The poems called in this study Weaving Songs were in ancient times also known as History Songs, for the first name applied to them was Chansons d'istoire; then, a little later apparently, they were called Chansons de toile or Weaving Songs. By modern critics they have also been termed Romances but this name is not altogether satisfactory. If one glances through the critical edition of these poems published by Karl Bartsch under the title Romanzen und Pastourellen one finds that the Weaving Songs are mixed up with other poems under the loose title of Romanzen. The term Romance, in use since the days of Grimm and Fauriel but first made popular by the collection of old French poems published by Paulin Paris under the title of Le Romancero français, was borrowed from the Spanish towards the end of the eighteenth century and then it designated, as it does still today, poems of historical content like our English Ballads. If the term was suitable enough during the Romantic period when the Romancero appeared, it is a source of dangerous confusion nowadays when the same term is applied to poems so widely different in nature as the Weaving Songs and, to give only one instance, the lament of the young girl in the famous poem of Marcabru, A la fontana del vergier, which is generally termed a Romance.

The Association was called to order by the President, Professor William Guild Howard, at 2:45 p.m. In the absence of President Goodnow of The Johns Hopkins University, who was unfortunately obliged to be away from the city, the Association was welcomed to Baltimore by Professor James Wilson Bright.

Christopher Marlowe's name appears on the title-pages of the early editions of the following plays:

1. Dido: ‘Written by Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nash. Gent.‘ (1594)

2. Edward the Second: ‘Written by Chri. Marlow Gent.‘ (1594)

3. The Massacre at Paris: ‘Written by Christopher Marlow.‘ (n. d. ca. 1600.)

4. Doctor Faustus: ‘Written by Ch. Marl.‘ (1604)

5. The Jew of Malta: ‘Written by CHRISTOPHER MARLO.‘ (1633)

6. Lust's Dominion: ‘Written by Christofer Marloe, Gent.‘ (1657)

The last hundred years have destroyed the social, political, artistic, philosophical and religious beliefs of the past and substituted new ones. While no one of these new ones has proven satisfactory, it is particularly in the domain of religion that the experiments of a century have borne little fruit. The spiritual indecision of to-day unquestionably had its origin in the peculiar variety of religion which the romantic era gave to the world.

It has often seemed strange to lovers of Shakspere that the most genial of dramatists should have written plays which, while not attaining the horror and pathos of tragedy, arouse distaste and even repugnance. Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, despite superb poetry and marvellous delineation of character, are so repellent in theme and treatment that they are seldom represented on the stage today, and seldom lie close to the affection of readers of Shakspere. This is even more the case with All's Well that Ends Well. “Everyone who reads this play,” says the editor of the Arden Shakespeare volume, “is at first shocked and perplexed by the revolting idea which underlies the plot ... it leaves so unpleasant a flavour with some people that it is not tasted again.”

Many of us remember Matthew Arnold's recommendation in the Essay on the Study of Poetry of the line from Dante's Paradiso, (III. 85)

E la sua voluntate è nostra pace

as a touchstone of poetic value. The independent beauty of this line may be questioned by comparison with some lines that follow near it. The words of Beatrice in the fifth canto, from the first verse through the twelfth, for example, seem to have a tonal sweetness, with a richness of ethical content that might somewhat more justly be cited to illustrate Matthew Arnold's point. Few isolated lines, however, really shine out by themselves from any poet. We read or recall them with the mood induced by their setting. Climaxes they may be, but their sovereign value depends on the sequence, as the ear and the mind are addressed together, perhaps.

In his interesting discussion of the politics of the greater romantic poets, Mr. Walter Graham throws light not so much upon the work of the poets as upon the men themselves. The illumination is biographical rather than critical. Is it not possible to carry the analysis of the material further, to view the problem involved in the political doctrines of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Shelley in such a way as to give a literary as well as a biographical significance to the data? The importance of such analysis for Scott, Southey, and Keats is less, and in any case cannot be undertaken in the present paper. With respect to Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Byron, however, such a consideration has not only its own value but would confirm and also perhaps offer a correction of the biographical view.

