Of the characters with whom Beowulf has an explicit association in speech and action, Unferth is without question the most difficult to assess, and his function in the Danish court would appear to be just as enigmatic. Other characters who play an active part in the events, such as Hrothgar, Wealhtheow, and Wiglaf, are depicted with clarity and consistency, but with Unferth the poet has proceeded deliberately by means of allusion and equivocation, or at least so it seems to the modern reader who is separated from the Anglo-Saxon audience for which some of our mysteries may not have existed at all. From one of the earliest comments on Unferth's role in the poem to the most recent, four primary assumptions about him have been reiterated, viz., 1) he has an important position in the Danish court, 2) he is trusted by the king and his followers, 3) he is later (after Beowulf's return to Geatland) involved in a conspiracy to overthrow Hrothgar's rule, and 4) he is at first estranged from and then reconciled with Beowulf. Relevant to the first two premises a query has persistently been raised: why is Unferth allowed to attack Beowulf with impunity and what motivates his abuse? The bases of these assumptions are not all of one kind: for one and two, students have relied on that vaguely understood epithet, ϸyle, and one comment by the poet (1166-67); for three, on specific allusions by the poet about Unferth's relation with Hrothulf (1164-68); for four, Unferth's gift of Hrunting and Beowulf's response to the gift. What I propose to do here is to reexamine these premises and the query in terms of the conception of ϸyle in Old English and Old Norse, the graphic representation of Unferth, and the problem of the sword-giving.

La oposición medieval entre Dios y Naturaleza, en la cual ésta última era considerada como una potencia enteramente subordinada al Creador y por consiguiente de categoría inferior en relación con el destino último del hombre, va a sufrir en los albores del Renacimiento una dislocación que afecta su constitución más íntima. Dios sigue existiendo como autor de todo lo creado, pero la Naturaleza surge a un primer plano como justificación en sí misma, con poderes inmanentes para su proceso y desenvolvimiento indefinido. Tal desplazamiento de perspectiva significa también un cambio de valoración en el marco de los ideales y de las experiencias humanas, en cuanto éstos últimos se polarizan hacia lo exclusivamente mundano y temporal. De la misma manera, la oposición entre “Cultura” y “Naturaleza,” entendida aquélla como el conjunto de leyes y de formas creadas por el hombre para su vida en sociedad, sufre un diverso reajuste interno. Al conceder el hombre mayor preponderancia al mundo natural, brota una implícita rebeldía contra las barreras de contención que él mismo se ha impuesto para someter a la Naturaleza siempre lista a desbordarse. Tal reacondicionamiento de nociones correlativas y antagónicas aparece en la Tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, en la forma de un resquebrajamiento reversivo de los valores tradicionales y consagrados de la religión (Divinidad) y de la honra (sociedad), frente al triunfo del mundo natural, y constituye una de las características estructurales y definidoras de la obra. Examinaremos en seguida la compleja interrelación de estos conceptos y valores.

In the voluminous literature which has arisen in connection with all possible aspects of Shakespeare's Hamlet, a respectable percentage is found to deal with the Ghost. The character, function, and antecedents of the Ghost, like those of the other dramatis personae, have been subjected to the most searching scrutiny and analysis. In particular, Shakespeare's use of a ghost rôle in Hamlet has been discussed in relationship to the evolution of the Senecan ghost in Elizabethan drama, and compared to other “revenge” ghosts of contemporary or earlier authors. In the light of the obvious relationship of the ghost rôle in Hamlet to that of the Senecan-Elizabethan stage ghost, no further pedigree has seemed necessary for the Ghost himself as a character in the play. This is the more understandable in that, so far as I have been able to ascertain, the scholars who have discussed the sources of Hamlet have been unanimous in stating or implying that no trace of the Ghost exists in any of the accepted sources of the play. With the general accuracy of these impressions regarding the genesis of the rôle there can be no quarrel. It should nevertheless interest and perhaps startle researchers and students in the field to learn that the ghost of Hamlet's father did “appear” in one of the accepted sources of the play, the Histoires tragiques of François de Belieforest.

