In a recent issue of the University of Texas Bulletin, D. T. Starnes has contributed a long-needed and most useful survey of early English lexicography and has clearly outlined the many aspects of this complicated subject. It is my purpose here to offer a few notes and comments.

Much has been written for and against or concerning the use of agudos, or oxytones, and esdrújulos, or proparoxytones, in rime in Italianate verse (seven and eleven syllable lines) by the poets of the Spanish Golden Age. The names of Buceta and Zerolo on the esdrújulo, and Menéndez y Pelayo and Rodríguez Marín on the agudo, are outstanding. Nothing has been done, however, so far as I know, to correlate the use of the two chronologically. A short résumé of the history of opinion and criticism of their use may shed some light on the matter.

Few readers of Marlowe's Dr. Faustus would, I think, concur in the judgment pronounced by a popular contemporary critic who declares that Faustus is “essentially childish. . . . He longs for magic power like a boy who has read the Arabian Nights.” Instead of juvenile simplicity, the magician of Wittenberg presents, for most of us, a highly complex problem of personality, embodying in his single nature most magnificent aspiration, most basely earthbound satisfaction. The Faustus of the opening and closing scenes, and of certain ones between, is authentic superman, exalted by the passionate urgency of his yearning into a vast and lofty plane of being. Yet, once possessed of magic, this superman becomes, in his exercise of it, boor, buffoon, and sensualist.

Splendora may have been unworthy of the praise or censure of her contemporaries; she may not deserve ours. Yet the series of poems addressed to her and here transcribed from contemporary manuscripts reveal that her cheeks bloomed as rosily, her eyes burned as brightly, her lips flamed with as brilliant a scarlet as those of Amarantha, Lucasta, Sacharissa, and other beauties of established literary distinction.

THE Elizabethan style of acting is discussed nowhere in the four volumes of The Elizabethan Stage, and the word acting itself is missing from the subject-index. It is as if Sir Edmund Chambers would crown his generosities by leaving us a playground—one precinct free for untrammeled guessing. The sport is active, and two teams are discernible on the field, but the teams are not playing with each other: they are not defending their own inferences or attacking those of their opponents. The purpose of the present essay is not to end the game but to organize it—at least so far as that can be done by one who enters a game not as a referee but as a player. The most conspicuous Shakespearian criticism of recent years is based largely upon assumptions about the style in which the plays were originally acted, so that even a partisan discussion of these assumptions may prove useful. What follows is an attempt to define two alternate styles of acting—formal acting and natural acting; to attack the case for natural acting on the Elizabethan stage and to defend the case for formal acting; and, finally, to suggest the manner in which the issue bears upon contemporary criticism.)

The known facts of the several versions of the Arcadia have been presented many times. Briefly, the original version was widely circulated in manuscript but never printed. Sidney commenced an elaborate revision, which was left unfinished at his death in 1586. In 1590 the revised portion was published, superintended, without much doubt, by Fulke Greville. In 1593 appeared a new edition, supervised by Mary, Countess of Pembroke, which consisted of the revised portion with the addition of the third, fourth, and fifth books from the earlier manuscript version to complete the story.

The late “Elizabethan” tragedy Andromana; or, The Merchant's Wife, probably written shortly after 1642 and first published in 1660, furnishes interesting evidence of the assimilation of certain material into the drama just as the Puritans were closing the London theatres. In its sources, in many of its ideas, in the way of presenting its problem, and in its mood, it reflects the influence of John Ford's studies of abnormal psychology, modelled on the case histories presented in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. The play allows a carefully documented study of this literary material and of the deepening interest in its dramatic presentation in that its story can be examined in three successive stages at three widely separated dates:

1. In the generally acknowledged source, the Plangus story in Sidney's Arcadia (1590).

2. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Cupid's Revenge (ca. 1611).

