his career, a highly-placed civil servant who was personally involved in the hunting down of clandestine priests and other religious dissidents — a role not lost upon Donne who became part of his official household, living more or less as a member of the Egerton family in York House close to the sprawling, twenty-three acre city-within-a-city that was the Palace of Whitehall. 

 

It was at York House, while carrying out his duties as Egerton's schedule-maker, guest-greeter, researcher and document-drafter, that Donne met Ann More, the fourteen year old daughter of the new Lady Egerton's short-tempered brother, Sir George More.  Donne fell deeply in love with Ann during the course of the next two years, something he was careful to keep secret from his employer despite his favoured status as Egerton's trusted secretary and confidante.  

 

But trouble was brewing.  Donne's former hero, the dashing but dangerously erratic Earl of Essex, was consigned by the Queen to the care of his friend Lord Egerton who in essence became his gaoler, his gaol being the luxurious home-away-from-home that was the already severely overcrowded York House.  In early 1600 the new Lady Egerton died, effectively removing any reason for Ann, her ward, to remain in London.  Ann was sent back to Losely Park, her father's estate in rural Surrey, leaving Donne to wonder if he would ever see or be allowed to speak with her again. 

 

Donne did not have much leisure in which to dwell upon his loss.  Egerton soon remarried, with the third Lady Egerton bringing more than forty of her own household to live at York House.  This meant there was no longer space for Donne to lodge in his master's house, obliging him to move to his own quarters further along the Strand either in or in close proximity to (sources disagree) another bustling business/residential complex known as the Savoy.  He was living here in February 1601 when the now freed Earl of Essex launched what was to be his ill-fated coup against the Queen that resulted in him and several of his followers being arrested and imprisoned in the Tower of London.  (Henry Wotton, Donne's old Oxford friend, had wisely decamped to France to avoid being hauled in for questioning and packed off to gaol along with his former boss and that nobleman's regretful allies.)  Essex was swiftly tried for treason and sentenced to death, a legal process that Donne, in his capacity as Egerton's law clerk, directly participated in despite his oft-expressed aversion to all forms of corporal and capital punishment.  

 

 

Thomas Egerton, Viscount Brackley

   

 

In October 1601, nearly a year after the execution of Essex and many of his supporters, Donne was appointed the Member of Parliament for Brackley, a Northamptonshire borough under the direct control of Egerton who felt it wise to have his most trusted employee take up the position prior to the convening of what would be the final Parliament that Elizabeth I would be alive to convene and preside over.  One of Donne's fellow MPs was Sir George More who had returned to London to attend Parliament accompanied by his daughter.  Ann More and Donne renewed their acquaintance, possibly in secret, and three weeks before Christmas became man and wife at a small private ceremony presided over by Donne's friend Samuel Brooke and witnessed by that Anglican cleric's brother, Donne's even closer friend Christopher Brooke.  The newlyweds spent their wedding night apart, the groom in his London apartment and the bride in lodgings rented by her unsuspecting father.  George More was not informed of his daughter's marriage because, being not yet sixteen, Ann was still legally forbidden to marry without his consent.

 

The discovery of the marriage, which remained a secret until well into February 1602 when Donne himself wrote to his father-in-law to inform him that it had taken place, effectively ended the bridegroom's fledgling political career and whatever hopes he had formerly cherished of obtaining some kind of paid position at Court.  Donne was immediately imprisoned along with the Brooke brothers, consigned to the death trap that was London's unhygienic Fleet Prison where he quickly succumbed to a fever.  Although his stay in the Fleet was short — he spent all of what remained of his inheritance to prove that his marriage to Ann was legally valid — it marked the beginning of a very different life for him, one that began with the loss of his position at Egerton's secretary and saw him and Ann become totally dependent on the charity of Francis Wolley, Ann's unhappily married nineteen year old cousin, to put food on their table and a roof over their heads.

 

The newlyweds moved into a house on Wolley's estate at Pyrford in Surrey and were living here, somewhat reconciled to her father but not completely, in early 1603 when the recently deceased Elizabeth I was replaced on the throne by her cousin James VI of Scotland.  Life at Court was utterly transformed under the reign of the new monarch, a transformation that Donne could only observe from Pyrford like the poor relation he had now quite literally become.  Many of his former friends and acquaintances were knighted by the new King while his father-in-law was named Treasurer of the Household to Charles, the Prince of Wales.  While Donne himself received no honours he did earn the patronage and friendship of Henry Goodyer, an aristocratic, well-connected courtier who was able to keep him apprised of potential job opportunities and provide an outlet for his growing sense of melancholy.  Donne was also able to re-establish a connection with Henry Wotton who had deemed it safe to return to England following the death of Elizabeth I and the end of Tudor rule.

