On this day in 1692, British poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell died. Shadwell wrote eighteen plays and became poet laureate but, as the Columbia History of English Literature puts it, "he enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable in ours," as literary skill "was not among the gifts of his mind." This is utter kindness compared to the attacks suffered by Shadwell from contemporary John Dryden. For it is as loser in their satire war that Shadwell is now remembered, his three written about Dryden being no match for Dryden's three about him. In Mac Flecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T ... FULL STORY »
