Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 14.djvu/108

 , and that two of his youngest daughters shall keep the bar by turns. With regard to his second son (William), he wills that ‘he shall be put to prentice to some good marchant or other tradesman.’ Besides William, John D'Avenant had three sons—Robert (a fellow of St. John's College, Oxford, preferred to the parsonage of West Kington, Wiltshire), Nicholas (an attorney), and George. He had also three daughters, one of whom, according to Aubrey, was married to Gabriel Bridges, B.D., of Corpus Christi College, and a second to Dr. Sherburne, a canon of Hereford.

By writers of a subsequent generation D'Avenant has been said to have been an offspring of Shakespeare, who on his journeys between London and Stratford was wont to stay at the tavern kept by John D'Avenant. Oldys, on whom the responsibility for the story seems chiefly to rest, says that Pope, on the authority of Betterton, told him that one day young D'Avenant, having said, in answer to the inquiry of ‘an old townsman’ who asked him whither he was hurrying, that he was going to see his godfather, Shakespeare, was met by the retort, ‘Have a care that you don't take God's name in vain.’ Aubrey, in his ‘Letters of Eminent Persons,’ says that Shakespeare ‘was wont to goe into Warwickshire once a year, and did commonly in his journey lye at this house in Oxon, where he was exceedingly respected;’ and Wood, whose language possibly suggested the notion, says that Mrs. D'Avenant ‘was a very beautiful woman of a good wit and conversation, in which she was imitated by none of her children but by this William.’ The father, meanwhile, ‘who was a very grave and discreet citizen (yet an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare, who frequented his house on his journeys between Warwickshire and London), was of a melancholick disposition and was seldom or never seen to laugh, in which he was imitated by none of his children but by Robert, his eldest son, afterwards fellow of St. John's College and a venerable doctor of divinity.’ Aubrey states that ‘Sir William would sometimes when he was pleasant over a glass of wine with his most intimate friends—e.g. Sam Butler (author of “Hudibras”), &c.—say that it seemed to him that he writt with the very spirit that Shakespeare [did], and seemed contented enough to be thought his son.’ In a curious collection of satires upon D'Avenant, one of two closely connected works of so great rarity as to have been unseen of most if not all of his biographers, there are, however, what may be contemporary allusions to the scandal. The book is entitled, ‘The Incomparable Poem Gondibert vindicated from the Wit Combats of Four Esquires, Clinias, Dametas, Sancho, and Jack Pudding,’ 1655, 12mo. On the last page (27) of this is a poem upon the author's writing his name, as on the ‘Title of the Booke’ (‘Gondibert’), D'Avenant. The opening stanza of this runs as follows:—

An allusion to Avon, in which D'Avenant is advised to wash himself, appears also on page 14. Unless these allusions to Avon refer to Shakespeare, it is difficult, since Avon was not then a classical stream, to see what is meant. The reference in the opening lines is to the derivation, apparently put forth by D'Avenant himself, of his name from Avenant, a name said to exist in Lombardy. This origin is gravely advanced in an elegy on Sir William D'Avenant printed by Mr. Huth from the flyleaf of a copy of Denham's ‘Poems,’ 1668.

D'Avenant's early education was received in Oxford under Edward Sylvester (Aubrey, doubtless in mistake, calls him Charles), described by Wood as ‘a noted Latinist and Grecian, who taught privately in All Saints' Parish or in the Free School joining to Magd. Coll.’ Aubrey says ‘I feare he was drawne from schoole before he was wyse enough’ (Letters of Eminent Persons, ii. 303). In his twelfth year he wrote an ‘Ode in Remembrance of Master Shakespeare,’ not printed until 1638. Subsequently he went, it is supposed ‘in 1620–1 or thereabouts,’ to Lincoln College, under Mr. Daniel Hough. His stay Wood assumes to have been short. When, accordingly, he left to become page to Frances, first duchess of Richmond, he had obtained ‘some smattering in logic,’ and though he ‘wanted much of university learning, yet he made as high and noble flights in the poetical faculty as fancy could advance without it.’ With a further recollection of Shakespeare, Wood says we may justly style him the ‘Sweet swan of Isis.’

From the service of the duchess he passed into that of, lord Brooke [q. v.] After Brooke's murder in 1628, D'Avenant became a hanger about court, and betook himself to writing plays and poetry, which obtained him the friendship of Endymion Porter, Henry Jermyn, subsequently Earl of St. Albans, and many other persons of influence. In 1629 he issued his first dramatic work, ‘The Tragedy of Albovine, King of the