Thomas May, playwright, poet, translator, and historian, lived a life marred by ephemeral success and lasting disappointments. His expectations of becoming a country squire, even a justice of the peace, fell to nothing at the death of his improvident father. The home that he had anticipated inheriting sold, he spent his life in London, moving in circles distinguished for literary talent and courtly grace; this corpulent man afflicted with a stammer was relegated to the periphery of a group that knew him for his geniality among his "very friends" and for his weak jests. His closest ties with them seem to have been a series of perfunctory commendatory poems for his works. As a Jacobean man of letters, he played the role of a minor character, an attendant lord, a writer dedicated to received traditions without the imagination to remake them for his own. His plays were not...