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Albumazar
''Albumazar'' is a Jacobean era play, a comedy written by Thomas Tomkis that was performed and published in 1615. Productions The play was specially commissioned by Trinity College, Cambridge to entertain King James I during his 1615 visit to the University. College officials sought a play from alumnus Tomkis, then a lawyer in Wolverhampton, who had written the successful ''Lingua'' for his college a decade earlier. Gentlemen of Trinity College acted ''Albumazar'' before the King and his court on 9 March 1615 (new style). One report on this production from an audience member survives, in a letter from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton – though Chamberlain thought it a failure. The play was revived onstage during the Restoration, by the Duke's Company at their theatre at Lincoln's Inn Fields; Samuel Pepys saw it on 22 February 1668. In 1744 playwright James Ralph adapted Tomkis's play into his ''The Astrologer;'' it was not a success, and ran for one performance only. In ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Tomkis
Thomas Tomkis (or Tomkys) (c. 1580 – 1634) was an English playwright of the late Elizabethan and the Jacobean eras, and arguably one of the more cryptic figures of English Renaissance drama. Tomkis was the son of a Staffordshire clergyman, John Tomkys, who became the Public Preacher at St Mary's church, Shrewsbury in Shropshire, from 1582 until his death in 1592. Thomas matriculated in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1597. Tomkis earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1600, and his Master of Arts degree in 1604; he became a minor fellow of Trinity College in 1602, and a major fellow in 1604. He remained at the college until 1610, when he moved to Wolverhampton and set up a successful legal practice. His college called him back five years later, to prepare an entertainment of King James I. Tomkis is credited with two academic plays of the early seventeenth century: ''Lingua'' (published 1607) and '' Albumazar'' (published 1615). He is also regarded as a likely author of ''Pathom ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lingua (play)
''Lingua, or the Combat of the Tongue and the Five Senses for Superiority'' is an allegorical stage play of the first decade of the 17th century, generally attributed to the academic playwright Thomas Tomkis. Publication ''Lingua'' was entered into the Stationers' Register on 23 February 1607 (new style), and was published later that year in a quarto printed by George Eld for the bookseller Simon Waterson. The play proved to have unusual long-term popularity for an academic work, and was reprinted in 1610, 1617, 1622, 1632, and 1657. Its use of English rather than the more normal Latin gave ''Lingua'' a wider accessibility to a general audience than academic dramas of its era usually had. In 1613 ''Lingua'' was translated into a German version titled ''Speculum Aestheticum'', by Johannes Rhenanus; a Dutch translation followed in 1648, by Lambert van den Bosch. Date The date of the play's stage premiere is uncertain. The play's text itself contains a reference to the year 1602: "A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Walter Burre
Walter Burre ( fl. 1597 – 1622) was a London bookseller and publisher of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, best remembered for publishing several key texts in English Renaissance drama. Burre was made a "freeman" of the Stationers Company — meaning that he became a full-fledged member of the London guild of booksellers — in 1596. From 1597 to 1622 he did business in a sequence of three London shops; the most important was at the sign of the Crane in St Paul's Churchyard (1604 and after). Drama and Literature In the span of a decade, Burre published the first editions of four plays by Ben Jonson: * ''Every Man in His Humour,'' 1601 * ''Cynthia's Revels,'' 1601 * ''The Alchemist,'' 1610 * '' Catiline: His Conspiracy,'' 1611. Beyond the confines of the Jonson canon, Burre issued a number of other first quartos of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays — Thomas Nashe's ''Summer's Last Will and Testament'' (1600), Thomas Middleton's ''A Mad World, My Masters'' ( ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Alchemist (play)
''The Alchemist'' is a comedy by English playwright Ben Jonson. First performed in 1610 by the King's Men, it is generally considered Jonson's best and most characteristic comedy; Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that it had one of the three most perfect plots in literature. The play's clever fulfilment of the classical unities and vivid depiction of human folly have made it one of the few Renaissance plays (except the works of Shakespeare) with a continuing life on stage, apart from a period of neglect during the Victorian era. Background ''The Alchemist'' premiered 34 years after the first permanent public theatre (The Theatre) opened in London; it is, then, a product of the early maturity of commercial drama in London. Only one of the University Wits who had transformed drama in the Elizabethan period remained alive (this was Thomas Lodge); in the other direction, the last great playwright to flourish before the Interregnum, James Shirley, was already a teenager. The theatr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Nicholas Okes
Nicholas Okes (died 1645) was an English printer in London of the Jacobean and Caroline eras, remembered for printing works of English Renaissance drama. He was responsible for early editions of works by many of the playwrights of the period, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, Thomas Heywood, James Shirley, and John Ford. Life and work Okes was the son of a "horner," a man who made hornbooks for the elementary education of small children; Okes's grandfather may have been a lute player. Nicholas Okes began his apprenticeship with printer Richard Field at Christmas 1595. He was made a "freeman" (full member) of the Stationers Company on 5 December 1603. His career advanced in 1606, in connection with the printing establishment of George and Lionel Snowden; Lionel left the firm and Okes took the man's place as George Snowden's partner (29 January 1606). Snowden, in turn, left the business on 13 April 1607, when Okes bought h ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Dring
