William Cartwright

William Cartrwight (1611-1643). Courtesy Yooniqimages.

Rev. William Cartwright (December 1611 - 29 November 1643) was an English poet and playwright.

Life

Overview

Cartwright was the son of a gentleman of Gloucestershire, who had run through his fortune and kept an inn at Cirencester. The son was educated at Westminster School and Oxford, entered the Church, was a zealous Royalist, and an eloquent preacher and lecturer in metaphysics. He also wrote spirited lyrics and 4 plays. He was the friend of Ben Jonson, Henry Vaughan, and Izaak Walton. He died at Oxford of camp fever. His virtues, learning, and charming manners made him highly popular in his day.

Youth and education

Catwright was born at Northway, near Tewkesbury, the son of a William Cartwright who, after squandering a fair inheritance, had been reduced to keep an inn at Cirencester. This is Wood's account (Athenæ, ed. Bliss, iii. 69), and is probably true; but Lloyd (Memoirs, ed. 1668, p. 423) states that he was born on 16 Aug. 1615, and that his father was a Thomas Cartwright of Burford in Oxfordshire.

He was sent to the free school at Cirencester and afterwards, as a king's scholar, to Westminster, where in 1628 he was chosen a student of Christ Church, Oxford. He earned a B.A. in 1632, and an M.A. in 1635.

Career

Cartwright entered into holy orders, and became (in Wood's words) "the most florid and seraphical preacher in the university." The lectures that he delivered as metaphysical reader (in succession to Thomas Barlow, afterwards bishop of Lincoln) were greatly admired.

Fell said of him, "Cartwright was the utmost man could come to;" and Ben Jonson declared "My son Cartwright writes all like a man." Langbaine gives him this character: "He was extreamly remarkable both for his outward and inward endowments; his body being as handsome as his soul. He was an expert linguist, understanding not only Greek and Latin, but French and Italian, as perfectly as his mother-tongue. He was an excellent orator, and yet an admirable poet." Lloyd is still more enthusiastic in his praise: "To have the same person cast his net and catch souls as well in the pulpit as on the stage!... A miracle of industry and wit, sitting sixteen hours a day at all manner of knowledge, an excellent preacher in whom hallowed fancies and reason grew visions and holy passions, raptures and extasies, and all this at thirty years of age!"

The Royal Slave: A tragi-comedy, which had been printed separately in 1639 and 1640, was performed before the king and queen by the students of Christ Church on 30 Aug. 1636. Henry Lawes wrote the music to the songs, and among the actors was Richard Busby, who "approv'd himself a second Roscius." The play was mounted at considerable cost (the actors appearing in Persian costume), and gave such satisfaction that the court "unanimously acknowledg'd that it did exceed all things of that nature which they had ever seen." The queen was so charmed with the Royal Slave that in the following November the king's company was ordered to represent it at Hampton Court; but the performance of the professional players was judged far inferior to that of the amateurs.

On 1 September 1642 he was nominated to the council of war, and on 16 September he was imprisoned by Lord Say, but released on bail. In the following October Bishop Duppa appointed him succentor in the church of Salisbury; and on 12 April 1643 he was chosen junior proctor of the university.

He died at Oxford on 29 Nov. 1643, of a malignant fever (called the camp-disease), and was buried on 1 Dec. at the upper end of the north aisle of Christ Church Cathedral.

The king, who was then at Oxford, being asked why he wore black on the day of Cartwright's funeral, replied that "since the muses had so much mourned for the loss of such a son it would be a shame for him not to appear in mourning for the loss of such a subject."

Writing

Cartwright's plays and poems were collected in 1651 by Humphrey Moseley in one vol. 8vo. No less than 56 copies of commendatory verses are prefixed, among the contributors being Dr. John Fell, Jasper Mayne, Henry Vaughan the Silurist, Alexander Brome, Izaak Walton, &c.

There is nothing in the volume to support the reputation that Cartwright gained among his contemporaries for extraordinary ability. There are 4 plays of which the Ordinary is the best; and the rest of the volume chiefly consists of complimentary epistles, love-verses, and translations.

