In Breuddwyd Rhonabwy we read: “Behold, bards came and recited verses before Arthur, and no man understood those verses … save that they were in Arthur's praise.” These words fittingly describe a poem (No. xxx) in the thirteenth-century Book of Taliesin, entitled Preiddeu Annwn, which would seem to mean “The Spoils (i.e. plunder) of the Other World.” Sharon Turner, who was the first to offer a translation, frankly confessed that the Welsh scholars of his day did not profess to understand above one half of any of the Taliesin poems. He asserted—not without reason—that in the particular verses under discussion “all connection of thought seems to have been studiously avoided”; and in conclusion he exclaimed, “Could Lycophron or the Sybils, or any ancient oracle, be more elaborately incomprehensible?”

Although by the fourteenth century, minstrelsy had passed the time of its greatest glory, which had been the period of the troubadours, the courts of kings and nobles were still the centers of activity for the better class of musicians and entertainers. While the lower orders of the profession roamed the highways, picking up a living wherever and however they could, their more skilful brethren were usually attached to the households of the wealthy and powerful, where they not only received superior compensation, but frequently were able to practise their art on a higher plane than could the wanderers of the road. This was often due as much to their superior ability as to the more cultivated taste of their audiences. Edward III of England, as one of the greatest monarchs of the fourteenth century, and perhaps partly because of the influence of Queen Philippa, maintained a group of minstrels appropriate to the splendor of his court. Though we have no complete record of the personnel of his band of musicians during the half century of his reign, some facts as to their number, names, compensation, and activities have survived which enable us to visualize certain aspects of their life and work.

In an appendix to the first and most complete study of the Irish wargoddesses, C. Lottner called attention to their resemblance to the valkyries and pointed particularly to the following apparent similarities:

1. (1) The valkyries, like the war-goddesses, appear alone or in groups of three.

2. (2) Like the war-goddesses, they are often companions of single heroes.

3. (3) Like the war-goddesses, they appear in the form of birds.

4. (4) The Germanic cognate of Irish Bodb, a war-goddess, the Cathubodua of a continental inscription, appears in Baduhenna, the name of a Germanic goddess mentioned by Tacitus.

Amusés, les historiens et les critiques ont souvent prêté quelques moments d'attention à la Puce de Mme. Desroches. Se sont-ils toujours doutés que cette puce appartînt à un cycle assez riche: poèmes (et chansons) où l'auteur fait le vœu d‘être changé en quelque chose qui touche la femme aimée, ou dont elle use, ou qui la reflète: non seulement puce ou mouche, mais gants, collier, miroir, ...? On chantait, nous dit-on, voici cinquante ans: “Je voudrais être La Fleur novelle/De son chapeau.” Des couplets comiques mettaient en scène, au commencement du XIXe siècle, un Suisse allemand, un peu lourdaud, qui déclarait à sa belle, en mauvais français: “Moi, je voudrais être une mouche/Pour voler sur ta belle front.” On ferait un livre sur ce simple thème. Qu'il nous suffise d‘étudier quelques exemples.

In her important study of the Wakefield Group in the Towneley cycle, Dr. Millicent Carey has much to say regarding the various English versions of the play of Noah and his wife. Here, says Dr. Carey, “Noah's wife appears as a speaking character for the first time ... Although she is mentioned in all the other versions from the Bible on, she is never known to utter a word until the dramatists of the Middle Ages make her an important member of their dramatis personae.” For the unbiblical Newcastle introduction of the devil and the temptation of Noah's wife—unique in the English miracle plays—Dr. Carey says that she has found no hint in Jewish legend. She considers the suggestion of Brotanek, who favors derivation by analogy with the Eve legend; of Brandl, who argues an approximation to Morality play construction; and of Cushman, who, rejecting the two former theories, remarks on the ubiquitous rôle of the devil as tempter in medieval legend generally. She points out an English dramatic parallel in the incident of the appearance of the devil to Pilate's wife in the York cycle, itself perhaps derived through analogy from the Eve story, and refers to certain other Continental parallels where the devil is a well-recognized device for registering “obstruction to the expressed wishes of God”—a device which may have originated in the Eve story or “may simply be a reflection of the mediaeval tendency to explain all evil as caused by the devil.”

The title-page of Marlowe's Tamburlaine (1590) presents “two Tragicall Discourses” concerning a mighty monarch who “(for his tyranny, and terrour in Warre) was rearmed, The Scourge of God.” A dozen times in the play Tamburlaine calls our attention to his title; and the last syllables of his dying breath are devoted to announcing it. “Scourge of God,” however, is no mere phrase that happened to catch the playwright's fancy; it is a definitive concept which signifies a pattern of human behavior and of divine destiny.

