The study of any choral lyric, properly so called, and designed to be sung and otherwise performed by a group of executants on a specific public occasion, must be considerably hampered when its original musical setting is not at hand. Indeed the appreciation of such a poem as Alexander's Feast can be only partial at best if the text is read with the comparatively simple apparatus that one usually brings to bear upon a sonnet by Sidney. When the music to a choral ode was no afterthought but rather an integral part of the whole performance, the divorcement of the words from their setting results in an inevitable loss of understanding and of proper response. The ideal way to absorb any choral lyric, whether it be by Pindar, the author of the Book of Judges, or Dryden, would be to hear, if not to participate in, the complex display of sound through which its author intended it to be proclaimed. And since one cannot be present at the original performance of any save contemporary compositions of the kind, it becomes imperative to reconstruct, through the vigorous use of both study and imagination, the original circumstances and the original music which accompanied the poem.

In his “Introduction” to Beowulf (p. lvii) Klaeber makes the following remark:

That some of the speeches follow conventional lines of heroic tradition need not be doubted. This applies to the type of the gylpcwide before the combat (675 ff., 1392 ff., 2510 ff.), the ‘comitatus’ speech or exhortation of the retainers (2633 ff., cp. Bjarkamál [Par. §7: Saxo ii.59 ff.,] Maldon 212 ff., 246 ff., Finnsb. 37 ff.).

cyninges Ðegn,
guma gilphlæden, gidda gemyndig,
sē Ðe ealfela ealdgesegena
worn gemunde —word ōÐer fand
sōÐe gebunden— secg eft ongan
sīÐ Bēowulfes snyttrum styrian,
ond on spēd wrecan spel gerāde,
wordum wrixlan; wēlhwylc gecwæÐ,
Ðæt hē fram Sigemunde(s) secgan …
(Beowulf, ll. 867b–875)

GRENDEL is overcome. The warriors who urged their horses along the trail of bloody tracks are returning to Heorot. A poet-warrior sings, adding the name of Grendel's conqueror to the roll of Germanic heroes. The author of Beowulf gives a brief but precious account of the principles of his poetry. One word finds the other, rightly bound, and there is a varying with words. The inevitable alliteration of Old English poetry, as in the second line above, is obviously the most conspicuous way in which one word found the other, rightly bound. Likewise, varying in words aptly describes the principle underlying the “Kenning” or epic epithet. This principle of style consists in the repetition of words or phrases to round out a full poetic picture by presenting an idea from varying points of view. Examples are cyninges Ðegn, guma gilphlæden, and secg, all of which refer to the poet-warrior in the quoted passage.

Probably no play of Lope de Vega could claim structural perfection. Nevertheless, in his Fuente Ovejuna, universally accepted as a masterpiece, one marvels that the dynamic sweeping main plot—the stirring recital of this town's rebellion against its tyrannical overlord, the Grand Commander of Calatrava—should have been joined to a secondary plot apparently so irrelevant simply to give an account of a young Grand Master's unsuccessful attack on Cuidad Real. The historical background afforded by this episode in the life of the dashing Maestre, don Rodrigo Téllez Girón, does contribute to our understanding of the troubled first years of Ferdinand and Isabella and, to some extent, to the subtly created mediæval atmosphere. But even as milieu, it is far from essential to the epic account of Fuente Ovejuna's uprising. The Reyes Católicos, accorded attention quite out of proportion to their minor function in the drama—the administration of justice from the horizon—are themselves a distracting element.

THOUGH the importance of Sforza Oddi's three comedies in the history of the renaissance theatre has been indicated both by Sanesi and by Flamini, there is still no study devoted to him which provides a detailed biography of the author as well as an evaluation of his work. The following article attempts to analyze his plays more fully than has hitherto been done, and to estimate their significance in the history of Italian comedy. The biographical material has been collected and coördinated from a number of scattered writings dating from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. A certain amount of this material is new, and is the result of research in the libraries of Perugia and Parma. Nothing has been known before about Sforza Oddi's father, apart from his name. The date of the dramatist's first marriage, of the death of his first wife, the fact of his brother's death, and all information drawn from his will (a document previously unknown), and from the record of his doctorate, are mentioned here for the first time.

