In a previous paper, “The Origin of the Ancren Riwle,” I showed that a remarkable series of coincidences would seem to prove that the Ancren Riwle was written for the three “puellae” (Emma, Christina, and Gunhilda), to whom the hermitage of Kilburn, together with land and three corrodies, was granted by the abbot and convent of Westminster c. 1134. Their house was described in the foundation charter as “heremitorium de Cuneburna, quod aedificavit Godwynus,” and it was given to the three young women “concessu tamen, atque precatu illius Godwyni heremitae, quatinus eundem locum qui ad ilium pertinet in elemosina pro redemptione animarum totius praedicti conventus fratrum possideant.” The gift was made, not only to the three maidens in question, but “omnibus illis quae inibi eadem sanctitatis vitae norma fruendi causa futurae sunt.” Godwin, who had evidently instigated the establishment, was to oversee it: “Sit ille praescriptus heremita Godwynus, magister loci, illarumque puellarum quamdiu vixerit custos. Et post ejus obitum eligat conventus puellarum seniorem ydoneum, qui earum ecclesiae praesit, abbatis tamen concilio.” Some further information as to the nucleus of Kilburn Priory is given us by Prior Flete of Westminster in the fifteenth century. He writes of Abbot Herebert: “Iste fundavit cellam canonissarum de Kilborn, ubi prius quidam nomine Godwinus heremiticam multo tempore ducebat vitam. . . . statuit tres virgines Deo sacratas, domicellas videlicet camerae Matildis bonae reginae, consortis regis Henrici primi.”

When Christopher Hunt took it upon himself, in 1593, to publish the first five “songs” of Godfrey of Bulloigne or the Recoverie of Hierusalem . . . . translated into English by R.C. Esquire (that is, of course, Richard Carew), he reprinted on facing pages the first five cantos of the Italian original. “Thereby,” says Hunt in his prefatory address, “the learned reader shall see to how strict a course the translator hath tyed himselfe in the whole worke, usurping as little liberty as any whatsoever, that ever wrote with any commendation.”

The suggestion which this paper has to make will remain only a suggestion when the argument is complete. Perhaps I should disarm criticism in advance by admitting that the plausibility of my final and boldest point consists partly in its seductiveness. I should, in short, like to persuade the reader that the character of Belphoebe in The Faerie Queene owes something not only to the Venus of the Æneid but also to the allegorical interpretations of the Virgilian Venus which Spenser inherited from Italy.

Three times in Canto X of the First Book of the Faerie Queene the ‘godly aged Sire’ impresses upon Red Crosse the fact of his earthly, rather than elfin, lineage.

In spite of the fact that Spenser, less than three years befor his death, published An Hymne of Heavenly Beautie and An Hymne of Heavenly Love, which show a mixture of strongly Christian elements with Platonic idealism, there has been a tendency of late to classify Spenser as pre-eminently pagan, or even atheistic. A moderate view is that of Denis Saurat, who, in his “Les idées philosophiques de Spenser,” concludes that religion was necessary to Spenser's temperament but impossible to his intellect. He credits Spenser with no systematic cosmogony or reasoned agnosticism; and, though he quotes Professor Greenlaw on Spenser's interest in contemporary scientific thought, he does not seem inclined to rate it so highly. Spenser, as Saurat depicts him, is by temperament a pagan: though he has a sincere desire for religious faith, he has at the same time an intellectual inability to believe.

Critics have frequently remarked upon the Ovidian eroticism which Marlowe introduces into his poem, and which is quite lacking in the sober Greek original. A few particular parallels have been noted between Hero and Leander and Marlowe's earlier translation of Ovid's Amores, and this article collects some more. As the two works are commonly placed at the beginning and end of Marlowe's career, the close verbal resemblances suggest that he had a good memory or was rereading his translation when writing Hero and Leander.

