Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in many ways might be considered the most significant and characteristic of his works. Yet in this drama the poet himself has pointed out his indebtedness to the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus. Able scholars, in turn, have examined the relationship between the English and the Greek plays. Over half a century ago Vera D. Scudder published her study, and in 1908 Richard Ackermann brought out his critical commentary. Among others, W. J. Alexander and A. M. D. Hughes, in editing their selections from the poems of Shelley, noted the parallels between his work and that of Æschylus. In more recent times, Carl Grabo has gone beyond the study of Greek-English parallels, and Newman Ivey White in the notable twenty-second chapter of his Shelley has enriched our understanding of Prometheus Unbound. Still one may hope by concentrating on the problem to give fuller meaning to the action of the mind of Æschylus upon that of Shelley as together they face tyranny and pain.

Though Shakespeare's liking for Stoic commonplaces of the sort that one finds in the prose works of Seneca, Plutarch, Cardano, and Justus Lipsius no longer needs to be pointed out and though interesting evidence has recently been assembled1 of Shakespeare's utilizing the forms and principles of traditional Renaissance rhetoric, there is one rhetorical pattern used by Shakespeare, itself a development from Stoic prose models, which seems not to have caught the eye of modern students. This is the consolatio or “Paramythia … a forme of speech which the Orator vseth to take away, or diminish a sorrow conceiued in the minde of his hearer”, as Henry Peacham defined it in 1593.

Professor Hurley's statement in regard to the use of assonance for consonance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries holds true for the fifteenth century court lyric verse:1 “There are in the 16th and 17th centuries, if the printed texts are to be believed, innumerable examples of assonance in rime-strophes. Thus CERVANTES, Comedias y Entremeses, ed. Schevill y Bonilla, i, 72; ‘Yo haré con su señoría/que se oponga a tu partita’.”2 The same writer also states that he regards assonance in such cases “as failure to achieve perfect rime.” R. Foulché-Delbosc's Cancionero castellano del siglo XV offers some twelve score examples of assonance used to replace consonance. That the poets were at least sometimes conscious of the imperfection is shown in Gomez Manrrique's statement (ii, 36a): “Del qual vn poco furtado,/avnque no syn grande afan,/a vos, señor de Almaçan,/pregunto, mal consonando…”“”“

In the year 1798 even an ardent Federalist could be vexed at the grossly inaccurate picture of America to be found in British periodicals. One young Federalist who was more annoyed than most was Elihu Hubbard Smith, a New York physician and literary man and erstwhile Hartford Wit. On his own initiative, Smith wrote a series of brief biographies of the Wits which he sent to John Aikin, editor of the Monthly Magazine and British Register. In an accompanying letter he pointed out to Aikin that his magazine not only ignorantly misrepresented America to the British public but also taught many young Americans to see their country in a false and unfavorable light. He offered the biographical sketches as a step toward correcting the situation and also proposed that he organize his friends into a corps of correspondents to ensure Mr. Aikin's progressive enlightenment. Of these friends he wrote:

If it were critically sound to interpret a verse or lines of verse apart from their context, lines 13–14 of Milton's Sonnet XX, “Lawrence of vertuous Father”, might present an unfortunate ambiguity; for if the verses,

are examined alone, “spare” may seem to mean either “refrain” or “afford.” Both meanings have in fact been urged; Thomas Keightley and David Masson represent the opposed positions. The former wrote, “spare, sc. time.—interpose, i.e. place them in the intervals of his serious occupations.” Masson commented:

The words beautiful, pathetic, sublime, and their synonyms appear often in Samuel Johnson's discussions of literary pleasure. Although I do not know that all three are ever used together in one sentence, the sublime and the pathetic, on the one hand, and the sublime and the beautiful, on the other, are among Johnson's most frequently recurring doublets. Each word becomes an important term of aesthetic meaning, clearly distinguished from the others; each expands under the pressure of contemporary theory; each is complicated and enriched by the vigorous personality of its user; and each is used as a tool of practical criticism to help account for the distinguishing excellence of a great English poet. For Johnson, Pope exemplified the beautiful, Shakespeare the pathetic, and Milton the sublime.

