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.

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.

The central situation in Anthony Munday's play of John a Kent and John a Cumber (ca. 1594) is, as its title suggests, a contest between two magicians, John a Kent, a Welshman, and John a Cumber, a Scotchman. Their meeting is occasioned by a wooing contest which forms the romantic theme of the play and in which a pair of Welsh lovers (Powesse and Merridock) strive to win from the English Pembroke and the Scotch Morton the ladies Sidanen and Marian in spite of the opposition of the ladies' relatives. In his magic arts Kent, like Prospero, is assisted by an elvish sprite, who supplements and assists in Kent's display of power. Finally, for the low comedy the dramatist has included a group of rustics, who serve partly as foils for the magicians, partly as unwitting furtherers of the action. All these, as we shall see, are elements already conventional in Elizabethan drama by Munday's time, and his originality consists in his adaptation and association of these elements.

In 1885 Evans undertook definitely to show that the text of the first quarto of Othello was, as compared to the folio at least, quite worthless. More recent editors, on the other hand, are inclined to allow greater authority to some of the texts that precede the folio, and have not hesitated to classify the Othello as one of the “good” quartos. No detailed and analytic study, however, of this version has been made since Evans' attempt, which therefore passes in many quarters doubtless as vulgate doctrine. The present study aims at a complete classification of the variants between these two fundamental texts. In this classification scholars may differ regarding individual items, but these disagreements must be numerous and crucial essentially to alter the results. Part I consists of an enumeration of all the textual differences, and Part II of an interpretation of them with a view to evaluating the F and the Q texts.

If Shakespeare's plays, as is generally admitted, are incomparably greater than their sources, their greatness must inhere mainly in his changes and additions. Most scholars have attributed this precious residue to the dramatist's imagination, which, they seem to suppose, created it from nothing. Certainly his imagination informed the whole: but the additions that he built into his originals, supplying motivation and verisimilitude, he took from the life around him; for this was the material that both he and his audience knew best: thus he elizabethanized the stories that he used, and made them reflect the popular attitude toward the characters and the themes that he portrayed; for, in an age of little learning, he could not hope, even had he wished, to educate his audience to a different point of view. Dogberry, as a constable, must be stupid; Henry V must appear as a national hero; and interest on money in The Merchant of Venice must be hateful—all to accord with contemporary fact or opinion. But modern readers see such characters and themes quite out of focus, and interpret them in modern ways.

… of antres vast and desarts idle,
Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven,
It was my hint to speak, such was the process;
And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders.

It has usually been assumed that Othello's adventures came to Shakespeare out of the pages of Mandeville or Pliny. There is, however, another possibility and one likely to offer a far more exciting invitation to a poet with Shakspere's keen sensitivity to visual impressions. There is a startling resemblance between the items in the passage quoted and the quaintly decorated Renaissance maps.

Some time ago, Dr. W. J. Lawrence, writing in the Criterion, stated his belief that the Shakespearean “Bad Quartos” which have in the past provoked so many conflicting explanations are in reality nothing more than unauthorized stage adaptations made directly from the full theatre manuscript by pirates who then performed the plays in the provinces. Dr. Lawrence reached this conclusion after finding certain similarities running through all the bad quartos, notably the absence of reflective passages, which would indicate abridgment for provincial performance, and the transposition of scenes, which might have resulted from the necessities of doubling. As to the bad quarto of Henry V, at least, I am convinced that Dr. Lawrence's theory is the right one. From a careful word-for-word comparison of that text with the folio text of 1623, I had myself reached the same conclusion before his article came to my attention. Since Dr. Lawrence did not attempt to show the manner in which the supposed adaptation was made, I shall here set forth the results of my own more detailed study in support of his general hypothesis.

Professor J. Q. Adams, in his admirable edition of Macbeth, has recently contended unequivocally that “in several places” of the original text, the Folio, “portions of Shakespeare's play are lost or intentionally omitted.” Specifically, he argues that three scenes—one each in the first, second, and last acts—have been lost. For various reasons this contention challenges more detailed consideration than it seems thus far to have received. It is an integral though not necessarily a vital part of the commentary in this edition; it revives—though with a decided difference—an old and much-debated hypothesis concerning textual losses from this play; and it requires, if certain aspects of the reasoning underlying it are to be accepted, a not inconsiderable readjustment of current views as to the swift and compelling structural efficacy of the play as it stands, not to mention a fresh appraisal of no less a personage than Lady Macbeth. Yet Professor Adams's edition adheres scrupulously—except perhaps in the three instances to be noted—to the principle which prompts the present inquiry. “We ought,” says Bradley in a very similar connection, “to do our best to interpret the text”—i.e., the text as it stands—“before we have recourse to this kind of suggestion.” Granting that an able exposition of textual difficulties is a boon in itself, are the difficulties such as to justify conjecture concerning exactly what may or may not have been lost or purposely omitted, and where?

