That this has become an age of criticism is a commonplace. But that the very fact of our critical concern has also produced in the United States a generation of sensitive and, for historical and technical reasons, uniquely competent editors of literary texts is far less generally known. Critical concentration on the verbal subtlety of novelists as well as poets has strengthened the desire to read “clear text.” Attention paid to textual revisions has sharpened critical insight just as regard for the whole effects of whole works has enriched response. The need to know all a writer wrote in order to interpret truly any part of it is once more recognized as essential by the serious critic. New editions of letters and collections of criticism appear. Critics compile bibliographies. Biography and literary history flourish.

Al margen de la creatión literaria y en cierto modo también al margen de las tradictones locales netamente rurales, florece aun en muchos pueblos de la Peninsula y en algunos de la America Hispana la llamada ‘fiesta de moros y cristianos,’ curiosa encrucijada de ciertas maneras de juego, festejo y drama, que tuvieron vigencia cortesana en la España de los Austrias y que hoy sobreviven injertas en la tradición, popular y predominantemente campesina, de las fiestas patronales. El estudio completo de este fenomeno ofreceria considerable interes intrinseco y abriria nuevas perspectivas sobre la cuestion. Podrian entonces examinarse las fiestas en relation con la teoria de don Ramon Menendez Pidal sobre la ‘tradicionalidad' como caracteristica fundamental de la actividad creadora del pueblo espanol. Por otra parte, en cuanto estos festejos expresan una vision intuitiva e ingenua de la historia de España, concretada en la estampa de moros y cristianos enfrentados, cabe analizarlos en funcion de las modernas interpretaciones del pasado espanol, verdadera cuestion palpitante del momento actual, que han suscitado los grandes libros recientemente publicados por don Americo Castro, en los que se subraya en forma tan nueva e intensa la significación de la larga contienda entre cristiandad e islam sobre el suelo de la Peninsula. Estos y otros posibles enfoques requieren una labor expositiva previa, que coordine y sintetice datos desperdigados en numerosas monografias, asi como nuevos esfuerzos por caracterizar aspectos especificos de la representation. En este sentido el presente articulo aspira a aportar una contribution util aunque limitada. Su proposito es el de ofrecer una vision panoramica del estado actual de la fiesta en España y algunas consideraciones respecto a su pasado y a los puntos de contacto que en esta area se han producido entre corrientes literarias y folcloricas.

Toward the close of the last century, one of the busiest areas of literary research centered about the Faust Book. The Faust image, that unique gift of Germany to Western tradition, had fascinated scholars and critics for over a hundred years, and the oldest printed texts of the Faust Book had long since been established and edited. During the nineteenth century, however, further documentary references to the historical Faust had been accumulating, while at the same time researchers had gained a more complete and accurate knowledge of the scope of the Faust legend together with its relationship to similar sorcerers' tales. Then, beginning in the 1880's, a number of important discoveries were made in such rapid succession as to hinder careful evaluation of any one document.

It is with some misgiving that I consider the title of this address: all this in twenty minutes! The word responsibility too makes me a little nervous. I am one of those who, in our profession, find themselves handicapped in discussions concerning our aims, hopes, and interests, by the peculiar combination of pseudoscientific jargon and moralistic preachment which any allusion to methods seems to generate. Whoever fails to refer to “structured situations,” “feedback,” “triggered nonthoughtful responses,” “batteries of tests,” “standards” and “values” gives serious intimations of professional immorality. Nonetheless I should have preferred another word, privilege, strength, or even, yes, why not, pleasure. “No man can exist without pleasure,” said Aquinas, nor without it, it seems to me can he learn, mature, or teach well.

Of the many enterprises undertaken during the last few years to upgrade the teaching of English, the 1962 Summer Institute Program sponsored by the Commission on English of the College Entrance Examination Board has been the most dramatic and, in many ways, the most promising. Already it is clear that the effects of this program are being felt in many high-school classes, and that the formula devised by the Commission on English is being copied widely and successfully. The potential usefulness of such Institutes for the advanced training of high-school English teachers, therefore, has already been demonstrated. What makes these Institutes of especial significance to MLA members, however, is that the program required twenty of the most influential Departments of English in the country to involve themselves directly in this advanced training of high-school teachers. These were not institutes conducted by professors of Education with the casual blessing of Departments of English; these were institutes administered and largely taught by professors of English. The difference is a very great one indeed. Whether we like it or not, the CEEB Institutes have, in effect, forced those of us in Departments of English to acknowledge a substantial responsibility for improving the quality of English teaching in the high schools. Because of them—and of such subsequent activities as the Allerton Conference and the Curriculum Centers—a new appraisal of our proper professional functions has been quietly taking place on one campus after another. Even now it is no exaggeration to say, I believe, that a Department of English may no longer claim to be of the top rank unless it includes among its programs one or more designed to aid the high-school English teacher, both the tenderfoot and the old-timer.

