The verse romance King Robert of Sicily (King Roberd of Cisyle) is the Middle English version of a well-known legend about The Proud King Humiliated (Deposed)—an arrogant and boastful king whose throne is taken over by an angel-substitute until the beggared monarch learns proper humility. Told of the Emperor Jovinian in the Latin Gesta Romanorum, the story had also appeared in other contexts in almost all the vernacular languages of Europe before the end of the fifteenth century. The tale must have been especially appealing to the English, to judge from the number of extant manuscripts heretofore known, nine manuscripts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This paper calls attention to still another manuscript, folio 2 of BM Additional MS. 34801. It has, strangely enough, never been noticed, although its existence was recorded in a catalogue over sixty years ago.

The International character of Christine de Pisan's writings has long ago been investigated where it concerns her familiarity with the works of her compatriots Dante and Boccaccio or her relations with the English court during the early years of the fifteenth century. Considerably less well known is the Portuguese translation of her Livre des trois vertus, which is to be found in MS. 11,515 of the National Library in Madrid. This translation was, furthermore, published in Lisbon in 1518. Although two copies of the edition still exist and are listed in Portuguese bibliographies, the only mention of such a translation among studies devoted to Christine de Pisan is a passing refererence in Mathilde Laigle's Livre des trois vertus: son milieu historique et litteraire (Paris, 1912). Here a footnote promises further information in a projected edition of the Trois vertus which has never appeared. Several years later the Portuguese translation was referred to by Aubrey Bell in his Portuguese Literature, but with several errors of detail. As the existence of the manuscript and the two printed copies cannot fail to arouse the curiosity of any student of Christine de Pisan's writings or, indeed, of the intellectual currents of the late Middle Ages, it would seem worth while to attempt a plausible explanation of the circumstances which brought the Portuguese version into being.

The high value of Everyman has been provocatively asserted in T. S. Eliot's description of it as “perhaps” the only English drama “within the limitations of art.” Eliot writes this while discussing the lack of form in post-Kydian drama and thus implies that the source of this value is the play's formal unity. David Kaula has taken Eliot to mean “that nothing in the play is extraneous to the central homiletic purpose, that all elements of style, structure, and theme are governed by the conventions of allegory.” Yet the emphasis on Everyman's homiletic purpose and allegorical conventions does not sufficiently explain either its critical esteem or its theatrical popularity. Fortunately, Eliot has enlarged upon his original assessment in a later work. He argues that religious drama, to be successful, must combine its doctrine with “ordinary dramatic interest.” Everyman fulfills his requirement:

Al margen de la creatión literaria y en cierto modo también al margen de las tradictones locales netamente rurales, florece aun en muchos pueblos de la Peninsula y en algunos de la America Hispana la llamada ‘fiesta de moros y cristianos,’ curiosa encrucijada de ciertas maneras de juego, festejo y drama, que tuvieron vigencia cortesana en la España de los Austrias y que hoy sobreviven injertas en la tradición, popular y predominantemente campesina, de las fiestas patronales. El estudio completo de este fenomeno ofreceria considerable interes intrinseco y abriria nuevas perspectivas sobre la cuestion. Podrian entonces examinarse las fiestas en relation con la teoria de don Ramon Menendez Pidal sobre la ‘tradicionalidad' como caracteristica fundamental de la actividad creadora del pueblo espanol. Por otra parte, en cuanto estos festejos expresan una vision intuitiva e ingenua de la historia de España, concretada en la estampa de moros y cristianos enfrentados, cabe analizarlos en funcion de las modernas interpretaciones del pasado espanol, verdadera cuestion palpitante del momento actual, que han suscitado los grandes libros recientemente publicados por don Americo Castro, en los que se subraya en forma tan nueva e intensa la significación de la larga contienda entre cristiandad e islam sobre el suelo de la Peninsula. Estos y otros posibles enfoques requieren una labor expositiva previa, que coordine y sintetice datos desperdigados en numerosas monografias, asi como nuevos esfuerzos por caracterizar aspectos especificos de la representation. En este sentido el presente articulo aspira a aportar una contribution util aunque limitada. Su proposito es el de ofrecer una vision panoramica del estado actual de la fiesta en España y algunas consideraciones respecto a su pasado y a los puntos de contacto que en esta area se han producido entre corrientes literarias y folcloricas.

