Plotting the Modern City: John Dryden's Sir Martin Mar-All on the Dorset Garden Stage

Over the course of four days in September, 1666, a fire sparked in a bakery turned four-fifths of central London to dust. Wandering the streets around his home three days after the Great Fire subsided, the diarist John Evelyn describes a city in ruins—its buildings and landmarks “mealted, & reduc'd to cinders by the vehement heats,” its “bielanes & narrower streetes … quite fill'd up with rubbish, nor could one have possibly known where he was, but by the ruines of some church, or hall, that had some remarkable towre or pinacle remaining.” John Dryden echoes Evelyn's sense of disorientation in Annus Mirabilis, his poem dedicated to the people of London and published in 1667; he describes “the Cracks of Falling houses,” the “Shrieks of Subjects” as the Fire “wades the Streets,” threatens the palace, and lays the city's famed financial centers “to waste.” And he describes, too, the desperate attempts by those left homeless by the Fire to make spaces for themselves in the ruins: Those who have [no home] sit round where once it was, And with full Eyes each wonted Room require: Haunting the yet warm ashes of the place, As murder'd Men walk where they did expire.

Experiencing Leonardo

Chapter 9 considers incidences of direct contact with Leonardo’s works by Britons abroad and at the Caroline court in London; that is, first-hand experience of the artist. Although the opportunity to view or handle drawings, manuscripts, or paintings attributed to Leonardo was extremely rare, an examination of the wider matrix of these experiences provides a sense of a less tangible aspect of the early English reception. Key episodes include: Charles, Prince of Wales and Leonardo’s codices belonging to Juan de Espina (Madrid, 1623); George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, Rubens, and Leonardo’s Mona Lisa (Paris, 1625); Queen Henrietta Maria, Inigo Jones, and ‘Ginevra de’ Benci’ (London, 1636); Abraham van der Doort, Roger de Plessis, Duke of Liancourt, and Leonardo’s St John the Baptist (London, 1630); John Evelyn (Paris, 1644). The chapter concludes with a discussion of three works attributed to Leonardo or his immediate followers documented in the Caroline Royal Collection before 1639.