In the years after Elizabeth I's death, the English church policies she had maintained throughout the "golden years" of her reign unraveled quickly. Her successors, James I and his son Charles, were adamant supporters of the divine right of kings in a world discovering the natural rights of man. Before long, the Stuart king Charles I found himself literally battling England's republican (and largely Protestant) factions to save his own royal neck. Those who supported Charles I's absolutist monarchy were known as Cavaliers.
The Cavaliers included several literary giants, whose lives John Stubbs (John Donne) examines in Reprobates. Among them are Ben Jonson, dramatist and patron of many young Cavalier poets; Sir John Suckling, best known for his "Ballad Upon a Wedding" and for inventing cribbage; and William Davenant, godson and self-proclaimed heir to William Shakespeare, who found the only thing worse than having syphilis in the 17th century was trying to cure it. Their poetic style was generally light, focusing on momentary pleasures and secular events, in contrast to the introspective and often spiritual works of immediate predecessors like John Donne.
With exhaustive facts and dry wit, Stubbs's book sketches detailed and fascinating portraits of the lives of the Cavalier poets, their loves and the political forces that shaped and were shaped by their work. History and literary analysis are punctuated with moments of levity and downright humor. Reprobates is not light reading, but it is rewarding. --Dani Alexis Ryskamp, blogger at Intractable Bibliophilia