The invention of Tartuffe is decisive in the evolution of Molière’s art. As parasite, he shifts the action of the comedy indoors, accenting both inwardness and concealment. As agent of the father’s “holy experiment,” he inaugurates the Andromeda scheme whereby Molière’s fathers regularly will hand over a beloved daughter to the misfit who mirrors the dark state of their own souls. As charlatan of piety, he poses a challenge to the age which his creator was to pay for dearly in a five-year struggle to gain for his play the freedom of the stage. Though the denouement of Tartuffe is essentially political—reflecting the challenge by a political cabal to its right to exist—the comedy proper ends with its villain stripped of the protective cloak of the religion of an unseen Presence, by an appeal to the palpable truth of the religion of ancient Greece where comedy originated.

A sound basis for interpreting the odes as a sequence, with unity of theme and progression of thought, may be found in the theme of mutability. It is generally acknowledged as central in the other odes but has been neglected in discussions of the “Ode to Psyche.” Though this theme is dealt with defensively, it is evident in the tone, in the paradoxical conception of Psyche as a dying immortal, in the imaginative effort to restore her presence and rescue her from the “faint Olympians,” and in the final act of internalization. As in the other odes, the answer to the problem of mutability lies in an acceptance of the natural process of which man's life is a part and in a will to adapt. Though Keats would make Psyche the presider over his soul, he is aware that in the end he must preside over his own growth and “Soul-making.”

The association of ideas as manifested in Shakespeare’s image clusters, discussed by Caroline Spurgeon and Edward Armstrong, was used by R. W. Chambers as a test of authorship for the Sir Thomas More fragment. Some unstudied associations tie Iago to one side of Shylock and the More fragment to another, providing further evidence of Shakespeare’s authorship and the probable date of composition. Image clusters similarly suggest that King John preceded Richard II; and King Lear, Timon of Athens. Our consideration needs to be broadened beyond exclusively verbal terms: Shakespeare’s imagination is fully theatrical. Association is not a mere stimulus-response limiting of the imagination; it provided flexible and wide-ranging systems of intermeshing concepts at Shakespeare’s most creative moments.

Although Milton wrote extensively on poetics, we cannot get his views by simply piecing together his scattered statements; they changed and developed to the end of his writing life. But central from early to late years were questions of the poet’s inspiration, relation to his audience, and possible usefulness. Perhaps the core of his poetics is best described by the Greek word paideia; for however distinctively Christian, Milton was too thoroughly the heir of humanism to disavow classical teaching and Renaissance commentary on poetics. Still, only his final poems in their implications can suggest his final theory.

The visual focus in Tennyson's poetry moves between particularized objects and hazy vistas. His particularist bent, arising in part from myopia, coincided with the bias of an age that both exalted the Symbol and revered empirical observation. But Tennyson's fears of psychic entrapment within the object and of nature's uncontrollable prolixity inclined him alternatively toward the receding “past” and the distanced “picture.” This tendency reinforces itself through the correlative temporal and spatial frames of his poetry: “modern frames” enclose his “pasts”; “casements” focus his “pictures.” Tennyson thus exemplifies the Victorian attempt to reconcile particulars and universals, and the “telescopic dualism” of nineteenth-century painting and poetry, wherein detailed foregrounds and indefinite, receding backgrounds are discrete. In Tennyson such a division distinguishes a material world precisely apprehensible through sight and a spiritual one that fades toward diaphaneity. The paradigm for Tennyson's unattainable goal of optical (and epistemological) inclusiveness is “The Eagle.”

Kafka’s writings have been illuminated by a spectrum of critical altitudes encompassing theological, psychological, ontological, and existential interpretations. In the present interpretation of Der Prozeß, language, reading, and writing subvert these categories while being bound to them. The Court functions as a literary text, extending and erasing itself and exacting an exchange of writing from its servants and wards. Joseph K., like der Mann in the parable of the doorkeeper, is excluded from the Law while claimed by it. This paradox characterizes K.’s experience. Like literary language, the Court seems to be identical to everyday existence, but, in the multiplicity of the often mutually negating legal interpretations that it entertains and in its anaerobic atmosphere, the Court defines itself as the negation of existence and its logic. Der Prozeß thus demarcates the border between literature and the life it seems to represent.

Coleridge's mode of composition in the Biographia Literaria is best considered as marginal discourse, and here the chapters on Hartleian association are analyzed from this point of view. Coleridge's previous attempts to refute Hartley depended on a proof of the free will, a proof that he did not complete and that, for moral purposes, he does not hazard in the Biographia. Instead, Coleridge proffers a subsidiary criticism that he had formed years before, affixing his comments to borrowed arguments. Although Coleridge's marginal rhetoric persuades that Hartley's model is insufficient, it also illustrates that there is no coherent alternative principle. The text vanishes beneath the burden of its marginalia. Coleridge's criticism subverts a partial truth only to substitute a rhetoric partial to the demands of a desire too restless to abide in any principle or text.

