In Contrast to the apologetic and ambiguous prologue of the Libro de buen amor, that preceding the Lazarillo de Tormes shocks us with its forthright arrogance: “Yo por bien tengo que cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas vengan a noticia de muchos y no se entierren en la sepultura del olvido.” The evasive ego of Juan Ruiz—an ego which, as Alfonso Reyes notes, is comic by mediaeval definition and slips with childish glee into one role after another—has been replaced by an explosion of self: “Yo por bien tengo …” The “soy quien soy” of the hero-braggarts of the “comedia” seems to have been combined with the autobiographical complacency of an Alonso de Contreras or a Pedro de Baeza. The result is that the reader, as soon as he becomes aware of the insignificance of the events so pompously announced, tends to read the prologue as a parody. If Lazarillo is an anti-hero, the prologue is appropriately an anti-prologue. The oral bombast of “cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas” sounds almost as if it were designed to hawk the “pliegos sueltos” of a “romance.” Prologues are by definition self-conscious, but in this one self-consciousness is driven to self-caricature.

A marianne moore poem must be walked round slowly—parts picked up, handled, mused on, laid back—then the whole thing walked round again—and again. The reader may give up on a particular poem, deciding that for the present he cannot decipher it. But the disjecta membra will not give him up so readily. Jigsaw puzzles exasperate some. Half-submerged in consciousness, however, these pieces from Miss Moore's poems breed connecting links.

The story of Sigebryht, Cynewulf, and Cyneheard—the entry in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle for 755—is frequently cited as a unique and dramatic specimen of the pre-Alfredian Chronicle. Historians as well as English language scholars have attested the value of the passage, and it has been used to illustrate the pre-feudal heroic ideal. Unified and rather detailed, the entry is an account of political strife. Events spanning twenty-nine years are condensed into a short narrative, and the author's conciseness is complicated by an involved pronomial reference not uncommon in Anglo-Saxon literature. Primarily because of the difficulty with pronouns, the translation of the text and the discernment of its larger meanings have been points of continuing debate.

Durante la Edad Media y sobre todo en los primeros siglos, en las palabras de Pablo Luis Landsberg: “La fe en el orden preestablecido de la historia y en su forma eterna y limitada, originó, pues, para la conciencia medieval, la inclusión de la historia, por modo profundo, dentro de la gran realidad eterna. La historia fué considerada no en los accidentes del acontecer exterior sino en la necesidad de la esencia interior. No se buscaba la comprobación de los hechos ‘tal y como habían sido realmente’ (Ranke) sino que, en lo acontecido, buscábase lo eterno. El historiador de la Edad Media es el escritor de leyendas, que manifiesta en historias, acaso ‘falsas,‘ la esencia de las personas y los acontecimientos.”

Widsith is the only Old English poem concerned exclusively with a scop and Deor the only one specifically attributed to a scop. In both a scop is represented as speaking, and in each he tells something of what had befallen him—Widsith, the far-wandering and richly rewarded scop, and Deor, the court scop who had lost his long-held and lucrative post to a rival. These poems are therefore similar and also the only ones which give us a first-person account of a scop's career. It is usually for the sake of the information thus provided that the poems are discussed together. This information is precious little, however, and some of it is dubious.

With the recent publication of such books as Richard Southern's The Medieval Theatre in the Round (London, 1957) and Glynne Wickham's Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, Vol. i (London, 1959), the medieval English drama has come to be examined with much greater emphasis on the circumstances of its performance. While the Wakefield cycle has not been of focal interest to these studies, it has nevertheless attracted renewed attention as a dramatic work. Of special concern to students of the Wakefield plays is Martial Rose's introduction to his recently published modernized edition of the cycle. Mr. Rose sets forth the interesting theory that the Wakefield plays were not enacted processionally on pageant wagons as is generally believed, but rather that they were performed “in one fixed locality, on a multiple stage, and in the round.” This hypothesis, supported as it is by a very convincing body of arguments, is likely to have a far-reaching effect on Wakefield criticism. At the very least, it chalenges a number of widely-held opinions concerning the dramatic experience which the performance of the cycle provided. As a case in point, I should like here to focus on the Annunciation pageant and to demonstrate that, in an enlarged setting, its dramatic action becomes even more successful than it has hitherto been regarded. First, however, it will be necessary to review the “fixed-stage” theory and to examine its bearing on Wakefield criticism in general.

