Why, of the many significant writings of the seventeenth century, do Hamlet, Don Quijote, and La vida es sueño belong together in a comparative study? Certainly not merely because they are the most famous works of Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Calderón, three of the century's most famous men. Beyond doubt, the differences separating them are sharp and obvious: form and technique, style and concept, guiding esthetic impulses of authors who were disparate in their temperament and their lives. But if we fix our attention on the ideological problems embodied in the careers of the three heroes, Hamlet, Don Quijote, and Segismundo, we immediately discern strong bonds of relationship, to the point where not only similarities but even contrasts take on significance, reflecting light from one work upon the other, and finally upon the intellectual outlook and preoccupations of the time.

The morning after Grendel met his match and fled from Heorot, a group of Danish retainers and leaders traced him to the mere of the nickers, wondering at the tracks he had left behind him and rejoicing at his overthrow. We are told nothing of their stay at the mere; indeed we are not told that they made any stay there. But the poet devotes 65 lines to their ride back, giving most of this space, it is true, to Sigemund and Heremod, with songs about whom the Danes were entertained on the way. I say the Danes, because there is nothing to indicate that any Geats took part in the ride. Beowulf himself was a subject of conversation among the Danes; a scop even made a song about him. But we have no reason to think that he was there to hear it. King Hrothgar likewise seems to have stayed behind.

A rose by any other name—preferably rosa eglanteria—smelled not merely as sweet, but sweeter, in the cultured nostril of the Renaissance. Throughout Europe personal names customarily appeared in print in forms far removed from the simple vernacular bestowed at baptism. In examining twenty-odd thousand volumes while indexing dedications and other preliminaries in British books printed before 1641, the writer has encountered hundreds of instances. A survey of this material, organized to illustrate the various types of masquerade that writers assumed, may assist other students of Renaissance literature. The droller examples may even amuse. My final section, after noting various types of mystifications and puzzles, will leave the reader with a group of unsolved signatures on which he is invited to exercise his ingenuity. The examples throughout the article are drawn from books printed in the British Isles before 1675, except for a few from British authors published on the Continent. No excursion has been made into the rich field of Latin legal documents, though I must acknowledge aid from such standard keys to that material as Charles T. Martin's Record Interpreter.

Although Michelangelo was so self-conscious about his poems as to dismiss them as “silly things” and “heavy pastries,” the neo-Platonic pieces provide us with avenues to his most intimate thoughts on art. In his canzoniere one learns that two little-known guideposts alongside his theoretical approach to painting and sculpture are the special interrelations existing between the eye and the hand and between the intellect and the hand. It is with these relationships which he recognized between, first, vision and manual execution and between, second, poetic conceptualizing and manual execution, that these pages will be concerned.

The writings of Charles Brockden Brown have evoked a number of curious judgments: Shelley's admiration of Constantia Dudley, for instance, and Margaret Fuller's intimation that she herself might have been a worthy companion for so intellectual and sensitive a man as Brown. Anyone deceived by Brown's fiction is in distinguished company certainly, for even the fastidious Hawthorne and the critical Poe thought well of his work. Whether all the extravagances he evokes redound to his credit is perhaps a matter of opinion, but it is hardly to his credit as a novelist that his fiction should not be recognized as such. Recently, however, what is clearly his attempt to write an epistolary novel of a grand passion, in the manner of Werther and La Nouvelle Héloise, has been misread and offered as providing biographical data.