Drayton's Epistles are imitations of Ovid's Heroides only in a limited sense, for they were strongly influenced by the vogue of complaint poems (like Daniel's Rosamond), popular during the 1590's. The Epistles resemble both the Heroides and the complaint poems in their rhetorical embellishment and their moral sententiousness. In a few cases, Drayton clearly intended some parallels between Ovid's characters and his own (Hero and Leander-Queen Mary and Charles Brandon; Paris and Helen-Edward IV and Jane Shore). However, unlike Ovid, he informed his poems with a unifying purpose: to show how Providence had guided England through its turbulent past into the glorious age of Queen Elizabeth. Although Elizabeth does not appear in the Epistles, it is clear that Drayton selected his historical events so as to anticipate the greatness of her reign. The patriotic tone of these poems is typical of much historical literature of the 1590's; their concern with Providence evolves from the concept of Fortune in the Mirror for Magistrates. The Epistles, then, are far more Elizabethan than Ovidian, and contemporary praise of Drayton as “the English Ovid” can be misleading.

Close examination of the interlocutor's reflected reactions provides a method for a reading of La Chute which is more consistent with Camus's basic outlook. As he takes part in sporadic although important exchanges with Clamence, the interlocutor is first led generally to see resemblances to the generous lawyer. Later, however, he displays increasingly unfavorable reactions until he finally laughs aloud when Clamence states that he will listen fraternally to the other's confession. By creating an interlocutor who rejects the speaker's views and purposes, Camus affords the reader the pleasure of ridiculing Clamence and of reasserting his own interpretation of life rather than being intimidated into accepting Clamence's degrading portrait as characteristic of modern man.

While it is generally acknowledged that Montaigne introduced the concept of “honnêteté” into French cultural life, the significance of the phenomenon has not been fully realized, especially as it concerns our understanding of the Essays. It appears that one aspect of the psychological make-up of “l'honneste homme” has been largely neglected by critics: the fact that “l'honneste homme,” like his precursor, Castiglione's Courtier, is by profession a man of arms. Such was the case with Montaigne himself and this factor should be given more weight in order to achieve a better-balanced interpretation of the Essays. The influence of Stoicism, particularly on Montaigne's thinking about death, has probably been exaggerated. In the early essays dealing with the subject, Montaigne evinces concerns typical of the nobility, the military caste of his age. These concerns will remain his for the rest of his life, though they are more apparent in the early essays than in the late ones. The “evolution” of Montaigne's thought may bear just as much, if not more, on changes of perspective as on changes in the essayist's convictions. It appears that the versatility of “l'honneste homme,” the ability of this “universal” man to adapt to circumstances as the need dictates, may be more appropriate than the concept of “evolution” as a characterization of the development of Montaigne's thought in the Essays.

Samuel Richardson used in his novels character types and plots already developed in the English drama. Playwrights such as Charles Johnson, George Lillo, and even Henry Fielding had presented the same story as Pamela—the attempted seduction of a poor but innocent maiden by a well-born rake— and characters similar to the novel's virgin heroine and libertine hero. In the first part of Clarissa Richardson handled a theme common in the drama, that of enforced betrothal, and developed this theme with characterizations, character relationships, and dramatic confrontations already used by playwrights. Throughout the novel Clarissa resembles a type of suffering heroine and Lovelace a type of rakish villain popular in the drama, and the second part of the novel strikingly resembles Charles Johnson's play Caelia. The characters of Sir Charles Grandison also have their dramatic counterparts, especially the hero, who is clearly a product of the theater's men of sense.

Pedro de Veragüe's Doctrina de la discricon has been rightly regarded as “a most important monument of XIVth century Spanish poetry.” It has heretofore been known through a single manuscript (E) from which it has been edited twice. This study utilizes four new textual sources: a manuscript from the Colegio Mayor de San Bartoiomé: S (the best, despite the influence of the Leonese dialect); a second manuscript from the Gayangos Collection (M); a third from a private collection (R); and the only extant copy of a sixteenth-century printing preserved in the British Museum (L). As appears from the watermarks and script, R (1438-55) and S antedate the known manuscript E. M is a late copy (ca. 1535) of considerable textual value. L was preceded by editions now lost and was probably printed by Varela in Seville ca. 1525. The stemma shows that S, R, M, and L share an ancestor of which E is not a descendant. These four new texts contain new stanzas and clarify the meaning of numerous corrupt passages. The present study gives the new stanzas and some of the most important lectiones varice from S, R, M, and L. Basically a textual comment, it endeavors to explain the difficult passages of the poem and includes notes on its language, versification, and historic background. (In Spanish)

