Scholars and critics are wont to say that not even the editors of the First Folio knew what to make of Troilus and Cressida. Although the assertion has almost no validity, it is a comforting, protective one to repeat: comforting, for no play by Shakespeare has received such diverse interpretation; protective, for the statement absolves one from re-examining the basic bibliographical facts of the play. Diversity in Shakespearean interpretation is certainly desirable, yet that which surrounds Troilus and Cressida has become confusing and contradictory1 because the play is approached from assumptions of historical fact which are themselves widely diverse. Without a firm knowledge of origins, no critic—scholarly, literary, historical, or “new”—can generate the kind of imaginative assurance that is necessary in order to say something significant and lasting about the form and content of a Shakespearean play. Since so very little is known about Troilus and Cressida in its contemporary setting, an attempt to reconstruct the facts of its origins is all the more important. In this article, then, I shall initially review the known facts of the play on stage and in print, then propose that new facts be accepted along with the old in an account of origins which is conservative yet comprehensive. Generally I hope to establish a firm basis for further historical investigation and deeper critical understanding of Troilus and Cressida; specifically I hope in the last three sections to dispel three widely-held misconceptions: that the play failed or was not played publicly, that one of the Inns of Court commissioned the play, and that the editors of the First Folio were aesthetically uncertain concerning its place in that work.

Of the characters with whom Beowulf has an explicit association in speech and action, Unferth is without question the most difficult to assess, and his function in the Danish court would appear to be just as enigmatic. Other characters who play an active part in the events, such as Hrothgar, Wealhtheow, and Wiglaf, are depicted with clarity and consistency, but with Unferth the poet has proceeded deliberately by means of allusion and equivocation, or at least so it seems to the modern reader who is separated from the Anglo-Saxon audience for which some of our mysteries may not have existed at all. From one of the earliest comments on Unferth's role in the poem to the most recent, four primary assumptions about him have been reiterated, viz., 1) he has an important position in the Danish court, 2) he is trusted by the king and his followers, 3) he is later (after Beowulf's return to Geatland) involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Hrothgar's rule, and 4) he is at first estranged from and then reconciled with Beowulf. Relevant to the first two premises a query has persistently been raised: why is Unferth allowed to attack Beowulf with impunity and what motivates his abuse? The bases of these assumptions are not all of one kind: for one and two, students have relied on that vaguely understood epithet, ϸyle, and one comment by the poet (1166-67); for three, on specific allusions by the poet about Unferth's relation with Hrothulf (1164-68); for four, Unferth's gift of Hrunting and Beowulf's response to the gift. What I propose to do here is to reexamine these premises and the query in terms of the conception of ϸyle in Old English and Old Norse, the graphic representation of Unferth, and the problem of the sword-giving.

It is not generally realized how suddenly Italian culture and manners became popular in Tudor England. After Chaucer's surprising discovery and translation of Italian literature, it was nearly two centuries before another translation from the Italian was published in England. This was the Certayne Psalmes (1549) of Thomas Wyatt, taken from a work by Aretino. In the same decade, royalty took up the new interest. Henry VIII knew little if any Italian. Mary could understand it, probably because it was close to her mother's Spanish, which she spoke, but she did not speak or read Italian. Elizabeth, on the other hand, studied Italian when she was ten years old (1544), as we shall see presently, and she learned to speak it fluently. This progression marks the suddenness of the new obsessive taste for Italian, a taste which endured for a whole century. This essay will trace the genesis of the fashion.

La oposición medieval entre Dios y Naturaleza, en la cual ésta última era considerada como una potencia enteramente subordinada al Creador y por consiguiente de categoría inferior en relación con el destino último del hombre, va a sufrir en los albores del Renacimiento una dislocación que afecta su constitución más íntima. Dios sigue existiendo como autor de todo lo creado, pero la Naturaleza surge a un primer plano como justificación en sí misma, con poderes inmanentes para su proceso y desenvolvimiento indefinido. Tal desplazamiento de perspectiva significa también un cambio de valoración en el marco de los ideales y de las experiencias humanas, en cuanto éstos últimos se polarizan hacia lo exclusivamente mundano y temporal. De la misma manera, la oposición entre “Cultura” y “Naturaleza,” entendida aquélla como el conjunto de leyes y de formas creadas por el hombre para su vida en sociedad, sufre un diverso reajuste interno. Al conceder el hombre mayor preponderancia al mundo natural, brota una implícita rebeldía contra las barreras de contención que él mismo se ha impuesto para someter a la Naturaleza siempre lista a desbordarse. Tal reacondicionamiento de nociones correlativas y antagónicas aparece en la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, en la forma de un resquebrajamiento reversivo de los valores tradicionales y consagrados de la religión (Divinidad) y de la honra (sociedad), frente al triunfo del mundo natural, y constituye una de las características estructurales y definidoras de la obra. Examinaremos en seguida la compleja interrelación de estos conceptos y valores.

