ABSTRACT
The fifteenth century is commonly dismissed as a dreary and barren waste in the history of English literature. Such a judgment is severe, and results in part from the reader’s disappointment when he finds that the high level reached at the end of the fourteenth century in the Pearl, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Piers Plowman, and the poetry of Chaucer is not maintained in the work of Lydgate, Hoccleve, and their contemporaries. Moreover, the fifteenth century has little new to offer. In many respects it continues the fourteenth, rather than breaking new ground. Its poets appear as followers of Chaucer and Gower, and later of Lydgate, rather than as leaders pointing new directions. It continues to treat the themes and types already current. Thus it shows an unbroken continuity with the past, and for this reason we have considered some of the works of this century along with those of earlier periods, especially in the chapters on the romance, the lyric, and the drama. However, in the drama and in English prose the fifteenth century made significant contributions. We should not forget that it was the century which produced Malory and the Second Shepherds’ Play.1