Until very recently the Merchant's Tale has been the least controversial of all the Canterbury Tales. Several generations of critics have been united in scandalized astonishment over the un-Chaucerian qualities of the tale. Tatlock expressed the prevailing view in these often quoted words: “For unrelieved acidity the Merchant's Tale is approached nowhere in Chaucer's works. … Without a trace of warm-hearted tolerance or genial humor, expansive realism or even broadly smiling animalism, it is ruled by concentrated intelligence and unpitying analysis.” A generation earlier Kittredge had called the tale a “frenzy of contempt and hatred,” and a generation later Hugh Holman brought together all the old terms, “savagely obscene, angrily embittered, pessimistic, and unsmiling,” and contributed his own “dark cynicism.”

Though apparently only a fragment, the posthumously published New Atlantis provides insights into Bacon's idea of science not discoverable in his other works. In Salomon's House, the poet of science gave a local habitation and a name to the process and product of science, creating a concrete image of the “learning” for which he had sued so eloquently and so fruitlessly twenty years earlier before the new monarch, the learned James. Clearly an integral part of Bacon's program, in many places the New Atlantis is no less than a fictionalized paradigm of The First Book of the Advancement of Learning For example, as a correlative to the arguments by which he defended learning from the ignorant zeal of religious, political, and social fanatics, Bacon created in the New Atlantis a little world sanctified to God, politically stable, socially conservative, and morally pure and dedicated to the pursuit of science. Further, in its leading institution, the College of the Six Days Works, we find also a correlative to the criticisms of contemporary scientific practice that Bacon had offered earlier in The Advancement in his analysis of “the errors and vanities which have intervened amongst the studies themselves of the learned” and in the “peccant humours” which weaken and corrupt learning. But the New Atlantis is more than a mere paradigm: it projects an image of science in operation and of the relation of scientists to society not to be found in Bacon's earlier works. My purpose here is to explore the structure of that image, emphasizing in particular the contrast between it and the image of science projected by other Renaissance Utopias.

No one questions the importance of Malherbe. We read and admire some of his poems in anthologies, we know that his literary doctrine was a landmark in French criticism, we are aware that he and his disciples did much to bring about the development of seventeenth-century classicism. Yet, except in the monumental studies by René Fromilhague, not much has been written concerning Malherbe's technique as a poet. Fromilhague has investigated every detail of stanza forms and rhymes in Malherbe but there are many aspects of his art which deserve further attention: his imagery, his sonorities, his expression of emotion, to name just a few. In the present paper I shall limit myself to his odes, which are of course his major writings, and within the odes to the question of their form and content. It will be necessary, first, to discuss very briefly Malherbe's concept of the ode as a literary genre. Then I shall go on to inspect the seven completed odes (in one case virtually completed), particularly their themes and internal organization. The interest of this problem arises from the unanimous acclaim which literary historians have given to the “rigorous logic” or “admirable structure” or the tight “enchaînement des idées” in these poems. Such comments, we shall see, have little to justify them.

Immediately after his tragedy Pompée (1642–43), Corneille wrote Le Menteur (1643), a comedy. In the “Epître” of the latter play, Corneille tried to explain this curious sequence in genre and offered as one of his reasons: “Et d'ailleurs, étant obligé au genre comique de ma première réputation, je ne pouvois l'abandonner tout à fait sans quelque espèce d'ingratitude.” This argument simply recalled to his contemporaries that five, and in a sense all six, of the earliest plays by the author of the tragic masterpieces from Le Cid (1637) to Polyeucte (1641–42) were in the comic vein. Influenced by the incomprehension or hostility of the “classical” period, later generations were little aware of this first flowering of Corneille's dramatic genius.

In the halcyon days of the MLA, when I was young and my revered master, John Manly, was still in his prime, it was our custom to highlight the program for the annual meeting with two major speeches: a smoke-talk at the big dinner we used to have, and a presidential address. The difference in name reflects a difference in form and matter: the smoke-talk was expected to be in lighter vein; the presidential address, in heavier vein (if I may say so). It was the aim of the smoke-talker above all to be amusing; witty if possible but funny at least. And his success was measured by the number of times he made his audience laugh. The smoke-talk was nearly always well attended, for hope springs eternal in the academic breast. There were those, I admit, natural cynics or members disillusioned by repeated disappointment, who came to the dinner but slipped out after eating their dessert and drinking their coffee, but we could always think they were fleeing the foulness of the tobacco-laden air rather than the prospective boredom of the two speeches (for the smoke-talker had to be introduced and the introducer might speak as long as the speaker). But most of us stuck it out, tobacco smoke and all, and more often than not we went away well content. The most satisfying evening of this kind that I can remember was one at Harvard back in the twenties, when George Kittredge was the smoke-talker and Charles Grandgent introduced him. My mouth waters for more when I think of that pair of speeches. It is a pity that we had to give up the smoke-talk and the dinner that went with it, but there are too many of us nowadays to sit down to a meal together in one room, and so much goes on at our meetings that a whole evening devoted to corporate, communal pleasure (or what passes for pleasure) has become more than we have any right to expect.

