Edward Hake, satirist, poet, lawyer, and Puritan, is best known as the author of News out of Paul's Churchyard , a series of eight energetic satires first published in 1567 in an edition that is now lost. But Hake produced a wide variety of other works: at least one other volume of poems, encomiastic verses on Queen Elizabeth, prose condemnations of contemporary social abuses, and translations of a work by Desiderius Erasmus and one attributed to Thomas à Kempis. A practicing lawyer who had studied law at Barnard's and Gray's Inns, Hake is also of interest to legal historians as the author of a legal treatise, Epieikeia (1953), that is a unique source of information about late-sixteenth-century conceptions of Chancery and common-law equity.

Almost nothing is known of Hake's parentage. A 1581 entry in the Calendar of the Patent Rolls records that in that year Isabel Hake, widow, and her son Edward...