 

In February 1605 Donne, often ill and growing ever more restless and discouraged about his future, applied for and was granted a licence by the King to travel overseas with a younger companion named Walter Chute and a full retinue of horses and servants.  The purpose of the journey remains unknown — the companions almost certainly spent time in Paris and had moved on to Venice by the beginning of the autumn —  although it seems likely that Donne hoped to revive his stalled political career by using the trip to sharpen his linguistic skills and establish himself in the eyes of the King as a useful would-be diplomat.  He returned to Pyrford in the spring of 1606 — still alarmed, as the entire country was, by the attempt the Catholic plotter Guy Fawkes had made in November 1605 to assassinate the King by blowing up Parliament with gunpowder — to be greeted by his anxious young wife and new infant son George.  (A third son named Francis would follow in 1607.)  

 

With his family growing and no prospect of obtaining a meaningful job on the horizon, Francis Wolley intervened with his uncle George More to obtain the Donnes an allowance of £80 per year, the interest on Ann's long withheld dowry of £800.  Obtaining this income allowed them and their growing family — Ann would give birth to twelve children prior to her childbearing-related death in 1617 — to leave Pyrford and rent a large but draughty cottage of their own in the village of Mitcham, one hour by horseback from London.  It was here, in the house that the unhappy poet variously described as his 'prison,' 'dungeon' and 'hospital,' that he devoted himself to researching points of law and divinity and writing heartfelt letters to Henry Goodyer and other sympathetic friends, a group which now included his fellow poet (and convicted murderer) Ben Jonson. 

 

 

Ben Jonson

 

 

Donne completed a number of poems and several prose pieces at Mitcham — Biathanatos, a defence of the act of suicide being the most controversial of the latter — while continuing to search in vain for some type of remunerative position at Court.  While his searches were unsuccessful, his charm, erudition and courtesy did manage to endear him to several important personages including Magdalen Herbert, a culture-loving gentlewoman who was familiar with his writings.  He exchanged many letters with Mrs Herbert throughout 1607 and 1608 and also befriended Lucy Russell, the Countess of Bedford, one of Queen Anne's Ladies in Waiting and someone whose patronage had likewise been sought by Ben Jonson and several other cash-strapped poets.  

 

Yet not even Lucy Russell could help Donne obtain the Court position he continued to seek.  Apparently, the King remembered the alleged illegality of Donne's secret marriage to Ann and did not view him as a suitable candidate for a position on his staff — a fact that led to Donne being summoned to a meeting with the Reverend Dr Thomas Morton, Dean of Gloucester, who recommended that he abandon his political/diplomatic ambitions and consider taking holy orders to become a Protestant clergyman.  Donne rejected Morton's well intended advice — and the comfortable Church-provided living that would have followed his ordination —explaining that he did not wish to bring 'that sacred calling' into dishonour by having it associated with a life as filled with 'irregularity' as his life had been.  This no doubt referred to his growing status as a much admired but still unpublished poet, creator of verse that frequently referenced the sexual adventures he had enjoyed as a young man but had come to bitterly regret since his marriage.  

 

Yet Morton had more than altruism in mind when he offered Donne a way out of the 'prison' that his life at Mitcham had become.  As one of the highest ranking clergymen in England Morton was actively engaged in defending Protestantism against its homegrown and foreign-based Catholic detractors and saw in Donne a potential literary ally — someone who, in 1610, made a personal contribution to this war of words by publishing a polemical work titled Pseudo-martyr, dedicated to the King, which called on English Papists to abandon their militant attempts to overthrow the nation's rightful monarch.  James I, as he had been known since accepting the crown and creating the Kingdom of Great Britain, was so impressed by Donne's arguments that he all but commanded the reluctant author to enter the ministry.  

 

Although Donne continued to resist the idea of taking holy orders his thoughts remained very much focused on religion, with the composition of what came to be known as his Holy Sonnets taking up much of his time between 1609 and 1614, a period which also saw him return briefly — and unhappily — to the Continent as the companion to Robert Drury and that nobleman's devout, well educated wife Anne.   While the elaborately sycophantic elegy he wrote in honour of the Drury's deceased daughter did not win him the favour of former aristocratic patrons like Lucy Russell (who apparently felt that the tributes he had written for them had somehow been cheapened by its appearance), their patronage allowed him to move his young family from Mitcham to a town house in Drury Lane in London, a fashionable area that offered easier access to Court and to the courtiers whose influence he still hoped to exploit to obtain a position as a member of the King's staff. 

 

 

Lucy Russell, Countess of Bedford

 

 

For the next three years Donne would, by means of flattery and sometimes outright begging, seek the assistance of several important figures in the orbit of the King and even briefly return to Parliament as an MP, this time representing the borough of Taunton.  While these activities did represent progress of a kind, they did not change the King's mind about what profession he felt Donne was best suited to follow.  Yet Donne still struggled to accept the idea that he could ever become 'pure' enough in mind and spirit to join the clergy.  

 

In November 1614 the issue came to a head with the death of Donne's seven year old son Francis, the third of his children to die since the beginning of that year.  (Drury Lane, fashionable address though it was, was no more hygienic than any other part of overcrowded, stinking, plague-ridden London.)  Suffering from recurring bouts of illness and faced with ever-mounting debts, Donne made peace with his doubts and announced that he would take holy orders, confirming his new vocation by publishing a commentary on the opening verses of the first two books of The Bible titled Essays in Divinity.  

