Confronted with his fabulously ugly wife after an unwelcome marriage ceremony, Chaucer's hero in the Wife of Bath's Tale receives from her a bit of consolation as ineffective as it is irrefutable. True it is, she says, that I am foul and old, but consider that for this very reason you need never fear that I shall cuckold you:

D 1215 “For filthe and eelde, also moot I thee
Been gret wardeyns upon chastitee.“

In the Library of Congress there is a micro-film of the cod. germ. quart-414, Berlin, Preussische Staatsbibliothek, a manuscript valuable for those interested in the study of Meistergesang. It contains Meisterlieder which Hans Sachs had collected and includes forty which he wrote himself. Begun in July, 1517, the copying was probably completed by the end of the next year, since none of the poems carry a date later than 1518. For this article a detailed account of the history of the manuscript is not essential. Various scholars have described it briefly, and Goedeke noted its contents, to a certain extent, in his Grundriß. The manuscript is a long one, 459 leaves in addition to a Preface and twenty folios of Index. It is hoped that the following analysis may prove of assistance to those who, like myself, might want to investigate particular problems.

Pattern poetry is verse which by the varying length of its lines forms a picture or design. Although most readers have noticed Herbert's “Easter Wings” or some of the fanciful shapes in Carolyn Wells' Whimsey Anthology, few have realized that these verses are forms which have come down to the modern era from Greek literature and possibly from even earlier oriental writings. My purpose in this article is to bring to light still one more influence which the Greek Anthology exerted on English literature in the sixteenth century and to discuss the first English poets who began to write shaped verses, forerunners of hundreds of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century patterns in poetry.

The gossipy, semi-journalistic style of Nashe's Pierce Penilesse made it an immediate best-seller. Between 1592 and 1595, according to Nashe himself, it passed through “at the least … sixe Impressions.” But the author's joy at his sudden success seems to have been somewhat dimmed as the result of a literary indiscretion that plagued him all the rest of his life. In this remarkable pamphlet, for the purpose of illustrating the deadly sin of hypocrisy, he introduces an extended fable or allegory satirizing men in high places. Since he himself considered his “tale of a Battle-dore,” as he facetiously calls it, to be a digression from the main theme of Pierce Penilesse, and hence a unit in itself, it may be treated without reference to its context.

A few years ago one bold critic rose in defense of Jaques and protested against “the disturbing intrusion of antiquarian learning” in the interpretation of Shakespeare. Apparently, however, this troublesome academic ghost is still unlaid. Indeed, so much erudite nonsense has been talked about “Elizabethan psychology” in the last quarter of a century that it has come to seem either mortal ignorance or scholarly apostasy to challenge it. We may no longer read the Elizabethans and Jacobeans for their plain poetical meanings: any phrase that speaks however faintly of souls and deeds, or of thoughts and feelings, we must interpret literally in terms of a dutifully mastered sixteenth century jargon. If a plotting villain who sees his intended victim approaching so much as cries “Dive, thoughts, down to my soul!” his words are found heavy with psychological import he little dreamed of: he is using “words which represent the final perversion of the will. In the light of Elizabethan thinking, they probably mean the wilful subjection of intellect to a mode of thought and action guided by the desires of the heart.”

Scholars and students interested in doing research work in Meistergesang will find Berlin 414 an important MS for this genre. In content, for example, it has more to offer even than the famed Kolmar MS or the Dresden M 13.

True, the Kolmar MS is in the lead numerically, as it lists more poems or Lieder than the Berlin 414, but in handling the Karl Bartsch edition of the MS, the author frequently felt that it was unsatisfactory and had many limitations when the checking of the contents was concerned, since there are but 203 Lieder completely printed out of the 940 poems. In the Berlin MS we find just about every one of the 398 poems given in their entirety.

Put off by the casual tone of the poet who in his Arcadia, a “trifle … triflinglie handled,” seemed to be guided only by the whim of his sister, readers are often unable to reconcile the sprightly air of the cavalier raconteur with the serious intent of the young defender of poets and poesy. But giving proper weight to Sidney's “poetry must teach as well as delight,” critics have come to concede his sober purpose in romance as well as in apologetic. Sprezzatura, courtly grace, conceals, however, not only moral seriousness but also equal seriousness in poetic plan and procedure. We must look in the Arcadia for the careful artist as well as the edifying teacher. We must try to discover there that strong rein of order which Sidney thought necessary to check the “high flying libertie of conceit proper to the Poet,” that art which “doth give the fashion,” the traces of that Dedalus whom “the highest flying wit” must have to guide him.

The tragic history of the royal house of Denmark opens with an episode which seems today, on any rational basis, absurd. Horatio tells Marcellus and Bernardo on the castle terrace at midnight that the elder Fortinbras, King of Norway, challenged Hamlet's father to single combat, agreeing to forfeit all his lands if vanquished, and that the Danish king put up an equal stake. In the ensuing encounter Fortinbras was slain. The elder Hamlet thus appears as a reckless champion, risking life and lands on personal valor, rather than as a careful guardian of his domain. Nowadays, if we give this a thought, we are likely to dismiss it as an odd custom, familiar from Viking days and the time when knighthood was in flower. It is indeed one of the archaic features of the old tale of Amleth which survived into Shakespeare's pages, but it still had, in the Elizabethan age, a validity which is not always realized. Although it is only a small piece in the great tapestry of Hamlet, it will repay, I think, some special examination.