Probably at no point during the English Renaissance did the influence of neo-Latin writers upon English vernacular prose and poetry become so predominant as during the emergence of the rhetorical principles and practice of the plain style. The comprehensive descriptive treatises of classical poetic theory, such as those of Minturno and J. C. Scaliger, which were used extensively by the writers of English rhetoric books like George Puttenham and Henry Peacham the elder, did not recommend and defend so much as enumerate specific principles. Since the English rhetoric books were primarily concerned with methods of amplification and the more ornate stylistic conventions of the Continental literary movements, they were directed mainly at the courtly Petrarchan imitators and borrowed little from discussions of the plain style. This meant, of course, that one would have had to return to the Latin text of such general reference works as Scaliger's Poetices for information about the genus tenue or the genres which employed it, and even then such works often did little more than transpose their classical sources. The neo-Latin influence upon anti-Ciceronianism in prose and anti-Petrarchanism in verse, therefore, became considerably more significant when an English writer, such as Jonson, in reacting against the poetic attitudes and practice of the Petrarchans, looked for rhetorical corroboration for his position and found it, not only in certain ancient writers, but in such men as Erasmus, Vives, Lipsius, and Bacon, who advocated various applications of the Attic style and argued their case with power and precision. Jonson's Discoveries is particularly valuable as a statement of the neo-Latin influence on the plain style, since it describes a rhetorical position which he consistently practised in his own writing. Since he borrowed accurate descriptions of the style and its intentions from treatises of the men just mentioned, as well as from the famous works on the classical genres which employed the sermo by such scholars as Daniel Heinsius and Isaac Casaubon, the Discoveries can be described as a handbook of the new authorities on matters of style. Although it was not published until 1640, the neo-Latin authorities it cites exerted their formative influence on Jonson's stylistic ideas and practice from the middle 1590's on and, largely through his own authority, on those of the first half of the seventeenth century.

Despite its sovereign status among English elegies and within English poetry in general, two strictures upon Lycidas continue in some degree to shadow the poem: the one would hold with Dr. Johnson that its pastoral apparatus is a flaw in terms both of art and of personal expression; the other would agree with G. Wilson Knight that the work lacks order or unity. Both strictures have become increasingly untenable in the light of one type of study which has helped to make reavailable the form and power of the pastoral elegy in itself, and of another type which has marked the structural and affective unity of Milton's poem. Yet some readers still may feel that Milton sets cool pastoral against impassioned personal outcry, and will consider the two modes of expression to be in direct conflict. Milton editors and critics therefore will continue to face the question of unity in Lycidas. Recently Douglas Bush and Merritt Y. Hughes, for example, delivered defenses of the poem in the course of registering adverse charges made against it.

Criticism of the Horatian ode is in much the same state as it was twenty, or even fifty years ago, although recently the opinion has rightly been gaining ground that Marvell was less ambiguously Cromwellian than older and more sentimentally royalist readers liked to think. However, a belief in Marvell's political impartiality, or in the reluctance of his support for Cromwell, remains almost a sine qua non for anyone who discusses the poem, but I shall try to show that by 1650 Marvell had become completely Cromwellian, and that his theme was Cromwell's election as the constitutional dictator of England, in accordance with the popular concept of the dux bellorum which permitted dictators at the commencement of new empires. My second proposal is that the undeniable impartiality of Marvell's tone and stance derives not from a neutral political attitude, but from the careful rhetorical procedure which Marvell adopted in order to make his theme persuasive to a doubtful audience. The ode is a political or deliberative oration, written to the pattern of such speeches formulated by the classical orators. Deliberative speeches generally dealt with a “difficult” subject, the genus admirabile causae, and frequently began with an insinuatio—a device employed when the opinion of the audience was considered to be prejudiced against the case. But before beginning an examination of the poem and identifying the source of Marvell's brilliant “insinuation,” it would be well to outline very briefly the state of English loyalism in 1649-50, which lends credence to Marvell's position in the ode, and helps to explain how it was possible for a man of integrity to hold opinions so contrary to his earlier royalism.

