Beaumont may have received from the success of the _Don Quixote_ of 1605 some impulse provocative to the writing of _The Knight_, but a dramatic satire, such as _The Knight_, might have occurred to him if _Don Quixote_ had never been written; just as that other dramatic satire upon the dramas of folk-lore romance, _The Old Wives Tale_, had occurred to Peele some fifteen years before _Don Quixote_ appeared; and as it had occurred to the author of _Thersites_ to ridicule, upon the stage, Greek tales of heroism and British worthies of knighthood and the greenwood still fifty-five years earlier. The puritan and the ritualist, the country justice and the squire, the schoolmaster and the scribbling pedant, the purveyor of marvels of forest and marsh, the knight-adventurer of ancient lore or of modern creation, the damsel distressed or enamoured of visionary castles, had, one and all, awakened laughter upon the Tudor stage. The leisure wasted, and the emotion misspent, over the _Morte d'Arthur_ and the histories of Huon of Bordeaux, Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hamptoun, or of Robin Hood and Clim of the Clough, had been deplored by many an anxious educator and essayist of the day. Why was it not time and the fit occasion, in a period when city grocers and their wives would tolerate no kind of play but such as revamped the more modern tales of chivalry, or tricked tradesmen out in the factitious glory of quite recent heroes of romance,--why was it not time for an attack upon the vogue of Anthony Munday's translations of the now offending cycles, _Amadis of Gaul_, _Palmerin de Oliva_, _Palmerin of England_, and upon the vogue of the English versions of _The Mirror of Knighthood_ with its culminating bathos of the _Knight of the Sunne and His Brother Rosicleer_? These had, in various instalments, befuddled the popular mind for thirty years.