ABSTRACT
Our survey of drama has taken us up to the end of the fifteenthcentury, and we may now consider what else was happening in the literary field in a century which saw the most important literary event of our civilization, namely the invention of printing. It is a period of which we have a peculiarly thorough record of domestic life in the Paston Letters, a collection covering three generations of family life in Norfolk. The public life of the same age is perhaps coloured in our imaginations by the recollections of Shakespeare’s historical plays, covering the reigns of Henry IV, Henry V, Henry VI and Richard III. But it is not a great century for English literature. In Sir Thomas Malory we have one writer of the first rank, and there is a small group of gifted poets in Scotland.
