Many scholars have found in Hamlet's soliloquy beginning “To be, or not to be” the crux of the drama. Those who, like the Romantic critics, have interpreted the play as a struggle between Hamlet's determination to avenge his father and his inhibiting propensity to over-subtle philosophizing have felt that here, more clearly than anywhere else, he is exposing his malady: over-delicate sensibility and a love of intellectual hair-splitting which absorb energy that should have gone into decisive action. Such critics point for further confirmation to the soliloquy at the end of Act ii, in which Hamlet contrasts his own lethargy (in language far from lethargic) with the deep histrionic passion of the player who has just recited for him, and to the later soliloquy (iv. iv), in which he certainly does quite roundly chide himself for procrastination, while he confesses to have had “cause, and will, and strength, and means, / To do't.”

The revenge tragedy, a distinct species of the tragedy of blood, may be defined as a tragedy whose leading motive is revenge and whose main action deals with the progress of this revenge, leading to the death of the murderers and often the death of the avenger himself.

This type, as thus defined, probably first appeared on the Elizabethan stage in the Spanish Tragedy and the original Hamlet.2 Of these two plays the old Hamlet is not extant and can only be reconstructed conjecturally; the Spanish Tragedy represents, therefore, the origin of the type. Just what the ultimate sources of the type may have been, is not a question which enters our discussion. In the Spanish Tragedy the influence of Seneca is marked as in much early English tragedy,1 and there may be some indebtedness to contemporary French and Italian drama of the Senecan sort.2 We are not, however, to examine the Spanish Tragedy in connection with the influence of Seneca but in connection with a long succession of Elizabethan revenge plays; and for such an investigation it serves well enough as a starting point. Thomas Kyd was the author of this play and probably, as Dr. Sarrazin 3 has shown, of the old Hamlet. He may safely be taken as the introducer of the revenge tragedy upon the English stage, and his work may be considered one of the many dramatic innovations of the Elizabethan period.

The attack of the Puritans and of the city authorities upon the amusements of London under Charles I and the Interregnum was directed primarily against plays and playhouses. The sport of bear-baiting—one of the favorite entertainments of the Londoners—was allowed to continue almost without interruption throughout the Commonwealth.

Recent teaching duties have obliged me to reread the bulk of Unamuno's published writings. In this rereading I have been struck by three or four clusters of images that recur with what seems like obsessive frequency. The purpose of this essay is to exhibit these images and to attempt to discover what function they fulfill in Unamuno's writing.

William Hazlitt is read to-day as an essayist and a critic of literature. His art-criticism, except for a few papers preserved in his best known books, is familiar to few readers, and to them it will probably remain a matter of curious interest rather than of serious concern. Before Hazlitt's day even, the foundations had been laid, in the works of Wincklemann and Lessing, of a more precise study of aesthetic principles, which was destined to make obsolete most of the eighteenth-century treatises on art; with their works Hazlitt was, like most other English writers of his day, unacquainted. He was thus so far removed from the best thought of his time that his opinions on art have, for the student of aesthetic theory, little historical importance. The archaeological discoveries of the nineteenth century, the rise of impressionism in painting, the spread in all quarters of art and criticism of what may be somewhat roughly termed the naturalistic movement, and especially the development of a more strict and comprehensive study of aesthetic principles, have combined to make large sections of Hazlitt's theoretic discussions unacceptable to-day.

No systematic study of the parallels in the Orlando Innamorato and the Faerie Queene has hitherto been presented. Random references to analogues were noted by Upton,1 but most of them remain of little value as positive proof of influence.

The conclusion Northrop Frye contributed to the Literary History of Canada (1965) depicts in narrative form his evolving sense of how critics necessarily become involved in their critical creations and, further, of how the degree of this involvement provides a measure of their own imaginative development. Frye reads the Canadian literary tradition as a romance that implicates him in its structures. Because the conclusion glosses the fall-and-redemption myth that inspires much of his work, it illustrates his conception of literary history making as simultaneously an act of self-making. Viewed from the perspective of Frye's own transforming voyage through it, the conclusion appears in a new light as a romance about the creation of the idea of Canada, a metaphoric conception that is transhistorical, autonomous, and distinctly literary. (RL)

