Among the questions which still await investigation in the literary history of sixteenth and seventeenth century England, not the least important is that of the survival of the vernacular writings of the Middle Ages. No one can have studied the records of publishing activities during the Tudor and Stuart periods without becoming aware that a considerable number of the romances, tales, poems, chronicles, lives of saints of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries still continued to circulate, and to find, though probably in ever smaller numbers, appreciative readers. Nor can anyone who has noted this persistence of medieval literature beyond the Middle Ages fail to draw from it inferences not a little damaging to our current conceptions of sixteenth and seventeenth century taste. As yet, however, no historian of literature has dealt with the problem in a systematic or detailed way—no one has tried to set clearly before us precisely which works, out of the total body of medieval writings, remained in vogue, how long the popularity of each of them lasted, how far they were modified in form or content to suit the taste of successive generations, by what sort of “public” they were read, and of what nature was the influence which they exercised upon the newer writers. Some day perhaps we shall have such a history of the survival of medieval literature in early modern England. In the meantime, as a preliminary treatment of a single phase of the subject, the present study of Guy of Warwick may not be without its interest. It proposes to trace from the days of the early printers to the close of the eighteenth century the fortunes of but one—though perhaps the most typical one—of the many romances whose popularity survived the Middle Ages.

In Rouge et Noir, Stendhal (Henri Beyle) defines a novel as a miroir: qui se promène sur la grande route. We may apply this figure to his Correspondance which, less open to the suspicion of pose than his other writings, reflects much of la vie littéraire of France during the first four decades of the nineteenth century. Stendhal was brought up on a classicist régime, he saw the passing of pseudo-classicism, he contributed to the triumph of romanticism and was himself a realist, before the term had been: invented. In a letter to Mr. Stritch of London, written in 1823 in the midst of the romanticist ebullition, he declared: Le caractère principal de la nation française est la méfiance (II, p. 296). No one could offer more natural qualifications for recognition as the spokesman of his nation in this regard, than this man, who, French by birth, wrote under a German pseudonym and had himself buried as a citizen of Milan under the Italian inscription which he had composed for his own tombstone.

No traditional story was so popular in the Elizabethan age as that of the siege of Troy and some of its episodes; because of its antiquity and undying beauty, of the fame and greatness of the early writers who had treated it, and to some extent of the tradition that the Britons were descendants of the Trojans, a tradition which certainly often determined the point of view. After the close of the Middle Ages its popularity had increased rather than diminished, among both educated and uneducated. And nothing better than this story illustrates the true relation of the age to the nearer and the remoter past,—the continuation of mediaeval tradition and taste, especially among the little-educated; and the often uncouth modification of it by an increased knowledge and a sharpened understanding of the classics. To Chaucer and the followers of Guido delle Colonne were added a more intelligently-read Virgil and Ovid, and a new-found Homer. But for the most part they were subdued to what they worked in, the romantic and rather undiscerning taste of the not highly educated.

Chaucer's Booh of the Duchess opens, as is generally agreed, with five lines rather closely translated from Froissart's Paradys d'Amours. Froissart, however, was himself imitating a passage from Guillaume de Machaut's Fontaine Amoureuse, and Chaucer, who knew both works, utilized the Fontaine, along with Ovid, for the tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, which occupies most of his Proem. Yet, in the midst of this story, he darted back to the Paradys for a moment to pick up the strange name Fclympasteyr, and, near the end of the Proem, the influence of Froissart is again visible in a few details. One of these is amusing. Froissart prayed not only to Morpheus, but to Juno and Oleus:

Car tant priai a Morpheus,
A Juno et a Oleus—(15-16).

Possibly no entry in the Stationers' Register has given rise to more discussion than the puzzling “to be staied” entered in the margin beside the titles of four plays on one of the fly-leaves of “Register C.”

The attention of students of mediaeval drama has often been arrested by a short dramatic text from a Vienna manuscript published by DuMéril among the examples of the liturgical Epiphany play in his Origines Latines du Théâtre Moderne. Among the mediaeval Latin plays of Epiphany this slight specimen is unique in its rhetorical form, in the names of the dramatis personæ, and in the absence of liturgical elements. The play is composed of thirteen leonine hexameters, which provide thirty-one speeches, each of the last ten hexameters being divided among three speakers. The first three lines, in the nature of an invitatory, are assigned to Stella as a speaking character, and the Magi appear under the names of Aureolus, Thureolus, and Myrreolus. The play bears no marks from the liturgy. Although the introductory rubric Ad adorandum Filium Dei per Stellam invitantur Eoy might serve well enough for launching a liturgical play, there is no concluding rubric to indicate a liturgical association, and the text itself contains no formulae reminiscent of the liturgy.