I commenti e i saggi sui molteplici passi ed episodi che nell'Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto occupano un posto di primo piano nell'economia del poema e che, più importante, rappresentano un aspetto rilevantissimo della civiltà medioevale e rinascimentale, la cavalleria, sono praticamente tutti informati all'ammirazione per le gesta grandiose, le imprese eroiche, gli atti di coraggio, la forza eccezzionale e la superiore abilità nel maneggio delle armi dei cavalieri. Ma questo non può essere che un criterio di giudizio superficiale in vista dell'importanza storico-culturale dell'istituzione cavalleresca e dei differenti modi di manifestarsi del suo spirito nel corso della storia.

In his What Happens in Hamlet, J. D. Wilson studies Hamlet's melancholy in the light of Renaissance beliefs, and especially those indicated in Bright's Treatise of Melancholie, to which Shakespeare seems to have been indebted for a number of ideas as well as turns of phrase. Significantly, as Wilson shows, the melancholy man was not only “prone to spectral visitations,” but was also aggravated in his condition by thwarted ambition; further, he “ponders and debates long, and does not act until his blood is up: then acts vigorously.” We can reasonably agree with this author that a knowledge of the contemporary corpus of doctrines and beliefs is important for an understanding of Hamlet's character and motivation, in which the thread of melancholy evidently connects several important elements. In the Introduction to his edition of Shakespeare's play, Wilson mentions another source for a melancholy Hamlet: the Histoires tragiques of François de Belleferest, which is recognized as the most immediate extant source of the play. Belleferest does, says Wilson, make a “definite reference to Amleth's [Hamlet's] over-great melancholy,” following a hint already to be found in the version of Saxo Grammaticus (Belleforest's source); but Wilson does no more than call attention to the reference, without noting Belleforest's additional remarks on the subject, and specifically denying to either source any other contributions to Hamlet's character. It will be the purpose of this article to show that not only the melancholy complex, but also other important facets of Hamlet's character have a probable basis in Saxo and Belleferest, and especially in the latter.

God is now conceived of as something outside man and man's handiwork, and it follows that it must be idolatry to worship that which Phidias and Scopas made … Night will fall upon man's wisdom now that man has been taught that he is nothing. He had discovered, or half-discovered, that the world is round and one of many like it, but now he must believe that the sky is but a tent spread above a level floor, and that he may be stirred into a frenzy of anxiety and so to moral transformation, blot out the knowledge or half-knowledge that he has lived many times, and think that all eternity depends upon a moment's decision.—Yeats, A Vision

Gellert beendet den ersten Teil seines Romans mit der Rückkehr des totgeglaubten Grafen von G. aus sibirischer Gefangenschaft. Das zufällige und glückliche Wiedersehen des Grafen mit seiner Gemahlin ruft jedoch einige “Bestürzung” hervor, denn die Gräfin hatte sich inzwischen mit dem Herrn R., dem besten Freund des Grafen, vermählt. Herr R. fühlt sich deshalb genötigt, dem zurückgekehrten Freund folgendes Bekenntnis zu machen: “Ich habe Sie durch die unschuldigste Liebe so sehr beleidigt, als ob ich Ihr Feind gewesen wäre. Ich habe Ihnen Ihre Gemahlin entzogen … Ihre Gegenwart aber verdammt nunmehr das sonst so tugendhafte Band.” Die Gräfin von G., nicht weniger bekümmert und verstört, eröffnet den zweiten Teil ihrer Lebensgeschichte mit einer ähnlich selbstquälerischen Reflexion: “und eben zu der Zeit, da er mich so brünstig geliebt und alles für mich gefühlt hat, was nur sein Elend hat vergrößern können, habe ich in den Armen eines andern Gemahls der Freuden der Liebe und des Lebens genossen. Wie viel tausend Thränen hat mich dieser Gedanke schon gekostet, und wie oft bin ich vor meiner unschuldigen Liebe zu dem Herrn R. als vor einem Verbrechen erröthet” (iv, 256 f.).

Just as Defoe had maintained that the novel could surpass the pulpit in encouraging morality, so Richardson explicitly declared his intention of making Clarissa nothing less than an instrument of reviving the Christian religion:

The english Romantics had a special affinity for metaphors and similes of inner eyes, inner ears, and inner senses. These ancient and commonplace figures are widely pervasive and often conspicuously prominent in the literature of the period, appearing under myriad modifications and serving a wide variety of functions. Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Keats used them in some of the most familiar and pivotal passages in their works, apparently seeking to charge them with new meaning. In fact, these figures are so prominent in Romantic literature that they must have been found serviceable to some particularly urgent expressive need of the time. I believe it was the Romantics' intense preoccupation with psychological theory, and the particular types of psychological theory they wished to support and oppose, which led them to explore and exploit afresh the possibilities of inner-sense figures.