The Ordinary, which had been included in all the editions of Dodsley's old plays, is a lively comedy of intrigue, containing some amusing satire on the puritans. The other plays are: The Lady-Errant: A tragi-comedy and The Siege; or, Love's convert: A tragi-comedy. Among the poems are an elegy on Ben Jonson, that had previously appeared in Jonsonus Virbius, 1638; 2 copies of commendatory verses on Fletcher, which had been prefixed to the 1647 folio of Beaumont and Fletcher; and commendatory verses on 2 plays of Thomas Killigrew, Claricilla and The Prisoners. In one of the verse-addresses to Fletcher, Cartwright writes:—

Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best wit lies

I' th' ladies' questions and the fools' replies.

In most copies there are blanks at pp. 301, 302, 305, where the lines are too royalist in sentiment for the times.

Cartwright's other works are: 1. ‘An Offspring of Mercy issuing out of the Womb of Cruelty, or a Passion Sermon preached in Christ Church,’ 1652, 8vo. 2. ‘November, or Signal Dayes observed in that Month in relation to the Crown and Royal Family,’ 4to, written in 1643, but not published until 1671. At the end of Dr. John Collop's ‘Poesis Rediviva,’ 1656, Humphrey Moseley announced for speedy publication a volume of ‘Poemata Græca et Latina’ by Cartwright, but the promise was not fulfilled. A portrait of Cartwright by Lombart is prefixed to the collected edition of his plays and poems, 1651.

Critical introduction

by Adolphus William Ward

Cartwright, whom his academical and literary contemporaries regarded as a phenomenon, is to us chiefly interesting as a type. If it be allowable to regard as extravagant the tendencies represented by him in both his life and his poetry, he may justly be remembered by a sufficiently prominent title among English poets — that of the typically extravagant Oxford resident of his period. He was a most enthusiastic royalist in the most royalist city and community of the kingdom; and, in a sense, he died a martyr to his political sentiment.

In an age of "florid and seraphical preachers," this designation was attached distinctively to the youthful succentor of Salisbury Cathedral and junior proctor of the University. It is therefore but natural that among the panegyrical poets of an age given to panegyric, Cartwright’s efforts in this direction should have remained unsurpassed. His muse devoted herself with that unshrinking courtliness which has often characterised our old Universities to singing the praises of the King, the Queen, their "fourth child," their "sixth child," and all the royal family, as occasion might demand, invite or suggest. When "our happy Charles" recovered from the terrible epidemic of his times, Cartwright, in the first of the poems given here, was at hand with an exercise of flattery, which in its central conceit was afterwards imitated, but hardly equalled, by the youthful Dryden.

Other events belonging to the sphere of the Court chronicler prompted longer and loftier strains: returns from journeys across the border or abroad, marriages, and above all occasions sacred to Lucina, the favourite deity, and indeed the safest inspiration, of panegyrical poets. In default of these, there were the deaths of noblemen and gentlewomen, and the advents of promising Vice-Chancellors to be sung, or the merits of brother dramatists past or present, a Fletcher or a Killigrew, to be extolled, and there was the living "Father of Poets" Ben Jonson, to be venerated coram publico by his pious son.

And yet Ben Jonson himself, among whose foibles it was not to overpraise even friends and followers, was not in error when he proclaimed of "his son Cartwright’ that he ‘wrote all like a man.’ Cartwright, though his study of Horace and Martial had failed to teach him the grace of simplicity, was a sure and a ripe scholar; and he moves among classical illustrations and allusions with an almost alarming ease. His conceits, fetched from far and near, and jostling one another in their superabundance, mark him out as a genuine member of the Fantastic School of poets. In his lines To the Memory of Ben Jonson, he blames his fellow-playwrights,

  ‘who into one piece do
Throw all that they can say, and their friends too,
Pumping themselves for one term’s noise so dry
As if they made their wills in poetry.’

