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

[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.