> Rob
>
> in terms of the ramshackle Elizabethan economy Sidney was well off. I
> regard him as a kind of Rupert Brooke, but a better writer.
Depends who you compare him with -- better off than Ralegh, less moneyed
than Surrey.
So admittedly, we're ignoring 99.9% of the population. But what else is
new? Compare the US and the UK today.
There are damn few aristo writers of any merit -- seems to be a curse worse
than having a Brummie accent. Most, like Chaucer and Wyatt and Greville,
were middle-class apparachiks.
Like Trollope, make your money in a respectable day job (Stevens? Eliot?)
and write on the fly.
Of the aristos, Sidney was easily the best.
Surrey was a pathetic lame-brained loser.
As for Grey Gowrie .... !!!
R.
(Oops -- forgot -- shame on me, as a True North Britain -- James IV, and
_The Kingis Quair_.
:-(((
Charles d'Orleans was French, so we can forgive him.
R2
> As for proto-Calvinism, don't get me going on that, yes, the workers
> should work harder, to pay for their masters' entertainments.
Unusually for you, that seems to lack an 'istorical perspective.
Think the Levellers
> Some spare, but he didn't live in a mud hut, which was what most
> people outside the cities really did.
Who the hell was living (outside Wales) in a mud hut in the
1580s?
Get real, matey. If you smelly English had been living in mud huts as late
as then, you wouldn't have had the Great Fire of London.
C3P0
