During the Duke of Alençon's second courtship of Queen Elizabeth the Earl of Leicester emerged as the leading opponent of the marriage. At the same time he began to patronize a circle of writers which included Gabriel Harvey, Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney, who helped to create the 'golden 1 literature of the English Renaissance. In this thesis I investigate their relations with Leicester and by a detailed examination of their main works, such as the Spenser-Harvey Letters, the Old Arcadia, theShepheardes Calender and theFaerie Queene, and their development, show how they reflect the Earl's intellectual and political concerns. I argue that Alençon was a notable patron and that his growing knowledge of his rival's academic interests encouraged Leicester to maintain his own literary faction. One of his aims was to show the French that English culture was not provincial and he demon- strated this in the entertainment The Four Foster Children of Desire for which he was largely responsible. Having outlined the background of the crisis of the courtship I evoke Leicester's life and circumstances during this period, particularly his relationship with the Queen and patronage at Oxford. I then describe the distinctive interests of his circle in law, history, politics and poetry and go on to establish that Alençon took part in the French academic movement and that his courtiers included distinguished poets and thinkers. The second half of the thesis is a series of detailed studies of Harvey, Spenser and Sidney in relation to Leicester, and their writings during the Alençon court- ship. Finally I examine the court entertainments of this period and argue for the Four Foster Children as a turning-point in Elizabethan literature. My conclusion is that Leicester was a more loyal and discriminating patron than he is usually said to have been and that he played a significant part in introducing the 'golden' age of Elizabethan literature.

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This thesis examines how the fortunes of poets and the status of poetry were changing at the end of the sixteenth century in Portugal. Centring on the long-neglected verse epistles in Diogo Bernardes's 'O Lima' (1596), I re-evaluate our sense of what it meant to be a poet when writing verse was not a sure-fire way to earn a living and when lyric poetry was regularly lampooned as trifling and immoral. Bernardes's surprisingly forthright cartas, I argue, offer new insights into the protagonists and procedures of literary patronage in Portugal. I use a combination of close readings and sociological methods to illuminate the practical strategies and rhetorical brinkmanship that Bernardes deployed in his quest for favour and highlight the frustrations and moral dilemmas of seeking the support of powerful, but fickle, patrons. Bernardes was a particularly remarkable writer for having printed his verse during his lifetime, and so I also trace how lyric verse was slowly legitimated as a cultural product during the sixteenth century and offer a case study of how an author's reputation was forged in the collaborative enterprise of print, then re-formed by the work of readers, thereby shedding light on the complex mechanisms of early modern canon formation. Paradoxically, I demonstrate that unequivocal praise of a writer's work can harm, rather than help, their chances of remaining in the canon. Although Bernardes's work is an echo chamber for these deep reverberations from the broader history of literature, this thesis also listens closely to Bernardes's distinctive poetic voice and allows it to speak out. Playful, candid, mercurial, it is a poetic voice that here seeks a wider audience.

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In its current sense, courting means 'wooing'; but its original meaning was 'residing at court'. The amorous sense of the word developed from a purely social sense in most major European languages around the turn of the sixteenth century, a time when, according to some historians, Western states were gradually moving toward the genesis of absolutism and the establishment of courts as symbols and agents of centralised monarchical power. This study examines the shift in meaning of the words courtship and to court, seeking the origins of courtship in court society, with particular reference to the court and literature of the Elizabethan period. Chapter 1 charts the traditional association between courts and love, first in the historiography of 'courtly love', and then in historical and sociological accounts of court society. Recent studies have questioned the quasi- Marxist notion that the amorous practices of the court and the 'bourgeois' ideals of harmonious, fruitful marriage were antithetical, and this thesis examines whether the development of 'romantic love' has a courtly as well as a bourgeois provenance. Chapter 2 conducts a lexical study of the semantic change of the verb to court in French, Italian, and English, with an extended synchronic analysis of the word in Elizabethan literature. Chapter 3 goes on to diversify the functional classification required by semantic analysis and considers the implications of courtship as a social, literary and rhetorical act in the works of Lyly and Sidney. It considers the 'humanist' dilemma of a language that was aimed primarily at seduction, and suggests that, in the largely discursive mode of the courtly questione d'amore, courtship could be condoned as a verbalisation of love, and a postponement of the satisfaction of desire. Chapter 4 then moves away from the distinction between humanist and courtly concerns, to examine the practice of courtship at the court of Elizabeth I. It focuses on allegorical representations of Desire in courtly pageants, and suggests that the ambiguities inherent in the 'legitimised' Desire of Elizabethan shows exemplify the situation of poets and courtiers who found themselves at the court of a female sovereign. In chapter 5 discussions of the equivocation inveterate to courtly texts leads to a study of The Faerie Queene, and specifically to Spenser's presentation of courtship and courtly society in the imperialist themes of Book II and their apparent subversion in Book VI. The study concludes with a brief appraisal of Spenser's Amoretti as a model for the kind of courtship that has been under review.