By the middle of the sixteenth century, French had already had the poems and works of Villon, Du Bellay and Ronsard to rival or at least challenge those of Petrarch. Italian’s earlier literary Renaissance had also produced Dante, Machiavelli and Ariosto, while Spanish could boast Juan del Encina and Fernando de Rojas. Although English could already claim Chaucer and his contemporaries, their works were written in an English which had become to a great extent defunct. Because of changes in pronunciation and in forms of speech — like the loss of the final “e” — the Tudors could not hear
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