The use of law in Middle English literature is not extraneous but grows naturally out of a profound faith in law as the tie that binds all things, in heaven and in earth: all law—divine, natural, and human—is, in essence, one law. Hence, Christ's victory over Satan is dramatized in the language of Westminster, the promise of salvation is seen in terms of the emerging law of contracts, and our place in heaven is treated as real estate. The process is seen most clearly in the Château d'Amour, Piers Plowman, Pearl, and “Quia Amore Langueo.” With the disintegration of the belief in a single, coherent law, however, the legal metaphor lost most of its force and economy. As heirs of that disintegration, we must be careful not to impose it unwittingly on Medieval literature and thus fragment a vision that was whole.

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.

The moral problems that are explored in King Lear can be clarified by viewing them in the context of Shakespeare's history plays and of contemporary social conflicts. Lear and Gloucester share the values of a feudal aristocracy that is threatened by an acquisitive and irreverent bourgeois class; the argument over Lear's train reflects the Tudor monarchs' struggle against maintenance, the right of an aristocrat to keep an armed retinue. The Tudor crisis of the aristocracy had tragic connotations for Shakespeare, and the heroes of his later plays are usually figures of the “old regime.” This is not inconsistent with Marx's concept of tragedy, but Shakespeare's humanism should be recognized as nostalgic rather than forward-looking.

Lussurioso’s valedictory in The Revenger’s Tragedy—”My tongue is out of office”—isolates a dominant image that Cyril Tourneur adapted from the Kydian revenge play, particularly Titus Andronieus where the mutilation of Lavinia represents the gothic assault on the definitively human ability to speak and the cancellation of the eloquent bond that creates a just society. Whereas Shakespeare finally affirms this classical idealization of rhetoric, Tourneur accentuates the opposing tradition of rhetoric as the ability to flatter, seduce, and speak unjustly. He employs the biblical concept of the fiery tongue as a quasi-independent organ with psychic and ethical potency. In Tourneur’s world of “nimble and desperate tongues,” the linguistic glory of man becomes a phallic and self-destructive act that justifies Vindice’s moral degeneration and tragic end. With other images that ironically evoke lost ideals of Renaissance humanism, imagery of the tongue helps to illuminate the grotesque Jacobean darkness of the play.

Between the interpretation in Milton's prose works of the monarchy of Charles I and the portrayal in Paradise Lost of the tyranny of Satan there exists an extensive and complex consistency based on the concept of the divine right of kings, a doctrine that informs the character and world view of Satan as well as of King Charles. In his effort to counteract the Eikon Basilike's picture of Charles as a Christlike martyr-king, Milton drew in Eikonoklastes—albeit in fragmentary form—his own essentially fictional characterization of Charles as a tyrant. This analysis, continued in the Defences, studies Charles's personal heroism, political behavior, delusions about himself, his followers, and his cause and is extensively paralleled in the depiction of Satan. These prose works thus serve as a valuable literary gloss on Paradise Lost—on certain details of imagery and characterization and on Milton's conception of true liberty and revolution.

The four invocations to the Muse in Paradise Lost signal the stages of a compositional process coordinating the levels of the poem's inspiration and overall design. Using in downward sequence the four inspirational “furors” Neoplatonism derived from Plato's Phaedrus, Milton calibrated each narrative stage of his work to the thematic range governing that inspirational level, while the entire progression of the poem expresses the structural significance of this scalar paradigm. Such techniques were used by Dante and others and by Milton himself in Lycidas. But in Paradise Lost the inspirational pattern, as the spatial axis governing the poem's descending and ascending movements, combines with the narrative movements of the poem's temporal axis to shape a particular form that Milton considered essential to every art dedicated to the highest good and final end implicit in the divine scheme. It is this “universal form” that both metaphysically and structurally underlies Paradise Lost.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf wanted, as she says, “to criticise the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense.” Her critical attention is focused not on individuals but on the values of a particular class at a particular historical moment. Her novel examines the governing class’s control over English society in the period immediately following the First World War, showing how coercive the ideal of stoical fortitude nurtured during the War had become by the time it was over. The dominant faith in the value of self-control creates an atmosphere of emotional austerity that in one way or another affects the behavior of all the characters in the novel. It inhibits the natural expression of feeling in those who live by the governing-class code and turns the more rebellious members of the society into unstable emotional exhibitionists.