Joseph Addison was an English essayist, poet, playwright, and politician. He was the eldest son of Lancelot Addison. His name is usually remembered alongside that of his long-standing friend Richard Steele, with whom he founded The Spectator magazine. His simple prose style marked the end of the mannerisms and conventional classical images of the 17th century.
Sir Richard Steele was an Anglo-Irish writer, playwright, and politician, remembered as co-founder, with his friend Joseph Addison, of the magazine The Spectator.
Politeness is the practical application of good manners or etiquette so as not to offend others and to put them at ease. It is a culturally defined phenomenon, and therefore what is considered polite in one culture can sometimes be quite rude or simply eccentric in another cultural context.
Thomas Tickell was a minor English poet and man of letters.
Penny dreadfuls were cheap popular serial literature produced during the 19th century in the United Kingdom. The pejorative term is roughly interchangeable with penny horrible, penny awful, and penny blood. The term typically referred to a story published in weekly parts of 8 to 16 pages, each costing one penny. The subject matter of these stories was typically sensational, focusing on the exploits of detectives, criminals, or supernatural entities. First published in the 1830s, penny dreadfuls featured characters such as Sweeney Todd, Dick Turpin, Varney the Vampire, and Spring-heeled Jack.
Augustan literature is a style of British literature produced during the reigns of Queen Anne, King George I, and George II in the first half of the 18th century and ending in the 1740s, with the deaths of Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, in 1744 and 1745, respectively. It was a literary epoch that featured the rapid development of the novel, an explosion in satire, the mutation of drama from political satire into melodrama and an evolution toward poetry of personal exploration. In philosophy, it was an age increasingly dominated by empiricism, while in the writings of political economy, it marked the evolution of mercantilism as a formal philosophy, the development of capitalism and the triumph of trade.
The Guardian was a short-lived newspaper published in London from 12 March to 1 October 1713.
Augustan prose is somewhat ill-defined, as the definition of "Augustan" relies primarily upon changes in taste in poetry. However, the general time represented by Augustan literature saw a rise in prose writing as high literature. The essay, satire, and dialogue thrived in the age, and the English novel was truly begun as a serious art form. At the outset of the Augustan age, essays were still primarily imitative, novels were few and still dominated by the Romance, and prose was a rarely used format for satire, but, by the end of the period, the English essay was a fully formed periodical feature, novels surpassed drama as entertainment and as an outlet for serious authors, and prose was serving every conceivable function in public discourse. It is the age that most provides the transition from a court-centered and poetic literature to a more democratic, decentralized literary world of prose.
Justus van Effen was a Dutch author, who wrote chiefly in French but also made crucial contributions to Dutch literature. A journalist, he imitated The Spectator with the publication of the Dutch-language Hollandsche Spectator. He gained international fame as a writer of French periodicals and a translator from English into French, and he is also recognized as one of the most important Dutch language writers of the 18th century and an influential figure of the Dutch Enlightenment.
Roger deCoverley is the name of an English country dance and a Scottish country dance. An early version was published in The Dancing Master, 9th edition (1695). The Virginia Reel is probably related to it.
The Rambler was a periodical by Samuel Johnson.
In literature, a character sketch, or character, is a rough-and-ready rendering and thumbnail portrayal of an individual, capturing, in brief, that person's physical characteristics, psychological attributes, and the like. The brief descriptions often capitalize on the more unusual or humorous aspects of the person's character. Character sketches are usually identified by irony, humor, exaggeration, and satire. The term originated in portraiture, where the character sketch is a common academic exercise. The artist performing a character sketch attempts to capture an expression or gesture that goes beyond coincident actions and gets to the essence of the individual.
Inkle and Yarico is a comic opera first staged in London, England, in August 1787, with music by Samuel Arnold and a libretto by George Colman the Younger.
The Conscious Lovers is a sentimental comedy written in five acts by the Irish author Richard Steele. The Conscious Lovers appeared on stage on 7 November 1722, at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane and was an immediate success, with an initial run of eighteen consecutive nights.
The Hollandsche Spectator was an important Dutch language newspaper of the Enlightenment period.
William Harrison (1685–1713) was an English poet and diplomat.
The Tatler was a British literary and society journal begun by Richard Steele in 1709 and published for two years. It represented a new approach to journalism, featuring cultivated essays on contemporary manners, and established the pattern that would be copied in such British classics as Addison and Steele's The Spectator, Samuel Johnson's The Rambler and The Idler, and Goldsmith's Citizen of the World. The Tatler would also influence essayists as late as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Addison and Steele liquidated The Tatler in order to make a fresh start with the similar Spectator, and the collected issues of Tatler are usually published in the same volume as the collected Spectator.
Martin Powell, was an Irish master puppeteer and puppet show impresario, who put on a repertoire of satirical and parodical marionette shows that invariably featured the Punch character. He drew audiences first at provincial towns such as Bath, then moving his venue to London. His theatre established itself in early 1710 at its first location, at the north end of St. Martin's Street intersected by Litchfield St., not quite in Covent Garden. But by 1711 he relocated the theatre to the galleries of Covent Garden, at Little Piazza, opposite St. Paul's Church.
Yarico is a musical based on a 17th-century story of the Amerindian woman – Yarico, who saved the life of, and subsequently fell in love with a British merchant Thomas Inkle, who then sold her into slavery on the island of Barbados – Inkle and Yarico. It was first recorded by Richard Ligon, in his book entitled “The True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes” (1657). Ever since its first staging by George Colman the Younger in 1787, the story became hugely popular inspiring writers across Europe as well as in America., to produce a number of different treatments of it The music is by James McConnel, the book and lyrics are by Carl Miller with additional lyrics by Paul Leigh. The musical played at the London Theatre Workshop from February 17, to March 28, 2015