It is increasingly the tendency of Beowulf students to stress the importance of the historical passages of the poem. Since Grundtvig established the date of Hygelac's last raid, one is inclined to expect corroboration of other parts of the narrative. But the extent to which one may reasonably accept the poet's statements is a matter for dispute. When he says that Beowulf was present at the last raid of Hygelac, there is no reason for doubt. Not so when he says that the hero swam off with thirty suits of armor. When the swimming match with Breca is mentioned, one may reasonably suppose that the hero distinguished himself in a swimming contest in his youth. But when he swims for days and fights off all manner of uncouth beasts, there seems to be sufficient grounds for skepticism. Or when Beowulf, filled with years dies fighting the dragon, we may feel sure that he died a violent death, without accepting the existence of dragons in the sixth century. Thus in general, we may limit confidence to simple facts simply asserted.

Athelston is one of the most vigorous and independent of Middle English romances, yet it is one about which least is known. Various writers have commented on this “strange neglect,” but in the years since 1829 when Hartshorne first published the text in his Ancient Metrical Tales, it has only twice been made the subject of serious study. Zupitza's edition in Englische Studien XIII-XIV (1889–1890) was primarily textual in character and devoted less than two pages to questions of origin. In Englische Studien XXXVI (1906), Prof. Gerould discussed “Social and Historical Reminiscences in Athelston.” Frankly accepting Zupitza's brief conjectures as to the original personages and events of the story, he concerned himself with the study of sworn brotherhood, a custom prominently referred to in the romance, and with the interesting possibility that the characterization of king and bishop in the romance had been influenced by the vivid personalities of Henry II and Thomas Becket. Certainly their memory was as living for the fourteenth century as it had been for the twelfth since it was continually renewed by the pilgrim hosts at Becket's shrine. A story which had to tell of the quarrel between a king and a churchman might well borrow something from the traditional violence of King Henry and the fearless courage of Becket, but such influence in Athelston, if it existed at all, must have affected simply the characterization of the two dominant personalities; in other respects, in motive, detail and incident, there is no real correspondence between history and the romance. In a story so closely knit as Athelston it is unprofitable to believe that it had absorbed unrelated incidents or that it had varied very much from whatever was its basic type. From the false accusation brought by the king's friend against his sworn brother, through the king's quarrel with the archbishop who hurries to the defense of the king's sister and her husband, to the great climax when the accused pass through the ordeal by fire, the story pursues an almost inevitable course which allows for hardly one of the haphazard accretions usual in mediaeval romance.

During the summer of 1849, while Melville was in New York writing White Jacket, the New York Herald carried a running story of the arrest and trial of a petty criminal known as the “Confidence Man.” There are several parallels between the Herald's “Confidence Man” and the character that Melville created in his later novel The Confidence-Man. Both the New York “Confidence Man” and Melville's Confidence-Man use the same approach and the same line of reasoning, leading to the same question: “Could you put any confidence in me?” Both men work under several aliases; both men use the former-acquaintance routine to relax their victims. In both the reality and the fiction there is a matter of bail to get out of the Tombs. And in both the novel and a Herald editorial a strong parallel is drawn between petty confidence men and the confidence men of Wall Street. From this correlation there is little doubt that this “Confidence Man” of 1849 was, in fact, the prototype for a major part of Melville's character in 1857.

Keats's second ode to Fanny Brawne, the important poem (biographically considered) beginning “What can I do to drive away Remembrance from my eyes,” contains a striking passage which has never been correctly interpreted. The poem as a whole shows Keats in an agitated state of mind. He is so enslaved by his thoughts of Fanny Brawne, he says, that he can neither regain his “old liberty” nor “mount” in his verse “above The reach of fluttering Love.” At this point he writes:

More dismal cares
Seize on me unawares,—
Where shall I learn to get my peace again?
To banish thoughts of that most hateful land,
Dungeoner of my friends, that wicked strand
Where they were wreck'd and live a wrecked life;
That monstrous region, whose dull rivers pour,
Ever from their sordid urns unto the shore,
Unown'd of any weedy-haired gods;
Whose winds, all zephyrless, hold scourging rods,
Iced in the great lakes, to afflict mankind;
Whose rank-grown forests, frosted, black, and blind,
Would fright a Dryad; whose harsh herbaged meads
Make lean and lank the starv'd ox while he feeds;
There bad flowers have no scent, birds no sweet song,
And great unerring Nature once seems wrong.

