Thomas Woodward Part 2

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(Conclusion)
(Tying Up Loose Ends)
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==Tying Up Loose Ends==  
 
==Tying Up Loose Ends==  
 
So much for attempting research on people living in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England, right? The deeper one digs, the greater the unresolvable puzzles one apparently turns up.
 
  
 
The Thomas Woodward who was the friend and intimate of the poet John Donne also seems to have been at one time the unwilling object of the poet's occasional homosexual interest: four verse letters exist (written when Donne was eighteen and Woodward sixteen), addressed to "T.W.", and expressing (as George Klawitter has shown) "first, the poet's infatuation for his friend, and then, his severe disappointment when the youth fails to respond with a like ardor." These poems, says Klawitter, "including Woodward's response, are full of sexual puns and a highly charged homoeroticism." (33) Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Elizabethan literature and biography should not be unduly surprised by this disclosure. Even the great Shakespeare himself addressed the first one hundred and twenty-six of his famous ''Sonnets'' to a handsome young man, usually in tender, sometimes arguably in homoerotic, tones. There were of course still others, such as Marlowe and Barnfield, who were far more explicit than this, and left no doubt at all about their proclivities and interests.
 
The Thomas Woodward who was the friend and intimate of the poet John Donne also seems to have been at one time the unwilling object of the poet's occasional homosexual interest: four verse letters exist (written when Donne was eighteen and Woodward sixteen), addressed to "T.W.", and expressing (as George Klawitter has shown) "first, the poet's infatuation for his friend, and then, his severe disappointment when the youth fails to respond with a like ardor." These poems, says Klawitter, "including Woodward's response, are full of sexual puns and a highly charged homoeroticism." (33) Anyone with more than a passing familiarity with Elizabethan literature and biography should not be unduly surprised by this disclosure. Even the great Shakespeare himself addressed the first one hundred and twenty-six of his famous ''Sonnets'' to a handsome young man, usually in tender, sometimes arguably in homoerotic, tones. There were of course still others, such as Marlowe and Barnfield, who were far more explicit than this, and left no doubt at all about their proclivities and interests.

Revision as of 07:09, 8 June 2008

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