England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

This chapter situates the sixteenth-century drive to define ’Englishness’ through literature within a broader European context, charting the widespread efforts to reify ’national character’ through the production of standardised grammars for vernaculars and assertions of their peculiar grace. After surveying early modern thought on the relationship between language, nation and empire, the chapter discusses the particular strategy adopted by English writers (centrally Puttenham and Sidney) to establish the very peripheral barbarousness of the English tongue as a proof of its distinction, before pointing at the close towards the emerging role of empire in underpinning notions of Englishness.

The epilogue considers the afterlives of “matter” and “making” in the Elizabethan period. Through brief readings of Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella and Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy, the epilogue demonstrates that both ideas continue to guide literary practice during this period. At the same time, however, the economic and political position of the Elizabethan poet differs markedly from the place that earlier court writers had occupied in the sphere of cultural production, and this shift in position motivates a gradual turn, in Elizabethan literary theory, away from notions of “making,” which draw attention to the material process by which literature is constructed, and towards notions of “authorship,” which hold instead that literature is produced by an autonomous figure whose type of work is categorically distinct from other kinds of labor. “Authorship” thus emerges from an ideological shift predicated, not upon a fundamental difference in literary technique, but upon a change in the conditions under which early modern poets worked.