I have recently expressed the opinion that the story of Androcles and the Lion, a tour de force by Apion the Egyptian, was suggested to its author by an actual occurrence in the amphitheatre at Rome; and that Apion supplied both motivation and decorative incident out of his own fertile fancy, much as a journalist of our own time would elaborate a column sensation out of a small nucleus of fact.

There came to my attention, in 1921, through the kindness of my colleague, Professor Frank Jewett Mather Jr., a manuscript of a Latin Life of St. Margaret, which he had recently purchased. Through his further kindness, I was permitted to examine and to transcribe the text of the manuscript, which was formerly in the possession of Sir Thomas Brooke, Bart., of Armitage Bridge. The manuscript is of vellum and measures × inches, being what we should now call a pocket volume. Indeed, the condition of the last leaf indicates that the book may have been some devout reader's constant companion before it was put into its present comparatively modern binding. It contains twenty-two leaves, of which nineteen are in a hand of the later fourteenth century, and the last three in a hand of the fifteenth century. Unless I am mistaken, both scribes were Englishmen. One may conjecture—though this is no more than a guess—that the second scribe was employed to complete the text because of some accident that had befallen the book. His work was crude in comparison with that of the first scribe, who wrote neatly, while he or a co-worker embellished the book with no less than nineteen boldly drawn and very interesting miniatures. The four pictures on the appended leaves are as rough as the script.

Until within a few years past, as all students of Shakespeare are aware, it was generally believed that the punctuation of his text in the early quartos and the First Folio was negligent, erratic, and wholly unauthoritative; the corollary being that modern editors must practically repunctuate the plays in accordance with modern usage, though avoiding scrupulously all other unnecessary alterations of the old texts. Even the late Dr. Furness, editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare, whose veneration for the text of the Folio showed some tendency to become an obsession in his later years, did not permit this veneration to extend to punctuation, but commonly spoke of that element of the text as the negligible work of Elizabethan printers. Recently, however, there has been observable a disposition to claim no little authority for the punctuation of the old texts, and, on the part of certain scholars indubitably worthy of respectful attention, to draw inferences as to their significance of a remarkable, not to say revolutionary, character. The time would seem to be ripe for a careful consideration of the evidence which has been adduced.

[In the following paper, for reasons of brevity, a working hypothesis has been presented in narrative form: wherever a definite statement of historical fact has been made in support of a literary theory, the authority has been given in the footnotes. The article aims at elucidating certain problems in Love's Labour's Lost by correlating them with certain matters of historical fact which took place in and about the year 1591. The following points constitute problems in Love's Labour's Lost: (a) date of composition and first performance; (b) The unexpected dénoûment in the postponed marriages; (c) The choice of names for the leading male characters, Navarre, Berowne, etc.; (d) The curious emphasis laid upon the killing of the deer by the Princess; (e) The similarity of the Pageant scene at the close of the play to the Tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe in The Midsummer Night's Dream; (f) The satire on Euphuism and Sonnets and other courtly affectations; (g) The unique observance by Shakespeare of the unities of time and place. The ensuing narrative has been evolved by applying to these problems the following matters of historical fact: (a) Burleigh's attempts, 1589–94, to force Southampton into marriage with his grand-daughter, Elizabeth de Vere, and Southampton's successful evasion of his betrothal; (b) Southampton's flight to France, 1591, to take part in the war in Normandy; (c) The Royal Progress, 1591, to Portsmouth and certain incidents in the entertainment of the Queen at Cowdray House.]

The contribution made to the liberalization of neo-classical criticism by the small but interesting body of Shakespearean comment in the Tatler and the Spectator, deserves more than the passing mention it has hitherto received. The first to point out the entirely unclassical character of some of this material was apparently John Foster, Victorian biographer and man of letters. He notes specifically the absence of any set analysis or fine spun theory about Shakespeare's art, and the spontaneous outbursts of admiration for his philosophy, poetry, ethics and passion, which characterize much of Steele's remarks. G. A. Aitken, in his edition of the Tatler, refers to Steele's plan for improving the “vitiated tastes” of his contemporaries by means of stage representations of the noble characters of Shakespeare and others. Lounsbury discusses Addison's attitude towards the problems of poetic justice and tragi-comedy. Mr. Harold V. Routh observes that Steele discovered in Shakespeare a sublime moralist of middle class life at a time when a poet was generally valued for his rhetoric rather than for any serious reflections on men and manners. Professor Nichol Smith, in his volume of Shakespearean essays, dwells upon Addison's attitude towards Shakespeare's disregard of the “rules,” that veritable touchstone of neo-classical criticism. These remarks are obviously in the nature of chance observations. No attempt has yet been made, as far as the writer is aware, to examine this critical opinion in its relation to the whole history of eighteenth century criticism of Shakespeare. This, therefore, is the purpose of the present paper.

Everyone is agreed that the historical importance of The Siege of Rhodes easily surpasses its intrinsic interest, and everyone knows that the play was one of the most influential of the pioneer works of Restoration drama—and of the heroic drama in particular. Even those who like to discount the value of “source-hunting” in general will be inclined to admit its usefulness in establishing the antecedents and relationships of a work which in so many ways marks the beginnings of a new era. It is not surprising, therefore, that the sources of the play have been studied with care and to good effect. One fact about them has been established so clearly by the several investigators that it may be dismissed here with a mere mention; namely, that D'Avenant drew chiefly upon Knolles's Historie of the Turkes (1603) for such incidents of the historical siege of Rhodes as he wished to use. As D'Avenant tells us, however, he undertook to “soften” for the sake of variety, “the martial encounters between Solyman and the Rhodians” by “intermingling the conjugal vertues of Alphonso and Ianthe.” The scholars who have looked into the matter are not altogether agreed as to where to place the ultimate blame for the softening: as to how much of the romantic story D'Avenant may have invented, or whence he may have drawn it.

Professor Alwin Thaler's paper, “Strolling Players and Provincial Drama after Shakspere,” was of particular interest to me for the reason that his interpretations and conclusions were based so extensively upon the Memoirs of Thomas Holcroft, a document which I have taken as the subject for repeated studies. Indeed, in attempting to illustrate the life of Holcroft, radical, novelist, and playwright, I had myself been led to collect a considerable amount of material relating to the strollers of the eighteenth century. In presenting the notes which follow my purpose is to offer an additional contribution to the subject, supplementing the material assembled by Professor Thaler, but taking pains not to duplicate his references.

Pater's thought is thoroughly pervaded by the Teutonic element; indeed, when he begins his essay, Apollo in Picardy, with an unidentified quotation which reads like a synthesis of his own reflections and credits it to “a writer of Teutonic proclivities,” the observant reader is inclined to suspect that Pater is really quoting from himself. Even if this identification should prove to be mistaken, Pater's interest in Goethe, in Hegel, and in Winckelmann still points to his indebtedness to Tuetonic thought, for the substance of his work constantly shows how the ideas of these Germans fertilized his own thinking on such matters as the aim and ideal of life, the fundamental principles of æsthetic theory, Romanticism as a mood of the mind, Greek art and Greek mythology. The present paper is not concerned with this Teutonic influence in all of its phases, but confines itself to a single theme, to be traced not only in Pater's critical essays but also in his more creative and fanciful pieces, in which an idea derived from Heinrich Heine comes to its blossoming. Pater met with this idea in the writings of Heine as early as 1869 and he continued to show his interest in it down to 1893, so that its influence is discernible throughout almost the whole course of his literary career.

There has been a great deal of discussion as to whether or not the three novels which Wilhelm Raabe composed during his period of residence in Stuttgart (Der Hunger pastor, 1864; Abu Telfan, 1868; Der Schüdderump, 1870) constitute a genuine trilogy. One may cavil at this transference of a specialized term from the drama to three novels to which it is not wholly applicable. On the other hand, one may defend this term as a convenient, though not entirely accurate designation of the essential unity of these three novels.

A comparison of the mob in Zola's novel Germinal, 1885, and in Hauptmann's drama, The Weavers, 1892, reveals many points of resemblance. Some of these grow essentially out of the general similarity of theme, others represent more incidental details; yet the outward resemblance is greatly offset by the fact that the miners and weavers as such are fundamentally different. Nevertheless, both authors portray the abject poverty of a class of laborers—poverty due essentially to merciless exploitation on the part of unscrupulous employers who have degraded and virtually enslaved their employes. In both cases these miserable starvelings revolt against a tyranny which would suck the very blood from their veins and the marrow from their bones; under the momentary leadership of virtual outsiders they resort to violence in their protest against starvation wages. In varying degree, as determined by the greater epic breadth of the novel on the one hand and by the narrower scope of the drama on the other hand, details are given of individual and general misery, decrepitude, degeneracy, despair, long-continued suffering and of a subsequent flaring up into violent rebellion against the unendurable.

In an age of questioning like ours, literary definitions can as little as anything else escape being called to the bar to give an account of themselves, and of their right to exist; and some, no doubt, would say that the case has already been decided against them. Personally, after having engaged in framing a few of my own, I do not share that view; and what I wish to do here is to consider briefly what gives literary definitions their validity, and what considerations ought to guide us in framing them. The task will involve some attention to the general speculative background against which purely literary problems are relieved, and may bring together some aspects which will derive at least relative novelty from their juxtaposition.