There were two extreme types of literary career in Elizabethan England. The first was that of the gentleman amateur, who would write poems or prose fiction for private circulation in manuscript form, and who would jealously strive to make it look as though any appearance of those works in print was not their responsibility. The most powerful example of this type of writer was Sir Philip Sidney, none of whose literary writings appeared in print during his lifetime. Sir Walter Ralegh, whom Spenser met in Ireland, also went to great lengths to avoid what has been called ‘the stigma of print’. Extant copies of the popular anthology England's Helicon have slips labelled ‘Ignoto’ pasted over Ralegh's initials, which were presumably inserted by a nervous printer prompted by an irate author. George Puttenham remarked that ‘I know very many notable Gentlemen in the Court that have written commendably, and suppressed it agayne, or els suffred it to be publisht without their owne names to it: as if it were a discredit for a Gentleman to seeme learned, and to show him selfe amorous of any good Art’.1 At the other end of the literary spectrum were professional writers, who were often poor scholars from grammar schools, who went to university as sizars, and who then sought to scavenge a living in London from the press or from the stage. Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe were the most famous examples of writers of this type, but for each of them there were a score of less talented, and less successful, hacks who found it hard to eat and harder to define their role in society. Robert Greene, for example, struggled to earn a living from pamphlets and plays, before dying in poverty and repentance in 1592. Midway along this scale were ‘professional’ writers who managed to win the patronage of noble men or women, or of the Queen herself. George Gascoigne composed entertainments for the Earl of Leicester in 1575, and Ben Jonson, a pupil of William Camden at Westminster school, was later to become the well-rewarded writer of court masques for James I. The position of these writers was economically and socially delicate: they needed to print in order to become known, and they needed to dedicate their works to wellknown figures in order to be rewarded for them.