This study is of the position of Thomas Dekker in a literary genre, prison literature, which comprises descriptions in prose works, poems, and plays, of one or more of London's fourteen prisons. The study seeks to establish the canon, chronology, and significance of Dekker's contributions to this literature, and, at the same time, it undertakes to overcome the absence, in literary and social history, of an examination of penal writings published during the reign of James I of England. The genre first flourished in the Jacobean period, and Thomas Dekker was its earliest principal writer. He wrote or collaborated upon about half of the entire output of Jacobean prison works; he composed all of his prison writings, with the possible exception of one, throughout the course of more than twenty years; and he cast the material into the four literary types of which this genre is composed: rogue exposures, dramatic settings, reformatory essays, and “characters.”

Alarconian criticism has been given direction largely by Pérez de Montalbán's remark about the dramatist's extrañeza; consequently, much attention has been addressed to the spirit of his work—his philosophy, his moral concepts, his characterizations, his mexicanismo—but relatively little to the structure of his comedias. Thus the mechanical elements of Alarcón's plays have been largely neglected, this neglect apparently arising from the belief that in the matter of structure Alarcón relied heavily upon his masters Tirso and Lope. I have made some preliminary studies of the structure of the Alarconian comedia, and my examination of this subject reveals that in at least one respect Alarcón was demonstrably independent of these masters. The letter which is read aloud on the stage clearly illustrates how the poet departed from the practices of his contemporaries; in point of fact, the letter proves significant since a comparative study of Alarcón, Tirso, and Lope shows special patterns to be distinctive of each of these poets.

It has been generally assumed that in the Morrell of the July eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender Spenser intended to satirize Dr. John Aylmer, bishop of London at the time of the composition and publication of this poem. Morrell's antagonist in this eclogue, Thomalin, has usually been considered a Puritan, but the Puritan so honored has been a matter of dispute among those scholars bold enough to hazard an identification. In this article I intend, first, to present in detail the grounds for Spenser's presumed dislike of Aylmer and to indicate Spenser's probable attitude towards him; second, to suggest that Dr. Thomas Cooper, bishop of Lincoln between 1571 and 1584, and definitely not a Puritan, is a more probable Thomalin.

Parallels with Robert Greene's The Historie of Orlando Furioso support the theory that Shakespeare in 1592-93 may have composed some preliminary sketches for a play which he later wrote up as The Taming of the Shrew and which another wrote up as The Taming of a Shrew.

However closely Shakespeare in writing Antony and Cleopatra may have followed North's Plutarch, he did not find in the biography a ready-made tragic heroine. Though Plutarch's Cleopatra is admittedly vivid and fascinating during her days of prosperity, she falls far below the demands of tragedy when her fortune changes. For the Cleopatra of the last two acts of his play, Shakespeare had to look elsewhere. It is my belief that he found what he wanted in Horace's Cleopatra Ode.

Few Elizabethan scholars are unacquainted with The Arte of Rhetorique that Thomas Wilson published at London in 1553. A supposed connection with the plays of Shakespeare would alone have been sufficient to lend it importance even if intrinsically it did not merit attention; this work, however, is informed with a vigorous commonsense that has long since gained for itself the recognition it deserves.

The complexity of human nature has always made difficult the task of the literary critic who would attempt to explain the nature of the pleasure that we derive from tragedy. The question has so many connections with speculations outside its own sphere—moral, psychological, political, economic, religious speculations—in short, the entire philosophy of an age—that some simplification, some focal point, is requisite for the historian of ideas who would attempt to record the changes in it through a given age. Since in the eighteenth century the question of tragic pleasure was a live one, in the very forefront of aesthetic speculation, the need for some kind of simplification, some kind of constant against which the evolution of doctrines can be seen, is particularly great. A convenient counter of this kind can be found in the Lucretian “return upon ourselves.”

This study of Christopher Marlowe's The Tragicall Historie of Doctor Faustus and The Taming of a Shrew is related to the preceding study on “Shakespeare's Shrew and Greene's Orlando” in that both involve parallels between A Shrew and contemporary plays—parallels which have been thought by H. D. Sykes and others to involve Samuel Rowley in the rôle of a contributor to each. Instead of such a common author a theory of common sources in earlier versions of the plays is herein maintained. Shakespeare is apparently not involved in these parallels with Doctor Faustus either as the author of The Taming of the Shrew or as the probable author of the original version of the play.

The parallels with A Shrew which are herewith cited seem to call for a theory of a common source in an earlier form of Doctor Faustus than the 1604 and 1616 texts.1

Augustan England was no nest of singing birds. An age of prose and reason found small predilection for

those melodious bursts that fill
The spacious times of great Elizabeth
With sounds that echo still.

An error has been committed at the expense of René Le Bossu, the noted seventeenth-century critic of the epic; and its elimination is important not only in justice to “the learned Bossu” but in correcting a widely accepted misinterpretation of one of our foremost English writers. Furthermore, in addition to affording belated personal justice, the correction will reveal a notable example of the unconscious influence of party spirit in criticism and scholarship, as a result of which cool and informed appraisal is sacrificed to the pleasure of ridicule.

