Thomas More Thomas More Thomas More had an education suited to a son of a gentleman, and seemed destined for the legal career mapped out by his father. Although the future held much promise for him, More was unsure of the direction he wanted his life to take. He considered becoming a priest but decided not to enter the Church because of his burning desire to have a family.

Geoffrey Chaucer -- courtier, diplomat, and poet -- is arguably one of the most important figures in English literature. His philosophically profound, yet at times bawdy, body of work represents true ...

John Milton (December 9, 1608 - November 8, 1674) was an English poet, prose polemicist, and civil servant for the English Commonwealth. Most famed for his epic poem "Paradise Lost", Milton is celebrated as well for his eloquent treatise condemning censorship, "Areopagitica".

Inigo Jones (July 15, 1573 - June 21, 1652) is regarded as the first significant English architect, and the first to bring Renaissance architecture to England. He also made valuable contributions to stage design. Beyond the fact that he was born in the vicinity of Smithfield in central London, the son of a Welsh Catholic clothworker, and christened at the church of St Bartholomew the Less, little is known about Jones's early years. But towards the end of the 16th century, …

John Donne, 1572 – March 31, 1631) was a Jacobean poet and preacher, representative of the metaphysical poets of the period. His works, notable for their realistic and sensual style, include sonnets, love poetry, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams, elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and immediacy of metaphor, compared with that of his contemporaries.

Sir Thomas Gresham (c. 1519 - 21 November, 1579) was an English merchant and financier who worked for King Edward VI of England and for Edward's half-sister Queen Elizabeth I of England.

Thomas Middleton (1580 - 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with John Fletcher and Ben Jonson as among the most successful and prolific of playwrights who wrote their best plays during the Jacobean period. He stands with Shakespeare as one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, …

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 - 30 May 1744) is generally regarded as the greatest English poet of the early eighteenth century, best known for his satirical verse and for his translation of Homer. He is the third most frequently quoted writer in the English language, after Shakespeare and Tennyson. Pope was a master of the heroic couplet.

Edward Alleyn (1 September 1566 - 25 November 1626) was an English actor who was a major figure of the Elizabethan theatre and founder of Dulwich College and Alleyn's School. He was born in Bishopsgate, London, the son of an innkeeper, and baptised at St Botolph-without-Bishopsgate. Known to contemporaries as "Ned", his surname is sometimes spelled Allen or Alleyne. It is not known at what date he began to act, …

Robert Herrick (baptized August 24 1591- October 1674) was a 17th century English poet. Born in Cheapside, London, he was the seventh child and fourth son of Nicholas Herrick, a prosperous goldsmith, who committed suicide when Robert was a year old. It is likely that he attended Westminster School. In 1607 he became apprenticed to his uncle, Sir William Herrick, who was a goldsmith and jeweller to the king. The apprenticeship ended after only six years when Herrick, …

Joseph Jackson Lister, FRS (January 11, 1786 - October 24, 1869) was an amateur British opticist and physicist and the father of Joseph Lister.