The Conflict of Conscience, a morality play by Nathaniel Wood, was printed in London, 1581, in a black-letter quarto. This is the only known edition of the work; it appeared, however, in two issues. The first of these gives the name of “Frauncis Spera” on the title-page and in the Prologue, and at the end of the piece the Nuntius announces that Philologus, the character representing the Italian, Francesco Spiera, had committed suicide. The second issue does not mention the name of the historical prototype of the chief character in the drama, and in it the Nuntius announces that Philologus had been reconverted to Protestantism before his death.

[Elements as they are added one by one to form a sentence progressively limit the semantic range of all that has preceded. This causes beginning elements to have a wider semantic range than elements toward the end. The concept of linear modification thus developed knits together a number of otherwise heterogeneous manifestations of sentence order in English, and provides a plausible theory of adjective position.]

The linear geometry of the sentence imposes certain relationships upon the elements that compose it. These relationships are conveniently expressed as dichotomies. Two dichotomies are, figuratively, spatial: they are contiguous versus separate (A is next to B or is distant from B) and within versus without (A is contained within B or is outside B). Two dichotomies are temporal : first versus last and before versus after. While it does not follow that any of these pairs necessarily has linguistic importance, given their location at the very foundation of sentence structure it would be strange if they had not been seized upon for some use in communication. I think it can be shown that all of them have, probably in all languages, though I am concerned here only with the last two, the temporal dichotomies, and even with these, only in two languages.

In The Life of the Poet, Lawrence Lipking speaks of the mature poet's effort to shape a summation in verse that will give meaning and wholeness to the poet's lifework. Osip Mandelstam refused to create such a summation, unlike many of his modernist contemporaries. He developed instead a complex, playful, defiantly open-ended poetics that resists all attempts to shape a definitive, fitting conclusion to his life-in-art. Seeking an appropriate poetic ending to the life of the poet-martyr—Mandelstam died en route to the gulag at the height of Stalin's terror—many critics chose to overlook the provocatively playful lyrics that accompany his more somber late verses. Through analysis of two poems on Charlie Chaplin written near the end of Mandelstam's life, this essay aims both to reopen the question of the poet's ending and to complicate the reader's portrait of the artist's final days.

Al margen de la creatión literaria y en cierto modo también al margen de las tradictones locales netamente rurales, florece aun en muchos pueblos de la Peninsula y en algunos de la America Hispana la llamada ‘fiesta de moros y cristianos,’ curiosa encrucijada de ciertas maneras de juego, festejo y drama, que tuvieron vigencia cortesana en la España de los Austrias y que hoy sobreviven injertas en la tradición, popular y predominantemente campesina, de las fiestas patronales. El estudio completo de este fenomeno ofreceria considerable interes intrinseco y abriria nuevas perspectivas sobre la cuestion. Podrian entonces examinarse las fiestas en relation con la teoria de don Ramon Menendez Pidal sobre la ‘tradicionalidad' como caracteristica fundamental de la actividad creadora del pueblo espanol. Por otra parte, en cuanto estos festejos expresan una vision intuitiva e ingenua de la historia de España, concretada en la estampa de moros y cristianos enfrentados, cabe analizarlos en funcion de las modernas interpretaciones del pasado espanol, verdadera cuestion palpitante del momento actual, que han suscitado los grandes libros recientemente publicados por don Americo Castro, en los que se subraya en forma tan nueva e intensa la significación de la larga contienda entre cristiandad e islam sobre el suelo de la Peninsula. Estos y otros posibles enfoques requieren una labor expositiva previa, que coordine y sintetice datos desperdigados en numerosas monografias, asi como nuevos esfuerzos por caracterizar aspectos especificos de la representation. En este sentido el presente articulo aspira a aportar una contribution util aunque limitada. Su proposito es el de ofrecer una vision panoramica del estado actual de la fiesta en España y algunas consideraciones respecto a su pasado y a los puntos de contacto que en esta area se han producido entre corrientes literarias y folcloricas.

