The best parts of Robert Y. Turner's article “Dramatic Conventions in All's Well That Ends Well (PMLA, lxxv, Dec. 1960) concern the denouement of that play. He acutely points out that it is Bertram, with his agonies and perplexities, not Diana, who ”holds the center of the stage“ during her long series of paradoxes; he shows how Shakespeare has added details to his source which prolong and intensify Bertram's distress; and he relates this distress to that of other similar heroes as well as to that of earlier comic butts. I should like, however, to question a number of other points in this article and thereby to challenge as unproved what I take to be its main thesis: that in All's Well Shakespeare ”produced a comedy more of an age than for all time“ because he chose there to follow a contemporary vogue for ”prodigal son comedies“ whose conventions ”have lost their savor.“

T. S. Eliot's most recent play, The Confidential Clerk, received short shrift in New York after triumphs in Edinburgh andLondon.lt would be too much perhaps to say that the play was “snuffed out by the reviews,” but it certainly came up against as unsympathetic a row of reviewers as any great dramatist has had to face. A leading journalistic critic wrote that The Confidential Clerk “represents a deliberate attempt to be ordinary. Unfortunately, Eliot has succeeded.” When he indicated in a lecture at Harvard University several years ago that, like Shakespeare, he hoped gradually to reduce dramatic verse to the level of colloquial speech before attempting elaborate embroidery of it, Eliot could not have expected his words to fly back in his face in precisely this way. Mrs. Guzzard's ringing lines seem especially apropos here: “Wishes, when realized, sometimes turn / Against those who have made them.” At any rate the apparently simple language (some have called it “unpoetic”) and farcical plot devices of the new play seem to have turned aside extensive serious critical consideration. For a play that comes to grips so forcibly with such compelling issues as the spiritual loneliness and inarticulateness of modern men and women, freedom of the will and predestination, cultural integration, and the place of the arts in life, it has been curiously underrated. The Confidential Clerk, while closely linked with Eliot's previous plays, is in so many ways a new departure as to reward close study. As a matter of fact, much of its poignancy and plangency eludes one when the play is viewed for the first time merely as a stage piece. Probably no other play of Eliot's calls for such total immersion.

In a familiar passage from a letter to W. S. Landor, Wordsworth exposed, as I see it, the central purpose of his art: “Even in poetry it it the imaginative only ... that which is conversant (with), or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me.” “Things,” he said, had to be lost in each other and limita to vanish; otherwise he was indifferent. The argument of this essay is intended to suggest an approach to Wordsworth at the poetic level of infinity. This is the realm of pure universals, the insight of poetry which reveals a state of being independent of sensuous limitations. In the sense of Hegel it is the level of reality, possessing a wholly independent being, as opposed to that of appearance, depending wholly in its existence upon the senses. The exact nature of reality remains, of course, a question for pure philosophy; and it is probable that the discipline of philosophy rather than that of literary criticism must judge finally the dialectic of poetry concerned with infinity. Yet the highest attainment of the fine arts is clearly an act of turning upon the infinite, an invocation in the observer or the listener of a sense of endlessness. Medium, form, and technique are the approaches to the ultimate experience inherent in a particular work. As artistic acts from the world of appearance, they may be analyzed and defined by the particular critical disciplines concerned with them. At the end of these functions lies the problem of philosophy. What is the nature of the wholly independent being which all great art attains? Wordsworth implies in his statement to Landor that awareness of the infinite is the final objective of poetry. My purpose is to investigate the method of Wordsworth's thought at the threshold of this objective rather than to define philosophically what the sense of infinity, in itself, contains. It seems clear that nothing more need be said upon the imaginative process as this is explored in Wordsworth's Prefaces or interpreted by his critics.

