Bernard Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is generally presented by his critics as something to be ashamed of, often as an expression of his ignorance or perversity. Even to critics who find Shaw generally admirable, his attack upon Shakespeare is solecistic and blindspotted, and is either wholly condemned or halfheartedly defended. Hesketh Pearson dismisses the whole matter, contending that Shaw wrongly assumes that Shakespeare's characters speak for Shakespeare. Thus, the pessimism that Shaw finds pervasive in Shakespeare is explained by Pearson as a picture of reality by an objective artist. Archibald Henderson believes that Shaw's Shakespeare criticism is either anachronistic thinking or an act of vengeance on the British critics who viciously attacked Ibsen. James Gibbons Huneker apologizes for Shaw's criticisms of Shakespeare, justifying them on the ground that Shakespeare was not hurt by them. None of these critics meets Shaw's criticisms head-on, and their reactions have little to recommend them above Henry Arthur Jones's angry denunciation of Shaw as a desecrator of graves and a traitor to England.

When Manuel Cañete, in the introduction to the academic edition of Lucas Fernández, first spoke of a certain Alonso de Salaya “tan diestro en bosquejar delicadamente amorosos coloquios,” there was some reason to wonder whether he could have actually read these amorosos coloquios instead of merely quoting the first two lines of a “Farsa en coplas” from the notes which Gallardo, examining the catalogues of Ferdinand Columbus, had taken in the Biblioteca Colombina. When, three years later, in the preface to his edition of Carvajal's Tragedia Josephina, Cañete quoted the first twenty-five lines of the same “linda farsa” by Alonso de Salaya, it became even more tantalizing.

Milton's spelling has evoked much comment and speculation since Jonathan Richardson noted certain inconsistencies in the early editions of Paradise Lost. Yet no complete study has previously been reported. Because of the problems of transmisson of text to or through scribes and because of the potential alterations of compositors, printed works offer inconclusive and only corroborative evidence of how Milton spelled. The place to start is with spellings in Milton's own hand. Accordingly I have prepared a complete concordance of all English words or abbreviations found in holograph materials. Included, therefore, are all words which were deleted from a final text and all spellings which were altered in any way. From my resulting full examination of the orthography I present here, because of the limitations of space, only the evidence concerning Milton's use or omission of idle final “e.” All manuscript words to which an idle final “e” may have been attached and all words showing inconsistencies in the use of idle final “e” are reported. These words are divided into the following categories: 1) uncompounded and uninflected words (that is, root words), 2) words or groups of words which ordinarily would have been considered under category one but which evidence spelling that classifies them as exceptional, 3) suffixed and compound words, and 4) inflected words (including those in category two).

During the year 1906 the four hundredth anniversary of the finding of the marble group of Laocoön and his sons in Rome—“opus omnibus et picturae et statuariae artis praeferendum”—has been duly celebrated. The most conspicuous act in this celebration was undoubtedly Dr. Ludwig Pollak's announcement at a meeting of the German Archeological Institute that he had discovered an ancient copy of the missing right arm of Laocoön, bent backward so that the hand must have been near the head, as has long been supposed. Hardly less noteworthy, however, was the effect of recent additional discoveries of inscriptions in Rhodes that seem to fix the date of the sculptors in the middle of the first century b. c., and Richard Foerster's comprehensive article in the Jahrbuch des archäologischen Instituts—the latest and most authoritative exposition of facts and expression of opinions about the statue.

To the various kinds of irony that critics have noticed in Milton's Samson Agonistes may be added another, the irony of alternatives. This irony is based on a proposition with alternative possibilities posited by one of the characters: either this will happen or that; but both choices eventuate, although they appear to be mutually exclusive. Milton calls this kind of proposition axioma disjunclum contingens in his Art of Logic. Samson s prophecy that he will either die or do some great deed, the doubts of his friends whether he has been slain by or is slaying the Philistines, their expectation of either good or bad news are all ironically resolved in the catastrophe, which combines alternatives and reveals the simplifying power of providence. Similarly, although the Chorus states that there are two kinds of heroism, active and passive, either of which may be Samson s, both eventuate. Samson s heroism includes both courageous action and Christian patience as he slays and is slain. In his conclusion, Milton fuses genuine tragedy with religious drama, because Samson as an active hero dies tragically, and as a martyr wins a spiritual victory and the crown of patience.

Sometime around 1608, during his years of idleness at Mitcham, John Donne was overwhelmed with a sense of his own vanity in being cut off from “the body of the world.” Since he had been reduced to this state by excessive love of a woman (in his marriage to Ann More) and of knowledge (in his “hydroptic, immoderate desire of human learning”), Donne quite naturally turned to Solomon and the Book of Ecclesiastes for an understanding of his own predicament. The influence endured. The effects of Ecclesiastes are most evident in Donne's Anniversaries but can also be traced through virtually the entire range of his work.

The ensuing remarks on Homi Bhabha's collection of essays The Location of Culture are framed by the following questions: Under what discursive conditions does a text arrive? How do conditions beyond the text determine its reception and circulation? And why is Bhabha routinely associated more with ambivalence, interstice, and liminality than with the ways in which they illuminate problems of race, the archive, history, or the affective bodily subject of history? To focus these ruminations, I will discuss the intervention, impact, and afterlife of The Location of Culture through the concept of hybridity, arguably one of the greatest hits of postcolonial studies and one closely associated with the work of Bhabha. Informed by Mikhail Bakhtin's propositions about hybridity in linguistic utterance; by Sigmund Freud's theories of ambivalence; by Walter Benjamin's discussions of history, event, and language; by Jacques Lacan's discourses on ego, language, and subjectivity; by Michel Foucault's investigations of history, knowledge, and power; and by Jacques Derrida's theories of différance, Bhabha's formulations have gained currency well beyond the humanities. Appropriations of hybridity in globalization discourse, however, often do not honor Bhabha's poststructural politics or its rooting in a complex history of ideas even as the critics of hybridity fail to recognize its inception in archival moments and particular enunciative contexts. Bhabha's work not only poses questions to history in a mode characteristic of deconstruction, it also commences in history in a clearly postcolonial modality. I want to review missed appointments with pressing questions of history and race in the global reception of Bhabha's concept of hybridity, an approach that constitutes an implicit plea for the recognition and reanimation of these questions in contemporary uses of the term hybridity in the discourse of globalization.

Mikhail Leonovich Gasparov (1935-2005) was one of the greatest and most prolific russian literary scholars of the twentieth century.

Though associated with the Moscow-Tartu school of semiotics, Gasparov's writings were so diverse and multifaceted—and his scholarly personality so distinct—as to elude categorization.

Gasparov's accomplishments are all the more remarkable when measured against the rigid Marxist-Leninist paradigms that ruled humanities education and scholarship in the Soviet Union. A philologist with a special interest in verse form, he managed to sidestep the procrustean bed of Soviet ideology, building instead on the barely tolerated work of the Russian formalists and structuralists. He embraced and developed their goal of turning literary study into an exact science by applying statistical analysis and probability theory to poetics. Gasparov's scholarship was based on unprecedented amounts of data, which he painstakingly compiled in the precomputer era. However, he was never satisfied with the data as such; he used them to reach profound and unexpected conclusions.

Two questions are involved in a discussion of “Jewish gaberdine”: First, what was a gaberdine? Second, what was the distinction in dress between Jew and Christian? Modern Shakesperean editors, confronted by the necessity of explaining gaberdine, quote the statements of the New English Dictionary, of previous editors, or of authors of costume books. The editors of the N.E.D. having found no reference to the word earlier than 1520, and none which gave an idea of the garment, fell back on the definitions in seventeenth-century dictionaries, which tell only half the story. Authors of costume books made compilations of quotations given in other costume books, and thus grew a definition which gained weight through sheer repetition. Most of these compilers cite the statements of Planché, but none of them quotes the sentence with which he concludes his discussion after examining the definitions of lexicographers and making deductions from literary references: “But, alas, we are no nearer to identification!” Any attempt at identification requires examination of the etymology of the word; definition and pictorial representation of the garments to which cognate terms in other languages were applied; contemporary evidence concerning materials of which gaberdines were made, and the rank of persons for whom they were made.

Modern critical theory is commonly thought of as a collection of diverse methods, schools, systems, and approaches. There is, however, a significant pattern in the diversity. This pattern is generated by the conflict between the widespread effort of twentieth-century theorists to make criticism scientific and the internal resistance to that effort presented by the hermeneutic impulse. The scientific tradition is characterized and unified by a set of common theoretical principles and by a common sequence of transformations that each school within it undergoes. The result of these transformations is that every proposed scientific model for criticism changes into an interpretive method and the project of scientific criticism is subverted.

In recent years critics have contested the traditional understanding of Celestina's “enchantment” of Melibea as diabolically assisted. Yet rhetorical, feminist, and poststructuralist readings have not explained Celestina's discursive practice in the wider context of other Spanish sorceresses of language. I argue that Celestina's protracted appeal to Melibea and allusion to a prayer or charm of Saint Apollonia correspond to the language and methods of other Spanish and New World sorceresses investigated by ecclesiastical courts and the Inquisition. I draw from unedited conquest-era documents to compare Celestina's “linguistic sorcery” with that of women who transformed Catholic prayers and narratives of saints' tortures into erotically charged love philters for subduing men. Like the women examined by inquisitors and inspectors (visitadores), Celestina, far from requiring diabolical intervention in her discursive practice, draws on the culture's language of submission as she explores the continuity between suffering and ecstasy.