 

These commentaries were, in a sense, test runs for the sermons that would, following Donne's ordination on 23 January 1615 and elevation to the revered position of Dean of St Paul's Cathedral in 1621, make him arguably the most famous, widely read clergyman in England.  But his newfound social and financial security came at a high cost.  On 15 August 1617, five days after giving birth to their twelfth child, his wife Ann died, an incalculable loss — despite their frequent and sometimes lengthy separations — from which he never fully recovered.  It had been his love for Ann, and his hasty and perhaps ill-advised decision to marry her, which had ruined his career prospects even as it had inspired much of his best, most moving poetry.  He blamed himself for her death and transmuted the physical passion he had shared with her into an equally fierce passion for God and his new calling as an Anglican cleric.

By the time the Reverend Dr Donne, as he was now known, was installed as the Dean of St Paul's in 1621 he had been at the centre of Court life for four years, serving as a Royal Chaplain and as Minister to the Benchers at Lincoln's Inn in addition to being awarded the livings of three parishes in Huntingdonshire, Kent and Bedfordshire.  He also took one last journey to Europe, accompanying the diplomat James Hay, the Earl of Carlisle, to Germany in 1618 in the capacity of that Court favourite's personal chaplain.  

 

Donne's position was now so secure that, by 1623, he was able to negotiate a favourable marriage settlement with the former actor and theatre owner Ned Alleyn for the hand of his eldest daughter Constance despite having suffered what had been the life-threatening illness which had inspired his greatest work of prose, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions.  Nor was his position at Court weakened by the death of James I on 27 March 1625 and the accession of his son Charles I to the throne.  In 1626 Donne was appointed a governor of the charitable institution known as the Charterhouse and later served as an ecclesiastical judge in both the Court of Delegates and the Court of High Commission, the latter being the same court he had applied to in order to validate his marriage some twenty-five years earlier. 

 

 

JOHN DONNE, c 1600

 

 

Yet tragedy awaited Donne again in January 1627 when his eighteen year old daughter Lucy, who was staying with her recently widowed sister Constance, suddenly died.  Hers was to be one of many deaths Donne would be forced to contend with during that year, including those of his dearest friend Henry Goodyer and that of his former patroness, the now strictly Puritan Lucy Russell.  

 

It was also in 1627 that Donne brought his eighty year old mother to the Deanery of St Paul's to live with him — a long delayed 'duty' that carried with it the irony of having a woman who, despite intense pressure to do so, had never abandoned her Catholic faith residing as his guest within the most visible physical symbol of the English Protestant church.  Elizabeth would remain his houseguest until her death in early 1630, an event which no doubt contributed to Donne, whose health had never been robust, falling ill and becoming confined to his bed.  He remained in bed — famously leaving it to be measured for the winding sheet he would be buried in — until he somehow found the strength to get up and preach what was to be his last-ever sermon, delivered in the royal presence of Charles I, on 25 February 1631.  In a little over a month Donne was dead, leaving the world on 31 March 1631 at the age of fifty-nine.  

 

Although Donne's final sermon had been published under the evocative title Death's Duel literally weeks after he had preached it to the new monarch, two more years would pass before the first edition of his poems would roll off the presses.  By then his literary heritage, both secular and sacred, was firmly in the control of his eldest son, also named John, who had followed him into the Church and spent most of his life suing others for what he deemed to be his denied rights to oversee and publish (and thereby profit from) new editions of his father's work.  But, as more than one scholar has noted, it was thanks to the greed of John Donne fils that so much of the work of John Donne père survived the cataclysm of the English Civil War and remained available to be 'rediscovered and re-evaluated' by them and the likes of his fellow poet TS Eliot in the first half of the twentieth century where his unusual syntax, unambiguous language and insistence on the importance of conveying individual experience seemed to make him one of the earliest practitioners of Modernism. 

HOLY SONNETS

XIV

Batter my heart, three personed God; for, you

As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

That I may rise, and stand, overthrow me, and bend

Your force, to break, blow, burn and make me new.

I, like an usurped town, to another due,

Labour to admit to you, but Oh, to no end,

Reason your viceroy in me, me should defend,

But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

Yet dearly I love, and would be loved fain,

But am betrothed unto your enemy:

Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

 

Written c 1609-1614

Published 1633

Use the link below to read more poems by English poet, essayist and clergyman JOHN DONNE:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-donne

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

Poet of the Month 001: WALTER RALEGH

Poet of the Month 026: ROBERT SOUTHWELL

Poet of the Month 078: MARY WROTH

 

Poet of the Month 078: MARY WROTH

 

 

 

MARY WROTH

?1587 – ?1653

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SONNET XIX

 

 

 

Come, darkest night, becoming sorrow best;

    Light, leave thy light, fit for a lightsome soul;

    Darkness doth truly suit with me oppressed,

    Whom absence' power doth from mirth control:

The very trees with hanging heads condole

    Sweet summer's parting, and of leaves distressed

    In dying colours make a griefful roll,

    So much, alas, to sorrow are they pressed.

