ROBERT DEVEREUX, EARL OF ESSEX (1566-1601).
It is possible that Essex, who sometimes dabbled in literature, had
himself a hand in the device of Love and Self-Love, with which he entertained Elizabeth on 17 Nov. 1595, and of which some of the speeches are generally credited to Bacon (q.v.). WILLIAM DODD (c. 1597-1602). A Scholar and Fellow of St. John's, Cambridge, and a conjectured author of Parnassus (cf. ch. xxiv). MICHAEL DRAYTON (c. 1563-1631). Drayton was born at Hartshill in Warwickshire, and brought up in the household of Sir Henry Goodyere of Polesworth, whose daughter Anne, afterwards Lady Rainsford, is the Idea of his pastorals and sonnets. With The Harmony of the Church (1591) began a life-long series of ambitious poems, in all the characteristic Elizabethan manners, for which Drayton found many patrons, notably Lucy Lady Bedford, Sir Walter Aston of Tixall, Prince Henry and Prince Charles, and Edward Earl of Dorset. The guerdons of his pen were not sufficient to keep him from having recourse to the stage. Meres classed him in 1598 among the 'best for tragedy', and Henslowe's diary shows him a busy writer for the Admiral's men, almost invariably in collaboration with Dekker and others, from Dec. 1597 to Jan. 1599, and a more occasional one from Oct. 1599 to May 1602. At a later date he may possibly have written for Queen Anne's men, since commendatory verses by T. Greene are prefixed to his Poems of 1605. In 1608 he belonged to the King's Revels syndicate at Whitefriars. No later connexion with the stage can be traced, and he took no steps to print his plays with his other works. His Elegy to Henry Reynolds of Poets and Poesie (C. Brett, Drayton's Minor Poems, 108) does honour to Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Beaumont, and tradition makes him a partaker in the drinking-bout that led to Shakespeare's end. Jonson wrote commendatory verses for him in 1627, but in 1619 had told Drummond (Laing, 10) that 'Drayton feared him; and he esteemed not of him'. The irresponsible Fleay, i. 361; ii. 271, 323, identifies him with Luculento of E. M. O., Captain Jenkins of Dekker and Webster's Northward Ho!, and the eponym of the anonymous Sir Giles Goosecap; Small, 98, with the Decius criticized in the anonymous Jack Drum's Entertainment, who may also be Dekker. The collections of Drayton's Poems do not include his plays.—Dissertations: O. Elton, M. D. (1895, Spenser Soc., 1905); L. Whitaker, M. D. as a Dramatist (1903, M. L. A. xviii. 378).
Sir John Oldcastle. 1599
With Hathaway, Munday, and Wilson.
S. R. 1600, Aug. 11 (Vicars). 'The first parte of the history of the life of Sir John Oldcastell lord Cobham. Item the second and last parte of the history of Sir John Oldcastell lord Cobham with his martyrdom,' Thomas Pavier (Arber, iii. 169).
