Background
In his early years, after a brief attendance at Lincoln College, Oxford, D'avenant went to London, served various courtiers, and wrote his first occasional poems and tragedies of blood. After participating in a military campaign on the Continent in 1627, he returned to England, succeeded in winning the patronage of Queen Henrietta Maria, and ultimately became, in 1638, Ben Jonson's successor to the semi-official laureateship. His career as a writer of masques was interrupted by the Civil Wars, and he became a paymaster, a plotter, and finally Newcastle's lieutenant-general of the ordnance, being knighted in 1643. During the period of the Royalist exile in France, he wrote his unfinished romantic epic, Gondibert (published in 1650), with its important critical preface, and was proscribed by the Parliament for his valiant aid in supplying the King's armies from the Continent. In 1650 he sailed for the New World with an appointment from Charles II as treasurer of Virginia, but he was intercepted in the Channel by Parliamentary forces, brought back to England, and threatened with execution in the Tower. Finally freed, he wrote The Siege of Rhodes (1656), the first opera staged in England.
After the Restoration, D'avenant was granted a patent to establish the Duke's Playhouse, in which he presented operas, comedies, and tragedies, stressing the new painted scenery that he was instrumental in introducing to the English public theater. He revived his popular comedy, The Wits (1634), and his influential tragicomedy, Love and Honor (1634); made several notorious adaptations of plays by Shakespeare and other dramatists; and wrote new comedies of his own. D'avenant died on Nov. 7, 1668, and was buried in Westminster Abbey.