Without its verbal irony, Tom Jones would be quite a different book: massive and well made but lacking the high polish and the effect of urbane control which do much to preserve it as a major classic. Its realism, its satire, and even its much-praised plot keep their unified brilliance through being governed by an ironic style that forms as important a contribution to the English novel as any Fielding made.

Wieland is conventionally and correctly regarded as a novel of purpose which marks a turn from the stories of love and seduction fathered by Richardson to the kind of story made prominent by Holcroft, Bage, and Godwin. The particular purposes of Wieland, however, have never been precisely identified, and this reading is offered in the belief that the novel has been subjected by most students to a form of damnation through faint praise. By marveling that an American in 1798 could produce readable fiction, they place undue emphasis on mere chronology and slight the importance of the novel as part of a more meaningful cultural continuity. Wieland is an important novel because of the extraordinary manner in which Brown employs sentiment against itself (rather than simply dismissing it, as it is averred he has done), penetrates beneath the principles of the optimistic psychology of his day, and recognizes the claims which Calvinism makes on the American character.

Götz . . . has always seemed to me . . . rather a tedious play for non-Germans, says Ronald Peacock (Goethe's Major Plays) Manchester, 1959, p. 12). This verdict strikes uncomfortably close to the apparent value set on the play among English and American readers, and it implies at most a mixed compliment to the Germans, who presumably like it better. In Peacock's view, “a great act of historical sympathy is needed.” To respond to such a need is surely more an act of loyal charity than of critical judgment—and a dubious tribute to the work itself. In sum, Peacock finds the play historically “determined” not only by its sixteenth-century background but by its eighteenth-century genesis: Götz the uncorrupted “natural genius,” an idealized antithesis, in Herder's spirit for example, to the prevailing social order.

Several years ago I published an article drawing attention to a forgotten statement by the nineteenth-century bibliographer T. F. Dibdin to the effect that Thomas Moore and not, as has often been supposed, Hazlitt or Jeffrey wrote the much disputed review of Coleridge's Christabel that appeared in the Edinburgh Review for September 1816 (xxvii, 58-67). Dibdin's phrasing suggested that he might have known the truth from a good source. Testing his ascription in the light of other evidence, I concluded that he was almost certainly right though as far as was known otherwise Moore had not acknowledged the article and might very well even have denied it. It now appears that in effect Moore did deny it, and the question therefore should be reviewed.

How seriously one takes a writer's disavowal of an anonymous publication obviously depends upon the writer and the circumstances. Some authors must be believed without question; from others—Scott is the prime nineteenth-century example—a denial is somewhat less than final. His fellow-Scotsman Jeffrey, on the other hand, though as editor of the Edinburgh Review he had constantly to do with anonymous writing, avoided the alternatives of betrayal or prevarication by a consistent policy of silence; when he did speak out, even inveterate enemies scarcely questioned his word. The difference may be less a matter of ethical standards than of the author's conception of the privilege attached to anonymity, which can sometimes be preserved only by evasion or deception. Thomas Moore leaves us in no uncertainty about his position. “For my own part, I think every possible trick fair with that animal ferae naturae, the Public,” he wrote to the poet Rogers in 1814. This was his justification for a tangle of misstatements and secrecy into which he had been driven by a complex of worry and hope over the reception of Lalla Rookh. It applied equally to his anonymous writing, which he was often disposed to deny when its success was doubtful. “Though I shall of course deny the trifles I am now doing, yet, if they are liked, I shall be sure to get the credit of them,” he wrote in a letter of 1813. “Of course” is the telling phrase in this confession. At one time or another, sometimes explicitly and sometimes by implication, he denied his authorship of the Intercepted Letters, Little Man and Little Soul, Tom Crib's Memorial to Congress, A Vision: by the Author of Christabel, and at least one contribution to the Edinburgh Review; he also once planned to pass off an air of his own composing as a “national” air. These denials happen to have survived in his own written records. Others have probably gone unrecorded, for his concealments were many.

