1550-1780

The first half of the 18th century, during which English poets such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift emulated Virgil, Ovid, and Horace.

Because James Thomson’s long, reflective landscape poem The Seasons (1730) commanded so much attention and affection for at least 100 years after he wrote it, his achievement has been identified with it. Thomson...

Playwright, poet, and translator George Chapman was an important figure in the English Renaissance. His plays, particularly, were adapted for the stage throughout the Restoration, and, though his reputation...

The achievement of Christopher Marlowe, poet and dramatist, was enormous—surpassed only by that of his exact contemporary, William Shakespeare. A few months the elder, Marlowe was usually the leader, although...

Of all English poets, Thomas Chatterton seemed to his great Romantic successors most to typify a commitment to the life of imagination. His poverty and untimely suicide represented the martyrdom of the poet...

No one can deny the power, endurance, and memorable lines of the work of John Skelton; he is indisputably the first major Tudor poet, writing during the reigns of Edward IV, Richard III, and (for most of his...

Samuel Johnson, the premier English literary figure of the mid and late 18th century, was a writer of exceptional range: a poet, a lexicographer, a translator, a journalist and essayist, a travel writer, a...

Anglo-Irish poet, satirist, essayist, and political pamphleteer Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, Ireland. He spent much of his early adult life in England before returning to Dublin to serve as Dean of St...

The acknowledged master of the heroic couplet and one of the primary tastemakers of the Augustan age, British writer Alexander Pope was a central figure in the Neoclassical movement of the early 18th century...

Thomas Tusser was born in Essex, England, in 1524. Employed as a “singing boy” from a young age, he was educated at Eton and King’s College and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. It seems likely that he also spent time...

French Renaissance poet Pierre de Ronsard was educated at the Collège de Navarre in Paris. He served as a page to the Duke of Orléans and to James V, the king of Scotland. After nearly losing all his hearing...

Gaspara Stampa was a 16th-century poet, musician, and singer born in Padua, Italy. Following her father’s death in the 1530s, she and her mother moved to Venice. There, her family home became an epicenter ...

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was a prolific writer who worked in many genres, including poetry, fiction, drama, letters, biography, science, and even science fiction. Unlike most women of her ...

Marguerite de Navarre was not the only educated woman to write and publish verse during the first half of the sixteenth century, but she was the first woman of the French nobility who carefully compiled from...

Mary Sidney was the most important non-royal woman writer and patron in Elizabethan England. Without appearing to transgress the strictures against women's writing, she composed a sizable body of work, evading...

Elizabethan epigrammatist and clergyman Thomas Bastard was born in Blandford, Dorchester, and educated at Winchester College and New College, Oxford, where he earned a BA and MA and was made a perpetual Fellow...

Chidiock Tichborne was born in Southampton, England, to Roman Catholic parents. Though Catholicism was tolerated in England during Tichborne’s early years, when Queen Elizabeth I was excommunicated by the ...

An essayist, novelist, poet, and playwright, Goldsmith was born in Kilkenny West, County Westmeath, Ireland. He graduated from Trinity College, Dublin, and studied medicine in Edinburgh but never received ...

Lady Mary Wroth was the first Englishwoman to write a complete sonnet sequence as well as an original work of prose fiction. Although earlier women writers of the 16th century had mainly explored the genres...