Charlemagne a ramené jusqu'à Saint Romain de Blaye les corps de Roland, d'Olivier, de Turpin. “Les Français,” dit M. Joseph Bédier traduisant le v. 3694 du Roland, “les remettent à Dieu et à ses Noms.” M. Wilmotte (Archivum Romanicum,xv, 155–156) trouve cette explication peu probable et en propose une nouvelle: il s'agirait des nuns (= nonnus ‘haute fonction ecclésiastique’) du monastère d'hommes de St. Romain à Blaye et il s'agirait d'un parallèle à l'enterrement d'Aude au mustier des nunains (v. 3730). Et M. Wilmotte de s'exclamer, triomphant sur ses devanciers, y compris le dernier éditeur, M. Bertoni: “Voilà la clef du mystère!”

The account of Conall Corc's exile from Ireland to Scotland and of his adventures in that country until his return home to become, eventually, king of Munster about 400 a.d. is here edited for the first time from the Book of Leinster. Unfortunately, the loss of one or more folios of the MS at this point renders the text acephalous so that the surviving portion commences abruptly in the middle of a sentence with his departure by sea from Dublin. As the title has also not been preserved, this fragment is arbitrarily called Longes Chonaill Chuirc, “The Exile of Conall Corc” for purposes of convenient reference. But what the actual heading in the MS was, will never be ascertainable, unless a happy chance leads to the discovery of the missing leaf or leaves.

Midway in his canticus the woeful Troilus laments: “Al sterelees within a boot am I.” This might seem to be nothing more than a felicitous phrase aptly suited to describe the plight of the unhappy lover. But in the Man of Law's Tale Constance actually experienced the dreadful circumstances which gave rise to a metaphor. We remember that the old soldaness, after killing her son and his Christian partisans, caused the Roman bride to be put on a ship without a rudder, and bade her learn navigation back to Italy. What treasure Constance had brought to Syria was put into the boat with her, as well as a considerable supply of victuals and clothes. For a number of years thereafter Constance tossed about on the sea, preserved from harm and death by Him who saved Daniel and Jonah, until her ship stuck fast on the shore of Northumberland, where she was found by the constable of a castle who came down to search the wreck. Soon after Constance's marriage to King Ælla of Northumberland, the monarch was called away to fight his enemies. Ælla's mother, like the old soldaness of Syria, hated her son's wife and plotted her destruction. When Constance's child was born the old queen contrived that the message to Ælla announcing the news should report the birth of a monster, with the suggestion that Constance was an evil fairy; and for the king's reply she substituted a command that the young woman and her offspring should be placed in the ship in which she had been found originally,—that is, a ship without rudder in the beginning, and now, apparently, a wreck,—that she should be pushed out from shore and charged never to return. The salient facts in these two episodes, which we may call Constance I and Constance II, are: Expulsion by sea in an unseaworthy boat, setting adrift in the same kind of boat by reason of a serious indictment, and safe-conduct or protection by a mysterious or divine power.

Bei allen Völkern ist die zu Sprüchen geprägte Volks- und Lebensweisheit uralter Besitz. Auch in der deutschen Literatur beginnen die zwei wesensverschiedenen Quellen der spruchhaften Literaturgattung, nämlich Volksgefühl und Uebersetzungsliteratur, bereits in früher Zeit zu fliessen. Lang müsste natürlich die Liste bei letzterer sein, wollte der mit ihr vertraute Kenner nur ein ungefähres Bild ihrer mannigfaltigen Wirkungsweise entwerfen. Denn ein Cato, Facetus, Moretus, Floretus, Regimen Scholarium, Speculum Morum, Liber de Contemptu Mundi, Traditio Morum, Liber Moralis, Phagifacetus, Poenitentiarius, usw. geben nur ein sehr unvollkommenes Bild der ungeheuren Masse der gnomischen Poesie, die vermittels mehr oder minder gut gelungener Uebersetzungen zur Verfügung gestellt, bei günstigen Voraussetzungen auf empfänglichen Boden fiel und so allmählich dem immer umfangreicher werdenden Spruchschatze einverleibt werden konnte. Früh wurden ausser deutschen Sprichwörtern auch verdeutschte in den Dienst der Schule gestellt, wobei, ganz der mittelalterlichen Gepflogenheit entsprechend, dem Schüler nebst gutem Latein auch gediegene Lebensweisheit übermittelt werden sollte. Dem Inhalt nach decken sich die meisten dieser Lehrsprüche mit guten Ratschlägen und Vorschriften, wie sie zumeist in der Bibel, den Kirchenvätern und in den moralisierenden Schriften der Alten zutage treten.

