This chapter has two correlative aims: on the one hand it seeks to complicate the customary conception of Byron as a figure of strength, and on the other hand it challenges the commonplace pejorative understanding of levity as a matter of frivolity, irreverence, or licentiousness, by drawing attention to other, more positive forms of lightness that also play a vital role in Byron’s comic masterpiece. More particularly, by reflecting on Don Juan’s ‘three graces’ (the Duchess of Fitz-Fulke, Lady Adeline, and Aurora Raby), the chapter highlights three contrasting models of levity: the carnivalesque, the courtly, and the eschatological. One of the surprising things that emerges from this consideration of the poem’s intermingling of sexual, socio-political, and religious forms of lightness is an underlying posture of epistemological weakness, which both fosters and is fostered by a sceptical openness to possibilities.

Thomas Wyatt lived in an environment where it was unwise, if not impossible, to speak one’s thoughts plainly. This chapter explores how Wyatt’s life at court, and his career as an ambassador, informed his tendency towards irony, obliquity, and indirection in his verse. As a close reading of his diplomatic correspondence demonstrates, Wyatt learned to speak in blank phrases, proverbs, and clichés, not just from his ambassadorial profession, but from contemporary writings on counsel, courtiership, and literary style. What is more, these influences seem to have inspired a theory of making in which, for Wyatt, the message of a poem is to be found, neither in its matter, nor in its form, but in its suggestive implications—in the sense of “grace,” to use his term, that the poem may evoke for its reader. By tracing the effects of this “grace” throughout Wyatt’s lyrics—and especially in poems such as “What Vaileth Trouth” and “They Fle From Me”—I argue that Wyatt anticipates later theories of aesthetic autonomy by shifting the reader’s attention away from the contingent materials of his poetry and towards the imaginative space that a poem may seem to open up.

Baldesar Castiglione’s courtesy book Il Cortegiano introduced the notion of sprezzatura (a kind of ‘effortless mastery’) to early modern England. The notion of courtesy, which characterised the Middle English period, was replaced by the notion of civility. A review of the relevant research shows how the theoretical framework proposed by Brown and Levinson with the key notions of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ politeness has been applied to the plays by William Shakespeare. The chapter continues with a third-wave discursive politeness approach that is exemplified with case studies of two plays by Ben Jonson, Volpone, Or the Fox and Bartholomew Fair. They demonstrate how default politeness or impoliteness values of specific linguistic forms interact with the discursive contexts in which they occur.

As the newly invigorated and performative disciplines of poetry and rhetoric took hold in court cultural life, so too did the inseparable activities of poetic recitation and performance. Civic humanism was adapted to the new cultural ethos of the courts, which cultivated courtly splendor and entertainment as an expression of dynastic magnificenza. Court life accordingly reshaped poetic practice in important ways: through hybridizing interaction with polyphonic practice, the fostering of intensifying debates on the nature and status of Italian vernacular, the turn to more introspective poetic modes and forms modeled on Petrarch’s canzoniere, and the cultivation of more socialized forms of poetic expression such as the dialogue and theatrical presentations. This chapter focuses on three centers (Ferrara, Urbino, and Naples), which have been chosen for the vitality of their poetic performance practices and for the variety of their court cultures. Like humanism in general, cantare ad lyram took hold in each of these centers in a manner particular to each court’s distinctive character: residual feudalism and a strong university in Ferrara, the complex patronage structure of Naples (including the Spanish heritage of its Aragonese kings), and the Urbino court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro as seen through the idealizing lens of Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano.