ABSTRACT
Phoebe Sheavyn wrote her D.Litt. dissertation for the University of London on ‘Economic Aspects of the Life of the Professional Writer under Elizabeth and James I’. Five chapters of this formed The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, in which she argued that Elizabethan poets were obliged by the lack of a natural patron for their work to attract patronage by artificial means-‘Hence extravagance in eulogy; hence servile humility in the writer’ (The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, 1909, pp. 22-3 and 195).
