Assessing attitudes towards artifice is one of the most reliable ways of distinguishing between modern and early-modern culture. The triumph of modernism in the twentieth century brought with it a suspicion of anything ornamental or highly wrought, an aesthetic typified in Mies van der Rohe's famous phrase ‘less is more’ and Adolf Loos's essay ‘Ornament as Crime’. Such a notion would have been incomprehensible to European artists of the Renaissance: in writing, in visual design, in the arts and crafts generally, English people of the sixteenth century favoured objects that were ornamental, ‘curious’, and unabashedly arranged. Artisans and audiences were devoted, in the words of Richard Lanham, to ‘the style which shows’ they did not share Lady Bracknell's regrets.

A taste for equivalence underwrites the highly structured Elizabethan style, and in literary composition the balanced distribution of constituent parts is achieved by means of the rhetorical figure known as compar or parison. Put simply, these terms designate the use of similarly structured phrases or clauses.