Elsewhere I have undertaken to show that the sermons of Chaucer's Pardoner and Parson conform to the practice of the mediaeval pulpit. It remains to examine Chaucer's utterances regarding preachers and preaching, in order to determine the full extent of his knowledge of the ars praedicandi. I shall treat the passages regarding the methods of sermon making, the times and places of preaching, the conduct of the preacher in the pulpit, and finally the audience.

The Saracens in Italian popular literature are exotic. They are of French origin and came with the French epic into Italy, where this epic material found a second fatherland. For the Franco-Italian versions which served as a connecting link between the French poems and the court epics of Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, Ciecco da Ferrara, Tasso and the rest, one may consult the magistral work of Pio Rajna Le fonti dell' Orlando Furioso (Firenze, 1876), the same author's Ricerche intorno ai Reali di Francia (Bologna, 1872), and the Introduction of Johannes Hübscher's edition of “Orlando” in Stengel's Ausgaben und Abhandlungen. No. lx, (Marburg, 1886). The following works may also be profitably consulted: F. Castets, Recherches sur les rapports des chansons de geste et de l‘épopée chevaleresque italienne. (Paris, 1887); Vincenzo Crescini, “Orlando nella chanson de Roland i nei poemi del Bojardo e dell’ Ariosto,” Il Propugnatore, xiii, Pt. 1, 2 (Bologna, 1880).

The fiction of Theodore Dreiser has often been praised for its fidelity to the facts of ordinary experience, its massive accumulation and arrangement of incidents, and its criticism of bourgeois America. It has seldom been praised as skillful writing, however; and with almost the sole exception of F. O. Matthiessen, critics have dismissed Dreiser as a poor manipulator of the language, whose effects are achieved in spite of his style. It is usually suggested, furthermore, that beyond a recurring use of clothing as symbols, Dreiser had no awareness of the resources of image and metaphor. It is said that his efforts at comparison were likely to be hackneyed and incredibly jumbled, as in a passage in The Financier about men who fade into poverty: “They were compelled by some devilish accident of birth or lack of force or resourcefulness to stew in their own juice of wretchedness, or to shuffle off this mortal coil—which under other circumstances had such glittering possibilities— via the rope, the knife, the bullet, or the cup of poison.”

Although Nicholas Grimald has been mentioned as a forerunner of English classicism, his use of the closed and balanced decasyllabic couplet has not been emphasized sufficiently to challenge the position commonly assigned to Beaumont, Sandys, Waller, or Jonson. I shall attempt to point out his neoclassic qualities, and to account for them in terms of his sources. In so doing I hope to throw light upon the early history of the heroic couplet, Grimald's position as a pioneer, and the relation of the Latin elegiac distich to English classical verse.

The impresa portrait of Sir Philip Sidney which hangs in the Tudor section of the National Portrait Gallery (no. 1862) in London, shows a strikingly handsome young man. (See Figure 1.) The warm gold of his hair is repeated in the braidings and buttons of his white satin dress, in sword-belt, and in the figures which make up the design of headgear and shield. A somewhat bungling painter has caught the sweet gravity of the poet who in the words of his friend was from childhood up never “other than a man.” But sunniness and glow are dominant. Inevitably one recalls Sir Henry's apt characterization of this son of his as Lumen familiae suae. As a matter of fact, the warmth of coloration is part of a general consonance. For the impresa in the upper left-hand corner is of a fire thrusting red and yellow points of life through crossed green boughs, with the “word,” Inveniam Viam Aut Faciam. And the design of the shield celebrates Apollo, the god of Fire and Light, of the golden sun and the tawny flame which like Youth itself must make or find a way.

Uneasy with the forms of literary expression and its costs, the speakers of Herbert’s poems frequently bear disturbed relationships to their own accounts. An interesting version of the disturbance between storyteller and story occurs in “The Collar,” where present-tense speech is fenced off from, and framed by, the eroding influence of a retrospective narrative voice. The poem provides an occasion to study the motives for and virtues of storytelling, to examine the ways in which accounts are not only generated but preserved, and to explore those problems that arise when a fixed story must be reread and its boundaries changed. Because the speaker of “The Collar” both protects and dismantles his account, the poem also raises questions about the values we attach to narratives, the costs we are willing to support in order to maintain them, and the difficulties we undergo when stories fail to represent us in traditional ways.

Goethe's first letter to Schiller, in which he agreed to support the Horen, and which marks the beginning of their unique alliance, contains a passage, in effect, as follows: