Life
1615-1669, b. Dublin, son of Lord Chief Justice of King’s Bench in
Ireland; English Surveyor-Gen. to Charles II; issued Cooper’s
Hill (1642), a topographical or loco-descriptive poem; The Sophy,
a trag. (1642), said by John Aubrey to have ‘broke[n] out like the
Irish rebellion ... when no one ... in the least suspected it’ [but
see CAB infra]; Cato Major (1669), from Cicero; wrote The
Famous Battle of the Catts in the Province of Ulster (1668), a satire
in verse; also A True Presbyterian (London 1680), a verse satire;
his lines on the Thames are classic; architect on Burlington House and
Greenwich Hospital; bur. Westminster; lampooned by Samuel Butler, author
of Hudibras. RR CAB DNB PI JMC OCEL OCIL.
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Criticism
Brendan Ó Hehir, Harmony from Discords: A Life of Sir John Denham
(California UP 1968), 288pp.
William Upcott, Bibliographical Account of Principal Works relating to English Topography [1818] (Wakefield: Simmons 1978).
J. F. Foster, ‘Topographical Tradition in Anglo-Irish Poetry’ in Colonial Consequences (1992), p.197ff.;
J. F. Foster ‘Encountering Traditions’, in J. W. Foster and Helena C. G. Chesney, ed., Nature in Ireland: A Scientific and Cultural History, Dublin: Lilliput 1997, espec. pp.58-59.
Robert Gibson, A Treatise of Practical Surveying (1752; 2nd ed. Dublin 1763).
Peter Callan’s A Dissertation on the Practice of Land Surveying in Ireland (Drog. 1758); Benjamin Noble’s Geodaesia Hibernica (Dublin 1763). [15].
Brendan O’Hehir, critical ed. of Cooper’s Hill as Expans’d Hieroglyphics (Berkeley: California UP 1969).
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Peter Kavanagh, The Irish Theatre (Tralee: The Kerryman 1946), cites The Sophy (acted Blackfriars, 1641; printed 1642); founded on Herbert’s Travels [i.e., Thomas A. Herbert, Travels in Persia, 1627-29], it in no way relates to Ireland; as Charles II’s surveyor of His Majesty’s buildings Denham succeeded Inigo Jones and had Christopher Wren as his deputy; also cites Langbaine on Sir John Denham: ‘before the foggy air of that climate could influence, or in any way adulerate his Mind, he was brought from thence’ (Dramatic Poets); Aubrey agrees with Langbaine in calling him ‘the dreamingst young fellow’ who, at college, ‘would game extremely’ and ‘was rooked by gamesters’; Aubrey also tells how he when he was a student a Lincoln’s Inn, he went out at night to ‘blott out all the signes betweeen Temple-barre and Charing-cross, which made great confusion the next day ...’ (Brief Lives, Vol. i, p.220; Kavanagh, p.27).
Richard Ryan, Biographia Hibernica: Irish Worthies (1821), Vol. II, p.70-74.
Dictionary of National Biography, refers to his father (1559-1639); Lord Chief Justice of King’s Bench in Ireland, 1612, and baron of the English exchequer [not the Irish]; author of brief opinion in Hampden’s favour and Cooper’s Hill, the first strictly descriptive poem in English; The Sophy, a verse trag., set in Turkey, taken from Sir Thomas Herbert’s Travels (1634). Note that no Irish connection is asserted here not any mention of Battle of the Catts and True Presbyterian;
Charles Read, ed., A Cabinet of Irish Literature (3 vols., 1876-78), calls his mother a dg. of Sir Garrett More, baron of Mellefont; cites his tragedy The Sophy (1641) of which Waller said, ‘he broke out like the Irish rebellion, threescore thousand strong, when nobody was aware or in the least suspected it’ [quoted in John Aubrey’s Brief Lives; also in Thomas Campbell, Philosophical Survey, 1778]. Of Cooper’s Hill (1643), written at Eghem and is so noticed in Camden’s Britannia; Dryden called it ‘a poem which for majesty of style is, and ever will be, the standard of good writing’. Reade singles out Poem on the Death of Cowley, and quotes Dr. Johnson, ‘Denham is justly considered one of the fathers of English poetry ... improved our taste and advanced our language’; Pope speaks of ‘Denham’s strength and Waller’s sweetness’ in Essay on Criticism; works include Version of the Book of Psalms [DIW err. The famous battle of the Catts in the Province of Ulster, 1688 (sic)].
His second wife, Margaret Brookes, became acknowledged mistress of the
Duke of York, an event which caused Denham’s temporary madness. Ftn.,
he is accused of poisoning her in Memoir of Grammont; and note,
Aubrey says ‘she was poisoned by the hands of Co. of Roc. with chocolate
(See Kavanagh, op. cit.) And NOTE, For details of his support of Charles
I, and his lying under suspicion of murdering his young wife with ‘the
fatal chocolate’, see LIBRARY.
Among the earliest in translators of the classics in the 17th c. were Sir John Denham’, Aeneid 2 (1656) and his rendering of Sarpedon’s speech in Iliad 12, praised by Pope in his note on Iliad, 12.2. Cited in WB Stanford, Ireland and the Classical Tradition (1984).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)