Beginning with a discussion of the political commonplaces in Elizabethan England, Talbert then focuses on the writings of Sir Thomas Smith, Richard Hooker, Sir Philip Sidney, and authors of seditious tracts and Elizabethan pageants. There emerges a process of thought that was conventional to Shakespeare's contemporaries and much more complex than that indicated by the Elizabethan "world-picture" alone.

Originally published in 1962.

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