Boris Godunov (play) opera, "Boris Godunov" (1874), is based on this play. Having finished the play, Pushkin famously wrote to his friend Pyotr Vyazemsky: "What a Pushkin, what a son of a bitch!" . Pushkin wrote of the play: "The study of Shakespeare, Karamzin, and our old chronicles gave me the idea of clothing in dramatic forms one of the most dramatic epochs of our history. Not disturbed by any other influence, I imitated Shakespeare in his broad and free depictions of characters, in the simple and careless combination of plots; I followed Karamzin in the clear development of events; I tried to
The White Doe of Rylstone to make a weekly pilgrimage from Rylstone to Bolton Abbey. The historical parts of the story of "The White Doe" are taken from a ballad called "The Rising in the North", which Wordsworth had read in Percy's "Reliques of Ancient English Poetry", and also from Nicolson and Burn's "The History and Antiquities of the Counties of Westmorland and Cumberland". The influence of other ballads from Percy's "Reliques" has also been traced in the poem, and the dedicatory poem to "The White Doe" is filled with references to Spenser's "The Faerie Queene". The metre of the poem is similar to that