Though apparently only a fragment, the posthumously published New Atlantis provides insights into Bacon's idea of science not discoverable in his other works. In Salomon's House, the poet of science gave a local habitation and a name to the process and product of science, creating a concrete image of the “learning” for which he had sued so eloquently and so fruitlessly twenty years earlier before the new monarch, the learned James. Clearly an integral part of Bacon's program, in many places the New Atlantis is no less than a fictionalized paradigm of The First Book of the Advancement of Learning For example, as a correlative to the arguments by which he defended learning from the ignorant zeal of religious, political, and social fanatics, Bacon created in the New Atlantis a little world sanctified to God, politically stable, socially conservative, and morally pure and dedicated to the pursuit of science. Further, in its leading institution, the College of the Six Days Works, we find also a correlative to the criticisms of contemporary scientific practice that Bacon had offered earlier in The Advancement in his analysis of “the errors and vanities which have intervened amongst the studies themselves of the learned” and in the “peccant humours” which weaken and corrupt learning. But the New Atlantis is more than a mere paradigm: it projects an image of science in operation and of the relation of scientists to society not to be found in Bacon's earlier works. My purpose here is to explore the structure of that image, emphasizing in particular the contrast between it and the image of science projected by other Renaissance Utopias.

Milton's spelling has evoked much comment and speculation since Jonathan Richardson noted certain inconsistencies in the early editions of Paradise Lost. Yet no complete study has previously been reported. Because of the problems of transmisson of text to or through scribes and because of the potential alterations of compositors, printed works offer inconclusive and only corroborative evidence of how Milton spelled. The place to start is with spellings in Milton's own hand. Accordingly I have prepared a complete concordance of all English words or abbreviations found in holograph materials. Included, therefore, are all words which were deleted from a final text and all spellings which were altered in any way. From my resulting full examination of the orthography I present here, because of the limitations of space, only the evidence concerning Milton's use or omission of idle final “e.” All manuscript words to which an idle final “e” may have been attached and all words showing inconsistencies in the use of idle final “e” are reported. These words are divided into the following categories: 1) uncompounded and uninflected words (that is, root words), 2) words or groups of words which ordinarily would have been considered under category one but which evidence spelling that classifies them as exceptional, 3) suffixed and compound words, and 4) inflected words (including those in category two).

Four recent articles have presented two contradictory opinions concerning Johnson's sources for the Ethiopian background of Rasselas. The contention that his inspiration for the Happy Valley came from a wide variety of readings on Ethiopia is counter-balanced by an equal insistence on the importance of his debt to Lobo's Relation d'Abissinie. The student of Johnson remains unenlightened by this series of articles, not only because the relative merits of their arguments are never discussed but also because none of them has been based on a comprehensive study of the Ethiopian materials available to Johnson. In an effort to bring the problem closer to its definitive solution, I propose to examine a largely neglected body of material on Ethiopia, identify specific sources for Ethiopian features of Rasselas and Rambler essays 204–205, and suggest that the circumstances of the composition of Rasselas were significantly different from those generally imagined.

Fifty years after the modern study of sentimentalism was inaugurated by Ernest Bernbaum, the problem remains whether the term has ever been satisfactorily defined or described. Two recent developments reveal some of the difficulties: Arthur Sherbo in The English Sentimental Drama takes five basic criteria considered by most authorities as typical, and shows that they may all apply to plays demonstrably not sentimental. John Harrington Smith, in the preface to The Gay Couple in Restoration Comedy (1948), announces that he has completely avoided the term “sentimental” as too vague to be of much value. Yet Ronald Crane, writing fourteen years before, assumed the essential traits of sentimentalism to be fairly clear, and Norman Holland has implied that two criteria borrowed from Bernbaum and Krutch still supply an adequate definition. There is not even agreement whether sentimentality is a positive or negative quality. Krutch and Sherbo feel that it is false and dishonest, therefore bad. Crane concedes that it is somewhat limited intellectually, but emphasizes its humanitarianism and emotional warmth, especially the “self-approving joy” that makes virtue satisfying. Bernbaum vacillates between sympathy and contempt.

It two articles based on his study of the Bodleian MS of Shelley's “The Triumph of Life” G. M. Matthews has presented evidence which, he suggests, proves that, during the weeks immediately preceding Shelley's trip to Leghorn with Edward Williams and their subsequent drowning, Shelley and Jane Williams engaged in “a love-affair, passionate on Shelley's part and at least complaisant on Jane's, cutting across the pattern of marriages within the confined little community of Casa Magni,” and that much of the somber tone of “The Triumph of Life” can be attributed to this domestic crisis.

Any study of Hawthorne's villains seems to demand first of all an examination of the word “villain” lest the category become as unwieldy as that group in Hawthorne's “The Procession of Life” who ranked themselves in “the brotherhood of crime.” When a term becomes all-inclusive, it is no longer useful, and since almost all of Hawthorne's tales and romances show a concern for sin and evil, there is a temptation to call all of his sinners, as well as all of those whose lives or actions bring some harm to others, villains. But this is a distortion since the word is defined simply as a person of depraved and malevolent character devoted to base or evil acts, one who deliberately plots and does serious harm to others.

