By 1975, the bizarreanticsof the show's stars -- GrahamChapman, John Cleese, TerryGilliam, Eric Idle, TerryJonesandMichael Palin -- made it one of the best-rated PBSseries of itstime.
Yes, documents from 400 years ago could be lost, yet we have letters from Thomas Nashe, Philip Massinger, Gabriel Harvey, Samuel Daniel, George Peele, Edmund Spenser, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and William Drummond, Anthony Mundy, John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, Robert Greene, Christopher Marlowe and others, many of them lesser writers.