Many scholars have been calling for a new edition of Sir John Harington's "Epigrams". Gerard Kilroy, using the three manuscripts arranged and revised by the author, offers the first complete text in print of Harington's four hundred Epigrams, uncovers Harington's elaborate design of forty theological decades, and restores the emblems and political elegies that Harington uses to frame his complete collection and define its serious purpose. The first part of the volume forms a substantial biographical, literary and historical introduction, using Harington's own words to reveal the man behind the studied persona. Also included is a commentary on the structure, patterns and sequences in the Epigrams; the political and theological concerns behind the poems; and an outline of Harington's intricate word-play, use of ambiguity and innovations in stanza form. In the final chapter, Kilroy provides a detailed account of the three manuscripts on which this text is based, explores the posthumous transmission of the poems both in manuscript miscellanies and in the selective and progressively disordered printed editions. In the second part of the volume, Kilroy's transcription of the Epigrams preserves in type as many features as possible of the handwritten text: its original spelling, autograph revisions, indentation and complex numerical scheme. The critical apparatus reveals deletions and alternative readings, while an Appendix includes all additional material in the closely related group of manuscripts. The poems are furnished with a first-line index and a concordance of the numbering in manuscript and printed editions. This is first edition of the Epigrams to allow one to see the complete text, which Harington supervised and meticulously revised in his own hand, as an elaborate and intricate work of art.