Your Executive Secretary has asked me to discuss a particular aspect of our recent efforts involving the schools. The question, specifically, is why are scientists willing to spend large parts of their short lives outside their lovely ivory towers, trying to help the schools to help themselves. Surely it might be, but is not, only an excess of missionary zeal. Nor is it that science itself is getting too difficult or too precious, though sometimes we have our moments of depression, when we believe that science is moving away from the concerns of people. Of course, it is not. No, in our ivory towers it is still true that a molecule may not talk but it never talks back; moreover, its feelings are never hurt, and it never does one thing because you ask it to do another. Ask a molecule a sensible question, and you will get a sensible answer.

The reputation of Bartholomew Fair has undergone some curious revolutions over the years. In its own day, and during the Restoration period, it seems to have been one of the most widely admired of Jonson's plays, but later generations came to judge it more harshly, tending to dismiss it as another example of the generally acknowledged decline in Jonson's artistic powers that was traced from the high point he had attained in the three preceding comedies, Volpone, Epicene, and The Alchemist, down to the final works that Dryden called his “dotages.” More recently, however, the critical pendulum has been swinging in the opposite direction, and by now we have seen a number of students of Jonson who are prepared to discuss this play with the same respect accorded to the three “major comedies,” and even a few who claim to find in it “the culmination of the dramatist's comic art.”

In writing the chapter on “The Work of Robert de Boron and the Didot Perceval” for Arthurian Literature in the Middle Ages, Pierre Le Gentil shows that many questions remain unanswered for readers of the Metrical Joseph. Beyond the statements which we understand as the poet's—that at the time when he told the story of the graal he was with his lord Gautier de Montbéliard in peace, that no one had yet told the story, and that he intends to continue with stories of Alain, Petrus, Moyses, and Bron—we have been guided in our reading largely by conjecture. From the fragment of the Merlin which follows the Metrical Joseph in MS. fr. 20047 of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, we can see that the poet places the two works within the concept of the struggle between Christ and Satan for the soul of man. Several of his sources have been pointed out; but beyond a few conclusions from the text itself, a reader wonders at the strange combination of Christian tradition and Celtic legend which Robert de Boron has effected in these two works. Discussions have been complicated by manuscripts of works related in various ways to the poems of MS. fr. 20047, and by the proliferation of stories of the Grail following Robert de Boron's Christianization of Celtic stories which had been circulating for about a hundred years before his time.

Students of The Canterbury Tales have devoted relatively slight attention to the incident of the Canon at Boughton under Blee and to his Yeoman's tale, and even of this they have not given much to the Canon himself. H. G. Richardson and J. M. Manly investigated possible historical models for him, and Marie P. Hamilton has shown that he was a Canon Regular. But apart from these, discussion has been confined mainly to the sources and extent of Chaucer's alchemical knowledge, the possible audience for the tale considered apart from the Canterbury group, and the character of the Yeoman, so much more fully developed than that of his master.

In the gently melancholic meditation on solitude which forms the second part of “Le Songe d'un habitant du Mogol” (xi, 4), La Fontaine wonders if he will ever be able to escape the hubbub of life in Paris and retire to some peaceful rural retreat. At least he can anticipate how he might there spend his time, upon a subject well fitted to solitary contemplation:

Quand pourront les neuf Sœurs, loin des cours et des villes
M'occuper tout entier, et m'apprendre des cieux
Les divers mouvements inconnus à nos yeux,
Les noms et les vertus de ces clartés errantes,
Par qui sont nos destins et nos mœurs différentes?

For a Peace Corps official to speak to the leading organization of teachers of foreign languages is somewhat analogous to a speech by Secretary McNamara to the assembled space manufacturers. We are certainly, at this point, the largest users of your product—if we correctly understand each other that your product is the modern man (or woman to be sure) trained in the use of a language other than his own. I realize that this is a narrow definition of the work you do, but I hope that in the time allotted to me I will be able to satisfy you that we in the Peace Corps, as you in the Foreign Language Section of the Modern Language Association, share a broader concern for the uses—past, present, and future—of language.

Textual cruces in The Seafarer, especially those near the end of the poem, have been not so much resolved as relegated to the lumber room in the mansion of poetry. On the one hand, oral-formulaic analysts regard The Seafarer as a verse text of 124 lines, predominantly formulaic, probably composed by a learned poet. The major problem, under this view, is that of deciding to what extent it is formulaic and then inferring the manner of composition: does the unique text represent a slightly defective record of oral composition? does it represent a poem composed entirely in writing, with deliberation foreign to oral composition, though employing traditional formulas of oral poetry? or does the text perhaps preserve orally composed sections that have been remembered by a deliberate, lettered poet who has built these sections into a poem he composed pen in hand? On the other hand, the historical-thematic analysts, also regarding the poem as a 124-line composition, employing inherited poetic language, continue to adduce evidence converging on the conclusion that a homiletic writer has shaped traditional verse materials to his own pious ends. One can no longer question the pervasiveness of doctrinal and homiletic devices in the conception and diction of the poem. Both oral-formulaic analysis and historical-thematic analysis, by their very nature, tend to assume the integrity of an Old English text—allowing, of course, for copyists' lapses of attention and errors in understanding. Neither approach, however, has been particularly concerned to resolve some persistent question of the integrity of the text or to suggest ways of regarding the textual cruces in the final section of the poem.

