This essay interrogates Sergei Eisenstein's critique of D. W. Griffith's montage aesthetic, arguing that, in Griffith's Orphans of the Storm, historical perspective is constituted in opposition to (rather than as a result of) the forward surge of the film's montage. Griffith represents historical consciousness through the narrative figure of trembling, harking back to Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, another text in which the movements of history are registered on the bodies of witnesses who struggle to keep their composure. Both Griffith and Dickens construct a social world driven to extremes by competing ideological forces and imagine historical subjects whose reactions to emergency—witnessing and trembling—hold them apart from it. Ultimately, these gestures of response suggest a tendency in melodramatic texts to construct a normative subjectivity that resists the antithetical underpinnings of melodrama itself.

This essay is about the pressure on the words poetry and marriage to pair off homologously, to behave isomorphically, and about the forms of resistance to that pressure, examples of which I locate under a term, indifference, that in Romanticism is coupled with conjugality to signify not apathy but recalcitrance. Reading Austen, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Schlegel, and Barbauld, I adopt indifference to describe writing that works in fugitive ways outside the forensic boundaries of marriage culture, which constrain marriage writing whether it is epithalamic or anticonjugal. I then argue that Marianne Moore's “Marriage” (1923) and Anne Carson's The Beauty of the Husband (2001) do not write narrowly for or against marriage as, outrageously, freedom's necessary form but, more widely, write against the foundational grain of a pervasive marriage culture that would preempt the subjects and forms of writing, as well as the question of freedom.

By 1755 English dramatic audiences as well as English dramatic critics were less concerned with faults in the construction of Shakespeare's plays then they had been twenty years earlier. Largely because of Garrick's excellent acting, the focal point of Shakespearian criticism was shifting from consideration of plot structure to consideration of character delineation. But even though advance was being made in the new criticism as well as in the growth of Shakespeare idolatry, such a varied mixture of realistic material, classical mythology, and fairy lore as Shakespeare used in A Midsummer Night's Dream was bound to fail in presentation. Pepys, nearly one hundred years earlier (September 29, 1662), had seen the play and had remarked that it was the most insipid and ridiculous one he had ever witnessed in his life. In 1716 Richard Leveridge presented his Comick Masque of Pyramus and Thisbe at Lincoln's Inn Fields, where it had nine performances (from April 11 of that year until September 9, 1723). As the title suggests, it was a brief handling of Bottom's playing artisans—a mere fragment of Shakespeare's play. On January 21, 1745 an anonymous Mock Opera, Pyramus and Thisbe, appeared at Covent Garden and enjoyed some twenty-two performances until April 13, 1748. The music was composed by John Frederick Lampe, and the play was slightly longer than Leveridge's. No other performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream in any of its parts is recorded until 1755 when Garrick made his first attempt to give his audiences some more of the material of the play. He was wise, as subsequent events proved, not to try to present it at that time in its entirety. Yet he was vitally interested in the whole of the play and joined eight years later with his friend George Colman in an attempt to produce it in its Shakespearian form.

In determining more narrowly the date of A Session of the Poets, commonly ascribed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, c. 1676, the dating of the play Wits Led by the Nose has proved to be of preliminary concern, since it contains the first known reference to A Session. Wits Led has on the title-page verso “August 1677,” the date when it was licensed for printing, but there is no external evidence for the date of composition or of its acting at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Falling back on internal evidence, we find this not explicit, but of a significance beyond the dating. The internal evidence for the acting date offers a clue to an unsettled question of identity: who made up the “younger part” of the King's or Duke's Company that acted in Lent, and what relation if any did these actors bear to the Nursery? The answer to this may provide another principle for determining the acting date of certain Restoration plays—the principle, namely, that a particular set of actor's names in a dramatis personæ may have a seasonal significance.

Gröber, in his history of Romance philology, recognizes Fauchet as the man who founded the study of mediaeval French literature “soweit es die ihm zugänglichen Hss. gestatteten.” England had to wait another two hundred years till Sharon Turner did her a like service with his History of England from the Earliest Period to the Norman Conquest (1795-1805). Fauchet was also a political historian of the mediaeval period, but in this field he had an illustrious predecessor, in the person of Jean Dutillet (d. 1570), lawyer and secretary to Henry II of France. This able man was commissioned by his king to investigate the trésor des chartres; the result was a six-volume report, La France ancienne, du gouvernement des trois estats en l'ordre de la justice de France avec les changements qui sont arrivés. This is the first modern history of a mediaeval period (the Capetian dynasty), and Dutillet followed it with treatises on the Albigensian Crusade and the Gallican Church, which were published after his death. Fauchet, following in Dutillet's footsteps, but on his own initiative, took as his province the first two dynasties of France. Before taking up the subject of his library it may be well to summarize what is known of Fauchet's life and work.