Thus of dead leaves her farewell carpet's made:

    Their fall, their branches, all their mournings prove,

    With leafless, naked bodies, whose hues vade

    From hopeful green, to wither in their love:

If leaves and trees for absence mourners be,

No marvel that I grieve, who like want see.

 

 

 

 

The Countess of Montgomerie's 'Urania'

(1621) 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

control = restrain, prevent

 

distressed = plundered, stolen

 

griefful = sorrowful

 

roll = a role plus a roll of pressed leaves

 

prove = experience

 

vade = weaken, fade

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mary Wroth, the eldest child of well-connected English aristocrat Robert Sidney and his Welsh-born wife Barbara Gamage, was also the niece of Philip Sidney, the most famous poet of the Elizabethan age (far more so than William Shakespeare during his short life) and his sister Mary Pembroke, translator of the Psalms into English and a notable poet in her own right.

 

 

Wroth's lifelong love for her cousin William Herbert, the Earl of Pembroke, inspired her to write The Countess of Montgomerie's 'Urania,' an epic work of fiction that, while it contains numerous cross references and a variety of sub-plots, ostensibly tells the tale of Queen Pamphilia and her undying love for her cousin, the philandering Emperor Amphilanthus.  (Wroth and Herbert were in a sexual relationship that continued after their respective marriages to other people, with Wroth being a frequent guest at her lover's London home and country estate.  She also bore Herbert two illegitimate children following the deaths of her husband and of the one legitimate child that she bore by him.)  Considered to be the first work of extended prose fiction ever published by an Englishwoman, its fifty-six verse interludes were admired by many leading poets of the day including Ben Jonson (who would later enjoy the patronage of the Earl of Pembroke in his court role of Lord Chamberlain and go on to dedicate his 1612 play The Alchemist to Wroth) and George Chapman. 

 

 

But Wroth's work was not without its critics.  Edward Denny, Baron of Waltham, recognised himself as one of its characters, as did several other members of the court of James I, and attacked Wroth both in person and in print, his complaints eventually reaching the ear of the King and forcing her to justify herself to the monarch's favourite courtier the Duke of Buckingham.  The controversy prevented the volume from being reprinted during Wroth's lifetime, sending a clear signal to other female writers that it would be unwise if not unsafe to make their work publicly available as she had done.  In fact, forty more years would pass before Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, became the next woman to publish another work of long form fiction in Britain under her own name. 

 

 

Undaunted by this setback, Wroth broke through the gender barrier again by writing the play Love's Victory, which was performed privately despite her London home being situated next door to the Blackfriar's Theatre and a short distance across the Thames from The Globe whose acting company, co-run by William Shakespeare, enjoyed the patronage of her lover William Herbert.  Wroth had a passionate interest in the theatre, acting with Queen Anne as an 'Ethiopian nymph' in The Masque of Blackness created by Jonson and his production designing collaborator Inigo Jones which was presented at court in January 1605 and again in The Masque of Beauty which was presented to the King three years later.  Nor were these her first performances at court.  At the age of thirteen she had danced, perhaps solo or accompanied by the daughters of other aristocrats, for Queen Elizabeth I.

 

 

Wroth, who yearned to marry her cousin but was prevented from doing so by the disparities in their wealth and social status, entered into an arranged marriage with Robert Wroth in 1604.  While theirs was an unhappy union in several respects, the marriage endured until 1614 when Robert Wroth, who was deeply in debt by that time, died.  A month later Mary gave birth to their only child, a boy she named James in honour of the reigning monarch.  Her son only lived for two years, meaning that the bulk of her late husband's estate then passed to the uncle who was his closest male relative, saddling the widowed Mary with what, for the time, was her own massive debt of approximately £23,000.  

 

 

This may have contributed, along with the controversy that greeted the publication of Urania, to her subsequent fall from royal favour, although she did apply for and receive a number of royal warrants of protection that were useful in staving off legal proceedings launched against her by her deceased husband's creditors.  She remained determined to pay them off and may well have done so prior to moving to the town of Woodford and dying there, her groundbreaking literary achievements entirely forgotten, in either 1651 or 1653.

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read a more detailed summary of the life and work of British poet, novelist and dramatist MARY WROTH:

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/mary-wroth

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You might also enjoy:

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 073: QUEEN ELIZABETH I

 

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 046: THOMAS WYATT

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 010: ANONYMOUS

 

 

 

 

Some Books About… WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE 
? 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616

To read every book written about William Shakespeare would require several lifetimes.  No writer, and certainly no British writer, has generated more supplementary literature than Shakespeare and his work have generated in the four centuries since his death.  And nor does the flood of BardLit –– or, if you prefer, WillWrite –– appear to be in danger of slowing to a trickle any time soon.  Many new books are published about Shakespeare every year, written in English and a variety of other languages, as scholars, cultural critics and even novelists discover new parallels between his plays (particularly the tragedies and histories) and what occurs on a daily basis in our increasingly mad (and maddening) post-9/11 world.  

I would not presume to suggest that the books discussed below are the 'best' books ever published about Shakespeare and his work.  They are merely a sampling of those which have proven useful to me in my ongoing quest to come to terms with this most challenging and elusive of literary geniuses.  

