Sing Heavenly News: Journalism and Poetic Authority in Samuel Sheppard's The Faerie King (c. 1654)

Abstract

This article analyzes the relationship between poetry and news writing in revolutionary England as exemplified by the writings of the prolific royalist journalist and poet Samuel Sheppard (1624-1655?). Offering an extended analysis of Sheppard's work (and focusing particularly on his unfinished epic poem, The Faerie King ), I examine how writers might lay claim to the authority of the poet in a literary marketplace utterly transformed by pamphlet journalism. If, earlier in the century, in The Staple of News (1622), Ben Jonson observed with horror the effects that newsprint was supposedly having on the audiences of his verbal art, did the poet-journalists of the revolutionary decades share this view? Did these men, a tribe of sons and bastards supposedly loyal to the memory and legacy of Jonson, also see Parnassus and Grub Street as such very different places? Using the example of Sheppard I suggest that even if they did in theory, in practice they struggled to keep these two worlds apart. Sheppard demonstrates, however unwillingly, that by the mid-seventeenth century poetry and news could be mutually enriching modes of discourse.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.