The orthodox view regarding the introduction of end rime into English verse is succinctly set forth in the following quotations : “ Endrime, being a stranger to the early Germanic languages, its appearance in any of them may commonly be taken as a sign of foreign influence. In general, of course, rime and the stanza were introduced together into English verse, under the influence of Latin hymns and French lyrics.” “ Die alliterierende Langzeile war die einzige in der ags. Poesie bekannte Versart und blieb in derselben bis zu ende der ersten ags. oder altenglischen Sprachperiode in Gebrauch.” “ The transformation of the O. E. alliterative line into rhyme verse did not take place before the Middle English period. It was due to the influence of the rhymed French and Latin verse.” “ Alliterative verse was remodelled on Latin and French verse—or foreign verses were directly imitated.” The implication is that there never existed in Anglo-Saxon any verse of a form different from that of the five-type alliterative verse which prevails in the corpus of extant Anglo-Saxon poetry.

The image projected in the reader's mind by an author's description offers a basis for comparison with the visual arts. Art historical criteria are applied to equivalent descriptions—a portrait, an architectural complex, and a scene involving motion—in the Perceval of Chrestien de Troyes and the Parzival of Wolfram von Eschenbach. Chrestien's traditional rhetorical portrait of Blancheflor is a still, frontal, symmetrical image; his description of chastel merveile gives meticulous surface detail but instead of a logical spatial connection the parts are simply juxtaposed in the plane; Gavain's fight with the lion shows no real motion but breaks down into a series of still vignettes which represent rather than show the action. On the other hand, Wolfram's portrait of Condwiramurs is glimpsed from various angles and distances as she moves through space; Schastel Marveile is vaguely described but spatially self-consistent; motion in Gawan's lion fight is continuous in both space and time. Thus Chrestien's descriptions relate to the dominant tradition of medieval art which shows figures and objects in characteristic poses or arrangements outlined in the plane, Wolfram's to that uncommon strain which attempts to cope with natural relationships, particularly those of volumes in space.

When a monumental new edition of Billy Budd appeared in 1962, it was the hope of the editors that their exhaustive scholarship might contribute to a definitive interpretation of the novel. Such a wish might seem unnecessarily restrictive, but the extreme critical divergence on Billy Budd has created a genuine threat to its artistic integrity as a result of its apparent failure to support a demonstrable reading. This essay is an attempt to end the war, or to make the end more predictable.

The general history of minstrel life in the Middle Ages has been several times very adequately treated, but the relation of the jongleurs to the classes outside the courts has, owing to a natural scarcity of documentation, been more or less neglected. The so-called “biographies” of the troubadours seem to me, however, to throw considerable light on this subject and on the relation between the jongleur, who was professionally an entertainer, and the troubadour, who was technically an inventor or composer of poetry and song. It was not until about the middle of the twelfth century that the new idea of trobar, of individual composition with the copyright of one's name attached to it, came to Provence. The new troubadour craft came to demand certain fine qualities; its honor and its promise of high patronage attracted numbers of the more gifted jongleurs, some of the best of whom, we learn, were of the lower classes.

One doesn't get too many teaching moments like this: I am standing by the water fountain outside our classroom. One of the students taking a break from the final exam in the course in Dante's Divine Comedy looks up at me from the fountain and says, “When I read this stuff, it's like I'm out of here.”