In spite of the work accomplished by such students of the court masque as Brotanek, Reyher, and Miss Welsford and such Jonsonian scholars as Castelain and Herford, I believe that Jonson's long concern with the courtly spectacle has not been fully understood. Jonson's pedantry or antiquarianism, the many excellent lyrical passages in his main masques, the “little comedies of manners” in his antimasques, and the “usual flattery” of the courtly entertainment have been the critics' points of emphasis. Very recently Mr. Gordon pointed out that in The Masque of Blacknesse and The Masque of Beautie Jonson attempted to elucidate solid Renaissance doctrine, but only Mr. Gilbert, as far as I know, has questioned the correctness of interpreting as flattery some of the passages praising James in Jonson's courtly spectacles. Usually Jonson's “weighty antiquarianism” and “unabashed flattery” have been either censured or indulgently condoned in these “strictly occasional” works wherein the greatest persons in the realm exhibited themselves and their riches in the intricate dances that formed the center of the Masque and the sumptuous tournament that formed the center of the Barriers.

Francisco de Hollanda has been assured a modest paragraph in the ledger of history for three principal merits: he was a competent miniaturist, he was one of Portugal's most enthusiastic humanists, and he was a friend of Michelangelo Buonarroti. Curiously enough, it was this latter acquaintanceship which constituted his chief claim to fame. In the month of October, 1538, Francisco was present at three conversations on art and aesthetics in which participated, among others, Michelangelo and his good friend Vittoria Colonna. Francisco recorded these conversations for posterity. Together with a fourth dialogue in which Michelangelo does not figure, these Dialogos em Roma form the latter half of Francisco's Da pintura antigua, published at Lisbon in 1548.

The “lost poems” of Sir Arthur Gorges (c. 1557-1625) have been found. They are the “sweet layes of love” that Spenser praised in Colin Clout (384-391). When Colin calls upon Alcyon (Gorges) to abandon songs of mourning for his dead Daphne, he urges him to pursue the brave conceit of his sweet Eglantine of Meriflure. This Eglantine poem is in the new-found manuscript, but it is still incomplete: it is headed “Pastoral unfynyshed,” and an “etc.” is written where it breaks off after the sixth stanza. Even at Colin's bidding, the widowed Alcyon never finished his shepherd's song to Eglantine (“shee woonnes in plesaunte Meryfleur”). She is the Daphne whom he later lost, as other poems in this manuscript prove, where Daphne and the eglantine are significantly associated; thus she is the Douglas Howard who is the subject of Spenser's elegy Daphnaida.

The classical conception of the “urbs æterna,” voiced by a long line of Rome's poets and orators, is an element in Milton's Paradise Regained which deserves recognition particularly since it serves to bring to light the strong possibility that in composing Paradise Regained Milton may have levied on the poetry of the Roman panegyrist Claudianus (fl. 400 a.d.).

A recent editor of Shakespeare describes Measure for Measure as “strange and puzzling,” “the despair of commentators.” No play, it would seem, has met with estimates more conflicting. Even common sense (in the person of Samuel Johnson) has voiced disapproval; and the insight of Coleridge, which so often probes deeper, has registered here a pained dislike. Complaints against either the play's subject, its plot, its hero, or its heroine have been heard from critics as eminent as Hazlitt, Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, and Sir Edmund Chambers. In opposition to the disparagers, however, there has appeared within the last century a strain of favorable criticism, lately almost enthusiastic. The rehabilitation may be said to have begun when certain Victorian commentators proclaimed Isabella a sweetly noble heroine, defying Mrs. Lennox's judgment of her as a “mere Vixen.” Yet these same Victorians disapproved the Duke; so that the recent and brilliant apology for the Duke by G. Wilson Knight, comparing the Duke's words and deeds with those of Jesus Christ, has come as a remarkable advance in the reappreciation of the play. At the same time W. W. Lawrence, by his study of medieval custom and analogue, has helped recommend the play's action and enhance its theatrical plausibility. Despite these defenses there are critics who continue to read Measure for Measure as a portrait of disillusionment,‘ negation, and the playwright's supposed cynicism. But two recent Annual Lectures before the British Academy take up boldly the opposite view. C. J. Sisson declares that “Far from being rotten, the play is sound to the core, and profoundly Christian in spirit”; and the late R. W. Chambers acclaims it as embodying a philosophy “more definitely Christian than that of The Tempest.” Appearing the same year as Professor Chambers’ spirited essay is C. J. Reimer's Marburg dissertation, in which we find repeated with emphasis Louis Albrecht's earlier high estimate of the play: it reveals, say these German scholars, the “Hauptzüge der Shakespeareschen Weltanschauung”—namely, a Christian faith not dogmatic or ecclesiastical but Biblical and evangelical. Finally, there has been in recent months a flurry of essays exploring the play's ethical nature. D. A. Traversi calls Measure for Measure “uncompromisingly moral”; F. R. Leavis finds in it a “fineness of ethical and poetic sensibility” which makes it “one of the very greatest of the plays”; and Miss M. C. Bradbrook offers the suggestion to regard it as “something resembling the medieval Morality.” Out of this welter of criticism one truth clearly emerges: that in this instance Shakespeare's work has abundantly justified its teasing title by becoming a “measure” for critics.