Richard Robinson, although a minor author, enjoyed striking success in winning major patrons, including Sir Philip Sidney, for his translations and compilations. Robinson's manuscript Eupolemia, Archippus, and Panoplia (1603; published 1924), a semi-autobiographical record of his benefactors compiled at the end of his career, is a unique source for the study of professional authorship in the 1570s through the 1590s, when he was working as both a legal copyist and a published author. The very lack of distinction in Robinson's oeuvre means that his experiences illuminate the wider possibilities for making a living as a writer in Elizabethan London.

Richard Robinson was a Londoner; the exact date of his birth is unknown. It is hard to reconcile a comment that he was age fifty-eight on 25 May 1603 with an earlier claim that he had been laboring in London for thirty-one years in 1595--since it is known that he left school to...