Hey for honesty, the lively seventeenth century adaptation of the Plutus of Aristophanes, was long attributed without question to the joint authorhip of Thomas Randolph and a certain F. J. whose identity has never been ascertained. The title-page of the first edition reads: “. A Pleasant Comedie, Entituled Hey for Honesty, Down with Knavery. Translated out of Aristophanes his Plutus, by Tho: Randolph. Augmented and Published by F. J.” This unambiguous statement of dual authorship went unchallenged until 1875. Several attempts were then made to prove that Randolph had no part whatever in the translation, and that the whole play was written by F. J. It is the purpose of this article to present new evidence, first, that the play is in truth the result of dual authorship, and second, that Thomas Randolph was the original translator and adapter.

Scientists have recently proposed 1610 as a candidate for the first year of the new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. They pinpoint the rise of European colonialism and the global movement of life among ecosystems it precipitated as the triggers for measurable changes in the earth system. We used digital humanities methods to mine historical archives to evaluate the relations among colonialism, early modern globalism, and the origins of the Anthropocene. We suggest that the Anthropocene was initiated by a premodern earth system that defined life across the globe in spatial terms, furthering the goals of empire—a regime of biopower that has not been adequately acknowledged in debates on the Anthropocene. We propose that the idea of empire, rather than Enlightenment narratives of progress and scientific modernity, must be considered in our definition of the Anthropocene. (JJL and JB)

As the only stable element of Milton's universe in Paradise Lost and the theological if not the dramatic center of the poem, heaven deserves more attention than it usually receives. Although Milton drew heavily upon the Biblical New Jerusalem, his heaven is unusual in being far more pastoral than the heaven of Revelation. Insofar as it resembles the New Jerusalem, heaven suggests the regality and power of God. The victory of the Son in his jeweled chariot, the best illustration of omnipotence in the poem, reflects the spirit of Protestant commentators on the final victory of Christ in Revelation. In its pastoral aspect heaven embodies the bliss and repose of the angels and foreshadows the sabbatical rest of the saints. The tradition of a pastoral heaven, entwined with the tradition of the earthly paradise, was transmitted primarily by medieval hymns and vision literature and by the Renaissance pastoral elegy. Milton's heavenly paradise offers the consolation of a bliss which resembles that of Eden and also a higher, festive joy arising from the continual praise of God. Heaven may be less engaging than Eden, but it is the image of the true city and the true paradise toward which the human drama moves.

In 1909 the lord lieutenant of Ireland attempted to prevent the Abbey Theatre from producing Bernard Shaw's Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet because the English lord chamberlain had denied the play a license. Shaw and the Abbey directors Lady Gregory and W. B. Yeats seized the opportunity to contest the extension of English censorship to Ireland. With their genius for hype, they produced the spectacle of their resistance, winning nationalist support for the Abbey. The triumphant first performance was a multivalent occasion, the season's most stylish and seditious event. Gregory filled the theater with Dublin Castle society, members of the very state apparatus that had tried to stop the production; but in meetings with Castle officials and in Abbey press releases, she adopted the idiom of the Irish rebel tradition. Like those other Irish happenings the speech from the dock and the graveside oration, this event was staged not only for its immediate audience but for the Irish people of the future.

In Laʒjanion's poem commonly called Brut there is an extraordinary profusion of epic formulas, full of flavor and charm, contributing as much as anything to the marked individuality of the poem. The same or similar phrases are used again and again, as a rule in the same or similar circumstances, or to describe the same person or action. The degree of similarity which makes a phrase a formula is impossible to define, but in the first list in each case given below is meant to be essentially close. A phrase is considered a formula when it occurs three times or more in this poem; two occurrences may be accidental, but three are becoming habitual. Other occurrences could doubtless be found, and also other formulas, but we have meant to exclude mere stock-rimes, and in general phrases so inevitable that they would not have been felt as formulas by Laʒamon or his auditors, however often repeated. Some of our items might be combined, others subdivided, for they often merge with each other; the whole matter is fluid. The most frequent form is generally taken as standard. Hundreds of less frequent or important variants are disregarded. Each formula is nicknamed by a striking word in it.

Discourse on globalization regularly sells itself as the next big thing. If we read before buying it, however, it may seem that the novelty of globalization has been oversold and its enduring features underestimated. Against the tendency to oppose global processes to local practices (e.g., as future to past), the essay argues for seeing literary studies hitorically as a form of “glocalization,” reworking the topics of locality and place while recalling the forms of their dislocation. Recognizing this historical implication in the global should keep us from being stampeded by market-driven scenarios of globalism and allow us to recover ways to configure alternative futures. What is needed are tactical (in Certeau's sense) responses to globalization and a renewed commitment to practices of disciplined skepticism.

