BRIEF LIVES
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
England’s misfortunes were the making of John Aubrey. For if England had been less interesting he might never have bothered to write his quirky, gossip-filled collection of biographical sketches, collected and published as Brief Lives some 201 years after his death in 1697. That would have been a loss, because Aubrey’s sketches are much more like a Restoration equivalent of News of the Weird than, say, Webster’s Biographical Dictionary, packed as they are with odd, scandalous, and bizarre facts.
Sexual preferences, peculiar habits, odd behavior were all considered fair game by the mischievous Aubrey, who delighted in repeating the rumor that poet Sir Philip Sidney slept with his sister or stating as fact that Francis Bacon was a pederast or that the play-writing team of Beaumont and Fletcher “lay together [and] had one Wench in the house between them.” Indiscretion was the better part of John Aubrey’s valor.
