In the treatment of classical authors and works used or borrowed upon by Rabelais, Cicero's share has not been fully studied, or, if studied, not properly emphasized. Plattard in his study of Rabelais maintains that “Bien que Gargantua recommande à Pantagruel, étudiant à Paris de former son style latin ‘à l'imitation de celui de Cicéron,’ Rabelais ne semble pas avoir beaucoup pratiqué lui-même les œuvres de Cicéron.” In the Lefranc edition of Rabelais' works, the same unawareness is evident although there are, besides quite a few direct mentions of Cicero in the text, many notations indicating possible references to him. These, however, are presumed to have been taken mostly from Erasmus. But on this point there is no complete accord. That Rabelais borrowed generously and frequently there can be no question. It is the purpose of this paper to show the borrowings made by him from Cicero's De Oratore and the Orator.

For his work on the Bible in English and for his translations from Erasmus, Richard Taverner has had a modest importance in early Tudor literature. In other respects, he has been an easy man to disregard. He misses the pioneer's distinction in both his fields; he obscures the interest of his own utterances by offering them in the guise of translation; even what we know of his life suggests no highly individual achievement. In summary, his biography traces a path well worn by his generation of humanists—scholars trained at Renaissance Oxford and Cambridge, men matured in the dramatic, dangerous school of experience that was England between the fall of Wolsey and the death of Henry VIII. The times welcomed such a useful scholarship as Taverner devoted to education, politics, and religion. We, in turn, may increase our understanding of those times by recognizing, not simply the work he did, but also his methods and some of his results. For such a study, his little book preserved in exemplars of six editions, Proverbes or Adagies … gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, has the double interest of revealing more of Taverner's thought than we should expect to find in it and of helping to color the fame of Erasmus in England.

The literature of the estates of the world, so clearly developed in medieval France and England, was further enriched for the modern reader by the publication in 1936 of the fifteenth-century satire Mum and the Sothsegger. Discovered in the west country, near the locale of Piers Plowman, to which it bears a number of similarities, it reviews the condition of “all kinds of estates,“ from king to peasant, in the eventful last days of Richard II and the early years of the reign of Henry IV. Though a part of the newly discovered manuscript is a fragment of alliterative verse already published under the title Richard the Redeles, the much larger part concerning the case of Mum and the Truthteller was unknown to modern readers and seems to have been largely neglected since its publication. The question of the relation of the two fragments is unsettled, but since in the sixteenth century they were known as one poem under the title of Mum, Sothsegger, since their language and form are identical, and since certain ideas in the two parts are closely related, there is good reason for considering them here together as parts of a single poem.

It is an odd feature of the greatest of English tragedies that the hero disappears completely from view for a considerable time, and even leaves the country in which the action takes place. Slackening in the dramatic tension is avoided by the introduction of new and startling events—the madness and death of Ophelia, the revolt against Claudius, and the return and threatened vengeance of Laertes, a far more picturesque and dangerous agent of the King's designs than Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, who are at this point disposed of for good and all. The adventures of Hamlet are in the meantime reported by letters, not always an exciting business in the theatre, and briefly recounted to Horatio just before the final tragedy. They are generally little regarded by the audience, who have more absorbing matter for their attention in the coming encounter with the King. In most acting versions the scene on a plain in Denmark, with the fine and important soliloquy “How all occasions do inform against me,” is omitted.

From the Elizabethan prosodists we shall obtain no more than a few scattered hints concerning Donne's versification. Prosodists are notoriously conservative, and the Elizabethans are no exception. Putten-ham, in spite of his evident pleasure in the sound of verse, still places his confidence in the final arbitration of the eye; and it is thus that he comments on the diagram of a stanza-form: “most times your occular proportion doeth declare the nature of the audible; for if it please the eare well, the same represented by delineation to the view pleaseth the eye well, and e converso.” This ocular prosody leads him to say that “it is somewhat more tolerable to help the rime by false orthographie then to leave an unplesant dissonance to the eare by keeping trewe orthographie and loosing the rime, as for example it is better to rime Dore with Restore then in his truer orthographie, which is Doore.” Even with the rise of lyric and of dramatic blank verse this attitude does not disappear. Campion, for instance, makes the sensible remark that normal accent “is diligently to be observ'd, for chiefely by the accent in any language the true value of the sillables is to be measured.” And he knows that “we must esteeme our sillables as we speake, not as we write; for the sound of them in a verse is to be valued, and not their letters.” Yet he inconsistently admits length by position, as in Trumpington.