Recent interpretations of Thyrsis' magic herb have usually employed one or more of several angles of approach: (1) the implications of its name, (2) its similarities with, or differences from, the herb moly, and (3) its function in a larger context—its relation to the theme, dramatic structure, and ethical allegory of Milton's masque. Though all three approaches are necessary for a valid solution of this crux, each has encountered certain inherent difficulties. The third has been especially vulnerable to subjective bias; reading into haemony whatever meaning has best fitted his own conception of the poem's overall structure and sense, the individual critic has been prone to find in the herb the particular concept he had wanted to find. The second has been complicated not only by the variety of meanings commentators have ascribed to moly, but also by critical disagreement as to how far the two plants represent similar or dissimilar ideas. The first approach has hitherto failed to establish a solid basis for the allegory. The only etymology on which scholars are agreed— Keightley's suggestion that haemony was named after “Haemonia or Thessaly, the land of magic”1—tells one very little about its allegorical significance. Possible clues to the allegory have been discovered in several alternative etymologies, but these have not yet won general acceptance.

I. Brief History of the Project: Since 1952, the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association of America, responding to the national urgency with regard to foreign languages, has been engaged in a vigorous campaign aimed in large part at improving foreign-language teaching in our country.

In 1955, as one of its activities, the Steering Committee of the Foreign Language Program formulated the “Qualifications for Secondary School Teachers of Modern Foreign Languages,” a statement which was subsequently endorsed for publication by the MLA Executive Council, by the Modern Language Committee of the Secondary Education Board, by the Committee on the Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, and by the executive boards or councils of the following national and regional organizations: National Federation of Modern Language Teachers Associations, American Association of Teachers of French, American Association of Teachers of German, American Association of Teachers of Italian, American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese, American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages, Central States Modern Language Teachers Association, Middle States Association of Modern Language Teachers, New England Modern Language Association, Northeast Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, Northwest Conference on Foreign Language Teaching, Philological Association of the Pacific Coast, Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association, South Atlantic Modern Language Association, and South-Central Modern Language Association.

Robert greene himself tells us actually .very little about his university career except that he was a gadabout who finally proceeded to the M.A. degree.

The Poetomachia, no matter how explained, embarrasses nearly everyone now working with Elizabethan drama. The term itself sounds like a coinage which a nineteenth-century crank lifted from some minor essayist who copied Bacon or Burton—“World, I was once resolu'd to bee round with thee, because I know tis thy fashion to bee round with euery bodie: but the winde shifting his point, the Veine turn'd: yet because thou wilt sit as Iudge of all matters … I care not much if I make description (before thy Vniuersality) of that terrible Poetomachia, lately commenc'd” et cetera—and out of it coaxed a provincial philosophy. Disturbing to some eyes and naïve to others, this Victorian heirloom, like a former source of innocent merriment which any amateur psychoanalyst can tell screens a neurosis or like great-grandfather's waste tract which never yielded its ore, serves chiefly as an ornate tribute to misapplied ingenuity. Contriving chimeras in a fantastic realm between the Globe stage and the Mermaid hearth or searching for the key to release beleaguered playwrights from dramatis personae bothers equally scholars who attempt to reconstruct and critics who seek to renovate. Literary historians alone cannot drop the romantic fiction with impunity, but no one blames them for relegating it to a footnote. Reviewers of the Variorum Troilus and Cressida dutifully listed the aspect among the many surveyed or begrudged the three pages out of six hundred which the volume allocated it. Shortly after one group established the neutrality of Shakespeare's supposed foray, another, through several monographs, dismissed Jonson's and Marston's (and Dekker's and everyone else's) hostility beyond the sniping in Poetaster and Satiromastix. To a backward glance peace or, rather, the absence of war may reign.

Many of the critics of the heroic plays of the Restoration have had at least some passing comment to make about the concepts of love and honor embodied in these plays. L. N. Chase, for example, asserts that in the heroic play “virtue is often sneered at, reason and honor are brushed contemptuously aside.” Though he admits that love is usually justified and even glorified in these dramas, he denies that it is “a high and ennobling passion” for it “sanctions a violation of all moral laws wherever they are opposed to its free sweep and range.” Bonamy Dobrée also asserts that a “sound, guaranteed heroic love was excuse for any betrayal of friendship or dereliction of duty.” Nevertheless, he believes that in an age hungry for heroism and balked of it in real life, these plays provided on a superficial level the kind of heroism which satisfied the emotional needs of Restoration audiences. Allardyce Nicoll accepts essentially the same explanation for the popularity of heroic drama, yet he regards “flaunting honor” and “impossibly idealistic love passions” as typical of these plays.

In 1763 when Edmund Burke had not yet given up his plan to make his way in the world by literary efforts, he wrote a letter to William Gerard (“Single Speech”) Hamilton who had just procured for him a pension on the Irish Establishment. His purpose was to make it clear that in accepting the pension he would not be giving up all his time, some of which he wanted to devote to writing:

Die feststellung, daß die beiden großen historischen Dramen Eichendorffs, Ezelin von Romano und Der letzte Held von Marienburg, zusammen mit den späten Versepen zu der verwittertsten Schicht seines Dichtwerkes gehören, ist bereits eine Beschönigung. Lebendig waren sie nie, und dem heutigen Leser scheint ihr stereotypes Waffengeklirr, ihre vordergründige Redseligkeit, ihr Flickwerk aus Shakes-peareschen, Schillerschen und Goetheschen Reminiszenzen mit einem Rost überzogen, der sie gerade dort am brüchigsten macht, wo er am “edelsten” aufliegt. Daß ein so im Innersten lyrischer Dichter wie Eichendorff sich überhaupt der großen dramatischen Form zuwendet, mag an sich schon überraschen; und der Hinweis auf Brentano, selbst auf Arnim und Tieck als Parallelfälle ist kaum geeignet, unser Erstaunen zu mindern. Sie nämlich hatten sich in der Gründung Prags und im Kaiser Octavianus das Historische in Märchen und Mythe übersetzt, die durch das lyrische Idiom Geheimnis und Weihe empfingen, abgekehrt jeder Zur-Schau-Stellung, dem Theater also, oder doch gerichtet auf eines, das, wie Arnim in einem Brief an Goethe bekannte, “nirgends vorhanden ist”. Eichendorff aber drängte es zur Geschichte, sichtbar aufgerollt als Bühnenhandlung, und so konnte das mißliche Resultat nicht ausbleiben, daß sein Eigentliches, Symbolmagie und -beschwörung durch das Poetische, als Uneigentliches in das Werk einging, Dekoration nur, die sich unverbindlich dem Historischen überwölbt, oder brüchiger Boden, durch den es ins Unprofilierte versickert.

In the voluminous literature which has arisen in connection with all possible aspects of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a respectable percentage is found to deal with the Ghost. The character, function, and antecedents of the Ghost, like those of the other dramatis personae, have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny and analysis. In particular, Shakespeare's use of a ghost rôle in Hamlet has been discussed in relationship to the evolution of the Senecan ghost in Elizabethan drama, and compared to other “revenge” ghosts of contemporary or earlier authors. In the light of the obvious relationship of the ghost rôle in Hamlet to that of the Senecan-Elizabethan stage ghost, no further pedigree has seemed necessary for the Ghost himself as a character in the play. This is the more understandable in that, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the scholars who have discussed the sources of Hamlet have been unanimous in stating or implying that no trace of the Ghost exists in any of the accepted sources of the play. With the general accuracy of these impressions regarding the genesis of the rôle there can be no quarrel. It should nevertheless interest and perhaps startle researchers and students in the field to learn that the ghost of Hamlet's father did “appear” in one of the accepted sources of the play, the Histoires tragiques of François de Belieforest.

It is difficult for me to express in so many words what I feel as I am standing here before this august body of scholars and teachers to address you as your president—in this particular year 1961. It is not only the honor as such that is crushing, an honor which in all humility I accepted for the greater glory of my beloved University rather than as a nod to my own modest talents. No, what is really crushing is to be called upon to address you at this particular juncture of world events, described in the words of President Kennedy as “the most dangerous time in the history of the human race,” in the eery light of the fact that “the events and decisions of the next ten months may well decide the fate of man for the next 10,000 years.” Even one year ago, nobody would have prognosticated in such terms. The German problem, the causa movens of it all, has been with us, and with this society of American humanists, for quite some time. In 1917, it was the noble lot of Kuno Francke to strike the balance of cultural values, and, in 1941, John Walz had a similar task, of incomparably greater magnitude. In 1957, when by H. Carrington Lancaster's presidential forecast of 1939, a third World War might have been upon us, Taylor Starck held this high office. Well, the year 1957 was remarkable enough, setting a milestone also in our affairs in the advent of Sputnik I. But at least we were spared the apocalyptic visions of a thermo-nuclear Armageddon with which we have become but too familiar in this, the year of the Lord 1961.

