In the sixteenth century poetry followed patronage like a shadow. At a time when the newly invented printing press was disseminating texts at a rate never before imagined, writers, editors, translators, and compilers did not earn a living from their labors. Receiving a single payment for their manuscripts but no royalties thereafter, writers remained as dependent on patrons for employment, retainerships, and cash rewards as they had done in the age of scribal reproduction. To publish was not to profit, and the days when a writer might make a fortune from his pen and claim, as Pope did, to be “Above a Patron,” were still a long way off. Literature that was written at the behest of a patron, literature that aimed to attract a patron, literature that ruminated the vagaries of the patronage system, literature that deplored its shortcomings - these account for so large a proportion of sixteenth-century writing that the literature of the period has not unreasonably been described as a “literature of patronage.”