Arecent study of the manuscripts of the works of Chrétien de Troyes contains an appendix which purports to survey the published fragments of the various romances. In point of fact, so far as Erec is concerned, it omits all reference to the. three fragments we now possess. Those to which the author refers are not properly speaking manuscript fragments, but rather early publications of excerpts from complete manuscripts which have now been collated by Foerster in his large edition and by myself in a forthcoming edition of the same romance. Therefore, despite the fact that Foerster's collation was careless and incomplete, these early fragmentary publications are of slight interest. However, in an extensive work dealing with the ensemble of the manuscript tradition of Chrétien, some mention should have been made of the three real fragments which we possess, even though, as the editors of the two published ones have remarked, they are not extensive enough to be of great importance in the classification of the manuscripts.

Because of its feeble quality and bad text, relatively few students have cared to give much attention to Marlowe's drama of contemporary France, The Massacre at Paris. But it has never been a principle of criticism that the amount to be learned about an author is always in proportion to the literary excellence of the work under study. Investigation reveals that there is at least one definite source for this play not hitherto clearly recognized as such, and that, once this fact is established, observations upon Marlowe's craftsmanship may be made, scarcely less interesting than those which proceed from similar studies of his greater plays.

Exactly what was the influence of the liturgical drama, and how did it show itself? A continuous tradition from the Latin church plays through the vernacular religious plays of the later middle ages has been generally recognized since the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially since the publication of Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. The only basic attack upon the accepted historical explanation is too insubstantial to be at all convincing; and our knowledge of the liturgical plays and of their relation to individual vernacular plays or groups of plays has been much increased of late, through Professor Young's presentation of the corpus of the liturgical drama, and through many special studies of French and German texts. At the same time, we must reckon with the cumulatively impressive evidence, offered by such scholars as Emile Roy, Grace Frank, Frances A. Foster, and G. R. Owst, of the use of vernacular narrative and homiletic sources in the vernacular religious plays of the middle ages. With our present fuller knowledge both of the liturgical drama and of the rich non-dramatic material which was utilized in the later plays, we need to distinguish and redefine the specifically dramatic tradition which sprang from the liturgical plays, and the manner in which it persisted.

The Folger Shakespeare Library possesses a number of separate plays, all from the Shakespearian Third Folio, and all bearing unmistakable signs of theatrical annotation. They were acquired by Mr. Folger from a variety of sources: the majority were bought from a bookseller in Munich, one was purchased in London, and another came with the Warwick Castle collection of Shakespeariana. There are nine plays in all: The Comedy of Errors, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, Henry VIII, Timon of Athens, Macbeth, King Lear, and Othello, but three of them—The Merry Wives, Macbeth, and Othello—are imperfect. It soon became clear that they were all from the same original volume, which, apparently, had belonged to Halliwell-Phillipps and was dismembered by him. The bindings of the separate plays—half leather, with boards of marbled paper or purplish-brown cloth—are obviously all the work of one binder, and are similar to the bindings of other books which have passed through Halliwell-Phillipps's hands. In addition, his handwriting is to be found in six of them: in The Merry Wives and Macbeth there is an inscription on one of the preliminary flyleaves, and in the other four there is a mere “C. and P.” on a fly-leaf at the end of the book.

The lost Middle English romance which we may call Olive and Landres was written before 1286. It was, therefore, one of the earliest English romances of which we know—among extant romances only four are certainly as old as that, and hardly half a dozen others can conceivably be as old. Before it disappeared it was translated into Old Norse prose. A foreword to the translation tells us how, in the winter after the death of the Scottish King Alexander, grandfather of the Maid of Norway (that is, in the winter of 1286), Lord Bjarni Erlingsson of Bjarkey was busy on a political mission to Scotland. There he found this saga written down in the English language. Impressed, ostensibly by its high moral lessons, Lord Bjarni had the saga translated from English into Norse.

One of the most common standards by which the Pléiade poets judged a writer was that of his truth or sincerity. Although none could be more classically traditional or more psychologically obvious, the wide use of this criterion is surprising. For nowhere in the prose treatises of Du Bellay, Peletier, Sébilet, Ronsard, or the others, are mendacity and sincerity in literature discussed independently. It is true that Ronsard comments in brief fashion upon historical truth and verisimilitude in the Abbrégé de l'arl poétique and in the 1587 preface to the Franciade, but, as we shall explain below, it is truth as an ethical concept that is to be our concern here.