Following Moria's metamorphoses, Erasmus' Praise falls into three sections whose interrelationships generate the total meaning of the work. Moving from section to section, Folly leads her auditors through a dialectic of conversion. At first ironic, Folly is the goddess of metamorphosis, a variant of Circe, offering men her gift of pleasurable illusion. She wants them to accept life as a comic play and attacks the “Stoic” for attempting self-divinization while rejecting the play of life. She argues that her power can make men happy in Plato's cave. But in the satirical middle section, Folly betrays them by showing them the real tragedy of their lot. While revealing that one cannot separate lifepreserving, pleasurable folly from destructive madness, by her transformation into a “Stoic” truth-teller, Folly prevents men from placing their faith in her benevolence. Thus, in the final section, she turns with them to Christian folly, the faith that leads men out of Plato's cave to God's unchanging, benevolent reality. Folly's final, ecstatic vision gives her followers a transcendent perspective redefining and including the comitragic visions of the first two sections.

John Marston's The Malcontent and Parasitaster, or The Fawne are examined in the light ofan analysis of A Knack to Know a Knave (1592). Marston's plays share with the earlier play details of form that involve not only the disguised authority figure noted by critics but also his declaration of purpose, the source and sort of vice he observes, the means by which his discoveries are given expanded significance, and the technique and result of the final exposures. The study of the formal pattern of these elements provides the link between Marston's plays and an earlier example of disguise as the dramatic device upon which the plot turns. The study also clarifies Marston's purposes, in The Fawne to provide a light, satiric survey of the abuses of love and in The Malcontent to analyze with greater complexity what is necessary for a virtuous ruler to control a partly corrupt realm.

Die Wahlverwandtschaften is an early example of the sustained and systematic use of “erlebte Rede.” This fact has remained generally unrecognized to the detriment of a correct reading. It is of paramount importance to know whether Goethe or a narrator speaks with authorial authority, or whether a narrator draws back the curtain to let us overhear the preformulated, groping mediations of one of the characters. By its very nature, “erlebte Rede” is ambiguous, multileveled, hovering between objective assertion and subjective consciousness. By using “erlebte Rede” the narrator does not withdraw behind his characters (contrary to some critics); he is often present as an ironic artist who manipulates and “exhibits” his characters. By revealing subjectivity as subjectivity, the narrator, in a sense, reestablishes an ironic objectivity. (In German)

The Heliand “Preface” comprises a “Praefatio” in prose and thirty-four hexameter “Versus.” According to the “Praefatio” a Saxon poet was commissioned by Louis the Pious to execute a metrical paraphrase of the Bible. To this account the “Versus” add the fiction, borrowed from Bede's Caedmon story, that the poet was inspired in a dream to carry out the undertaking. The “Praefatio et Versus” appear for the first time in a printed book from 1562 and were once thought to be a humanist counterfeit, but they are now generally considered to be medieval in origin. The prose “Praefatio” seems to justify our confidence, but the first fifteen lines in the “Versus” make this composition suspect; they belong to the tradition of the country idyll, a genre unknown in the ninth century, but well documented in the sixteenth. The sentiments and wording are particularly close to Angelo Poliziano's popular poem “Rusticus” (1483). It therefore seems likely that the “Versus” were added to the “Praefatio” by an antiquarian familiar with Bede sometime in the middle of the sixteenth century.

Although Dryden is generally regarded as a public poet concerned with public themes, in the last fifteen years of his life he turned to more private themes to justify himself and his career. We need to be aware of the autobiographical element to appreciate such poems as the “Ode to Oldham,” which is not only about a fellow writer but also about Dryden's own achievements as a satirist. The “Ode to Mrs. Killigrew,” a Catholic poem, expresses his new awareness of the art of poesy and enacts its ritualistic drama of penance for his “sins.” The epistle “To Congreve” is a cathartic expression of Dryden's bitterness as a “cast” poet and of his hopes in a beloved protege while “Alexander's Feast,” by a poet who had just triumphed over many adversities, asserts the poet's power and greatness. These poems are more meaningful if read with awareness of them as personal revelations and affirmations of Dryden the man.