Laughter, in Verlaine's early work, has a major function in the creative process, both as a means and an end in itself. In two uncompleted Opéra bouffe librettos composed in collaboration with Emmanuel Chabrier, Verlaine satirizes Napoleon Ill's regime but, through laughter, replaces the Second Empire with a clown's world. His development of a comical “tyrantclown” theme to effect this transformation parallels the sinister “clowntyrant” theme of the early poetry. Whereas, in the latter, laughter resolves itself in silence and death, in the Opéra bouffe it creates and animates a timeless life of innocence and freedom. Comparison with “tyrant-clown” passages in Hugo's Châtiments further reveals Verlaine's effort to convert the world against which he revolts into a sanctuary where a buffoon's laughter can reign absolutely.

Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer's grotesque involves a bizarre distortion which is neither tragic nor comic but disquieting. He conceives of the imagination as having an abnormal region that produces absurdities and monstrous forms. Grotesque motifs draw upon two spheres of reality: a nether-world coexistent with Nature, and the everyday historical world. The “other side” of Nature, uncanny and capricious, is inhabited by deformed beings governed by different laws of harmony and dissonance. There, non-Ovidian metamorphoses produce admixtures of satanic beauty and monstrosity, with Becquer's description of them eschewing Dantesque moralism and approaching gratuitous estheticism. In contrast, the historical world attracts the imagination by means of architecture and its fantastic motifs. Other links to social reality appear in the detached sensibility of the grotesque. For example, the carnival is described by a mood of hollow gaiety atypical of the ebullient Romantic carnival. Mannequin images also express disillusion and the advent of an anti-Roman tic reaction, as does the presence of gratuitously induced incongruities. Thus, Becquer stands between the Romantic grotesque, with its healthy distortions, and the self-destructive grotesquerie of the twentieth century.

The 1952 poem is commonly read as a manifesto of Spain's contemporary “social” poets and as an expression of their aversion to the estheticism of a previous poetic generation. The “esthete” addressed in the poem seems at first glance to be an obvious caricature of Juan Ramón Jiménez. The “esthete,” on closer examination, differs significantly from Jiménez in several respects. Jiménez shares neither his interest in abstract beauty divorced from existential concerns nor his overly refined, “literary” language. The only real point of identity between Jiménez and the “esthete” lies in their shared concern for the “Obra” as a substitute for personal immortality; but even that concern is typical of only one period in Jiménez' career. A comparison between Jiménez and Hierro reveals no such clear contrast in their approaches to poetry as that implied by Hierro between himself and the “esthete.” The latter turns out to be a straw man reflecting some aspects of Jiménez, some of the vanguard poets of the twenties, and something of a half-hidden visionary side of Hierro himself. Hierro seems to have invented the “esthete” as a means of affirming his own poetic individuality, a maneuver which was surely unnecessary in view of the fact that by 1952 Hierro already possessed an unmistakably personal style.

A dramatic incident in the literary warfare between England and America during the first quarter of the nineteenth century was Tom Moore's indictment of the American character in Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (1806), inspired by a tour through the United States in the summer of 1804. Four Juvenalian “epistles” developed the contrast in America between man's humanitarian dreams and his actual moral and political performance. Because of the poet's popularity, his diatribe, which included slanderous portraits of Jefferson and Washington, was widely discussed and deeply resented even by Moore's American friends. The most substantial rebuttals came in a lengthy critique of Moore's work offered as prefatory material to an American edition of Epistles, Odes, and Other Poems (Philadelphia, 1806); in a serial review by William Coleman in the New-York Evening Post (October-November 1806); and in an anonymous poem entitled An Attempt to Vindicate the American Character (Philadelphia, 1806). So violent was the reaction that not until the publication of Lalla Rookh in 1817 did “Anacreon” Moore regain favor among Columbian readers, and by that time he had come to regret what he called his “crude and boyish tirades against the Americans.”

Laughter in Oliver Twist is used as a weapon against the reader's conventional social identifications, forcing him to recognize in himself the social brutality which threatens Oliver. Repeatedly, Dickens evokes laughter at one of the novel's social outcasts and then shows that laughter to be cold and inadequate by echoing it in a demonstrably evil character. By means of this process of subversion, the reader is forced away from the bright social world of the Maylie-Brownlow group into an intense association with the orphans and the victims: Oliver, Fagin and his associates, and Mr. Bumble.