Most Shakespeare scholars have believed that an earlier form of The Taming of the Shrew once existed, whether it was The Taming of a Shrew or some other version. There are scholars also who hold that an earlier form of The Taming of a Shrew must be postulated. Some have suggested a theory of a common source.

In the study of the origins and development of French eighteenth century thought, the importance of Isaac de la Peyrère has been strangely overlooked. I say “strangely ”advisedly since not only was La Peyrère a person of some prominence in his day, but through his works, was one of the first to disseminate certain critical arguments which were to prove popular with deists in both France and England, and which find their highest degree of success in Voltaire's Essai sur les mœurs, La Bible enfin expliquée, and the Dictionnaire philosophique. Accordingly it is the purpose of this article to investigate La Peyrère's place among his contemporaries, the subsequent fortune of his ideas, and to attempt to evaluate his importance in the formation and development of critical deism in both France and England.

Recent comprehensive literary histories affirm their own impossibility, a gesture that once belonged to opponents of the genre. The challenge of “the impossible whole,” of course, has always influenced the design of histories of entire literary traditions, but the open avowal that the form is a project of the cultural imagination has several notable consequences. In this new understanding, for example, the histories of a given tradition answer to and provoke rather than supersede one another in sequence. Literary works cease to be pseudoevents listed to achieve the appearance of a full history; they dematerialize, and the literary historian uses their instability to maintain the discomfiting question of the relations among “history,” “literature,” and “nation.” For these reasons, the impossible genre will remain a medium of choice, and of controversy, as long as the current academic and public debate over textual, authorial, and cultural identities continues to rage.

It's time for a pop quiz. you have ten minutes. (is your heart racing? take a deep breath.)

What major events in American literature and American history took place in and around the following years?

(1) 1789

(2) 1800

(3) 1820

(4) 1830

THE Elizabethan style of acting is discussed nowhere in the four volumes of The Elizabethan Stage, and the word acting itself is missing from the subject-index. It is as if Sir Edmund Chambers would crown his generosities by leaving us a playground—one precinct free for untrammeled guessing. The sport is active, and two teams are discernible on the field, but the teams are not playing with each other: they are not defending their own inferences or attacking those of their opponents. The purpose of the present essay is not to end the game but to organize it—at least so far as that can be done by one who enters a game not as a referee but as a player. The most conspicuous Shakespearian criticism of recent years is based largely upon assumptions about the style in which the plays were originally acted, so that even a partisan discussion of these assumptions may prove useful. What follows is an attempt to define two alternate styles of acting—formal acting and natural acting; to attack the case for natural acting on the Elizabethan stage and to defend the case for formal acting; and, finally, to suggest the manner in which the issue bears upon contemporary criticism.)

In spite of its language which is admittedly difficult and in spite of certain problems of literary history which beset it, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight has never been considered hard to interpret as a work of art. The apparent obviousness of its genre and its combination of apparently straight-forward narrative and notable passages of description do not lead one to suspect that complicated problems of intention or meaning are lurking beneath its vivid and attractive poetry. Piers Plowman, everyone agrees, is a difficult poem and has, at least since the sixteenth century, been recognized as such. Those who are attracted to it are stimulated to probe its significance and to elucidate its mysteries. No such stimulus comes to the much larger group who enjoy and study Sir Gawain, for, although much has been written on it, it has always been con. sidered a relatively uncomplicated, beautifully organized, and masterfully presented obvious poem. Yet the more one studies Sir Gawain and ponders on its charms and organization the more one begins to wonder and speculate. Of course in one sense all literary or artistic masterpieces are miracles and occasion for wonder, but above and beyond the pleasure and surprise which come from great achievement and the feeling of perfection, some works create a peculiar sense of intellectual puzzlement as to the author's intention and tone and even on a more prosaic level as to the tie between a work and its milieu: intellectual, artistic, and social.