3. In Andromana (after 1642).

In the history of literatures, as in the history of the races that produce them, it is axiomatic that often there comes from without some invigorating influence which, on being assimilated, may assume a significance perhaps all out of proportion to its original importance. Such was the effect of the figurón, in the Spanish comedia de figurón, upon the development of a type of uncouth and cowardly lover rôle in seventeenth-century French comedy, such as that of Sganarelle in Molière's Le Manage forcé. Now that we are enabled to study in its proper perspective French dramatic literature of the grand siècle, thanks to Professor Lancaster's monumental work on the subject, it becomes increasingly possible as well as pertinent for those interested in comparative literature to supplement and to underline certain facts already clearly brought out in Mr. Lancaster's six-volume study. In this paper I wish to present some observations on the literary antecedents of the figurón in Spanish drama and an interpretation of the significance of the figurón, together with a few comments upon French treatment of this type as transplanted by Paul Scarron and Thomas Corneille.

Some twenty years ago, in an analysis of the Play-Scene, I remarked that it was extraordinary that so important a part of Hamlet had received so little attention. Oddly enough, interest in this scene was just beginning in good earnest, and much important criticism and lively controversy have followed in the intervening years. We might hope, then, that at the present day we should be clearer in our minds, and that the scholar, the actor, the stage-manager, and the “general reader” would now be happily in accord.

Shakespeare's intimate acquaintance with the music of his time and his enthusiasm for the art are well known, and there can be little question that he consorted to some extent with the London musicians of 1600. Certain of them may have been actively associated with the production, and possibly with the composition, of his plays. Precisely what form such association took, however, is a matter upon which investigation has hitherto yielded only meagre and confusing results. Speculation links Shakespeare's name with many composers and performers of the period, some of whom must indeed have supplied both the incidental music so abundantly required for his stage productions and the earliest settings of his lyrics.

Superficial resemblances between George Herbert's The Temple and John Keble's The Christian Year are too obvious to escape notice. Both emanated from little country parsonages, one at Bemerton, near Salisbury, the other at Hursley, five miles from Winchester, or possibly in part at Fairford in the Oxford region. Neither author intended his work for immediate publication. “Deliver this little book,” said Herbert, “to my dear brother Ferrar, and tell him he shall find in it a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed betwixt God and my soul, before I could subject mine to the will of Jesus my Master.” With the same modest self-effacement Keble planned, as one of his friends testified, “to go on improving the series all his life, and leave it to come out, if judged useful, only when he should be fairly out of the way.” Each book, furthermore, was written when clouds had gathered thick about the Church, and possibly the rationalizing temper of the nineteenth century was a more insidious foe than the stiff-necked Puritanism of the seventeenth. Inevitably, these two collections of sacred poems, the finest poetical expression of the Anglican Church, have been linked together.

According to the seventeenth-century interpretation of Ezekiel i and x, the cherubim were beings with four faces, as Milton indicates in describing the “Chariot of Paternal Deity”

This is repeated later, when Michael in his descent to the Garden of Eden is accompanied by

In a well-known passage in the Essay on Dramatic Poesy (1668), Dryden, pursuing his critical “examen” of The Silent Woman, tempers his extravagant praise of Ben Jonson's dramatic skill with serious criticism of his language.

If there is any fault in his language, ‘twas that he weaved it too closely and laboriously in his comedies especially; perhaps, too, he did a little too much Romanize our tongue, leaving the words which he translated almost as much Latin as he found them: wherein, though he learnedly followed their language, he did not enough comply with the idiom of ours.

The Celeslina's probable influence on the early stages of the English drama through the adaptation published in 1530, its direct though perhaps slight influence on the English realistic novel, and its much greater indirect influence through its stepchild, the picaresque novel, lend interest to the translation published in 1631 by James Mabbe, or “Maybe,” as he may have pronounced his name, since he uses the punning pseudonym Don Diego Puede-ser. Despite numerous errors, some as elementary as confusing subject and object or turning a grandson into a nephew, Mabbe's work is a brilliant achievement. It does not read like a translation; nor does it read like the Spanish Celestina. Apparently the translator set himself to erase the vertical line of the Middle Ages completely, to paganize the work, and to make it represent the Renaissance spirit as he felt it.

Shakespeare's intimate acquaintance with the music of his time and his enthusiasm for the art are well known, and there can be little question that he consorted to some extent with the London musicians of 1600. Certain of them may have been actively associated with the production, and possibly with the composition, of his plays. Precisely what form such association took, however, is a matter upon which investigation has hitherto yielded only meagre and confusing results. Speculation links Shakespeare's name with many composers and performers of the period, some of whom must indeed have supplied both the incidental music so abundantly required for his stage productions and the earliest settings of his lyrics.