Sir Richard Fanshawe, born on 12 June 1608 and dead in Madrid in June 1666, lived one of the most various and hazardous lives available to a seventeenth-century English man of letters. He was at once a poet, translator, civil servant, soldier-administrator, parliamentarian, courtier, prisoner, exile, and ambassador. His name has never become as immediately familiar as those of John Milton, Andrew Marvell, or John Dry…
Compare Poets
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.
Poet A
Sir Richard Fanshawe
Poet B
William Browne, of Tavistock
Compare two related contemporaries
A random pair who overlapped in time and whose poems already rhyme in the catalogue — a way into poets you may not have met.
Kindred spirits
Their work already rhymes in the catalogue. The rest of this page is the story around that rhyme.
Biography 73%
Poems 84%
Blended 78%
Swap sides
Another related pair
William Browne of Tavistock, born about 1588 and traditionally thought to have died about 1650, is one of the most attractive and elusive figures in early seventeenth-century English poetry. He was not a major public presence on the scale of Ben Jonson, John Donne, or George Wither, nor did he leave behind the unusually full documentary record that allows historians to reconstruct the lives of some contemporaries. Ye…
“They believe the spirit which inspired the Reformation and the genius which dictated the Magna Charta possessed you.”
In time
Sir Richard Fanshawe
William Browne, of Tavistock
1588
1666
They overlapped for 43 years (1608–1650).
When Sir Richard Fanshawe was born, William Browne, of Tavistock was about 20.
Sir Richard Fanshawe was about 42 when William Browne, of Tavistock died.
On the map
About 316 km separate Hertfordshire, England from Tavistock, Devon, England. Both have ground in England.
Sir Richard Fanshawe
William Browne, of Tavistock
Themes they return to
Distinctive words drawn from each poet’s critiqued poems — what they keep writing about, not just what their biographies mention.
Shared
From the biographies
inner temple
Sir Richard Fanshawe: madrid, the lusiad, ann fanshawe, jesus college, cavalier, the faithful shepherd, inner temple, civil war. William Browne, of Tavistock: devonshire, britannia's pastorals, the shepherd's pipe, george wither, exeter college, inner temple, pastoral writing, classical pastoral.
Poems that secretly rhyme
The closest poem-to-poem matches in critique space — the sort of kinship a listener hears before the catalogue admits it.
The world around them
While their lives overlapped
Notable events from the years they were both alive.
Sir Richard Fanshawe
1646
Return to England
William Browne, of Tavistock
1630
Relocation to Devon
Emotional landscapes
Sir Richard Fanshawe: Sensuality, Wonder, Fear. William Browne, of Tavistock: Tenderness, Joy, Longing.