The years 1840–50 were important ones in Anglo-American cultural and intellectual relations, for during this period American writers began to be widely read in England. Before that time books had been too expensive for almost everyone except the great readers or the greatly prosperous; in the 1840's, however, a combination of circumstances led to a revolution in English reading habits. Circulating libraries had been in operation in England for some years, but it was in 1842 that Mudie's began to make available for the first time literature of the world to all literate Englishmen. More important perhaps than the libraries were the cheap reprints which, at first, were sold mainly in the newly built and overflowing railway stations but which were later found in book stalls throughout the country. Commenting on Slater's shilling edition of Emerson's Orations, Lectures, and Addresses, The Critic wrote, for example, that “the work itself must be familiar by name to all our readers, but probably it has been out of the reach of many of them. It is not so now. The poorest may possess it.” That Emerson and many other American authors appeared in these cheap reprints was due, ironically enough, as much to defective international copyright laws as to a demand for their books. British publishers discovered that under certain conditions they could bring out the works of foreign writers without remuneration, and after 1839 they took full advantage of this knowledge. Emerson tried to outwit these pirates by sending the manuscripts of Essays, Second Series and of Poems to England prior to bringing the volumes out in America, and Carlyle used the Preface to the Second Essays to draw and quarter them. Emerson's precautions and Carlyle's strictures were of little avail: at about the same time that Poems came out, Orr and Company was issuing a pirated edition of Essays, Lectures, and Orations. Although evasion of copyright laws cannot be condoned on ethical grounds, it was fortuitous in one respect: the pirated editions were dirt cheap, and their wide sale along with legitimate reprints and the circulating library made accessible for the first time large quantities of American books to a wide British public. From 1840 to the end of the century, England read more books by American writers than by all of Europe combined and, fortunately for this study, all of the major works received critical appraisal in British periodicals.

Probably at no point during the English Renaissance did the influence of neo-Latin writers upon English vernacular prose and poetry become so predominant as during the emergence of the rhetorical principles and practice of the plain style. The comprehensive descriptive treatises of classical poetic theory, such as those of Minturno and J. C. Scaliger, which were used extensively by the writers of English rhetoric books like George Puttenham and Henry Peacham the elder, did not recommend and defend so much as enumerate specific principles. Since the English rhetoric books were primarily concerned with methods of amplification and the more ornate stylistic conventions of the Continental literary movements, they were directed mainly at the courtly Petrarchan imitators and borrowed little from discussions of the plain style. This meant, of course, that one would have had to return to the Latin text of such general reference works as Scaliger's Poetices for information about the genus tenue or the genres which employed it, and even then such works often did little more than transpose their classical sources. The neo-Latin influence upon anti-Ciceronianism in prose and anti-Petrarchanism in verse, therefore, became considerably more significant when an English writer, such as Jonson, in reacting against the poetic attitudes and practice of the Petrarchans, looked for rhetorical corroboration for his position and found it, not only in certain ancient writers, but in such men as Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, and Bacon, who advocated various applications of the Attic style and argued their case with power and precision. Jonson's Discoveries is particularly valuable as a statement of the neo-Latin influence on the plain style, since it describes a rhetorical position which he consistently practised in his own writing. Since he borrowed accurate descriptions of the style and its intentions from treatises of the men just mentioned, as well as from the famous works on the classical genres which employed the sermo by such scholars as Daniel Heinsius and Isaac Casaubon, the Discoveries can be described as a handbook of the new authorities on matters of style. Although it was not published until 1640, the neo-Latin authorities it cites exerted their formative influence on Jonson's stylistic ideas and practice from the middle 1590's on and, largely through his own authority, on those of the first half of the seventeenth century.

When, some months ago. President Kennedy stated that, in his opinion, the United States should “shoot the moon,” the chorus of dissenters would have reached the moon itself, except for the unquestioned but often overlooked scientific fact that sound does not travel in a vacuum. Various of my friends have directed their dissensions at me, chiefly, I suspect, because I have long declared in favor of a strong, national program of space research.