ELIZABETHAN POETRY AND PROSE (1) To understand Elizabethan literature it is necessary to remember that the social status it enjoyed was far different from that of literature in our own day.

The splendours of the Medicis in Italy had set up an ideal of courtliness, in which letters formed an integral and indispensable part.

For the Renaissance, the man of letters was only one aspect of the gentleman, and the true gentleman, as books so early and late respectively as Castiglione's _Courtier_ and Peacham's _Complete Gentleman_ show, numbered poetry as a necessary part of his accomplishments.

In England special circumstances intensified this tendency of the time.

The queen was unmarried: she was the first single woman to wear the English crown, and her vanity made her value the devotion of the men about her as something more intimate than mere loyalty or patriotism.