author
Giles Fletcher
1548–1611
Known for pairing public service with literary ambition, this Elizabethan writer moved between diplomacy, Parliament, and poetry. He is especially remembered for the sonnet sequence Licia and for his vivid account of late 16th-century Russia.
1 Audiobook
Elizabethan Sonnet Cycles: Phillis - Licia
by Giles Fletcher, Thomas Lodge
About the author
Educated at Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, he built a varied career as a poet, diplomat, and public figure in Elizabethan England. He served in Parliament and later held church administrative posts, showing the same range in public life that appears in his writing.
He traveled on diplomatic missions in Europe and is best known in politics for his embassy to Russia in 1588. From that experience came Of the Russe Common Wealth (1591), an influential description of the Russian state that helped shape how English readers imagined Muscovy.
As a man of letters, he is most closely linked with Licia, a sonnet sequence that earned him a lasting place in English Renaissance poetry. He was also the father of the poets Phineas Fletcher and Giles Fletcher the Younger, making him part of a remarkable literary family.