In 1940, he played small roles and did literary work for the director at the Old Vic Repertory Company in London. The next year he published his thesis, Shakespeare's Boy Actors, and embarked on an acting career outside London. He left Canada to study at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a BLitt degree in 1938. At Queen's he wrote for the student paper, The Queen's Journal, where he wrote a literary column. According to the Queen's University Journal Davies enrolled as a special student not working towards a degree, because he was unable to pass the mathematics component of Queen's entrance exam. Mary Magdalene's in his novel The Cunning Man.Īfter Upper Canada College, he studied at Queen's University at Kingston, Ontario, from 1932 until 1935. Davies later used his experience of the ceremonial of High Mass at St. He would later leave the Presbyterian Church and join Anglicanism over objections to Calvinist theology.

He attended Upper Canada College in Toronto from 1926 to 1932 and while there attended services at the Church of St. He spent his formative years in Renfrew, Ontario (and renamed it as 'Blairlogie', in his novel What's Bred in the Bone) many of the novel's characters are named after families he knew there. He also participated in theatrical productions as a child, where he developed a lifelong interest in drama. He followed in their footsteps and read everything he could. His father, a member of the Canadian Senate from 1942 to his death in 1967, was a newspaperman from Welshpool, Wales, and both parents were voracious readers. Growing up, Davies was surrounded by books and lively language. Davies was the founding Master of Massey College, a graduate residential college associated with the University of Toronto.ĭavies was born in Thamesville, Ontario, the third son of William Rupert Davies and Florence Sheppard McKay. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished ' men of letters', a term Davies gladly accepted for himself. William Robertson Davies CC OOnt FRSL FRSC (28 August 1913 – 2 December 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor.

The Deptford Trilogy, The Cornish Trilogy, The Salterton Trilogy Journalist, playwright, professor, critic, novelist

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