The King first noticed her when she was 16 - and with imperial greed he smashed her youthful love-affair with Harry Percy and began the process of royal seduction. But this was no ordinary woman, no maid-in-waiting to be possessed.

    Including authoritative texts of poems by twenty-three major and minor poets—from John Donne, Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson to George Gasciogne and Fulke Greville—and Williams' critical preface, English Renaissance Poetry remains an invaluable introductory anthology of short poems from our first modern poetry.