The sottie is a popular dramatic genre of the late Middle Ages which seems to have developed from the comic debates that players often used to gather an audience. In its developed form it resembles the contemporary Theater of the Absurd. The most meaningful approach to a comparison of the two theaters is by way of the thought embodied in the plays. They are both to a certain extent didactic, though they represent different outlooks and value systems. Both theaters utilize clowns and clowning techniques, and both are closely linked to the dream. The two historical periods concerned are presented in the plays as times when cultural ideals have become illusions out of tune with reality, and the accompanying alienation is expressed in powerful images of waiting. One of the most suggestive areas of resemblance is language, which has been cut from its rational moorings. The language of the sottie still has a creative vigor, while that of the Theater of the Absurd is moribund. Both, however, are languages of protest. Each theater creates a new norm against which to judge its society, thereby exposing those who would mask their venality with pretense.

The traditional treatment of the adverb has posed problems of classification in the three languages under consideration. English very has traditionally been classified as an adverb, and the efforts of structural linguists to reclassify it as an intensifier may be extended to French très and Spanish muy as well. However, the three intensifiers do not pattern in the same way, for very patterns with adjectives and adverbs, but not with verbs or nouns; très and muy pattern with adjectives, adverbs, nouns, and with the past participle of verbs. The patterning of très and muy with nouns raises the question of the basis for differentiating adjectives from nouns. While the distinction between these two form classes in English is sometimes arbitrary, the line separating them is even less clear-cut in French and Spanish, languages in which nominalization is more widespread than in English. The unsatisfactory treatment of the three intensifiers in bilingual dictionaries of the French- English and Spanish-English type is due to the failure of lexicographers to link illustrative phrases and sentences to relevant structural features of the languages concerned, a practice all too common in dictionaries not compiled in accordance with scientific principles of lexicography.

No previous study of John Marston's The Malcontent (1602-03) has focused upon the play's central structural and thematic symbol, the traditional Wheel of Fortune. Structurally, The Malcontent uses a rising and falling pattern that reflects the medieval “formula of four.” Both Pietro and Mendoza seem to be Regno at different points in the action, but fall from Fortune's Wheel and become Regnavi. The deposed Duke Altofronto (alias Malevole) is at first Sum sine Regno, but soon becomes Regnabo, and finally Regno by Act v. The Malcontent concludes with this “happy reversal” because it is a tragicomedy according to the definition in Guarini's II compendio della poesía tragicómica (1601). The play's basic themes and main characters also support a tragicomic vision, as Mendoza and Malevole demonstrate. Mendoza, like his master Machiavelli, believes in the proverb Audaces fortuna juvat. Malevole triumphs because he combats Fortune not with fortitude but with prudent Stoic resignation and Christian spiritual devotion. The inevitability of “heaven's impos'd conditions” leads to the restoration of order and either the spiritual regeneration of the sinners or their rejection from the new society.

No modern commentary on this changelessly relevant poem identifies its specific occasion as that of a new attempt by dissenters in 1732 and 1733 to repeal the Sacra mental Test Act in Ireland, Such an occasion is, however, suggested or explicitly stated by eighteenth-century transcribers of the poem, including William Collins, William Shen-stone, Ralph Griffiths, and the anonymous author of The Friends (1773), a rare novel in which “The Day of Judgement” first appeared in print. Substantive variants in the early transcriptions, often intensifying the criticism of dissenters, are significant in understanding how the poem was read in the eighteenth century. Jonathan Swift's authorship is corroborated by similarities in other works by him on the same subject in 1732-33, a somewhat later date than that usually assigned for the poem's composition.

An annotated transcription, with commentary, of the texts of two letters (21 July 1762 and 3 October 1765) in Baretti's recently discovered commonplace book. The letters offer autobiographical insight into Baretti's various disappointments and persecutions on the continent. The first one provides the original to which Johnson's letter of 21 December 1762 (Chapman, No. 147), one of his best known, is the reply.