An Understanding of the purposes and the popularity of Young's Night Thoughts is possible only through a realization of their relation to contemporary currents of thought. For the most part critics have confined their attention to the so-called personal element and the treatment of the theme of death, and have neglected perhaps the most outstanding feature of the Night Thoughts, the interest in Christian apologetics. Though the nine poems reveal a shift in emphasis and purpose—the first five, of 459, 694, 536, 842, and 1068 lines respectively, chiefly concerned with moral reflections on life and death, and the last four, of 819, 1480, 1417, and 2434 lines, almost wholly devoted to apologetics—there is throughout a fairly definite effort to defend one phase or other of religion. This rationalistic defence of religion places the poems in the current of apologetic literature so outstanding in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth century. Analysis of Young's aims and arguments will show to what extent he is following those of the outstanding defenders of religion and demonstrate that the Night Thoughts are to be considered as largely an expression of contemporary apologetics.

One is to infer from this characterization that Beowulf is exceedingly strong. Perhaps one can learn no more. For there may be no significance in the facts that the dragon is fifty feet long (l. 3042), that Beowulf rules the Geats fifty years (ll. 2209, 2733), that Hroþgar rules the Danes fifty years before the coming of Grendel (l. 1769), and that Grendel's dam holds the moors fifty years (l. 1498). And there may even be no connection between these facts except that Beowulf, Hroþgar, and Grendel's dam rule their domains for a very long time and that the dragon is a very long beast. Anything which approaches thirty or fifty in dimension, conventionally approaches the marvellous. Accordingly Deor says (ll. 18–19):

Đeodric ahte þritig wintra
Mæringa burg …

The cardinal question of the inherent strength of the initial syllable has again been raised by Roland G. Kent in an article “The Alleged Strength of the Initial Syllable,” Language, vii, 3, (September, 1931), 179–189. Kent introduces his challenge of certain current notions of the Latin accent with the query:

James Thomson's first contact with Newtonian philosophy was as a student at the University of Edinburgh between 1715 and 1725. Newtonianism had been first introduced there by David Gregory, who, upon graduation in 1683, was appointed Professor of Mathematics. William Whiston, Newton's successor at Cambridge, says that it was to one of Gregory's papers that he owed his conversion to Newton's philosophy. When David Gregory accepted the Savilian professorship of astronomy at Oxford in 1691, he was succeeded at Edinburgh by his brother, James Gregory, another Newtonian. In 1725, on the recommendation of Newton himself, Colin Maclaurin was appointed to assist James Gregory at Edinburgh; thus, from 1683 on, Newtonianism was firmly established in the University of Edinburgh.

One present-day student of that fascinating product of English medievalism, The Owl and the Nightingale, concludes his survey of the so-called “modern phase of discussion” of its problems with mingled approval and dissent. Hearty appreciation of the range and resourcefulness of the recent contributions of two American scholars to our knowledge of the sources and background of the poem contends with an ever-deepening conviction of the futility of their arguments in favor of an earlier date and environment than any hitherto suggested. May a persistent heretic in the face of their somewhat differing opinions cite first specific reasons for the rejection of these and then give his own grounds for yet another conclusion?

