John Wilson (playwright)

John Wilson
Born 1626 (1626)
London, England
Died 1696 (1696) (Aged 70)
London, England
Education Exeter College, Oxford
Occupation Lawyer, Playwright
Employer James II of England
Organization Lincoln's Inn
Notable work

  • The Cheats (1663)
  • Andronicus Comnenius (1664)
  • Belphegor (1691)

Religion Protestant

John Wilson (1626–1696) was an English playwright and lawyer.

Life and Work

He was son of Aaron Wilson, a royalist divine, and was born in London in 1627. He matriculated from Exeter College, Oxford, in 1644, and entered Lincoln's Inn two years later, being called to the bar in 1649. His unswerving support of the royal pretensions recommended him to James, duke of York, through whose influence he became Recorder of Derry about 1681. His Discourse of Monarchy (1684), a tract in favour of the succession of the duke of York, was followed (1685) by a "Pindarique" on his coronation. In 1688 he wrote Jus regium Coronae, a learned defence of James's action in dispensing with the penal statutes. He died in obscurity, due perhaps to his political opinions, in 1696. Wilson was the author of four plays, showing a vigorous and learned wit, and a power of character-drawing that place him rather among the followers of Ben Jonson than with the Restoration dramatists.

The Cheats (written in 1662, printed 1664, 1671) was played with great success in 1663. John Lacy found one of his best parts in Scruple, a caricature of a Presbyterian minister of accommodating morality. Andronicus Comnenius (1664), a blank verse tragedy, is based on the story of Andronicus Comnenus as told by Peter Heylin in his Cosmography. It contains a scene between the usurper and the widow of his victim Alexius which follows very closely Shakespeare's treatment of a parallel situation in Richard III. The Projectors (1665), a prose comedy of London life, is, like Molière's The Miser, founded on the Aulularia of Plautus, but there is no evidence that Wilson was acquainted with the French play. Belphegor, or the Marriage of the Devil; a Tragi-coniedy (1690), treats of a theme familiar to Elizabethan drama, but Wilson took the subject from the Belphegor attributed to Machiavelli, and alludes also to Straparola's version in the Notti. He also translated into English Erasmus's Encomium Moriae (1668).

References

Public Domain This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 

External links

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Sunday, December 13, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.