Weever, John

(1576-1632)

   Lancashire poet who left Queens College, Cambridge, without graduating. After touring the Continent, and settling in London, he became an authority on antiquitiesm. In 1631 he published a large volume titled Ancient Funeral Monuments (of Britain, Ireland and the Islands), dedicated to Charles I. Weever was buried in the church of St. James's, Clerkenwell, London. The majority of his poems are short epigrams with Latin titles. Epigram 22 in Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut, and Newest Fashion (1599) is a sonnet addressed to Shakespeare and was thought to have been a response to Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. He also wrote epigrams on Edmund Spenser's poverty and death, on Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Ben Jonson, John Marston, and William Warner (see entries). Some of his other publications: Faunus and Melliflora Or, the Original of Our English Satyres, 1600 (a copy is held at Rutgers University Library, New Jersey). The Mirror of Martyrs, 1601 (a copy is held at Rutgers University Library, New Jersey). The Whipping of the Satyre, 1601. Rochester Bridge, 1887 (printed for the Kent Archæological Society by Mitchell and Hughes, London).

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. English Poetry: Author Search. Chadwyck-Healey Ltd., 1995 (http://www.lib.utexas.edu:8080/search/epoetry/author.html). The National Portrait Gallery (www.npg.org.uk). Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (http://library.stanford.edu). The Columbia Granger's Index to Poetry. 11th ed. The Columbia Granger's World of Poetry, Columbia University Press, 2005 (http://www.columbiagrangers.org). The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs. Geoffrey Grigson, ed. Faber and Faber, 1977. Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia). poems).