Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

Ben Jonson was born around June 11, 1572, the posthumous son of a clergyman. He was educated at Westminster School by the great classical scholar William Camden and worked in his stepfather’s trade, bricklaying. The trade did not please him in the least, and he joined the army, serving in Flanders. He returned to England about 1592 and married Anne Lewis on November 14, 1594.

Jonson joined the theatrical company of Philip Henslowe in London as an actor and playwright on or before 1597, when he is identified in the papers of Henslowe. In 1597 he was imprisoned in the Fleet Prison for his involvement in a satire entitled The Isle of Dogs, declared seditious by the authorities. The following year Jonson killed a fellow actor, Gabriel Spencer, in a duel in the Fields at Shoreditch and was tried at Old Bailey for murder. He escaped the gallows only by pleading benefit of clergy. During his subsequent imprisonment he converted to Roman Catholicism only to convert back to Anglicism over a decade later, in 1610. He was released forfeit of all his possessions, and with a felon’s brand on his thumb.

William Alabaster (1567-1640)

William Alabaster, or Alablaster, was born at Hadleigh, Suffolk in 1567. He was educated at Hadleigh grammar school, Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, which he entered as a scholar in 1584. He took his B.A. in 1587, and M.A. in 1591. In 1592 he was incorporated of the University of Oxford.¹

While at Cambridge, Alabaster wrote Roxana, a Senecan tragedy in Latin, in 1592. It was performed at Trinity soon after to great enthusiasm. Forty years after its first performance, it was still esteemed highly enough to warrant an unauthorized publication, in 1632. Full of errors, this induced Alabaster to publish an authorized edition later in the same year. Johnson, in his Lives of the Poets, says, in reference to “Latin verses with classic elegance”: “If we produced any thing worthy of notice before the elegies of Milton, it was perhaps Alabaster’s Roxana.²

Life of Sir Thomas Overbury (1581-1613)

Source: 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

Sir Thomas Overbury (1581 – September 15, 1613), English poet and essayist, and the victim of one of the most sensational crimes in English history, was the son of Nicholas Overbury, of Bourton-on-the-Hill, and was born at Compton Scorpion, near Ilmington, in Warwickshire.

In the autumn of 1595 he became a gentleman commoner of Queen’s College, Oxford, took his degree of B.A. in 1598 and came to London to study law in the Middle Temple. He found favour with Sir Robert Cecil, travelled on the Continent and began to enjoy a reputation for an accomplished mind and free manners. About the year 1601, being in Edinburgh on a holiday, he met Robert Carr, then an obscure page to the earl of Dunbar; and so great a friendship was struck up between the two youths that they came up to London together.

Sir Francis Bacon

Excerpted from:
A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature.
John W. Cousins, ed. J M Dent & Co, London, 1910.

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Bacon, Francis, Lord Verulam, and Viscount St. Alban’s, philosopher and statesman, was the youngest son of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper, by his second wife, a daughter of Sir Anthony Cooke, whose sister married William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the great minister of Queen Elizabeth. He was born at York House in the Strand on Jan. 22, 1561, and in his 13th year was sent with his elder brother Anthony to Trinity College, Cambridge. Here he first met the Queen, who was impressed by his precocious intellect, and was accustomed to call him “the young Lord Keeper.” Here also he became dissatisfied with the Aristotelian philosophy as being unfruitful and leading only to resultless disputation.In 1576 he entered Gray’s Inn, and in the same year joined the embassy of Sir Amyas Paulet to France, where he remained until 1579. The death of his father in that year, before he had completed an intended provision for him, gave an adverse turn to his fortunes, and rendered it necessary that he should decide upon a profession. He accordingly returned to Gray’s Inn, and, after an unsuccessful attempt to induce Burghley to give him a post at court, and thus enable him to devote himself to a life of learning, he gave himself seriously to the study of law, and was called to the Bar in 1582. He did not, however, desert philosophy, and published a Latin tract, Temporis Partus Maximus (the Greatest Birth of Time), the first rough draft of his own system.

King James I

by John Butler

James I of England and VI of Scotland was born in 1566, the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Henry, Lord Darnley. James had to face difficulties from his earliest years—his mother was an incompetent ruler who quarrelled with politicians and churchmen such as John Knox, and she may have been involved in the murder of her husband Darnley, himself a worthless character. The murder was carried out partly to avenge the slaying of Mary’s secretary and possible lover, David Rizzio or Riccio, in which Darnley played a part (before James’s birth), and it also enabled Mary to marry her current lover, the Earl of Bothwell. Mary was deposed by the Scottish lords in 1567, and fled to England, where she sought the protective custody of Elizabeth I, who clapped her in prison and had her beheaded twenty years later.

Seamus Heaney

Digging

For some context on Seamus Heaney, see the Context section of Storm on the Island

1. Subject Matter
2. Structure and Language
3. Imagery and Sound
4. Attitude, tone and ideas
5. Comparison

W B Yeats: Song of the Old Mother

The Poem

The Song of the Old Mother

I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow;
And then I must scrub and bake and sweep
Till stars are beginning to blink and peep;
And the young lie long and dream in their bed
Of the matching of ribbons for bosom and head,
And their day goes over in idleness,
And they sigh if the wind but lift a tress:
While I must work because I am old,
And the seed of the fire gets feeble and cold.

The Language Of the Poem

• The Old Mother uses very simple language. It is ordinary polite English (not colloquial) with few words more than one syllable in length. This suggests that the woman has had a simple, straightforward life and that the things that occupy her now are basic: I must scrub and bake and sweep.
• However, the young women have nothing to do but worry about the colour of their ribbons. The contrast between the idleness of the young – who are more suited to physical work – and the old woman, is harsh.
• The young sigh or complain (line 8) if the wind merely disarranges their hair, but the old woman does not complain – at least, not explicitly. Do you feel that the final line is a veiled complaint?
• The title indicates that the woman is a Mother, but it is not clear whether the young whose idleness she describes are her children or not. It is possible that the word Mother is merely an affectionate name for an old woman, and that she has no children – or that her children have grown up and left her alone. If so, is she perhaps reminded of her own daughters when she sees the young women?

Sound

• There is some effective use of repetition in the poem:
  - The I must scrub and bake and sweep in line 3 is echoed by the I must work in line 9, reinforcing the repetitive, unending nature of her work.
  - Line 10 mirrors line 2, giving a feeling of finality and enclosure to the poem.
  
• The strong regular rhythm emphasises the physical side of the woman’s work: the beat falls on rise, dawn, kneel, blow in line 1, for example, as if hammering out her tough routine.
• There is a lot of alliteration and assonance in the poem. For example:
  - The repeated b and k and p sounds in scrub and bake and sweep (line 3) emphasise how hard and physical the woman’s work is
  - The long l sounds in lie long (line 5) help to convey the laziness of the young women.
  - We can hear the girls sighing in the assonance of line 8 – sigh if the wind but lift a tress – while the soft rhyme in lines 7 and 8 – idleness / tress emphasises the gentle way in which they spend their days.

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