The dating of La Mandragola is one of the most difficult problems in Machiavelli scholarship. Roberto Ridolfi, first in his biography of Machiavelli (1954) and more recently in an essay in La Bibliofilia (1962), proposed a new and apparently definitive solution; the comedy must have been written between January and February 1518, for the marriage of Lorenzo de’ Medici the younger, in the short space of one month, and performed soon after, on February 16, 1518.

In fact, we have very few and very late records about the performance of La Mandragola and the text of the comedy has come down to us only through an anonymous edition and one manuscript.

While contemporary scholarship on Erasmus’ Praise of Folly has been unusually productive, it has dealt primarily with structure and theme. It appears, however, that not nearly enough attention has been paid by scholars to the Listrius commentary which, after the 1515 Basel edition, became a standard appendage to the work. A close analysis of the commentary demonstrates that while at times it is ostentatious and irrelevant, its critical and interpretative remarks are often quite valuable. It can be seen not only as an objective statement of Erasmus' satiric method, but also as a kind of humanist courtesy book.

Almost from its inception, printers and translators made use of the commentary.

In Remigio Sabbadini's edition of the epistolary of Guarino Veronese, Letter 192 (Vol. 1, 306-307) ends as follows: ‘Vale mea suavitas; valeat et primaria femina θεoδωρα a sua filia Tadea, quae illam tantopere amat, sitit, ardet oculis et animo, ut iam nunc ascensionem meditetur.’ Sabbadini notes in his critical apparatus: ‘ascensionem non capisco. Forse a me secessionem.’ I hope to show, however, that the text is sound.

By its subscription we know that Letter 192 was written at Verona on October 15. On internal evidence Sabbadini conclusively assigns it to 1420. The addressee was Guarino's Venetian friend, Andrea Zulian. Teodora was Zulian's second wife, whom he wed in 1415.3 Taddea was Guarino's wife, no relation to Teodora; the word filia was simply a term of affectionate respect.

For more than two hundred years, the Buckley-Carte edition (London, 1733) of Jacques-Auguste de Thou's History of His Times has been the standard one for this great Latin chronicle of the latter half of the sixteenth century. In six massive folio volumes, it presents the most complete and accurate text generally available. A seventh volume offers an imposing array of pièces justificatives: letters by and to de Thou and his friends, discussing the publication, emendation, and censoring of the History as well as its reception at the courts of Europe and in the ‘republic of letters.’ Many of these documents were reproduced in the three most widely used French translations of the History. In his recent bibliographical study, Samuel Kinser demonstrates at great length the superiority of the London text.

The list of examples appended by Daniel to his translation of Paolo Giovio's Imprese has proved rather a puzzle to his commentators. Joan Rees, author of the standard monograph on Daniel, gives what seems to be the generally accepted view on the subject: ‘Daniel at this time was himself a good Italian scholar…. Perhaps Florio helped Daniel to collect material for the original part of his work since all the examples in his own [i.e., Daniel's] collection of devices are Italian and it is not easy to find the sources. It is unlikely that Daniel had gathered them himself on the spot…'; and she adds in a footnote: ‘Giovio's book had been translated into French in 1561 but there is no evidence that Daniel based his translation on the French version rather than the Italian original.’

Readers have always found it easier to agree that Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy is a good book than to agree on precisely what makes it so good or what message it is, in its laborious and complicated manner, delivering. As they stress now this aspect and now that of its fathomless richness, they seem at times hardly to be talking about the same work. For example, we are told that Burton is utterly credulous: 'For the nature of evidence (as it is called by the moderns) he cares nothing. Everything is admissible that has been written in a book.' And yet, ‘in Burton the English Renaissance grows… skeptical.' The book is ‘a medical treatise … orderly in arrangement.' Yet it is a ‘trackless jungle.’ It is a ‘formidable statement of … skepticism.' On the contrary, 'no greater adept of Platonism’ than Burton ‘ever lived'; or rather, ‘Burton was, first of all, a neo-Platonist.'6 But then, ‘he is no metaphysician.

One indication of the extent of musical activity in Strasbourg during the sixteenth century is the sizeable number and superior quality of collections of music and books about music printed there during the period. Scarcely fifty years after Gutenberg printed his first Bible at Mainz, a veritable flood of publications began to pour from the presses of Strasbourg. Although no Strasbourg printer devoted his talents exclusively to publishing music, several printers achieved a measure of prominence in the field. As a consequence of the printers’ diversity of material, the circle of individuals connected in some way with publishing included most of the leading writers, poets, clergymen, musicians, and artists of the day.

From the standpoint of sheer bulk alone hymnals or psalters merit first consideration. The advent of the Reformation in Strasbourg with services in the vernacular dating from 1524 accounts for the sudden interest in sacred music suitable for the congregation.

Sixteenth-Century Englishmen were not frequently given to self-scrutiny—at least not in writing. This was a disinclination which they shared with their medieval forbears, since autobiography was not a very common form of literary activity in the Middle Ages. Monastic self-analysis, sub specie aeternitatis and guided by the standard categories of virtues and vices—yes. Coherent study of the self, for its own sake and in all its quirks and idiosyncracies—scarcely ever. In the early sixteenth century, the murmur of new ideas from Italy did begin to touch England: a sense of distance and of difference between the present and the past, and an awakened appreciation for the discrete, the singular in human personality.