“Christis Kirk, on the Grene” and “Peblis to the Play” are no doubt the most popular and most frequently published works in Middle Scots literature; yet almost nothing has been written about them. This study aims to throw some light on them by viewing them as examples of the “peasant-brawl,” a popular literary tradition during the Ute Middle Ages. First it will define the peasant-brawl as a literary genre and then trace its development, using for this purpose mostly South German parallels, since these seem to be the most plentiful. One can justify the use of such geographically remote parallels because of certain cultural similarities between the Lowland Scots and the South Germans of that period, both of whom were largely derived from Teutonic tribes that had occupied foreign territory and destroyed, expelled, or assimilated the native element. Both peoples had absorbed Roman Christianity and later French civilization, which they gradually blended with their own cultural heritage. In view of these similarities in origin and development, one might expect their popular literatures to have much in common, just as their vernaculars did.

Several years ago Professor Gray of Bryn Mawr discovered, on the Exchequer Rolls for 1455–56, record of payments to four Greek visitors to England. Having noticed that discussions of English humanism were inclined to run thin for the third quarter of the century, he presented his findings concerning these Greeks as a contribution toward a new and more detailed telling of the story. He established that one of the beneficiaries, Emanuel of Constantinople, was the scribe of the famous Leicester Codex of the New Testament, and discussed the learned character of the King's Council in these years. Nevertheless, he concluded on so modest a note that one was not yet confident of the continuity of English humanism after the death of Humphrey in 1447. Previous writers give us a full and glowing account of the stir of men's minds under the influence of Humphrey, and a hasty sketch of travellers to and from Italy after Humphrey's death, not swinging into another full and vivid narrative until they reach the later years of Henry VII.

The history of criticism is largely the history of the changing questions we ask about works of art. The pre-eminence in our time of Yeats, Eliot, and Joyce, and the connection of these writers with an artistic method and a mode of thought that Eliot, in reviewing Joyce's Ulysses, has himself called mythical—all this leads me to ask about Browning's use of myth. The question seems particularly relevant since Yeats and Browning had in common an intense admiration for Shelley. Now Yeats, we know, admired not Shelley the Godwinian radical, but Shelley the Platonist and mythmaker—the Shelley who, in the manner of Blake, used archetypal symbols. The question is whether Browning—who did for a time admire Shelley the Godwinian radical—had affinities also with Shelley the mythmaker and (the two terms are inextricably connected) symbolist.

Karl Viëtors Studie in PMLA, LIX, 142–183 hat unter anderem überzeugend dargetan, daβ der Zusatz Ist fortzusetzen zu Goethes Gedicht auf Schillers Schädel weder eine Wiederaufnahme des Wilhelm Meister im Sinn hat, noch besagen will, daβ das Gedicht als solches fortgesetzt, gewiβermaβen verlängert hätte werden sollen. Goethe habe vielmehr an ein zweites oder eine Reihe weiterer Gedichte gedacht, die sich mit Problemen der Naturphilosophie befaβt hätten, wie sie im Gedicht angedeutet sind.

No editor of Spenser has failed to remark on certain poems and passages which reflect the influence of Chaucer. Attention has not hitherto been called, however, to what not only seems to be the most marked example of this influence, but to what is also an unusually clear case of literary borrowing. The purpose of this study is to show that in Daphnaïda, Spenser has followed Chaucer's Booh of the Duchess, in general form and outline, in manner of treatment, and in style and subject matter; that he has taken from the Duchess certain stanzas almost entire, has borrowed from it whole sections of eulogistic ideas and elegiac conceits, and has adopted Chaucer's phraseology itself, with a freedom at once both striking and convincing.

Mario Vargas Llosa's La tía Julia y el escribidor consists of the rigorous alternation of two textual registers that nonetheless appear to have little in common. A careful reading reveals that these seemingly unrelated tracts can be taken jointly as a fantasy depicting the triumph of oedipal desire and configuring a tale of the author's coming into being. This fantasy provides an insight into the ideology of writing that underlies Vargas Llosa's entire textual production. The phantasmatic empowerment of the writing subject thus identified is linked finally to Vargas Llosa's widely disseminated pronouncements regarding economic and political agency in Latin America and to his equally influential views on the nature of the literary act.

The existence of voluminous Brontë juvenilia has long been known. Anyone who has read Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë must remember the astonishing list of twenty-two ‘books’ therein enumerated as having been completed by August 3, 1830, near the end of Charlotte's fourteenth year. Mr. Clement K. Shorter continues the list through 1839, bringing the number of titles up to forty. To these may be added from sources not included in his list an almost equal number of sketches and fragments, making a total which in volume approximates the author's published works.