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.

Scholars have long debated the origins of John Skelton’s idiosyncratic form of verse, the so-called “Skeltonic.” In this chapter, I suggest that the action and effect of Skeltonics are best understood through the lens of one of Skelton’s long-standing preoccupations: the attempt to simulate, in writing, the presence of a living thing. During the early sixteenth century, Humanist intellectuals argued over the proper way to represent liveliness in verse, particularly in their discussions of imitatio and enargeia. Where Skelton differs from his contemporaries, however, is in his conviction that proper imitatio requires the use of copia, an abundant style that (in his hands) aims to depict a physical thing, not merely as it appears frozen in a single moment, but as it moves and breathes through time. After putting Skelton’s work into conversation with contemporary theories of imitatio and copia, I turn to two of his best-known poems, “Speke Parott” and “Phyllyp Sparowe,” which attempt to replicate living bodies in predcisely this way while also expressing some skepticism towards the politics of this procedure.