At the outset, Hamlet remarks on the futility of attempting to guess at his state of mind by appeal to the notatio, or standard behavioral model, favored by the science of physiognomy. Although the possibility of knowing other minds is provided for by Renaissance theory of natural law and by certain tenets of Neoplatonism, Hamlet's initial skepticism is in full accord with the weight of received opinion—e.g., with folk wisdom, orthodox theological authority, and traditional reservations about friendship and selfknowledge. The deceptiveness of notatio, moreover, is illustrated in the play by the hubris of Polonius' art of espionage and by the bitter testimony of Claudius to his success as a dissembler. In practice, however, both Claudius and Hamlet rely with no less confidence than Polonius on the possibility of reading the inner by the outer man. Though Hamlet is sustained in this confidence by a hopeful theory of histrionic performance, a scholar's habits of observation, a flair for satirical portraiture, and even a few trivial successes, the treachery of notatio is ominously revealed, along with the Polonian arrogance of relying on it, in his encounter with Gertrude, and especially in his conception of how the “Mousetrap” can be sprung.

Although less important than in Racine or Shakespeare, place in Moliere deserves attention. The more farcical plays have an outdoor, Italianate setting. In the highertoned indoor comedies the characters inhabit concentric circles; props, set, house, city, province, universe. At the center of Tartuffe stands the intruder, Tartuffe himself. A sequence of entrance and exit scenes defines the broader aspects of place in the play. Madame Pernelle's exit scene situates Orgon's family, a disputatious and gossipy household. Orgon's entrance reveals a person who has lost his sense of place. Conventionally in comedy the bourgeois father is happy to return from the hazards of the country to the security of his role as owner and master. To Orgon, however, the return means only reunion with Tartuffe. His entrance scene is balanced by his eviction at the hands of his protégé who changes places with him. Tartuffe's place is Orgon's house: his exits are false exits or strategic withdrawals, his return is triumphant until the regal denouement which sends him to the King's prison and Orgon's family to the King's palace where they will kneel in gratitude.

The suitability of Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale to its teller can be demonstrated by analyzing: (1) those elements in the Man of Law's character that are dramatically prominent in the tale of Constance, (2) the references to legal proceedings and the use of legalistic rhetoric, especially exclamatio and interrogatio, in the tale, and (3) the affinities between the Man of Law's Tale and the other tales in the rhyme-royal group. As an example, the manner of the Man of Law's defense is heavily dependent upon the advice and examples given to lawyers in the Rhetorica ad Herennium, a dependence not found in those tales, like that of the Clerk, that at first might seem similar to the tale of Constance. Since all of the legal rhetoric and most of the references to the law are Chaucer's additions to Trivet, it is likely that Trivet's account was deliberately modified to suit the Man of Law.

In his expository writings about religion, Swift suggests that moral fervor is often a disguise for immoral motives. He advises the preacher to avoid any pronounced display of personal qualities in his sermons and to try to eliminate the almost inevitable distortions caused by self-display. In his satires, Swift often has his persona say true things for reprehensible reasons. The satire then becomes primarily a study of the moral implications of the relationship of the speaker to his proposals, rather than primarily an incitement to practical action. In Gulliver's Travels the persona presents a view of man's evil that is generally in accord with the traditions of Christianity and of satire. But Swift shows us the immoral intentions of Gulliver; although Gulliver pretends that he wants to reform us, his pretense is a strategy for disguising his own evil from us and from himself. The satiric attack in the book then becomes double; Gulliver satirizes man, and Swift satirizes the motives for Gulliver's satire.

