John Shakespeare, shoemaker, or corviser, who lived in Stratford-on-Avon in the 1580's and 1590's, and who is sometimes hard to to distinguish from John Shakespeare, the father of the poet, in the borough records, can now be identified as belonging to the Balsall family of the same name, and the genealogy of that family can now be traced in outline for two hundred years. Since this family lived so long in a neighborhood where many Shakespeares lived, and since it is known to have been the parent of the Baddesley Clinton branch, it may prove, when sufficient evidence has accumulated, to be the parent of other branches also. It is therefore of interest to students of Shakespeare.

Italy, for obvious reasons, always kept closer than other countries to ancient classical literature. There the classic spirit was native, for the Italians were always conscious of being the heirs of the ancient Roman Empire; there Humanism and the Renaissance arose; there the counter-Reformation resisted the Protestant spirit of the northern countries; there Arcadian academies and pseudo-classicism flourished. But the Romantic attitude was present in many Italian writers from the Middle Ages on. Petrarch was romantic in his introspective melancholy, Ariosto was romantic in his love of picturesque adventure; yet both are classic in the perfection of their style as well as in their knowledge of antiquity. Thus the two tendencies existed side by side, frequently in the same man, although in theory Italy remained classicist until the end of the eighteenth century. The pre-romantic literature of France, England, and Germany was modified in Italy by the prevalent classical tradition, but it found there a fertile soil. As a literary movement, Romanticism in Italy is best considered as represented by a group of writers in the period which followed the collapse of Napoleon's empire.

In 1684 William Winstanley summarized the Tudor reputation of Richard III:

But as Honour is always attended on by Envy, so hath this worthy Princes fame been blasted by malicious traducers, who like Shakespear in his Play of him, render him dreadfully black in his actions, a monster of nature, rather then a man of admirable parts; whose slanders having been examined by wise and moderate men, they have onely found malice and ignorance to have been his greatest accusers, persons who can onely lay suspition to his charge; and suspition in Law is no more guilt than imagination.

Before the theory that early English humanism suffered an arrest at the death of More and Fisher hardens into dogma, it may be well to draw attention to the importance of a small group of English scholars who under the patronage of Henry VIII and Cromwell pursued classical studies in the household of Reginald Pole in Italy during the second decade of the sixteenth century, and who later put their learning to use in the king's service in England. One of that group, Richard Morison, deserves more than the scanty notice he has heretofore received. Drafted at a critical moment after the outbreak of the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, he was advanced literally overnight to a position of strategic importance as official propagandist against the rebels. The four tracts which he wrote in 1536 and 1539 in support of the government's action, together with his unpublished writings, constitute the largest single body of evidence, though by no means the only evidence, for the persistence of the humanistic tradition in the period immediately after More's death. Moreover, they reveal a hitherto unsuspected acquaintance with the political works of Machiavelli, whose influence in Cromwellian political policy has recently been denied. The present description of the literary career of Morison is therefore of importance for its bearing on the history both of humanism and of political ideas in early Tudor England.

Richard Haydocke, who published at Oxford in 1598 a translation of Lomazzo's Trattato dell'arte della Pittura, and Alexander Browne, who claimed authorship of the Ars Pictoria (1669), are not completely unknown to fame. Each had rather curious contacts with historically important persons: the former, with King James I and with Sir Thomas Bodley, founder of the Bodleian Library; the latter, with the Duchess of Monmouth, and with Mr. Samuel Pepys, whose wife was his pupil. It is true that the shrines of these writers have been visited but seldom, although the diligent inquirer will find that each is accorded a brief notice in the catholic pages of the Dictionary of National Biography, and occasional comment upon one or the other crops up in widely scattered sources.

During the romantic era Spain enjoyed for perhaps the first time in her history a genuine European vogue. The theorizers of romanticism in Germany, England, and France—especially Germany—discovered in Spanish literature, as they imperfectly knew it—chiefly the Don Quixote, the ballads, and the theatre of Calderón—ammunition for their critical and anticlassical campaign, while the creative writers of these countries found in the land and its people, their history, legends and letters, a new and rich store of themes and settings, made as if to order in response to the demand of the moment for the picturesque and the passionate, the chivalresque and the medieval. But having little interest in Spain for herself nor (Mérimée excepted) any real knowledge of her language, history, or culture, they recreated a conventional, literary Spain according to their own needs, desires and imaginations, that “romantic” Spain best typified perhaps in the Carmen of Mérimée and of Bizet, a conception which has persisted in the popular mind down to the present and against which Spaniards and Hispanophiles—then and now—have reacted more or less violently and in vain. (And, may I add, not with complete justification, for creative artists are hardly to be censured for not being exact historians or archeologists.)

The purpose of this study is to point out Racine's extensive use of peripeteia and recognition in the construction of his plots. That he relied on these two dramatic resources, which Aristotle considered “the most powerful elements of emotional interest in Tragedy,” is hinted at in Lanson's Esquisse d'une histoire de la tragédie française.

The frame thereof seemd partly circulare,
And part triangulare, O worke divine;
These two the first and last proportions are,
The one imperfect, mortall, foeminine;
Th' other immortall, perfect, masculine,
And twixt them both a quadrate was the base
Proportioned equally by seven and nine;
Nine was the circle set in heavens place,
All which compacted made a goodly diapase.
—The Faerie Queene,ii. ix. 22

To offer one more interpretation of the meaning of Spenser's cryptic “House of Alma” may appear like the gratuitous opening of an old wound. I do so only in the fond belief that my proposed therapy will produce a lasting cure, since it satisfies the twin requirements of entire self-consistency and consistency with the Aristotelian ethics which dominate both the canto and book of which this stanza is a part.

Henry Fielding's early writing has been considered mere farce, commercial “theatre,” which has no intrinsic relation to his later ethical work. A reëxamination of his plays indicates, however, that they have a basic seriousness which in many respects anticipates his great novels. For the present I confine my discussion to Fielding's second play, The Temple Beau (1730). Though in general The Temple Beau is conventional in satire and derives from the tradition and practice of the comedy of manners, the play contains at least one important anticipation of the mature work of Fielding, his initial endeavor to find and to use a symbol which has the power to express his attitude toward life.

Although the original MSS of most of Sir Thomas Browne's published works have disappeared, a number of fragments and drafts of passages of The Garden of Cyrus have survived in his loose papers and notebooks, now in the British Museum and Bodleian. In editing Browne's miscellaneous writings a few years ago Keynes noted the resemblance of several fragments to portions of the printed essay, but aside from his brief annotations this material has remained unexplored.

In 1934 Professor Lebègue devoted a series of three articles to the changes made by Montchrestien in the language of his play Sophonisbe as evident in the 1596, 1601, and (to a lesser degree) in the 1604 editions. In these articles Lebègue further attempted to show that the changes made by Montchrestien were the result of the latter's conversations with his compatriot Malherbe. It must be admitted at the outset that Lebègue establishes a very convincing argument for Sophonisbe and especially in so far as concerns the changes made between the 1596 and 1601 editions upon which he has concentrated his main effort. But at the same time one cannot escape the conclusion that if Montchrestien had been a willing pupil of Malherbe before 1601 and had retained some of the latter's teachings, he, nevertheless, reasserted his linguistic independence shortly thereafter. For the 1604 edition of his plays teems with forms, uses, and expressions which, no doubt, would have suffered the ignominy of being crossed out by the irritable pen of the “Docteur en négative.”

In any brief consideration of the implications for English romanticism of the five papers just presented, it is necessary to choose one method of treatment. I must disregard, therefore, international influences, a subject full of danger unless one has time to bolster each statement, and also comparisons and contrasts as such between individual writers or even, to any extent, between nations. I confine myself to a suggestion of the complexity of English romanticism, which seems to share in all the manifold characteristics of romanticism as a general European literary phenomenon and to manifest and combine them in ways of its own. But first I must say what I understand by romanticism.

