The questione della lingua: that is the question or, at least, the one that was posed by early modern Italians regarding the status of the vernacular in the sixteenth century. Renaissance Italian writers involved in the debate widely known as the ‘question of the language’ considered their options: they had to choose, first, between the native tongue and Latin, still the lingua franca of European culture; and second (if they chose Italian), they had to discriminate further among the several dialects of Italian then current. Early modern British authors, too, often faced such choices – whether to write in Latin or in the mother tongue and, if in the latter, what form of the vernacular to choose. Although the question of selecting among regional dialects had been more or less settled with regard to the written language, the British vernaculars were not yet standard languages; that is, they were neither uniform nor fixed by rule. The Renaissance in Britain has long been identified with a prodigious variety and plasticity in the forms and uses of native languages, a ‘linguistic exuberance’ characteristic of its greatest poets, including Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare and John Milton. The Renaissance was no linguistic free-for-all, however: sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century writers, across a range of disciplines, address the question of the language by discriminating among available forms and experimenting with new ones. The linguistic choices made by Renaissance British writers, and what was at stake in the choosing, will be the subject of this chapter.