Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe disagreed violently about Pietro Aretino, the Italian polemicist and pornographer (1492-1556), and their differences about him help to explain why Nashe was able to make a laughingstock of Harvey in their literary quarrel. During Harvey's youth (in the 1570's), he held the then prevailing view that Aretino was a gifted polemicist and politician (only in the 1590's did English writers begin to think of the Italian almost exclusively as a pornographer). In 1592 Harvey attacked Aretino just as violently as he had earlier praised him. His change of opinion must have occurred because he had had his fingers burned writing satire in 1580 and because Nashe, now his opponent, was praising Aretino extravagantly as the Scourge of Princes. Harvey, because of his distaste for Aretino and indeed for all satirists, was now writing as a man of reason above scurrility. Nashe, with Aretino as one of his models, cultivated an opposite pose, that of the lashing modern prose satirist, long on hyperbole and short on sober seriousness. Harvey, with his ponderous irony, was no match for Nashe, the “true English Aretine.“ (DCMcP)

If the neo-classical aesthetic of imitation could lead to poetic photocopies, it could also stimulate a remarkable variety of invention, as Spenser's “April“, Milton s Nativity Ode, and Marvell's “The Picture of Little T. C.“ demonstrate. All are imitations of the golden-age or messianic eclogue, and cannot really be understood outside of their genre; but at the same time they completely metamorphose the conventional generic pattern. Spenser's “April” employs the golden-age conventions not only to celebrate Elizabeth I but also, and more importantly, to portray symbolically, in the identification of Elisa with Song, the Orphic ordering power of art, the interrelation of the order of art and the order of the body politic, and the new golden age of poetry heralded by his work. Milton's Nativity Ode uses the same formulas (but remolded by Christian truth and the procedures of divine meditation) to praise the true messiah, Christ, and to celebrate the new golden age, the new Eden, which His birth begins. And Marvell's “Little T. C.” uses the golden-age formulas to assert wittily the Renaissance longing for a new golden age of free love, when Honor ceases to restrict the natural flowering of the human bud.

For those who regard Troilus and Cressida as a play marred by incongruous elements and an uncertain purpose, Act iv, Scene v, will always constitute an obvious source of dissatisfaction. Here, a long-awaited andloudly heralded climax—the duel between Ajax and Hector—rapidly subsides into anticlimax: before Ajax is even warm with action, Hector calls an end to the combat on the ground that he and his opponent are cousins. Moreover, Hector explains his motive for withdrawal, and comments on Ajax's reply, in speeches whose diction and style merely add to the discordant effect of his behavior:

While the public action in War and Peace moves toward war and then away from it, an analogous private journey from spiritual war to spiritual peace takes place within each of the protagonists. For three of them, Tolstoy structures the development by (a) situating for each character a specific major turning point, (b) constructing among the three stories various parallels and contrasts, and (c) developing appropriate patterns of symbolic imagery. Nicholas moves from war to peace by becoming transformed from a soldier into a farmer, husband, and father; the change is defined by imagery associated with physical liberation and two kinds of hunt. The movement in Natasha's life is from peace to war and is a result of the exposure of her innocence and happiness to temptation and suffering. This development is underscored by imagery connected with two kinds of singing, by the contrasting ways in which she reacts to the party at Uncle's and to the opera, and by a specific analogy between her fate and that of the nation. The movement from war to peace in Mary's story occurs when the inner conflicts created by her relations with her father are resolved, after the latter's death, upon the arrival of Nicholas, with whom her experience is further linked by a repetition of the imagery of liberation.

Cardenio, a “lost” play of 1612-13 based on Shelton's translation of Don Quixote (1612), is partly preserved, in altered form, in Lewis Theobald's Double Falshood of 1727. Theobald probably altered Cardenio drastically, as he did Richard II. To internal evidence that Cardenio was written by Shakespeare and Fletcher can be added chronological evidence and reluctant testimony to the joint authorship by the publisher Moseley, Charles Gildon, and Theobald. One of Theobald's three manuscripts can be traced in the hands of Moseley, the Davenants, Betterton, Gildon, Theobald's patron (Charles Boyle), and Theobald. A Restoration performance probably was intended. Theobald persisted in claiming that the original play was by Shakespeare alone after he learned otherwise, from Gildon and the Stationers' Register, to save his reputation as a Shakespeare scholar and please his patron. To protect his “Shakespeare” play, Theobald obtained a unique royal license, which Pope ridiculed in the Dunciad. Theobald probably sold his play and Shakespeare manuscripts outright to his publisher. He was prevented from publishing Cardenio by the copyright Act of 1710, the practice of regarding copyright as perpetual, and his quest of money and patronage.

A study of Pope's treatment of the passage in the Iliad known as the Shield of Achilles provides insights into his working methods, his place in the quarrel between Ancients and Moderns, and his attitude toward and appreciation of Homer. Our understanding of the published text can be enhanced by some knowledge of the manuscript revisions of the passage, including Pope's own sketch of the Shield, by an examination of Vleughels Shield of Achilles which Pope ultimately chose to illustrate his text, by a consideration of his notes with their extensive debt to, as well as departures from, the notes of Madame Dacier, and finally by a study of Pope's essay, “Observations on the Shield of Achilles.” This essay is shown to be only partially the work of Pope, the first two parts having been lifted, with inadequate acknowledgment, from two French defenders of Homer, André Dacier and Jean Boivin. The third and original part of Pope's essay points directly to the critical principles, with their emphasis on pictorial presentation, which guided him throughout his translation of Homer. Pope's view of the Shield passage, when contrasted with ancient allegorical interpretations or modern mythopoeic ones, reveals both his limitations and his success as a leader of his age in a critical and philosophical reaffirmation of the epic tradition.