Buffoonery and rascality—the two outstanding qualities of the morality play “Vice”—led, under differing influences, to the Elizabethan clown and villain. In early Tudor times, “witty slave” and “parasite” came from the classical drama to an English stage which already knew a figure combining certain of their characteristics, and to an audience who recognized in them certain familiar features. The “Vice” was originally the agent or servant of the Seven Deadly Sins, and sought to entrap “Mankind”—by whatever name he was known—into the power of evil. In a sense, he was a kind of “parasite,” too, his reward depending on the success of his service, and he was the dynamic character in the old plays. Incidentally, he was also the source of much (if not all) the humor in the moralities, and was one of the first figures to reflect the life of the times in a drama which dealt chiefly with personified virtues and vices. He had, for obvious reasons, no virtue in his composition; but he was human, and his vitality gave him an attraction which has descended to some of the later representatives of this type.

This paper has for object the study of the type avoir beau+infinitive in Old French and Modern French. While pursuing the research the author was led to the observation of several cognate types which will be treated later. These, however, may be occasionally referred to in the present paper by the following stock phrases: bel le salua, le blé leva bel, molt lor est bel. In all these types bel is used adverbially.

Goethe's first letter to Schiller, in which he agreed to support the Horen, and which marks the beginning of their unique alliance, contains a passage, in effect, as follows:

The essay “On the Ancient Metrical Romances,” introduced into the third volume of Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), is an important landmark in the modern revival of interest in the medieval romances. Through the earlier part of the eighteenth century the infrequent comments on the romances had been incidental to something else (chivalry, for a conspicuous example) or had been concerned with theories, chiefly of origin, based on very little evidence. Of the romances themselves, little was known, but they were generally considered barbarous, uncultivated, and infantile. But in Percy's essay the subject is treated with some attempt at completeness, and includes not merely theories about their origin (though these are present) but a discussion of the romances themselves. Upon scrutiny, Percy's knowledge of the subject is found to be large, much larger than has been generally suspected, and toward the material he is seen to display a hesitating and diffident enthusiasm manifestly held in check by the disapproval of the current taste. A summary of his essay follows:

This memorable passage (despite its anachronism in assuming that a superstition popular in the time of James I had already been accepted in the time of King Duncan of Scotland) illustrates the ramifications incident to an attempt to study a problem touching upon Romance philology and the history of medicine. The inflammation of the lymphatic glands, technically known as “tuberculous cervical adenitis” but ordinarily called “scrofula,” for a long period received the name of “the King's Evil,” and the treatment of it used to be the special prerogative of royalty. It was thought that the power of the British King to cure scrofula by touching the afflicted person went back to the time of King Lucius of Great Britain. As a matter of fact, King Lucius never existed —except in the imagination of the English theologian William Tooker in the sixteenth century—and the thaumaturgical power of the King began with Henry II (between 1154 and 1189). In France this royal prerogative was supposed to go back to the Merovingian King Clovis, but the earliest document substantiating the claim is the De Gallorum Imperio et Philosophia of Étienne Forcatel, published at Paris in 1579. The tradition of a French King's curing scrofula started with Philip I (between 1060 and 1108), and was actually revived at the coronation of Charles X at Reims in 1825. Attention is called to a painting of the sixteenth century, in the Pinacoteca of Turin, which shows a King of France about to touch a scrofulous crowd. At the right stands a patient on whose stomach one can discern clearly the head of a pig.

Considerable interest has been manifested of late regarding Chaucer's rhetoric. This was occasioned by the French medievalist, Edmond Farai, when in 1924 he edited five poetical treatises which had circulated in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Professor Manly in 1926 in a lecture delivered to the British Academy, concluded that the poet had in all probability studied these texts, and that much of his technical art was learned from them, rather than from his French models, as had formerly been supposed. Two years later, Professor Baldwin climaxed his Medieval Rhetoric and Poetic with a concluding chapter on Chaucer's technique, which records the poet's reaction to such doctrines as these works contain. During the past year, PMLA has published three articles related either to Chaucerian rhetoric or the medieval manuals. Two of these, following the thesis of Manly, assume quite definitely that Faral's treatises exerted a primary influence upon the mind of Chaucer. All these studies are based upon a comparison of only the Chaucerian works and the Latin manuals. Consideration has not been given to the poet's source material as a third element of correlation.