The purpose of this paper is to add another chapter to the constantly growing account of Melville as a writer who, in calculating his effects, often had recourse to travel diaries and guidebooks to furnish him with factual information and with dramatic episodes, which appear as the authentic experiences of his characters. In this instance the book is Redburn, the novel which he regarded as one of the least of his works, but which many besides John Masefield have admired as a spirited and sometimes harrowing narrative of a boy's running away to sea.

The first of the “Two other very commendable letters” in the correspondence between Spenser and Harvey has been reprinted in every complete edition of the poet's works since it was first printed by Hughes in 1715 and has been frequently cited by scholars during the past century, either because of the general light which it throws on this oddly assorted pair, or because of its famous reference to the the “surceasing and silence of balde Rymers,” or because of the evidence which it supplies of a close relationship at this time between Spenser and the Earl of Leicester. Nevertheless, there seems to be no general agreement among editors and scholars as to the precise date at which this letter was written; and as a result, every one who has quoted it has put forward his own assumption as its proper interpretation. It is the object of this paper to discuss these assumptions, and to determine, if possible, the true explanation of the date at which this letter was composed.

Cuban American literature and Oscar Hijuelos's texts in particular have generally been approached through a consideration of their material, multicultural aspects. This essay analyzes Hijuelos's The Fourteen Sisters of Emilio Montez O'Brien, on which there is little critical work, by combining the novel's descriptions of photography and immigrant experiences with theories of photography. My reading considers the placing of ghosts and memory in the narrative and problematizes the undialectical presence of death in it. Referring to Hijuelos's text as an “imagetext” (photographs exist in it only through descriptions, never appearing visually), I read it through Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida and his development of the wounding punctum of a photograph, which produces a melancholy lingering trace of the past in the present moment. In this reading, the immigration experience in Hijuelos's novel exceeds narrativization and is unrepresentable by it.

Shelley's Prometheus Unbound in many ways might be considered the most significant and characteristic of his works. Yet in this drama the poet himself has pointed out his indebtedness to the Prometheus Bound of Æschylus. Able scholars, in turn, have examined the relationship between the English and the Greek plays. Over half a century ago Vera D. Scudder published her study, and in 1908 Richard Ackermann brought out his critical commentary. Among others, W. J. Alexander and A. M. D. Hughes, in editing their selections from the poems of Shelley, noted the parallels between his work and that of Æschylus. In more recent times, Carl Grabo has gone beyond the study of Greek-English parallels, and Newman Ivey White in the notable twenty-second chapter of his Shelley has enriched our understanding of Prometheus Unbound. Still one may hope by concentrating on the problem to give fuller meaning to the action of the mind of Æschylus upon that of Shelley as together they face tyranny and pain.

The explanation of Middle English run presents many difficulties. These could easily be solved if one succeeded in proving, or at least in making probable, the existence of an Old English runnan.

La Logique de Port-Royal is regarded by historians of this science as a treatise that does not fit into any of their categories; indeed, the art of Logic as an independent exercise of the mind seemed unacceptable to its authors. Writing at the end of the Aristotelian era and under the influence of Cartesian theories, but having their own convictions about man's nature and obligations, Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole saw logical reasoning as justifiable only if it trains the mind to distinguish between Good and Bad. They believed in the existence of an immutable, eternal truth; man's reason is intended to make this Truth a perceivable reality. Logic, most importantly, therefore, trains our word-using and concept-making faculty to acknowledge that the needs of man's soul belong to a much higher order of values than the science of “things”: it should thus give reason the strength to be “true” to its own nature. (In French)

An unpublished diary which Ruskin kept during the summer of 1842 when he was conceiving the plan of Modern Pointers furnishes new information on the development of his mind at that time. Writing of this year in Praeterita, Raskin was obliged to rely on a memory weakened by age and disease. “To my sorrow, and supreme surprise,” he noted in his autobiography which he had begun in 1885, “I find no diary whatever of the feelings or discoveries of this year.” He apparently had forgotten that in 1872 he had given such a diary as a Christmas present to his American friend, Charles Eliot Norton. This important manuscript, which remained in the Norton family until 1936 and was then donated to the Yale University Library as a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Arnold Whitredge, seems to have been unknown to Ruskin's editors and succeeding students of his ideas. As reliable and recent a work as Derrick Leon's biography of Ruskin makes no mention of it and follows instead the account of the events of 1842 offered in Praeterita. A comparison of the manuscript with Praeterita shows that Ruskin's memory had dramatized this year of his youth in a way that misrepresented the state of mind in which Modern Painters was begun.

