For the last few years, when the vacation and holiday seasons come around and
the news stories start to dry up, I've looked back in time to previous centuries
to find something newsworthy. Today, please join me on a whistle stop tour
400 years back in time to the year 1609 ....
The Renaissance is in full swing. While Galileo demonstrates his first
telescope to Venetian lawmakers and Cornelius Drebbel invents the thermostat,
Johannes Kepler is busy publishing his first two laws of planetary motion.
Meanwhile Henry Hudson is off adventuring, becoming the first European to see
Delaware Bay and the Hudson River. Not far away, seven ships arrive at the
Jamestown colony reporting the sad demise of their flagship, the Sea Venture,
wrecked off the coast of the uninhabited island of Bermuda. The
survivors, including writer William Strachey, eventually reach Virginia ten
months later in two small ships they built while marooned on the island.
Strachey's account of the wreck is believed to be the inspiration for
Shakespeare's The Tempest (1610-11).
Talking
of Shakespeare, the bard is in good voice in 1609, publishing two books of
poetry: The Sonnets (mostly written before 1600) and A Lover's
Complaint; and two plays: Pericles, Prince of Tyre and Troilus and
Cressida. His contemporaries, Thomas Middleton and Ben Jonson,
are also busy publishing their own works. Elsewhere, in Naples, the
outlawed (for killing a man in a brawl) painter, Michelangelo Merisi da
Carravagio, completes at least four great works including
The Raising of Lazarus, and
Salome With The Head of John The Baptist. Carravagio dies the
following year but his work will inspire some of the next generation of painters
including Rubens and Rembrandt.
While Europe savors its first sips of tea courtesy of the Dutch East India
Company, and the people of Strasbourg (Alsace) and Augsburg (Bavaria) enjoy the
first regularly published newspapers in Europe, the Spanish Inquisition moves
into high gear with the Basque witch trials. Meanwhile, somewhere in
England, teenage songwriter Thomas Ravenscroft publishes a little ditty that,
four hundred years later, I would hazard to guess, can be recited in its modern
form by more people than any of Shakespeare's verses!
Three Blinde Mice,
Three Blinde Mice,
Dame Iulian,
Dame Iulian,
the Miller and his merry olde Wife,
shee scrapte her tripe licke thou the knife
Davina Morgan-Witts - BookBrowse Editor
More "This
Year in History"
