Reflective Englishmen of the seventh and eighth centuries, living under the transforming influence of classical and Christian ideas, must have satisfied a special need by revaluating their Germanic patrimony in terms of the new culture. In that process the Teutonic heritage naturally took on an added lustre wherever it lent itself to Christian interpretation. Beowulf more fully than any other English poem reflects that effort to assimilate and reappraise whereby the Germanic tradition from the Continent was ennobled by the new theology, as by a light flashed backward into the heroic past. Thus the career of the Danish king Heremod becomes an exemplum for a Christian homily on pride; Grendel, creature of northern fantasy, is placed in a Biblical lineage of evil reaching back to the first murder. The poet probably recognized, however, that his illumination of the past stopped short of perfect fusion of new and old, to say nothing of historical fidelity. Doubtless he was less disturbed than we are by vestiges of his pagan sources that lie awkwardly in the matrix of his Christian prepossessions. He had the advantage of knowing what he meant when, for example, he used terms of various and elastic connotation like wyrd. Also, if I am not mistaken, he saw his divergent materials in relation to a great central truth, an underlying principle which enabled him to recognize a larger unity in his fabulous tales than appears on the surface, and which made them in his eyes more worthy to survive in a reflective poem of epic magnitude.

The many valuable studies on Old French spirituality which we possess do not consider the higher spirituality par excellence, namely mysticism. The reason for it is evident: We have only a few Old French mystical texts, none of them presenting an adequately recognizable system. Consequently the meaning of the words and metaphors used there remains obscure, if there are no Latin parallel texts whose semantic implications are more evident. But even if Latin parallels help to a certain extent to clear up the meaning, there remains one fact which characterizes not only the Old French medieval mystical texts, but the German, Italian, and English ones as well. The popular mystical texts are vague and not as well organized as the texts of the Schoolmen, whose clear terminology generally contains a more precise expression of the Ineffable. The whole interest of the linguist lies in discovering how a young vernacular language competes in expressivity with the Latin of the theologian, and what it can achieve. The fact that a mystical literature in any vernacular comes into being, always means that experimental mystics tell others of their experiences, or that pious souls yearn for this religious experience of a direct contact with the Divinity after having understood the lore of those experimental or real mystics. For the linguist, of course, it makes no difference—as it does for the theologian or the psychologist—whether the mystical text comes from real or would like to be mystics. The latter in their urge can be poetically and lingusitically more creative than the former who, though religious geniuses, may turn out to be poor language makers.

Scholars have regretted that the enormous work embodied in The Text of the “Canterbury tales” did not leave Professor Manly the time and strength to integrate in a summary his main ideas as to the early history of the work. For that unwritten chapter no one, of course, could hope to offer a substitute. Yet much which would have gone into it and is not clear at the first reading takes form and coherence as one's familiarity grows with Manly's ideas and his material. One comes to see that, on most of the important features of the early history of the text, he had formed very definite opinions, while his silence on a number of others, if in some cases hard to interpret, more often clearly reflects a conviction that no light can be elicited either from the manuscripts or anything else within our ken. Correlating all indications I shall try to present in its main lines Manly's view of the history of the Canterbury tales to c. 1500, indicating as far as possible the basis for his opinions.

Confronted with his fabulously ugly wife after an unwelcome marriage ceremony, Chaucer's hero in the Wife of Bath's Tale receives from her a bit of consolation as ineffective as it is irrefutable. True it is, she says, that I am foul and old, but consider that for this very reason you need never fear that I shall cuckold you:

D 1215 “For filthe and eelde, also moot I thee
Been gret wardeyns upon chastitee.“

The gossipy, semi-journalistic style of Nashe's Pierce Penilesse made it an immediate best-seller. Between 1592 and 1595, according to Nashe himself, it passed through “at the least … sixe Impressions.” But the author's joy at his sudden success seems to have been somewhat dimmed as the result of a literary indiscretion that plagued him all the rest of his life. In this remarkable pamphlet, for the purpose of illustrating the deadly sin of hypocrisy, he introduces an extended fable or allegory satirizing men in high places. Since he himself considered his “tale of a Battle-dore,” as he facetiously calls it, to be a digression from the main theme of Pierce Penilesse, and hence a unit in itself, it may be treated without reference to its context.

