The Coventry carol ‘Lully lulla yu littell tine child’, sung by the women in The Taylors & Shearmens Pageant to their babes before Herod's murderous soldiers burst in on them, is now well known and deservedly popular. It was first copied out by Thomas Sharp in 1825 from a manuscript copy of the pageant ‘newly correcte by Robert Croo’, who is said at the end to have finished his work on March 14, 1534. The manuscript was unfortunately destroyed in the disastrous fire at Birmingham City Reference Library in 1879, and thus Sharp's edition of the play has assumed considerable importance. Sharp's copying down of the musical score for ‘Lully lulla yu littell tine child’ presents no editorial difficulties; he was probably impressed by its immediate appeal and copied carefully from the manuscript. ‘Lully lulla’ has duly found a place in The Oxford Book of Carols.

Relatively little is known about the actual influence of Jacques Amyot on Charles IX and Henry III, who were entrusted as young boys to his pedagogical care. Amyot's translation of the works of Plutarch was so popular that Montaigne called it a ‘breviaire’. It is hardly conceivable that his efforts as an educator should not have left a traceable imprint. In this paper I have attempted to trace this imprint. The question of whether or not Amyot's influence on the two last Valois is to be qualified as constructive will entail another question: ‘Was Amyot's pedagogy a success or a failure within the sphere of literature, the arts and “culture” in the restricted sense, or in the sphere of action, political and socio-economic?’ An attempt to answer these questions might open up an interesting late Renaissance vista into the relationship between ‘art for art's sake’ and ‘art as social significance’.

The Phoenix is the most sententious and didactic of all Thomas Middleton's plays. Even his tragedies and tragicomedies are not as pervasively moralistic as this play. The reason for this difference in The Phoenix has never been explored because only the more attractive, realistic parts of the comedy have been singled out for comment.

Like A Fair Quarrel and The Old Law, which are also more didactic than the rest of Middleton's dramatic work, The Phoenix was performed before the King: the quarto edition has the subtitle, ‘as it hath beene sundrye times Acted by the Children of Paules, And presented before his Maiestie’. The sententiousness of The Phoenix derives, I think, from a definite attempt by Middleton to interest the King and in a sense advise him. The Phoenix, I hope to show, is a comedy written for a king.

Histories and dictionaries of Italian literature continue to assign the comedy Ortensio to Alessandro Piccolomini, the Sicnese writer of the sixteenth century who, in his day, enjoyed a wide reputation as a philosopher and playwright. The authorship of the Ortensio was sporadically but unsubstantially doubted in the past and, in more recent years, was challenged seriously in at least two important articles. Apparently, few writers have taken cognizance of these articles or have taken into consideration the conclusions of Maria Rossi and Ireneo Sanesi, who proved that the comedy was written collectively by the members of the Accademia degl'Intronati of Siena. Perhaps one of the reasons why these articles have not been incorporated in subsequent studies on Piccolomini is that they do not deal specifically with the problem. Both M. Rossi and I. Sanesi treat the authorship of the Ortensio in an incidental manner, since the concern of the former is an appraisal of all the literary works of Piccolomini, while that of the latter is the establishment of the correct date of two letters.

In a recent book, Dante poeta veltro (Florence, 1953), Leonardo Olschki discussed the statues of Castor and Pollux that stand at the top of the ramp leading onto the Capitoline hill in Rome. He showed that these representations of the Dioscures were brought to the heart of the Renaissance city not merely as works of art, but as symbols: symbols of heavenly protection (they are the Gemini of the Zodiac) and of Liberty (to Dante they stood for popular resistance to tyranny), in which roles they had been the guardians of Rome since ancient times. In addition, Olschki discovered an attribute appended for political reasons by a sixteenth-century Pontiff, Clement VII, that made the twins respectively the Pope and the Emperor—co-rulers of the modern Roman Empire.

When Maurice Scève wrote his Délie, obiect de plus haulte vertu, he did not allow his creative powers unlimited scope. Many of the dizains are imitations or else direct translations of Italian models. All of the poetic conventions of Scève's era are to be met with in the book. Addressing erotic verse to an actual or invented mistress called Delia was itself a convention, for that matter, at least as old as Tibullus. But in spite of this, there are abundant indications that some of the poems recount an authentic love experienced by Scève. Indeed, the reader is told as much when in one instance the poet remarks that he has chosen the name Délie in order not to disclose a real woman. In telling us that this is the ‘surnom’ by which his lady is to be called, the poet takes care to assert in addition that it is a ‘surnom louable’ (LIX).

