Giles Fletcher the Elder is generally thought of in connection with the "Spenserian" poets of the reign of James I, a group of consciously Protestant writers--including Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, William Browne, George Wither, and Fletcher's sons Phineas and Giles the younger--who were opposed to many of the king's policies, especially in matters of foreign affairs, and who attempted to remain faithful to the model of the militant Protestant poet that they found in the work of Edmund Spenser. The work of Giles Fletcher the Elder was, however, written during Elizabeth's reign and thus precedes the particular political issues that underpin the writings of his sons and their associates, and his importance as a writer lies not only in his influence on the Jacobean and Caroline generations of Protestant poets but also in his own works, primarily the sonnet sequence Licia (1593) and the geographic treatise Of the Russe...