The introduction begins by outlining trends in studies of authorial careers and authorship, which, owing to the influence of New Historicism, have mostly focused on the ways in which early modern authors created themselves during their own lifetime. It then provides an overview of milestone publishing events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (including Tottel’s Miscellany, Jonson’s Workes and the Shakespeare folios) and moves on to argue that authorial careers did not always end with their deaths, as both readers and publishers would retrospectively seek to evaluate an author’s complete works and produce definitive editions. This retrospective view on the works was often accompanied by a desire to put them in a logical-seeming sequence that mirrored the author’s life and to supplement the text with a prefatory life of the author and/or a portrait.

This chapter retraces the reception of Petrarch and Petrarchism in early modern England from Wyatt and Surrey to Shakespeare and Drayton via Sidney and Spenser, arguing that poets turned to annotated editions of Petrarch’s works with rich commentaries, so that poetry and poetic commentary became one in the sonnets adapted from Petrarch. Early authors produced a body of English Petrarchism and were imitated by later poets who shaped their own poems as critical commentaries upon the work of their forerunners. Petrarch himself was represented in varied ways, as a master of rhetoric or as religious poet, as an aggressive or a passive lover. Insisting on the social dimension of poetry writing and publishing, and focusing on the readership targeted by each category of poet, this chapter recalls the differences in status and scope between the early Tudor poets, who did not publish their poems themselves, and the later poets, who used their published sonnets to comment on the achievements of their predecessors.

Contemporary editorial work on Shakes-peares Sonnets has tended to focus on the individual poem to the detriment of the collection as a whole, favouring ingenious close reading and shaping the understanding of the poem as the emanation of a lyric voice. On the contrary, a holistic approach to the Sonnets as a unique continuous poem reveals the consistencies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, and systematicities that constitute a ‘grammar’, seen here as a rhythmic, rather than just syntactic, notion. Punctuation, for instance, has been modelled on the conventions of modern prose in modern editions, while early modern punctuation was rhythmical rather than logical. The study of the uses of ‘have’ and of ‘this’ demonstrates that some recurring patterns, the rhythmic gestures of the Quarto, can be identified in the Sonnets. It is at least partly because of editorial practices that such work is needed: while Donne’s texts are known for their rhythmical oddities, Shakespeare’s Sonnets have been treated in a way that erases their rhythmical virtuosity and the way their ‘strangeness’ affects the English language.

A principal contribution of this revisionary biography is that Gabriel Harvey’s relationship with Edmund Spenser is fully contextualized. This is the first close reading of Gabriel Harvey’s Gratulationes Valdinenses (1578), a work he intended to serve as his Shepheardes Calender. Harvey reprinted a number of poems by members of the Leicester circle, but nothing written by Edmund Spenser, suggesting that Spenser and Harvey were not especially close friends in 1578. In the tributes to Elizabeth and Leicester, he rejoices at the queen’s letting him kiss her hand and to the suggestion that he will be sent to Italy. He gloats about the queen’s comment that he already looks Italian (vultu Itali). In Book Four, he addresses a series of eulogies to Sir Christopher Hatton, the Earl of Oxford, and Sir Philip Sidney. In the eulogy to Philip Sidney, Harvey proclaims, ‘Sum iecur’ [I am all liver], a proclamation that suggests that he is consumed with lust for Sidney. The phrase ‘cogit amare iecur’ [the liver knows how to love] becomes a refrain in later satiric treatments of Harvey beginning with Pedantius (1581). Harvey’s own Gratulationes Valdinenses is the source for those taunts.

This chapter surveys previous biographies by Alexander Grosart (1882–84), Alexander Judson (1945), and Andrew Hadfield (2012), re-examining the evidence concerning Spenser’s lineage and concludes that we know only that he was born in 1554. His father’s name and occupation are unknown – although conjectures that he was a journeyman merchant tailor have found their way into reference works. From an important manuscript source, the ‘Nowell Account Book’, Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS A.6.50, we know that Spenser was the protégé of a circle of London clergymen, who expected him to take holy orders. This important documentary source details funds distributed from the estate of Robert Nowell, Attorney of the Queen’s Court of Wards, and brother of Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul’s. Spenser’s name does not appear in the admission records for Merchant Taylors’ School. We know that he attended Merchant Taylors’ School only because of bequests he received in the ‘Nowell Account Book’.