Some four years ago I was set the task of tracing the origin of two Dutch plays on Julius Cæsar which up to that time had received no critical attention. The examination of the dramatic treatment of Cæsar in various ages and literatures involved in the solution of this problem led me to the belief that we possessed a body of plays on this subject which might be made to yield some little light on Shakespeare's treatment of the character. His after all is only one of many. Cæsar has to the succeeding generations of men been everything from Satyr to Hyperion: from the “divus Julius” of Valerius Maximus to the arch-destroyer and brilliant opportunist of Professor Ferrero; from the execrated oppressor of Roman liberties of Lucan to the demi-god of Mommsen; from the perfect knight of Jehan de Tuin to the silly tyrant of Hans Sachs; and finally Dante's desperate resort to the last refuge of embarrassed compliment—“ What fine eyes he has;” almost every view, in short, has been held of him except that he was an inconsiderable or negligible person. A priori, then, the conjunction of great subject and great poet in the case of Shakespeare was auspicious, but the result, from Ben Jonson to Mr. Bernard Shaw, has seldom passed unchallenged. It is not, however, with what Shakespeare might have made of Cæsar, and has not, that I am here concerned; but rather with the attempt to explain, if it is possible, how he came to make of him what he did. At the risk, then, of saying some fairly trite things, I propose to examine Shakespeare's treatment of the character of Cæsar as it appears in his immediate source, Plutarch, with a view to showing at what points other dramatic treatments of the character serve, in my opinion at least, to explain Shakespeare's.

In the Publications of the Modern Language Association for March, 1909, I tried to show reason for believing that Chaucer's Legend of Medea was written later than the Man of Law's Prologue, and that hence the date of its composition must fall some time after 1390, when the poet was already engaged on the Canterbury Tales. In the following number of the same journal Professor G. L. Kittredge replied to my paper with a thorough-going denial. Professor Kittredge's name rightly carries with it so great an authority,—particularly in matters pertaining to Chaucer,—that, if I am still to maintain my position, I must consider his objections and show why I cannot hold them valid. Whatever may be the final verdict of scholars as to the date of Medea, the issue involves so many questions which throw light on Chaucer's methods of work that a full discussion of it cannot be without profit.

Modernity has taught us, with some reason, to laugh at pastorals. Nevertheless there is deep humanity in those artificial songs of shepherds and shepherdesses. With the frigid pipings of Thyrsis and Corydon we are indeed out of tune. Since, however, the pastoral fascinated Theocritus, Virgil, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Spenser, who wrote for ail time, we ought to approach the outworn form in a spirit of serious sympathy. Even proud idealists sometimes waver. Poetry must furnish, at times, an escape from life—not always the clarion call to life's struggles. Men took the pastoral in order to flee for a moment into Arcadia, to clothe in pleasant vagueness confessions of the delightful miseries of calf-love, though strife stole too often even into Arcadia and goaded the shepherds into worldly bickerings. We have the same aspirations to-day as those poets when they wrote their pastorals,—moods that are not mere toys; but because hope is edged with doubt, we trifle with our dreams in ways no less artificial than the pleasant game of pastoral-making. We have not outgrown the pastoralist's moods.

The sources of the allegorical religious trilogy of the Cistercian monk and prior, Guillaume de Deguileville, have not been thoroughly investigated until comparatively recent years. In 1896, Tobler, reporting on Stürzinger's edition of the Pèlerinage de Vie Humaine, stated that Deguileville's characteristics as a poet must be compared to those of Jean de Meun and Daute, and that Deguileville's powers of description did not approach those of Dante. Gröber gives it as his opinion that Deguileville's trilogy was composed without any knowledge of the Divina Commedia, though there are analogies between the two. He cites St. Bernard, Aristotle, the Book of Daniel, the Apocalypse, Dionysius Areopagita, and ms. illustrations, as sources of certain features of Ame. J. E. Hultman, in an excellent study of the poet's life and works, brings to light the sources of a large part of the three poems. His is the first serious attempt to discover the literary antecedents of Deguileville, and is a thorough, though inevitably not an exhaustive, treatment of the subject. Farinelli points out additional analogies between Dante and Deguileville, at the same time denying the possibility of any direct influence.

Some fifteen years ago the prevailing theory as to the origin of mediæval plays concerning the Passion was authoritatively expressed in these words:

Professor Herford divides the Volksbücher of Fortunatas into the Frankfurt and the Augsburg groups. The Augsburg editions, he points out, have ungermanized names and slightly more copious incident. He says further: “All the known editions of the Volksbuch contain substantially the same story. From the first German edition, published at Augsburg in 1509, and its numerous German successors, to the Dutch, English, and Danish versions of the seventeenth century, the story everywhere unfolds itself in the same elaborate disorder, varying only in quantity of descriptive detail, or at most, in the omission or inclusion of some trifling episode.” With this conclusion Harms agrees; and I have found no reason to dispute this classification, and can only emphasize the trifling nature of the differences of the two groups and the extremely close agreement of texts within the same group. I make this statement after examining all the editions of the Volksbuch available in the Royal Library at Berlin, such additional ones as were obtainable through the aid of the Auskunftsbureau der deutschen Bibliotheken (which has the coöperation of three hundred German libraries), the British Museum, and the following libraries at Paris: the Library of the Sorbonne, the Bibliothèque Nationale, the Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, and the Bibliothèque de St. Geneviève. I found, however, one version in prose narrative form which presents a very free and clumsy adaptation of the conventional material of the Volksbuch, namely, Fortunatus mit seinem Seckel und Wunschhütlein, eine alte Geschichte für neue Zeiten, Frankfurt und Leipzig, 1787 (British Museum). The variations from the type found here do not correspond to those in Uhland's work. We must seek some other free adaptation of the conventional form, if we would find a source for Uhland's changes.