Colley Cibber declared that for The Non-juror, the most important of his dramas, he employed Molière's Tartuffe as the basis. His declaration has been accepted by later writers. Genest says, “it is taken from Moliere's Tartuffe.” Ward repeats, “Crowne may have helped to suggest to Cibber the composition of The Non-Juror (1717), which however more closely follows Tartuffe.” Van Laun declares: “Cibber has been accused of having stolen the plot, characters, incidents, and most part of the language from Medbourne; but this is untrue. What he has taken from him is the servant Charles (Laurence), who also betrays his master.” The ever-present German dissertation solemnly copies the statement: a certain Wilhelm Schneider concludes: “Medbournes ‘Tartuffe’ kann, zumal er zunächst Übersetzung ist, nach van Launs Artikel nur für wenige Anregungen herangezogen werden.” Joseph Knight in his article on Cibber in the Dictionary of National Biography remarks: “A strong Hanoverian, as was natural from his origin, Cibber saw bis way to adapting the ‘Tartuffe’ of Molière to English politics. ‘Tartuffe’ became accordingly in the ‘Non-juror’ an English catholic priest.” Americans have joined the chorus. A Western man asserts: “The Non-Juror is based directly on Molière's Tartuffe. … Cibber was no doubt familiar with Medbourne's play, but he used Molière as a basis, and owed practically nothing to any play other than the Tartuffe of Molière.” More recently Professor Nettleton speaks of “The Non-Juror (1717), an adaptation of Molière's Tartuffe to English setting,” and quotes with approval the words of Cibber.

Though three reprints of the anonymous Cæsar and Pompey, together with the discussion devoted to it by Parrott, Mühlfeld, and Boas, seem to represent doubtless quite as much attention as the play really deserves, I venture to add, out of materials long on hand, another note by way of summary and, in one or two places, of addition and correction. Such a review, showing the author's literary method to be one of the closest dependence on his models, may serve to raise a presumption that in his treatment of Cæsar, who resembles Marlowe's Tamburlaine without being a literal copy, he was familiar with plays about Cæsar which are now lost to us; or conscious, at least, of a dramatic tradition which made of Csasar a boastful conqueror.

Basilicata is the name of that territorial division of Southern Italy which is now known as the province of Potenza and which formed a part of the ancient Lucania. It is bounded on the north by the province of Foggia, on the northeast by the provinces of Bari and Lecce, on the east by the province of Cosenza, and on the west by the Mediterranean sea and the provinces of Salerno and Avellino. It has a population of about 512,000 inhabitants and comprises the circondari of Lagonegro, Matera, Melfi, and Potenza. The region is mountainous and the population is given largely to agriculture and sheep-raising. Although centrally located, the province possesses no mercantile towns of any great importance. Many objects of antiquity were discovered in this region: inscriptions, vases, fragments of statues, medallions, and two bronze tables, known as the Heraclean Tables, now in the Naples Museum.

About three years ago an article was published by the present writer defining the essential features of the enueg and the plazer and showing the rise of this type of poetry in Provençal and its subsequent spread to Catalan, French, Italian, and Portuguese. The enueg was found to be a rimed composition on the subject of vexations and annoyances, while the plazer took pleasures as its theme. Except for this difference, the important characteristics of both are the same: (A) the enumeration of a series of vexations or pleasures, usually without continuity; (B) the repetition of a word or phrase which indicates the attitude of the poet, such as ‘it vexes me’ or ‘it pleases me.‘ Since that time the investigations have been continued, especially in French and Italian.

In attempting to trace the theory of the German novelle back to its beginnings, a century and more ago, the student finds that Goethe's famous epigram of 1827: “Was ist die Novelle anders als eine sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit?” is rightly given third place chronologically among the more important contributions to the discussion before Tieck. Goethe's predecessors in this field were the brothers Schlegel, and their contributions were pioneer work in a truly peculiar sense of the word; for at the time they wrote, the German novelle was as good as non-existent, and criticism is wont to follow, not precede, literary production. It is true that both had foreign models from which to deduce their theory; in the case of Friedrich Schlegel, Boccaccio furnished the norm, for August Wilhelm, both Boccaccio and Cervantes. But it is also true that, as the foremost critical talents of the Romantic movement, the Schlegels were in search of a new literary form into which might be poured the new literary content of the movement with which they were allied; and so their critical statements are, in a certain sense, more or less conscious propaganda for Romanticism. It was in their characteristically Romantic flight from an uncongenial present that they rediscovered Boccaccio and Cervantes and realised that these two masters had excelled in a form not native to Germany. In introducing this form in theory into German literature theirs was pioneer criticism of the first order, and it is with no thought of belittling their attainment that attention may be called to the fact that their work was anticipated in a fashion by the greatest figure in literature among their contemporaries.