Among non-dramatic poets at all events, Cartwright is as amenable to this very charge of too visible effort as any other member of the school to which he belongs.

Of the higher imaginative power and tenderer grace to be found in some of the members of that school Cartwright has but few traces. But he possessed a real rhetorical inventiveness, and an extraordinary felicity of expression. These gifts he was able to display on occasions of the most opposite and diverse character, great and small, public and private,—from the occurrence of an unexampled frost to the publication of a treatise on the art of vaulting. Yet even with a panegyrical poet of the Fantastic School the relations between his theme and his own tastes and sentiments are of the highest importance.

In ingenuity Cartwright can hardly be said to have elsewhere surpassed the longest of the three following pieces, congenial to himself in its subject, though elaborately singular in treatment. For it may safely be asserted that this Ordination poem achieves its object of being altogether unique, without being altogether inappropriate. On the other hand, there could be no more common theme for elegiac verse than a premature death; but the lines on an occasion of the kind here reprinted are out of the common, though by no means unpleasing. Whether, had Cartwright lived beyond early manhood, he would have fulfilled or exceeded the promise of his youth, it is useless to enquire. He was more genuinely successful as a writer of occasional lyrics and elegies than as a dramatist.

Perhaps the seriousness of the epoch at the opening of which he died might have turned his efforts to religious poetry, in which the Fantastic School of English poetry achieved its noblest results, and to which this academical preacher’s and poet’s mind must have had a natural bias. What he actually accomplished in this direction was but little, though not altogether unworthy of being associated with the music of Milton’s friend and favourite composer.

Recognition

4 of his poems ("To Chloe," "Falsehood," "On the Queen's Return from the Low Countries," and "On a Virtuous Young Gentlewoman That Died Suddenly") were included in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900.

Publications

Poetry

• To the Right Honourable Philip Earle of Pembroke and Mountgomerie. London: T.W., 1641.
• November; or, Signal days. London: 1647; London: T.N., for Henry Herringman, 1671,
• The Life and Poems (edited by R. Cullis Goffin). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1918.

Play

• The Royall Slave: A tragi-comedy. Oxford, UK: William Turner, for Thomas Robinson, 1639.

Non-fiction

• An Off-spring of Mercy, Issuing out of the Womb of Cruelty; or, A passion sermon preached at Christs-Church in Oxford. London: A.M. for Iohn Brown, 1652,

Collected editions

• Comedies, Tragi-comedies, with other poems. London: Humphrey Moseley, 1651.
• The Plays and Poems (edited by G. Blakemore Evans). Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 1951.

Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.

"No Platonic Love," by William Cartwright

See also

• List of British poets
• List of English-language playwrights

References

•  Bullen, Arthur Henry (1885–1900) "Cartwright, William (1611–1643)" Dictionary of National Biography London: Smith, Elder, pp. 232-233  Wikisource, Web, Dec. 23, 2017.

External links

Poems

• Cartwright in the Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1900: "To Chloe," "Falsehood," "On the Queen's Return from the Low Countries," "On a Virtuous Young Gentlewoman that died suddenly"
• William Cartwright at the Poetry Foundation
• Rev. William Cartwright (1611-1643) info & 2 poems at English Poetry, 1579-1830
• Cartwright in The English Poets: An anthology: "On His Majesty’s Recovery from the Small-Pox, 1633," "A New Year’s Gift to Brian Lord Bishop of Sarum upon the Author’s Entering into Holy Orders, 1638," "On a Virtuous Young Gentlewoman That Died Suddenly"
• William Cartwright at PoemHunter (6 poems)
• William Cartwright at Poetry Nook (232 poems)

About

• William Cartwright in the Encyclopædia Britannica
• William Cartwright in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature.
• William Cartwright: A Royalist muse weblog
• Cartwright, William in the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain, the Dictionary of National Biography (edited by Leslie Stephen & Sidney Lee). London: Smith, Elder, 1885-1900. Original article is at: Cartwright, William (1611-1643)