The period for study, a golden one in English literary achievement, was one in which major poets and dramatists were involved in or preoccupied with political events. The Further Subject invites candidates to explore the relationship between literary developments and political ones. The following authors have been selected for study: More, Skelton, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare (for whom the set texts are taken from his English and Roman history plays), Bacon, Jonson, Middleton, Massinger, Milton, Marvell. Candidates are encouraged to consider the lives and influences, as well as the writings, of these men, and to relate the writings to their historical contexts. They are also encouraged to read more widely in the literature of the period and to consider the historical changes which the literature of the period illuminates or reflects. Among the themes of the subject are: the Court; humanism; nobility, honour and service; biography; literature and the nation; the relationship between Christian and classical values; early Stuart monarchy and the masque; the development of the history play; the relationship of the drama to politics and to Puritanism; the responses of writers to the Puritan Revolution.