Alfred de Vigny's Servitude et grandeur militaires is a highly personal work, but it is related to the historical and literary conjuncture of the 1830's, which saw the French army's Napoleonic grandeur sullied in the suppression of working-class revolts. A refutation of Joseph de Maistre's concept of the soldier as an apocalyptic executioner and Lamennais's denigration of the soldier's honor, Servitude is a characteristic Vigny triptych, but only the third tale, “La Canne de jonc,” provides a morally determining lesson. Here the necessity of experience in the formation of conscience is emphasized. The hero of the tale, Captain Renaud, who throughout his career meets a series of negative and absent fathers (suggesting a metaphysical void that must be filled with human values), inadvertently kills a young Russian cadet during the campaign of France. Years later, Renaud is mortally wounded by a talionic reincarnation of the enfant russe, and expiates his crime in stoic silence. Conscience, as in Vigny's poetry, is attained in the grandeur and honor of silence and renunciation.

Dickens' Our Mutual Friend is an existential novel dealing with the struggles of the central characters to place, in Sartrean terms, existence before essence. This theme of self-definition involves characters singularly preoccupied with analyzing the deadness of past history and with rejecting the impositions of the past upon the present and the future. Boffin's historical reading and Lizzie Hexam's visions in the symbolic fire both reveal the necessity of change if there is to be an existential future. The main protagonist, Eugene Wrayburn, faced with the Shakespearean-Sartrean decision of whether or not to be in his sexual relationship with Lizzie, chooses to reject the pornographic cliches of Victorian sexuality and establish an existence for himself outside of the atrophied “Society” of the novel. Because of these decisions by the central characters to reject the dead history of the past, Our Mutual Friend is an optimistic statement of Dickens' belief in the power of the individual to regenerate a dead world.

The neglect of The Merry Wives of Windsor among scholars and critics results from a failure to appreciate the special nature of the play. Although superficially structured like Roman comedy, the play is really built upon the succession of Falstaff episodes, which give meaning to the Fenton-Anne plot and provide a resolution for it. In this play Falstaff is no lecher but a discredited old adventurer, down on his luck, who becomes the scapegoat for a community afflicted generally by the lust and greed that some of its members seek to make him solely responsible for. The humiliations that they impose upon him are similar to those traditionally inflicted upon the scapegoat figures of European folk custom, and at the end of the play he has become the horned scapegoat indeed, the visible bearer of punishment, and the means whereby innocent love may triumph in Windsor in spite of parental vanity and economic interests. Thus, with the punishment of Falstaff, death is once more temporarily defeated, and the renewal, appropriately celebrated in comedy, is presented for the approval of sympathetic audiences.

Hardy's “Poems of 1912-13” constitute a formal elegy over his first wife, Emma. The twenty-one lyrics are thematically unified, and the sequence is given overall form and structure by the persona's organized perception of time. Within the sequence the narrator focuses upon time periods in the following order: recent past, present; then distant past, recent past, present. This five-part temporal model serves as the form of the elegy, a form that it is likely Hardy worked consciously to achieve. It is also likely that he wrote this sequence in full consciousness of the great elegies preceding his, for he adapted many of the conventions of the elegiac tradition to his own artistic needs. The traditional consolation of perpetuity outside time and space, however, he denied, and for it he substituted the consolation of full emotional and intellectual comprehension of the couple's experience together. This limited consolation, based upon the persona's organized perception of time, is the logic of grief for Hardy's godless universe.

Despite wide disagreement as to the meaning of Coleridge's Kubla Khan, several recent interpretations point toward what can be formulated by combining (1) Plato's conception of a realm of nonmalicious, daemonic creatures dwelling in unrestricted joy outside human limitations and (2) Plato's conception of the Dionysus-inspired “possessed” poet in a furor divinus as the agent who can in an incantation call up before men the enchanting, terrifying beauty of this daemon world. Suggesting the nature of daemonic beauty and its effects upon people may be a chief aim of the poem, as variant readings in the autograph text indicate. Kubla Khan seems to be a poem about daemonic poetry, a strain that reappears intermittently and thus the search for spiritual and philosophic meanings in the poem could be relinquished. From this point of view, Kubla Khan appears neither as a fragment nor as a poem about evil.