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

The Stationers’ Registers list the play for publication in 1639, 1651, and 1653, but the next copy known is in the collection of Davenant’s works that appeared in 1673, when the play was published as prose.⁷ There is no record of it in the theatre until a performance at Oxford in 1931, but its importance is in the title page. For it is with this that Davenant gives his name the aristocratic apostrophe and becomes D’Avenant, implying, it was said, that the name derives from Lombardy, although he still signed himself Davenant for family and legal matters. Four of his friends flatter him by using the new spelling in their commendations. One of these is Edward Hyde, later Lord Clarendon and Chancellor to Charles II, with whom Davenant shared rooms at the Middle Temple, where he lived after the death of Greville. Once again, he was living in a community, centred around the Inns of Court, where literary talents were encouraged and where he was to gain more influential friends and patronage. Davenant seems to have been a remarkably amiable person, or perhaps very thick skinned, for he was satirised both about his adoption of a new name and, later, his crooked nose.

Some occasional verses “written by severall of the Authors Friends”⁸ were published in 1653, with the second edition of the first three books of Gondibert (which Davenant says he sourced from an ancient Lombard record) and included the anonymous poem.

Upon the Authors writing his name, (as in the Title of his Booke) D’Avenant