ABSTRACT
One of the most charming as well as significant instances of this kind is that of the song which Izaak Walton introduces into the episode of the meeting with the beggars in The Compleat Angler. He took it, as he acknowledges, from Francis Davison’s anthology A Poetical Rhapsody. It has the initial burden of the true carol, and, as is most frequent in earlier times, the burden is a simple couplet. The Compleat Angler has offered this example of a belated carol to many thousands of readers through three centuries, but a similar survival in the earlier Tudor drama has not had much notice. In providing his plays with incidental songs, some interwoven with the action, some presented as independent pieces standing on their own merits, william Shakespeare is following a practice well established on the cruder English stage of the time of his youth and earlier.
