Pick two poets who seem to have nothing to do with each other — a Gothic American and a pastoral Englishman, say — and see where the catalogue actually joins them: overlapping years, shared ground, distinctive themes, and the poems that secretly rhyme.
Thomas Shadwell
Thomas Nashe
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Thomas Shadwell, born about 1642 and dead on 19 November 1692, was one of the busiest, most contentious, and most revealing writers of England’s Restoration. He wrote poems, prologues, epilogues, political satires, translations, and royal panegyrics, but his chief achievement was in the theatre. For more than two decades he supplied London with comedies whose streets, taverns, gaming rooms, spas, lodgings, laboratori…
“And wit's the noblest frailty of the mind.”
Thomas Nashe, baptized on 26 November 1567 and probably born shortly before that date in Lowestoft, Suffolk, was one of the most brilliant, abrasive, inventive, and precarious figures of the English Renaissance. He died sometime after 1599 and is conventionally assigned a death date of about 1601, though the circumstances and exact date remain unknown. In a life that appears to have lasted little more than three deca…
“Our learning ought to be our lives' amendment, and the fruits of our private study ought to appear in our public behavior.”
About 25 km separate Santon Hall, Norfolk, England from Lowestoft, Suffolk, England. Both have ground in Norfolk.
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Thomas Shadwell: norfolk, santon hall, the sullen lovers, the libertine, the virtuoso, ben jonson, john dryden, whig polemicist. Thomas Nashe: lowestoft, william nashe, janet nashe, the anatomy of absurdity, pierce penniless, a litany in time of plague, martin marprelate controversy, university wits.
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
Thomas Shadwell: Despair, Fear, Longing. Thomas Nashe: Despair, Sorrow, Fear.
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