He who would enter upon anything like an adequate explanation of the remarkably complex and contradictory character of Chaucer's Wife of Bath must expect heavenly guidance and receive aid from the stars. Though one may not be quite prepared to accept entirely the pronouncement that she “is one of the most amazing characters … the brain of man has ever conceived,” still she is so vividly feminine and human, so coarse and shameless in her disclosures of the marital relations with five husbands, and yet so imaginative and delicate in her story-telling, that one is fascinated against his will and beset with an irresistible impulse to analyze her dual personality with the view of locating, if possible, definite causes for the coexistence of more incongruent elements than are ordinarily found in living human beings. Some time ago when I proposed casting the horoscope of the Wife of Bath, it was with the supposition that rules of natural astrology might be used exclusively in the interpretation of certain data, concerning planets and their influence, which Chaucer has furnished us; but it is not entirely so. In the full presentation of the Wife's “fortune”—her character, personal appearance, and the significance and location of mysterious “marks” about her body—constant reference must be made to what the mediæval mind believed to be truths found in the “science” of celestial physiognomy and perhaps of geomancy.

The entremes, or passo, for the words were early synonymous, is a short dramatic composition, burlesque or farcical in character, used as a passing-scene for purposes of comic relief. In considering these scenes, especially in the early years of their development before they can be looked upon as forming a well-established literary genre, one of the most important considerations is their essentially parasitic character. Scenes that are in every wise entremeses may be found frequently in Spanish plays of the first half of the sixteenth century. What must first and above all determine whether a given passage is or is not entremes in character, is its intercalation as essentially independent of the plot of the play. Other than this, the delimitations of these scenes are by no means fixed and definite. It must be understood, moreover, that the early writers did not in all probability look upon them as actual entremeses. The earliest known uses of the word with reference to a dramatic composition are found in a composition by Horozco frequently cited, and in the prologue to the Comedia de Sepúlveda where the author seems to show a very excellent understanding of their function: “No os puede dar gusto el sujeto ansi desnudo de aquella gracia con que el proceso dél suelen ornar los recitantes y otros muchos entremeses que intervienen por ornamento de la comedia, que no tienen cuerpo en el sujeto della.” Nevertheless, whether looked upon as such or not, these detached scenes contain in germ the future entremes, and cannot be ignored in a consideration of its origin and development.

Is Othello a puppet, an Englishman, or a Moor? No less estimable a Shakespeare scholar than Professor Stoll has pointed out what he has called the “great heap of contradictions” in the character of Othello and has come to the conclusion that Shakespeare is merely following a dramatic jealousy tradition in the play of Othello—that he “but leans on the convention of slander and ‘diabolical soliciting’… . Only, in order to expedite matters, Shakespeare leans hard, and Othello presents little or no resistance to temptation, is eager, excited, is, for all his protestations of faith, won over in a trice.” One cannot help feeling, according to Stoll, that Othello is “wrenched and altered” by the dramatist in the temptation scene. A. C. Bradley, on the other hand, whose opinions I cite as typical of the opposite point of view, insists that “any man situated as Othello was, would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous.” Othello, in other words, is behaving like a normal human being of our own race. Bradley repudiates the “mistaken view” that Othello “retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood.” His nationality is incidental, and “in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important.” He even goes so far as to say that “if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.”

In spite of all that has been done to elucidate this beautiful poem, there still seems to be room to add some items in textual emendation and explanation. The pioneer work of Morris was excellent for its time, and is still to be reckoned with. Gollancz and Osgood have added much in their editions of the poem, and such commentators as Kölbing and Holthausen have made interesting suggestions. Nor must we neglect the critical studies of Fick and Knigge, Fischer and Schumacker. The comments of all of these and of others who have less fully considered the poem must be read and weighed by any who would understand this nameless poet, who at his best may be ranked with the great ones of the fourteenth century. His language, however, and sometimes his careless indication of sentence union and transition make the closest reading necessary.

