The great flowering of English drama and poetry in the last quarter of the
sixteenth century, together with the lesser, but still significant, develop-
ments in house-building, religious music, and portrait miniatures, cannot
be understood in isolation. For the art of the time--and the phrase stands
for literature and music as well as for painting and building--was not so
much a reflection of the social and political order as a part of it. A portrait
of the Queen was a political statement much more than it was a reflection of
her appearance; the prodigy houses did not just display the wealth and
prestige of their owners but were themselves integral to that wealth and
prestige; and history plays, watched and heard by thousands, were part of
the political discourse of the age. Given the close involvement of writers
and their audiences, or of portrait painters and their sitters, with the great
men and women of the time, it would be surprising if visual and literary
images did not reflect the world of power and social ranking of which they
were themselves a part. The purpose of this chapter is to explore some of
the forms in which political and social values were given 'public signifi-
cation' ¹ in art and literature, and to investigate the ways in which different
aspects of the social order interacted.

The sixteenth century brought major changes in schools and universities,
with important consequences for the education of boys and men in many
levels of society. While a broad groundswell of educational change had
begun in the fifteenth century, when laymen started to play a great part in
running schools and members of the landed classes grew more literate, the
major boom in the foundation of schools came in the middle and latter parts
of the sixteenth century. In Kent, for example, most small towns had three

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