"Extraordinarily rich and awesomely learned...The complexity of its subject matter is here mastered in an exemplary fashion. The study offers detailed, concrete, and perceptive assessments of individual writers within a lucid and carefully balanced design...As a work of striking originality as well as formidable yet lively scholarship,...Green's book will become a central, even classic, text for students of Renaissance poetry and of a cardinal topos in the history of criticism and hermeneutics." -From the citation for the award of the Harry Levin Prize of the American Comparative Literature...