'Nothing is certain but death and taxes, yet David Glimp finds that these certainties are always accompanied by a perplexing uncertainty especially amenable to literature. His book traces and renders legible the large-scale social question embedded in minutiae of taxation and state security, showing how Marlowe, Herbert, and Milton were all, in their own ways, drawing upon fiscal language to ask what the common good might mean.' Christopher Warley, Professor of English, University of Toronto

'In Fiscal Policy and the Limits of Sovereignty in Renaissance English Literature,David Glimp offers a nuanced examination of how the administrative realities of funding collective security and managing risk in early modern England shaped literary culture. In deft readings of works by Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, George Herbert, and John Milton, the book identifies what amounts to a 'fiscal poetics,' hiding in plain sight, that transforms our sense of the relationship between writing and security in the period.' Julian Yates, H. Fletcher Brown Professor of English and Material Culture Studies, University of Delaware