Thomas Dring (died 1668) was a London publisher and bookseller of the middle seventeenth century. He was in business from 1649 on; his shop (as his title pages indicate) was located "at the sign of the George in Fleet Street, near St. Dunstan's Church." Drama Much like his contemporary William Cooke, Thomas Dring specialized in the publication of law books, but also issued works in a range of subjects including English Renaissance drama. In the latter subject, his most significant single project was the ''Five New Plays'' of 1653, an important collection of the dramas of Richard Brome that Dring published in partnership with Humphrey Moseley and Richard Marriot. Dring also issued first or later editions of other plays of the period: * Walter Montague's masque ''The Shepherd's Paradise'', 1659 * Sir Robert Stapylton's '' The Slighted Maid'', 1663 * James Shirley's ''Love Tricks'', 1667 (the 3rd edition) * Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's '' The Changeling'', 1668 (2nd e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ja'far Ibn Muhammad Abu Ma'shar Al-Balkhi
Abu Ma'shar al-Balkhi, Latinized as Albumasar (also ''Albusar'', ''Albuxar''; full name ''Abū Maʿshar Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad ibn ʿUmar al-Balkhī'' ; , AH 171–272), was an early Persian Muslim astrologer, thought to be the greatest astrologer of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. While he was not a major innovator, his practical manuals for training astrologers profoundly influenced Muslim intellectual history and, through translations, that of western Europe and Byzantium. Life Abu Ma'shar was a native of Balkh in Khurasan, one of the main bases of support of the Abbasid revolt in the early 8th century. Its population, as was generally the case in the frontier areas of the Arab conquest of Persia, remained culturally dedicated to its Sassanian and Hellenistic heritage. He probably came to Baghdad in the early years of the caliphate of al-Maʾmūn (r. 813–833). According to An-Nadim's ''Al-Fihrist'' (10th century), he lived on the West Side of Baghdad, near ''Bab Khura ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Dryden
'' John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John". Early life Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Barone t (1553–1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminst ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ben Jonson
Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popularised the comedy of humours; he is best known for the satirical plays ''Every Man in His Humour'' (1598), '' Volpone, or The Fox'' (c. 1606), '' The Alchemist'' (1610) and '' Bartholomew Fair'' (1614) and for his lyric and epigrammatic poetry. "He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare, during the reign of James I." Jonson was a classically educated, well-read and cultured man of the English Renaissance with an appetite for controversy (personal and political, artistic and intellectual) whose cultural influence was of unparalleled breadth upon the playwrights and the poets of the Jacobean era (1603–1625) and of the Caroline era (1625–1642)."Ben Jonson", ''Grolier Encyclopedia of Knowledge'', volume 10, p. 388. His ancestor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Galileo Galilei
Galileo di Vincenzo Bonaiuti de' Galilei (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) was an Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer, sometimes described as a polymath. Commonly referred to as Galileo, his name was pronounced (, ). He was born in the city of Pisa, then part of the Duchy of Florence. Galileo has been called the "father" of observational astronomy, modern physics, the scientific method, and modern science. Galileo studied speed and velocity, gravity and free fall, the principle of relativity, inertia, projectile motion and also worked in applied science and technology, describing the properties of pendulums and "hydrostatic balances". He invented the thermoscope and various military compasses, and used the telescope for scientific observations of celestial objects. His contributions to observational astronomy include telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, observation of the four largest satellites of Jupiter, observation of Saturn's rings, and a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Giambattista Della Porta
Giambattista della Porta (; 1535 – 4 February 1615), also known as Giovanni Battista Della Porta, was an Italian scholar, polymath and playwright who lived in Naples at the time of the Renaissance, Scientific Revolution and Reformation. Giambattista della Porta spent the majority of his life on scientific endeavors. He benefited from an informal education of tutors and visits from renowned scholars. His most famous work, first published in 1558, is entitled ''Magia Naturalis (Natural Magic).'' In this book he covered a variety of the subjects he had investigated, including occult philosophy, astrology, alchemy, mathematics, meteorology, and natural philosophy. He was also referred to as "professor of secrets". Childhood Giambattista della Porta was born at Vico Equense, near Naples, to the nobleman Nardo Antonio della Porta. He was the third of four sons and the second to survive childhood, having an older brother Gian Vincenzo and a younger brother Gian Ferrante.Giambattist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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