The tendency in modern literary specialization for all authors to be boosted, sometimes at the expense of the truly great, is a serious threat to literary standards already undermined by scholarly mass production. One must therefore protest when a Carlyle is raised above a Matthew Arnold by responsible people, as he seems to have been raised by David J. DeLaura in “Arnold and Carlyle” (PMLA, 79, 1964, 104-29). Carlyle's crude, propagandist message is not the same as a cool scholarly abstract of his ideas. The manner colors all the matter. Carlyle's main weaknesses are that he exaggerates, that he oversimplifies life, is aggressive, egotistical, that he blurs religion (epitomizing a decay in faith), uses the rhetorical tricks of the advertiser, and in imposing upon his readers (whom he scorns and bullies) is insincere. To complain that Arnold accepted Carlyle's influence and yet rejected the man and the manner is to complain about what had to be. Scholars should beware of mistaking our common cultural inheritance for specific borrowing. No doubt Arnold partly concealed his debt, and was ungenerous, but his not being a saint does not canonize Carlyle. Literary justice requires the placing of writers in true critical and historical perspective.

Dreiser drew heavily upon his youthful experience of the theater in creating his first novel. His characters are as foolishly enamored of the false glamor and factitious realities of the stage as he himself had once been. By the time he wrote Sister Carrie, however, he had achieved a mature perspective and control which allowed him to use the theater for his own artistic purposes. He characterizes his heroine's fantasy life by showing how she constantly associates the stage (gaslight) with Aladdin's treasure cave (magic lamp). At the same time he emphasizes the inadequacy of these fantasies by creating a network of ironic parallels between the plays his characters attend or act in, and their actual situations in his story. The most elaborate of these ironies involves Augustin Daly's Under the Gaslight, the play-within-the-play which gives Carrie her first taste of acting. The reactions of Dreiser's three principal characters to Daly's play offer a suggestive paradigm of their general psychology throughout the novel—a sadly immature, almost infantile, psychology.

La Cousine Bette was written at a time when the classification scheme of La Comédie humaine no longer seemed adequate for its raw materials and was marked by a prodigious expansion in the length of Balzac's customary exposition. The ending of that exposition (desire gratified, desire frustrated) hints at the thematic unity of the work. Thus Bette embodies frustration, negativity, and ultimately the death wish itself: this drive is then parceled out among the other destructive women characters as well. Hulot in contrast expresses the force of Eros. Not only are both characters allegorical: they are shown in the process of becoming allegorical, and the deeper subject of the book is the very history of obsession itself. Balzac is able to record this instinctual system because his work is pre-individualistic: at the same time, the very symmetry of the instincts requires a third character, Madame Hulot, to function as consciousness or ego, and it is from this third pole that Balzac's sentimentalism (and his political ideology) derive, as necessary and inherent structural distortions.

Beckett's novel Watt portrays the titular protagonist in the midst of a world which has crumbled. Watt attempts to solace and comfort himself by constructing logically complete and correct mental systems. These systems are the famous lists, series, combinations, and permutations which constitute a third of the novel. Little attention has been paid to this major feature of Watt. A close examination, however, uncovers enough unobtrusive but real flaws (omissions, incorrect items) in these series and combinations to support the conclusion that these mistakes are deliberate. Thus, Watt's attempts at an internal personal system, and the personal systems themselves, are as unreliable as the external world.

That Whitman materials were by official directive for a time “sequestered from public use” ought to have been included in the part of Broderick's note (PMLA, 84, 1969, 1657) which deals with the availability of the Harned Collection for public consultation.

London Stage Index and Information Bank. A pilot study is underway at Lawrence Univ. to determine the best way of providing for The London Stage 1660–1800 a cumulative index and computer-accessible information bank. This series, edited by William B. van Lennep (late of Harvard), Emmett L. Avery (Washington State), Arthur H. Scouten (Pennsylvania), Geo. Winchester Stone, Jr. (New York Univ.), and Charles Beecher Hogan (Yale), is an exhaustive calendar of plays, entertainments, after pieces, dancing, and singing, together with casts, box receipts, advertising, contemporary comment, and all available information about scenery, theatre construction, costuming, audiences, management, and production, compiled from the playbills, newspapers, and theatrical diaries of the period. Until its publication, these records, scattered all over the world, were virtually inaccessible. Now, a scholar may turn to this 11-volume, 8,000-page, 3-million-word reference work with the confidence that whatever information is missing concerning the performance of plays in London during this period is not likely to exist.