The story of the introduction of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's dramatic masterpieces to the American theatre is itself an American Revolutionary drama. When once the materials widespread over many years and places are duly assembled and ordered, the resultant outline of events unfolds like the scenario of an arresting chronicle play. The dramatic factors of time, place, and action become clear and colorful. The action develops against dramatic backgrounds—the American Revolution, the birth of the American Republic. The scene shifts from the American mainland to the British West Indies, and back to focal points of the American scene. The plot thickens as theatrical enterprise encounters various forces of moral and political hostility to the theatre. The time of the action prolongs over years, until the progressive campaigns of American theatrical managers, despite sundry temporary local reverses, attain conclusive victory. Within this larger framework of American theatrical venture and warfare, Sheridan's dramatic work may well illustrate “the play within the play.”

Soon after the death of Lope de Vega in 1635 Calderón was recognized as the foremost playwright of Spain and of the pleasure-loving court of Philip IV. It was not long before Philip decided to bestow upon his protégé the coveted order of Santiago. Pope Urban VIII signed the pontifical dispensation on April 28, 1637, and from that day on Calderón wore the insignia of his newly acquired honor.1 But the rise of Calderón as a court dramatist had begun several years earlier when some of his plays were being produced in the Salón de las Comedias of the old alcázar.

[6022–6054: 6026 discont r.n.g.; 6031, 6040 no inf; 6042 delete “sur 1' ”; 6043 discont r.n.g.; 6044 compl; 6045 delete “and Vidos B.E.” add at end “B”; 6046, 6049 compl].

Dr. Johnson said of The Two Gentlemen of Verona: “When 1 read this play I cannot but think that I discover both in the serious and ludicrous scenes, the language and sentiments of Shakespear.” But this play has since fared ill with the critics. Ignored by Coleridge, it was passed off noncommitally by Hazlitt with a few quotations from Speed and Julia. The depreciation of the play for various kinds and degrees of ineptness and obtuseness by such observers as Dowden, Chambers, G. P. Baker, Quiller-Couch, Dover Wilson, Tannenbaum, Charlton, and Van Doren, has tended to obscure its true import. Even the well-intentioned defenses of W. W. Lawrence, Alvin Shaler, and S. A. Small have not been able to reinstate Two Gentlemen into a position of genuine significance in Shakespeare's development.

It is generally recognized that during the central third of the sixteenth century there occurred a shift of thought so considerable as to place Ariosto and Tasso in two separate moments of intellectual history. The critical activity of the period was focussed upon the elaboration of Aristotle's Rhetoric and Poetic into a complex system of regulations; its poetic activity was characterized by the emergence of forms patterned on classical models. The most striking of these, because the most divergent from previous forms, is the ode.

Despite the fact that the interpretive literature on Chaucer's Knight's Tale is extensive, the poem has remained one of the most baffling of the Canterbury Tales. It has resisted satisfactory interpretation where poems of much more complicated structure—as the Merchant's Tale—and much more varied style—as the Nun's Priest's Tale—-have yielded brilliant results to criticism. The critics of the past fifty years have lacked neither learning nor ingenuity, but somehow their interpretations remain marked by a characteristic indecisiveness—made particularly evident where equally acute analyses produce conflicting and contradictory results—and by a simplicity that does not do justice to the poem and its five hundred years of popularity. It is possible that this critical unsuccess is owing to an error of perspective, that the poem has been generally examined and evaluated in the light of assumptions which are not central to its method. It is the purpose of the present essay to establish this as more than a possibility, and to suggest a viewpoint from which the poem may be seen to have a coherence and fullness of meaning which the traditional critics have hardly touched upon.

Francesco Sansovino (1521-83), prolific translator, publisher, editor, and polygraph, deserves a place in the history of Renaissance culture, not because he can lay any real claim to originality but because he played a significant rôle in the dissemination of Italian literature. Of his many works one of the most popular and most important was without doubt his Concetti politici, a collection of maxims which first appeared in 1578, but which was subsequently republished in modified form in 1583, 1588, 1598, and 1608, together with Guicciardini's Av-vertimenti and Lottini's Avvedimenti civili. More important still, the original text of 1578 was translated into English in 1590 by Robert Hitchcock under the title of Quintessence of Wit, and as such was to make its contribution to the development of the English maxim and the English essay, as Elbert N. S. Thompson pointed out some years ago. In the preface to the 1578 edition, Sansovino states that he drew his 805 maxims from two histories and thirty-four authors, whom he lists by name. Among these authorities are Aristotle, Bembo, Cicero, Comines, Giovio, Guevara, Guicciardini, Livy, Plato, Polybius, Sallust, Tacitus, and Thucydides. The list, however, lacks one name, that of Machiavelli, the one writer that Sansovino consulted perhaps more than any other.

