Sir William Davenant

Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) was an English playwright. The popularity of his romantic plays and elaborate spectacles called masques gained him an appointment as poet laureate in 1638. But his reputation now rests on his techniques in staging plays.
Davenant trained the first actresses to replace the boy actors who had played all female roles in plays in England. In place of the bare open-air Elizabethan stages, he introduced to the English theater the painted
scenery and artificial lighting used in continental Europe. Davenant wrote the words for what is generally considered the first English opera, The Siege of Rhodes (1656). He is generally blamed for cutting and rewriting some of Shakespeare's plays to fit new theatrical conditions and the changing taste of the audience.
Davenant was born in Oxford.