Critical comment on the Nun's Priest's Tale often seems to be of two sorts. One is a straightforward response to the plain fact that the tale is funny. The other is a response to the somewhat less obvious fact that the tale is also serious, or at least that it makes a statement worthy of serious consideration. The second sort of comment may find the seriousness of the poem in an allegorical reading and it often seems a trifle defensive, as if written with an anxious or reproving eye on Matthew Arnold. However, even if one feels, as I do, that this defensiveness is a critical disadvantage, reluctance to read the poem as more than a simple joke would be equally disadvantageous. To identify Chauntecleer with Adam seems as mistaken as to take what looks like a fabular Moralitas for the final statement of the poem's import.

The British Council conference on the teaching of English Literature overseas was held at King's College, Cambridge, England, 16–18 July 1962. As K. R. Johnstone, Deputy Director-General of the British Council, pointed out, this was the first conference on teaching English Literature overseas, though such teaching has been in progress for over a century. More than seventy-five participants came from twenty-five different countries, and had taught in many more. The discussions of the conference were taped and will be published in a 60,000 word book by the firm of Methuen.

Milton's spelling has evoked much comment and speculation since Jonathan Richardson noted certain inconsistencies in the early editions of Paradise Lost. Yet no complete study has previously been reported. Because of the problems of transmisson of text to or through scribes and because of the potential alterations of compositors, printed works offer inconclusive and only corroborative evidence of how Milton spelled. The place to start is with spellings in Milton's own hand. Accordingly I have prepared a complete concordance of all English words or abbreviations found in holograph materials. Included, therefore, are all words which were deleted from a final text and all spellings which were altered in any way. From my resulting full examination of the orthography I present here, because of the limitations of space, only the evidence concerning Milton's use or omission of idle final “e.” All manuscript words to which an idle final “e” may have been attached and all words showing inconsistencies in the use of idle final “e” are reported. These words are divided into the following categories: 1) uncompounded and uninflected words (that is, root words), 2) words or groups of words which ordinarily would have been considered under category one but which evidence spelling that classifies them as exceptional, 3) suffixed and compound words, and 4) inflected words (including those in category two).

In the short span of years since Kipling wrote that “East is East and West is West,/And never the twain shall meet” we have witnessed the meeting of East and West. We have become enmeshed in the resulting tangle of dissident philosophies, and who can predict the eventual outcome?

It would be difficult to place alongside each other two words that have more vague and varied meanings—to most people—than the last two words in the title I have given to these remarks. The words are “cultural” and “communication.” This is not the place—or at any rate, I am not the “professor”—for a seminar in semantics. But I cannot let this opportunity pass without pointing out the problems of nomenclature—of language—with which we must contend. The phrase “educational and cultural affairs” is clearly a case in point. The actual activities covered by this phrase are concrete and specific. But this phrase itself and others like it—cross-cultural relations, cultural interchange, and the like— are imprecise, and therefore largely meaningless to many people.

As a foreword to Amphitryon Molière might have selected the famous passage from Descartes's first Méditation: “Je supposerai donc qu'il y a non point un vrai Dieu, qui est la souveraine source de vérité, mais un certain mauvais génie, non moins rusé et trompeur que puissant, qui a employé toute son industrie à me tromper” (Œuvres et Lettres, Pléiade, p. 272). The play is in large measure a working out of this hypothesis. Examination of the dramatic and symbolic functions of Jupiter reveals, however, that the wicked genius of Amphitryon is no spirit, but reason itself. Jupiter is not a hidden puppet-master, but an active participant in human affairs, seeking human ends and not just the pleasure of deluding people. His descent into the world of ordinary mortals provides the occasion for the dramatic action of the comedy: a world which has been well and securely ordered until then suddenly cracks open. Everything in it becomes potential illusion; nothing can be relied on any more; a man is no longer even sure if he is himself or what he is. Jupiter is a liberating force, dramatically and symbolically. His presence dissolves the world of conventional realities and reveals a new world of possibilities, but these possibilities never achieve substance or consistency, and in the end there is no brave new world, only the old one with all its patterns destroyed. The colorful kingdom of fantasy is suddenly abandoned at the end of the play and we find ourselves back in the world of everyday empirical reality. Jupiter, the brilliant magician, turns out to be an ordinary grand seigneur. All that has happened after all is that a false order has been exposed, vanquished, and replaced by blatant disorder. The rule of Amphitryon has yielded to the rule of Jupiter. But whereas Amphitryon ruled in the firm conviction that the order of things, which happened to suit him very well, was a necessary and just order, Jupiter is without illusions. There is no rational order, no just rule for him. There is only the right of the strongest. Jupiter's justification of his own violence at the end of the play is an obvious and deliberate piece of irony on the part of the author.

Donne's Wit has been linked to Caval-canti and Alciati, Marino and Ramus, Anacreon and St. Bonaventure. The variety of these analogues confronts scholars with a dilemma: for it suggests that The Songs and Sonets must be either a profound intellectual synthesis or a grotesque philosophical chaos; and yet in fact they are neither. The dilemma might be resolved, however, by the discovery that Donne's lyrics are in a tradition which accounts for both their sophisticated levity and their dramatic truth, both their epigrammatic neatness and their symbolic import. The work of the “presecentisti”—by which term I mean chiefly Serafino l'Aquilano, Torquato Tasso, and Guarino—forms such a tradition.