 

Riverside Books USA, 1999

 

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (1998) by HAROLD BLOOM

'The plays,' states Harold Bloom in his introduction to this hefty and consistently thought-provoking study of them, 'remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually.  They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them.  Shakespeare will go on explaining us because, in part, he invented us, which is the central argument of this book.'  

It's a fascinating argument and a convincing one, presented by a prominent North American academic who was at the forefront of the study of literature in his native land from 1959 until his death half a century later.  But Bloom's fellow scholars are not his target audience.  Rather, his book is aimed at what he calls 'common readers and theatergoers' who, he hopes, will come to share his belief that is in the works of Shakespeare that we as a species first discovered what it really means to describe ourselves as 'human.'  He seeks to rescue 'Sweet Master Will' from the post-modern deconstructionists and give him back to the people –– or the groundlings to borrow a theatrical term –– for whom his works were, of course, originally written not for the sake of 'Art' or 'cultural significance' but for the more pressing reasons of earning a living and making the theatre company he co-owned a financially viable enterprise.  Shakespeare's purpose, Bloom seeks to remind us, was not to educate and elucidate but, first and foremost, to entertain and, by entertaining, to prosper in what was arguably the most exciting and competitive theatrical environment the Western world has ever seen. 

He analyses the events and themes of each play in scrupulous detail, expending the most ink on Hamlet (49 pages, as might be expected given its central position in the canon of Western literature) and the least on The Merry Wives of Windsor (4 pages) which he describes, not without justification, as a 'weak play' and a contender, along with The Two Gentleman of Verona, for the dubious honour of being 'Shakespeare's slightest comedy.'  But even here he offers intriguing insights into what may have been Shakespeare's reasons for writing a play that appears to deliberately humiliate one of his most popular characters, the rambunctious n'er-do-well Sir John Falstaff.  (He even refers to the humiliated Falstaff as 'pseudo-Falstaff' to differentiate him from the 'authentic Falstaff' who features in and, for as long as he's onstage, dominates parts one and two of Henry IV.)  He concludes that Shakespeare's decision to present Falstaff flummoxed by love and taken short by scheming women was his way of '…warding off personal horror' by making him the symbol of –– if not the scapegoat for –– his own romantic rejections and subsequent descents into depression.  Discounting the apocryphal tale which suggests the play was allegedly produced at the request of Elizabeth I who requested a work featuring 'Falstaff in love,' it is an interesting theory and one worth bearing in mind while reading what has been a little read work seldom staged since its 1597 (or 1598) premiere.

This is not to suggest that every theory that Bloom offers should be unquestioningly accepted because he taught at Yale, NYU and Harvard.  This a very personal book, possibly the most personal of the many he wrote about Shakespeare (his final book about the Bard, published a few months before his death, was Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind) and, as such, is a subjective expression of his particular likes, dislikes and occasional self-indulgences.  (He freely states as much in his introduction.)  His essay on Timon of Athens (which he places under the heading of 'Tragic Epilogues') –– another knotty and seldom performed work very likely to have been co-written with Thomas Middleton –– contains a few pronouncements I find it difficult to accept, including but not limited to the unverifiable statement that the playwright '…experienced a personal revulsion at what he was finishing, and turned away from it to do some play doctoring upon what became Pericles.'  Bloom seems baffled, even slightly insulted, by Timon's unrelenting misanthropy, describing the play as '…an amazing torso, powerfully expressionistic' that Shakespeare –– '…a great self critic' –– dismissed as being '…largely unworthy of him.'
  
Did he?  That's a lot of information to infer from a five act drama created in either 1604 or 1605 by a writer who sometimes worked with collaborators (as he did here with Middleton and again with George Wilkins on Pericles, for example) and whose motivations and thought processes remain completely mysterious to us, even when the person doing the inferring happens to be one of the world's leading literary scholars.  But this is a minor quibble and in no way indicative of the value of the book as a whole.  It remains a useful and stimulating text even as it challenges your assumptions about your favourite plays and what you think, or like to think, you understand about them.  Bloom is to be applauded for reminding us that these astonishing dramas were the product of Shakespeare's uncanny ability to portray humanity in all its forms, be they high-born, low-born or somewhere in-between.

Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  Its author HAROLD BLOOM died on 14 October 2019 at the age of eighty-nine.

Vintage/Random House UK, 1996

 

Shakespeare (1970) by ANTHONY BURGESS 

Like Harold Bloom, English novelist and critic Anthony Burgess was an unabashed and self-confessed Bardolator –– a Shakespeare fan (or should that be fanatic?) who recognised in the plays and poems a melding of literature and human consciousness which has yet to be equalled and is unlikely to be surpassed.  This slim volume, originally written to accompany a glossy photographic study of Shakespeare's life, followed the 1964 publication of Nothing Like The Sun –– a brilliantly inventive novel subtitled A Story of Shakespeare's Love-Life as notable for its exuberant wordplay as for the refreshingly honest irreverence it displays toward its subject –– and an unproduced 1968 screenplay that Burgess wrote for a proposed big budget Hollywood musical provisionally titled Will! or The Bawdy Bard.  The film was permanently shelved in 1970 but Burgess, never one to waste an idea when he could recycle it, revisited the experience of writing its script in his 1984 novel Enderby's Dark Lady, final volume of a tetraology concerning his poetic alter-ego Francis Xavier Enderby whose picaresque adventures could be said to have something of a Shakespearean bent to them.

