The modern redemption of the Dunciad has been in part a demonstration that the poem deals with extant dunceness more than with forgotten dunces. By way of extending the demonstration, I wish to show how luminously Pope associates the spread of bad books with the dynamics of a commercialized society. While dealing of course with other problems too, the Dunciad and its pendants treat a notable aspect of the issue which pervades and unifies most of his mature satire—the antinomy of mercenary and humane values. Repeatedly between 1728 and 1743 Pope contemplates the predicament of a nation that is “sunk in lucre's sordid charms” and of men who are “alike in nothing but one lust of gold.” He protests the corrupt practices of politicians like Walpole, the extravagance of aristocrats like Timon, and the acquisitive enterprise of business men like Balaam. As far afield as the great Parisian banquet of the Dunciad (iv.549-564) Maynard Mack has sensitively detected Pope's animus toward a “money culture.” Since it underlies his general outlook of gloom, this animus is even behind the sighs for a “sinking land” which appear briefly amid the spacious optimism of the Essay on Man (iv.265-266). A similarity between two of Pope's finest symbols marks the special place of the Dunciad within his vision of evil: in the Epilogue to the Satires the goddess Vice rules an avaricious world by means of “golden chains” (i.147-148, 161-162); and Dulness, the deity of the Dunciad, fixes society to a bimetallic standard of “lead and gold” (iv.13-16).

Milton's students have lived, and fairly placidly on the whole, with the problems they have discerned in Paradise Regained or with feeble solutions in despite of the poet's plain instruction to read his work as, before all else, a parable for the church. If we bow to his authority we have only to explain centuries of critical silence; once delivered from the accepted interpretation of the poem as a manual of holy living, we shall no longer need to guess why John Milton, who eternally found his own habits blameless, should in a piece of pietism unique among his works, in a “quietistic, Quaker-like poem” denying his constant humanism, consign to the devil the chief blessings of this world, most of the arts that polish life, many of the goods that he had sought for himself, and, leaving himself without excuse, then invite his friends to regard the result as his finest work. His very pride in the brief epic must, for all its undeniable beauties, seem a little like a mother's love for a defective child unless he meant a little more than meets the careless ear, inasmuch as the most resolute exculpations have not entirely explained away the poem's “inhospitable bareness,” its generous portion of didactic tedium, and the dramatic failure of its static contest.

Historical statements about Tristram Shandy have in the past generally been hampered by critical misconceptions about the book. As long as it was taken to be a farrago, the value of which depended on a few lucky strokes on an otherwise haphazard and worthless canvas, efforts to see it in its historical context were doomed to failure. In effect, such a hodgepodge could have no important context. It was, as critics and historians repeated endlessly, a mad, inexplicable thing, unreasoned and unreasonable, having real kinship in literature only with other mad books, most of them long since wisely forgotten. As a whole it was really nothing, and consequently as a whole it could not be related to other wholes. Thus, with the exception of such matters as the peculiar sentence structure, the minute delineation of gesture, and the depiction of humor and sentiment, there were really no artistic devices to be placed in a historical context; all one could do was to place Sterne in the historical stream of those who were delightfully inartistic.

During a short life of great activity, in emulation of his friend and master, Lope de Vega Carpio, Juan Pérez de Montalván (1602-38) wrote a considerable number of plays, wide in their variety of subject matter and diverse in verse structure. The study of the latter phenomenon, in imitation of distinguished treatises for other dramatists of the Golden Age, will form the chief criterion in this presentation of chronology. That a serious consideration of Montalván's versification is long overdue is evident. As early as 1919, S. G. Morley, in referring to the authorship of La lindona de Galicia, remarked: “Then, one important factor, Montalván's formula [of versification], is practically an unknown quantity . . . ” More recently, Irving A. Leonard in his article, “Montalbán's El valor perseguido and the Mexican Inquisition, 1682,” spoke of the problem of authorship in the case of a play attributed to both Lope de Vega and Montalván. It is hoped that future studies of the authorship and chronology of plays associated in any way with the name of Juan Pérez de Montalván will be facilitated by the facts presented here.