Professor Hurley's statement in regard to the use of assonance for consonance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries holds true for the fifteenth century court lyric verse:1 “There are in the 16th and 17th centuries, if the printed texts are to be believed, innumerable examples of assonance in rime-strophes. Thus CERVANTES, Comedias y Entremeses, ed. Schevill y Bonilla, i, 72; ‘Yo haré con su señoría/que se oponga a tu partita’.”2 The same writer also states that he regards assonance in such cases “as failure to achieve perfect rime.” R. Foulché-Delbosc's Cancionero castellano del siglo XV offers some twelve score examples of assonance used to replace consonance. That the poets were at least sometimes conscious of the imperfection is shown in Gomez Manrrique's statement (ii, 36a): “Del qual vn poco furtado,/avnque no syn grande afan,/a vos, señor de Almaçan,/pregunto, mal consonando…”“”“

Wordsworthians have long been puzzled and perhaps a little distressed by the poet's apparent shift in political opinion. It is curious that in all the discussion that has resulted no one has said much about Wordsworth's rather vigorous life as a man of business. The story begins with the popular picture of Wordsworth “virtuous, simple, and unaffectedly restricting every want and wish to the bounds of a very narrow income”, with his “little cottage, and the sister and wife dressing the mutton leg in the same room where it was to be eat.” There is probably some truth behind this picture, though it belongs to an earlier period than that of Scott's letter. For some years after his father's death (1784) Wordsworth very likely had more expectations than cash. But since his uncles and guardians were prepared to contribute almost 460 to his college expenses, Wordsworth's only real hardship must have been in not having his own money at hand. Moreover Wordsworth's father, who, in succession to his father and to his cousin, John Robinson, the favorite of George II, had been attorney and land-agent to the Earl of Lonsdale, left only part of his estate tied up in the famous debt owed by the Earl. It is difficult to determine the size of the remainder. Words worth's elder brother, had about 100 a year; and there seems to have been other real and personal property. Gordon Wordsworth, working from the account of his greatgrandfather, lists the following property as belonging at some time to John Wordsworth: the Sockbridge estate; “the various ‘Cattle Gates’ upon the moor”; Ingmire Close, which he had bought from his father-in-law, and which gave him a vote in Cumberland; two fields near Cockermouth, which had cost 200; and “other small properties in various parts of Cumberland.” And the other children must have had some share in an estate at Newbiggin, in Westmorland.

I used to worry a lot about what good we do in the humanities. Sometimes I'd get so sore from the everyday ethical barbs that interrupt a literature teacher's chain of thought that my thinking would get derailed from aesthetic questions to questions of their importance. The moments that haunted me most were when graduate students would wonder why—when the world was so urgently in need of practical contributions—they should write a dissertation about this or that literary genre or motif or formal property. They didn't doubt that preparing to teach in the arts is an enormous pleasure and also a privilege. But what redeems the profession from irresponsibility? What direct or indirect outcomes could justify the resources of time and money, the intellectual passions that can replace sleep at night, the dedication to writing books that (by my hardly admirable example) can trump even a mother's attention to her children? Can we, in good faith, counsel students to pursue humanistic careers when the same barbs that bother us may prick their conscience if they manage to land a job?

William Drummond of Hawthornden is as much a translator as an original poet. This Mr. Kastner has shown in detail in the copious notes to his edition of the poet and in several special articles. He translated and adapted from a large number of Italian and French poets, as well as some Spanish and some neo-Latin writers. Yet his work, read as a whole, has a very individual note and charm of personality that unify it and give it distinction. This was not due to similarity in his sources. The poets whom he translated were widely varied in tempers and styles—so much so that some of them have made their idiosyncrasies felt in the work of other English poets and have started particular streams of influence. It is of interest to draw together all the translations and adaptations from each of the French and Italian poets, Drummond's principal sources, and make a detailed comparison of style, to see what particular contribution each made to Drummond's style, and how far we find in him Petrarchism, Marinism, and so forth. By this series of contrasts we shall be able first to define these influences more exactly. And this definition is of interest, incidentally, not only for Drummond, but for other poets such as Donne and Crashaw. Second, we shall see the particular style of Drummond emerging from among the various source poets and taking on its integral character.

Although often dismissed as a Victorian curiosity, the faith of Tennyson's In Memoriam anticipates the radically modern religious vision of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Both In Memoriam and Teilhard's The Phenomenon of Man stress the need for modern man to see the human phenomenon in the light of recent scientific knowledge. Both works portray the anxiety and doubt that such a vision entails; both works portray the shape that faith must take if man is to survive. Tennyson and Teilhard see modern doubt as stemming from the space-time malady: overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe, modern man fears his existence is both frail and futile. To counter this malady, both men develop a cosmic faith stressing love as the spiritual energy that drives evolution onward; the need for greater knowledge, communication, and spiritual growth; and an awareness of human survival after death. Translating this faith into Christian terms, both men see man's salvation in his efforts to evolve toward a cosmic Christ-that-is-to-be. Although Tennyson speaks as poet in mostly personal terms and Teilhard speaks as scientist-sage in more general terms, both men use art to lead the reader to Real Assent.