The phenomenon of synaesthesia has been much studied in recent years, both on its psychological and on its literary side. In the strict scientific sense, it consists in the arousing, by the stimulation of one sense, a concomitant sensation in another. Thus the man who always felt a pain in a certain tooth when a soprano sang off-key was a genuine synaesthetic. In such simple forms, modern investigators have shown, synaesthesia is a psychological “Urphänomen” and can be traced back to prehistoric times, though it became an object of scientific attention only with Newton's Opticks in 1704.

During 1721, when a violent plague raged around Marseilles, concern in England focused not so much on the nature of the disease as on problems of civil order, particularly among the London poor. But in his Journal of the Plague Year (1722), an account of the plague of 1665, Defoe’s compassion for the poor extended to a sympathetic account of their spirit of rebellion. Defoe’s work compares the sufferings of the past and the potential agonies of a new plague, but reflects also the mental despair caused by the bursting of the South Sea Bubble during 1721. Yet Defoe’s fictional account celebrates the past and future triumph of London through the compassion of its citizens. In making history as much prophecy as a reflection of the past, Defoe also created the first realistic fiction with a narrator sympathetic to both victim and survivor, common sufferers trapped by forces beyond human control.

It is no criticism to note that Rita Felski's provocative, Frank, and spirited book The Limits of Critique is itself a work of critique, and a rhetorically powerful and persuasive one at that. While the hermeneutics of suspicion comes under considerable analytic pressure in the book, Felski does not hesitate to read for hidden meanings, tease out internal contradictions, or cast a skeptical eye on skepticism. Rather, she effectively engages in critique, without apology or embarrassment.

It is sometimes said that unlike other epics Beowulf does not start in medias res, but it does; Beowulf has a backstory, which we are deep into when the poem begins. The backstory is not told in the poem, however, so modern readers may miss it entirely. It is found in the poem's analogues and was the focus of most Beowulf scholarship until 1936, when J. R. R. Tolkien turned our attention to the monster fights in the foreground. Following Tolkien, today's readers focus on what the poem does say, taking little or no interest in the analogues. There is quite a difference, however, between reading Beowulf as complete in itself and reading it intertextually, as part of a cycle of tales. An intertextual reading yields many surprises, among them a hidden incest theme. Beowulf is haunted by this and other dark matters, repressed in its textual unconscious.

Recent readings of Rebecca Harding Davis's landmark exploration of the emerging industrial working class have been concerned primarily with the connections between class formation and gender relations. By focusing attention instead on the text's indebtedness to various contemporaneous discourses of racial subjection (which crucially shape and delimit analyses of class and representations of labor during the late antebellum era), I argue that the transcendence, mobility, and salvation that the text allows its working-class characters are subtly but consistently aligned with an emerging racial conception of whiteness. Not only does this alignment link freedom with whiteness and exploitation with blackness, but through these disabling linkages it also establishes a literary precedent for representing (and Actively resolving) class struggles with racial language.

The orator in petticoats often launched her plays with such audacity that she eclipsed the glory of the Prologue-monsieur and established the vogue of a particular kind of stage-oration which the poets called “She-Prologues” or “Female Prologues and Epilogues.” For her, Lyly, Shakespeare, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Suckling, Dryden, Congreve, and many lesser playwrights wrote feminine orations; and as she pleaded her customary theme, “for my sake,” she made herself mistress of an art that won applause for As You Like It, Love for Love, The Way of the World, Cato, and more than two hundred other plays before 1714. A tall woman of her tongue was the She-Prologue; yet no one, I believe, has told the history of her addresses, the history of a particular type of playhouse-discourse with a vogue that touches upon the great change in the theatre resulting from the employment of actresses. Witty, saucy, beautiful, she and her playhouse-sisters with a gift for oratory harangued the pit and gallery for more than half a century: Nell 'neath a big hat, like a bug under a leaf; Mrs. Barry and Mrs. Bracegirdle, true friends to Betterton; yes, more than twenty other women—prattling sometimes, sometimes discoursing—circumscribed the matter and manner of the female prologue or epilogue, an address by a female orator of the stage.

