In April 1589 the London bookseller Thomas Orwin transferred to Richard Field the license he had obtained the preceding November to print a treatise on poetic rhetoric. Field published the work in May as The Arte of English Poesie. Contrived into Three Bookes: The First of Poets and Poesie, the Second of Proportion, the Third of Ornament. No author's name appears on the title page; in a dedicatory address to William Cecil, first Baron Burghley, Field explains that the book came into his hands anonymously. He conjectures, however, that it was devised "for the Queen's recreation and service." The provenance of the work remained a mystery for some time.

The book was, however, well known in literary circles. Ben Jonson owned a copy that is now in the British Library. Some disparaging allusions to it can be found in the preface to Sir John Harington's translation (1591) of Ludovico Ariosto's...