Calling all English Majors...

[neotoma]

I'm looking for romantic poetry from the late Elizabethan and early Jacobin periods -- say 1580 to 1608. I'd like to avoid Shakespeare, since I know there *were* other poets out there then. Donne? Marlowe? Who else might have been popular enough for octavos of their poems to be available?

How familiar would an educated man have been with the Roman poets? I could get to the dirtier bits of Catallus, but is that period? Or would someone else be better for the 'classics' of the time?

Comments

[likeadeuce.livejournal.com]

I'm not an Elizabethan, but I'd think pretty much anything Latin would be fair game. Since, "Little Latin, less Greek" was the slam on Shakespeare, presumably gentlemen were expected to know it. As to what was the most popular, dunno.

Ben Jonson, along with Marlowe and Donne, are the other-English-poets who spring to mind. Are you looking for a verse that accomplishes something particular?

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

I promised gblvr a Hank/Bobby fic (after making her beta two fics without that pairing -- I'm so cruel), but it's turned into a Hal/Robbie fic.

Which means I need something period for a bit shmoop under a tree.

[gwendolen.livejournal.com]

Marlowe is more a playwright.

Try Edmund Spenser and Thomas Raleigh as the most well-known poets of the Elisbethean period. There were many others.

[writestufflee.livejournal.com]

Not an Elizabethan either, but I'm a former medievalist with an Elizabethan ex-boyfriend who's steeped in the stuff. Walter Raleigh, Thomas Campion, Thomas Nashe, Donne for sure, Philip Sidney barely fits in (he died in 1586), but he would have been well known then, Spenser absolutely. Not much difference between poets & playwrights at this time: all the plays were in verse, but Marlowe definitely wrote poetry too. Latin was required and in fact the lingua franca of scholars and gentlemen (which is why Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dante & the Pearl Poet were such anomalies for writing in the vernacular), Greek nearly as mandatory, especially if you were studying for clerical orders, the naughty bits of Catullus were well-known, well-loved, and oft-repeated. Ovid was a favorite too. Pretty much all the Latin and Greek poets we have translations of now existed and were well known in the Late Middle Ages & Renaissance.

Hope that helps!

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

the naughty bits of Catullus were well-known, well-loved, and oft-repeated.

Even to two young men taught by an uptight ex-Dominican? If so, I have at least one jest that I have to include. Catullus is *so* filthy. ;)

[writestufflee.livejournal.com]

I'm sure they would have been warned off Catullus and then immediately run out to find him, like boys everywhere. *G* Even the monasteries had copies of Catullus, tho. Were the boys only tutored at home, or did they have access to a cathedral school? Some headmaster or university student somewhere would have had it in his library too. You know how pron is: it gets around. And really, how better to motivate the lads into declining verbs than to promise them the naughty bits? Worked for me with Chaucer!

[writestufflee.livejournal.com]

Just thinking: Can you make your tutor a Jesuit? He's more likely not to be Catullus-phobic.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

No, not when he was living in exile in England. He'd never been let into the country if he had been a Jesuit.

I'm going with formerly a Dominican, since they were the 'intellectual' order before the Jesuits were founded.

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Some of the Metaphysical poets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets), especially John Donne and George Herbert, as well as the Cavalier poets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cavalier_poets). One might also check out Raleigh, Sidney, Surrey, Wyatt, Spenser, Sidney's sister the Countess of Pembroke, and the poetry anthologies like The Shepherds' Calendar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Clout).

Have fun! There's some wonderful stuff there!

[ellid.livejournal.com]

Oh, two more names:

Petrarch and Dante. Both were translated into English by the Jacobean period and were highly influential.

As for me, I think that "On His Mistress Going to Bed" is one of the most erotic poems in the English language.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have considered "On His Mistress"... I'm just not sure that it is what you use to seduce your best friend after being away at sea for months and you've brought him a chest full of books as a present.

[writestufflee.livejournal.com]

Too bad you've decided to avoid Shakespeare,then ; there's a fair amount of homoeroticism in his sonnets.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, and I might run off to the young man sonnets if I get desperate, but there were other writers of the time, and I doubt Robbie could bring back only Shakespeare and still fill a sea-chest. Shakespeare wasn't the whole of the publishing industry back then, no matter how enduring he has proved.

[twistedchick]

I think you might want to look at the Courtier Poets -- Sir Philip Sidney, Sir Walter Raleigh, and a few others. I have a book somewhere... Anyone educated at that level would have been familiar with Latin (however, they may or may not have liked it enough to read it) but might not have had Greek. Marlowe, yes. Donne, yes. Campion, yes. And there are others.

[executrix.livejournal.com]

All educated people knew Ovid, which has lots of naughty but not quite filthy material.

BTW, for most of that period, one would be about as likely to hire a Jesuit tutor as a public school system would have been to hire a Communist teacher in 1955.

[neotoma.livejournal.com]

Ovid's Metamorpheses might have something -- there is a lot Jupiter seducing people in that one, right?

Yeah, which is why I decided against him being an ex-Jesuit. Ex-Dominican is *slightly* less fraught. And he was running a "Select College for the Sons of Gentlefolk" -- that's straight from canon.