Cavaliers, clubs, and literary culture

Cavaliers, Clubs, and Literary Culture is centered around the lives and poetry of Sir John Mennes (a naval officer) and his friend James Smith (a debauched cleric) in Stuart and Interregnum England. It explores the largely uncharted territory between the official culture of the court and the often oppositional culture of the city by examining the clubs of city wits, stage actors, and would-be courtiers that flourished during the early and middle years of the seventeenth century. Employing a wealth of untapped manuscript and print sources, Timothy Raylor traces the careers of two struggling poets during the 1630s and sketches their milieu. Mennes's and Smith's involvement with important theatrical and literary figures (including Philip Massinger, Robert Herrick, Sir William Davenant, Sir Kenelm Digby, and Sir John Suckling) is established. The membership, activities, and character of their dissolute fraternity, the Order of the Fancy, are discussed for the first time. Raylor shows that the burlesques and travesties that are generally seen as a Restoration phenomenon had their origins in this earlier milieu. Furthermore, the politicization of this primarily frolicsome mode is traced