Newburgh Hamilton (1691–1761) was an Irish writer and librettist. He was born in

County Tyrone County Tyrone (; ) is one of the six counties of Northern Ireland, one of the nine counties of Ulster and one of the thirty-two traditional counties of Ireland. Its county town is Omagh. Adjoined to the south-west shore of Lough Neagh, the cou ...

Ireland Ireland (, ; ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe. Geopolitically, the island is divided between the Republic of Ireland (officially Names of the Irish state, named Irelan ...

(now

Northern Ireland Northern Ireland ( ; ) is a Countries of the United Kingdom, part of the United Kingdom in the north-east of the island of Ireland. It has been #Descriptions, variously described as a country, province or region. Northern Ireland shares Repub ...

) and entered

Trinity College, Dublin Trinity College Dublin (), officially titled The College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin, and legally incorporated as Trinity College, the University of Dublin (TCD), is the sole constituent college of the Univ ...

, in 1708, aged sixteen, but (as was common in those days) he left without obtaining a degree. He is known to have been George Frederick Handel's librettist for three works: '' Alexander's Feast'' (1736), ''

Samson SAMSON (Software for Adaptive Modeling and Simulation Of Nanosystems) is a computer software platform for molecular design being developed bOneAngstromand previously by the NANO-D group at the French Institute for Research in Computer Science an ...

'' (1743) and the ''

Occasional Oratorio ''An Occasional Oratorio'' ( HWV 62) is an oratorio by George Frideric Handel, based upon a libretto by Newburgh Hamilton after the poetry of John Milton and Edmund Spenser. The work was written in the midst of the Jacobite rising of 1745–174 ...

'' (1746). In writing the libretto for Handel's ''Samson'' (1743), he followed John Milton's ''

Samson Agonistes ''Samson Agonistes'' (from Greek Σαμσών ἀγωνιστής, "Samson the champion") is a tragic closet drama by John Milton. It appeared with the publication of Milton's '' Paradise Regained'' in 1671, as the title page of that volume st ...

'' rather than creating it from the story found in the

Book of Judges The Book of Judges is the seventh book of the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Old Testament. In the narrative of the Hebrew Bible, it covers the time between the conquest described in the Book of Joshua and the establishment of a kingdom in the ...

. His comedy ''The Petticoat-Plotter'' was presented at Drury Lane on 5 June 1712 and '' The Doating Lovers'' was premièred at

Lincoln's Inn Fields Theatre Lisle's Tennis Court was a building off Portugal Street in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. Originally built as a real tennis court, it was used as a playhouse during two periods, 1661–1674 and 1695–1705. During the early period, ...

on 23 June 1715. His work is discussed in Terence Tobin, ''Plays by Scots 1660-1800'' (University of Iowa Press, 1974) and by Adrienne Scullion in Bill Findlay, ''A History of Scottish Theatre'' (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1998)

See also