John donne biography death of princess
Home / General Biography Information / John donne biography death of princess
Donne's father died suddenly in 1576, and left the three children to be raised by their mother, Elizabeth, who was the daughter of epigrammatist and playwright John Heywood and a relative of Sir Thomas More. The last thing Donne wrote just before his death was Hymne to God, my God, In my Sicknesse. Donne's monument, in his shroud, survived the Great Fire of London and can still be seen today at St.
Paul's. On March 27, 1625, James I died, and Donne preached his first sermon for Charles I. But for his ailing health, (he had mouth sores and had experienced significant weight loss) Donne almost certainly would have become a bishop in 1630. When he was four, Donne's father died, and his mother remarried shortly thereafter.
Donne's works are also remarkably witty, employing paradoxes, puns, and subtle yet remarkable logic. Donne continued to write poetry, notably his Holy Sonnets (1618), but the time for love songs was over. It is possible that Donne co-wrote or ghost-wrote some of Morton's pamphlets (1604-1607). John and his brother Henry were then admitted to Oxford University, where he spent approximately three years.
He studied law and anticipated a political career.
That ambition seemed likely when, following naval expeditions to Spain and the Azores , he was appointed private secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal.
For More Information
Bald, Robert C. John Donne: A Life.
His mother was the youngest daughter of a popular playwright, and a direct descendant of Sir Thomas More.
Donne's first teachers were Jesuits. He spent the next three years at the University of Cambridge, but took no degree at either university because he would not take the Oath of Supremacy required at graduation.
Donne's character
Donne's was a complex personality, an unusual blend of passion, zeal, and brilliance; God and women were his favorite themes, but his subject otherwise ranged over the pagan (people who do not worship the Christian God) and the religious, the familiar and the unclear, the sarcastic and the sincere, the wittily bright and the religiously wise.
John Donne was born in Bread Street, London in 1572 to a prosperous Roman Catholic family - a precarious thing at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment was rife in England. These poems revealed his faith in the medieval order of things, which had been disrupted by the growing political, scientific, and philosophic doubt of the times.
Reproduced by permission of
Archive Photos, Inc.
iron) of Welsh ancestry, John Donne was born in London, England, between January 4 and June 19 (the exact day is unknown), 1572, and was raised a Londoner and a Roman Catholic. The account of Donne's life in the 1590s from an early biographer, Izaak Walton, depicts him as a young, licentious rake.Donne's poetry
After some years at Oxford (from 1584) and possibly Cambridge, Donne studied law at Lincoln's Inn from 1592 to 1594. His mother, Elizabeth, a great niece of Sir (later Saint) Thomas More (1477–1535), came from a cultured, devout family: her father, John Heywood, wrote interludes (short plays that are put on during breaks in other entertainment); her brother Jasper was a Jesuit (a person who belongs to a Roman Catholic religious group called the Society of Jesus whose members are concerned with spreading their religious message and teaching); and her son Henry, John's brother, died in 1593 of a fever caught in Newgate Prison, where he was imprisoned for sheltering a Roman Catholic priest.
Church career
In 1615 Donne was ordained (to be officially installed as a member of the clergy in the church) a priest. But in the same year, he secretly married Lady Egerton's niece, seventeen-year-old Anne More, daughter of Sir George More, Lieutenant of the Tower, and effectively committed career suicide.