In what sequence to present the tales was one of the first problems which the editors of the Canterbury Tales had to face. Various orders were elaborated or improvised. The important ones are:11) the very bad order of the otherwise excellent Hengwrt MS. (Hg); 2) the much better one common to the Ellesmere MS. (El) and the MSS constituting group a;2 3 and 4) the two largely similar orders of group c and of MS. Har-leian 7334 (Ha4); and 5) that of group d reproduced unchanged in group b. For the reader's convenience I give here these five orders in the simplest possible form, i.e., without indicating the presence or absence of links: 1) Hg: ADB1 SqT MeT FkT SNT C1T CB2HI 2) a and El: AB1DEFCB2GHI 3) c: A Gam B1 SqT D C1T MeT FkT GCB2HI 4) Ha4: A Gam B1DEFGCB2HI 5) d and b: A Gam B1 SqT MeT D C1T FkT GCB2HI

Practically every play of the period 1587–92 that cannot be definitely credited to somebody else has at one time or another been attributed to Robert Greene.1 The canon of Greene's dramatic work has now been fairly well established, however, by conservative modern critics and it includes only those dramas for which there is reasonably sound evidence, external or internal or both, of his authorship. The attribution of yet another play to the formerly all-too-convenient Greene would not ordinarily arouse interest. But the recovery in recent years of John of Bordeaux, a sequel to his Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (ca. 1589), the appearance in 1936 of an edition of this sequel in the Malone Society Reprints, and the tentative assignment of it to Greene by two such careful scholars as W. L. Renwick and W. W. Greg, its editors—these are developments which deserve more attention than they have yet received.2 There is no contemporary evidence concerning a second part of Friar Bacon,3 and now that a sequel is known to exist, there is no external evidence as to who wrote it. My purpose here is to analyze John of Bordeaux in relation to Greene and his work. This analysis, it may be said at once, supports at every point the assignment of the play to Greene.

Alonso Gerónimo de Salas Barbadillo, keen wit and talented writer, began his literary career in the early years of the seventeenth century and pursued it until his death in 1635. Personal friend of Cervantes and Lope de Vega, he was an esteemed associate of the many writers residing in Madrid. Staunchly individualistic, he was at the same time very much a part of his social and literary milieu. Posterity relegates him to the lesser ranks of those who wrought creatively in the seventeenth century; nevertheless, he has been receiving his due increasingly in the last half-century in studies and editions.

Bernhard Suphan selber hat einmal bemerkt, dass “Herder in Luthers Schriften bewandert war wie wenige” Menschen des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und dass “keiner von den klassischen Zeitgenossen die Grösse des Reformators in so vollen Tönen und zu alien Zeiten gerühmt hat wie er.” Dies wichtige Gesamturteil, dem auch Rudolf Haym nicht widerspricht, weist auf den beträchtlichen Umfang der herderschen Lutherkenntnisse wie auch auf den hohen Grad seiner Lutheranerken-nung hin, insofern manche andere Deutsche der Herderzeit, vor allem Hamann und Lessing, ebenfalls über ein beachtliches Lutherwissen verfügten und den Reformater gehörig lobten. Ist Klopstocks Lutherinteresse vorwiegend sprachlich-künstlerisch, Goethes und Schillers trotz mancher Feinheit und Prägnanz doch mehr peripherisch als zentral, so ist die Lutherkenntnis Hamanns, Herders und Lessings erheblich umfassender. Bei allem Gemeinsamen nun in dem Lutherbilde der drei Letztgenannten bestehen aber auch zwischen ihnen wesentliche Unterschiede in ihrer Stellung zu Luther, Unterschiede, die sich bis in den Kern ihrer verschiedenen Persönlichkeiten erstrecken. In Herders Verhältnis zu Luther lassen sich im allgemeinen drei Hauptepochen unterscheiden, die Rigaer, die Bückeburger und die Weimarer, von denen die letzte wegen ihrer Länge wie auch wegen ihrer Reichhaltigkeit in zwei Unterteile zerfällt, die Jahrzehnte von 1776 bis 1786 und, nach einem mehr als fünfjährigen Schweigen über Luther, von 1792 bis zu Herders Tod. Innerhalb dieser einzelnen Epochen jedoch wird die Darstellung nicht streng chronologisch verfahren, sondern, ohne Ansprüche auf Vollständigkeit bei der Masse des Materials, nur das Wesentliche mehr systematisch als historisch vorzulegen sich bemühen. Allein Hauptgesichtspunkte und Hauptentwicklungslinien können im Rahmen dieses Aufsatzes berücksichtigt werden.