It was an unexpectedly chilly day in May 2004 when the news flashed across various electronic mailing lists that Gloria Anzaldúa had died from complications related to diabetes. I was in the midst of teaching a course on contemporary issues in feminism to a formidable group of undergraduate women and men, in which we were reading “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” and “La Conciencia de la Mestiza: Towards a New Consciousness.” These are my favorite essays from Anzaldúa's Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza, a text published in 1987 and still crucial to any understanding of identity and politics in feminism today. The announcement, made by Anzaldúa's coeditor and compañera, Cherrie Moraga, requested that we construct homemade shrines to honor Anzaldúa's presence and aid her passing. My classroom was in Dartmouth Hall, a venerable eighteenth-century building only a stone's throw from Baker Library, whose tower sports a weathervane with the image of Dartmouth's founder, Reverend Eleazar Wheelock, teaching a crosslegged, befeathered, and pipe-smoking Indian, Samson Occom, his most famous student, beneath the symbolic lone pine. Into the graywalled room, I brought objects that seemed out of place there and incendiary: candles, flowers, incense, and books—an armful of wellthumbed volumes containing the nearly talismanic words, her own and those of others, that Anzaldúa struggled to bring into print.

Although more than thirty years have passed since the publication of Nitze's fundamental study of Chrétien's Erec, Arthurian scholarship has still to make full use of the implications he has given toward a better understanding both of details and of the unifying principle of this first French Arthurian romance. Basing itself, then, upon Nitze's contribution, and drawing upon other more recent studies, the present article proposes as its end the presentation of the many episodes of this romance as concordant elements in a great psychological novel.

At the beginning of the Vita Nuova Dante tells us that he proposes to copy into the little book words which he finds written in the book of his memory under the rubric Incipit Vita Nova; thus he brought together lyrics that he had already written, and connected them by a narrative and analysis in prose. The Vita Nuova belongs, then, to the class of writings made up of alternating prose and verse. As in the case of the Convivio, this method of composition was perfectly natural under the circumstances; Dante doubtless intended to do for his own early poems what had been done for certain Troubadours by the compilers of some of the Provençal anthologies, in which a prose biography is interspersed with specimens of the poet's verse. This has been pointed out by Pio Rajna, who further suggests that the analytical divisioni may have been modeled on certain works of St. Thomas. The prose explanations in the Provençal anthologies are called razos, and Dante uses the word ragione with the same meaning. In at least one respect, however, the Vita Nuova differs in form from the other works of this type; for the poems do not simply follow one another chronologically or according to the exigencies of the narrative, but are arranged on a symmetrical plan. The credit for having made this plain belongs to Professor C. E. Norton, who pointed it out in 1859.

