Robert Chester (poet)
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Robert Chester (flourished 1601) is the mysterious author of the poem Love's Martyr which was published in 1601 as the main poem in a collection which also included much shorter poems by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, George Chapman and John Marston, along with the anonymous "Vatum Chorus" and "Ignoto". Despite attempts to identify Chester no information has ever emerged to indicate with any certainty who he was. Currently all that is known of Chester is his name and the long poem he published. It is also not known why Shakespeare and so many other distinguished poets supplemented the publication of such an obscure person with their own works.
Chester's poem was dedicated to Sir John Salusbury of the Salusbury family in Wales, and may have been published to celebrate his knighthood in June 1601.[1] Love's Martyr and several of the other poems praise the loving relationship between Sir John and his wife. Shakespeare's poem The Phoenix and the Turtle is an unexplained exception.
Chester has been identified with a man of that name from Royston Cambridgeshire, and with another individual from Denbighshire.[2] E.A.J. Honigmann argues that Chester was probably Salusbury's chaplin or secretary and that he and his patron shared a taste for "mystical verse" which contained obscure acrostic puzzles.[3]
[edit] References
- ^ John Finnis and Patrick Martin, "Another turn for the Turtle", The Times, April 18, 2003
- ^ G. C. Moore Smith, review of "Poems by Sir John Salusbury and Robert Chester" by Carleton Brown, The Modern Language Review, Vol. 9, No. 4, Oct., 1914, pp. 533-536
- ^ E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years, Manchester University Press, 1998, p.93