Critics are now agreed that Rabelais' Gargantua, which takes its place as the First Book in the author's complete works, was composed and published approximately two years after the first book of Pantagruel. The latter must have appeared first at the autumn fairs at Frankfort in 1532, and it is highly improbable that the former was launched before August of 1534. During the two intervening years the author had suffered the censorship of his first work in October, 1533, and had profited from his first trip to Rome in the entourage of DuBellay early in 1534. Quite some time, eight years to be exact, elapsed after the publication of the Gargantua before the appearance of his promised continuation of the Pantagruel in 1542.

Quid petitur sacris nisi tantum fama poetis?“ inquired Boissard as a representative sixteenth-century man of letters. That he cribbed the wording of his question from Ovid merely makes him a more typically Renaissance author. Like other literary theorists of the period, the emblematists—those essayists in prose and verse who reached such a vast public in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—subscribed to the contention that the great poet achieves renown and immortality through his works. The emblematists frequently chose engravings or woodcuts containing symbols of glory, affixed brief titles or ”posies“ to these cuts, and then subjoined thereto essays or poems developing the theme of literary glory suggested by the plate. The accompanying reproduction from Peacham's Minerva Britanna (note 23) will acquaint the reader with a typical page from an emblem-book. Of all the literary notions encountered in emblem-books, this belief that the Muse saves poets from ignominy and death is the most frequent. It is the basic idea underlying the classic cult of poetic glory, the one cult shared by classic and Romanticist alike. It is interesting to see reappearing in every language of Western Europe the gratifying thought that authors win eternal life and kudos through their compositions. It strikes a most familiar note when we encounter it phrased in Renaissance Latin, for we remember reading it over and over in classic Latin texts.

Grimm's Deutsches Wörterbuch treats this word under Bosse, m. (ii, 261–263) and Posse, Posz, Possen, m. (vii, 2013 f.). There is also a long article by Biltz, “Über das Wort und den Begriff Posse,” in Herrigs Archiv,lxxiii, 33–46 (1885), and a brief résumé in Kluge-Götze, 11th ed. (1932), p. 453, under Posse, f. Grimm (ii, 261 ff.) says of the word:

Bosse, m. jocus, nugae, ineptiae, astutia, gestus. es ist schwer, die gestalt und abkunft dieses worts zu sichern, dessen anlaut zwischen B und P schwankt, dessen nom. oft in einsilbiges bosz, botz gekürzt erscheint (wie blicze in blitz, bisse in biß, bitz, böse in bosz), zuletzt gar in possen (wie viele schwache m.) gedehnt. so häufig seit dem 16.jh. der ausdruck wird, nirgends erscheint er früher.

The identification of the writers employed by the bishops in their counterattack against Martin Marprelate is almost as difficult as is that of Martin himself. Most prominent of those suspected is Thomas Nashe; indeed, at one time or another every one of the anti-Martinist pamphlets has been ascribed to him. Since in his own day his name was frequently associated with Martin's, shortly after his death the legend sprang up that he was chiefly responsible for downing Martin. Until 1903, when McKerrow began his edition, it was taken for granted that Nashe was the leading anti-Martinist writer.

In studies of Elizabethan pronunciation the method used has been consideration of such things as poetic rhythm, the spellings of people who could be expected to spell more or less phonetically, and rime. Many of the results are, naturally, doubtful, and there are many disagreements and questions left open. So far, except for one brief reference to Campian by Viètor, no one appears to have considered the possibilities offered by the examination of contemporary song books, especially those of the lutenists. In this paper I have studied some of the debated points in the light of the evidence from the music.

