Reprobates: The Cavaliers of the English Civil War - Hardcover

Stubbs, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393068803 ISBN 13: 9780393068801

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2011

Synopsis

A rich account of a group of royalist wits and their reluctant part in a national disaster.

In the followup to his "vivid, ardent, and engaging" John Donne: The Reformed Soul (New York Review of Books), John Stubbs finds his next subject in the turbulent period of the English Civil War. With a centuries-old conflict between the monarchy and Parliament threatening to explode, a group of poets known as Cavaliers emerged to defend the king against the Protestant reformers and, in doing so, defined an artistic movement exemplified by lines such as Robert Herrick's "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may." Often imagined as elegant gentlemen, chivalrous and dandified, they were just as likely to be found in the form of the degenerate Sir John Suckling or the syphilitic William Davenant.

Biographer Stubbs sheds light on this groundbreaking group of men, on their world and their journeys through it, in peace and war, from the Blackfriars Playhouse to the battlefields of King Charles's kingdoms.

About this title

About the Author:

John Stubbs studied English at Oxford and Renaissance literature at Cambridge, where he completed a doctorate. John Donne was awarded a Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award and shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award. Stubbs lives in Ljubljana, Slovenia.

Review:

“A work of real energy and strength. . . . Andrew Marvell, John Herrick, John Milton, Inigo Jones, Ben Jonson―all these and many more are given fresh new life in these pages, summarized and appreciated and analyzed with a zest that’s too infectious not to be commended. . . . [T]here isn’t one single page of Reprobates that’s tedious . . . this is most certainly a book to be read and loved by general readers.”
- Open Letters Monthly

“Starred review. Blending subtle aesthetics with entertaining picaresque, this is an entrancing, highly original account of Merrye Olde England locked in a losing battle with no-nonsense modernity.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Truly a literary history, one in which Stubbs weaves a grander narrative out of not only events but also the verse and drama that illustrated it. . . . [W]ith his own harmony and delight animating Reprobates, Stubbs is a worthy inheritor to the subjects he so ardently admires.”
- Washington Independent Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 0393068803
• ISBN 13: 9780393068801
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 549