Sir William Alexander, first Earl of Stirling, was one of the Scots nobles who went to England with James VI of Scotland when, as James I, he succeeded Elizabeth to the throne of England in 1603. Representative of the courtly writing encouraged, patronized, and influenced by that monarch, Alexander's works include a youthful sonnet sequence; occasional poems for his royal patron Prince Henry; an elegy on the occasion of that prince's death in 1612; Doomes-Day (1614, 1637), which influenced John Milton's Paradise Lost (1667); many (perhaps most) of the metrical psalms attributed to James I; a fragment of a poem on the biblical Jonathan; and, most significant among his poetical works, four Senecan closet dramas--The Tragedie of Darius (1603), Croesus (1604), The Alexandræan (1607), and Julius Caesar (1607)--written in the fashion of French tragedian Robert Garnier. Alexander also wrote literary prose. Of greatest historical interest is his continuation (1613) of Sir Philip Sidney's incomplete...