Rymer

THOMAS RYMER (1641 - 1713)

Probably born at Yafferton Hall, near Northallerton, Rymer went to the school in Danby Wiske kept by Thomas Smelt, a noted royalist, before going on to Cambridge. He is chiefly remembered for his valuable collection of historical records Foedera (1704-35) a collection in twenty volumes of English treaties from 1101 to his own time. He is best known otherwise as a trenchant critic, very much on the side of the ancients versus the moderns. The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered (1678) was an attack on Elizabethan drama, continued in A Short View of Tragedy (1692) which contains his famous condemnation of Othello as ‘a bloody farce without salt or savour’. Alexander Pope considered him ‘one of the best critics we ever had’ (Spence’s Anecdotes v. JOSEPH SPENCE). Macaulay, however, thought him ‘the worst critic that ever lived’.

Myers Literary Guide:	The North-East
THOMAS RYMER (1641 - 1713) Probably born at Yafferton Hall, near Northallerton, Rymer went to the school in Danby Wiske kept by Thomas Smelt, a noted royalist, before going on to Cambridge. He is chiefly remembered for his valuable collection of historical records Foedera (1704-35) a collection in twenty volumes of English treaties from 1101 to his own time. He is best known otherwise as a trenchant critic, very much on the side of the ancients versus the moderns. The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered (1678) was an attack on Elizabethan drama, continued in A Short View of Tragedy (1692) which contains his famous condemnation of Othello as ‘a bloody farce without salt or savour’. Alexander Pope considered him ‘one of the best critics we ever had’ (Spence’s Anecdotes v. JOSEPH SPENCE). Macaulay, however, thought him ‘the worst critic that ever lived’.
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