Under date of March 3, 1592, Henslowe's Diary records the acting of the “new” play “Harry the Sixth.” In 1 Henry VI as we now have it, the General of Bordeaux addresses Talbot as “our nation's terror and their bloody scourge,” and Thomas Nashe in his famous allusion to a Talbot play (Piers Peniless, Stationers' Register, Aug. 8, 1592) speaks of him as “brave Talbot the terror of the French.” All this, according to general belief, refers to the same play, “Harry the Sixth,” or the earliest form or version of what we now call 1 Henry VI.

All students of Milton and most casual visitors to the British Museum know that Milton's family Bible is now part of the manuscript collection of the Museum (MS. Add. 32,310), and that it is regularly on display in one of the exhibition cases. It is of course kept open at the page which contains the well-known entries of births and deaths of various members of Milton's family, including himself, and few people realize that it contains anything else of interest.

A prose text of the Twelve Profits of Tribulation (MS. Royal 17 B xvii) based on the Latin treatise, De Duodecim Utilitatibus Tribulationis ascribed to Peter of Blois, archdeacon of Bath (†ca. 1200), was included by Horstmann in his edition of the works of Richard Rolle. Miss Hope Allen in her study of Rolle's writings has since demonstrated that this treatise is wrongly assigned to him. Horstmann also printed the text of the Twelve Profits from MS. Rawlinson C.894, and listed several other manuscripts containing prose versions of this treatise, in both English and French.

The Dyalogus published by Johannes Stamler in 1508 when he was rector of the parish church in the little German town of Kissing, a suburb of Augsburg, has up to this time been so completely overlooked by literary critics that its appearance now may be in a measure classed as a discovery. Stamler himself has fared no better at the hands of biographers. A few bibliographers list the play, but with the exception of A. Veith in his Bibliotheca Augustana do scarcely more than quote the full title. Several give a detailed account of Hans Burgkmair's frontispiece, a woodcut depicting, besides the characters of the play, Pope Julian II, and the Emperor Maximilian I. But the woodcut was used only in the first edition, of which twenty-five copies have been located so far. It does not appear in the smaller Italian translation published the same year in Venice by the little-known Giovanni Padovano.

The “Cartapacio de Francisco Morán de Estrella formado en Toro hacia 1585,” constituting part of the Poesías varias, M 531, a manuscript in the library of the Royal Palace at Madrid, contains (on folios 142–146) El llanto de San Pedro traducido por Sancho Viezma, octavas. In spite of the use of the word traducido the poem is not a translation of Tansillo's Lagrime di San Pietro and only partly is it an imitation. The term may have been employed by the scribe under an erroneous impression that it was a translation, or may have been loosely employed to stand for imitation or derivation, a procedure not uncommon at the time.

Siegfried Mauermann in Die Bühnenanweisungen im deutschen Drama bis 1700 (1911) made the assertion that we cannot seriously reckon with the presence of a curtain on the German stage before 1600. Since Mauermann's monograph is well documented with numerous quotations of stage directions in which there is no mention of a curtain before 1600, one would be inclined to agree, were it not that several studies made since then incidentally present material that definitely disproves Mauermann's conjecture. As apparently no investigation gives a reasonably complete survey of the introduction and early use of the curtain on the German stage, the following findings are presented.

In PMLA for September, 1935, I proposed a new and later date than customary for the flourishing of the author of the Secunda Pastorum in the Towneley cycle of mystery plays. It seemed to me then, as it seems to me now, that the evidence of the costume allusions in his plays and the evidence of local history both pointed to the years 1425–50 as encompassing the years of his major work. At the close of that article I quoted W. W. Greg and Miss Marie C. Lyle as bibliographical authorities, the one as believing that the York Passion Group could “hardly be earlier than 1400” and the other as placing the influence of the Gospel of Nicodemus upon that group as after 1415 when Roger Burton, city clerk of York, set down in the official York Memorandum Book a description of the plays as he knew them at that time. Miss Lyle, it is true, was immediately replied to by Miss Grace Clark and partly dislodged from her position. After reviewing Miss Clark's argument as it bore on the point at issue, however, I concluded that “my case would stand.” I propose now to bring the bibliographical evidence under the review of Burton's two “lists”—the first set down, as I have said, in 1415, and the second a few years later—and also under the review of entries in the York Memorandum Book (Surlees Society,cxx and cxxv).

Biographers of Marvell have found themselves in a curious predicament. Although a considerable number of Marvell's letters have come down to us and evidence of other kinds is at least comparatively extensive, it has proved impossible to arrive at any clear understanding of his character. That fundamental uncertainty is chiefly a result of the fact that at two or three critical points the evidence is limited and enigmatic.

