In 1873 in Trial-Forwords to Minor Poems: Further Additions and Corrections Furnivall called attention to seven records under the heading “Thomas Chaucer, esquire and vintner (?1 man, or 2)”:

[1] 1399-1400. Duchy of Lancaster. Ministers' Accounts. Div. 29, Bundle 144. Payment of £20 to Thomas Chaucer for his two Annuities, due at Easter and Michaelmas, with £10 arrears.

[2] 1406, March 12. City Hustings Roll, 133. Thomas Chausers: Deed of entail on him of City lands, near St. Paul's, by his ‘consanguineus,’ William Chaumbre, cleric.

[3] 1416, February 3. Hustings Roll, 145. Release to Thomas Chaucer of the interest of Thomas Hoo and Agnes his wife in these entaild lands.

[4] 1413, June 7. Conveyance by Geoffrey Dallyng, Citizen and Vintner, and Matilda his wife, to Thomas Chaucer, esquire, and 4 other men, of a reversion in some City houses and land (no doubt as Trustees for some City Corporation).

[5] 1426, December 7. Hustings Roll, 155. Conveyance by William Manby, cleric, to Thomas Chaucers and Richard Wyot, esquires, and 4 others, clerics, of land in the parish of St. Margaret's, Lothbury, in the City of London, seemingly as Trustees for some ecclesiastical Corporation.

[6] 1428, May 20. Hustings Roll, 156. Conveyance by William atte Watir, barber, and John Cole, junior, Citizen and Vintner, of a tenement in Fleet Street to Thomas Chawsere and 12 other men—all 13 being described in one part of the Deed as Citizens and Vintners, evidently as Trustees for the Vintners' Company.

[7] 1428, June 11. Release to Thomas Chawsere and his 12 co-trustees—Thomas Chawsere and another (Lewis John), being called esquires, the rest Citizens and Vintners— of the estate of Thomas Croften, as mortgagee in possession, in the said tenement in Fleet Street.

In his play Catiline His Conspiracy, Ben Jonson allegorizes Cicero's fight to save the Roman Republic as a battle against the kind of spectacular drama that, Jonson claimed, his audiences so enjoyed. This metatheatrical polemic hinges on the rhetorical technique of enargeia: the power of language to conjure an image. For the early moderns, enargeia resolved the “paradox of representation”—the contradiction between “making present” and “standing for”—by subordinating visual presence to verbal illusionism. Jonson, aligning neoclassical poetics with humanist historiography, dramatizes this hierarchy of representation. In Catiline, Cicero's rhetoric puts visions of violence before his audience's eyes only to prevent their realization onstage. The play thus seeks to exorcise the specter of political violence that haunted early modern England and the Roman Republic alike. Yet the rhetoric of Jonson's Cicero proves just as coercive as the spectacular violence that it has replaced. From Jonson's time to ours, separating rhetoric from violence has remained the challenge of republicanism.

I use the term lyric in the sense of form rather than of inspiration and should say stances except that the word was not applied to the lyric monologues until 1630. My subject is the origin of the monologues, written in other meters than the alexandrine couplet, that are found in the plays of Corneille and his contemporaries. The most familiar examples are those of the Cid and Polyeucte. They are usually of a contemplative nature, but do not necessarily contain a soul struggle.

Henry James tells us in his preface to the revised edition of his novels, with what interest and emotion he renewed acquaintance with his book, Roderick Hudson, after a quarter of a century had elapsed since its first appearance, in 1875. He takes up its failings and its defects, of which he is fully conscious and which he sees with very keen perspicacity. He writes:

The work in which his Defence of Poetry occurs, the De Genealogia Deorum, was first suggested to Boccaccio while he was yet a young man, by Hugo, king of Cyprus. Hugo sent to the young poet, asking him to write a work upon the mythology of antiquity, there being no such book then in existence. Boccaccio seems to have been by no means eager for so tremendous a task, but urged on by his royal patron he at last began it, and continued to work on it at intervals, though the king who had originally set him the undertaking did not live to see its completion. Completed, indeed, it never really was, and it was without the author's knowledge and against his wishes that the manuscript passed out of his hands before it had undergone revision. This accounts in part for the desultory character of the work, its diffuseness, its repetitions, its lack of arrangement and subordination; only in part, of course, for something of all this—that, namely, which corresponds with the essentially undiscriminating, non-selective mind of the author himself—could not have been eliminated by any amount of revision.

A writer is moulded out of faults, and the greatest become much more the better for having had the courage to be a little bad. All writers experiment in some degree with technique, but not many, after their apprenticeship has been served, appear willing to desert the manner in which one achievement has been attained for another, untried, yet potentially permitting fuller and more complex expressiveness. Even less frequently does an established writer change the manner of expression midway in the work, destroying the unity of effect by radical alterations in technique while the work is in progress. In a novel or poem, at least, the new manner is not likely to emerge unexpectedly; a work written for publication can be withheld until its parts are integrated. A dramatist, however—especially one working in close conjunction with a voracious theatre—may not have such an opportunity. Deadlines render revisions luxuries and make beneficial experimentation a catch-as-catch-can matter. Under such circumstances, discoveries that cannot be ignored are likely to be dangerous to both the art and the commerce of the theatre.

