Courteous Exchanges traces how Spenser’s and Shakespeare’s explorations of courtesy—a social practice that encouraged a hypersensitivity to artful self-presentation—provided a vocabulary and forum to comment on their own literary practices and for readers and audiences to reflect on the constructed nature of both texts and aristocratic identity. This book argues that Shakespeare owes Spenser a more extensive debt than has generally been acknowledged. At the same time, I suggest a broader congruity in how readers and audiences engaged with literary and theatrical works in early modern England. My work establishes courtesy as a generative model that allows for a range of responses to literary and theatrical works, while also attending to the ways it both supports and critiques systems of privilege. My contribution considers courtesy’s special role in constructing Renaissance readers and playgoers who recognized their overlapping roles as judges of texts and people. Spenser and Shakespeare both depict and enact paradoxical courtesy, I argue, educating readers and audiences to reflect explicitly on how poetry and theater mediate pressing social and cultural issues. In examining their own reactions to a literary text, Renaissance readers and audiences, I argue, developed habits of thought that encouraged them to evaluate their responses to the cultural fiction of inherited gentility and the social performance of courtesy that supported it.