Although we know that medieval writers were not novelists, we can still succumb to the illusion that the characters in their works occasionally exhibit a degree of psychological complexity and “depth” out of keeping with our historical expectations. Chaucer's Criseyde and Malory's Guinevere are such characters; in both, the illusion results largely from a technique of using dialogue to suggest responses, thoughts, or feelings that are otherwise hidden. To achieve such suggestiveness, Chaucer and Malory employ a device that theorists of speech acts call “implicature.” As we overhear the words of Criseyde and Guinevere, we must constantly fill in gaps, supply missing relations, and guess at some “real” meaning that the surface meaning seems to conceal. Through this process we participate in the construction of two characters whose elusiveness, opacity, and apparent inconsistency are surprisingly verisimilar.

Della cruscanism has been primarily associated in literary history with a rash of bad taste which broke out in English poetry between 1787 and 1791 and for which Robert Merry was held responsible. It took its name from the pseudonym “Della Crusca” which Merry used in a poetical correspondence carried on in the World between 1787 and 1789 with Mrs. Hannah Cowley, who signed herself “Anna Matilda,” and other ladies. It was a compound of amorous superlatives, dithyrambic apostrophes, pretentious ornament overflowing in flowery epithets, and a heady romanticism completely lacking the comparatively disciplined artistry which Byron and Shelley were later to achieve in Romantic poetry dealing with similar themes. This flood of bombastic sentiment was stemmed in England by William Gifford, whose satirical onslaughts in the Baviad (1791) and the Maeviad (1795) have left Merry branded as a mere poetaster ever since.

The chief purpose of this paper is to describe one phase of the domestication of Latin drama on the Renaissance stage, specifically to show how a conventional type made famous by the Roman comedians, the miles gloriosus, was fashioned by the academic playwrights of sixteenth-century Italy into an instrument of contemporary satire. A secondary aim is to provide a fuller literary background for the study of the braggart in Elizabethan drama. Such analysis requires a summary of themes, situations, and attitudes that have enriched the comic tradition of Europe, and demands also a definition of the comic spirit that exposes and derides the vainglorious folly of the alazon or boaster who struts and brags of his merits in utter disregard of truth. Menander and his disciples in Latin comedy developed a satiric method which the Italians borrowed for the ridicule of modern representatives of the alazon. Any consideration of the commedia erudita must also be prefaced by a review of the political conditions in Italy that brought to prominence such hated types as the Spaniard and other mercenary soldiers. This paper describes the rôle of the Spaniard and traces the evolution of the braggart from the imitations of Plautus and Terence, through the modifications of conventional themes, and finally to the new elements inspired by the changed domestic conditions of the peninsula.

Schiller, far from regarding the story of Joan of Arc as a web of medieval superstition, found a rational explanation for her peculiar behavior in Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism. It can be shown that Johanna starts out in a somnambulistic trance, is awakened gradually to normal consciousness by her encounters with Montgomery, the Black Knight, and Lionel, and finally regains a trance state in her apotheosis. The source of Johanna's control over persons and events is her possession of “active” (hypnotic) vision. Her enjoyment of this power coincides with her trance states, and she is bereft of it when conscious. This radical break between somnambulism and consciousness symbolizes the unbridgeable gulf between the aims and values of human life (represented by Thibault, Charles, and Agnes Sorel) and the exigencies of the historical and political process.

In a previous article I pointed out that Swift's analysis of Jack the Dissenter had been in part anticipated by earlier satirists. Some references to plays, poems, and prose attacks were then given to substantiate my contention. In this brief bibliography of non-dramatic satire from the Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621, to Tom Brown, ca. 1700, further evidence will be presented that before Swift's time there was a long tradition of satire of the Puritans, and one which in many ways was much like his own attack. Since the work of presenting the dramatic satire of the Puritans has, in part at least, been done, no titles of plays will be included. The bibliography will also confine itself to citation of satires on the Puritans. The year 1621 was chosen as a starting point, for I believe that with the Anatomy of Melancholy there began a new era of satire, and especially of analysis of cause and effect in the problems of religious enthusiasm, a subject upon which Swift wrote some of his best passages. That this bibliography is in any way complete is not claimed; it is hoped, however, that it will present some satires which have been neglected by students of the strife between the Puritans and their satirists, and will also help to clarify the problems of the literary background of A Tale of a Tub and the Discourse on the Mechanical Operation of the Spirit

