In 1553, six years before Tasso first began to sketch the poem that was to become the Gerusalemme liberata, the Catholic monarchs Philip II and Mary Tudor acceded to the throne of England, after the Protestant reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI. The event was celebrated in an encomiastic oration, De restituta in Anglia religione ("On the restoration of religion in England"), by the minor Modenese humanist, Antonio Fiordibello. In one passage Fiordibello searches for a precedent to the achievement of the new English rulers.

It is commonly acknowledged that although Elizabeth I vowed herself to a life of perpetual virginity, she entered into a symbolic marriage with England as her husband. In this way she could receive the" adulation of her subjects as the universal object of a Petrarchan religion of love, one that pervaded ballads, pageants, and dramatic entertainments. Scholars claim that she was able to convert her unprecedented weakness as a celibate queen into a powerful propagandistic claim that she sacrificed personal interests in the name of public service.

In his hagiographic treatment of the life of Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville presents the last events in his hero's existence as constituting a particularly exemplary "tragedy"; he celebrates Sidney's generosity towards a common soldier in need of water, his endurance in suffering pain, and his careful "fashioning" of his soul to meet death when the end appeared inevitable.

The modern arrangement of the texts of plays evolved from the confluence of two distinct methods of setting out plays for readers and theatrical use. The earliest, which I shall call the native tradition, had its seeds in the European liturgical drama and is most clearly manifested in the manuscripts of the early moral plays and of guild plays associated with Corpus Christi from the fourteenth century to the cessation of the performances late in the sixteenth century. The second is the classical method, exemplified by the early printings of the plays of Terence, Plautus, and Seneca from 1470 onwards and adopted by the university educated writers of secular plays in the sixteenth century.

The Sala delle Arti Liberali of the Vatican Borgia apartment has never been the subject of comprehensive research. The sala is one of the private rooms of Alexander VI Borgia which were decorated between 1492 and 1494 by Bernardino Pinturicchio and his school. The frescoes in this particular room, of the allegories of the Liberal Arts, are not by the master himself but were executed by minor Umbrian painters; they have never, therefore, attracted great art-historical attention.