In spite of the work accomplished by such students of the court masque as Brotanek, Reyher, and Miss Welsford and such Jonsonian scholars as Castelain and Herford, I believe that Jonson's long concern with the courtly spectacle has not been fully understood. Jonson's pedantry or antiquarianism, the many excellent lyrical passages in his main masques, the “little comedies of manners” in his antimasques, and the “usual flattery” of the courtly entertainment have been the critics' points of emphasis. Very recently Mr. Gordon pointed out that in The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Beautie Jonson attempted to elucidate solid Renaissance doctrine, but only Mr. Gilbert, as far as I know, has questioned the correctness of interpreting as flattery some of the passages praising James in Jonson's courtly spectacles. Usually Jonson's “weighty antiquarianism” and “unabashed flattery” have been either censured or indulgently condoned in these “strictly occasional” works wherein the greatest persons in the realm exhibited themselves and their riches in the intricate dances that formed the center of the Masque and the sumptuous tournament that formed the center of the Barriers.

The classical conception of the “urbs æterna,” voiced by a long line of Rome's poets and orators, is an element in Milton's Paradise Regained which deserves recognition particularly since it serves to bring to light the strong possibility that in composing Paradise Regained Milton may have levied on the poetry of the Roman panegyrist Claudianus (fl. 400 a.d.).

From the time Friedrich Hebbel arrived in Vienna in 1845 until his death there eighteen years later, he moved in the same literary and social milieu as Grillparzer. It is well known that a certain aloofness, amounting almost to hostility, existed between them. What, however, has not been fully explained, is the reason underlying it. While some sources state that these two great contemporary dramatists did not like one another as individuals, and others claim that they did not appreciate each other as writers, no one attempt has been made to evaluate all the factors involved. A recent doctoral dissertation does go into the relationship of Hebbel to Grillparzer, but not too fully. Robert B. Nance, its author, writes regarding Hebbel: “Personal feeling often played a large part in influencing his opinions of contemporary authors, particularly in the case of Gutzkow, Laube and Grillparzer, for this reason his relationship with these men has been sketched briefly.” Because the statements of friends and contemporaries are biased and often contradictory, Nance has used them as little as possible in arriving at Hebbel's real criticism. This is only too true. These very friends and contemporaries have, however, played an important part in coloring the evaluations of most scholars who studied the relationship of Hebbel and Grillparzer. Since Hebbel himself was biased and inconsistent in his attitude toward Grillparzer and since Grillparzer, too, expressed himself on numerous occasions about Hebbel, it is important to study all the existing sources to see to what extent they may be reconciled to support or refute any one explanation. This is the purpose of this article.

In an earlier paper, I undertook to show that the style of acting in the serious drama of the eighteenth century closely paralleled the general interest of the century in the imitation of nature—of nature methodized. Four principal “schools,” varying in technique but not in purpose, were examined: Betterton, the Cibber-Booth-Wilks Triumvirate, Macklin-Garrick, and Kemble-Siddons. The fourth school, with which the paper arbitrarily ended, extends well beyond the eighteenth century and provides a natural introduction to the study of acting techniques in the Romantic and Victorian periods. Like the eighteenth, the nineteenth century is primarily a century of great actors rather than great plays, and it is to the actors, rather than to the playwrights, that we must turn to find the theatrical expression of the spirit of the times. Edmund Kean and William C. Macready represent the earlier and later stages of romanticism as accurately as Shelley and Tennyson, and Victorianism is as plainly marked in Alfred Wigan and Irving as in Ruskin or Trollope.

Although Federico Gamboa is often called the leading exponent of literary naturalism in Mexico and as such was inevitably a follower of Zola, it is difficult to demonstrate that he borrowed heavily or continuously from the French master. His work provides only scattered examples of direct appropriation from Zola and the latter's influence on him was rather general than specific, bearing mainly on his choice of subject-matter, method of treatment and overall social outlook. But in at least one novel it is possible to see more than this general influence, to find evidence of an attempt on Gamboa's part not only to imitate Zola but to take a form already developed by his predecessor and to turn it to his own philosophic and artistic ends. That novel is Reconquista. Lacking specific declarations from Gamboa himself, we cannot reach definite conclusions, but certain evidence indicates that the work may have been based on Zola's L'Œuvre, based on it not as an imitation but as an answer to the basic idea that Zola had expressed in that long and turgid novel.