It has usually been assumed by historians of the drama that amusements of a dramatic kind at court kept pace with those of the country in general. The entries of 1348 in the Record Books of the Great Wardrobe, which belong to the reign of Edward III, and which concern tunics and visors used in a Christmas celebration, have been interpreted as referring to dramatic entertainments (Collier, i, 15, 22; Warton, ii, 72; Brotanek; Ward, i, 148). This view, however, has recently been called into question in the researches of Professor Arthur Beatty, of the University of Wisconsin, who has pointed out that tunics and visors were also necessities of the tournament, that “It is antecedently improbable that Edward III should have had dramatic entertainments on important occasions,” and that therefore these important entries do not prove the existence of dramatic entertainments at this early date.

Although French fable literature played a prominent part in the evolution of the Æsopic Fable in the Middle Ages, no general account of its history and development has as yet been written by any modern scholar. Single collections of French fables dating from this period have been published from time to time in more or less critical editions, and certain phases of the more general field have been investigated by various scholars, but it is believed that the present paper may justly claim to be the first general survey of Old French Fable Literature within certain well-defined limits.

The Scandinavian analogues to the adventures of Beowulf are of considerable interest to students of the Anglo-Saxon epic. Stories of this type, occasionally affording striking resemblances in detail, appear in distant countries,—among the Japanese and the North American Indians, for example,—but these are clearly of little significance for the evolution of the tale on Germanic soil. And we need hardly attach more weight to the feats of the Celtic hero Cuchulinn, nearer neighbor though he be, than to those of Tsuna in Japan. The case is different with parallels in märchen and saga found among the very peoples by whose kinsfolk the deeds in the epic must have been celebrated. In two instances the story is told of heroes of later times. Grettir the Strong, who subdues two trolls, one in a hall and the other in a cave under a waterfall, was a historical character of the eleventh century, and Orm Storolfsson, whose struggles with a demon cat and a giant recall in many ways the deeds of Beowulf, flourished some two centuries later. The validity of a third parallel, in the Saga of Hrolf Kraki, is by no means clear. Here the problem is complicated in various ways. The saga itself is late, hardly older than the time of Chaucer in its present shape, and possibly dating from the early part of the fifteenth century.

This interesting clue to the source of the play has not been carefully followed up. “The origin of the story on which it is founded,” says Ward, “is unknown; but unless the Prologue's assertion that the plot is based on fact is to be taken literally, its source is probably some nearly contemporary novel. Either Ford or the novelist from whom he borrowed made little account of historical probability in choosing Sparta as the scene of a love-tragedy which savours of mediæval Italy.” Ellis, also, remarks that the scene is “curiously placed in Sparta,” and adds that the story “may have been taken from an Italian novel.”

Among the most characteristic and most positive propositions in Lessing's Laokoon are these from chapter xxi: “Ein anderer Weg, auf welchem die Poesie die Kunst in Schilderung körperlicher Schönheit wiederum einholet, ist dieser, dass sie Schönheit in Reitz verwandelt. Reitz ist Schönheit in Bewegung.” F. T. Vischer said with reference to this chapter, “Lessing hatte zuerst die Anmuth (er sagt: Reiz, wovon nachher) als Schönheit in der Bewegung definiert.” Commenting on the same chapter, G. E. Guhrauer wrote, “Reiz ist Schönheit in Bewegung, und eben darum für den Maler weniger als den Dichter bequem. Dieser Begriff, eine glückliche Bereicherung der Ästhetik, von welcher Schiller späterhin in dem Aufsatz über Anmuth und Würde einen so sinnreichen und fruchtbaren Gebrauch machte, findet sich vor Lessing schon bei Home, welchen er bei seiner Vertrautheit mit den schottischen Philosophen unstreitig gekannt hat. Insofern ist es nicht ganz genau, wenn Vischer … von Lessing sagt, dass der Begriff der Anmuth bei ihm zuerst gefunden werde.” H. Blümner rushed to the defence of Lessing and Vischer. Grace, he admitted, is associated with motion not only by Home, but also by Webb (Inquiry into the Beauties of Painting, 1764), and by Hagedorn (Betrachtungen über die Mahlerey, 1762), —“dennoch durfte Vischer mit vollem Rechte Lessing als den Vater dieses Begriffes bezeichnen, da er durch ihn erst entwickelt und in die Ästhetik eingeführt worden ist.” On a previous page (31) Blümner had pointed out that Webb's idea of grace was not his own, but went back to Home.

The purpose of the following pages is merely to present several unpublished texts of liturgico-dramatic offices. Certain of these texts require no special comment, and will take their places naturally alongside similar texts already published. Certain others will, I hope, be welcomed for the new details they offer to the student of mediæval dramatic origins.

The writers who have given us our best accounts of the liturgical plays for Epiphany seem to have overlooked a complete and charming Officium Stellae found in a manuscript in the Bibliothèque Mazarine in Paris. To this text my attention was first called by the article of Monsieur A. Gastoué, Un petit drame liturgique parisien pour Pâques, in the course of which he writes,

“En dehors des coutumes décrites par Léon Gautier et qui variaient suivant les localités, il est encore d'autres ‘intéressantes. Tel, dans le ms. 1270 de la Mazarine, le ravissant Offices de l'Étoile, représenté à Nevers, au Xie siècle, le matin de l'Epiphanie, qui, au reste, a attiré déjà l'attention des chercheurs (cf. Catalogue des mss. de la Bibliothèque Mazarine).”

The wheel as an attribute of Fortune is of Roman origin, and, together with the globe which often takes its place, signifies the inconstancy of the goddess. In Roman art the wheel or globe is. represented as being held in the hand of the goddess, or lying at her feet; she is sometimes represented as standing on the globe. Motion of the wheel is not implied in its postures.

In Latin literature previous to the middle ages the references to the globe or wheel as attributes of Fortune are few in number, the earliest of them being seemingly that of Pacuvius (second century B. C.): “Fortunam insanam esse et cæcam et brutam perhibent philosophi saxoque instare in globoso prædicant volubili.” Cicero (first century B. C.) writes in Piso, 10, 22: “cumque ipse nudus in convivio saltaret in quo cum illum saltatorium versaret orbem ne turn quidem fortunæ rotam pertimescebat.”

In the Man of Law's introduction, we are told that anybody who wishes to refer to Chaucer's “Seintes Legende of Cupyde” may see there, among other things,

“The crueltee of thee, queen Medea,
Thy litel children hanging by the hals.“

Now the Legend of Good Women contains nothing that corresponds precisely with these lines. The discrepancy is not startling, but it is sufficient to stimulate conjecture. Professor Lounsbury, in 1892, suggested as a possibility that “when Chaucer wrote the prologue to the Man of Law's Tale he had not written the account of Medea which has come down to us [in the Legend]; and that when it was written it came to be something different from what he had purposed to make it originally.” In a recent article in these Publications Professor Root has attempted to bring evidence in support of Mr. Lounsbury's suggestion.