Swinburne's devotion to the popular ballad is well-known, and his continued experiments with ballad imitation—from “May Janet” to “The Brothers”—attest to the longevity of this passion. But one of the earliest manifestations of his devotion—an unfinished edition of popular ballads—has received less careful attention than it deserves. Furthermore, what little has been written about this anthology has been tainted with errors—errors for which the ultimate responsibility lies on the head of Thomas James Wise. Wise owned the manuscript of Swinburne's ballad edition, described it in his catalogues, and allowed its contents to be printed. Since even the most innocent of the great forger's published statements about the books and manuscripts in his possession cannot be taken on trust, it will be prudent to reexamine what he has said—and what others have repeated—about Swinburne's edition of the ballads.

The fiction of Theodore Dreiser has often been praised for its fidelity to the facts of ordinary experience, its massive accumulation and arrangement of incidents, and its criticism of bourgeois America. It has seldom been praised as skillful writing, however; and with almost the sole exception of F. O. Matthiessen, critics have dismissed Dreiser as a poor manipulator of the language, whose effects are achieved in spite of his style. It is usually suggested, furthermore, that beyond a recurring use of clothing as symbols, Dreiser had no awareness of the resources of image and metaphor. It is said that his efforts at comparison were likely to be hackneyed and incredibly jumbled, as in a passage in The Financier about men who fade into poverty: “They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—which under other circumstances had such glittering possibilities— via the rope, the knife, the bullet, or the cup of poison.”

During her lifetime Dorothy Richardson withheld all but the essential facts about herself—and gave even these grudgingly. In the years of the novelist's greatest vogue, between 1915 and 1930, when Pilgrimage was preferred by some of its readers to Proust and Joyce and was dismissed by others as unformed and insignificant, she held back the minimal biographical details which most novelists readily furnish. She listed neither place of birth nor date in Who's Who. She offered only what was known: the titles of her books and her publisher's address, and in a parenthesis her married name. It would seem that she wished to remain for her readers the author of Pilgrimage, the creator of Miriam, the historian of a woman's stream of consciousness.

The nervous, obsessional Lawrence, summoning mysterious gods, blueprinting Utopian colonies with himself at their head, and assuming the Christlike task of changing the course of modern history, tends to shut out our view of the other Lawrences. He was also, somewhat unexpectedly, a writer with a highly developed flair for comic satire.

Twenty years after its publication in 1942, Camus's short novel L'Etranger has preserved its wide appeal through its haunting intensity, strange simplicity, and virile freshness. However, the general overemphasis on the philosophical significance of the story, the failure to deal with certain literary aspects, and the obscure or ambiguous features of the novel seem to call for a new appraisal of Camus's masterpiece.

Dès sa première rencontre avec Les Séquestrés d'Altona le lecteur retrouve dans cette piece de nombreux themes sartriens tels que l'emprisonnement, l'acte ou le geste de l'intellectuel, l'authenticite et la liberte de choix. Les personnages lui sont eux aussi familiers; ce sont les freres et les sceurs d'autres personnages connus: Frantz est a la fois Oreste, Hugo et Goetz; Johanna Eve, Jessica et Estelle; Leni Electre, Olga et Ines. Neanmoins Les Sequestris d'Altona est une piece differente de toutes les autres. Dans Les Mouches ou Huis-Clos ou Les Mains sales, le probleme etait nettement delimiter la liberte fondait sur Oreste comme la foudre, ou etait refusee a Garcin ou a Hugo. Ici, le probleme ontologique de l'homme a la recherche de son identite n'est que le tremplin d'une autre recherche. Argos, le salon de style Second Empire, ou le bureau de Hoederer sont depasses, et la chambre muree de Frantz s'elargit aux dimensions de l'Histoire. Peut-etre n'est-il pas teme-raire de faire remarquer que les pieces precedentes sont, dans une certaine mesure, des illustrations de L'Etre et le neant (Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etre et le neant, Gallimard, 1943), et pour cette raison beaucoup plus orientees vers les problemes personnels et intimes d'individus particuliers. Avec Les Sequestres d'Altona, non seulement Hambourg, ou l'Allemagne, ou les Etats-Unis, ou la Russie, ou meme l'Organisation de l'Armee Secrete comme on l'a parfois suggere, entrent en scene, mais encore l'Histoire dans sa marche inexorable, de Luther a Hitler, et pourquoi ne pas le dire, de la chute d'Adam et d'Eve jusqu'au trente-et-unieme siecle. Les Sequestres d'Altona est la premiere piece qui corresponde a la Critique de la raison dialectique, c'est-a-dire a Taction de l'Homme sur l'Histoire, et de l'Histoire sur l'Homme.