In A Theatre for voluptuous Worldlings the young Spenser translated the French of Marot, itself a version of the Italian of Petrarch, with an enjoyment which is obvious despite the rhythmic stiffness of inexperience:

But elsewhere in the Theatre, following his Flemish model, he sounded with equal conviction the note of Protestant fervour:

Spenser was only sixteen or seventeen when he made these verse translations for Jan van der Noodt, but in a number of ways they anticipate his preoccupations of later years. Throughout his writing life the poet continued to reveal in his work both an enthusiasm for the humanist inheritance and a zealous, even militant Protestantism. His knowledge of the literature of antiquity and of Renaissance Italy and France has received sympathetic critical study during our own century - his debts to Virgil and Ovid, to Petrarch, Ariosto and Tasso, to Marot and du Bellay, to Renaissance Neoplatonism, mythography and iconography, have been admirably scrutinised – but the impact of his Protestantism on his imaginative writing has been treated with more reserve.