It has frequently been assumed that Keats, in revising the earlier version of Hyperion into The Fall of Hyperion: A Dream, was liberating himself from the influence of Milton and, especially, of Paradise Lost. In the new induction to The Fall he abandoned the epic structure of the first Hyperion for a form that is both more personal and allegoric—that of a vision or dream. The change is sweeping, involving not only structure but style, and apparently reflects the poet's dissatisfaction with the epic nature of the earlier version. Valid reasons for that dissatisfaction are not difficult to find. The first two books of Hyperion, with their description of the fallen divinities and their conclave, in general parallel the action of the first two books of Paradise Lost. Whereas Milton in his opening books gradually introduces his main subject, the fall of man, Keats suddenly presents, in his third, the deification of the poet, Apollo, through an imaginative and supremely intense realization of human destiny and its suffering. That vision is largely subjective and personal and represents Keats's groping toward a new and more mature conception of tragic beauty, the relevance of which to the epic events that precede it is not, and perhaps never could have been, made clear. Nor is it apparent how he could have continued his narrative when its climax had already been achieved.

Arthur Gordon Pym has been dead these many years, having perished, we are told, in an accident shortly after his return from a journey to the south. The faint tappings we have heard of late do not come from within the box, but from without; modern critics are attempting to loosen the nails pounded in by decades of indifference. In view of America's history of literary revivals and resurrections, it would not be surprising to see the lid fly suddenly off, letting Pym, like Mr. Shuttleworthy, spring into a sitting position and proclaim himself the author of a great masterpiece of literature.

Nothing that dramatic is likely to happen. But it is true that after one hundred years of bewilderment at the betrayal of sensibility evidenced in the French admiration of The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, American critics and literary historians began to praise or condemn the book on a firmer basis than the memory of a childhood reading. In the last few years three critics have given the work the benefit of sensitive and mature judgment. To these I feel the need to add some thoughts, partly because someone, in memory of Poe, should cherish the vision of the young artist, happy in his artist's duplicity, juggling parts, manipulating symbols with ingenuity and dexterity toward an end he was destined never to achieve; and partly, too, because I can now say, with all the assurance of hindsight, that as an artist he was doomed almost from the start, that the philosophical ending was in the artistic beginning. Poe's works are all variations on a single persistent theme that finds its expression in forms ranging from pure hokum to pure speculation. Somewhere between the extremes, in a few stories, Poe manages to strike a chord familiar to the modern reader's ear.

Although the wealth of religious imagery in Hawthorne's “Roger Marvin's Burial” has been frequently remarked, little attempt has been made to identify specific Biblical allusions for the purpose of analyzing them in the light of the story in which they appear. This neglect of an important aspect of the author's complex method of composition extends to the whole of his work and is the result of a generally held, though ill-defined, idea that such allusions, stemming as they do from the author's known familiarity with the Bible, represent pure overflow and are not truly integral to the pieces in which they are embedded. Nathalia Wright, for example, has observed that compared to Melville, Hawthorne made “slight and straightforward use of Scripture.” I submit that a more rigorous examination of Hawthorne's use of the Bible than has heretofore been made will reveal the reverse to be true. His employment of Scripture is extensive, subtle, and must be considered an organic aspect of a most complex literary method. An analysis of the uses to which Hawthorne put his Biblical sources in “Roger Malvin's Burial” will serve to illustrate the case in point.

The revisions that a writer makes in a work often reveal his method of composition and thus add to our knowledge of his creative process. In an effort to increase our understanding of the creative practices of De Quincey, I have undertaken an analysis of the revisions that he made in the “Dream-Fugue.”