Vanbrugh's position in the history of drama has never been adequately defined. He and his successor, Farquhar, have suffered more than any other dramatists of their period from the ill effects of biassed criticism, which has viewed their work solely in the light of a particular tradition, the Comedy of Manners; and the resulting deformity, caused by the failure of their work to fit the mould, is condemned by the very critics who have produced it. They have recognized that the work of Vanbrugh is no longer typically of the Comedy of Manners genre, but they have neglected to analyze the difference in an individual study, and have contented themselves with regarding as inferior any divergences or deviations from the accepted Comedy of Manners norm. These deviations, moreover, have been taken to point toward sentimental comedy, and Vanbrugh, having been dubbed a “transition” figure, has suffered the penalty of “not belonging.”

One incident in the life of David Garrick—Shakespeare's Priest—has subsequently evoked the harshest kind of criticism even from his professed admirers, namely, his alteration of Hamlet. James Boaden, who prefaced an edition of the actor's letters in 1831 with a biographical sketch, wrote:

If there be any one act of his management which we should wish to blot out from these pages it is his rash violation of the whole scheme of Shakespeare's Hamlet … All the contrivances of Shakespeare by which he added absence from the scene to the melancholy irresolution of the character were rendered abortive. It became as much a monodrame as Timon; and the passive Hamlet was kept on the rack of perpetual exertion. His very speeches were trimmed up with startling exclamations and furious resolves: even Yoric himself was thrown out of the play to render the wit and pathos of Sterne inapplicable and unintelligible. It was an actor's mutilation of all parts but his own.

(This is an exact reproduction of the particular copy of the 1747 text which Garrick used as a foundation for his alteration. All the lines marked by Garrick for elimination are put into the footnotes. All the lines indicated by a quotation mark for excision by Hughs and Wilks which remain in the present text were restored by Garrick. Other Garrick restorations and emendations are italicized.)

In a recently published article, Mr. J. R. MacGillivray has announced the necessity for redating Wordsworth's play. By closely checking allusions in Wordworth's letters, he is able to show that it could not have been begun before March 7, 1796, and that the letter in which the poet tells Wrangham that the first draft of it is nearly finished must have been written “some time between the beginning of December 1796 and the end of February 1797.” The play, MacGillivray feels, would have been begun not long before October 24, when Dorothy reported her brother “now ardent in the composition of a tragedy.”

Hugo Von Hofmannsthal (1874–1929) und Anton Wildgans (1881–1932), beide geboren zu Wien, gelten in der literarischen Welt als die repräsentativsten österreichischen Dichter der letzten Jahrzehnte. Beide haben auch in ihren Werken wiederholt auf das “spezifisch Österreichische” hingewiesen; Wildgans hat geradezu Wort und Begriff des “österreichischen Menschen” geschaffen, Hofmannsthal wird von Wassermann, offenbar im Anklang an Wildgans' Wortprägung, als solch ein “österreichischer Mensch” geschildert. So nimmt es kein Wunder, dass der Beginn des Briefwechsels und damit auch der Freundschaft zwischen den beiden Dichtern durch die Schicksalsstunde des alten Österreichs, den Beginn des Weltringens 1914, veranlasst war. Die in diesen Kriegsjahren mehr auf dem Dienste am Vaterlande fussende dichterische Zusammenarbeit der beiden gestaltete sich allmählich immer mehr zu edelster freundschaftlicher Bindung, welche die gegenseitigen Pläne und Schöpfungen nicht mit nivellierendem literarischem Kritizismus, wohl aber mit feinstem Einfühlen in die ureigenste Gedanken- und Arbeitswelt des andern begleitete und auch befruchtete. Die bedingungslose Unmittelbarkeit des Ausdrucks, die besonders bei dem in seinen Werken als Meister der Form und Distanzierung bekannten Hofmannsthal bisweilen überrascht, wirft vielfach persönlich wertvolle Schlaglichter auf das geheimste Seelenklingen und die scheinbar unberührbare Innerlichkeit der Dichterfreunde. Gingen die Ansichten und Wege des neu-österreichischen Klassikers, des “zeitlosen,” im christlich-neuplatonischen Schönheitsideal aufgehenden Hofmannsthal und die des schollenverbundenen Lyrikers Wildgans, des Sängers der Menschlichkeit und des Menschlichen, auch oft weit auseinander, so fanden sie sich doch immer wiederum auf dem Boden des Heimatlich-Österreichischen, das sich aber stets in Liebe und Treue zum “grossen” Deutschtum und zum deutschen Geist verbunden fühlte. Der Briefwechsel kommt einige Tage vor dem tragischen Tode Hofmannsthals, 15. Juli 1929, zu einem plötzlichen Ende.