Romance is one of the most abused generic terms of medieval literature. For a good many scholars it serves as a commodious bottom drawer which will hold almost anything that could not be stored elsewhere. Having been enlarged to mean nothing less than “imaginative fiction,” the term romance communicates very little, especially when it is applied to such a conglomerate body of works as “The Middle English Romances.” Apparently indifferent to the possibilities of greater clarity and meaning through a more circumspect application of the word, scholars have wasted little time on morphological problems in the Middle English romances, and yet they would not discountenance discussions of whether The Scarlet Letter is a novel or a romance. There, indeed, labelling the work with one or the other term becomes a matter of making a statement about the area of meaning of the work and about the techniques with which this meaning is conveyed. In medieval studies, the latitude in application of the term romance and its consequent diminishing usefulness for descriptive purposes might have been felt more keenly if it were not for the assumption that the tracing of the sources of a given work has contributed the most significant part to its understanding. However, the variety of forms that the same story material can demonstrably assume, e.g., the Arthurian tradition, should make us more sensitive to the opinion of some scholars that generic patterns have a more important influence than story material upon the shape of a literary product. Moreover, the concept of genre acts as a kind of perspective which one assumes towards the work one is examining, and depending upon its appropriateness, it can make the structure more or less meaningful. The few writers who have ventured to deal with the whole body of the so-called romances and to make judgments on their respective merits have ignored the possibility that, without finer and more specific terminological distinctions, they may be mistaken about some of the ugly ducklings. Such has been the lot of the Middle English version of the story of Amis and Amiloun, because the perspectives of romance and saint's legend are not identical.

From the eighteenth century to the present, editors, critics, and directors have recognized special problems in the interpretation of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Every major play has been extensively debated, to be sure, but discussions of this play have been marked by an unusual perplexity. There is little agreement about the most elementary questions. Is Caesar an egocentric, dangerous dictator—a genuine threat to Rome; or is he the “noblest man / That ever lived in the tide of times,” as Antony says he is? Is Brutus the mistaken idealist, strong in abstract principle but weak in human perceptiveness; or is he, as Swinburne thought, the “very noblest figure of a typical and ideal republican in all the literature of the world”? Is he the Aristotelian hero, noble but flawed, recognizing at last that he has erred? Or is he the willful egoist, embodying the very traits of Caesarism which he professes to hate? Is Cassius the dedicated republican that Brutus, Titinius, and many of his own speeches make him appear to be? Or is he the “lean and hungry” envious one who hates Caesar for merely personal reasons? These are only a few of the questions the play poses. Everywhere one turns, contradictions loom.

This year brought forth an event of great potential significance for members of the Modern Language Association, for members of similar organizations in other humanistic disciplines, and possibly for the nation as a whole. On September 29 in the Rose Garden at the White House, President Johnson signed into law an Act creating an agency to be known as the National Foundation on the Arts and the Humanities. This agency is to provide Federal funds “to complement, assist, and add to” the money provided “by local, State, regional, and private agencies” in support of the Arts and the Humanities.

Athough The Merchant of Venice ranks with Hamlet in theatrical popularity, it ranks low in critical esteem. A play that is difficult to classify, it is variously labeled tragi-comedy or romantic comedy; but neither label embraces nor harmonizes the seemingly disparate plots. Further, the plots are often condemned as preposterous and unrelated to life; and a fairly common view is that the play is a fairy tale: “There is no more reality in Shylock's bond and the Lord of Belmont's will than in Jack and the Beanstalk.” Critics adopting such a position find the chief merit of the play in its “flesh-and-blood characters” who triumph over the shortcomings of the story, with emphasis on Shylock, who is sometimes regarded as the protagonist. The approach to Shylock has been diverse, ranging from Stoll's notion of him as a comic butt in terms of Elizabethan conventions to the view that he is a tragic figure. Readers have shown a preoccupation with Shylock the Jew as scapegoat, stereotype, victim, or Elizabethan usurer; usually this interest has taken a realistic turn, with concern over questions of anti-Semitism and the legality of the trial.

Thomas Gray's Pindaric ode, “The Progress of Poesy,” completed in 1754, concludes with an odd definition of the “way” of the poet:

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,

Beneath the Good how far—but far above the Great.

Auspicious is the term by which I would describe the eighty-second year of the Modern Language Association. Our development has been satisfactory and our activities useful. But I have a sense of more important events impending for which the last year and the year or two yet to come are, essentially, preparation. I recall having had this feeling once before, between 1953 and 1955, during the first years of the Foreign Language Program. We had at that time the same stream of new faces through the office, the same effort to establish new lines of communication within the profession, the same struggle to achieve consensus and establish policy. That period saw the transformation of the MLA from a comfortable learned society into a professional association engaged in pedagogical and political activity relating to the modern foreign languages on a national scale. For the last ten years, we have been pursuing the leads and developing the policies laid down at that time. We have grown in the meanwhile from seven thousand to twenty-two thousand members; the headquarters staff has grown from four to forty-four; we have begun to add concern for the curriculum and teaching of English to our concern for the curriculum and teaching of the foreign languages.

