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

[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.