He attended St Omer English Jesuit School from 1619 to 1624, where he may have taken part in the annual drama productions: in 1623 the play was Guy of Warwick.
[6] Much of Flecknoe's later poetry was epigrammatic, in the line of Ben Jonson, with aristocratic addressees, which led one critic to remark that he was "better acquainted with the Nobility than with the Muses".
[8] The separate section of “Epigrams Divine and Moral” in the 1670 edition is, however, indicative of a religious seriousness persisting from his first publication some 44 years before in the devotional Hierothelamium.
He also took a moral stance in his prose works on English drama, and it may have been one of those that prompted Dryden to make him an object of satire in his Mac Flecknoe (1682), where he is depicted as the dying Monarch of Nonsense, bequeathing his title to the playwright Thomas Shadwell.
[11] More recently, Paul Hammond accounts for it by the literary politics of the time and points out that many details in his depiction are drawn from the imagery of Flecknoe’s own poems.