The political purpose of Gorboduc, which was first noticed by Leonard H. Courtney, has been elaborated by Professor H. A. Watt in his dissertation, Gorboduc: or, Ferrex and Porrex. The two authors wrote the play rather from the point of view of legal advisers than from that of students. It served as a tactful approach to Queen Elizabeth on the question of the limitation of the succession which would necessitate her marrying. Professor Watt, in his discussion, cites numerous pages from Sackville's portion of the play, but he does not discuss the political significance of Norton's portion, although Norton is believed to have been chairman of the committee appointed to wait upon Elizabeth to present the petition of parliament for limitation of the succession. Norton's “personal interest in the question,” as Watt remarks, “has been well established.” One might reasonably expect, therefore, to find references to the political lesson which the tragedy was to convey to the Queen in the portion of Gorboduc written by Norton. It is the purpose of this paper to examine particularly, with this in view, Norton's part of the text of Gorboduc.

Students of Elizabethan drama know that the provincial roots and byways thereof have not yet been fully explored. Such scholars as Murray and Chambers have, to be sure, produced admirable chronological sketch-maps of the companies' tours, but other things remain to be done. It will be generally agreed, I think, that something may yet be gained by studying, jointly or severally, but in any case more closely than has yet been done, the implications of some of the many plays which demonstrably reflect—in story, theme, background, or incidental allusion—their provincial origins or associations. In undertaking this general study for another purpose I have been attracted especially to certain of these plays which afford tangible clues, such as local names or allusions, apparently justifying further research. Here, specifically, I wish to present my findings concerning one case in point—the pleasant comedy of Faire Em as a “country play.” It will serve my purpose to recall, first, the relatively familiar facts about the play.

The text of David and Bethsabe, as editors of Peele have long been aware, presents a series of perplexing problems: several passages in the play are directly contradictory, the movements and speeches of certain characters in Scene ix are quite unexplainable by any rules of drama or logic, one of the choruses holds out a promise, which is not fulfilled, of presenting David's death, and within the text occurs a misplaced fragment of a lost scene. Dyce, Manly, and Greg have commented on these discrepancies in the play, and the students of Peele have recognized the cruces involved. Yet in spite of the suggestions of P. A. Daniel and Professor Manly and the detailed studies of Dr. Dannenberg and Dr. Neitzel, no satisfactory solution of the difficulties in the quarto text has been found.

It is, or at least it ought to be, illuminating to discover the attitude of a worker in any of the arts toward the other media of artistic expression. It seems curious therefore that, although it has been thought worth while to investigate Shakespeare's acquaintance with the law, his interest in medicine and in flower gardening, no one has been much concerned about his knowledge of pictures. Upon Shakespeare and music some one writes an article almost once a month but upon Shakespeare and the fine arts we have little beside the brief chapters in Shakespeare's England, a page or two in Prof. J. M. Manly's article on “Shapespeare Himself,” and Mr. Sidney Colvin's discussion of “The Sack of Troy in Shakespeare's Lucrece and in Some Fifteenth Century Drawings and Tapestries.”

Mr. Ray Heffner's article, “Shakespeare, Hayward, and Essex,” is confused and at times self-contradictory; but the main points which he attempts to maintain against my paper, “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” seem to be these:

1. That the play, founded on Hayward's history of Henry IV, which Essex is said, in Item 5 of the “Analytical abstract of the evidence in support of the charge of treason against the Earl of Essex,” to have witnessed, could not have been the play on the deposition of Richard II which the Essex conspirators are known to have attended in a group on February 7, 1601, the day before the rebellion; and that the performances referred to in this Abstract were not of a play by Shakespeare, nor acted by his company, but of an unknown play, performed perhaps by Essex's own actors at his house on some unknown occasion, which Mr. Heffner dates first as necessarily “after February, 1599,” later, as “in February, 1599,” and, in conclusion, as “in January, 1599.”

In the familiar oration of Prince Hal over the body of the slain Percy occur the lines:

“Favours” in this passage is usually glossed as a scarf or riband, perhaps a glove. The lines are taken to imply a stage direction of some sort. It would seem, however, that Shakespeare here intended more than a conventional chivalric gesture on the part of the regenerate Prince. From a chain of textual evidence it is demonstrable that the playwright had in mind for his climax a far more dramatic, more tacitly ironic move—Hal's disengaging his royal plumes (the “budding honours” of his own helmet) to shroud the face of his dead rival. In three earlier passages the quarto text supports this interpretation.

Othello is a domestic tragedy of the English Renaissance—Renaissance in its source as well as in the dramatist's conception, and therefore a reflection of Renaissance concepts of marriage, infidelity, and personal honor; and, from this background, the present paper proposes to interpret the character of Iago. Since Rymer's day, Iago has been cursorily dismissed as a villain of the deepest dye: so thought Johnson, Lord Kames, and Twining in the eighteenth century; so thought Coleridge, Mrs. Jamieson, Clarke, Campbell, Dowden, Swinburne, Hudson, and George Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth; so, Herford, Canning, Bradley, Stoll, and Miss Winstanley in the twentieth. In general agreement are Schlegel, Ulrici, Bodenstedt, von Friesen, Bulthaupt, Brandi, and Schücking in Germany; and Guizot, de Vigny, Hugo, and Taine in France. One difficulty, however, with such an attitude is that it proves too much; and many of its proponents, Swinburne, Hudson, Herford, and Schücking, for example, find that it takes Iago quite out of human reality. As Herford remarks, Shakespeare has deepened and given verisimilitude to most of the figures in Cinthio's novel; but, in Iago, he “deliberately set aside what was normal and plausible in his prototype.” Is Iago, then, the great exception to Shakespeare's supreme dramatic reality? The critics, moreover, who impute to the dramatist so extra-human a creation must either explain how an Elizabethan audience could have understood it, or else put Iago, as would Professor Stoll, into the class of mere dramatic conventions, pious frauds of stagecraft easily recognized and understood by the audience, but without counterpart in contemporary life. The present study escapes both horns of this dilemma by denying the initial premise and contending that the character of Iago and all his major acts are woven of the very warp and woof of Elizabethan conditions and ideals.

In an article published elsewhere I have explained my method of verse-sentence analysis and have presented in tabular form its application to a considerable number of English poems, ranging in time from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Browning's My last Duchess. In that article I pointed out that by the use of this method it was possible to trace the evolution of Shakespeare's style in the interweaving of line and sentence. In his early plays there is a high degree of parallelism between the line and the grammatical units of the sentence; in the late plays there is a marked tendency toward divergence between line and sentence.

Literary historians are practically agreed as to the origin of the two elements which comprise the main plot of Ben Jonson's Epicorne. The story of a man induced by false pretences to marry an almost insanely loquacious woman is a version of a declamation by the Greek Sophist Libanius on the surly man who has married a talkative wife. In regard to this relationship there can be no question. The second, and more important, element of the main plot is the practical joke played upon an eccentric which results in his ostensible marriage to a boy disguised as a girl. The source of this story, the most authoritative German critics and Dr. Henry agree, is to be found in Plautus's Casina, in which a somewhat similar trick is played upon Lysidamus. To this opinion Herford and Simpson, the editors of the definitive edition of Jonson's works, add their endorsement:

When Francis Bacon set down, in the fragment called the New Atlantis, his conception of a commonwealth as it ought to be, he was following a precedent of honorable antiquity. As we should expect, he shows obvious indebtedness to Plato's Republic, Timœus, and Critias and to More's Utopia; but the fact that the latest of these was a century old when Bacon began to write gave him scope for considerable originality in creating a “perfect state” adapted to the thought of his own times. His notes and writings over a period of years show that many of the theories and projects that took form in the New Atlantis had long been in his mind. By 1608 he had perceived the importance to science of coöperation in research, had seen the suitability of a collegiate organization as an agency for carrying on scientific investigation, and had jotted down specific details of plans, problems, and equipment which show that his mind was occupied with the practical aspects of his ideal. Although the opportunity to establish a college of research in an English university never came to Bacon, the concept of such an institution persisted until it became the soul of his Utopia—Salomon's House, or the College of the Six Days' Work, credited with having inspired the founding of the Royal Society.

The Revenger's Tragedy was long regarded as the work of Cyril Tourneur, but in recent years scholars have vigorously denied his authorship. Though this discussion has demonstrated the weakness of the case for Tourneur, it has not thus far resulted in establishing general agreement as to the true author of the play.

The Drinking Academy, A Play by Thomas Randolph, edited by Dr. Samuel A. Tannenbaum and me and published by the Harvard University Press in June, 1930, was noticed at length in The Review of English Studies for October by Professor G. C. Moore Smith. He rejects Randolph's authorship and advances the claim of Robert Baron. “The present writer expressed the view,” he asserts, “that if the manuscript was, as alleged, in the handwriting of its author, the play could hardly be Randolph's.” As I was emboldened to accept Dr. Day's ascription of the play to Randolph partly by the fact that Professor Moore Smith, convinced by Dr. Day's evidence, had himself categorically assigned it to Randolph in the very note to which he thus vaguely refers, I subjoin extracts therefrom, since—as the testimony of an expert—they are an important element in the case.

The text of The Concealed Fansyes, which has hitherto remained unprinted, is preserved in the Bodleian library in Rawlinson MS. Poet. 16, which bears the following title: “Poems, songs, and a pastorall, by the Rt honble the Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley.” Though the play was listed by Halliwell-Phillipps, students of the drama have displayed very little curiosity in regard to it. Indeed, aside from a few communications which appeared many years ago in Notes and Queries, I have not found the slightest discussion of this play.

Even a cursory examination of the two stout volumes of H. H. Houben's Verbotene Literatur von der klassischen Zeit bis zur Gegenwart vividly brings home to the reader the significant rôle that censorship has played in the history of German literature during the past one hundred and fifty years. Here we find represented not only the authors of Young Germany, Heine, Gutzkow, Laube, Wienbarg, Mundt, and modern writers, such as Dehmel, Hauptmann, Schönherr, Sudermann, but even relatively harmless poets like Bettina von Arnim, Grillparzer, Hebbel, Heyse. Despite the fact that Schnitzler is listed in the announcement at the end of the first volume as among those to be treated in the second volume, he is nevertheless conspicuously absent, while such lesser lights as Bahr, Dreyer, Fulda, Hartleben are included. Houben himself has recognized the Austrian poet's title to a place of honor in this literary rogues' gallery. In discussing Maria von Magdala by Heyse, who drew a sharp line between his poetic muse and the sensationalism and unbridled freedom of the modern dramatists, Houben points out that in one respect Heyse has far outdone the younger generation, “durch einen solennen Zensurskandal, der anderthalb Jahre die Öffentlichkeit in Atem hielt und in seiner kulturhistorischen Bedeutung höchstens durch den Kampf um Schnitzlers Reigen übertroffen wurde.”

Schnitzler's early dramas from Anatol (1889) to Der Schleier der Beatrice (1899) deal largely with problems of love as seen through the eyes of philandering youth. His dramas after the turn of the century treat problems of married life as these confront middle-aged people. The most important of the latter dramas are: Der einsame Weg (1903), Zwischenspiel (1904), and Das weite Land (1910). The last named play was begun in 1902 and underwent radical transformations before its appearance eight years later. A study of its genesis ought to shed important light upon the final published version.

In seinem kleinen Aufsatz, “Über Königliche Hoheit” (1910), sagt Thomas Mann:

Der Fürst, den ich eigentlich im Sinne hatte, ist der, von dem Schiller seinen Karl VII. sagen lässt: ‘Drum soll der Sänger mit dem König gehen, sie beide wohnen auf der Menschheit Höhen.’ Die anspielungsreiche Analyse des fürstlichen Daseins als eines formalen, unsachlichen, übersachlichen, mit einem Worte artistischen Daseins und die Erlösung der Hoheit durch die Liebe: Das ist der Inhalt meines Romans, und, voller Sympathie für jede Art ‘Sonderfall,’ predigt er Menschlichkeit.

In a previous article I tried to make clear the essentially autobiographical character of Thomas Mann's works. His writings, as I interpreted them, are primarily concerned with the problem of his own inheritance and career, more particularly manifest in the conflict raging in his breast between his bourgeois origins and his artistic profession (see pp. 564, 565). This same dominant dualism, which has been later elaborated in more recent critical works, is nowhere more clearly apparent than in the artist-heroes of his stories, to which important class of characters the present investigation prefers to restrict itself.

Hans naumann gibt in seiner Deutschen Dichtung der Gegenwart (1923) folgende Darstellung von Clara Viebigs Kunst:

Naturalismus wie Heimatkunst, peinlichst genaue Gegenstandsmalerei, sozialen wie psychologischen Realismus, all dies beherrscht diese verspätete, aber konsequent gebliebene und bedeutendste Naturalistin in ganz ausserordentlichem Mass.

The discussion of an author in terms of a literary school invites two methods of procedure. The investigator may touch lightly on each of a large number of works, or he may limit himself to a more exhaustive study of a single work. The latter method is the one adopted for this paper, since it has the double advantage of involving lighter obligations and of leading to more definite results. The work selected for examination is Per Hallström's short story, A Secret Idyll.