Certain Aspects of modern critical theory can be defined in terms of its use—or rather, misuse—of Aristotle's Poetics, especially of Aristotle's conception of plot and his statement that poetry deals with universals rather than particulars. The same, of course, can be said of other periods as well. Sidney's view of Aristotle, for example, was confined to the notion that a poem was an imitation of an action, but he platonized even this conception by claiming that the action imitated was an ideal one—what ought to be rather than what is—and this, as we shall see, became quite a common distortion of the famous passage at the beginning of the ninth chapter of the Poetics. The other side of the coin is found in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries' concern with the genres and the unities and their supposed rules. It cannot be said that Aristotle has been a vital influence on literary criticism since the nineteenth century, except for the current minority report being filed by the Chicago Critics, but these two aspects of the Poetics nevertheless offered a support and a challenge to certain nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics for clarifying their own ideas about poetry.

In moby-dick, Melville alluded to various eastern religions in addition to Christianity. Scholars noticing these allusions have tended to group without much discrimination Zoroastrianism (the fire worship of the Persians), Manicheism (belief in a universal duality of good and evil as coeternal principles), Hindu myths (such as that of Vishnu in Chapter lxxxii of Moby-Dick), and, less frequently, Gnosticism (without indicating how the particular doctrines apply to the novel). In proposing to treat chiefly of Gnostic influences on Moby-Dick, I shall contend that Melville applied Gnostic myths and doctrines more specifically and consistently than has been recognized, that he carefully distinguished between Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, and that certain passages in Moby-Dick require familiarity with the Gnostic mythos to be understood. But only when discussing the most obscure of these passages would I claim that the Gnostics alone were in Melville's mind. No influence on his great book was exclusive. In proving the influence of Gnostic thought upon it, I have no wish to minimize the importance of, let us say, Zoroaster, Milton, or the Hindus. Thus in demonstrating one eastern religion's influence upon Melville, it is not my intention to unseat another's.

We are lucky to have in Forster's admirable life of Dickens what Forster himself calls the “germ” of Great Expectations. Forster reports that in 1860 Dickens announced in a letter, “For a little piece I have been writing—or am writing; for I hope to finish it to-day—such a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me, that I begin to doubt whether I had not better cancel the little paper, and reserve the notion for a new book. You shall judge as soon as I get it printed. But it so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.” “This,” Forster adds, “was the germ of Pip and Magwitch,” and a marginal gloss declares, “Germ of new tale.”

In a review-article dealing with four recent monographs, all of which were to some extent devoted to problems connected with the genesis of Zola's novels, M. Jean Onimus points out that it is hard to think of another author in whom such problems can be more satisfactorily studied. The survival of the dossiers of each of the novels in the three great cycles makes it possible to elucidate almost the entire process of composition in respect of each component work and hence to generalize about this process with considerably more assurance than is permissible to the student of any other major French novelist. “Ce que nous cherchons avec tant de difficulté chez Balzac, ce que Stendhal nous livre au hasard de ses ‘pilotis’ et des commentaires en marge de ses manuscrits, ce que Gide nous a donné dans le Journal des Faux-Monnayeurs, Zola nous le révèle pour toutes ses œuvres et jusque dans le dernier détail.”

This streamlined tale, which Flaubert claims to have composed as a relaxing exercise, but which he himself termed “effervescent,” is in fact, in its very craftsmanlike perfection, one of his most turbulent texts. Cruelty, spirituality, pathology—the most disturbing aspects of his temperament as well as the most paradoxical interplay of themes make of this reworking of a minor saint's legend one of Flaubert's most “personal” works. No text of Flaubert's appears on the surface more impassive and more liberated from any element that is not under the strictest esthetic control. The aloofness of an almost inhuman hero, the historical and mythic distance, the utilization of an already existing legend, the display of quaint erudition—all suggest a totally impersonal relation between the author and his literary material.

Eliot's statement in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” that poetry is “an escape from personality” seems to support the widely held belief that his theory of poetry is impersonal. Cleanth Brooks, for example, cites this passage and remarks that Eliot asserts, “with almost shocking emphasis,” that the poem does not express personality. On the other hand, a number of writers on Eliot have argued that his theory involves personal expression, basing their arguments on statements in which Eliot recommends or praises the poet's revelation of self. The evidence, I believe, clearly supports this interpretation, or more precisely, the interpretation that Eliot's theory is one of indirect personal expression. My purpose is to analyze Eliot's theory, to examine how the poem, in Eliot's view, expresses personality, and how this expression affects his standard of esthetic value.