A major sortie in what Maxwell Anderson has called Bernard Shaw's “furious critical assault on the romantic theatre” is the section entitled “Better than Shakespear?” in the Preface to Three Plays for Puritans. Well-known today, this discussion offers proof of Eric Bentley's assertion that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism should be judged as polemic rather than criticism of a more objective sort. Shaw's attack in that Preface on Shakespeare's Julius Caesar has naturally been a principal object of critical attention ever since it was penned, but this fact should not blind us to another, that Shaw was at least as much concerned with Antony and Cleopatra, and that in fact his own comedy, as one scholar pointed out more than a generation ago, was more of a counterblast to Antony than to Caesar. It is easy to forget that Shaw followed the lead of certain of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries in re-introducing Cleopatra into a play about Caesar (whom he called “this greatest of all protagonists”) whereas Shakespeare keeps the two rigorously separate. Shaw's purpose in doing what he did was clear, and this purpose is explicated in detail in his comments on Shakespeare's Antony.

Although many critics of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India have mentioned that Professor Godbole, the Hindu educator, behaves somewhat queerly during the course of the novel, no one, so far as I can discover, since the book's publication in 1924 has seemed to have any serious doubt that Godbole is a man of genuine goodwill or that he is the source of much that is good. This conventional attitude has been expanded upon within recent years by several critics who have put Godbole forward as Forster's primary spokesman for cosmic and divine truth. Forster's point, they claim, is that Hinduism is closer to this truth than any other religion; the author is using Godbole to make this revelation known. To James McConkey, one of the proponents of the Godbolean viewpoint, “the full measure of the success” of Forster's Indian novel “suggests that Forster has finally come to terms with himself and his universe.” These terms are imparted through Godbole “the only person in all the novels who becomes the character-equivalent of the Forsterian voice.” Godbole's position is “one of detachment from human reality and from the physical world, a detachment obtained by as complete a denial of individual consciousness as is possible, that denial and remove bringing with them a sense of love and an awareness of unity.” Hindu metaphysics “bears a number of definite relationships to the stabilized Forsterian philosophical position.” It is Godbole who is “the one most responsible for whatever sense of hope is granted” in the last section of the novel. The “way of Godbole is the only possible way: love, even though to exist it must maintain a detachment from the physical world and human relationships, offers the single upward path from the land of sterility and echoing evil.” To Hugh Maclean, another Godbolean adherent, Mrs. Moore, the elderly Englishwoman, finds completeness only after death through the intercession of Godbole; the latter “excludes nothing” from his spiritual life, and because of this he “will be able [ultimately] to encompass everything.” It is only Godbole whose mind has seized on the order of the universe. Forster is advocating above everything else that people should become like Godbole, one who is able to accomplish the “absorption of the self within a transcendental frame of reference.”

Eluard's rupture with Breton, in 1938, is attributed to a change in political ideology, from surrealism to Stalinism. Doubt is thrown on this simple explanation by the deliberate silence of Eluard, Breton, and their biographers, who have not recorded the event, though no such reluctance followed the earlier defections of Aragon, Desnos, or Prévert, who were accused, and who answered, in violent and well-known diatribes. It was not until 1951 that Eluard acknowledged the importance of the break, in publishing a testament of his surrealist days, and reproducing poems that he had tried until then to keep secret. A close examination of his poetry and of a few external events reveals several important facts. As we shall see, the vital elements in the rupture include Eluard's fatigue both with Breton's pacifism and with the thematic and technical artifices of dream interpretation. An analysis of his protest is obscured by his other psychic worries, from the war in Spain to his isolation from events during the first years of the German occupation. Eluard's personal crises came to an end with the death of his wife, Nusch, on 28 November 1946, and in a sense, until then, he found full peace of mind after 1937 only during the period of Poésie ininterrompue, published on 3 January 1946, and of his revised Choix de poèmes, of 15 July.

It has been so much taken for granted and so unquestioningly assumed that the Jefferson, Mississippi, of William Faulkner's novels is to be identified with Oxford, the author's home and the seat of the University of Mississippi, that it may seem presumptuous of anyone to throw doubt on the identification. Certainly anyone who does so will be setting himself at variance with most if not all of the critics and biographers who have chosen to write on the gifted Mississippian. For illustrations I need menton only Robert Coughlan, Irving Howe, Ward L. Miner, and William Van O'Connor, all of whom, differing as they do on other points, are at one in thinking that Oxford served as a model for the Jefferson of the novels.

L'être et le Néant is a hymn in praise of the insubstantial. In that book the substantial emerges as the great enemy. It is the inert, the viscous, the spiritless. It is the realm of death, both in our conventional, literal sense of that word, and in the broader sense of whatever is not active, vital life at its most “authentic.” Among substantial forms of existence, in this broader sense, Sartre includes “character” or “selfhood.” He does not deny that character and selfhood exist: on the contrary he asserts their existence emphatically. They, and all other substantialities, alone have “being.” But the “being” of selfhood and character is inert, lifeless. We see this in introspection, Sartre says. Our character exists only in the past. As “being” it can never be “becoming.” Character is that essence which is lodged behind, even though in, us. That essence plays no part in the present of consciousness, the moving, insubstantial life which is what we distinctly are as living creatures.