Christopher Marlowe's name appears on the title-pages of the early editions of the following plays:

1. Dido: ‘Written by Christopher Marlowe, and Thomas Nash. Gent.‘ (1594)

2. Edward the Second: ‘Written by Chri. Marlow Gent.‘ (1594)

3. The Massacre at Paris: ‘Written by Christopher Marlow.‘ (n. d. ca. 1600.)

4. Doctor Faustus: ‘Written by Ch. Marl.‘ (1604)

5. The Jew of Malta: ‘Written by CHRISTOPHER MARLO.‘ (1633)

6. Lust's Dominion: ‘Written by Christofer Marloe, Gent.‘ (1657)

It has often seemed strange to lovers of Shakspere that the most genial of dramatists should have written plays which, while not attaining the horror and pathos of tragedy, arouse distaste and even repugnance. Troilus and Cressida and Measure for Measure, despite superb poetry and marvellous delineation of character, are so repellent in theme and treatment that they are seldom represented on the stage today, and seldom lie close to the affection of readers of Shakspere. This is even more the case with All's Well that Ends Well. “Everyone who reads this play,” says the editor of the Arden Shakespeare volume, “is at first shocked and perplexed by the revolting idea which underlies the plot ... it leaves so unpleasant a flavour with some people that it is not tasted again.”

Is Othello a puppet, an Englishman, or a Moor? No less estimable a Shakespeare scholar than Professor Stoll has pointed out what he has called the “great heap of contradictions” in the character of Othello and has come to the conclusion that Shakespeare is merely following a dramatic jealousy tradition in the play of Othello—that he “but leans on the convention of slander and ‘diabolical soliciting’… . Only, in order to expedite matters, Shakespeare leans hard, and Othello presents little or no resistance to temptation, is eager, excited, is, for all his protestations of faith, won over in a trice.” One cannot help feeling, according to Stoll, that Othello is “wrenched and altered” by the dramatist in the temptation scene. A. C. Bradley, on the other hand, whose opinions I cite as typical of the opposite point of view, insists that “any man situated as Othello was, would have been disturbed by Iago's communications, and I add that many men would have been made wildly jealous.” Othello, in other words, is behaving like a normal human being of our own race. Bradley repudiates the “mistaken view” that Othello “retains beneath the surface the savage passions of his Moorish blood.” His nationality is incidental, and “in regard to the essentials of his character it is not important.” He even goes so far as to say that “if anyone had told Shakespeare that no Englishman would have acted like the Moor, and had congratulated him on the accuracy of his racial psychology, I am sure he would have laughed.”

The problems connected with the authorship of Henry the Eighth are in some ways different from those usual in the doubtful plays. In the first place, the external evidence is singularly exact and definite and in no way contradictory. That a play dealing with the reign of Henry the Eighth and bearing either the title or the sub-title All Is True was being acted June 29, 1613 at the Globe Theatre is attested by at least three contemporary documents which tell of the fire which destroyed the theatre that day. The publication of the play in the Folio of 1623 is, however, the only direct attribution to Shakespeare. According to one of the ballads written about the Globe fire, Heminge and Condell, the Folio editors, were both present at the time of the fire; their later inclusion of the play in the Folio must, therefore, have been with full knowledge of its authorship. In the second place, the play is so evidently by two hands that, even as early as 1758, Roderick pointed out peculiarities of metre which did not seem to him Shakespearean. A chance remark of Tennyson's that ‘many passages in Henry the Eighth were very much in the manner of Fletcher,’ combined with his own impressions, led Spedding to investigate the matter more fully, with the result that in 1850 he published his paper, ‘Who wrote Shakespeare's Henry the Eighth?’ As a result of this investigation and of the application of metrical tests, in the results of which his investigations were substantiated by those of Fleay, Furnivall and others, he concluded that more than one half of the play had been written by Fletcher, and pronounced as Shakespearean only the following scenes: Act I, Scenes 1 and 2; Act II, Scenes 3 and 4; Act III Scene 2 (to the exit of the king); Act V Scene 1—with alterations. With this decision, so far as the work of Fletcher is concerned, practically all later critics have been in agreement. The problem, then, has long been one not of the sole authorship of Shakespeare, but of his part in the play.

In a recent article Professor J. R. Hulbert has disputed the traditional assignment of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and of the alliterative romances generally, to the West Midland dialect of Middle English. He contends that the lack of sufficient criteria for distinguishing West Midland from East Midland, and the lack of documents from the Northwest Midland area, make it impossible to determine whether Gawain was composed in the East or in the West; we are justified, he says, only in saying that it is a North Midland text. It is the purpose of the present article to refute Professor Hulbert's argument in so far as it concerns Gawain, this and the other poems of the same manuscript being the only alliterative works he discusses in detail, and to show that there is quite sufficient evidence to permit us to assign it to the Northwest rather than to the Northeast Midland dialect.

Cet article est la continuation du travail publié ici-même sur “L'Histoire de l'Impression et de la Publication du Discours sur l'Inégalité, de J.-J. Rousseau,” par Albert Schinz.

Characteristic of the Italian Language is the modern use of the conditional perfect instead of the present. This interchange of tenses is not permitted by either of her two living sister languages, French and Spanish. Nor does English admit such constructions: we are not allowed to say, for example, “He said he should have done it tomorrow,” but must say, “He said he would do it tomorrow.” In Italian on the other hand, there are numerous examples of this construction as the following quotations will illustrate:

“There's printing a book of ‘Selections from R. B.‘ (Sculptor and poet) which is to popularize my old things; …” Thus wrote Robert Browning to his friend, W. W. Story, in the spring of 1862, humorously alluding to the joyous companionship in Story's studio two years earlier, when he had been spending as much as three hours daily, thumping the wet clay. Nothing but clay did he care for, “poor lost soul,”—so Mrs. Browning had at that time declared, for she grudged a little the time taken from his poetry. And this enthusiasm had been a matter of more than one winter. Very vivid is the memory of it, therefore, in 1862. “I try and see old friends,” the poet writes, in the letter already quoted, “when my true treat would be an evening over the piles of unread books, or a morning with the old coat and wet clay. Oh, the days!” Robert Browning, sculptor and poet; here is a key to unlock,—not, indeed, the heart, but at least some secrets of the brain and hand of the robust craftsman.

If It may be said of Emerson's Writings that

In his every syllable
Lurketh Nature veritable,

Thoreau should be given much, perhaps most, of the credit. For Emerson owed as much to Thoreau in respect to the material world as Thoreau owed to him in respect to the world of spirit. Remove the details of material nature from Emerson's essays, and you will rob them of much of their charm and power, since the author would be in perpetual danger of soaring aloft, balloon-fashion, among his “Circles” in worlds unrealised. Remove them from his Poems, where the sensuous, the concrete, is vitally necessary, and the poetry itself is gone with them. By a most happy conjunction of events, the very man who perhaps of all his countrymen had most to give Emerson, was his fellow-townsman, his friend, his companion in countless walks to the pine-groves, a valued assistant in editing the Dial, the guardian of his hearth while he sojourned abroad, and a sympathetic interpreter and critic of his inner life. Their friendship was not, of course, a free union of personalities, though we must make allowance for the stiffnesses of the Puritan tradition and bear in mind that, if Emerson would as soon think of embracing a tree as putting his arm around Henry, the forbidding Henry could be a charming Piper of Hamelin to the Emerson children, could sing his favorite “Tom Bowling” under the shelter of a rock during a shower in the presence of R. W. E. himself, and, when the mood was right, could dance with something like abandon.