The fifth edition of Attilio Momigliano's Storia della Letteratura Iialiana (Milan, 1946) still insists on the mainly ornamental function of the Decameron frame story: “II motivo del verde e dei fiori che inghirlandano la lieta compagnia, ha per lo più la superficialità e la povertà di un ornamento: è più decorazione che pittura. Ed è questo il carattere di tutta l'intelaiatura del libro : un largo affresco aristocratico da guardare nel decoro del complesso senza meditazione e senza analisi” (pp. 79 ff.). Yet a number of modern critics have seen in the cornice more than an ornament and have considered it rather an organic part of the entire work. Some of these writers see symbolic significance in the brigata's departure (or escape) from the stricken city to more ideal places, and their assumptions seem to be borne out by the statements of Boccaccio, who actually leaves no doubt about his artistic intention and consciousness in writing the frame story. However, it seems strange that even those critics who see symbolic significance in the brigata's departure from the city should look at the remainder of the cornice as a single setting and should overlook entirely the group's wanderings from garden to garden. Although a detailed study of these gardens has not hitherto been made, they and the group's peregrinations suggest symbolically the philosophy of the whole work and are thus essential to its interpretation.

“Some one had blundered.” The vision of Lily Briscoe reveals that it was Mrs. Ramsay.

On 31 January 1842, shortly after Dickens arrived on his first visit to the United States, he wrote to his friend Thomas Mitton, “There is a great deal afloat here in the way of subjects for description. I keep my eyes open pretty wide, and hope to have done so to some purpose by the time I come home.” And certainly Dickens' observations were to “some purpose.” The American visit produced a fine series of letters, a travel book, American Notes for General Circulation (1842), and the famous American chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44). These three basic sources—the letters on America, which were never intended for publication as such; the Notes, which represented Dickens' public statement of what he saw in America; and Chuzzlewit, the fictional recreation of the America he found—form an extraordinary trilogy of materials made to order for the study of the relationship between fact and fiction. But strangely enough, despite the immensity of the Dickens bibliography, one hunts vainly for such a study. And yet, by analyzing the American chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit in the light of Dickens' letters from America and his American Notes, it is possible to achieve a better understanding of his artistic methods and limitations. One can see, for example, how Dickens the observer, the selector, worked, how he broke up some experiences and fused others together. One can watch impressions and images recur and reappear as the associations with which they are connected also recur and reappear. Finally, one can better understand the fictional difficulties and shortcomings in the American interlude of Martin Chuzzlewit; one can better explain a good many artistic lapses and seemingly wild exaggerations.

The instrumentalization of nineteenth-century literary historiography in the project of literary and cultural nation building has become a critical commonplace, as Claudio Guillén (6) and David Perkins (4), among many others, have outlined. Beginning with John Neal's American Writers (1824–25), nineteenth-century histories of North American literature emphatically embraced this nationalist paradigm, striving to identify and defend the “American” qualities in America's newly emergent national literature. But when called on, at the beginning of the twentieth century, to justify the establishment of American literature departments in universities across the country, literary histories were, especially during the 1920s and 1930s, under even greater pressure to prove the extent to which American literature is indeed American (Vanderbilt 186–91). Although the rise of New Criticism and the influence of Russian formalism after World War II saw a temporary setback to American historiographical nationalism (Spengemann, Mirror 154), the subsequent institutionalization of American studies took place in the context of the cold war, and the 1960s, in particular, brought a renewed emphasis on the (for the most part nationally oriented) sociopolitical and historical contextualization of American literature. And even the shift to intra-American cultural pluralism in the wake of trans- and subnational challenges to traditional notions of the nation-state throughout the past few decades has all too frequently been accompanied by renewed attempts to establish a revised version of historiographical nationalism.

