A thoroughly researched and critically rewarding reinvestigation of the politics of textual collaboration in the early decades of the seventeenth century.' -Years Work in English Studies.'This is very much a book for scholars already immersed in the nuances and crosscurrents of mid- and late Jacobean literary culture... much of value in the way specific social and literary lineages are traced.' -Sixteenth Century Journal'O'Callaghan should be commended for weighing in on some major theoretical issues - competing conceptions of nationalism, literary communities, and the emergence of a public sphere - by way of under-studied texts by writers not named Shakespeare or Jonson.' -Sixteenth Century Journal'The 'Shepheard's Nation' is an important contribution to our understanding of Jacobean literature and politics. Michelle O'Callaghan writes lucidly and carefully, and her book is genuinely interdisciplinary, dealing authoritatively with politcal history and theory and with the development of print culture, as well as with literary works.' -Andrew Hadfield, Times Literary SupplementThe Jacobean Spenserian poets, William Browne, George Wither, and Christopher Brooke, formed a distinctive oppositional community in the years 1612 to 1625. Their collective responses to contemporary events sheds new light on the literary and political culture of the early seventeenth century.