“Disintegration,” Sir Edmund Chambers has said, “is a constant itch in some minds.” And in order to show how pervasive the disease is, I hope I may be forgiven for using as my example Sir Edmund himself. It is to him, surely, that we owe the most today for our belief and faith that the plays in the 1623 folio are by Shakespeare alone and are, by and large, as they left Shakespeare's pen once and for all. In his British Academy lecture of 1924, “The Disintegration of Shakespeare,” Chambers showed (a) that contemporary records, Henslowe's and Sir Henry Herbert's, showed “very little testimony” for revision of old plays and (b) that the first principles and so-called proofs of the disintegrators could not bear careful investigation. Now what is to me so wonderful about this 1924 lecture is that whereas the author of The Elizabethan Stage (1923) may fairly, I believe, be called a nineteenth-century scholar, the man who wrote William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems (1930) not only has learned everything that McKerrow and Greg have to teach but also is more than able to meet Pollard and Wilson on their own ground. In other words, in the space of about seven years, Sir Edmund changed into what I might call a brilliant conservative. In the 1930 volumes, the disintegrators get even shorter shrift than they had received in the 1924 lecture. “Not proved” is the verdict against them again and again.

The scientific and pseudo-scientific lore in Milton's prose, like that in his poetry, is impressive for its bulk and its conventionality. What may at first seem recondite information is anticipated repeatedly in such vernacular encyclopedias and common handbooks as Bartholomew's De Proprietatibus Rerum (c. 1230), Stephen Batman's Batman vppon Bartholome (1582), Peter de la Primaudaye's The French Academie (1618), and John Swan's Speculum Mundi (1643). The range is tremendous: astronomy, astrology, herbal, animal, and lapidary lore, physiology, medical lore—all are drawn upon in their customary associations for illustration, argument, invective, and the other devices of controversial prose. Medical and anatomical allusions recur with great frequency. Anyone writing about the ills of the body politic, as Milton did, will make the expected comparisons with human disease; but the emphasis in Of Reformation and Eikonoklastes on fevers, flesh and skin diseases, insanity, and other ailments goes beyond the casual to the insistent and the directive. In Eikonoklastes and the Defences, for example, the stress falls upon disease and distortion rather than remedy : distemper, palsy, abortion, false pregnancy, and miscarriage. In these Milton is arguing more against an opponent than for an idea, and the morbid associations are part of his strategy.

In the first act of The Malcontent, the best known play of John Marston, Pietro is informed that his wife is engaged in an adulterous relationship with the usurping duke, Mendoza. Pietro's informant is Malevole, who is not content with a simple presentation of the facts. Instead, he taunts the foolish old man with a brutal account of the infamy of cuckoldom, tortures him with a lurid description of the wife's lascivious thoughts, suggests, finally, the possibility of unwitting incest:

Mal. Nay thinke, but thinke what may proceede of this, Adultery is often the mother of incest.
Piet. Incest.
Mal. Yes incest: marke, Mendozo of his wife begets perchance a daughter: Mendozo dies. His son marries this daughter. Say you? Nay tis frequent, not onely probable, but no question often acted, whilst ignorance, fearelesse ignorance claspes his owne seede.
Piet. Hydeous imagination. (i.iii, pp. 149-150)

Francesco sansovino's Concetti politici are a collection of 805 maxims which first appeared in 1578 and which were subsequently republished in modified form in 1583, 1588, 1598, and 1608, together with Guicciardini's Avvertimenti and Lottini's Avvedimenti civili. To the first edition, but not to any of those following, the author prefaced a list of 36 authorities from whose works he presumably drew all or nearly all of his concetti. The list includes the name of Guicciardini to whom, as we have demonstrated in a previous study, Sansovino was indebted for some 123 reflections. Yet it does not contain the name of Machiavelli, from whose writings, however, Sansovino did not scruple to borrow even more extensively. This omission is not difficult to explain in view of the Catholic attitude toward the author of the Principe, particularly after the Council of Trent and the publication of the Index. Although scholars have long been aware that Sansovino derived many of his concetti from Machiavelli, they have simply confined themselves to statements to that effect without every attempting to determine the precise extent of Sansovino's indebtedness. It is the purpose of the present paper to assess this debt.

