conduct their amours in all earnestness, like the heroes of 
Stendhal, in another in all flippancy, like the heroes of Noel 
Coward.” But whereas the Elizabethan was, like the Chaucerian 
“I,” able to shift into a variety of public and private roles, so he 
was able to play with language on various levels. The old oral 
bond with its flexibility of pitch held between reader and writer. 
Lever in explaining the nineteenth-century failure to grasp 
Sidney’s procedure comments (p. 57) “It was the atrophy of 
positive convention during the nineteenth century, and the 
consequent splitting of the individual into a public and a private 
self, that explains why so much personal verse of the Victorians 
evokes a sense of embarrassment.”

     S. L. Bethell’s Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic  
Tradition  takes up this theme thoroughly, showing how the 
break-up of the older bonds between author and public led