Burgess brings many of the same qualities that make Nothing Like The Sun such a delight to read to this biography, his primary aim being similar to that of Harold Bloom –– to accord this most human of writers his humanity by depicting him as a living imperfect man and not as the literary demi-god or fossilized relic of a bygone age the hagiographers and some of the more extreme cultural theorists seem determined to portray him as.  'What I claim here,' Burgess explains in his introduction, 'is the right of every Shakespeare-lover who has ever lived to paint his own portrait of the man.  One is short of the right paints and brushes and knows one is going to end up with a botched and inadequate picture, but here I have real pictures to help me out.  Or, to put it another way, my task is to help the pictures.'  

Be that as it may, the text is entertainingly readable without the accompanying illustrations, none of which are included in the 1996 Random House paperback edition or subsequent reprints of the book.  And Burgess's elegantly constructed prose doesn't suffer in the slightest from this lack of visual addenda.  He has a novelist's observant eye for the inclusion of character revealing detail (and the artful exclusion of what could easily prove to be distracting irrelevancies) and a rare skill for recreating the atmosphere of sixteenth and seventeeth century England in language that's never anything less than arresting in addition to being ferociously intelligent.  There are, of course, many other short biographies of Shakespeare available –– including a more recent and just as worthy one by Anglo-American travel writer and journalist Bill Bryson published in 2007 as part of the HarperCollins 'Eminent Lives' series –– but Burgess's biography remains one of the cleverest and, to my mind, most sympathetic portraits of Shakespeare ever published.

Shakespeare may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer, as may the 1964 novel Nothing Like The Sun which was last reprinted in 2013.

 

Jonathon Cape UK, 2004

 

Will In The World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (2004) by STEPHEN GREENBLATT

As should be evident by now, much of what's written about Shakespeare and his working methods is based upon little more than speculation if not outright guesswork.  This is an understandable necessity when so little is known about his day to day life that scholar and layperson alike have no choice but to turn to the plays themselves to discover who he was and what made him such a unique, time-defying genius.  Why did the possibly Catholic son of a glover and wool merchant turned usurer from provincial Warwickshire, a young husband and father with no more than a grammar school education, set off to London to become an actor and playwright in the toughest, most fiercely competitive theatrical marketplace in what was then the civilized world?  How did he come to take on and so quickly outwrite the 'University Wits' –– a group which included writers as gifted as Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Lodge, John Lyly and Thomas Nashe to name just a few –– to become the leading dramatist not only of the Elizabethan age but of every age that succeeded it? 

These are just some of the many intriguing questions that Stephen Greenblatt, a Professor at Harvard University and one of the most renowned Shakespeare scholars of the modern era, asks and tries to answer in Will In The World.  He does this by relating the few verifiable facts about his subject's life to his work and showing how the two mutually interacted with and influenced each other.  His strategy, according to a 2013 interview posted on his website, is to '…combine a responsible research of these documentary traces and weighing what they mean with a conjuring act, with the possibility of actually bringing his person much more into focus, but not only into focus but into life, a life he had in his world.  Because the book is written with the presumption that Shakespeare, first of all, was born with an immense innate talent… and that he also did a lot of hard work, including reading books and studying, and working on his iambic pentameter.  But something about the way he was living in the world, something about his responsiveness to what was around him, made an enormous difference, so what I tried to do is simply to throw windows open and see what was outside the room that he was working in, and what he descended to when he descended onto the street.'  

Greenblatt brings both erudition and compassion to his task, offering us a new way of seeing and understanding Shakespeare's life in the very different world he inhabited between his arrival in London in 1587 and his death –– from a fever allegedly induced by consuming too much pickled herring and rhenish wine in the company of his old friend Ben Jonson and fellow Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton –– in the spring of 1616.  Like the Bloom and Burgess works discussed above, this book is an attempt to humanize the most god-like of writers by taking us deeply into the world that inspired his lifelong love of words and fired what was obviously a profoundly expansive imagination.  The research, as you would expect of any self-respecting scholar, is impeccable and the book reveals a Shakespeare who, despite his seemingly effortless ability to express human experience in the highest poetic terms, still feels like one of us –– a man who understood the vicissitudes of life, who suffered losses and setbacks, who had one foot planted in the world of the aristocrats and the other firmly planted in the grimy world of Southwark with its brothels, skittle parlours, bear-baiting rings and playhouses but nevertheless chose to abandon both worlds to return to Stratford-on-Avon to live out the rest of his life as a rusticated land-owning gentleman.  None of these experiences occurred in isolation and Greenblatt does a superb job of linking them, showing us that the phenomenon we know as 'William Shakespeare' was as much the product of upbringing, environment and social networking as it was of his unprecedented skill as a dramatist.