IN commenting on Chapman's tragic heroes, Robert Ornstein observes that “Dangerous as it would be to identify Chapman with his Stoic heroes, I cannot but feel that he shared their spiritual isolation and their sense of alienation from an unworthy society.”1 However dangerous (and unfashionable) it may be to look for the author himself in dramatic works, I think a case can be made that Chapman does reveal himself not only in his Stoic heroes but also in many of his poems, plays, and translations, and that he deliberately sought subject matter which best expressed his own outlook and personal feelings. Critics have had a way of not looking into Chapman's works as a whole,2 but to do so is to see a relatively constant pattern, and when the usual pattern does not occur (as sometimes it does not in his comedies and tragedies), even then we have but a variation on it. The good man's confrontation with a corrupt, harsh, hostile, and often destructive world is the image of reality Chapman favors writing about, but a quest for consolations for numerous adversities is not infrequently a concomitant part of that experience. Many characters, fictional and actual, past and present, in the essentials of their experiences, can be read as guises for Chapman's own struggles with the world.

To the various kinds of irony that critics have noticed in Milton's Samson Agonistes may be added another, the irony of alternatives. This irony is based on a proposition with alternative possibilities posited by one of the characters: either this will happen or that; but both choices eventuate, although they appear to be mutually exclusive. Milton calls this kind of proposition axioma disjunclum contingens in his Art of Logic. Samson s prophecy that he will either die or do some great deed, the doubts of his friends whether he has been slain by or is slaying the Philistines, their expectation of either good or bad news are all ironically resolved in the catastrophe, which combines alternatives and reveals the simplifying power of providence. Similarly, although the Chorus states that there are two kinds of heroism, active and passive, either of which may be Samson s, both eventuate. Samson s heroism includes both courageous action and Christian patience as he slays and is slain. In his conclusion, Milton fuses genuine tragedy with religious drama, because Samson as an active hero dies tragically, and as a martyr wins a spiritual victory and the crown of patience.

Chaucer's elegy, The Book of the Duchess, has been read in the past either as an exercise in exclusively human consolation without religious meaning or—by the patristic critics—as so rigidly iconographic that the obvious dramatic situation has been sacrificed to accommodate patristic truths. Chaucer's real intention is more divinely directed than the former and more humanly directed than the latter. The poem offers Christian consolation complementary to the dramatic situation by weaving images of the resurrection into the warp and woof of mute pity. The recurrence of sleeping images, for example, in the case of the Dreamer himself and in the case of Ceys and Alcione, functions as a salubrious intermission between an anguished consciousness and a redemptive awakening. The repetition of horn blasts, both in the underworld episode and the hart-hunting scene, suggests the resurrectional trumpet of the New Testament. And the hunting scene, ambiguously involved as it is with the hart, suggests through the echoic use of resurrectional diction from the Canticle of Canticles further Christian affirmation about the mystery of immortality.

IN Our Knowledge of the External World, Bertrand Russell makes a significant distinction between two kinds of infinity. One kind is illustrated by the progression from zero to 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, on to infinity; Russell calls this an infinite progression, and it is unlimited. The other idea is illustrated by the division of an interval between, say, one and two; first divide it into halves, then divide each of those halves, and so on infinitely. This is a compact series or an infinite class, and it is limited. The infinite progression and the infinite class are quite different ideas, and they have different philosophical uses. I suggest that a similar distinction may be made concerning literary forms, and that this distinction helps us to understand what is new about Ben Jonson's dramatic method. The distinction reverberates through seventeenth-century literature, I believe, but Jonson is especially interesting because he is somewhat of a pioneer.

The conclusions of Jane Austen's novels are invariably ironic devices for the final summary of themes and characters. This role is illuminated by three main elements of all the conclusions. First, the novelist parodies the predictability of sentimental “happy endings” in much popular fiction. This accounts for the exaggerated self-consciousness with which she approaches the mechanics of concluding her own narratives, a self-consciousness that seems on the surface to contradict Jane Austen's well-known dislike of unrealistic plots. Second, she subverts the canons of poetic justice that are integral to most happy endings: instead of allocating “rewards” and punishment in accordance with ideal conventions, Jane Austen exposes the prevailing social norms that frequently undermine and replace traditional ideals. Finally, she replaces the arbitrary endings of poetic justice with the logical evolution of character and theme. Each character “punishes” or “rewards” himself, in keeping with his frequently unreliable sense of right and wrong. These features are particularly useful in a much-needed revaluation of Mansfield Park, for they demonstrate that it is not the didactic work described in traditional criticism. Thus Jane Austen's comic conclusion is a consistent device for the realistic, rather than didactic, analysis of character and society.

In his speech on “vertue” (I.iii) Iago defends the absolute power of the individual to will freely. This doctrine of the autonomous will was commonly attributed to the Jesuit theologian, Molina, whose writings were then the subject of bitter controversy. Iago's subtle twisting of moral values also falls into the pattern of malign casuistry and cynical self-aggrandizement associated with the Jesuit image in England. Iago, then, is not the usual Machiavel who spurns both religion and morality; he is the Jesuitical Machiavel who employs the language of piety to “enmesh them all.” Convinced that he is the master of his will, Iago usually finds no difficulty in supplying motives for his actions; yet, after he is unmasked, he doggedly remains silent. From the Augustinian (and Shakespearean) point of view this is simply the ultimate mute evidence that, contrary to his belief, Iago has been mastered by a radically evil will for which he has merely supplied both motive and opportunity. Like the Pardoner and the Ancient Mariner, he knows what he has done, but does not (in the fullest sense of the word) know why he has done it.