Poets were not reticent about claiming for themselves, in George Puttenham's words, the roles of ‘the first priests, the first prophets, the first legislators and politicians in the world’.

Puttenham was no stranger to the law, a fact which might give added emphasis to his point. He was related to distinguished lawyers, and was a lawyer himself, having attended the Middle Temple in the late 1550s. His own career as lawyer and apologist for poetry epitomises the closeness of these pursuits in the Renaissance. Not only did he rub shoulders at the Inns of Court with poets and poets-to-be, not only did he share the common aim of rhetoric employed in a forensic oratory and poetry (‘persuasion of the public peace and tranquillity’), not only would he have understood the nature of legal fictions and poetic fictions, but he also sees the deeper theoretical issues, later plumbed by Sidney, implicit in his statement that poets ‘were the first lawmakers to the people’.