Mathew Roydon

Mathew Roydon (sometimes spelled Matthew) (died 1622) was an English poet associated with the School of Night group of poets and writers.

Life The Dictionary of National Biography identified him tentatively as the son of Owen Roydon who co-operated with Thomas Proctor in 1578 in the latter's Gorgious Gallery of Gallant Inventions; and as the Mathew Royden who graduated M.A. at Oxford on 7 July 1580. He was soon afterwards a prominent figure in literary society in London, and knew the poets of the day, including Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Lodge, and George Chapman.

Roydon fell in with Marlowe, and he, Thomas Harriot, and William Warner are mentioned among those companions of the dramatist who shared his freethinking. It is not clear from the literature which Warner is meant.

In later life Roydon seems to have entered the service of Robert Radcliffe, 5th Earl of Sussex, a patron of men of letters. He was reduced to appeals for charity to Edward Alleyn. John Davies of Hereford addressed to Roydon highly complimentary verse in the appendix to his Scourge of Folly, 1611. Robert Armin, when dedicating his Italian Taylor and his Boy (1609) to Lady Haddington, the Earl of Sussex's daughter Elizabeth, refers to Roydon as 'a poetical light . . . which shines not in the world as it is wisht, but yet the worth of its lustre is known.' and quotes Nashe, prefacing Greene's Menaphon (1589), in saying that Roydon "hath shewed himselfe singular in the immortall Epitaph of his beloved Astrophell, besides many other most absolute Comike inventions". According to Garrett:

Fiction In Deborah Harkness's novel Shadow of Night, the character Matthew de Clermont, a vampire, is revealed to have been, in the Elizabethan era, Matthew Roydon of the School of Night. In The Marlen of Prague: Christopher Marlowe and the City of Gold, a historical fantasy by Angeli Primlani, Roydon appears as one of the Queen's mages.