Readers of Mr. Brooks Atkinson's review (New York Times, 19 Feb. 1950) of a recent production of As You Like It must have felt that the critic was at a loss for something relevant to say. The cluttered stage elicited objections (the danger of Miss Hepburn's barking her shins made the reviewer apprehensive—her legs “deserve every possible protection”). But the play itself was dismissed as pleasant but not suitable for tough-minded modern grown-ups: Shakespeare wrote it “carelessly as far as construction and logic were concerned,” and “By modern standards the plot is silly.” After these remarks, it would seem, nothing good could be said for the play. But the day is saved for Shakespeare's fame by the redeeming fact that despite all its demerits the play shows “the matchless genius of Shakespeare.”

The Munich codex germanicus 6353 ends with the following words:

To a casual reader these lines might seem to belong to the preceding poem in the MS., but a closer look proves this to be impossible. Indeed a seven-staved par such as described in the above lines is not to be found anywhere within the entire codex. In vain does one look in Mayer's edition of the MS. for some explanation. There the impression is added as if the lines were taken from the bottom of folio 168v, whereas actually they begin at the top of folio Zr and cover two-thirds of it, Apparently Mayer attached no significance to this fact, nor to the fact that blank folios follow the lines cited above (possibly because there are other blank folios scattered throughout the MS.), nor to the fact that the Schwennter referred to in the above “conclusion” is also mentioned in the Preface to the codex. He does, however, call attention to the very artistic handwriting of folios F, O, and Z, the folios which contain the prefatory material and the lines under consideration. Since the Preface states that Folz composed, wrote down, and then left behind him the poems in the MS. many years ago and that Jacob Bernhaubt Schwennter, named the Elder, likewise many years ago, spent much of his time singing and reading these same poems, and since the hand that made those statements also set down the final lines in Munich 6353, we may deduce that they were added after the death of Hans Folz. Even this small item has not been noted before, except for A. v. Keller's remark in his brief description of the Munich MS. that the closing lines, like the Preface, were von späterer hand. Rufold Henß, one of the investigators of Folz's style, appears to be the only scholar who saw something odd in the close of the Munich MS. Finding the words perplexing, he thought that they probably did not belong in that particular place and that they had been copied there by mistake. To date, therefore, no solution has been offered for this enigmatic ending.

One way to describe the passage from Richard II to Henry V is to say that the first play is a picture of a sick state in which appearance and reality are at odds and that the last play is a picture of a healthy state in which political appearance and reality are unified in terms of the Elizabethan ideal of monarchy. This essay suggests that one sign of the political sickness in Richard II is the presence, explicit or implied, of the Renaissance comparison between the state and the theater. As the suggestion is developed, the reader will be asked to grant that political problems are also philosophical problems, and that plot and character may be controlled expressions of a general moral theme as well as dramatic accounts of typical personalities or recurrent historical situations. Examples of the state-theater comparison from More and Machiavelli will be reviewed, not to prove direct indebtedness by Shakespeare, but to show how the comparison was available in two pertinent contexts, Christian humanism and Renaissance Realpolitic.

In the general scorn and neglect by modern literary scholars of the entire area in English literature between Chaucer and Spenser, few poets have fared so ill as the sixteenth-century Scottish Chaucerian Gavin Douglas. To be sure, his name appears frequently enough in histories of literature, and occasionally in studies of Chaucer, or Surrey, or Henryson, Lindsay, Dunbar. But one suspects that Douglas has less often been carefully and sympathetically read than he has been hustled into a dusty place of honor by conventional encomium, or relegated to the ranks of the inconsiderable on the ground that he is a mere “Chaucerian,” a petty tracer of his master's matchless strokes.