Of all the Euphuists, Robert Greene was the one most fascinated by the rhetorical possibilities provided for literature by science. Similes and allusions drawn from the storehouse of natural history appear on almost every page of his work. One counts references to more than thirty animals, forty minerals and precious stones, fifteen reptiles, thirty birds, fifteen fish, twenty trees, fifteen insects, and sixty herbs in the corpus of his prose romances. The number of his allusions must total almost a thousand—a staggering mass of material for such a mercurial mind to retain. What is the origin of all this learning?

The collection of poems in MS. Harley 7392 (article 2) has proved to be a unique source for verses by Raleigh, Dyer, the Earl of Oxford, and other lesser poets writing during the period of 1570–90. The most distinguished name among them, however, and the poet with the largest number of poems, is Sir Philip Sidney. Of the thirteen pieces by him, two do not appear elsewhere; and one, though familiar from its appearance in The Phoenix Nest (1593), has not before been attributed to him. These three are reprinted below.

Hearty, cheerful Mr. Cotton and pious Izaak Walton shared enthusiasms other than their common devotion to angling. Both of these seventeenth-century fishermen had some proficiency in singing, and wrote verse to be set to music. Walton, it will be recalled, “made a conversion of an old ketch, and added more to it,” for which Henry Lawes composed the melody of The Angler's Song. Charles Cotton in imitation of Walton's verse, or out of admiration for Lawes' music, wrote The Angler's Ballad, which can be sung to the tune for Walton's ketch. But Cotton's song writing was not limited to the fitting of new words to old measures. A number of his poems were set by Mr. Coleman, and one, The Picture, received the distinction of being “Set by Mr. Laws,” the composer who had provided the music not only for Walton's Angler's Song, but for Milton's Comus songs, for Shakespeare's sonnet cxvi, and for a great many other sixteenth and seventeenth century lyrics.

Ubrich Knoche in seinem schönen Artikel “Betrachtungen über Horazens Kunst der satirischen Gesprächsführung” (Philologus, xc [1936], S.373 ff.) zeigt, von demhorazischen Präzept ausgehend:

Although there is no doubt that the French Academy grew out of the meetings at Conrart's home, the fact that its origin has been claimed by two or three other groups shows the widespread vogue of these gatherings at the time of its foundation in 1634. Their importance is manifest in all the satires, poems, and novels of the time—such as Francion (1623), Le Berger Extravagant (1627), and Camus, Bishop of Belley's Alcime (1625). Consciously modeled on that of Baïf, these académies seem to have flourished in unbroken succession since the days of the Pléiade.

The revised Arcadia has long been recognized as a great treasure-house of sixteenth-century references. Scholars have unearthed from incidental and episodical passages many significant bits of political and social background. Like a mosaic, these pieces are gradually fitted together to complete the work; so that each fragment, no matter how small, fits into its place. Among the scholars eminent in this field are Friedrich Brie, who recognized the importance of knowledge of Elizabethan life generally to an understanding of the Arcadia; Emma Denkinger, who has investigated the impresa and emblems of Sidney's in connection with sixteenth-century literature and practice; and Edwin Greenlaw, who has revealed much political and autobiographical significance. Indeed, so great is the contemporaneity of the Arcadia that it is this aspect of the book which has a special interest, and Sidney himself may have derived greater pleasure in writing the so-called extraneous matter than in untangling his romance or in depicting characters.

The irresistible whirl of change moves faster as the world grows older, but the student of history and letters may still take uneasy comfort in the reflection that old legend dies hard. It lives long and, grown old, may be born anew if it be good legend—a challenging fable, a pointed parable, a tale which holds old men from the chimney corner because it has poignancy, beauty, truth, even if it be not the whole truth. And as with legend so with certain legendary literary judgments which have captured, as it were, the imagination of men. So it is, for instance, with Wordsworth's famous dictum concerning Milton: Milton's soul was like a star, but he did not dwell far apart from the world of affairs nor from warm and kindly human relationships. Yet Wordsworth's Milton lives, not only because the conception has in it an element of real, though partial truth, but more especially because it is dramatically effective—because it characterizes a complex figure in sharp, clean-cut, easily understandable lines. So it is also, I believe, with a fascinating old half-truth of critical legend which has had a curiously varied revival in our own time: the legend—one of Milton's own sponsorship though neither of his only begetting nor yet of Ben Jonson's—concerning the divine “easiness,” the gloriously unstudied artlessness of “sweetest Shakespeare, Fancy's child,” warbling “his native woodnotes wild.”