Leonard Digges (II)

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Leonard Digges (1588 – 1635) was a seventeenth-century poet and translator, a member of the prominent Digges family of Kent—son of the astronomer Thomas Digges (1545-95), grandson of the mathematician Leonard Digges (1520-59), and younger brother of statesman Sir Dudley Digges (1583-1639).

The younger Leonard Digges graduated from University College, Oxford in 1606; in 1626 he was awarded an M.A. and was bestowed the right to live at University College, which he did till his death. He was described by his friend James Mabbe as "a geat master of the English language, a perfect understander of the French and Spanish, a good poet, and no mean orator." He translated Claudian's The Rape of Proserpine (printed 1617). Another of Digges' translations, Gerardo, the Unfortunate Spaniard by Gonzalo de Céspedes y Meneses, was published in 1622; the publisher was Edward Blount, one of the publishers who would issue the First Folio of Shakespeare's works the following year, 1623. The third of the prefatory poems in that volume is the work of Digges.

There are in fact several connections between Digges and Shakespeare. When John Benson printed Shakespeare's poems in a single volume in 1640, he prefaced the collection with a poem by Digges that lauds the popularity of Shakespeare's characters Falstaff, Malvolio, and Beatrice and Benedick. After his father Thomas Digges' death in 1595, Digges' widowed mother Anne St. Leger remarried (1603); her second husband, and Digges' stepfather, was Thomas Russell, a friend of Shakespeare and one of the overseers of the poet's will. (Russell lived at Alderminster, four miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon).

Leonard Digges' brother, Sir Dudley Digges, was, among his other offices and duties, a member of the council of the Virginia Company that launched the colony at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. Digges may have been the connection through which Shakespeare knew about the wreck of the Sea Venture on Bermuda in the summer of 1609, the story that provided inspiration and material for The Tempest.

[edit] References

  • John Freehafer, "Leonard Digges, Ben Jonson, and the Beginning of Shakespeare Idolatry," Shakespeare Quarterly 21 (1970), pp. 63-75.
  • F. E. Halliday, A Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964, Baltimore, Penguin, 1964.
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