Henry Chettle existed on the insecure fringes of sixteenth-century literary culture. He followed a career that embraced printing, editing, pamphleteering, and playwriting. His prose works reflect a sense of modesty and decorum combined with the brashly opportunistic manner of a literary journalist.

The son of Robert Chettle, a London dyer, Chettle was apprenticed to the stationer Thomas East from 1577 to 1584. He must have encountered John Lyly's Euphues, which East printed in 1578. His first literary endeavors belong to about this time if, as is likely, he is the "H. C." who in 1579 translated a tract by Pope Gregory XIII on the death of John of Austria and wrote both a broadside ballad on the murder of Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley, "to be sung to the tune of 'Black and Yellow,'" and a miscellany called The Forest of Fancy. The latter work confesses its author's "young years and small...