The quarto (ca. 1570) of Ulpian Fulwell's An Enterlude intituled Like wil to like quod the Deuel to the Colier at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D. C. (STC 11473.2 bd. with 4965), contains on its back leaf (Sig. F2v) in ink in what appears to be a contemporary hand the music of a three-man song arranged for counter-tenor, tenor, and bass. The piece is anonymous and has no heading, and there are no words with the music. The rest of the quarto is free from annotations of any kind.

The music, whose distribution and range of parts as well as part movement point clearly to a concerted vocal piece, is presumably a setting for the concluding lyric of the play. Sung by Virtuous Life, Honour, and Good Fame, the lyric appears on the preceding signature (F2r). The music easily accommodates the words of the first four lines of each verse; the remaining two lines require the repetition of the second section of the music.

In the major study concerning the relationship between the French dramatist, Robert Garnier, and the Elizabethan drama, the author, A. M. Witherspoon, tends to see literary choice as primarily motivated by casual personal considerations. He claims, for example, that Garnier, living in a period of civil strife in France, chose Roman themes for several of his tragedies because he admired ‘the Roman genius for organization’. Likewise he explains the Countess of Pembroke's attraction to Garnier's tragedies in that they centered around strong-minded women like Portia and Cornelia.

Although one cannot, of course, discount the importance of congeniality of theme in a dramatist's selection of a subject to portray or of a translator's choice of a work to render, one must not at the same time overlook certain other influences which govern these choices. And, in fact, since both Garnier and the Countess of Pembroke wrote as members of learned and circumscribed coteries, we might expect external influences to assume more than usual importance.

Sir Thomas Wyatt's poetry has evoked wide disagreement among critics; even Wyatt studies seem conducive to scholarly scuffling. Back in 1908 and 1909, a lively controversy took place over the question of priority of French or Italian influence on the poet. The excitement has long since died down, but the question may be reopened by the small finding which this note reports.

Wyatt's well-known douzaine, Madame, withouten many wordes, was found by A. K. Foxwell to have a French source, with ‘some lines which are an exact translation of St. Gelais’ douzaine, S'amour vous a donne un cueur en gage’. Although this view has not been challenged before, a much likelier candidate for Wyatt's model is an Italian poem, Madonna, non so dir tante parole. This poem has been known to students of the Italian madrigal because it was set by one of the pioneer madrigalists, Phillip Verdelot.

It is often difficult to remember that Andrew Marvell the poet was also a polemical Puritan and practical politician, so little do his surviving poems reflect his public activity. Least of all, one would think, could his Garden poems, where his private intentions seem most highly developed and his general Neoplatonism most sharply particularized, yield up any reference to his Puritan life. But when we examine his ‘Bermudas’, one of Marvell's subtlest shorter poems and strikingly close to ‘The Garden’ in both its imagery and its implications of paradise, we cannot fail to realize its background of English expansion into the New World and of the religious drives that sent Englishmen oat from their island into harsher climates in the expectation of some sort of practical Eden. Marvell's song is the song of praise of his mariners to the God that led them ‘through the watry Maze’ to another island, long hidden from their knowledge and far kinder than England itself.

The Neo-Latin Lexicon was launched two years ago with the publication of a brief prospectus appearing in the Winter, 1955, issue of Renaissance News (vii, 160-162). That prospectus announced the initiation of a cooperative project in Neo-Latin lexicography which would study and codify the Latin coinages and neologisms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Subsequently, an editorial committee was formed consisting of R. T. Bruère (Chicago), Fred W. Householder, Jr. (Cornell), James R. Naiden (Lakeside School), and Paul W. Blackford (Western Illinois State College). With the publication of a detailed outline of the project in Classical Weekly (No. 8, March 7, 1955) and in the Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance (1955, xvii, 2), and with the distribution of that outline to scholars with known interests and proficiencies in the field of modern Latin studies, a group of collaborators was recruited.

Most of our performances of Renaissance ensemble music mirror only too exactly the blank appearance of the original parts. The normal reaction of the conscientious instrumentalist who has been brought up on scores sprinkled with signs indicating just how each note is to be played—as well as what tone is be to sounded and for how long—is to conclude that, if no ‘expression’ signs are present, then the composer was concerned only with pitch and duration, and that to produce anything more would be to mispresent his intentions. The resulting ‘abstract’ performance is inadvertently encouraged by those musical scholars who stress the new emphasis on expression of emotion found in the Baroque period (always in contrast to the music of earlier periods) and by the many musicologists who look at early instrumental music primarily to search for traces of its liberation from the tyranny of vocal style.