It was in 1905 that Mr. Evald Ljunggren, Librarian of Lund University, collated the newly discovered copy of the first quarto of Titus Andronicus with the quarto of 1600, and published his list of variant readings. Forty-seven of his readings involved more than mere variations in spelling and punctuation, and, of these, fifteen had been anticipated by the ingenuity of earlier scholars. One variant was a misprint, and thirty-one offered material for the consideration of the textual critic. But although these readings have been available to the scholarly world for a quarter of a century, editors have shown a marked hesitancy in introducing them into the traditional text of the play. The Neilson text, published the following year, incorporates only four, although twenty-two are listed in the notes. In the Tudor edition of 1913 Professor Elmer E. Stoll adopted as many as twenty-one, and in his notes included five others. But in the Yale Shakespeare issued in 1926, Mr. A. M. Witherspoon accepts none of the recovered variants, and in his notes leaves twenty-seven unmentioned. Basing his text almost entirely upon the First Folio, Mr. Witherspoon, I take it, assumes either that the editors of one or more of the editions following the first quarto had had access to the original Shakespearean manuscript or Shakespearean annotations, or else that Shakespeare himself did the revising.

The autobiographical novel Arabesques presents a complex double self-portrayal of an Israeli Arab as an artist. The narrator's gravitation toward the cultural center conflicts with his loyalty to his ethnic periphery. His search for identity as a minority writer intertwines with his search for identity as an individual. The tension of the unresolved identity split emerges in the work's fragmented structure and inconsistent story line. I argue that the centrality of Hebrew in Arabesques communicates the possibility of overcoming the split. Such reconciliation requires that instability and pluralism be accepted as forces that shape the lives of individuals and of nations. The use of Hebrew explodes both the cultural stagnation of the minority and the intransigence of the majority. The hybridization of language and lore destabilizes the definition of nationalism, bringing, for both the dominating and the dominated, the hope of cultural revitalization and of ideological rapprochement.

From the very first Dryden's critical essays have called forth widely divergent opinions. Written, as many of them were, in the heat of literary conflict, they served during their author's life, on the one hand, as a statement of faith to be expounded and defended, on the other, as a series of vulnerable points of attack. And even since they have held an assured place among English critical works—at first as authoritative judgments and later as historical documents of the very first importance—there has been no orthodox view as to their nature or value. Some historians have always been led by Dryden's popular, rambling style to deny them solid worth; others have found in them a vitality, a genuine insight, worth more than logic. According to Dean Swift they were “merely writ at first for filling, to raise the author's price a shilling;” Doctor Johnson, on the contrary, speaks of them as “the criticism of a poet; not a dull collection of theorems, nor a rude detection of faults, which perhaps the censor was not able to have committed; but a gay and vigorous dissertation, where delight is mingled with instruction.”

Efforts to make paradigms for the verbs of contemporary English run into difficult problems. It is not easy to decide what forms we will recognize, and if we do reach a decision we may still find it hard to group our forms satisfactorily. The kind of paradigms school grammars have contained are severely criticized by the new linguists, who hold Latin grammar and “meaning syntax” responsible. The new linguists have not as yet produced any paradigms with the finished symmetry that characterizes some of their tables of vowel sounds, but they have been giving thought to the matter. It is in order to note what has been done with verb forms in their two principal works of the present decade, the Trager and Smith Outline of English Structure and the Fries Structure of English. Perhaps still another effort at paradigm making can be excused too.

It has always been difficult to talk about new orleans without resorting to cliché. Long positioned as “America's most European city” or “the city that care forgot,” the locale looms large in the national—and the literary—imagination, triggering vivid fantasies of excess and decadence but also of old–world gentility and grandeur. New Orleans, especially in its juicy Gothic flavorings, has often performed as a stand–in for the South at large, while also exhibiting a certain unique cosmopolitanism or hybridity. We might even think of it as an early manifestation of a networked global hub, the routes of the slave trade mapping our first virtual navigation system. New Orleans and indeed the entire South perform powerful ideological work for the nation, functioning throughout the twentieth century as a convenient repository and origin story for much that ails the country: poverty, racism, rigid fundamentalism, decadence, and crime.

Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy, particularly his notions of transcendence and the “face of the other,” illuminates Eileen Chang's short story Lust, Caution (Se, jie) and, to a lesser extent, Ang Lee's film adaptation. Lust, Caution tells of an assassination plot against a collaborator with the Japanese during the second Sino–Japanese War in which the heroine's fatal decision to let go of her enemy results in the deaths of herself and her comrades. The story problematizes the status of the personal and ethical in times of war, occupation, and resistance through the heroine's path from the collective anonymity of national salvation to the theatrical solitude of underground activism and the intersubjective encounter with the face of the other. Also relevant is Hannah Arendt's theory of the (bourgeois) social, which in conjunction with its feminist revision prompts reflections on women's space of action in “dark times.”

This essay explores the layered, ideologically contradictory, and psychologically overdetermined ways national identities take form. The setting is the birth of the new American nation, the opening moments of George Washington's first administration. As European Americans from Benjamin Franklin to D. W. Griffith tell us, this is a white man's story about his “Black … and Tawney …” (br)others (Franklin, qtd. in Ferguson 169).