When Hamlet calls on the player to render a speech from 'Aeneas’ tale to Dido,’ his choice of subject offers some obvious parallels to his own situation. Hecuba, the archetypal grieving queen, is an effective contrast to Gertrude. Pyrrhus’ vengeance for his father's death is a reminder of the duty laid on Hamlet, as well as on Laertes and Fortinbras. Bloody Pyrrhus embodies the savage violence which both attracts and repels Hamlet. The player's speech has a more important function, however: it leads directly to Hamlet's ‘mousetrap’ strategy, the presentation of a play for Claudius. Hecuba's woes and the familiar idea of the guilty spectator at a play were already associated in a passage from Plutarch which probably was in Shakespeare's mind.

Du Rondeau, Berdan a dit: ‘Before Clément Marot the rondeau … was a name loosely applied to a large number of forms having little more than the use of the refrain in common… . In the jardin de Plaisance, in rondeau form, L'Infortuné gives his directions:

Par et, pour, mats, donq, par, cart, quant
Ne se doibt rondeau commencer
Qui ne scait son fait despencer
A bien conclure et rimacer
Ou de plat fauldra ou de cant
Acteurs seront celuy mocquant
Qui rondeau cuidera passer
Sans bien rentrer et compasser.
Par et etc.
Plusiers s'abusent en pensant
Que rondeau soit bon pour rentrer
Mais non chascun couplet porter
Doibt sens parfaict et suspenser
Clos et ouuert non suspensant
Par et etc.'

Berdan indique, en note, qu'il cite ce texte d'aprés Fabri [Le Grand et Vrai Art de Pleine Rhétorique, introd.

In his biography of Andrew Marvell, Pierre Legouis observed that in 'The Gallery’ Marvell effected a considerable change in the wellknown theme of the image engraved on the lover's heart. ‘That a lover's heart contains his mistress's picture had already been said, among others, by Donne and Carew; but Marvell renovates the hackneyed metaphor by enlarging it. His imagination reveals itself spacious without strain.' Although Legouis pays tribute to the visual quality of Marvell's imagination, he, like other critics, has hardly explored the question to what extent ‘The Gallery’ is indebted for inspiration to pictorial tradition. 'The Gallery’ is particularly significant in this respect, for it is the most explicit illustration in Marvell's poetry of Horace's phrase ut pictura poesis,interpreted for many centuries as an affirmation of the parallelism between the two arts, and of the saying attributed by Plutarch to Simonides: 'painting is mute poetry, poetry a speaking picture.’

From their early appearance in Idea the Shepheards Garland to their luminous apotheosis in The Muses Elizium, visions of the idyllic world of pastoral haunted Drayton's thought, as they haunted the Elizabethan culture he typified. At the same time he shared the Renaissance's admiration for the martial glories of the epic. Although in its various versions The Barons Wanes is perhaps his most ambitious effort in this genre, the depth of his response is also evident in the exultant rhythms of his paean to true English hearts, the famous and deservedly beloved ‘Ballad of Agincourt.’ Of particular interest in ‘To the Virginian Voyage’ is the curious inconsistency that results when Drayton tries to combine the attractions of both pastoralism and heroism in the same poem.

The name of Pietro Bizari has been linked with that of Sir Philip Sidney since 1633, when a duodecimo volume published in Frankfort appeared with a fulsome title

These letters, written by the learned Huguenot Hubert Languet, senior diplomat in the service of August, Elector of Saxony, became renowned for reasons other than the eminence of Languet and his protégé, Sidney.

It has long been recognized that Jack Drum's Entertainment (1600), a play now acknowledged to be the work of Marston, is indebted to the first part of Sir Philip Sidney's tale of Argalus and Parthenia (Arcadia, Bk. 11, chs. 2, 7); and that this as well as other material from the Arcadia appeared in the roughly contemporaneous The Trial of Chivalry. There has been, however, no effort to explore either the precise nature of Marston's use of the Arcadia, or the relationship between the plays. A study of these questions reinforces the argument that Marston's intention in Jack Drum's Entertainment is unmistakably satiric. The evidence strongly suggests that Marston's play, written for performance at Paul's, should be read in the context of the War of the Theaters: it burlesques the naively romantic crudities of the public theatres in general (what Marston, in his Introduction, calls ‘mouldy fopperies of stale Poetry, / Unpossible drie mustie Fictions'), but is directed specifically at The Trial of Chivalry, which had recently been staged by the Earl of Derby's Men.

While no one would deny that Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions is a unique work of the imagination, critical comment has generally failed to perceive the commonplaces that lie behind Donne's thought. All too often the work has been labeled the 'curious’ product of an ‘anxious and restless mind' when, in fact, Donne's devotional aims lead him to traditional themes and to a view of the self that tends to deny value to personal idiosyncracies. Devotional literature generally demands from both reader and author a kind of impersonality, or better, universality of self. The author of a devotional work focuses on that area of the self in which he and his reader share similar needs: both identify themselves as fallen men, the crucial fact in their self-understanding.

One interesting facet of Tamburlaine, Part I is Marlowe's dramatic characterization of Bajazet. The Great Turk's defeat and humiliation by Tamburlaine are standard features of Marlowe's acknowledged sources: his captivity in an iron cage, his being fed like a dog from Tamburlaine's table scraps, his use as Tamburlaine's footstool, and his final desperate suicide by braining against the bars of his cage. But Marlowe's debasement of Bajazet is more radical and all-encompassing. From his first appearance (III.i), the Ottoman emperor is portrayed as pompous, tyrannical, and prone to flattery. His confrontation with Tamburlaine (III.iii) is farcical rather than heroic. In short, Marlowe's Bajazet totally lacks the dignity and bravery accorded the Bajazet of his historical authorities.