Sporting with the Classics

Focuses on the original Latin poetry of William Dillingham, a 17th-cent. editor, and Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge Univ. It does so in an attempt to disprove claims that Dillingham’s talent lay in criticism rather than in original composition, and that his Latin verse shows his complete independence of the old school of classical imitation. This study highlights both the classical and the contemporary intertexts with which this hitherto neglected poetry engages. This highly talented verse “sports” with the classics in several ways: first in its self-consciously interaction with the Latin poets Virgil and Ovid; second in its appropriation of a classical world and its linguistic medium to describe such 17th-cent. sports or pastimes as bowling, horticulture, and bell-ringing.