Will In The World may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics, the latest BardLit book by STEPHEN GREENBLATT, was published by The Bodley Head on 8 June 2018 and remains widely available in both print and digital editions.

Cambridge University Press UK, 2009

 

The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 (Fourth Edition 2009) by ANDREW GURR

'Hamlet, like any other Shakespeare nobleman, wore his hat indoors… The unbonneted Hamlet familiar to modern audiences is a creation of the indoor theatre and fourth-wall staging, where every scene is in a room unless it is specified otherwise, and where everyone goes hatless accordingly.  Hamlet in 1601 walked under the sky in an open amphitheatre, on a platform that felt out-of-doors in comparison with modern theatres but indifferently represented indoors or out to the Elizabethans.'  

So begins Andrew Gurr's masterly and deservedly valued forty year study of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Carolinian theatre –– an industry dominated by the plays of William Shakespeare despite the fact that he probably didn't arrive in London until 1587, seventeen years after the city's first theatres were established, didn't have his first play performed there until 1592 (or thereabouts) and left the city for good in 1616, a few months prior to his death and twenty-six years before the Puritans closed the theatres not, as has generally been assumed, for religious reasons but as a means of maintaining public order.  While Shakespeare cannot be said to have invented the conventions of the English stage, it was his work, more than that of his contemporaries or any of his theatrical descendants, that stretched and tested those conventions in ways that still resonate with and continue to delight theatregoers today.

It can be easy to overlook the fact that Shakespeare was first and foremost a working playwright, someone who earned his living by composing verse dramas performed by actors in London playhouses and, after 1599, in one particular playhouse called The Globe that he co-owned with other members of the Chamberlain's Men, the London-based acting company (and favourite of Queen Elizabeth I of England and her successor King James I of Great Britain) for whom he wrote exclusively if not always alone.  This book examines the nuts and bolts aspects of Shakespeare's profession in fascinating but always accessible detail, providing the reader with one of the clearest pictures available not just of the theatres and the men who built, managed and acted in them, but also of the customs, mores and social attitudes of those who would pay a penny to the wherryman to be rowed across the Thames each week in order to attend performances and partake of the many other pleasures, illicit and otherwise, that the Bankside area had to offer.  

With chapters covering original staging practices, the personnel structures of the city's many professional acting companies, descriptions of styles of acting, the history of playhouse construction, the use of props and costumes and audience behaviour it is an indispensable guide to the very different (and sometimes dangerous due to the unpredictable presence of the plague which could break out again at any moment) theatregoing experience of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.  Nor is its focus exclusively confined to Shakespeare.  The plays of Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson, John Webster, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, George Chapman and even lesser known playwrights like Richard Brome (who was Jonson's servant and probably his protègé) are also discussed, making this an invaluable single volume reference for anyone eager to move beyond the texts themselves to understand how they were staged, performed and received by Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences who demanded that plays not only be gripping and action-packed but that each performance should conclude with all the players once again taking the stage to dance a boisterous jig together. 

The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642 may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer. 

Penguin Books UK, 2008

 

The Lodger: Shakespeare On Silver Street (2007) by CHARLES NICHOLL

A new style of Shakespeare biography has emerged in recent years in which the idea of examining his life in toto has been substituted for the examination of one particular period or aspect of it.  The Lodger is one such book and, I believe, a book that's destined to be regarded as a classic of Shakespeare scholarship by future generations.  Written by Charles Nicholl, a first-rate literary detective whose 1992 book about Christopher Marlowe remains the best examination of that poet's mysterious and probably royally sanctioned death, it focuses on the time Shakespeare spent as the tenant of the Mountjoys, a French 'tire-making' family who had emigrated to England, along with many of their Huguenot brethren, to escape religious persecution following the bloody St Bartholomew's Day Massacre of 1572.  

The Mountjoys settled on Silver Street in the Cripplegate district of London and it was here, probably some time in 1603, that they rented a room in their combined house and shop to a thirty-nine year old actor/playwright from the provinces whose most recent offering Measure for Measure had been another popular success.  Why did Shakespeare choose to rent a room from them, a family of 'strangers' as foreigners, be they French or Dutch or anything else, were disparagingly labelled at the time?  (Then as now, immigrants were scorned by the majority of the populace, who blamed them for everything from higher food prices to ruining English trade to intentionally spreading the plague.  Stupidity, it seems, is a timeless human attribute.)  This was hardly the norm in Jacobean London, even though many of Shakespeare's fellow playwrights –– including Thomas Nashe, Robert Greene and Ben Jonson –– were in the habit of taking lodgings close to London's theatre district where they could work in peace without necessarily placing themselves in the 'thick of the action' so to speak.  

Christopher Mountjoy, Shakespeare's landlord and the family patriarch, was a successful if parsimonious and somewhat belligerent figure, a hardheaded businessman whose skill at manufacturing 'tires' –– the common name for 'head attires' which were elaborate headpieces worn as fashion accessories by any woman who could afford one (including prostitutes) that often featured in paintings of the time –– was consistent enough to see him prosper and earn regular commissions from theatrical costumiers along with many high profile members of the aristocracy.  

