This is a major study of the relation between poetry and politics in sixteenth and seventeenth-century English literature, focusing in particular on the works of Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Milton, and Dryden. Taking issue with the traditional concept of the political poem and with recent New Historicist criticism, Erskine-Hill argues that the major tradition of political allusion is not, as has often been argued, that of the political allegory of Dryden's Absolom and Architophel and other overtly political poems, but rather a more shifting and less systematic practice, often involving equivocal or multiple reference.