William Alabaster, a poet in Latin and English, wrote an interesting and too little known collection of devotional sonnets late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. The sonnets, which belong to a late-Renaissance tradition of meditative verse, frequently forecast seventeenth-century religious poetry in style and manner. At his best he can bring to mind certain of George Herbert's poems, and even the less successful of Alabaster's sonnets share the taste for witty paradox that characterizes the period. Edmund Spenser praised Alabaster's fragmentary Neo-Latin epic on the career of Elizabeth, Elisaeis, and urged the queen to extend her patronage to its young author. Though of little more than historical interest, the single completed book of the poem does vindicate Spenser's praise of Alabaster's learning. Alabaster also wrote, or adapted, a lurid academic Latin tragedy, Roxana (1632), that enjoyed a contemporary reputation. Finally, his life and career illustrate something of...