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

[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.