The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant's<i>Gondibert</i>(1651)

Nevitt, Marcus

doi:10.1080/0268117x.2009.10555631

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 3 publications

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“…In this tavern-based landscape of classicised conviviality and "ritualised forms of aggression" the epithet of "wit" was a fundamental mark of distinction (O'Callaghan 2007: 6). More to the point, it epitomised a culture that reproduced itself thereafter -in new and more violent cultures of "clubbing" by the 1620s as well as in the particular conceits of each generation of poets (Raylor 1994;Nevitt 2009). In this latter respect "wit" was a kind of contested heirloom passing from one literary network to the next: from Robert Greene and his fraternity in the 1590s to Shakespeare and company to Ben Jonson and his "sons" to royalist dissidents like Sir William Davenant and his literary collaborator, Thomas Hobbes (Nevitt 2009: 290).…”

Section: Libertines and Witsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“Tumbled into the dirt”

Withington

2011

JHP

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This paper considers notions of "wit" in early modern England. It deploys quantitative methodologies to trace the term's general discursive importance over time; it also looks at the use and conceptualisation of the term by canonical writers -Robert Greene and William Shakespeare in the 1590s, Thomas Hobbes in the 1650s, and the "libertines" of the Restoration era. The paper argues that whereas cultural and social historians have tended to regard impoliteness in the period as either the deliberate inversion or cultural absence of "civil" norms -"anti-civility", in the words of Anna Bryson -wit provided a range of conventions and conversational repertoires outwith the normal bounds of civility. More to the point, in the hands of Thomas Hobbes wit demarcated a historicised theory of social practice.

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Section: Libertines and Witsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“Tumbled into the dirt”

Withington

2011

JHP

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Davenant,William

Nevitt¹

2017

The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature

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William Davenant (1606–68), dramatist, poet, and Restoration theatre manager, was born in Oxford, the second son of Jane and John Davenant who ran a tavern owned by New College. His origins, though relatively modest, were by no means obscure since Davenant's father, a respected vintner, was elected mayor of Oxford in 1621. Nor were they as glamorous as he occasionally encouraged his friends to believe. In a famous anecdote, recorded after the Restoration by John Aubrey, Davenant would, in his cups with Samuel Butler, intimate that he was Shakespeare's bastard or at least ‘seemed contented enough to be thought his Son’. Though Shakespeare probably was a frequent visitor to the Davenants' tavern, a convenient stopping point between London and Stratford, modern biographers have convincingly dismantled this myth, suggesting that Davenant might perhaps have been his godson, but no more (Edmond 1987). Either way, Davenant spent a short period studying at Lincoln College in his home town before his parents died in 1622, at which point he made his way to London, where he refused to follow the path marked out for him in his father's will which decreed that he was to be ‘put to Prentice to some good marchant of London or other tradesman’. Davenant instead put himself into the service of the aristocracy, first as a page to Frances Howard, duchess of Richmond, and then as a clerk or amanuensis to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. It was during his employment in these households that he probably first came into contact with the influential courtiers who would later propel him towards the centre of the nation's culture and politics: Sir Henry Jermyn and Endymion Porter.

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Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England

Skuse¹

2021

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Offering an innovative perspective on debates concerning embodiment in the early modern period, Alanna Skuse examines diverse kinds of surgical alteration, from mastectomy to castration, and amputation to facial reconstruction. Body-altering surgeries had profound socioeconomic and philosophical consequences. They reached beyond the physical self, and prompted early modern authors to develop searching questions about the nature of body integrity and its relationship to the soul: was the body a part of one's identity, or a mere 'prison' for the mind? How was the body connected to personal morality? What happened to the altered body after death? Drawing on a wide variety of texts including medical treatises, plays, poems, newspaper reports, and travel writings, this volume will argue that the answers to these questions were flexible, divergent, and often surprising, and helped to shape early modern thoughts on philosophy, literature, and the natural sciences. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

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The Insults of Defeat: Royalist Responses to Sir William Davenant'sGondibert(1651)

Cited by 6 publications

References 3 publications

“Tumbled into the dirt”

“Tumbled into the dirt”

Davenant,William

Surgery and Selfhood in Early Modern England

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