This book offers a fresh examination of key seventeenth-century writers in the context of their common interest in the republican, libertarian and oppositional potential of the philosophical tradition of Stoicism. Stoicism in England involved not actual withdrawal from society but an intense kind of literacy - reading and writing focused on Seneca, Tacitus, Lucan and Lipsius as they could be seen to comment on contemporary political situations and ideological problems. Through subtly nuanced close readings of Marvell, Katherine Philips and Milton, Andrew Shifflett shows that these writers had more in common than previous philosophical, political and aesthetic categories have allowed.