The present study purposes to establish a direct relationship between the comic underplot in Twelfth Night and the Jonsonian comic method as first developed in Every Man in His Humour and Every Man out of His Humour. Shakespeare's name appears first in the list of actors for the former play in the Jonson Folio (1616). This is almost the only indubitable instance of Shakespeare's acting, attested by written evidence on the authority of Jonson rather than based on tradition or hearsay. His thorough familiarity with this play is, consequently, a certainty, and the production of Every Man out of His Humour by his company in the following year is sufficient evidence that his knowledge of both plays was intimate and detailed.

Few lines written by Coleridge are more familiar than those near the end of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

He prayeth best, who loveth best

All things, both great and small;

For the dear God who loveth us,

He made and loveth all.

Prof. Edward A. Freeman—writing or speaking to a friend in regard to a young American who was going to the University of Jena in order to study Anglo-Saxon—remarked: “Why does he not go to Orange County, Va., instead of to Jena? They speak very good West-Saxon in Orange County.” This statement may serve as an introduction to my remarks on the pronunciation of Fredericksburg, Va. For Stafford, Spotsylvania, and Orange Counties have about the same pronunciation and have preserved to a remarkable degree the older English sounds brought over in the seventeenth century by the early settlers of this region.

If Chaucer knew nothing at all of the Decameron, his failure to get hold of it has every aspect of mystery. If Chaucer was acquainted with that rich human document, the use which he made of it is to many of us a still greater mystery. Accordingly we are led to inquire how much the England of Chaucer's time, or even of the century after his death, may have known concerning Boccaccio's hundred tales, aside from the story of Griselda's persecution told at second- or third-hand. The facts concerning England's discovery of the Decameron are of course not summed up in what we know about Painter.

Among the names of stones in the Alfonsine lapidaries are a number, frequently recurring, which are given in the manuscript as Chaldean names, and are usually followed by their equivalents or definitions in Spanish. Some thirty-seven of these have been listed by M. F. de Mély, who expresses the hope that someone will undertake the task of defining and identifying them. Thus far, however, no one has made any thoroughgoing attempt to investigate these Chaldean stone-names. The only identifications made by Mély himself are the names catu and alfeyru (alfeyxu), feynac. A single identification of bezebekaury as ruby is made by Barrington, who, as others have done, has pointed out the difficulty of identifying these Alfonsine stones. Before undertaking this task it will be necessary to correct and complete the list given by Mély, which really comprises 36 instead of 37 names since one stone is twice counted. Actually, the manuscript mentions no less than forty-five Chaldean stones.

In his Illustrations of Shakespeare Francis Douce maintains that Adlington's translation of Apuleius' Golden Ass is a book that Shakespeare certainly used. Admittedly, Douce supports this repeated assertion with very slight evidence; and no other scholar, so far as I know, has hitherto seriously urged the dramatist's knowledge of this popular book. Yet the chances are many that any reputable author in the sixteenth century would have known the writings of Apuleius, in the original, or, after 1566, in translation, or in both.

In the present article I hope to show that Lessing's Der Freigeist (1749) and Die Juden (1749) were influenced by early English sentimental comedy, and that about 1753 the German dramatist studied the work of Edward Moore, author of the chief English sentimental comedy of the second quarter of the eighteenth century—The Foundling (1748).

In Contrast to the apologetic and ambiguous prologue of the Libro de buen amor, that preceding the Lazarillo de Tormes shocks us with its forthright arrogance: “Yo por bien tengo que cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas vengan a noticia de muchos y no se entierren en la sepultura del olvido.” The evasive ego of Juan Ruiz—an ego which, as Alfonso Reyes notes, is comic by mediaeval definition and slips with childish glee into one role after another—has been replaced by an explosion of self: “Yo por bien tengo …” The “soy quien soy” of the hero-braggarts of the “comedia” seems to have been combined with the autobiographical complacency of an Alonso de Contreras or a Pedro de Baeza. The result is that the reader, as soon as he becomes aware of the insignificance of the events so pompously announced, tends to read the prologue as a parody. If Lazarillo is an anti-hero, the prologue is appropriately an anti-prologue. The oral bombast of “cosas tan señaladas y por ventura nunca oydas ni vistas” sounds almost as if it were designed to hawk the “pliegos sueltos” of a “romance.” Prologues are by definition self-conscious, but in this one self-consciousness is driven to self-caricature.

