SOURCE: Norbrook, David. “Levelling Poetry: George Wither and the English Revolution, 1642-1649.” English Literary Renaissance 21, no. 2 (spring 1991): 217-56.

In the following essay, Norbrook examines Wither's republican writings and his role, often neglected by critics, in the English Revolution.

George Wither's response to the English Revolution¹ is best known today from two anecdotes. During the Civil War, John Aubrey tells us, he was captured by the royalists and condemned to be hanged. He was reprieved by Sir John Denham, who declared that “whilest G. W. lived, he [Denham] should not be the worst poet in England.”² According to Peter Heylyn, in the early phase of the war Henry Marten broke into the jewel-house at Westminster and, declaring that “there would be no further use of those Toys and Trifles,” invested Wither, “an old Puritan satyrist,” in the royal habiliments. The poet, “being Crown'd and Royally array'd (as right well...