Samuel Johnson often known as Dr. Johnson holds a magisterial status among English literary critics. He was a man of his age. As a critic, Dr. Johnson's popularity and authority waned with the rise of romanticism because his views and opinions suffer from a number of prejudices and limitations. He belonged to the school of "Classic" or "Judicial" criticism as against the "Romantic" or "Aesthetic" criticism of the next generation.
Pierre Corneille (1606-1684) was one of the greatest dramatists of France during the seventeenth century. He is considered as the greatest dramatist along with Moliere and Jean Racine. Possessing an inborn interest in plays, Corneille paved the new route for French tragedy, defying the classical theories of play.
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is regarded as the best known English political philosopher and a representative critic of the time. He is famous for his book Leviathan (1651) where he develops his famous political and aesthetic theory.
Henry Reynolds (1564-1632) was an English poet and a literary critic of the seventeenth century. The author of "Mythomystes" defends the ancient writers against the modern writers and poets. Like Sidney, he defends poetry because of its allegorical content. Reynolds’s beliefs are similar with the ideas presented in Jonathan Swift’s "The Battle of Books".
Francis Bacon (1561- 1626) an English lawyer, statesman and philosopher, traditionally regarded as the first important figure in the history of British empiricism and in the development of the modern scientific world-view. He planned to write a major work, Instauratio magna, but only parts of it were completed. One, De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum 1623 (On the dignity and growth of the sciences) was a revised version of The Advancement of Learning 1605 (the first major philosophical work written in English – the second was Hobbes's Leviathan).
Tasso is the greatest Italian poet of the late Renaissance, celebrated for his heroic epic poem Gerusalemme liberata (1581; "Jerusalem Liberated"), dealing with the capture of Jerusalem during the First Crusade. In 1573, he wrote the pastoral drama L'Aminta (performed 1573; published 1581), which transcends the convention of artificial rusticity with the sensuous, lyrical inspiration of its picture of Arcadia.
Edmond Rostand (1868-1918) was born in Marseilles, the Southern seaport of France. Encouraged by a wealthy father to cultivate his literary talents, he became a well-known poet and dramatist. His most famous work is Cyrano de Bergerac (1897), a tragic comedy, which was a sensation in Paris, and continues to be a popular classic all over the world.
Giacopo (Jacopo) Mazzoni was born in Cesena, Italy on November 27, 1548. He was educated in Bologna, where he studied Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Rhetoric and Poetics. Later Mazzoni attended the University of Padua in 1563 where he studied philosophy and Jurisprudence.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) was born in Edinburgh, Scotland. He qualified as a doctor and practiced medicine for a time. But his interest was in writing stories. He became immensely famous for his novels about an amateur detective named Sherlock Holmes.
William Motter Inge was born on May 3, 1913 in Independence, Kansas, America. He is one of the best American playwright and his most of the plays were adopted to films. He completed his education at the University of Kansas at Lawrence. He had been a teacher at the George Peabody College from 1937 to 1945. During that time period he also served as a drama editor of the Star-Rimes in St. Louis for four years.