D'Avenant, Sir William 1606-68
English poet and playwright

He was born in Oxford. His father kept a tavern at which Shakespeare used to stay, thereby giving rise to the rumour that D'Avenant was Shakespeare's illegitimate son. He studied briefly at Lincoln College, Oxford, and later served in the household of the aged poet, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke. From 1628 he produced many plays, including The Cruel Brother (1630) and The Wits (1636), and in 1638 he was appointed Poet Laureate in succession to Ben Jonson. About the same time he lost his nose through an illness, a calamity which exposed him to public ridicule. Although knighted by King Charles I in 1643, he was later imprisoned in the Tower of London (1650-52), where he completed his epic, Gondibert (1651). He is considered to have been the founder of English opera with his Siege of Rhodes (1656), and he opened a theatre, the Cockpit, in Drury Lane, London, in 1658.

Bibliography: A Harbege, Sir William D'Avenant, 1606-1668 (1935)