With the recent publication of such books as Richard Southern's The Medieval Theatre in the Round (London, 1957) and Glynne Wickham's Early English Stages 1300 to 1600, Vol. i (London, 1959), the medieval English drama has come to be examined with much greater emphasis on the circumstances of its performance. While the Wakefield cycle has not been of focal interest to these studies, it has nevertheless attracted renewed attention as a dramatic work. Of special concern to students of the Wakefield plays is Martial Rose's introduction to his recently published modernized edition of the cycle. Mr. Rose sets forth the interesting theory that the Wakefield plays were not enacted processionally on pageant wagons as is generally believed, but rather that they were performed “in one fixed locality, on a multiple stage, and in the round.” This hypothesis, supported as it is by a very convincing body of arguments, is likely to have a far-reaching effect on Wakefield criticism. At the very least, it chalenges a number of widely-held opinions concerning the dramatic experience which the performance of the cycle provided. As a case in point, I should like here to focus on the Annunciation pageant and to demonstrate that, in an enlarged setting, its dramatic action becomes even more successful than it has hitherto been regarded. First, however, it will be necessary to review the “fixed-stage” theory and to examine its bearing on Wakefield criticism in general.

The book of the Courtier, by the overwhelming weight of its reputation and influence, comes to us as a handbook of the courtly virtues, or, more historically considered, as a treatise on the education of a Renaissance courtier. It is reasonable that it should. Castiglione himself announced his intention of teaching “what manner of man he must be who deserves the name of perfect Courtier, without defect of any kind” (i, 1); and his division of his work into four books which treat successively and compendiously the personal qualities, the conduct, the female counterpart, and the utility and aspirations of the courtier emphasizes its appearance of being a handbook. One can hardly refute, therefore, those writers who use The Courtier as an encyclopaedia of courteous manners, or even those who find in it a manual of Renaissance philosophy. Few works of the Renaissance have a more genuine documentary value.

In many respects Juan de Zabaleta seems close to the costumbrismo of the nineteenth century: the lack of narrative elements, the detailed description, the use of conversation in the presentation of types and as part of scenes rather than for narrative purposes, the urbanity of his style, the directness of his vision. The mental atmosphere of Zabaleta, on the other hand, is completely different: the curious time-lessness of his description, contrasted with the notion of transition; his choice of subjects for their moral value, contrasted with the search for the typical and picturesque; the sense of belonging to an ordered universe where laws may be broken but never repealed, contrasted with the irony of the later period where sometimes virtue is its own punishment. The list could be endless, for we are as much contrasting different ages as individual writers.

On 5 February 1805 John Wordsworth, the poet's brother, drowned when the ship he was commanding was wrecked off the English coast near Weymouth. No one would want to deny Ernest de Selincourt's assertion that his death was “the most terrible blow that either William or Dorothy had ever suffered”; it can easily be taken, as it often is, as the blow which signals the decline of Wordsworth's poetic power, his shift to Christianity, and his withdrawal into the isolation of Rydal Mount. There is justification for seeing in John's death such crippling force, but the story is more interesting and less conclusive, particularly as it relates to Wordsworth's poetic development, which is what will concern us here.

Recent Studies on d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques have tended to bear out Henri Trénel's assertion in 1904 that the poet is “le plus biblique des écrivains français.” Since Trénel's catalogue of Scriptural references and Hebraisms in the poem (by which he sought to prove his point), d'Aubigné critics have given more thought to the significance of this accumulation of Biblical imagery, focusing particularly on d'Aubigné's continuing correlation of characters and events in Old Testament, early Christian, and contemporary sixteenth-century history. Henri Weber, whose view represents the most generally accepted interpretation, explains that this correlation provides the temporal dimension required by the epic poem. Moreover, by showing contemporary events to be a repetition of Biblical history, it raises those events to a symbolic level consistent with d'Aubigné's notion that the fortunes of the Protestants represent the working out of God's providential design for His modern-day chosen people. Henry Sauerwein suggests that the Biblical imagery represents d'Aubigné's attempt to approximate the style of the Bible in order to achieve a form suited to Les Tragiques as God's revelation of the destiny of the Protestant people to the divinely inspired poet.

Our managing Trustee, Mr. Frederick B. Adams, Jr., has asked me to present to you the Report of the Trustees. At the close of the fiscal year the market value of our securities stood at $264,668, against some $259,000 for the previous year. The income from the fund this year came to $5,335, as against $8,200 for 1964. Some of the discrepancy here is attributable to our reporting, this time, an eleven-month year. Our fiscal year now ends 31 August, giving us an extra month to be audited and to prepare for the annual meeting. The income from the securities is distributed, under the bylaws, over the three endowment funds. The Trustees have approved the actions of the United States Trust Company in the management of the funds.

I commenti e i saggi sui molteplici passi ed episodi che nell'Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto occupano un posto di primo piano nell'economia del poema e che, più importante, rappresentano un aspetto rilevantissimo della civiltà medioevale e rinascimentale, la cavalleria, sono praticamente tutti informati all'ammirazione per le gesta grandiose, le imprese eroiche, gli atti di coraggio, la forza eccezzionale e la superiore abilità nel maneggio delle armi dei cavalieri. Ma questo non può essere che un criterio di giudizio superficiale in vista dell'importanza storico-culturale dell'istituzione cavalleresca e dei differenti modi di manifestarsi del suo spirito nel corso della storia.