To write in your own language, to play with it and mould it — these all became aims to which the educated wished to aspire. English literature became the vogue. Roger Ascham, Elizabeth I’s tutor, said that his colleagues would much rather read Malory’s mid-fifteenth-century tale Le Morte d’Arthur (in English) than the Bible. They began to copy and experiment. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, beheaded by Henry VIII, had used blank verse when translating Virgil’s Aeneid.