Similarities between the late medieval English mystery plays and late medieval religious art have often been pointed out; parallels in literature and painting to the dramatic scene in which Christ is stretched and nailed to the cross, for example, are numerous. So far, commentators have concentrated on the similarities which concern the way in which the sequence of events of the Christian story is presented—on the narrative details in the plays, paintings, carvings, narrative poems, and glass paintings. For example, the way Christ steps out of the tomb (that is, the dramatic narrative) in the Chester Resurrection has analogies in English alabaster carvings. Such a knowledge is valuable in that it helps demonstrate the popular religious context of much of the narrative detail of the plays (Plate I). I think, however, that the religious (and social) contexts of the performances (especially the rationale of the presence of the audience) can best be understood by considering a different kind of parallel between the plays and religious art—similarities in the static, non-narrative scenes. In particular, I wish to link Christ's monologues in the plays closely to some of the images (Plate II) of the Cult of Jesus of the late Middle Ages, which share with the plays and other religious arts of the period a certain sensational realism and impassioned emotionalism.

Forty years ago i realized dimly that in American schoolrooms it was quite respectable to study and try to learn a foreign language, but that the child who already knew one before he entered school was somehow at a disadvantage. This realization didn't come in that Louisiana town I later knew, where for many years the only person who couldn't speak French was the French teacher. It was in a New Mexico town where the teacher couldn't communicate with those Mexican people because she spoke “Castilian.” Today the situation hasn't changed much. In some ways it may be worse, simply because now we know better.

Whatever the play may have seemed to its immediate audience, to modern critics the Wakefield Mactacio Abel has generally seemed interesting for its realism but not especially successful either as drama or as dramatic sermon. Miss Eleanor Prosser goes so far as to say,

Doctrine remains in this play only by sufferance. But even apart from homiletic considerations, the play is unsuccessful. It has no unity: it leaps from farce to Scripture to farce with neither transition nor dramatic probability. The conflict is poorly established (witness the weakness of Abel and God); the characterization is one-dimensional; motivations are inconsistent (Cain's despair); much of the humor is pointless and simple-minded (Cain's striking Pykeharnes without motivation, just to keep his hand in, or the repeated obscenities that are comic solely by reason of their obscenity); the main interest in the play is irrelevant to the main plot action.

So much study has gone into the rhetorical workings of Chaucer's satire that almost anyone who reads Chaucer is now acutely aware of the persona or narrator in each poem. The fact of a disparity between the narrator and Chaucer himself has become a kind of premise or dogma of Chaucer criticism; we have become accustomed to phrases like “the fictional Chaucer,” “the postures of the narrator,” or “the finiteness of the narrator-role.” And yet because his major poems confer upon him the status of a major figure, we continue to be interested in Chaucer the man despite the prevailing formalism of Chaucer criticism. We read minor works by him for which, were they anonymous, we should not take the trouble to turn a page. We talk about his education, thought, “development,” “mind.” And in his best poems we feel him as a “man speaking to men.” As for the man himself, we have a few records, though none of these really proves that civil servant and poet were the same person. Mostly, we believe in him. Of course it is entirely possible that someone will come along and argue that the Canterbury Tales were an instance of group authorship, or were really written by John of Gaunt; but if someone did, we should all pooh-pooh him and ostracize him and direct plenty of irony at him.

Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused.
Hamlet

Discussions of Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy are almost as varied and divergent as interpretations of the play itself.1 Different understandings of the play and different formulations of Hamlet's character naturally affect interpretations of the soliloquy, but interpretations which fail to consider the dramatic context of the speech are surely faulty in critical procedure. Unfortunately, most discussions of the passage overlook or minimize the relevance of the surrounding action to it, an error that may then lead to problems of coherent or thorough analysis of meaning. The fault of ignoring the dramatic context, for example, may be seen in G. Wilson Knight's approach to the speech in “Hamlet Reconsidered”:

For more than a quarter of a century now Professor Louis I. Bredvold's Intellectual Milieu of John Dryden has remained the virtually unquestioned authority on the subject. Only recently have a few dissenting voices been raised against Bredvold's thesis that Dryden's religious development, particularly as that is revealed in Religio Laici, was tainted with skepticism and fideism, and that his conversion, first to Anglicanism, and later to Catholicism, was motivated by irrational considerations. The few voices I refer to are those of Thomas H. Fujimara, whose article “Dryden's Religio Laici: An Anglican Poem,” appeared in PMLA in June 1961, and Elias Chiasson, whose essay “Dryden's Apparent Skepticism in Religio Laici” came out in another journal about the same time. Both of these scholars, working independently, demonstrated the orthodoxy of Dryden's Anglicanism with convincing evidence from texts of Anglican writers extending from Hooker to Jeremy Taylor. But can we go along with such a judgment as that which Mr. Fujimara makes in the conclusion of his study—“that Dryden became a Catholic cannot be explained by anything in Religio Laici”? I think not, for reasons which, I trust, will appear in this article.

For almost two centuries the nature and significance of Samuel Johnson's work in the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia have been obscured. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins denied that any traces of Johnson's style exist in the translation, and, following their lead, most scholars have been willing to accept at face value Johnson's explanation of what he had done:

When the Foreign Language Program of the Modern Language Association was five years old, in 1957, its Advisory and Liaison Committee drew up a plan for its second five years and prepared a request for a foundation grant to implement the plan. The proposal outlined five areas of major effort. There were activities designed to increase the quantity of language study, but these activities were to be more than an extension of prior promotional activities of the MLA Foreign Language Program. The intention was still to persuade educators, parents, and the general public of the value of language education and of the necessity for sequences of language study that could result in proficiency in the spoken and written language. But in addition to an “information and advisory campaign,” the MLA also proposed “effective demonstration programs.”

On 8 December 1824 Robert Southey sent to the editor of the Courier a long letter containing a final, post-mortem installment in his feud with Lord Byron. Reacting to some allusions to himself in Medwin's recently published Conversations of Lord Byron, Southey characteristically joined truculent self-defense with bitter and abusive attack: