Chapter 1: Introduction provides on overview of the nature of English chivalric romances and an explanation of the historical circumstances of its particular vogue in late Elizabethan and early Jacobean England. It examines the biases in literary criticism—literary supersession and literary prefigurement, and neo-classical definitions of and relationships between genres—which serve to disregard or discount such romances. It concludes by sketching the discussions to follow, on the survival and significance of English chivalric romances, and on the methodology, both like and unlike source and influence studies, used in the interpretations of Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear.