SPENSER was not the first to combine legal thought with a literary imagination; in the sixteenth century alone, the works of Skelton, More, Rastell, Heywood, Bale, and Sidney all contain occasional legal elements, and the English medieval tradition of legal literature is in some ways even stronger. The Aristotelian association between comedy and justice was well known to sixteenth-century dramatists, and the use of the courtroom trial developed a convincing pedigree in English drama well before the plays of Middleton and Webster – two developments in the theatre that undoubtedly had something to do with the preponderance of law students, and legally educated patrons, in the audiences at Elizabethan and Jacobean playhouses. But The Faerie Queene still deserves to be recognized as extraordinary and influential: in combining with the matter of the heroic poem the language and concepts of native English law – sometimes in specific and technical ways, at other times in a diffuse and ambient manner – Spenser pioneered for the poets and dramatists of the 1590s a new rhetorical register for politically engaged poetry. While much is made of Spenser's archaism, his skill with language reached far beyond the apparently effortless pastiche of Chaucer, Langland and Skelton that he had, by 1579, made his hallmark; and it is in the enrichment of a pastoral and epic vocabulary to include words from technical sources – like the law – that Spenser shows his ‘daedale hand’ most conspicuously.