See Jerdan, National Portraits, vol. iii.; Gentleman’s Magazine, xcii. i. 273.
DONNAY, CHARLES MAURICE (1859- ), French dramatist, was born of middle-class parents in Paris in 1859. He made his serious début as a dramatist on the little stage of the Chat Noir with Phryné (1891), a series of Greek scenes. Lysistrata, a four-act comedy, was produced at the Grand Théâtre in 1892 with Mme Réjane in the title part. Later plays were Folle Entreprise (1894); Pension de famille (1894); Complices (1895), in collaboration with M. Groselande; Amants (1895), produced at the Renaissance theatre with Mme Jeanne Granier as Claudine Rozeray; La Douloureuse (1897); L’Affranchie (1898); Georgette Lemeunier (1898); Le Torrent (1899), at the Comédie Française; Éducation de prince (1900); La Clairière (1900), and Oiseaux de passage (1904), in collaboration with L. Descaves; La Bascule (1901); L’Autre danger, at the Comédie Française (1902); Le Retour de Jérusalem (1903); L’Escalade (1904); and Paraître (1906). With Amants he won a great success, and the play was hailed by Jules Lemaître as the Bérénice of contemporary French drama. Very advanced ideas on the relations between the sexes dominate the whole series of plays, and the witty dialogue is written with an apparent carelessness that approximates very closely to the language of every day.
DONNE, JOHN (1573-1631), English poet and divine of the reign of James I., was born in 1573 in the parish of St Nicholas Olave, in the city of London. His father was a wealthy merchant, who next year became warden of the Company of Ironmongers, but died early in 1576. Donne’s parents were Catholics, and his mother, Elizabeth Heywood, was directly descended from the sister of the great Sir Thomas More; she was the daughter of John Heywood the epigrammatist. As a child, Donne’s precocity was such that it was said of him that “this age hath brought forth another Pico della Mirandola.” He entered Hart Hall, Oxford, in October 1584, and left it in 1587, proceeding for a time to Cambridge, where he took his degree. At Oxford he began his friendship with Henry Wotton, and at Cambridge, probably, with Christopher Brooke. Donne was “removed to London” about 1590, and in 1592 he entered Lincoln’s Inn with the intention of studying the law.
When he came of age, he found himself in possession of a considerable fortune, and about the same time rejected the Catholic doctrine in favour of the Anglican communion. He began to produce Satires, which were not printed, but eagerly passed from hand to hand; the first three are known to belong to 1593, the fourth to 1594, while the other three are probably some years later. In 1596 Donne engaged himself for foreign service under the earl of Essex, and “waited upon his lordship” on board the “Repulse,” in the magnificent victory of the 11th of June. We possess several poems written by Donne during this expedition, and during the Islands Voyage of 1597, in which he accompanied Essex to the Azores. According to Walton, Donne spent some time in Italy and Spain, and intended to proceed to Palestine, “but at his being in the farthest parts of Italy, the disappointment of company, or of a safe convoy, or the uncertainty of returns of money into those remote parts, denied him that happiness.” There is some reason to suppose that he was on the continent at intervals between 1595 and the winter of 1597. His lyrical poetry was mainly the product of his exile, if we are to believe Ben Jonson, who told Drummond of Hawthornden that Donne “wrote all his best pieces ere he was 25 years old.” At his return to England he became private secretary in London to Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper (afterwards Lord Brackley), in whose family he remained four years. In 1600 he found himself in love with his master’s niece, Anne More, whom he married secretly in December 1601. As soon as this act was discovered, Donne was dismissed, and then thrown into the Fleet prison (February 1602), from which he was soon released. His circumstances, however, were now very much straitened. His own fortune had all been spent and “troubles did still multiply upon him.” Mrs Donne’s cousin, Sir Francis Wooley, offered the young couple an asylum at his country house of Pyrford, where they resided until the end of 1604.