There are extant three different, but incomplete, versions of the “Dream-Fugue.” These are: (1) The manuscript submitted to Blackwood's Magazine in 1849, now in possession of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh. The manuscript, which contains all except a portion of the last paragraph of the first four parts of the article, is a holograph and thus shows the revisions that De Quincey made while preparing the work. (2) The article as it appeared in Blackwood's Magazine in December 1849, being printed apparently from the holograph. (3) The article as it was published in the Author's Edition in 1854, showing the revisions De Quincey made in the magazine version when he included it as part of his collected works. In addition to these versions which are of some length, we have a fragment of three paragraphs found among De Quincey's papers after his death and published in 1891 by A.H. Japp in The Posthumous Works of De Quincey. Thus, we have four documents containing all or portions of the “Dream-Fugue,” with the holograph showing the most changes and therefore being the most useful in determining the author's pattern of revision.

Ruskin is no longer a controversial figure. Most contemporary critics, of art, of society, of literature, ignore him.

Ruskin's own weaknesses are responsible for much of this neglect—not least the flood of words which overflows the thirty-nine volumes of Cook and Wedderburn. No single volume, not even Unto This Last nor Praeterita, can be recommended without qualification, nor any single phase of Ruskin's work. His art judgments are often arrogantly inept, as toward Claude and Whistler and Renaissance architecture; his aesthetics is contradictory, homiletic; his social criticism is sometimes antiquarian, proposing quixotic reforms. The fervors of Ruskin's style offend current taste, with our preference for tight, flat, and uncommitted exposition.

What could have possessed Zola to let a writer of vaudevilles tamper with his novels? André Antoine asked himself the question in his journal the day after the dismal failure of Germinal, and we still wonder about it today. Very little is known about Busnach, except that he was one of the directors of the Athénée theater, and the author of such items as Ali-Baba and Froufrou. Did Zola really think this theatrical butterfly was capable of converting Germinal, or any other novel for that matter, into a play?

Let us not judge him by his boulevard reputation alone. Sarah Bernhardt called him the wittiest man in Paris, no mean compliment coming from her.2 He possessed the gift—or burden— of extreme sensitivity, and a line from one of his letters to Zola, “Je suis trop votre collaborateur et pas assez votre ami” might serve as epigraph to their relationship. Moreover, Zola had burned himself at the sputtering limelight of the Boulevard des Italiens with Les Heritiers Rabourdin and Le Bouton de rose; why should he not have welcomed the cooperation of a man who knew his business well? Despite the fact that there is a mass of available material on this collaboration— material which throws much light upon Zola's critical and esthetic theories—there has been no real attempt to relate Zola dramaturge with Zola romancier. Relationships did nevertheless exist, as I shall indicate. In the course of their collaboration, Busnach wrote Zola nearly 2000 letters, and in the absence of Zola's replies, these remain our chief source of information.3 My remarks are based upon them, and upon the texts of the plays.4

The close of the nineteenth century in Spain saw a sudden intellectual revival that has led some authorities to speak of a second Golden Age of Spanish literature. This modern Renaissance ushered in by the so-called “ Generation of 1898” projected its renovating influence well into the twentieth century with later writers who inherited the ideological, moral, and esthetic preoccupations of the initiators of the new currents. The unorthodoxy of the new approaches, however, by no means received an unqualified approval. In fact, perhaps the most characteristic reaction of the critic of this period has been, and indeed still is, to question not merely the value but the very validity of these unconventional creations: Is Ortega y Gasset's cultural ideology the expression of a genuine philosophy? Does Unamuno's intellectualized verse really merit the appellation of poetry? Can Miró's novels be said to progress beyond mere plastic description? This challenging of the authenticity of the literary product, stemming from what one critic calls “la mania clasificatoria,” has been directed most devastatingly against the novel, and perhaps against none more especially than that of José Martínez Ruiz, “Azorín.”