Notice of King John has been concentrated on questions of date; revision; polemic purpose; treatment of history; influence of the Image of Hypocrisy, Kirchmayer's Pammachius, Lindsay's Satire of the Three Estates, and Tyndale's Obedience of a Christian Man; and relation to the morality play and the chronicle play, between which it seems transitional, with its effect upon the latter, especially upon the Troublesome Reign and Shakespeare's King John. Herbert Barke notices here and there the historical basis of its use of the Roman rite. Otherwise there has been almost no notice of a substance and technique that, beyond this basis, articulate structure, unite allegory and history, and must have made the propaganda emotional for a mid-sixteenth-century audience.

Although the lion plays a considerable rôle in Chrétien de Troyes' Chevalier au Lion, his function in the poem has traditionally attracted relatively little attention on the part of Arthurian scholars. Gaston Paris, in one of his notable articles on Chrétien, relegated the story of the noble beast to a footnote in which he said: “cette historiette … ne sert à rien dans le récit où Chrétien a jugé bon de l'insérer.”1Naturally enough, scholars who regard Yvain as a Celtic otherworld tale dressed up in French clothing, finding no close analog to the lion in Celtic lore, have paid little attention to him. And those who have con-cerned themselves with demonstrating that the source of the lion story was Latin or Greek have been interested more in the relation between Yvain's lion and that of Androcles (or some other one) than in his function in the poem. Those who have studied particularly the structure of the poem have attached more importance to the lion,2 but so far as I know no one has pointed out what seems to me to be his symbolic significance. Since Chrétien repeatedly said that he was concerned both with the “matière” and the “sens” of his romances,3 and as he called Yvain the roman du Chevalier au Lion,4 it seems reasonable to examine the poem in some detail and try to see if he attached more significance to the lion than modern scholarship has pointed out.

It has been made increasingly evident by critics in recent years that the drowning of Edward King was the occasion, rather than the subject, of Lycidas. Milton's concern was generally with the life, death, and resurrection of the dedicated poet, and specifically with his own situation at the time. From this premise it follows that there are no digressions in the poem and that the form and traditions of pastoral elegy are entirely appropriate to its intentions.

In his notable article on the Ancrene Riwle, Macaulay made the first attempt to classify the English MSS on the basis of their readings.1He divided them into two groups: (1) BVP, which share a number of additions, and (2) CTNG, in which these additions do not occur or occur only by insertion in a different hand. The “additions” of B, as Macaulay himself notes, are so-called only with reference to the currently known text of N. But he evidently regards them as additions also with reference to the original text; for after discussing in detail inconsistencies between B and the other group of MSS in two of these passages, he adds (p. 151) :

Considering this, and also the unanimity with which the whole number of passages is rejected by the other thirteenth century manuscripts, so far as their original texts are concerned, I am disposed to think that they may be regarded as interpolations generally, and that we must assume that CTNG, though much inferior in general correctness of text to B, yet represent a more original form in this respect.