Nathan Drake

Nathan Drake (1766–1836) was an English physician and essayist. Born in York, the son of a painter, he took his medical degree at Edinburgh and from 1792 practiced at Hadleigh in Suffolk for the rest of his life. His leisure went to literature: Literary Hours, a collection of essays on poetry and fiction, went through several editions, and he wrote studies of the periodical essayists from Addison to Johnson. His largest work, Shakspeare and His Times, published in two volumes in 1817, surveyed the poet's life and writings together with the manners, customs, learning and amusements of Elizabethan and Jacobean England.