Die Ergebnisse dieser Untersuchung beruhen auf Analysen der acht wichtigeren Novellen Goethes. Zur Darstellung der Methode bringen wir aber hier nur drei davon in vollständiger Ausführung, indem wir uns für das Uebrige auf allgemeine fachmännische Vertrautheit mit einem wohlbekannten Stoffe verlassen zu können glauben. Das Netz eines Spannungsgefüges wird durch so viele sich durchkreuzende Momente bedingt, dass eine gleichzeitige, allumfassende Interpretation nicht leicht möglich ist. Einen nach dieser Richtung zielenden Vorschlag findet man in einem Artikel: “Zur Charakterologie des Kunstwerks,” wo Hermann Nohl erst nach Feststellung der Spannungsschichten des Kunstwerks, den Grundentscheidungen des menschlichen Charakters gemäss, “die Form der Werke bis in den äusseren Aufbau, ja bis in Klang und Rhythmus der einzelnen Sätze aus ihnen” interpretieren möchte. Für das Material dieser Untersuchung ist das Charakterologische kein unwesentlicher Massstab, aber, um eine zu starke Betonung des Wertproblems zu vermeiden, ziehen wir es vor, von dem Spannungsgegenstand selbst auszugehen, und betrachten zuerst im Nacheinander der Dichtung die stofflichen und gehaltlichen Momente und deren augenblickliche Wirkung auf Wissens- und Gefühlsspannung des Lesers. An dieser letzten, subjektiven Spannungsart bestimmte Intensitätsgrade aufzustellen, wäre eine undankbare, weil belanglose Aufgabe. Wie verschieden auch die Aufnahme des einzelnen Kunstwerks sein mag, der Aufbau des objektiven Werkes bleibt immer derselbe, und in den Erlebnissen der einzelnen Betrachter liegt ein “Gemeinsames: die von dem Kunstwerk gegebenen Vorstellungen,” was bei einer Untersuchung wie dieser den Anspruch auf Allgemeingültigkeit zu rechtfertigen scheint.

Mr. T. S. Eliot in his essay “The Function of Criticism” has commented admirably upon the part which criticism plays in the work of creation itself, calling the highest kind of criticism that which a trained and skilled writer directs toward his own work. “Probably,” Mr. Eliot says, “probably, indeed, the larger part of the labour of an author in composing his work is critical labour; the labour of sifting, combining, constructing, expunging, correcting, testing: this frightful toil is as much critical as creative.” But there is a tendency, “a Whiggery tendency,” so he continues, to deplore this activity of the artist, to regard the great artist as an unconscious artist. Certainly the eighteenth century, whose unfortunate imitation of Milton Mr. Eliot deplores elsewhere, regarded Milton as an unconscious artist, understanding him literally when he speaks (P.L.ix, 21–24) of a

. . . celestial Patroness who deigns
Her nightly visitation unimplored,
And dictates to me slumbering, or inspires
Easy my unpremeditated verse.

In my recent discussion of drama and the passions I here and there cited Cicero and W. B. Yeats; and on further reading in them I find that I had more occasion than I suspected. In criticism, since there are no longer any rules or scarcely any generally accepted principles, argument from authority is almost the only argument acceptable; and the best authority is a genius, either a critic like Aristotle or Longinus, who has had a wide and life-long experience, or else an artist who takes to criticism for a change. Some of the most notable critics have been artists—Horace, Petronius, Sidney, Milton, Dryden and Pope, Wordsworth and Coleridge, Shelley and Keats, Goethe and Heine, Arnold and Swinburne, Molière and Sainte-Beuve, Gautier, Delacroix, Wagner, Berlioz.