For his work on the Bible in English and for his translations from Erasmus, Richard Taverner has had a modest importance in early Tudor literature. In other respects, he has been an easy man to disregard. He misses the pioneer's distinction in both his fields; he obscures the interest of his own utterances by offering them in the guise of translation; even what we know of his life suggests no highly individual achievement. In summary, his biography traces a path well worn by his generation of humanists—scholars trained at Renaissance Oxford and Cambridge, men matured in the dramatic, dangerous school of experience that was England between the fall of Wolsey and the death of Henry VIII. The times welcomed such a useful scholarship as Taverner devoted to education, politics, and religion. We, in turn, may increase our understanding of those times by recognizing, not simply the work he did, but also his methods and some of his results. For such a study, his little book preserved in exemplars of six editions, Proverbes or Adagies … gathered out of the Chiliades of Erasmus, has the double interest of revealing more of Taverner's thought than we should expect to find in it and of helping to color the fame of Erasmus in England.

Italo Calvino's “Sotto il sole giaguaro” (“Under the Jaguar Sun”), a story about the sense of taste, is the culmination of his lifelong research on desire; it presents and analyzes all the primary functions of food, from the satisfaction of a biological need to the possibility of transgression, from the narrative sign to the cognitive tool used to outline the problematic relation among self, others, and the world (or among subject, nature, and history). “Sotto il sole giaguaro” deals with the dialectics of logos, sitos, and eros in an extremely original manner, by foregrounding primary images (like the female protagonist's mouth and the jaguar sun of the title) and by combining the narration of a tourist's journey with a love story and an anthropological inquiry into Aztec cannibalism. In this beautiful and challenging text, gastronomy fuses within itself anthropology and eroticism, while the underlying discourse probes the nature of literature. (G-PB)

In an article published elsewhere I have explained my method of verse-sentence analysis and have presented in tabular form its application to a considerable number of English poems, ranging in time from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Browning's My last Duchess. In that article I pointed out that by the use of this method it was possible to trace the evolution of Shakespeare's style in the interweaving of line and sentence. In his early plays there is a high degree of parallelism between the line and the grammatical units of the sentence; in the late plays there is a marked tendency toward divergence between line and sentence.

The account of Joseph in Genesis makes no mention of his precocity as a boy and deals but briefly with the beauty of his person. Indeed, it is not until he has become a man that he is described at all: Potiphar's wife cast her eyes upon him for “Joseph was a goodly person, and well favored.” But at a very early date commentators felt that this was altogether inadequate. A body of Hebrew and Mohammedan legend about Joseph's boyhood soon developed: he was credited with an almost preternatural beauty and wisdom, a beauty and wisdom befitting one who was the favorite of Yahweh.

Tennyson once remarked that he had been nearer thirty than twenty before he was anything of an artist, and his 1842 poems, which were his first mature publication, pre-eminently reflect an assiduous artistic novitiate. They have also been alleged to show how early he began that feeble self-adjustment to public taste which supposedly undermined his genius. Since they did appeal more directly than their predecessors of 1830 and 1832 to the prepossessions of the middle-class reader, and since they were produced during the years when he was supposedly kept silent by critical hostility, the disinterestedness of the 1842 volumes can plausibly be suspected. Yet important though it is to know how far this charge is justified, no adequate enquiry has as yet been made into the influence exerted on them by the reviews, for the statistics which must be thoroughly sifted before any reliable verdict can be reached have been over-simplified in the only two detailed enquiries which have as yet been published.3

“A Heroic Poem, truly such, is undoubtedly the greatest work which the soul of man is capable to perform.” While the solemnity of this pronouncement is certainly more characteristic of Rapin than of Dryden, the reverence for epic poetry is quite typical of the author of An Essay of Heroic Plays. As every reader of Dryden knows, the influence of Renaissance epic theory is all but omnipresent in his critical essays and prefaces. It is equally well known that the epic manner which Dryden often adopted in his verse owes much in a general way to the idea of the heroic poem. But fewer readers, I believe, realize the extent to which Dryden's epic style is directly indebted to his “master,” Virgil.