It was in 1905 that Mr. Evald Ljunggren, Librarian of Lund University, collated the newly discovered copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus with the quarto of 1600, and published his list of variant readings. Forty-seven of his readings involved more than mere variations in spelling and punctuation, and, of these, fifteen had been anticipated by the ingenuity of earlier scholars. One variant was a misprint, and thirty-one offered material for the consideration of the textual critic. But although these readings have been available to the scholarly world for a quarter of a century, editors have shown a marked hesitancy in introducing them into the traditional text of the play. The Neilson text, published the following year, incorporates only four, although twenty-two are listed in the notes. In the Tudor edition of 1913 Professor Elmer E. Stoll adopted as many as twenty-one, and in his notes included five others. But in the Yale Shakespeare issued in 1926, Mr. A. M. Witherspoon accepts none of the recovered variants, and in his notes leaves twenty-seven unmentioned. Basing his text almost entirely upon the First Folio, Mr. Witherspoon, I take it, assumes either that the editors of one or more of the editions following the first quarto had had access to the original Shakespearean manuscript or Shakespearean annotations, or else that Shakespeare himself did the revising.

The parish of St. Giles without Cripplegate is a most important one in the history of the early English drama. Within its confines and some five minutes walk to the north of the parish church stood the Fortune theatre, whose ancient site is still marked by the Playhouse Yard running between Golden Lane and White-cross Street. There are Elizabethan aspects to the parish still. One cannot elbow his way through the grimy crowds of White-cross Street Market and hear the occasional “Buy, buy, buy!” and the commoner “They're love-ly! They're love-ly!” and watch the haggling over fish and peepshows and lace and panaceas without thinking of earlier days.

It is well known that the performance in August, 1624 of Thomas Middleton's allegorical play A Game at Chesse, dealing with the Spanish marriage, caused a furore in London theatrical circles, and that the king (then on a progress), learning of it through the Spanish ambassador, ordered its suppression. No attempt, however, has been made to collect the references which this public satire would naturally occasion in the news-letters and private correspondence of the day. Of the allusions given below from these sources, five (nos. 1, 5, 8, 13, 14) have not been noticed before by students of the drama and two (nos. 3, 7), although previously known, are given accurately for the first time. Nos. 2, 6, 9-12, although they have already been correctly printed, are here summarized (within brackets) for the convenience of the reader and included in the series, in proper chronological sequence.

Fleay's suggestion that Look About You, acted by the Admiral's Men at the Rose, was written in 1599, April 17—May 26, must be rejected. He advances but two plausible arguments: (1) the title-page (1600) states that the play was “lately” acted; (2) Wadeson's comedy of The Honourable Life of the Humorous Earl of Gloucester (1601)—possibly but not necessarily a sequel to Look About You—would seem to indicate a date of 1599 or 1600 for the latter play. But “lately acted” on a title-page means little; and even if in this case it was correctly used, it may indicate only a revival of the play. Fleay's opinion must be discounted on much weightier evidence.

“If fielding had superior taste,” declared Sir Walter Scott, “the palm of more brilliancy of genius, more inexhaustible riches of invention, must in justice be awarded to Smollett. In comparison with his sphere, that in which Fielding walked was limited; and compared with the wealthy profusion of varied character and incident which Smollett has scattered through his works, there is a poverty of composition about his rival. . . . It is chiefly in his profusion, which amounts almost to prodigality, that we recognize the superior richness of Smollett's fancy. He never shows the least desire to make the most either of a character, or a situation, or an adventure, but throws them together with a carelessness which argues unlimited confidence in his own powers.” Few critical verdicts have been received with more general dissent. Apart from what most readers feel to be the injustice done to Fielding, the affirmations respecting Smollett have not gone unchallenged. Thackeray, although perhaps without having Scott in mind, has expressed an opinion almost diametrically opposite:

His [Smollett's] novels are recollections of his own adventures, his characters drawn, as I should think, from personages with whom he became acquainted in his own career of life. Strange companions he must have had; queer acquaintances he made in the Glasgow college, in the country apothecary's shop, in the gun-room of the man-of-war where he served as a surgeon, and in the hard life on shore where the sturdy adventurer struggled for fortune. He did not invent much, as I fancy, but had the keenest perceptive faculty, and described what he saw with wonderful relish and delightful broad humor.

