Edmund Spenser:
Credited Mulcaster with his embrace of the English language for poetry. Remained in contact with him all of his life.
(c. 1552 – 13 January 1599)[1] was an English poet best known for The Faerie Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognised as one of the premier craftsmen of Modern English verse in its infancy, and is considered one of the greatest poets in the English language.
Sir Lancelot Andrews:
Andrewes was born in 1555 in Barking, Greater London, and like his contemporary Thomas Harrison (see Jan. 2) studied at Merchant Taylors’ School, under Richard Mulcaster. HE KEPT A PORTRAIT OF MULCASTER IN HIS OFFICE ALL HIS LIFE. He graduated from Cambridge 21 years old, In 1571. He became a fellow (teacher) of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and a clergyman four years after that. Teaching undergraduates over a thirteen year period, he gradually rose to become Master (Principal) of his College in 1589. By this time he had already become chaplain to the Archbishop, and was a great favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, whom she appointed her chaplain. By 1601, he was Dean of the Abbey at Westminster. Before the KJV was published, he had also been appointed Bishop of Chichester, and then of Ely. near Cambridge. Seven years after the great publishing event, Andrewes became bishop ofWinchester, once the home of English Kings. Finally, he distinguished himself as Dean of the Chapel Royal. This is a body of singers and priests, which served to meet the spiritual needs of the Royal family at St James’ Palace and Hampton Court. Such a succession of significant offices meant there
were few Englishmen more powerful in his day! He died in London, 1626, aged sixty-one, and a monument marks the spot where he was buried. Having never married, he bequeathed his property to charity. The poet John Milton, then but a youth, wrote a glowing Latin elegy on his death. The well-known poet T. S. Eliotwrote an essay about him, “ considering him “an important figure in the history of the church, distinguished for the quality of his thoughts and prose.”
Thomas Lodge: Dramatist
(born c. 1557, London?, Eng.—died 1625, London), English poet, dramatist, and prose writer whose innovative versatility typified the Elizabethan age. He is best remembered for the prose romance Rosalynde, the source of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It.
He was the son of Sir Thomas Lodge, who was lord mayor of London in 1562. The younger Lodge was educated at Merchant Taylors’ School and at Trinity College, Oxford, and he studied law at Lincoln’s Inn, London, in 1578. Lodge’s earliest work was an anonymous pamphlet (c. 1579) in reply to Stephen Gosson’s attack on stage plays. His next work, An Alarum Against Usurers (1584), exposed the ways in which moneylenders lured young heirs into extravagance and debt. He then engaged in varied literary activity for a number of years. His Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), an Ovidian verse fable, is one of the earliest English poems to retell a classical story with imaginative embellishments, and it strongly influenced Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis. Lodge’s Phillis (1593) contains amorous sonnets and pastoral eclogues from French and Italian originals. In A Fig for Momus (1595), he introduced classical satires and verse epistles (modeled after those of Juvenal and Horace) into English literature for the first time. Aside from Rosalynde: Euphues Golden Legacie (1590), which provided the plot for Shakespeare’s comedy, Lodge’s most important romance was A Margarite of America (1596), which combines Senecan motives and Arcadian romance in an improbable love story between a Peruvian prince and a daughter of the king of Muscovy. His other romances are chiefly notable for the fine lyric poems scattered through them. Lodge continued to write moralizing pamphlets such as Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse (1596), and in 1594 he published two plays: The Wounds of Civill War and (with Robert Greene) A Looking Glasse for London and England.
Thomas Kyd: Dramatist
Wrote The Spanish Tragedy and other plays. As well known for his temperament as his playwriting.
In October 1565 the young Kyd was enrolled in the newly founded Merchant Taylors’ School, whose headmaster was Richard Mulcaster. Fellow students included Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge. Here, Kyd received a well-rounded education, thanks to Mulcaster’s progressive ideas. Apart from Latin and Greek, the curriculum included music, drama, physical education, and “good manners”. There is no evidence that Kyd went on to either of the English universities. He may have followed for a time his father’s profession; two letters written by him are extant and his handwriting suggests the training of a scrivener.
Sir James Whitelocke: SL (28 November 1570 – 22 June 1632) was an English judge and politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1610 and 1622.
‘In the Liber Famelicus of Sir James Whitelocke (Camden’s Society Publications, No. LXX), Sir James tells of his bringing up at Merchant Taylors’. He was born in 1570 and was elected from the school to be a probationer of St. John’s College, Oxfofd, in June, 1588. He says: ”I was brought up at School under Mr. Mulcaster in the famous school of the Merchant Taylors in London, where I continued until I was well instructed in the Hebrew, Greek and Latin tongues. His care was also to increase my skill in music, in which I was brought up in daily exercise in it, as in singing and playing upon instruments: and yearly he presented some plays to the court, in which his scholars were [the] only actors, and I one among them; and by that means [he] taught them good behaviour and audacity.”
Thomas Jenkins and John Cotham: Two of Shakespeare’s teachers at the Stratford Grammar School.