During the latter part of his residence in Sir Thomas Egerton’s house, Donne had composed the longest of his existing poems, The Progress of the Soul, not published until 1633. In the spring of 1605 we find the Donnes living at Camberwell, and a little later in a small house at Mitcham. He had by this time “acquired such a perfection” in civil and common law that he was able to take up professional work, and he now acted as a helper to Thomas Morton in his controversies with the Catholics. Donne is believed to have had a considerable share in writing the pamphlets against the papists which Morton issued between 1604 and 1607. In the latter year, Morton offered the poet certain preferment in the Church, if he would only consent to take holy orders. Donne, however, although he was at this time become deeply serious on religious matters, did not think himself fitted for the clerical life. In 1607 he started a correspondence with Mrs Magdalen Herbert of Montgomery Castle, the mother of George Herbert. Some of these pious epistles were printed by Izaak Walton. These exercises were not of a nature to add to his income, which was extremely small. His uncomfortable little house he speaks of as his “hospital” and his “prison;” his wife’s health was broken and he was bowed down by the number of his children, who often lacked even clothes and food. In the autumn of 1608, however, his father-in-law, Sir George More, became reconciled with them, and agreed to make them a generous allowance. Donne soon after formed part of the brilliant assemblage which Lucy, countess of Bradford, gathered around her at Twickenham; we possess several of the verse epistles he addressed to this lady. In 1609 Donne was engaged in composing his great controversial prose treatise, the Pseudo-Martyr, printed in 1610; this was an attempt to convince Roman Catholics in England that they might, without any inconsistency, take the oath of allegiance to James I. In 1611 Donne wrote a curious and bitter prose squib against the Jesuits, entitled Ignatius his Conclave. To the same period, but possibly somewhat earlier, belongs the apology for the principle of suicide, which was not published until 1644, long after Donne’s death. This work, the Biathanatos, is an attempt to show that “the scandalous disease of headlong dying,” to which Donne himself in his unhappy moods had “often such a sickly inclination,” was not necessarily and essentially sinful.
In 1610 Donne formed the acquaintance of a wealthy gentleman, Sir Robert Drury of Hawsted, who offered him and his wife an apartment in his large house in Drury Lane. Drury lost his only daughter, and in 1611 Donne published an extravagant elegy on her, entitled An Anatomy of the World, to which he added in 1612 a Progress of the Soul on the same subject; he threatened to celebrate the “blessèd Maid,” Elizabeth Drury, in a fresh elegy on each anniversary of her death, but he happily refrained from the third occasion onwards. At the close of 1611 Sir Robert Drury determined to visit Paris (but not, as Walton supposed, on an embassy of any kind), and he took Donne with him. When he left London, his wife was expecting an eighth child. It seems almost certain that her fear to have him absent led him to compose one of his loveliest poems:
| “Sweetest Love, I do not go For weariness of thee.” |
He is said to have had a vision, while he was at Amiens, of his wife, with her hair over her shoulders, bearing a dead child in her arms, on the very night that Mrs Donne, in London (or more probably in the Isle of Wight), was delivered of a still-born infant. He suffered, accordingly, a great anxiety, which was not removed until he reached Paris, where he received reassuring accounts of his wife’s health. The Drurys and Donne left Paris for Spa in May 1612, and travelled in the Low Countries and Germany until September, when they returned to London. In 1613 Donne contributed to the Lachrymae lachrymarum an obscure and frigid elegy on the death of the prince of Wales, and wrote his famous Marriage Song for St Valentine’s Day to celebrate the nuptials of the elector palatine with the princess Elizabeth. About this time Donne became intimate with Robert Ker, then Viscount Rochester and afterwards the infamous earl of Somerset, from whom he had hopes of preferment at court. Donne was now in weak health, and in a highly neurotic condition. He suggested to Rochester that if he should enter the church, a place there might be found for him. But he was more useful to the courtier in his legal capacity, and Rochester dissuaded him from the ministry. At the close of 1614, however, the king sent for Donne to Theobald’s, and “descended to a persuasion, almost to a solicitation of him, to enter into sacred orders,” but Donne asked for a few days to consider. Finally, early in 1614, King, bishop of London, “proceeded with all convenient speed to ordain him, first deacon, then priest.” He was, perhaps, a curate first at Paddington, and presently was appointed royal chaplain.