Over the centuries, a varying but persistent interest in magic and the occult sciences has reached, by way of devious paths, the culture and literature of Western Europe. In France, the vigor of this natural human bent was manifest even during the Age of Reason; Swedenborgians, Rosicrucians, martinistes, and Freemasons, together with a host of educated persons with no particular philosophical alliances, became pleasurably entangled in what Diderot disdainfully termed “ce tissu indigeste et ridicule de suppositions.“ “Le culte du merveilleux,” says a historian of that period, Constantin Bila, “n'épargnait aucune classe de la société.” The heightened interest in the marvelous, the supernatural, and the fantastic throughout the Romantic Period and the later nineteenth century is, of course, familiar.

The considerable amount of commentary published on Marlowe's Tamburlaine in recent years makes highly significant the fact that Tamburlaine's catastrophe remains one of the unsatisfactorily explained enigmas of the play. The unwary reader doubtless assumes that at the end of Tamburlaine II the Scythian conqueror simply—though somewhat vitriolically—dies, and that Marlowe should be called to account for marring his play with a badly-motivated catastrophe. The careful reader of Marlowe's text doubtless perceives (or at least suspects) that Tamburlaine's “distemper” at the end of the play is linked definitely with Renaissance medical, physiological, psychological, and astrological concepts. Yet no satisfactory analysis of how these concepts are involved in Tamburlaine's death has been made. Carroll Camden hazards the suggestion that Tamburlaine's death is immediately resultant upon his choleric humour. Miss Una Ellis-Fermor, the most recent editor of Tamburlaine, attempts to supply adequate annotation regarding the physician's diagnosis of Tamburlaine's “distemper,” but her footnotes are woefully inadequate as well as inaccurate. Don Cameron Allen, believing that “Marlowe conceived of his hero as a typical representative of the fortunati,” a Renaissance type of fortunate man upon whom Fortune never failed to smile, contends that Tamburlaine comes to no catastrophe at all but triumphantly “dies of old age.” Roy W. Battenhouse has recently considered Tamburlaine an instrument by means of which God, in His providential justice, scourges the world, and then, when the mundane chastisement is completed, strikes down His tyrannical instrument. Although in this article Professor Battenhouse does not explain, or even consider, the express bodily workings of Tamburlaine's malady, in his recent book he assumes (following Camden) that Tamburlaine is—among other things—a typical choleric man, and affirms that the physician's diagnosis indicates that Tamburlaine dies in a mad frenzy brought on by that disastrous affliction of the “humours” which Elizabethans termed choler adjust.

Among the probable sources upon which Swift drew for his Gulliver's Travels, there is one work which has been completely overlooked. This is Edward Tyson's book Orang-Outang, sive Homo Sylvestris, published under the imprimatur of the Royal Society at London in May or June, 1699. This work consists of two parts, the first dealing with the anatomy of a juvenile chimpanzee, the second with the knowledge of the apes and monkeys possessed by the ancients and their interpretation of it.

Possibly none of the “dark conceits” woven into the fabric of Spenser's allegory appear so impenetrable to modern eyes as the topical allusions. They were obscure in the sixteenth century, but served in consequence to catch immediate attention and interest. Today, when clues are difficult to recognize, when modern readers lack the easy familiarity with everyday events and personalities which Spenser took for granted in his public, much of the topical meaning of the Faerie Queene has been lost. Occasionally, however, some of the allusions are recognized and the range of meaning in the poem is thereby extended. It has been observed recently that the Mutability cantos may refer to the problem of the succession. If a fairly convincing case could be made for this suggestion, it would be possible to appreciate anew how Spenser delighted his readers by adroit reference to topics forbidden in open debate. The following discussion is offered not as proof, but rather as a suggestion with enough likelihood to call for consideration.