We cannot help thinking of certain characters in Shakespeare as real beings. We wonder what this person did before the play opened, and after it closed. What was the girlhood of Portia? Why had Othello never suspected the baseness of lago? What was the fate of Shylock after the scene in court? Of what sort was the married life of Beatrice and Benedick? Such questions are insistent and compelling, irrelevant though they are.

The inadequacy of our current literary terms is nowhere clearer than in the case of tragedy, despite the amount of energy that has been spent on efforts to define it. Beyond or below the incontestable examples—the masterpieces of Æschylus, of Sophocles, of Shakespeare—stretches a wide and uncertainly bounded territory, sometimes thought of as including almost any play of a fairly serious sort, sometimes divided according as its occupants present, or fail to present, certain accepted features. The former point of view leads to regarding as vaguely tragic even plays that end in no positive catastrophe, the latter to compiling lengthy catalogs of pieces that have nothing of the tragic form but the label. At first sight it may seem that there is a radical difference between plays which end in downfall and death and those in which a threatened woe is at length and completely averted; but if we limit the name of tragedy to the former class, we are forced to deny it to pieces that have traditionally laid claim to it, and thus to show how hard is the task of drawing positive distinctions. If we feel that the Agamemnon of Æschylus is really more akin to Macbeth, than to the bloodless products of a mistakenly classicizing Renaissance, we may yet find it hard to justify that feeling on the basis of the current conceptions, or to account for numerous facts which the actual plays present. Why, for instance, are the best examples of tragedy confined almost entirely to certain well-marked periods—Greek to less than a century between Salamis and the death of Sophocles, Elizabethan either to the seven years between 1586 and the death of Marlowe or to the decade 1599–1609, French to the somewhat longer but far less well filled interval between the Cid in 1636 and Phèdre in 1677? Why, again, are tragic heroes usually of royal or noble rank? “Why is the action usually set in a more or less remote time? Are traits like these essential to the form, or merely adventitious? To answer such questions, we need to examine two matters: the nature of the material best able to yield the tragic effect, the nature of the faculty by which that material is to be contemplated. The present paper—in rather summary fashion, and with no pretence at an exhaustive review of authorities—will attempt this double task.

In the introduction to my edition of the pre-Lutheran German Bible I had occasion to refer to the Epistola de Constantinopolitana urbe capta of Leonardus Chiensis, a German translation of which had been described in an auction catalogue of the year 1913.

One of the many interesting stories current in the Middle Ages is that of a young man who puts his marriage ring on the finger of a statue of Venus and is surprised to find that the image, taking the matter au sérieux, jealously forbids him the embraces of his earthly bride. Its relation to a large group of miracles of the Virgin has been frequently noticed (for example, by Mussafia and by Ward and Herbert ); it has received some attention from students of Mérimée as the source of his Vénus d'Ille; and Massmann, in his edition of the Kaiserchronik (1849-1854) collected a large number of variants (together with an almost equal number of faulty references). But Graf is the only scholar who has studied it in any detail, and his treatment is far from complete. I propose here to bring together the scattered materials of previous students, both of the story of the ring-betrothal to the Venus statue and of the Virgin miracle. I shall add no new versions of either story, but I shall discuss the former from a point of view radically different from Graf's, and shall endeavour to follow the tale from its obscure beginnings before William of Malmesbury, through its adaptation as a miracle of the Virgin, down to some of its present literary forms.

According to whether we count, in verse, all syllables, regardless of accent, or only the accented syllables, we recognize in the modern languages two systems of versification, the foot system and the syllabic system. In each of the following verses of Boileau, for example, we may enumerate twelve syllables, or find four feet thus graphically illustrated:

En vain | contre le Cid | un mini | stre se ligue,
Tout Paris | pour Chimè | ne a les yeux | de Rodrigue.

It is the purpose of the following paper to examine the relationship of the mediæval ballad to the dance, in origin and in traditional usage. Particular reference is had to the English and Scottish ballad type. In various preceding papers I have considered the theory currently accepted in America of the inseparableness of primitive dance, music, and song and have shown that primitive song is not narrative in character. I have also questioned the assumption that the ballad is the archetypal poetic form—this position should be assigned to the song, not the ballad—and the assumption of “communal” as against individual authorship for the English and Scottish popular ballads. The present paper examines the relation to the dance of the English and Scottish ballads. The view is widely accepted both in the Old World and in America that this, and similar ballad types, originated in the dance. The following paper canvasses the evidence for this view and makes inquiry as to its validity.

Two modern spectacles have become so familiar that we find it difficult to imagine even a prehistoric state without them: the author stalking a publisher, and the play treated as pure literature. There are, indeed, many plays—and even some successful ones—that do not reach print; but the closet-drama is established, and unquestioned as a literary form, in prose as well as verse. Hence it is difficult to visualize conditions that no more than three hundred years ago were the reverse of these: the play regarded as mere stage directions, not at all comparable with pure literature in prose or verse; and the publisher pursuing, satyr-like, the nymph-coy author for something to print. Yet the understanding of these surprising conditions is a pre-requisite to any establishing of Shaksperean or other Elizabethan texts, especially plays; for on it rests finally the main question of authenticity. A short survey of the following four aspects of Elizabethan publishing may help to show both their universality and their significance.

Groethe's literary sources for the Ur-Tasso acquainted him with the legend of Tasso, which had sprung up even before the publication of the first biography of the poet, by Manso, in 1620 (twenty-five years after Tasso's death), and flourisht uncheckt till the appearance, in 1785, in Rome, of the Abbate Serassi's La Vita di Torquato Tasso. One prominent feature of the legend, the love affair between the poet and the Princess Leonora, sister of the Duke of Ferrara, was retained by Goethe, even after he read Serassi's attempts to disprove it, because he was making the love motive in the drama a reflection of his own relation to Frau von Stein. As that Platonic relation had unfolded itself in life its reflection had assumed shape in the drama, till, on the completion of the second act, the poet had realized that there was a crisis ahead, both in life and in the play; and as he did not care to picture it in fancy, the two-act fragment was laid aside, in November, 1781, and was not toucht again till the author went to Italy. This fragment, the Ur-Tasso, was written in “poetischer Prosa.” The finisht drama is in un-rimed iambic pentameters. The revision of the drama was begun in Italy and finisht after the poet's return to Weimar. It is the purpose of this paper to discuss certain features of the history of that revision.

The poetry of Wordsworth seems, at first thought, to draw less from the visual sense than that of Milton, or Shelley, or Keats, or many another. For Wordsworth's manner is not a pictorial manner; his poetic methods are not those of the artist; he was no searcher out of the striking; and beauty, as commonly understood, was not to him the supreme inspiration.

Literary historians, in characterizing the pamphlet literature of the English Civil War and the early years of the Restoration have, as a rule, contented themselves with the statement that much of the prose of the period was written in dialogue. It is the purpose of this paper to give some idea of the varying popularity of the dialogue during the period from 1640 to 1700, to characterize the commonest type more precisely than has been customary, and briefly to suggest its possible relation to English predecessors and to foreign works, ancient and contemporary.

Lorsque la guerre éclata, la France, militairement parlant, n‘était pas prête. Malgré l'arrêt momentané des armées allemandes en Belgique, l'ennemi put arriver jusqu’ aux portes de Paris.

Whether or not The Dynasts is the greatest work in English literature of the last generation it is undoubtedly the most engrossing for the student of literary forms. English literature does not on the whole raise questions of form; we have been content to leave that to the Germans. But with The Dynasts we have for once out of our own native workshop a poem which drives the mind back to all the old problems that have dogged epic and dramatic literature through the centuries. And besides the old problems it raises a score of new ones which will stimulate enterprise and innovation in many a writer of to-day and to-morrow. If at the present moment the necessity of analyzing The Dynasts, complicated as the task may be, is not apparent to the reader of English literature at large, it will be apparent at no distant date.

The middle of the eighteenth century was a period of transition, and Charles Churchill, its greatest satirist, was typical of his age. The men whose influence appears most strongly in his works belonged to the classical and the pseudo-classical schools; those whom he influenced were the exponents of some phase of romanticism. In him we find the spirit of revolt against authority that appears in the early romanticists, but we do not find the lofty ideals, the introspective analysis, the spiritual interpretation of nature, that characterized the later poets. The very fact that he was a satirist links him indissolubly with the classicists. In his exaltation of reason as the “Lord Chief-Justice in the court of man,” in his general mode of thought and expression, he is conservative—in revolt, to be sure, against the school of Pope, yet an imitator of it at every turn.

In these Publications, vol. XII (1897), Professor R. E. Neil Dodge, in an article entitled Spenser's Imitations from Ariosto, described and commented on a large number of parallels between the two poets. This work was so thoroughly done that no one can expect to add greatly to his lists. Yet one cannot ever be sure of having exhausted the similarities between The Faerie Queene and the Orlando Furioso, and later gleaners, as Professor Dodge understood, may expect to be regarded with scattered ears. Since our knowledge of the relation of these two poems cannot be too full, I present here a few additional observations.

In a previous paper the syllabic quantity of twenty-five lines of Milton's Paradise Lost was discussed. In that paper it was shown that for three different readers approximately 90% of the syllables standing in the metrically stressed position were longer than the other syllables in the same foot in the unstressed position. In the following study it is my purpose to consider syllabic duration in lyric verse of different metres. The first two selections are iambic. They were read by I and Ka respectively, both instructors in vocal expression in western universities. All times are given in tenths and one-hundredths of a second; the times of pauses are in parenthesis.