Tillyard's interpretation of Lycidas as a tragic conflict between man's ego and his sense of finitude, resolved through a sublimation of the individual's fears and hopes in the aspirations of his group, has gained wide acceptance. Yet Tillyard, in focusing attention on the theme and its relationship to biographical data, has tended to minimize the pastoral and occasional aspects of the poem. On the other hand, the traditional over-emphasis on these aspects has long resulted in an evaluation of Lycidas as largely an allegory of college life and friendship or as a a supremely skillful exercise in a now archaic genre. Neither approach has included more than cursory consideration of Milton's imagery. This essay proposes that our understanding of Lycidas may be enriched by combining an historical and æsthetic point of view in a study of the relationship of the imagery of the poem to its other constituents. The essay will be particularly concerned with testing the hypothesis that the allusion to Orpheus in lines 56–63 is an important functional image through which Milton defined and developed his theme.

Macpherson's Poems of Ossian derived its extraordinary popularity from its power to resolve, in imaginary terms, the vexing ethical contradictions of the mid-eighteenth century. The poems effectively reconcile the age's nostalgia for the ancient polis ideal with its modern taste for polite manners. In the character of Fingal, the passionate fierceness of the citizen-warrior combines with the delicate affections fostered by domesticity, precommercial civic virtue joins with politesse, and the traditional attributes of masculinity merge with those of femininity. The abiding irony of Macpherson's text, however, is that its “feminization” of male heroes is offset by the dramatic elimination of all heroines, suggesting a certain male resentment toward women as sponsors of men's acquisition of manners.

Brant's Humanistic friends viewed the Narrenschiff (1494) as a satire in the Roman tradition which marked the beginning of a literary Renaissance in the German vernacular. That contemporary interpretation of the work justifies a comparison of the Narrenschiff with Erasmus' Encomium Moriae, “the most important remaining problem in Brant research” (Zeydel). The two works are formally comparable since both use rhetorical forms (e.g., oralio) as a structural basis for their satiric intent. Since the two satires also coincide on many points of content, the “Erasmian duplicity” seems the only obstacle to a complete juxtaposition. This duplicity, however, is a necessary consequence of Erasmus' use of prosopopoiia and is not characteristic of his frame of mind, as can be shown in his firm reliance on divine wisdom. In this he coincides again with Brant's attitude in the Narrenschiff. Thus, the difference between the two works is not one in kind or outlook but one mainly determined by the different audiences addressed.

From one standpoint, the major theme of Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge is not “character is fate” or “man against himself,” but rather it is the conflict between generations. This is a very ancient subject matter, one of the archetypal themes noted by the Jungian literary psychologist Maud Bodkin, who traces it in classical Greek drama and in Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear? In Hardy's novel the conflicting generations are represented by Michael Henchard, the middle-aged corn factor and mayor, and Donald Farfrae, the energetic young Scotchman whose two-fold abilities, “the commercial and the romantic” (p. 162), while exercised with the best of intentions, prove deadly to his patron. Because of the ineluctability of this theme, it is necessary that the affection between the two men should turn to hate and that Henchard, as the older, should go under. The special bitterness of Henchard's inevitable failure is perhaps Hardy's characteristically pessimistic contribution. But we might also relate this quality of bitterness to the lack—increasingly in Hardy's time and almost totally in ours—of a generally accepted religious outlook which could transform Henchard's sufferings into a mitigating ritual and his death into a sacrificial symbol. Whereas Lear dies in the bosom of his family, as it were, surrounded by both his living and dead relatives, in full view of an awed and edified audience, Henchard's death is hidden from the eyes of all men except the faithful “fool” Whittle, whose report is necessarily limited to a few concrete particulars. Under the circumstances, Elizabeth–Jane's “what bitterness lies there!” (p. 337) is, at least on one level of the narrative, a final comment which every reader must echo.