Marginalized herself in discussions of the New German Cinema, Margarethe von Trotta sets out in her film Marianne and Juliane (Die bleierne Zeit) to recover the experiences of women as subjects in history. Using feminism as her lens, von Trotta deconstructs and re-visions history through a fictionalized version of the lives of Gudrun Ensslin, a member of the Red Army Faction, and her sister Christiane, a feminist journalist. Von Trotta presents their story from the perspective of Juliane-Christiane, whose memories reveal parallels between public and private, past and present forms of repression and who rediscovers the importance of sororal and maternal bonding. The film emphasizes that the political and the historical are indivisible from the personal. In doing so, Marianne and Juliane politicizes spectatorship and destabilizes the economies of violence and gender on which many visual accounts of German history depend.

Yeats's interest in Byzantine art and civilization began in the Nineties and continued through his life. The first issue of “Rosa Alchemica” (1896) refers to the mosaic work at Ravenna (“mosaic not less beautiful than the mosaic in the Baptistery at Ravenna, but of a less severe beauty”), work which Yeats probably saw when in 1907 he travelled in Italy with Lady Gregory. Unfortunately, Yeats has left us no account of his visit to Ravenna. A revision of “The Holy Places,” final section of Discoveries, made for the 1912 edition of The Culling of an Agate, shows that between 1906 and 1912 Yeats's knowledge of Byzantine history had increased. In 1906 he wrote of “an unstable equilibrium of the whole European mind that would not have come had Constantinople wall been built of better stone;” in 1912 this became “had John Palaeologus cherished, despite that high and heady look … a hearty disposition to fight the Turk.” In preparation for the “Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, which Yeats wrote at Capri in February 1925, and left virtually unchanged in the revised Vision of 1937, Yeats read several books about Byzantine art and civilization and studied Byzantine mosaics in Rome and Sicily. He did not return to Ravenna, being fearful of its miasmal air. Once Byzantium had found a place in “the System,” it shortly appeared in the poetry, first in “Sailing to Byzantium,” and “Wisdom” (1926-27); then changed, though not utterly, in “Byzantium” (1930).

Marcel Proust stated clearly and repeatedly in his vast A la recherche du temps perdu his determining theory of involuntary memory. Proust's entire work was based upon experiences of total recall from a store of memories unconsciously preserved in the mind. In a paper delivered in 1957 by Dr. Wilder Penfield of the Montreal Neurological Institute are to be found physiological bases for Proust's esthetic experiences. Wilder reported that forgotten experiences were revealed to patients in great detail when electrodes were applied to various parts of their brains. Penfield thus supports Proust's view of a stream of memories (or, as Penfield calls it, a continuous filmstrip) preserving an individual's total experiential responses from childhood onward. The juxtaposition of Proust's statements with those of the neurosurgeon about the nature of this stream of unconscious memories, their relation to conscious memory, and the conditions under which they are recalled throws light upon the validity of Proust's technique.

Few men of letters have been personally loved and revered like Hermann Broch. Reducing the sphere of his private wants to an unbelievable minimum, he radiated a warmth and tolerance and sympathy to rare at to be unforgettable. His seeing eye, set in the face of a raven, had a quality of timeless wisdom that neutralised specific curiosity regarding his private past and even his literary development. For such things, so far as they mattered, there would be plenty of time, it seemed, in years to come. Did he not say with a chuckle that he would live to be a hundred? Then came the stunning shock, on a late May morning in 1951: he was dead.

When the student of medieval literature busies himself, as he must so often do, with the chronological sequence of an author's works, he finds himself saying that a given writing was ‘published’ in a given year. What does the word ‘published’ mean? Obviously it must mean something different from the modern process of printer's proofs, advance notices, public sale, and book-reviews. When the textual critic strives to wrest from the existing manuscripts of a medieval work the evidence which shall enable him to reconstruct the author's original autograph, he finds himself speaking of copies made directly from this autograph. Under what conditions were these earliest copies ordinarily made? To both literary historian and textual critic it should be of service to make as clear as may be just what was involved in the act of publication before the discovery of printing introduced the sort of publication with which we are now familiar, and to determine under what conditions an author's work might circulate during his lifetime.

