Abraham FraunceArticle Free Pass Fraunce was educated at
Shrewsbury and at St. John’s College, Cambridge, where his Latin
comedy Victoria, dedicated to Sidney, was probably written. He
was called to the bar at Gray’s Inn in 1588 and then apparently
practiced in the court of the Welsh marches. After the death of
Sidney, Fraunce was sponsored by Sidney’s sister Mary Herbert,
countess of Pembroke. His last work was published in 1592, and
nothing more is known until his death in 1633. Fraunce’s
critical textbook Arcadian Rhetorike (1588) illustrates each
precept with a quotation, often from the poetry of Sir Philip
Sidney and from Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, indicating these
two poets’ contemporary fame, though their chief works were
still unprinted. He also wrote The Lawiers Logike (1588),
illustrating logic in law, and The Countesse of Pembrokes
Emanuel (1591), a book of verse. Fraunce was a determined
classicist and wrote all his English verse in classical
hexameters, making his poetry rather awkward and u