Relatively little is known about the actual influence of Jacques Amyot on Charles IX and Henry III, who were entrusted as young boys to his pedagogical care. Amyot's translation of the works of Plutarch was so popular that Montaigne called it a ‘breviaire’. It is hardly conceivable that his efforts as an educator should not have left a traceable imprint. In this paper I have attempted to trace this imprint. The question of whether or not Amyot's influence on the two last Valois is to be qualified as constructive will entail another question: ‘Was Amyot's pedagogy a success or a failure within the sphere of literature, the arts and “culture” in the restricted sense, or in the sphere of action, political and socio-economic?’ An attempt to answer these questions might open up an interesting late Renaissance vista into the relationship between ‘art for art's sake’ and ‘art as social significance’.

The quarto (ca. 1570) of Ulpian Fulwell's An Enterlude intituled Like wil to like quod the Deuel to the Colier at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C. (STC 11473.2 bd. with 4965), contains on its back leaf (Sig. F2v) in ink in what appears to be a contemporary hand the music of a three-man song arranged for counter-tenor, tenor, and bass. The piece is anonymous and has no heading, and there are no words with the music. The rest of the quarto is free from annotations of any kind.

The music, whose distribution and range of parts as well as part movement point clearly to a concerted vocal piece, is presumably a setting for the concluding lyric of the play. Sung by Virtuous Life, Honour, and Good Fame, the lyric appears on the preceding signature (F2r). The music easily accommodates the words of the first four lines of each verse; the remaining two lines require the repetition of the second section of the music.