In Breuddwyd Rhonabwy we read: “Behold, bards came and recited verses before Arthur, and no man understood those verses … save that they were in Arthur's praise.” These words fittingly describe a poem (No. xxx) in the thirteenth-century Book of Taliesin, entitled Preiddeu Annwn, which would seem to mean “The Spoils (i.e. plunder) of the Other World.” Sharon Turner, who was the first to offer a translation, frankly confessed that the Welsh scholars of his day did not profess to understand above one half of any of the Taliesin poems. He asserted—not without reason—that in the particular verses under discussion “all connection of thought seems to have been studiously avoided”; and in conclusion he exclaimed, “Could Lycophron or the Sybils, or any ancient oracle, be more elaborately incomprehensible?”

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Friedrich Schlegel developed an influential theory of irony that anticipated some of the central concerns of post-modernity. His most vocal contemporary critic, the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, sought to demonstrate that Schlegel's theory of irony tacitly relied on certain problematic aspects of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophy. While Schlegel's theory of irony has generated seemingly endless commentary in recent critical discourse, Hegel's critique of Schlegelian irony has gone neglected. This essay's primary aim is to defend Hegel's critique of Schlegel by isolating irony's underlying Fichtean epistemology. Drawing on S⊘ren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Irony in the final section of this essay, I argue that Hegel's critique of irony can motivate a dialectical hermeneutics that offers a powerful alternative both to Paul de Man's poststructuralist hermeneutics and to recent cultural-studies-oriented criticism that tends to reduce literary texts to sociohistorical epiphenomena.

Two comic ideas inform the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The traditions of festival and ritual help to explain the one idea of celebrating man's quest for renewal in communion with nature and divinity; the traditions of Roman comedy and rhetoric help to explain the other, the idea of understanding man's folly in his quest for order in society. Shakespeare creates two contexts, finite society with its mores and laws, and nature with its transcendent gods, and then assimilates the two in the action and language of the play. The action combines a dialectical sequence based on social conflict and a symbolic sequence based on magic and myth. The language ranges between debate and song, argument and incantation. The gods of nature become both measure and mirror of the absurdity of human love, and the result is both satiric and celebrative: folly is understood as folly and celebrated as myth. Shakespeare's amusement at the artist's power through language to comprehend the relation of nature and experience and translate the comprehension into comic myth is apparent throughout. Bottom's wedding to Titania is summary of the comprehension and the play-within-a-play is a burlesque of the power.

Trained and working in literary studies, i began to analyze visual artifacts such as paintings sometime in the late 1980s. My interest in visual aspects has grown out of the realization that subjectivity is formed by a perpetual adjustment of images passing before the subject, who, as focalizer, makes them into a whole that is comprehensible because it is continuous. Having a certain continuity in one's thought depends, at a level more subliminal than conscious, on having a certain continuity in one's images.

But continuity is not the same thing as coherence. This distinction is another source of interest that informs work on visual narrativity. In such historically and sociologically varied texts and images as modern novels, the ancient and incomplete fragments that make up the Hebrew bible, and Rembrandt's paintings, I constantly came up against that which eludes the coherence of these artifacts. My attention was systematically arrested by the detail that seems out of place, the contradiction that tears open the work, the monstrous element that reveals flaws and disparities and, because it provokes astonishment, offers never-ending possibilities for the understanding of these works. Such experiences led me to consider those dimensions of literature that classical narratology has tended to think marginal and that pictorial narratology, unbounded by the presumption of linearity, would promote to the forefront or, at least, deploy as heuristic instruments with which to grasp structure outside linear plots.

Don Quixote, having shared the goatherds' rustic meal on his second sally, takes up a handful of acorns and launches into his lecture on the Golden Age: “Dichosa edad y siglos dichosos aquellos a quien los antiguos pusieron nombre de dorados, y no porque en ellos el oro, que en esta nuestra edad de hierro tanto se estima, se alcanzase en aquella venturosa sin fatiga alguna, sino porque entonces los que en ella vivían ignoraban estas dos palabras de tuyo y mío” ‘Blessed the time, and blessed the centuries, called by the ancients the Golden Age—and not because, then, the gold which we in our age of iron so value came to men's hands without effort, but because those who walked the earth in that time knew nothing of those two words, thine and mine.’ Bewildering as his harangue was for the listening goatherds, Don Quixote's introduction invites consideration of the location, ownership, and definition of the Spanish “Golden Age.” These aspects illuminate the challenge the period presents to early modern studies and vice versa.