Nathan Drake

author

Nathan Drake

1766–1836

A doctor by training and a man of letters by temperament, this English writer moved easily between medicine and literary criticism. He is best remembered for lively essays and for an early, wide-ranging study of Shakespeare and his age.

2 Audiobooks

Shakspeare and His Times [Vol. 2 of 2] Including the Biography of the Poet; criticisms on his genius and writings; a new chronology of his plays; a disquisition on the on the object of his sonnets; and a history of the manners, customs, and amusements, superstitions, poetry, and elegant literature of his age

Shakspeare and His Times [Vol. 2 of 2] Including the Biography of the Poet; criticisms on his genius and writings; a new chronology of his plays; a disquisition on the on the object of his sonnets; and a history of the manners, customs, and amusements, superstitions, poetry, and elegant literature of his age

by Nathan Drake

Shakspeare and His Times [Vol. 1 of 2] Including the Biography of the Poet; criticisms on his genius and writings; a new chronology of his plays; a disquisition on the on the object of his sonnets; and a history of the manners, customs, and amusements, superstitions, poetry, and elegant literature of his age

Shakspeare and His Times [Vol. 1 of 2] Including the Biography of the Poet; criticisms on his genius and writings; a new chronology of his plays; a disquisition on the on the object of his sonnets; and a history of the manners, customs, and amusements, superstitions, poetry, and elegant literature of his age

by Nathan Drake

About the author

Born in York on 15 January 1766, Nathan Drake grew up in an artistic family and was educated for medicine. He studied at the University of Edinburgh, earned his M.D. in 1789, and went on to practise as a physician in Suffolk, first at Sudbury and then at Hadleigh.

Alongside his medical work, he built a strong reputation as an essayist and critic. His Literary Hours helped make his name, and his best-known book, Shakspeare and his Times (1817), gathered biography, criticism, chronology, and cultural history into an ambitious portrait of Shakespeare's world.

Drake's career is a good example of the broad intellectual life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: he could write on medicine, literature, and history with equal energy. He died on 7 June 1836, and his work remains of interest both to readers of Romantic-era essays and to students of early Shakespeare criticism.