This volume contains a number of essays presented to Dame Helen Gardner in honour of her seventieth birthday by some of her many friends and colleagues. The contributions have been drawn from three continents: they span drama, poetry, and prose, and they exhibit a wide variety of skills, approaching Renaissance literature by way of history, biography, textual scholarship, music, iconography, and the visual arts, as well as criticism and the criticism of criticism. The greatest number of the essays are devoted to Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton, but there are also studies of Sidney, Burton, and Dryden, as well as of such general topics as echo songs and alchemical imagery. -- Book Jacket.