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Vote: | A slighted woman knows no bounds. |
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Vote: | Let our weakness be what it will, mankind will still be weaker; and whilst there is a world, 'tis woman that will govern it. |
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Vote: | Much of a muchness. |
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Vote: | Once a woman has given you her heart, you can never get rid of the rest of her. |
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Biography
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Sir John Vanbrugh (January 24, 1664? – March 26, 1726) was an English architect and dramatist, perhaps best known as the designer of Blenheim Palace. He wrote two argumentative and outspoken Restoration comedies, The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697), which have become enduring stage favourites but originally occasioned much controversy.
Vanbrugh was in many senses a radical throughout his life. As a young man and a committed Whig, he was part of the scheme to overthrow James II, put William III on the throne and protect English parliamentary democracy, dangerous undertakings which landed him in the dreaded Bastille of Paris as a political prisoner. In his career as a playwright, he offended many sections of Restoration and 18th-century society, not only by the sexual explicitness of his plays, but by their messages in defence of women's rights in marriage. He was attacked on both counts, and was one of the prime targets of Jeremy Collier's Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage. In his architectural career, he created what came to be known as English baroque. His architectural work was as bold and daring as his early political activism and his marriage-themed plays, and jarred conservative opinions on the subject.
Early life Vanbrugh's family background and youth, before he became a public figure, have been relayed down the centuries as hearsay and anecdote. Kerry Downes has shown in his well-researched modern biography (1987) that even the Encyclopædia Britannica and the Dictionary of National Biography repeat 18th- and 19th-century traditions which were originally offered as guesses but have hardened into "fact" in the process of being passed on. This accounts for several discrepancies between the entries in these encyclopædias and the following narrative, which is based on the findings of Downes (1987) and McCormick (1991).
Vanbrugh was born in London and grew up in Chester, where the family had been driven by the major outbreak of the plague in London in 1665. Downes is sceptical of earlier historians' claims of a lower middle-class background, and shows that an 18th-century suggestion that his father Giles Vanbrugh "may have been a sugar-baker" has been misunderstood. Sugar-baker implies wealth, as the term refers not to a maker of sweets but to an owner of a sugar house, a factory for the refining of raw sugar from the Barbados. Sugar refining would normally be combined with sugar trading, which was a lucrative business. Downes' example of one sugar baker's house in Liverpool being estimated to bring in £40,000 a year in trade from the Barbados throws a different light on Vanbrugh's social background than the picture of a backstreet Chester sweetshop which is painted by Leigh Hunt in 1840 and reflected in many later accounts.
How Vanbrugh spent the years from age 18 to 22 (after leaving school) is something of a mystery. There are no records of him between 1682 and 1686, or any shred of evidence for the persistent story that he was studying (sometimes specifically architecture) in France (stated as fact in the Dictionary of National Biography). As Laurence Whistler pointed out more than 60 years ago, there would have been no need for a young man of talent to go to France from England to study architecture. Moreover, the early drawings for Castle Howard show that he still drew like a novice in 1700, while the first thing he would have learned in a French architect's office would have been to set out a drawing properly.
The picture of a well-connected youth is reinforced by the fact that Vanbrugh in 1686 took up an officer's commission in his distant relative the Earl of Huntingdon's regiment. Since commissions were in the gift of the commanding officer, Vanbrugh's entry as an officer shows that he did have the kind of upscale family network that was then essential to a young man starting out in life.
It is worth noting, however, that in spite of the distant noble relatives and the sugar trade, Vanbrugh never in later life possessed any capital of his own for business ventures such as the Haymarket Theatre, but always had to rely on loans and backers. The fact that Giles Vanbrugh had twelve children to support and set up in life may go some way towards explaining the debts which were to plague John all his life.
...(more on Wikipedia)
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This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "John Vanbrugh".
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