The four Inns of Court evolved in the fourteenth century into the educational institutions and societies of the English legal profession. These communities provided easy access to the central legal courts, the royal court and the entertainments of London and its suburbs. In addition to, or instead of, the formal training that they could receive in the law, gentlemen's sons used their time at the Inns to cultivate the knowledge, skills and manners necessary for movement within elite socio-political spheres. By the turn of the seventeenth century, Inns members resided, studied, dined, conducted business, nurtured literary tastes and talents, and organised grand revels together, collectively forming one of the richest ‘socioliterary environments’ in the period. Studies have traditionally assessed the literary output of the Inns in terms of their members’ relationships to the royal court or the monarchy. Arthur Marotti's study of this coterie culture in the 1590s emphasises the competition among members who vied for the limited opportunities for advancement that emanated outward from Elizabeth's court. Such aspirations resulted in literary works and performances, like the Gray's Inn Christmas revels that are the focus of this chapter, that ‘reinforced the connections between the Inns and the royal court, the participants demonstrating their interest in and knowledge of their culture's central political institution’, and that ‘highlight[ed] the intentions of Gray's Inn revelers as aspiring courtiers who looked to the monarch and to her officers for preferment’. While Marotti considers the literary effects of anxieties related to the dearth of opportunities for individual gallants, Paul Raffield considers instead the controversial extension of the royal prerogative in the same period and reads the same revels as an oppositional response from the English legal profession. Through the establishment of their own fictional commonwealths at Christmas, ‘[t]he legal profession sought a new Utopia in which the sovereignty of common law was acknowledged by subject and ruler’. Each Inn was transformed into ‘an independent state, whose practices reflected the artificial reason and unchanging perfection of common law’, whose ‘ancient provenance [was] prior to and independent of the royal prerogative’. These mytho-logical realms emphasised ‘the practice of “ancient” English custom at the Inns’ that countered ‘the abuse of executive power by unaccountable instruments of government’.