During his own lifetime Bishop Joseph Hall was nicknamed “our spiritual Seneca” by Henry Wotton and later called “our English Seneca” by Thomas Fuller; as a result it has recently become fashionable to associate him with seventeenth-century English Neo-Stoicism. A seventeenth-century Neo-Stoic is of interest presumably because he points in the direction of eighteenth-century Neo-Stoicism, away from a revealed religion toward a natural religion, away from faith toward reason. In a recent article Philip A. Smith calls Hall “the leading Neo-Stoic of the seventeenth century” and says that he enthusiastically preached the “Neo-Stoic brand of theology” to which Sir Thomas Browne objected. This theology maintained that “to follow ‘right reason’ was to follow nature, which was the same thing as following God.” Smith goes on to say that “what most attracted seventeenth-century Christian humanists like Bishop Hall was the fact that Stoicism attempted to frame a theory of the universe and of the individual man which would approximate a rule of life in conformity with an ‘immanent cosmic reason‘”—though in the same paragraph he also mentions the point “that Neo-Stoic divines of the seventeenth century were interested in Stoicism almost exclusively from the ethical point of view.” He cites Lipsius to show how a Christian might reach an approximation between the Stoic Fate and Christian Providence, leaving the reader to assume that Hall might also have made this approximation. He says that “the natural light of reason, as expounded by the Stoic philosophers, became, for seventeenth-century Neo-Stoics, the accepted guide to conduct” and that “religious and moral writers endeavored to trace a relationship between moral and natural law which in effect resulted in the practical code of ethical behavior commonly associated with Neo-Stoicism.”

J. Alfred Prufrock’s pathetic admission—“It is impossible to say just what I mean!”—states a central theme of many of T. S. Eliot’s works, which concern the frustrated struggle to achieve satisfactory expression. The poems are varied “raids on the inarticulate” (“East Coker”) by the inarticulate. Their failure of speech leads, in many poems, to the shifting of verbal action to nonhuman agents—a process epitomized by the thunder’s utterance, “da,” in The Waste Land. Given the weaknesses of language, the poems display a baffling world in which neither principles nor particulars can be expressed, so that poetry fails to work and, ultimately, ceases to matter. Among such inadequate words, Eliot concentrates, ironically or devoutly, on the paradox of the Incarnation expressed as the wordless Word. The end of Eliot’s exploration is a vision of a condition of stillness, which poems can point to but never reach.

Coleridge's interest in philology, more specifically in English linguistics, was one manifestation—by no means the least important—of his amazing myriad-mindedness. His lectures, essays, notes, and reported conversations abound with allusions, comments, and speculations on the nature and problems of language in general and of English in particular; and his experiments in vocabulary bear additional testimony to his interest in the subject. Although increasing attention has recently been paid to this aspect of his genius, a systematic study of the subject awaits the publication of a definitive edition of his works. Nevertheless, an attempt might be made to examine certain limited phases of his interest in linguistics, particularly his theories about the nature and development of language, his observations on the character of English, and his own remarkable contributions to the enrichment of its vocabulary.

The importance of music in James Joyce's life and art has always been evident. A volume of his poems he called Chamber Music; the title of his last book is that of an Irish-American ballad. Almost the first recollections of young Stephen Dedalus were musical; and one of the most moving passages of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man describes Stephen's hungry young brothers and sisters singing “Oft in the Stilly Night,” in which Stephen joins. Music plays an essential part in several stories in Dubliners, notably in “The Dead.” Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are full of references to music and musicians.

The publication by I. I. Glivenko of Dostoevski's notebooks, in part in 1924 and in full in 1931, and the consequent re-evaluation of his novels have disposed rather conclusively of the opinion, long held and still occasionally repeated, that Dostoevski, though prophet, philosopher, and psychologist, was not a craftsman; that under the pressure of debts, bad economic habits, and unscrupulous publishers—all true conditions—he patched his novels together as best he could—all untrue.

The purposes of this article are two: 1) to consider the sources of “The Wanderings of Oisin” that Yeats himself gives; and 2) to consider additional sources, not given by Yeats, that I have found in the Irish literature written in English that we are fairly sure Yeats was familiar with. I shall be concerned throughout with only the first version of the poem—that of 1889—for in subsequent printings it was much changed.

In a recent article, “Swift's Project: A Religious and Political Satire” (PMLA, LXXII, March 1967, 54–63), Leland D. Peterson argues that Swift's Project for the Advancement of Religion, and the Reformation of Manners (1709) cannot be taken as a serious “reformation tract.” In his view, what Swift appears to be recommending in the Project is as outrageous in its own way as his more famous project in A Modest Proposal and we must therefore assume that in the earlier piece, as in the later, Swift's pose is ironic, his persona unsympathetic, and his purpose satirical. Peterson concludes by suggesting that “the main targets of satire in the Project are reformers and reforming societies, projectors, nominal Christianity, and the Whig Junto” (p. 58).