At two periods in the eighteenth century, literature was more closely and more frequently associated than is its wont, with immediately contemporary events, and instead of being a disinterested interpretation of life it was enlisted in the service of propaganda. At the outset of the century party-politics, the bickering of Whig and Tory, more than once roused Defoe, Arbuthnot, Addison, and Swift to seize a polemic pen, and from the tumult of controversy emerged works like The Campaign amd The History of John Bull, inspired as much by anticipated rewards as by agitated feelings. Again, at the close of the century, in the presence of such a social upheaval as the French Revolution, it was impossible for thinking men to remain neutral. Problems, born of the intellectual ferment of the age and concerned with the fundamental issues of religion, morals, and government, stirred men to a white heat of partisanship and set them writing passionately, according to their sympathies, in behalf of liberty, equality, the state of nature and civilization, Christianity and atheism, and traditional ethics and individualistic morality. Losing contact with beauty, imaginative literature indeed at this time too often staggers under a weight of social philosophy.

Among the English Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, Byron is undoubtedly the foremost in the amount of attention he has attracted from Continental critics and imitators. Shelley, however, has also received a rather generous amount of attention. The German translation of Prometheus Unbound, by Helene Richter, and the French translation of The Cenci, with its introductory appreciation by Swinburne, testify to the fact that Continental readers do not ignore Shelley, and a considerable number of German theses on such subjects as “Shelley und die Frauen,” “Shelley's Belesenheit,” and “Shelley's Quellen” show that he has not escaped his portion of industrious German scholarship. Italians, though not so voluminous in their attentions, have felt a special interest in him on account of his Italian residence and sympathies and his use of Italian material in The Cenci. Italian scholars have added a few minor details to our knowledge of Shelley's last years and have devoted some critical attention to The Cenci.

As hero in the romance of scholarship, Desiderius Erasmus has few peers. His fame rests not alone upon his breaking with Scotism and Ciceronianism, but also upon the vigor and validity of the systems which he was instrumental in substituting. In England especially the effects of his doctrines culminated in far-reaching changes of church, state, and university. Most estimates of his career paint him as a Humanistic hero from the first—a master of disputation, a notable author, a scholar in Greek, an educator with theories full-formed, a torch-bearer of Humanism almost before the torch began to blaze.

The problems connected with the authorship of Henry the Eighth are in some ways different from those usual in the doubtful plays. In the first place, the external evidence is singularly exact and definite and in no way contradictory. That a play dealing with the reign of Henry the Eighth and bearing either the title or the sub-title All Is True was being acted June 29, 1613 at the Globe Theatre is attested by at least three contemporary documents which tell of the fire which destroyed the theatre that day. The publication of the play in the Folio of 1623 is, however, the only direct attribution to Shakespeare. According to one of the ballads written about the Globe fire, Heminge and Condell, the Folio editors, were both present at the time of the fire; their later inclusion of the play in the Folio must, therefore, have been with full knowledge of its authorship. In the second place, the play is so evidently by two hands that, even as early as 1758, Roderick pointed out peculiarities of metre which did not seem to him Shakespearean. A chance remark of Tennyson's that ‘many passages in Henry the Eighth were very much in the manner of Fletcher,’ combined with his own impressions, led Spedding to investigate the matter more fully, with the result that in 1850 he published his paper, ‘Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth?’ As a result of this investigation and of the application of metrical tests, in the results of which his investigations were substantiated by those of Fleay, Furnivall and others, he concluded that more than one half of the play had been written by Fletcher, and pronounced as Shakespearean only the following scenes: Act I, Scenes 1 and 2; Act II, Scenes 3 and 4; Act III Scene 2 (to the exit of the king); Act V Scene 1—with alterations. With this decision, so far as the work of Fletcher is concerned, practically all later critics have been in agreement. The problem, then, has long been one not of the sole authorship of Shakespeare, but of his part in the play.

“For thogh a widwe hadde noght a sho,
So plesaunt was his In principio,
Yet wolde he have a ferthing er he wente.“
Prologue to Cant. Tales, ll. 253-5.

Exactly what was the Friar's “In principio,” and why did he use it when he went to call on barefoot widows?

These questions evidently suggested themselves to Tyrwhitt, who in his epoch-making edition of the Canterbury Tales (1775), observes: “This phrase is commonly explained to refer to the Beginning of St. John's Gospel. It may also refer to the Beginning of Genesis. In an old French Romance, l'histoire des trois Maries, it seems to signify some passage in the conclusion of the Mass.”