William Alabaster
John Gerard, an underground Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus who briefly served as the former clergyman's spiritual director, Alabaster was, "raised in Calvin's bosom.
According to Guiney, the date of Alabaster's covert reception into the illegal and underground Catholic Church in England, which caused the Vicar to willingly surrender both his living and his engagement, is fixed by an entry in his cousin Adam Winthrop's diary as 13 July 1597.
Alabaster's 85-long sonnet sequence, which "portray some profound spiritual experiences", were mainly, "written in 1597 while he was in The Clink prison and was conscious (as he himself says) of unwonted inspiration.
"[10] Another source of "unwonted inspiration" for Alabaster's religious poetry was, according to Gary Bouchard, the samizdat verse of recently martyred Jesuit priest Robert Southwell.
John Gerard concealed William Alabaster for two or three months in a London safe house and secret Catholic chapel overseen by Anne Line and Fr.
Gerard was reportedly very surprised and asked Alabaster, who, " "was used to having his own way over other people", to explain why he wished to join the Society, "when he knew, or should know, that it meant just the contrary of all he was used to.
Gerard's concerns, and the latter arranged to smuggle the former Anglican clergyman, very likely through the Antwerp-based network led by Richard Verstegan, to the Spanish Netherlands and gave Alabaster 300 florins towards his future expenses.
[15] In 1607 Alabaster published at Antwerp Apparatus in Revelationem Jesu Christi, in which he used his study of the Kabbalah to give a mystical interpretation to the Christian Bible.
[d] Fuller and Anthony à Wood bestowed exaggerated praise on it, while Samuel Johnson regarded it as the only Latin verse worthy of notice produced in England before Milton's elegies.
[19] A surreptitious edition in 1632 was followed by an authorized version a plagiarii unguibus vindicata, aucta et agnita ab Aithore, Gulielmo, Alabastro.
One book of an epic poem in Latin hexameters, in honour of Queen Elizabeth, is preserved in manuscript (MS) in the library of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.
