From antiquity to the Renaissance the pursuit of patronage was central to the literary career, yet relationships between poets and patrons were commonly conflicted, if not antagonistic, necessitating compromise even as they proffered stability and status. Was it just a matter of speaking lies to
power? The present study looks beyond the rhetoric of dedication to examine how traditional modes of literary patronage responded to the challenge of print, as the economies of gift-exchange were forced to compete with those of the marketplace. It demonstrates how awareness of such divergent milieux
prompted innovative modes of authorial self-representation, inspired or frustrated the desire for laureation, and promoted the remarkable self-reflexivity of Early Modern verse. By setting English Literature from Caxton to Jonson in the context of the most influential Classical and Italian exemplars
it affords a wide comparative context for the reassessment of patronage both as a social practice and a literary theme.
Introduction
PART ONE: THEORY AND PRACTICE
1. Of Followers and Friends: Problems of Definition
2. Visions of Laurel: Classical Exemplars
3. The Arts of Magnificence: Early Modern Exemplars
4. Economies of Script and Print
5. The Rhetoric of Paratexts
6. The
Protocols of Presentation
PART TWO: ITALIAN LITERARY PATRONAGE
7. Petrarch: The Renaissance of Patronage
8. Ariosto: Laureate or Poligrafo?
9. Tasso: Patronage and Imprisonment
PART THREE: ENGLISH LITERARY PATRONAGE, 1500-1625
10. Print and Patronage in the
Early Tudor Age
11. Elizabeth I and Court Patronage
12. Courts and Coteries
13. The Elizabethan Marketplace
14. Career Trajectories
15. Egerton: A Patron's 'Canon'
16. The Courts of King James and Prince Henry
17. Conclusion: Laurels Won and Lost
Bibliography
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Richard McCabe is Professor of English Language and Literature at Oxford University and Fellow of Merton College. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 2007, and held a Major Leverhuleme Fellowship from 2011 to 2014. He is author of Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation; The
Pillars of Eternity: Time and Providence in 'The Faerie Queene'; Incest, Drama, and Nature's Law 1550-1700; and Spenser's Monstrous Regiment: Elizabethan Ireland and the Poetics of Difference. He is the editor of the Penguin edition of Spenser's Shorter Poems and The Oxford Handbook of Edmund
Spenser.