Celebrity relies on a gaze, a collective or public regard that, in gazing, confers value. Celebrity also demands a face to celebrate—faciality is a sine qua non of “celebrification.” The historian Peter Brown demonstrates in The Cult of the Saints that late antiquity introduced the overriding importance of saints' images, bodies, relics, or tomb sites in a Christian worship that emphasized the mediation of saints between heaven and earth and in place of angels; celebrity had its origins in the woodcut portraits and wayside shrines that proliferated as well as in the professionally wrought iconic images of the saints. Against David Hume's judgment of this phenomenon as “vulgar” and a remnant of pagan folk religion, he argues that the rise of the cult of the saints was as influenced by elites, including Augustine, as by supposedly lesser folk, and that the latter, especially women and the poor, were thus able to participate in a democratizing of culture profoundly indebted to graveside practices that promoted personal relationships, even friendships, with the dead saints and the circulation of their faces in imagery and their body parts as relics (17). Moreover, far from introducing vulgarity into Christian rituals, Brown shows how the cult was imbued with the culture of classical antiquity and with values associated with Athenian democracy and the philosophy of nous, a non-rational intelligence linking us to the divine (48). That we deploy the term celebrity icon for such figures as Oprah or Angelina Jolie only underscores the vestiges of public religious ritual that remain embedded in celebrity practices and the nimbus of the sacred that haloes even seemingly debased celebrity discourses.

Herbert read's prose fantasy, The Green Child, is one of those strange works defiant of classification. Though judged favorably by the few critics and scholars who give it serious study, it is so vaguely and variously interpreted that it would seem to lack both the form and the content which justify such praise. The problem of interpretation and analysis is complicated by the structure of the work. Its division into three arbitrarily related sections allows critics to pick their favorite section, claim for it central importance and base their analyses on that part. An understanding and appreciation of the work is further complicated because Read has been for thirty-five years a leading spokesman for romanticism, anarchism, and humanism—doctrines which seem to counter those expressed in The Green Child. The style of the book, for example, is commonly regarded as classical. The political philosophy reflects a conservative anti-utopian attitude, and humanist ideals are set aside by natural processes ultimately destructive of man's conscious efforts. An understanding of Read's philosophy in the historical situation in which it arose, a knowledge of his theory of fantasy, comprehension of his irony, and an awareness of the structure of the work help to explain the curious nature of The Green Child.

Although “The City of Dreadful Night” has long been recognized as James Thomson's masterpiece, a good many critics have insisted that it is an uneven piece of work, inconsistent as an allegory, confused as to intellectual intent. I believe that the solution to many of the problems in this minor classic can be found if the poem is read and studied in its original order of composition, an approach made possible through the Morgan manuscript, a final copy of the poem in which Thomson meticulously recorded the date on which each stanza had been written. It has long been known that Thomson wrote the poem in two stages, part in 1870 and part in 1873, but the exact order of composition has never been established, and even Salt's careful biography only records Thomson's statement that “about half of it, not the first half as it now stands, was written in 1870.” The Morgan manuscript, however, makes it possible to chart the step-by-step progress of the poem's composition (see Table on page 616) and, for the first time, to read the poem in the order in which Thomson wrote it. I believe that if it is read in chronological sequence, a good deal of the confusion surrounding the poem can be understood through the realization that “The City of Dreadful Night” as we know it today actually combines two separate poems. Moreover, as I shall attempt to show by treating them separately, the 1870 “City” and the 1873 “City” are unquestionably two very different poems in concept and intention.

“‘There's some herb that's good for everybody except for them J. that thinks they're sick when they ain't,’ announced Mrs. Todd, with a truly professional air of finality. ‘Come, William, let's have Sweet Home, an’ then mother'll sing Cupid an' the Bee for us.'” Accuracy in detail is a merit that no one would deny to the work of Sarah Orne Jewett and hence some time ago, on reading the words just quoted from The Country of the Pointed Firs, the present writer was puzzled at finding Cupid and the Bee linked with Sweet Home in a setting meant to call up nothing but the homely reality of Maine. The title suggested Theocritus (pseudo-Theocritus) or an Anacreon (pseudo-Anacreon) unlikely to be much on the mind of Mrs. Todd or her aged mother. Sweet Home is duly sung, but we hear no more of Cupid and the Bee. One only gathers that to Miss Jewett in 1896 it had the color of an old song suitable to the age of the singer. As I had long been noting down occurrences of the theme,

As Cupid midst the roses played,
Transporting in the damask shade,
A bee stepped unseen among
The silken leaves' his finger stung.

His beauteous cheeks with tears were drowned;
He stormed, he blew the burning wound,
Then nimbly running through the grove
Thus plaintive to the Queen of Love:

“I'm killed, Mamma; alas, I die!
A little serpent winged to fly
That's called the bee in yonder plain,
Has stung me, and I die with pain.”

When Venus smiling thus rejoining:
“My dear, if you such anguish find
From the resentment of a bee,
Think what they feel that's stung by thee.”