A quaint piece of dramatic writing, the Cartel or Monomachie of Antoine Gaillard, is one of the earliest of seventeenth-century French plays in which an author puts his contemporaries on the stage and makes fellow writers the butt of his jests. It clears the way for Desmarest's Visionnaires, Saint-Evremond's Académistes, a half-dozen of Molière's plays, and a number of other pieces by Molière's contemporaries, whose satire is devoted to living individuals or to groups of literary persons; but the work has so little dramatic value that it would remain merely a date, were it not for the fact that by selecting real persons as the object of his satire, Gaillard has criticized from the standpoint of a contemporary a number of writers who flourished with greater or less distinction in 1633. In discussing the work I shall therefore dwell upon its biographical qualities, rather than upon its slender merit as a drama.

Every reader of the Restoration comedy of manners cannot fail to be impressed with the frequent occurrence of the character-sketch. Often this is of a typical personage having no part in the action, as when in Wycherley's Plain Dealer, Novel and Olivia together in dialogue form describe Lady Autumn, her daughter, and a fop, none of whom appears in the play. Again, one notices a marked use of the dramatic convention of making one actor describe another who is about to enter. A typical instance occurs in the scene just mentioned when Novel describes in the form of a “character,” Lord Plausible, and is interrupted by that gentleman's entrance.

Every student of the literature of the Middle Ages is aware that Eichard I was a highly popular figure in medieval England, and that about the historical facts of his career there grew up with rapidity and luxuriance a considerable growth of romantic legend. As his fame challenged the pre-eminence of Arthur among British heroes, so his exploits, like Arthur's, multiplied and grew more marvelous in the imagination of the people, though for obvious reasons the process never went so far. To Richard's prestige among his own people we have abundant testimony in the seven manuscripts of the Middle English romance of Richard Cœur de Lion extant and in the three printed editions of the sixteenth century. As Ellis pointed out, as early as 1805, in introducing his synopsis of the romance, it is a curious texture of narrative mainly historical concerning the Third Crusade, interwoven liberally with bits of this legendary material. It will be profitable, before dealing with illustrations of certain episodes occurring in the romance, to devote some attention to its development and structure. In a review of Dr. Karl Brunner's critical edition of Richard Cœur de Lion, to be published elsewhere, I hope to deal fully with the subject, and merely summarize here the results of my investigations. I owe much to Dr. Brunner's discussion, but more to that of Gaston Paris, whose conclusions in general I adopt.

In a series of recent articles Professor Frederick Tupper has put forward, with great skill and learning, a view regarding the plan of the Canterbury Tales which demands, on account of its originality and its importance, the most respectful and open-minded consideration. As one who was fortunate enough to be present at the inception of the theory, and who welcomed enthusiastically the promise of fresh light which it seemed to hold, I am free, I think, from antecedent prejudice. But as the theory has been developed in article after article I have felt myself compelled to dissent, with steadily strengthening conviction, from Professor Tupper's contention, and it is the purpose of this article to make clear the grounds on which it seems to me that that contention, in spite of its uncommon plausibility, must be rejected. All students of Chaucer are under a debt to Mr. Tupper, whether they agree with him or not. A fresh and original conception, maintained with an enthusiasm that vivifies dead facts, is of all too rare occurrence, and its “Forth, beste, out of thy stal” is wholesome stimulus. But Mr. Tupper would be the last to wish his vigorous challenge to gird up our loins and give a reason for the faith that is in us, to go unanswered. He has already offered hospitality to various objections in his articles, but he and his critics have not met, apparently, on common ground. In my own case I wish to accept, without question, his own choice of field and weapons.

In 1905, two important contributions were made to our knowledge of the sources of Ben Jonson's The Staple of News. Dr. De Winter, in a critical edition of the play, pointed out several important similarities between it and the earlier London Prodigal, which play he urged, further, was “mainly the work of Jonson's hand.” In the same year, Mr. Charles Crawford showed less important similarities between The Staple of News and The Bloody Brother, notably in speeches by the Master-Cook, a character in the former play, and insisted that here also Jonson had had a large hand in the play from which he later borrowed.