Robert Davenport (dramatist)

Robert Davenport (fl. 1623 – 1639) was an English dramatist of the early seventeenth century. Nothing is known of his early life or education; the title pages of two of his plays identify him as a "Gentleman," though there is no record of him at either of the two universities or the Inns of Court. Scholars have guessed that he was born c. 1590; if, as some scholars think, he wrote the Address "To the knowing Reader" in the first quarto of King John and Matilda, he was still alive in 1655. He enters the historical record in 1624, when two of his plays were licensed by the Master of the Revels.

His extant dramatic canon consists of only three plays: The City Nightcap, A New Trick to Cheat the Devil, and King John and Matilda. King John and Matilda (printed 1655) bears strong resemblances to The Death of Robert Earl of Huntingdon, the second of Anthony Munday and Henry Chettle's two Robin Hood plays, and can be regarded as virtually a rewrite of the earlier work. Yet Charles Lamb admired Davenport's version, and quoted from the closing scene in his Dramatic Specimens.

The City Nightcap was licensed in 1624, but not printed until 1661. The subplot of this play was borrowed from Cervantes and Boccaccio, and Aphra Behn's Amorous Prince (1671) is an adaptation of it. A New Trick to Cheat the Devil (printed 1639) is a farce, which contains among other things the idea of the popular supper story which reappears in Hans Christian Andersen's Little Claus and Big Claus. As told by Davenport the story closely resembles the Scottish Freres of Berwick, which was printed in 1603.

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