Sir William Davenant, the Court Masque, and the English Seventeen ...

For the next fourteen years Davenant had little time to think about the theatre. He became an emissary to the king from the queen to try to persuade him to accept the Covenant and was spoken of with affection in their letters to each other. Although certain poems suggest he had become disillusioned with royalty, he was one of the most faithful of the royal couple’s followers and was actively engaged in the war that followed. He was almost sentenced to death for a silly plot at the beginning, but his behaviour became more sober, and he was later trusted, by the queen in particular, to raise money and to find and buy guns and other materials for the king’s army. He joined William Cavendish, the Earl of Newcastle, who was the Lord General in charge in the North, as Lieutenant-General of the Ordnance and travelled back and forth from France. The king knighted him in Gloucester in 1643, and the tavern keeper’s son became Sir William Davenant.

After the defeat of Charles I, at Naseby in 1645, Davenant went to France and joined the exiled Henrietta Maria in Paris. There he passed the time by starting to write the heroic poem Gondibert and by discussing his ideas with other poets like Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley, who were also in Paris. But the philosopher Thomas Hobbes was the most influential of his acquaintances. Hobbes read each new section of Gondibert as it was finished, and Davenant published the correspondence he had with him, with Hobbes’s replies, as a separate preface before the poem itself.

While the poem is a rather rambling example of its kind of heroic epic, which Davenant never managed to complete, the preface is of great interest in displaying the thoughtful and pragmatic person that Davenant had become and in also giving a view of seventeenth-century ideas in an easily accessible colloquial style. Moreover, this is a particularly interesting document so far as theatrical history is concerned, for Davenant explains to Hobbes that he proposes to construct the poem on the lines of a play and outlines the structure of a seventeenth-century play and the function of each act.