While the Germans have long recognized a Litteraturwissenschaft, we do not often speak in English of a ‘science of literature.’ Do we then lack something which the Germans have, or do they lack something which they think they have? Do we feel that the name is a misnomer? Or is it that we are satisfied to possess the thing without caring how it is called? If this last is so, it were as well perhaps to be a little less indifferent, since names gradually affect modes of thinking. A rose by any other name will smell as sweet, but a rose by the name of rose tempts people to smell of it, especially blind people. It is a fact of some import for the users of German, that they have the convenient word Wissenschaft, which they can apply freely to the serious and systematic study of any subject under the sun. On the other hand, we are not unaffected, and I think the effect is bad, by the drift of English usage toward a restricted application of the word ‘science.’ The tendency leads people to associate with that word not so much the grand ideals of carefulness and love of truth, as rather the particular methods employed, and the kind of accuracy aimed at, in the study of physics and biology. Many are also led to feel that there are spheres of thought in which science has nothing to say; and so, instead of enlarging their conception of science, they become suspicious of it. The result is that we are far from realizing that universal allegiance to the scientific spirit, which in our day we ought to have. Instead, there is a division of sentiment, many persons, intelligent persons too, feeling that for certain purposes science is a blind guide. As if there could be in the long run any better basis of life than the truth ! And as if there could be any more hopeful way of getting at the truth than to keep trying, with all our might, in the light of all the evidence!

Students of Goldsmith have long recognized that in the framing of Tony Lumpkin, hilarious problem-child of Mrs. Hardcastle in She Stoops to Conquer, he was in some sort indebted to older English comedy. A resemblance to Humphry Gubbin in Steele's The Tender Husband, acted 1705, seems to have been first noticed by John Forster. Following Forster, George A. Aitken, in his Life of Steele (1889) affirmed that Humphry “certainly furnished Goldsmith with suggestions toward the creation of Tony Lumpkin” and cited the point that both are averse to marrying their cousins. He noticed the resemblance again in his edition of Steele's plays for the Mermaid Series, and it has since been a commonplace in histories of the drama.

The crucial and controlling metaphor of D. H. Lawrence's novel Women in Love is a metaphor of destruction, that two-faced image of disintegration by heat and annihilation by cold. Much of the novel's interest and more than half its meaning lies in Rupert Birkin's eccentric, hardly normal struggle to become modern history's new norm, and it is Birkin who conceives and develops this Africo-Nordic symbol as a way of giving habitation and name to his mystical perceptions. These Herculean labors are, of course, the labors of Lawrence also, only his arena is the entire novel; through its pages he scatters sparks of fire and ice, shimmering designs in black and white, mud and snow, showers of color, because the entire work is his attempt to perceive poetically what neither he nor we could perceive otherwise. Birkin's attempt in “Moony” (Chap, xix) to destroy the reflection of the ambivalent moon's reflected light is only one of the novel's numerous set poems or “constitutive symbols,” and the following great meditation on death by heat and by cold is simply the locus classicus of simultaneous efforts by both the character and his creator to express in metaphor the novel's deepest insights. But the literally thousands of allusions metaphoric and literal to matters Arctic and African which run through the whole work, cutting across chapters and groups of chapters, binding, finally, beginning to end, make of Lawrence's Women in Love itself a constitutive symbol. As are Moby Dick and A Passage to India, Der Steppenwolf and Julie de Carneilhan, so is Women in Love constructed like a poem; and poems, especially long ones, are not easily made. The making of this one preoccupied, even obsessed, Lawrence for a number of years. He long considered it, rightly, his masterpiece, and we know that under his shaping hands it took various shapes. When it was still more than a year from completion, its 1913–14 augmentation had already swelled larger than its parent body and been published as The Rainbow (1915).

Renaissance English casuistry, the branch of moral philosophy that applies general principles to particular cases, supplies a significant context for Milton’s Samson Agonistes. In subject matter, structure, and language, Milton’s tragedy resembles the prose cases of conscience in which casuists showed how to overcome doubt and despair and gain peaceful consciences by resolving difficult moral problems. Such casuistical concepts as the supremacy of the individual conscience, the relevance of circumstances to moral law, and the role of reason in resolving doubt illuminate the conflicting moral judgments that form the dramatic texture of Samson Agonistes. Samson learns how to judge his own actions in particular circumstances, and by doing so, learns to repent of his past sin, overcome his sense of powerlessness, and act with a clear conscience. The drama goes beyond conventional casuistry in its uncompromising assertion of the supremacy of the individual conscience and its unflinching recognition of the tragic limits of human power.