W ither, G eorge

Abstract

George Wither (1588–1667), as his biographer Charles Hensley noted (1969), was a ‘tireless pamphleteer’, publishing over 70 separate works during a career that spanned the reigns of the early Stuart kings, the Civil Wars, the Commonwealth, and the Restoration. The eldest son of a country gentleman, he was born in 1588, at Bentworth, Hampshire, and entered Magdalen College, Oxford, around 1604. He left without a degree, however, and transferred to Lincoln's Inn from a minor inn of chancery in 1615. He began making a name for himself as a poet in his early twenties, and published regularly throughout the 1610s and 1620s. It was the Civil Wars and Commonwealth that heightened Wither's sense of his prophetic calling and spurred him into action: the vast majority of his works – in which he used the pamphlet to respond to rapidly changing events – date from the 1640s until his death in 1667.