The chief difficulty in tracing the origin of the secular drama in Germany is the lack of texts to prove the performance of other than religious plays. Nevertheless a sufficient number of secular texts have been brought to light to contradict the old belief that expansion of the comic scenes in the religious dramas resulted in the early Carnival play. M. J. Rudwin, in his notable study, proved the Carnival play to have been “the natural outgrowth of the Carnival customs themselves.” Modern historians of literature agree with him on this point but discuss the development of the Fastnachtspiel in Nuremberg no further than to declare its origin to have been in the most important masque of the time, the Schembartlauf. Yet in the recent special work on the history of the German drama, Das deutsche Drama, F. Michael disclaims any immediate connection between the Schembartlauf and the plays. Up to the present no detailed examination of the manuscripts in which the Schembartlauf was recorded, the so-called Schembartbücher, has appeared. It will be of advantage to study the actual content of the manuscripts in order to estimate their importance for the history of German literature. Conclusions may then be drawn as to the possible relation of the Schembartlauf to the Fastnachtspiele.

Concerning Ludwig Tieck's relations to Americans, Köpke, in his biography of Tieck, merely says: “Von Nordamerikanern lernte er [sc. Tieck] den Theologen Robinson und den Literarhistoriker Ticknor kennen.” Viewed in the light of other sources, however, the relations of Tieck to George Ticknor, the American historian and student of literature, deserve more than this passing comment and indeed form an interesting chapter in the history of German-American literary contacts.

Georg Büchner, poet and scientist, was born at Goddelau in the vicinity of Darmstadt, October 17, 1813. Not long afterwards the family moved to Darmstadt; this accounts for the fact that Darmstadt is frequently spoken of as Georg Büchner's native city. He studied the natural sciences, later also philosophy, at Strassburg and Giessen. While a student at Giessen he became involved in secret revolutionary activities, as a result of which, and particularly as a result of his connection with the composition, publication, and secret distribution of the inflammatory pamphlet, The Hessian Courier, he was forced to flee in March, 1835, to Strassburg. Henceforth he kept himself aloof from political and seditious machinations and devoted himself exclusively to scientific and philosophical studies and to literary work. For his achievements in science and philosophy the University of Zürich granted him the doctorate, and he began giving lectures there on comparative anatomy in October, 1836. He died of typhoid, February 19, 1837, just four months after his removal to Zürich, at the age of twenty-three years and six months, honored and lamented by his colleagues and students, upon whom he had made an unusually deep impression.

The appearance in 1889 of a drama like Vor Sonnenaufgang as the work of a young genius, practically unknown, was startling. Though it would not be quite accurate to speak of it as the first drama written by Hauptmann, nothing was known of his earlier dramatic efforts. His lyrical works fared better. Both Promethidenloos and Das Bunte Buch had actually reached the public and are still treasured by their fortunate owners. Fasching and Bahnwärter Thiel had also appeared before 1889, as well as two short articles, almost unknown to-day—a review of Hermann Conradi's Lieder eines Sünders and an essay Gedanken über das Bemalen der Statuen.

Poesie und Prosa sind derart aufeinander angewiesen, dass sie sich zwar zeitweise voneinander entfernen und, wie zwei Arme eines Flusses, das Wasser sich abgraben können, dann aber immer wieder in Vereinigungen und neuen Verflechtungen sich gegenseitig stärken.

Deuten Rilkes Werke, da seiner Persönlichkeit entsprechend, aus ihr sprechend, sie aussprechend, im Zusammenhang, auf sein Wesen und seine Entwicklung hin, so kann der Cornet am ehesten gesondert, als “Dichtung an sich” verstanden werden. Diese schon 1899 geschriebene Weise mag, wie Heygrodt2 vermutet, nicht lange vor ihrem Ersterscheinen, 1906, als Rilke sein Buch der Bilder schrieb, endgiltige Gestalt erfahren haben. Friedrich von Oppeln-Bronikowski hat in seiner (damals fördernden) Arbeit3 auf den Cornet, da er im nämlichen Jahre erschien, wohl nicht mehr einzugehen vermocht. Fritz Strich aber, der den Weg des Gottsuchers und—künders darstellt, hat dieses am meisten entpersönlichten Werks am ehesten entraten zu können geglaubt.4 Vielleicht auch schenkte er ihm keine Beachtung, weil ihm der Rilke der Neuen Gedichte, Anderer Teil und des Buchs der Bilder am fernsten steht. Stellt er doch den “russischen” Rilke, der durch Tolstoi sein Selbst gefunden, als Typus dem “westlichen” George gegenüber, glaubt er doch, erst in den Sonetten an Orpheus und in den Duineser Elegien sei die Gefahr des Aesthetizismus überwunden.