In the darkest time of the long period of poverty, illness, and dependence that followed his imprudent elopement, John Donne wrote in a letter to Sir Henry Goodyer in September, 1608:

Two of the most precious things which God hath afforded us here, for the agony and exercise of our sense and spirit, which are a thirst and inhiation after the next life, and a frequency of prayer and meditation in this, are often envenomed and putrified, and stray into a corrupt disease…. With the first of these I have often suspected myself to be overtaken, which is with a desire of the next life; which though I know it is not merely out of a weariness of this, because I had the same desires when I went with the tide, and enjoyed fairer hopes than now; yet I doubt wordly encumbrances have increased it. I would not that death should take me asleep. I would not have him merely seize me, and only declare me to be dead, but win me and overcome me.

When I must shipwreck, I would do it in a sea where mine impotency might have some excuse; not in a sullen weedy lake, where I could not have so much as exercise for my swimming. Therefore I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what is no wonder. For to choose is to do; but to be no part of any body is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but great wens and excrescences; men of wit and delightful conversation but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole.1

In the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery there is a letter from Sir Philip Sidney to the sons of Joachim Camerarii, which has been published once, without comment, but I am now able to offer improved readings and to trace some of its background. As this letter was not printed with complete accuracy before, the text is now given in full:

When all the evidence has been marshalled, Milton's views on the position of women are both consistent and plain, whatever the astonishing obfuscations of many of his critics, assailants and apologists alike. Each side in the old controversy might at least have known better what they were attacking or defending if they had not ignored a major source-book for Milton's attitude, the History of Britain. There is reason to believe that Milton was here giving vent to a passing mood, but it was sharp and arrogant while it lasted. Herein we have a contrast with the evidence usually cited. Just preceding the composition of the early books of the History had come the divorce tracts, where the author made an heroic effort at impersonality, and perhaps only his images betray him; it would take a very sensitive critic to analyze them. Years later came Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes, where, as Professor Allan H. Gilbert has warned,1 the interpreter must tread lightly, for the poet in the angry outbursts of Adam and of Samson was not ostensibly speaking in his own person but rather writing as a dramatist. But in the History of Britain the voice that speaks out on the inferiority and proper subjection of women is at times unmistakably Milton's own. To heap up discredit upon what John Knox called “the monstrous regiment of women” he will go out of his way, whether by parenthetical remark, or by free alteration of his sources, or, in one case, by sheer misinterpretation of the original Latin.

As a critic of French letters, Chateaubriand desired above all to inaugurate a new literature which, rejecting the eighteenth century of the philosophes, would rejoin the fruitful tradition of the golden age that had produced such masters as Bossuet and Racine. His aim was no uninspired copying of seventeenth-century forms, but rather the creation of fresh masterpieces informed with the Christian, dualistic conception of man's nature which had been disregarded by the anti-religious eighteenth-century followers of French classicism. New elements from the national and Christian heritage were to be introduced, but the essential was to be the revival of what Chateaubriand judged to be the true spirit of the grand siècle.

Sir Francis Bacon's interest in the study of history was twofold. It was not only the broad interest of the philosopher but also the specific interest of the practical statesman. For the philosopher, history was important as the branch of human learning that has reference to man's memory. The true office of this knowledge, as he saw it, was “to represent the events themselves together with the counsels, and to leave the observations and conclusions thereupon to the liberty and faculty of every man's judgment.” On the other hand, the observations properly belonged to the field of politics. Bacon, the statesman, bred as he was in the realistic tradition of Machiavelli, found a utilitarian value in history. From the events and the counsels he drew conclusions that served as valuable lessons for the politics of the present and the future.

Es ist hier der Ort zu einer Erwägung allgemeiner Art. Man mag Helena naïv als absolute Vertreterin des griechischen, rein formalen Schönheitsideals, oder, wie wir, als eine durch romantische Ironie gebrochene und daher relativierte Spiegelung dieses Ideals betrachten. In der Schlußfolgerung, daß Faust dieser erneuten Versuchung zum Verweilen im schönen Augenblick nicht unterliegt, wird man zusammenkommen müssen. Das Reich der Schönheit hat für den hemmungslosen Willen keine haltende Kraft. Auch es ist nur ein Durchgangspunkt zu einer höheren Stufe. Wenn es also nur darum geht, dann ist alles in Ordnung. Faust wird nicht faul; er hat seine strebende Seele gerettet und äußerlich dem Teufel obgesiegt. Aber es handelt sich ja nicht allein darum, daß Fausts Tätigkeit höher wird. Sie muß—und das scheint uns das Entscheidende—auch “reiner” werden. Eine Erhöhung des Orts und selbst eine Beschränkung des Wirkungsfelds allein tun das nicht. Diese verändern wohl das Ziel, aber nicht die Immanenz des Willens. Wenn dieser die Idee, anstatt sie zu vergewaltigen, nicht in sich aufnimmt, dann hat alle Orts- und Zielveränderung geringen Wert. So lange Goethe seinen Faust nur durch die materielle Welt (Auerbachs Keller, Osterspaziergang, Gretchenerlebnis, Kaiserhof) führte, brauchte er sich um diese esoterische Seite des Problems nicht zu kümmern. Mit der Helenatragödie aber tritt Faust in das Reich des reinen Geistes ein, der sich ihm im Abglanz der Helena als Kunst objektiviert. Da dieser Geist “ewigen Wesens” und “den Göttern ebenbürtig” ist, erhebt sich die Frage, ob er in dieser Form sittlich-erzieherische Wirkung ausübt, d.h., ob die Kunst die Aufgabe der Ethik und Religion übernehmen kann.