WITH THE REEMERGENCE of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, particularly Homer, the concept of a Christian hero as distinct from the Christian champion arose to shape an enormous body of European literature. Broadly speaking, we may describe Christian heroism as aspiring to create an ideal figure, reminiscent of both the chivalric knight and the Christian Everyman, who might fit into a heroic poem that should at the same time rival and eclipse the epics of classical antiquity.1 Perhaps the first poem approaching such dimensions was Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a superlative romance, but with more tenuous claims to either Christian or heroic values. Ovid, not Virgil, remains clearly the main inspiration for Ariosto's playfully pagan sensuosity, and only by strenuous allegorical interpretation can Christianity be construed as a major force in the poem. Significantly, however, such interpretation was by no means lacking in sixteenth-century Italy, where a host of commentators eagerly supplied it. Concurrently in Portugal Camoens could describe Vasco da Gama's daring voyage with a truly missionary zeal and so create a narrative where heroic action genuinely dramatizes the virtues of the Christian faith. But except for one peculiar episode the Lusiadas lacks the dimension of romance. The curious allegory of the Island of Love with which the epic concludes is apparently evidence of Camoens' felt need to define however hastily his military hero's relation to a world of pastoral romance, where hero and lover are inseparable.

There is a “World” of Difference Between the Benign Descriptive Tautology of the Phrase World Literature When it is Used to indicate, with its phenomenological innocence, literature from a variety of sites and in various languages and the same phrase when it is used to indicate a unitary mode. I distinguish between these concepts by placing quotation marks around the phrase when the second sense is meant. “World literature” indeed results from an act of ideological and hegemonic production: it is a tendentious, normative category with all the magisterial and juridical authority of a taxonomic rubric. In a classic Althusserian sense, the phrase, in quotation marks, actively interpellates the world and the world responds to the ideological hail. In so doing the world constitutes itself epistemologically as certain and determinate. The hail privileges and exemplifies a particular configuration of the world, inevitably alienating and “othering” the possibility of infinite alternative configurations and constellations as various and protean as the world itself. The crucial difference is that until the moment of the hail, world literature just “was,” doing its thing expressively, speaking profusely and in polyglot chaos and richness without necessarily speaking for itself in a unitary, prescriptive, representational, and representative mode. To put it simply, every literature in the world was in the world, and this fact needed no reiteration, no self-conscious validation. Where else would anything or any literature be except in the world? Why not just let world literature be in its various sites, languages, and configurations?

Despite a recent tendency to consider the Merchant's Tale outside the dramatic context of its prologue, and to read it primarily as a broadly humorous, if discordant, piece of anti-feminism, the tale is actually unified by a consistent narrative point of view that successfully accommodates the apparently incongruous themes, tones, and styles of the poem. The final effect, moreover, is not comic at all, but rather sardonic, a dark and unsettling view of an aspect of man's experience. The Merchant's Prologue, though probably written after the tale, is carefully adjusted to the climate of the tale, and must be considered in any critical account, especially since it is through the strong, viable presence of the narrator that the tale is held together. Two features characterize this narrator, one tonal, the other attitudinal. The first is the cool, acidulous voice we hear narrating the story, the expression of an ironic intelligence deeply at odds with the world. The second is the narrator's heightened awareness of sex, particularly in its more grotesque and violent forms, which gives the tale its unsavory atmosphere. These marks of a single unified narrator, together with the ironic finale of the plot, result in a literary mode that is not finally comic, but which suggests comparison with the so-called “problem comedies” of Shakespeare.

Improvisation was long the apex of the arts of eloquence, yet modern scholars ignore its importance as a rhetorical and literary genre, thereby severing a long-enduring connection between rhetorical and literary history. This essay reads Plato's Menexenus to formulate a theory of improvisational rhetoric around the cultural position of Aspasia, a foreign woman renowned for eloquence in Periclean Athens. It then places this construction of improvisation alongside Germaine de Staël's early-nineteenth-century novel Corinne to demonstrate the endurance and evolution of improvisational rhetoric. Doing so not only illustrates the long-standing—and long-neglected—influence of improvisation on both rhetorical theory and literary production but also challenges present-day disciplinary prejudice by revealing the permeable boundary between imaginative works and those that provide rhetorical instruction.

