Stephen Hawes (died 1523) was a popular English poet during the Tudor period who is now little known. Life He was probably born in Suffolk when the surname was common. If his own statement of his age may be trusted, he was born about 1474. He was educated at Oxford and travelled in England, Scotland and France. On his return his various accomplishments, especially his most excellent vein in poetry, procured him a place at court. He was Groom of the Chamber to Henry VII as early as 1502. According to Anthony Wood, he could repeat by heart the works of most of the English poets, especially the poems of John Lydgate, whom he called his master. He was still living in 1521, when it is stated in Henry VIII's household accounts that £6, 13s. 4d. was paid to Mr Hawes for his play; he died before 1530, when Thomas Field, in his Conversation between a Lover and a Jay, wrote "". Some critics, notably C.S. Lewis, have treated Hawes dismissively: "faculty was what he lacked; there was more and better poetry in him than he could express", referring to his "broken-backed metre and dull excursions into the seven liberal arts". But his metre is not consistently broken-backed: from time to time (though not very often) one encounters lines that would not have disgraced either Chaucer before him or Spenser after him: "" or "" and so on, where, so long as one pronounces at least some of the final e's, the metre seems to work quite well. Novelist Hilda Lamb made Hawes a character of her novel "The Willing Heart" published in 1958, where he is fictionally portrayed as an illegitimate son of King Richard III's. No contemporary documents support this assumption. Works His major work is or , printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1509, but finished three years earlier. It was also printed with slightly varying titles by the same printer in 1517, by J. Wayland in 1554, by Richard Tottel and by John Waley in 1555. Tottel's edition was edited by T. Wright and reprinted by the Percy Society in 1846. The Passetyme of Pleasure is a long allegorical poem in seven-lined stanzas of man's life in this world. It is divided into sections after the manner of Le Morte d'Arthur and borrows the machinery of romance. Its main motive is the education of the knight,