But Shakespeare, it seems, was more than just the upstairs lodger of Mountjoy and his wife (and chief salesperson) Marie.  He also took a hand in persuading their apprentice, a man named Stephen Belott, to marry their daughter Mary in 1604 –– an involvement that would see him called to testify in court on the couple's behalf in May 1612 following Christopher Mountjoy's failure to pay the dowry of £60 they had been promised eight years earlier.  'It was,' Nicholl informs us, 'a family dispute: trivial, pecuniary, faintly sordid –– standard fare at the Court of Requests, whose function was broadly equivalent to the Small Claims Courts of today.'  Why was Shakespeare called in as a witness?  And what drove him to take on the unlikely role of matchmaker in the first place?

These are just some of the questions Nicholl confronts in this exhaustively researched and brilliantly written book, offering us a view of Shakespeare's life and the Jacobean world in general –– its culture, its fashion industry, its xenophobia, its fascinations with adultery and both the commercial and non-commercial forms of sex –– that ranks among the most vivid and engaging I have ever read.  Part biography and part mystery story, it presents us with an image of Shakespeare that, while not exactly at odds with other, more traditional representations of the playwright's life and legacy, comes much closer to revealing him as the flesh and blood human being he was than those more scholarly studies generally succeed in doing.  It's a rivetting investigation of an infrequently examined period of his life that, as one reviewer put it, 'Throws a new light on the man who was both a universal genius and just like us.'

The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer. 

Oxford University Press UK, 2001

 

The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare (2001) by MICHAEL DOBSON and STANLEY WELLS [editors]

If I had to select one book about Shakespeare to take with me to a desert island then this fine Oxford Companion would undoubtedly be it.  While numerous general reference guides about the playwright and his work have been published over the years (some more diligently researched than others), none that I've used has come close to achieving what this book achieves in its 541 closely spaced pages.  It offers the reader Shakespeare in his entirety –– his past and present selves as playwright, poet, impresario, theatre owner and family man, drawing on what in 2001 was the latest scholarship to present him in all aspects of his life and as the enduring central figure of what remains a vitally important literary and cultural legacy.  (An updated edition of the book, containing more than 80 new entries, was published in 2016 and is obviously the edition to seek out by anybody wishing to consult or purchase a copy.) 
 
The Companion is a compendium of facts both vital and trivial, a pleasing combination of scholarly data and knowledge for its own sake that never fails to delight even as it informs and elucidates.  If you have a burning desire to know who Samuel Gilburne was then all you have to do is turn to page 164 to learn that he was a member of the King's Men named in the actor list of the 1623 Folio.  If you want to know what role inns played in the development of Elizabethan theatre, the answer is waiting for you in a pithy entry appearing on page 213.  One of my favourite entries is the one about dogs written by Anne Button, who tells us that they '…are given names in Shakespeare more often than any other kind of animal in the plays… The principal dog brought onto the stage is Crab in The Two Gentleman of Verona, though the dog in "Pyramus and Thisbe" in A Midsummer Night's Dream might also have been a real animal in Shakespeare's day.'  

The book also features dedicated entries for every play and poem, accompanied by usefully condensed synopses, notes on sources and texts, artistic features, critical and stage histories plus film and television adaptations, if any.  These entries, like those concerning Shakespeare's fellow writers and business associates, serve as excellent starting points for further investigation, containing precisely the right amount of information in what is seldom longer than four single spaced, double columned pages.  Just as helpful are the dozens of maps and black and white photographs the book contains, all of which shed further light on Shakespeare's parallel lives as son, husband, poet and playwright and his ongoing after-life as the most persistently revered cultural icon in the Western world.  It makes the ideal reference guide for anybody interested in Shakespeare who is unable or unwilling to commit to one of the more scholarly studies of his life and career that can sometimes be daunting in terms of length and a bit of a linguistic slog for the inquisitive but time poor non-specialist.  

But why believe me when you can have the quality of this volume confirmed by no less a personage than Dame Judi Dench, who played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli's acclaimed 1960 RSC production of Romeo and Juliet and called the book 'A wonderful treasure house of information and insight.'  Ne'er a truer word was't spoke, fair lady.  Hie thee, gentle reader, and seek'st thou thine own copy forthwith. 

The updated edition of The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, containing more than 80 new entries, was published in 2016 and may still be obtainable from your local library, bookstore or preferred online retailer.  (It has a different cover to the original 2001 edition displayed above which is shown below to eliminate confusion.)

Oxford University Press UK, 2016

Use the link below to visit OpenSourceShakespeare, a self-proclaimed 'Experiment in Literary Technology' offering free digital editions of every play and poem written by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE plus a handy search engine which allows visitors to search each play and poem via '…the exact spelling of a word, the first part of a word form or any other part of a word form.'  

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/concordance/

 

Digital versions of the plays and poems are also available from Project Gutenberg and other free book sharing sites.

 

You might also enjoy:

 
Some Books About… ANTHONY BURGESS

 
Some Books About… JOSEPH CONRAD

 
Some Books About… FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN