If Shakespeare belonged to the United States by birth instead of by inheritance, the four-hundredth anniversary of his birth could not have been celebrated more widely or enthusiastically. It is not irrelevant to consider what his works have contributed to American culture, and what Americans have contributed to Shakespeare in the library and on the stage. To dispose first of some of the fringe benefits, it may be suggested that much innocent pleasure has accrued from the cultivation of Shakespeare gardens containing all the herbs, flowers, and trees named by the poet. An attempt to naturalize all the birds he mentions has had less happy results, though it must be acknowledged that the starlings imported by Eugene Schieffelin in 1880 have taken literally the injunction to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth.

I have always pictured Meursault as a stranger to the sentiments of other men. Love and hatred, ambition and envy, greed and jealousy are equally foreign to him. He attends the funeral of his mother as impassively as he watches, on the following day, a Fernandel movie. Eventually, Meursault kills a man, but how could I feel that he is a real criminal? How could this man have any motive for murder?

The old english poem Deor is preserved only in the Exeter Book (ff. 100a-100b) and its obscurities have given rise to a goodly number of speculations and emendations. As is proper, the main concern of scholarship has been to establish the literal meaning of its lines and the identity of the historical and semi-mythical characters to which direct allusion is made. Less attention has been paid for various reasons—at least in this century—to its overall signification: our ignorance of Germanic literary genres, our hesitancy to speculate until the certainty of the literal meaning can be established, positivistic biases, a lack of interest in this subject, a tendency to assume that there is no difficulty about understanding the poem's general aim or purpose.

For any just appraisal of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde it is essential to understand correctly the character of its hero. The whole meaning of the poem will change accordingly if one sees Troilus as either an ideal knight or a neurotic weakling, as a noble courtly lover or as Everyman painfully caught in the snares of Satan. Adherence to either one of these contrasting views has frequently led critics to neglect aspects and entire portions of the poem which would not agree with their adopted view of the hero: the poem is obviously full of ambiguities in characterization as well as in its very plot. In the following I wish to suggest that Chaucer presents (and indirectly evaluates) Troilus simultaneously on two different levels, from which the hero emerges as both strong and weak. This suggestion is based on an analysis of a seemingly insignificant commonplace Chaucer uses at least three times in Book iv: the conflict between reason and desire.

Rabelais's book opens with a cryptic allusion to a “sustantificque mouelle” hidden under the surface hilarity of his story and ends (if it was he who ended it) with an equally cryptic pronouncement by an oracular bottle. The penetration which is urged at the beginning—through fiber and bone to the marrow of truth which they protect—is evidently consummated at the end, the physiological turning into a geological image as Pantagruel and his friends penetrate the underground sanctuary where, in a flood of miraculous light, one may hear the word of truth, which is Trinch. The opinions of critics on this pronouncement range from considering it an absurd joke to a grave and specific allegory of one thing or another. Similarly, the substantific marrow which Rabelais promises us at the beginning is taken by some as a joke which hides a truth and by others as a joke that hides nothing but another joke. Most agree that there is a mixture of joke and seriousness in Rabelais's book, but some insist on a complete disjunction between the comic and the serious, while others argue for a close interpenetration.

Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleate.
Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.

Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
My Conversation make to be thy Reele
And reele the yarn thereon Spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:

Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
Then dy the Same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory

My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill
My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
Then mine appareil shall display before yee
That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

In the English eighteenth century, as in most ages before the twentieth century, to take history seriously was to believe, almost without exception, that history coheres, that it has a shape, that it is moving in a more-or-less orderly, more-or-less obvious direction toward or away from certain teleological poles. History was a decline from the “natural” condition of man for Shaftesbury and the primitivists; or it was an ascent toward the “natural” condition of man for Priestley and the progressivists. It was a decline from a general happiness for Lord Edward Fitzgerald; and it was an ascent toward a general happiness in at least that aspect of Pope's thought represented in the lines, “Oh Happiness! our being's end and aim!/ Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! What e'er thy name.” For Swift, and to a lesser extent Clarendon and Temple, history was a monstrous progressive aberration from standards of truth and reason. For most of the doctrinaire Whigs it was a gradual realization of human freedom. History was visualized by Young and Akenside as a corollary of what A. O. Lovejoy calls “the temporalizing of the Great Chain of Being.”

It is conventional to take Byron as a veritable Janus of the romantic period, looking toward the classicism of the past even while facing away from it as an authentic figure of his time. The classical Byron himself is seen under two aspects, satirical and dramatic, and these are distinguished from each other on the following grounds: Byron's classical satires, such as English Bards, are traced back to Pope, but his classical dramas, such as Sardanapalus, are supposed to reflect Greek, French, or Italian antecedents; and the classical satires belong essentially to Byron's earlier career, the classical dramas to his later career. This paper focuses on the peculiar classicism of Byron's drama, the classicism of his maturer work, and that which, as far as his total work is concerned, he most stoutly defended.

Many critics of James Fenimore Cooper's early novel The Pioneers (1823) have called attention to the excellence of various individual aspects of its manner and matter, but few have been willing to accord the book the coherence and unity that are the first measure of a genuine work of art. The orthodox critical view insists on Cooper's failure to integrate the three major elements of his novel: the lengthy descriptions of natural scenery and of village habits and occupations; the conflict between Natty Bumppo and Judge Temple, usually regarded as the thematic center of the narrative; and the main plot, the discovery of Oliver Effingham as the true heir to Judge Temple's huge land holdings. Customarily this approach first stresses the divergent origins of Cooper's materials as the basis of their discordance. Since the novel draws both on the real world of personal recollection and family tradition and on the powers of pure imagination, it somehow must lack unity. “Incongruously,” writes Alexander Cowie, Cooper tied his “warm boyhood memories to a superannuated plot involving the temporary dispossession of an estate.” Consequently, “there is in The Pioneers a more definite disjunction of the action from the illustrative material than in any of Cooper's tales of the frontier.” Professor Cowie invites us to set aside the action of the novel so that “the setting and characterization may be enjoyed for their own sake.”

The use that Rimbaud made of the definitive version of La Tentation de Saint Antoine, first published on 5 April 1874, throws light on the evolution of his poetics as well as his ideologies. The source book, one of the most distinguished vulgarizations of Hindu and gnostic thought, presents eastern illuminism and panoramic views of Alexandria in passages that Flaubert composed for the first time in 1871, after serious study of thousands of pages of ancient texts, and his new portrait of Saint Anthony is of special interest in that no sources have been located for it.

Le point de départ de ces réflexions sur l'esthétique du théâtre en France au dixneuvième siècle fut une remarque de M. J. Mistier qui a écrit dans son Introduction à La Renaissance de Gobineau: “Un étonnant paradoxe a voulu que de toute la production dramatique de notre dix-neuvième siècle les trois œuvres qui sont demeurées les plus vivantes n'aient jamais été destinées à la représentation: les Comédies de Musset, les drames philosophiques de Renan, la Renaissance de Gobineau.”

Maria francesca (1827–76), eldest of the four Rossettis, has come down to posterity unfairly characterized by an anecdote and a remark. For the anecdote Christina Rossetti is responsible although if she had suspected the extent to which it would have shaped future generations' opinion of her sister, she probably would never have originated it. In her “Reading Diary” Time Flies (London, 1885), Christina wrote that Maria “shrank from entering the Mummy Room at the British Museum under a vivid realisation of how the general resurrection might occur even as one stood among those solemn corpses turned into a sight for sightseers” (p. 128).

In 1917 Conrad wrote two letters on the subject of The Shadow-Line, one to his agent, J. B. Pinker, the other to his friend, Sidney Colvin. Both letters emphasise that this story is exact biography. To Pinker he wrote of “That piece of work which is not story really but exact biography,” and to Colvin he stated, “The very speeches are (I won't say authentic—they are that absolutely), I believe, verbally accurate. And all this happened in March-April 1887.”

In spite of the critical attention that it has received, Conrad's The Secret Sharer continues to present mysteries that usually affect our understanding of the story's climax in which Leggatt, the murderer and fugitive, is given his chance to escape while the ship hovers on the edge of disaster. Clearly enough, in its broadest aspects, the story is framed by a question and its answer. The narrative opens by presenting an uninitiated captain, a stranger to his ship and to himself, wondering how far he “should turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's own personality every man sets up for himself secretly.” It closes with the answer that through self-knowledge and self-mastery the captain has achieved “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” (p. 143). But between these two points, knowledge and self-mastery are won only after the disconcerting ordeal of protecting Leggatt and the strange exposure of the ship to near destruction, for the dangers from which the captain is allowed to extricate himself seem unnecessary ones of his own making. In turning towards the rocks of Koh-ring, he has done what he “certainly should not have done ... if it had been only a question of getting out of that sleepy gulf as quickly as possible” (pp. 132–133). Moreover, in shaving the land “as close as possible,” he has approached disaster far closer than necessary if it had been only a question of testing his authority or granting Leggatt a reasonable chance to escape.

Despite its appearance as a miscellaneous collection of lyrics, Dylan Thomas' poetry is a closely unified body of work. Poetic unity customarily reveals itself in cohesive imagery (what Kenneth Burke calls “symbolic equations”), and in the repetition and development of related themes. Thomas' Collected Poems possesses such imagistic and thematic coherence, and these images and themes, furthermore, have as their subsuming source the Bible.

La cimerísima interpretación de Amado Alonso es harto bien conocida. Residencia en la tierra encierra la terrible y dolorosa visión de la “invisible e incesante labor de autodesintegración a la que se entregan todos los seres vivos y todas las cosas inertes, por debajo y por dentro de su movimiento o de su quietud” (pág. 19). Esta atroz contemplación de la permanente desintegración sin sentido de la realidad, del morirse de todo lo vivo a la que se entrega Neruda en un obstinado ensimismamiento es, sobre todo, un modo íntegramente valedero de afectarse por la realidad: el morir de las cosas se identifica con el morir humano, y el poeta se angustia. En el primer tomo (1925–31), sin embargo, la visión no es de desintegración y el sentimiento es más bien de sombría melancolía que de angustia. Si hay desintegración, ésta es “el escenario ... por entre cuyos lentos escombros renace el espíritu indestructible” (pág. 24). El gozo de poetizar y especialmente el oscuro instinto amoroso, dos formas en que se manifiesta el anhelo de perpetuidad entre lo caduco, constituyen la vértebra que preserva desde adentro al mundo del poeta que se quiere desintegrar. A medida que el instinto amoroso, el ansia de perpetuidad, se debilita, se espesan la desintegración y la angustia: en el segundo tomo (1931–35), la desintegración y su dolor, de atmósfera, se convierten en el tema medular.