Miscellaneous. [6121–6129: 6126 present address unknown].

Visitors to Westminster Abbey may remember the memorial statue to David Garrick with its inscription:

To paint fair nature by divine command,
Her magic pencil in his glowing hand,
A Shakespeare rose: then to expand his fame
Wide o'er this breathing world, a Garrick came.
Tho' sunk in death the forms the poet drew,
The actor's genius bade them breathe anew;
Though like the bard himself, in night they lay
Immortal Garrick call'd them back to day;
And till Eternity with power sublime
Shall mark the mortal hour of hoary Time
Shakespeare and Garrick like twin stars shall shine
And earth irradiate with a beam divine.

The period between the Restoration and the first half of the eighteenth century in England is marked by the development of a religious spirit typified by reaction to Puritanical dogmatism. Affecting all levels of society, the new spirit encouraged inquiry into the theological assumptions of divine existence. The resultant liberal speculation was in sharp contrast to the close-minded “enthusiasm and superstition” which the neo-classicists commonly associated with the Age of Crom-well.1 With the new and rigorous trend toward open-minded inquiry came a resurgence of rationality and a rejection, in whole or in part, of all tenets of divine existence not founded upon demonstrable evidence. Theological discussion became fundamental; its method of investigation, like that of modern science, was based upon factual premises.

Linguistics. [6226–6242: 6226 discont (limited to Serbo-Croat, see below); 6233, 6234, 6239, 6240, 6242 compl].

Experimentation in prose rhythms is generally conceded to be a sign of mature literary art. It can not, in fact, be conceived to occur unless craftsmen in letters have become so far aware of their aesthetic medium—its physical basis and its principles—that they wish to subject it to deliberately planned tests for effect. The obvious meters of verse require much less awareness. Prose experiments appear characteristically within and just after periods of great artistic productivity, when a galaxy of creative writers has engendered the requisite literary self-consciousness. Such a period was surely the fourteenth century in England, and it should be a matter of no surprise if therefore several prose writers of the time adopted an attitude of experimentation.

The Corpus Christi play in sixteenth-century Spain evolved as it did because poets were consciously searching for a dramatic formula which should be appropriate to a sacramental play. The idea of a sacramental play, an auto sacramental, was new at that time. A sacramental drama had never before been attempted, either in Spain or elsewhere. Corpus Christi was celebrated, in. Spain as in Europe at large, with performances of mystery-type plays derived from the tropes of the liturgy. The earliest Corpus plays in Spain were Nativity plays which dramatists scarcely troubled to adapt. As the problem of making the Christmas play appropriate to Corpus Christi forced itself on the attention of dramatists a new idea of religious drama emerged.

The purpose of this paper is to give an example of the manner in which aesthetic criticism may also serve the needs of historical and philological criticism. As an example of procedure, a specific Old French prose romance is to be studied from an aesthetic as well as from an historical point of view. One main question will be raised with regard to each episode of the romance: “What is the purpose of this episode in the context of the narrative?” While the episodes have meaning in themselves, many episodes will acquire additional meaning from their position among the others. Consideration will be given the structure of the romance as a source for the understanding of the entire plot. This method of approach, the derivation of meaning from structure, may be said to follow a principle of aesthetic criticism. If the results obtained by such an approach seem acceptable, the method can be justified on aesthetic grounds. More difficult to settle, however, and the main concern of this inquiry, is the problem of whether or not such a method can lead to the finding of data valuable not only to the aesthetic critic but also to the historian and the philologist.

The fourfold interpretation of Holy Writ or of other authoritative texts, through the technique of exegesis commonly known as allegorical interpretation, was a well known cultural phenomenon throughout the Middle Ages.3 The practice of allegorical interpretation itself was well developed in the Western world by the time of Plato,4 and the fourfold method may be regarded as a further refinement of this technique. It constituted a tradition of remarkable vitality: as late as the early fifteenth century we find Erasmus inveighing against its abuses in The Praise of Folly with as much emphasis as Dante had defended it in his famed letter to Can Grande in an earlier century. It was taught at the University of Paris during the Middle Ages5.

One need not choose between Satan's being a tragic hero or an absurd villain. Either extreme stamps us as a more restricted moralist than Milton the poet. For then we are less able than Milton to admit the test of contradiction into the moral universe of our art. If Satan is a tragic hero, it is because we are not honestly willing to test good by evil. If Satan is merely an absurd villain, it is because we wish to ground our art upon too narrow a certainty; it is because we prefer the idea, and the confirmation of our certainty, to the more comprehensive, and therefore more daring, exploration of human experience—the submitting of an idea to a dramatic structure. If Satan is merely absurd, then we are not willing, though Milton is, to test evil by good.