Similarities between the late medieval English mystery plays and late medieval religious art have often been pointed out; parallels in literature and painting to the dramatic scene in which Christ is stretched and nailed to the cross, for example, are numerous. So far, commentators have concentrated on the similarities which concern the way in which the sequence of events of the Christian story is presented—on the narrative details in the plays, paintings, carvings, narrative poems, and glass paintings. For example, the way Christ steps out of the tomb (that is, the dramatic narrative) in the Chester Resurrection has analogies in English alabaster carvings. Such a knowledge is valuable in that it helps demonstrate the popular religious context of much of the narrative detail of the plays (Plate I). I think, however, that the religious (and social) contexts of the performances (especially the rationale of the presence of the audience) can best be understood by considering a different kind of parallel between the plays and religious art—similarities in the static, non-narrative scenes. In particular, I wish to link Christ's monologues in the plays closely to some of the images (Plate II) of the Cult of Jesus of the late Middle Ages, which share with the plays and other religious arts of the period a certain sensational realism and impassioned emotionalism.

The book of the Courtier, by the overwhelming weight of its reputation and influence, comes to us as a handbook of the courtly virtues, or, more historically considered, as a treatise on the education of a Renaissance courtier. It is reasonable that it should. Castiglione himself announced his intention of teaching “what manner of man he must be who deserves the name of perfect Courtier, without defect of any kind” (i, 1); and his division of his work into four books which treat successively and compendiously the personal qualities, the conduct, the female counterpart, and the utility and aspirations of the courtier emphasizes its appearance of being a handbook. One can hardly refute, therefore, those writers who use The Courtier as an encyclopaedia of courteous manners, or even those who find in it a manual of Renaissance philosophy. Few works of the Renaissance have a more genuine documentary value.

These specimens are based on notes taken by me in August and September, 1877, in Waterville, Maine. I used selections from them at the first meeting of the Romance Philology Conference, at Harvard University, in the year 1886-87, to illustrate the use of phonetic spelling for philological purposes and to illustrate also the regular character of sound changes in popular dialects.—There is in Waterville, as in many other places in New England, a colony of French Canadians, who live by themselves in a part of the village known as the Plains. My specimens were taken down in phonetic spelling from the mouth of a single person of this colony, who was employed as a servant girl at my father's house. It is a disadvantage that only one person's speech was thus observed, but she being uneducated—I do not think she could write and am not even sure that she knew how to read at all—her dialect was little if at all influenced by written French. She understood English well enough for most purposes, and all my questions were put in English, and she gave English translations when desired. I think there was hardly any possibility of her using a word not natural to her in consequence of any suggestion from me. I am not sure that her dialect was that of the whole French colony in Waterville; indeed it seems to me that some double forms she used with the same meaning may have been due to her knowing words belonging to originally different dialects. I have some reason to believe that at least one other French dialect than hers is or was not long ago spoken in New England.—My observations are very incomplete, as I expected and intended to continue them later and did not use all the opportunities I had, but scanty as they are, they suffice to give some idea of the peculiarities of the dialect.

Seventeen years ago, in a highly provocative article in this journal, E. C. Mossner rose to the defense of David Hume's historical writings, which had been treated with considerable severity by scholars such as J. B. Black, who, in his Art of History, had compared them unfavorably with those of his contemporaries, in particular Voltaire. Mossner, however, in trying to bring out the qualities of Hume's History of England, confronted it almost exclusively with Voltaire's Siècle de Louis XIV, and in this instance it must be admitted that Hume labored under a grave disadvantage, since his far more comprehensive subject was harder to master from the artistic as well as the scientific point of view than Voltaire's. In the present article we shall transfer the comparison from the Siècle to Voltaire's longest and most mature historical effort, the Essai sur les moeurs et l'esprit des nations, and this considerably changes our perspective, for here Voltaire is dealing with a similar and, if anything, more difficult theme. In this way a parallel may prove highly instructive in bringing out the excellences and weaknesses of the two historians respectively in their approach to comparable subjects and in the formulation of their philosophy of history. What makes comparisons particularly inviting is the circumstance that Voltaire's topic also includes Hume's, so that in numerous instances it is possible to examine the reaction of both writers to the same events and personalities. While our investigation of the resemblances and differences in the thought of these two outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment will stress some of the traits shared by most historians of their age, we shall also attempt to underline the more individual elements that emerge from their works.

Does the business of writing shape the works of even the most private authors? A demonstration that one of the major figures of French literature was influenced throughout his career by Renaissance publishing policy might clarify the relation of professional demands to individual genius. The way Montaigne expanded and enlarged his book from edition to edition, one of the most salient features of his writing, has been variously attributed to biographical and philosophical causes—that is, to sources in his creative energy. The historical records, however, suggest that Montaigne's revision of his Essais was inspired also by the need to reestablish ownership over a work that was about to fall into the public domain. Legislation from the period reveals that publishers regularly released revised editions to renew their privileges (short-term bookselling monopolies). (GH)