Literary Figures

Medieval

Venerable Bede (672/673–735)

Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400)

Renaissance

Sir Thomas More (1478-1535)	Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542)
Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547)	Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban (1561-1626)	Edmund Spenser (c. 1552-1599)
William Shakespeare (1564-1616)	Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593 )
John Donne (1572-1631)	Benjamin Jonson (1573-1637)
Robert Herrick (1591-1674)	George Herbert (1593-1633)
John Milton (1608-1674)	Andrew Marvell (1621-1678)

Restoration and 18th Century

Edmund Waller (1606-1687)	Sir John Suckling (1609-1642)
Samuel Butler (1612-1680)	Thomas Killigrew (1612-1683)
John Bunyan (1628-1688)	John Dryden (1631-1700)
Samuel Pepys (1633-1703)	Aphra Behn (1640-1689)
William Wycherley (1640-1715)	John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester (1647-1680)
Daniel Defoe (c. 1659/60-1731)	Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea (1661-1720)
Matthew Prior (1664-1721)	Sir John Vanbrugh (?1664-1726)
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)	William Congreve (1670-1729)
Colley Cibber (1671-1757)	Joseph Addison (1672-1719)
Nicholas Rowe (1674-1718)	John Gay (1685-1732)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)	Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762)
Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)	Mary Delany (1700-1788)
James Thomson (1700-1748)	Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)
Laurence Sterne (1713-1768)	Thomas Gray (1716-1771)
Horace Walpole, 4th Earl of Orford (1717-1797)	Samuel Foote (1720-1777)
Christopher Smart (1722-1771)	Tobias George Smollett (1721-1771)
Oliver Goldsmith (1728-1774)	James Boswell (1740-1795)
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797)	Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816)
George Crabbe (1754-1832)	Maria Edgeworth (1769-1849)
Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818)