The growing individual and national confidence thus far chronicled clearly raised questions regarding literary production. To what degree did achievement equal pretension? Did British letters really equal the classics? Was there life after Shakespeare's, or Milton's, or Dryden's death? Did the certainly free British write as well, or better, than the certainly enslaved French? Would Britannia's issue actually extend beyond sight, or even beyond the seventeenth century?

For such questions established authors like Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton could offer only partial answers. By the later seventeenth century each was or soon would be canonized in both senses, and with varying consistencies and colleagues. The frontispiece to William Winstanley's Lives of the … English Poets (1687), for example, shows laurelled, immortal Shakespeare in the company of other immortals like Homer, Ovid, Ennius, Pindar, Horace, Virgil, Chaucer, and Cowley. In Giles Jacob's Poetical Register (1719), however, Shakespeare is in entirely British company. His engraving is the center around which, clockwise from nine o'clock, we see Beaumont, Jonson, Fletcher, Wycherley, Dryden, and Otway. The two illustrations represent different stages in awareness of native literary greatness. For Winstanley, Shakespeare's greatness is testified by six classical and two British poets. For Jacob, Shakespeare's greatness is testified by six British dramatists. He has become the great sun around which lesser but also great and very different native satellites revolve.

By the middle years of the eighteenth century Britain's view of its chief poets had undergone significant changes. The often modernized Chaucer moves from linguistic barbarian to paternal ancestor respected for his accomplishments and for his early version of the rough but natural British voice.