D'Avenant, SIR WILLIAM

D'Avenant, SIR WILLIAM, English poet and playwright, was born in 1606 at Oxford, where his father kept the Crown Tavern, a house at which Shakespeare was in the habit of stopping when on his journeys between London and Stratford. A story arose later that D'Avenant's birth was due to an intrigue between his mother and the great dramatist, but for this there seems to be no foundation, though apparently D'Avenant himself was willing enough to barter his mother's reputation for the credit of such a parentage. Aubrey tells us that D'Avenant would often say, when pleasant over a cup of wine, that it seemed to him that he wrote with the very spirit that Shakespeare did, and 'seemed contented enough to be thought his son.' In his twelfth year the precocious boy penned an Ode in Remembrance of Master Shakespeare, not printed, however, until 1638. After a short period of study at Lincoln College, he became page to Frances, Duchess of Richmond; next passed into the household of the aged poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, and in 1628 took to writing for the stage. During the next ten years he produced many plays, the least poor of which were The Cruel Brother (1630) and The Wits (1636). In 1638, at the request of the queen, he was appointed poet-laureate in succession to Ben Jonson. About the same time he lost his nose through an illness—a calamity which laid him open to the merriment of such wits as Suckling, Denham, and Sir John Mennis. He afterwards became manager of Drury Lane Theatre, but became embroiled in the intrigues of the Civil War, and was apprehended and flung into the Tower. He soon escaped to France, and returning, distin- guished himself so much in the royalist cause, that he was knighted by Charles at the siege of Gloucester (September 1643). D'Avenant again got into difficulties, and was confined in the Tower for two years, when he was released, it is said, on the intercession of Milton. Once more he set about establishing theatrical representations, and in 1658 succeeded in opening a theatre. Two years earlier he had given what was practically the first opera in England, with Mrs Coleman as the first actress that ever appeared on an English stage. After the Restoration, D'Avenant was favoured by royal patronage, and continued to write and superintend the performance of plays until his death, April 7, 1668. His epic, entitled Gondibert, a feeble reaction from the romanticism of the Elizabethan poets, consists of fifteen hundred four-line heroic stanzas with alternate rhymes—a metre which the genius of Gray's Elegy can scarce save from the damning sin of monotony; much beraised by its contemporaries, it now sleeps securely in the same oblivion with the author's Madagascar, and his great opera The Siege of Rhodes. A collected edition of his plays, with memoir, was edited by Logan and Maidment (Edin. 5 vols. 1872-74).—CHARLES D'AVENANT, his eldest son, was born in London in 1656, was educated at Balliol College, sat in parliament under James II. and William III., was commissioner of excise and joint-licenser of plays, under Anne secretary to the Commissioners for Union with Scotland, next inspector-general of imports and exports. He died 6th November 1714. Among his writings are Discourses on the Publick Revenues and the Trade of England (1698), and A Discourse upon Grants (1700).