ONE OF DAVID F. Johnson's many contributions to the study of Middle Dutch Arthuriana is an argument about the diverse reasons why Walewein should be considered as operating in a class of his own in the Roman van Walewein. Johnson's reading is characteristically astute, but his thesis about Walewein's individuality presents an opportunity to examine once again the manipulation of genre and convention evident in another Arthurian masterpiece focusing upon Arthur's nephew: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight [hereafter SGGK]. In this most carefully crafted of medieval English romances, genre and convention are also closely tied to issues of heroism. Indeed, the Gawain-poet's manipulation of generic features includes a persistent emphasis on the isolation of his hero; this isolation is unusual given the generic telos of reconciliation so commonplace in the romance kind. Part of what happens, in consequence, is that Gawain is and is not a traditional romance hero; accordingly, SGGK is a generic hybrid. The question of how best to define romance has produced considerable scholarly debate, but love, whether of a heterosexual or homosexual partner, or of family, or of one's chivalric fellows, is a recurring and, indeed, defining feature of the genre; Gawain thus undertakes adventure for the love of Arthur. Unusually, though, Gawain is careful to avoid the kind of amorous or loving dalliance that is another staple form of adventure in the romance genre. Gawain is in fact continuously isolated throughout the poem, and this isolation suggests that he is also, in part, an unusual epic-heroic hero, one interested not only in the winning of that all-important heroic trait of public fame but also in abiding by a powerful code of honour. As so often in the heroic ethos, it is this code of honour and heroism – including, in this case, keeping Lady Bertilak's secret – that gets the hero Gawain into trouble. These issues of the hero's isolation, generic trouble, and honour are important for reassessing Gawain's supposed failure.

Erwin Cook makes a convincing case for the ancient Greek hero being both active and passive, a figure who is willing and capable of taking physical action and rendering appropriate harm to opponents, but who is equally likely to suffer harm him- or her-self.

IN A DISCUSSION of the meaning of ‘individuality’, Terry Eagleton cites two examples: ‘Homer's Odysseus seems to feel roughly this way, whereas Shakespeare's Hamlet most definitely does not’. Eagleton does something here that readers frequently do: he treats fictional characters like real, living, thinking people. It is a natural reflex to fill out the always-incomplete information in a story to make from it a plausible whole. The branch of literary criticism most commonly known as ‘cognitive literary studies’ takes this tendency as a point of departure for textual analysis. From this perspective, we may potentially resolve a conundrum found at the very heart of the Lanseloet van Denemerken, a fourteenth-century Middle Dutch play. Lanseloet van Denemerken [hereafter Lanseloet] is one of the so-called abele spelen ‘artful plays’ contained in the famous Hulthem manuscript (Brussels, Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 15.589–15.623), where the play is recorded (on fols. 223rb–230ra) along with 210 other, mostly Middle Dutch, texts. The author is unknown (although he is likely to have come from the southern Netherlands), and its date is just as difficult to determine. The codicology of the manuscript itself does provide a terminus ante quem: the watermarks in its paper point to a production date between 1405 and 1410, and it was written by one scribe. The play itself likely dates to the late fourteenth century.

The play is not very long (no more than 952 lines) but still brings quite a few players on stage. Lanseloet (crown prince of Denemerken), his mother, Sanderijn (the woman he loves), an anonymous knight (whom Sanderijn eventually weds), Reinout (Lanseloet's servant) and the anonymous knight's forester. The play is well-structured, and the actions of the characters are usually clearly motivated. But Lanseloet, of all people, does something that initially seems counterintuitive (and that turns out to be very counterproductive in his attempts to win over Sanderijn): he agrees to a ruse his mother devises. Precisely at this point, the text does not give unequivocal information about the choices Lanseloet makes. This lack of information is not a problem only if the audience fills in the gaps in the text based on the context, giving them more or less free rein as long as they do not make assumptions that are clearly contradicted by the text.

THE VISIBILITY OF the intentions and identities of the leading artists, sculptors, scribes, and illuminators of early medieval England seems to become more apparent as the centuries progress, but such acts of representation always require thoughtful work on the audiences’ part. One of those acts of representation concerns the teams of producers, whose work may be deliberately rendered invisible within the object. In early medieval English art, for example, clear signs of the hands of the artists – their personal style, how this thing was carved, painted, and made – are often concealed, yet indications of the maker may be discoverable if one searches carefully for them. These are not meant to stand out, or even to be identifiable, except in a minority of cases, where a lead artist or scribe has significant prestige. In this study we seek to uncover the evidence for the ways in which the producers of textual and artistic objects in the early medieval period made manifest their individual efforts, to determine what presence the maker does have within their own work, and the different ways in which individual craftspeople are identified within objects, especially when the artefact was produced by a team.

Artworks, including illuminated manuscripts, were made for God, or at least manufactured in the sight of God, and expressions of personal artistry might usually have been considered evidence of pride or vanity. Very few artists’ identities are known prior to the twelfth century, and where self-reference appears to be made through the possible depiction of an artist by that artist, their name is concealed and thus lost to history. On the other hand, a portrait of the scribe (and possibly artist) Eadwig Basan survives on folio 133r of the Eadwig Psalter (London, British Library, Arundel 155, c. 1012–23), but scholars cannot be sure that it is actually by his hand. In the twelfth century, by contrast, it is possible to identify some professional artists, including the well-known ‘Master Hugo’, whose work is seen in the famous highly-illuminated manuscript, Cambridge Corpus Christi College, 2 – the Bury Bible, made at Bury St Edmunds.

Chapter 2 investigates how identity in Senecan tragedy is achieved via sympathetic identification with others, whether individuals or groups. The chapters focuses on Roman practices of exemplarity, which encouraged the formation of individual selves via the appropriation of others’ - often normative - characteristics. This habit of coyping and becoming a copy of other people connects the human individual to the fictional character, which is by nature inherently replicable. The two plays discussed in this chapter are Troades, where Astyanax is constantly characterised as a ‘second Hector’, and Hercules, where the protagonist pursues self-aemulatio in place of family attachments.

Chapter 1 examines behavioural coherence as a marker of both fictional and actual identity. Concentrating on the recognition scenes in Medea and Thyestes, this chapter contends that Senecan recognition is less about revelation than about validation of an identity achieved through consistent, habitual conduct. It discusses key concepts of decorum and Stoic persona-theory as ways of evaluating Atreus‘ and Medea’s self-construction. It also demonstrates how such behavioural repetition has gone largely unnoticed, as scholars have focused instead on the textual repetition highlighted by dominant methods of intertexual analysis.

The Introduction sets forth the book’s main parameters and situates its study within the current landscape of Senecan scholarship. In addition, it provides a detailed overview of major theoretical approaches to literary character from the late nineteenth century to the present, arguing against the limitations inherent in both the formalist/structuralist method of character criticism, and the humanist/psychological method, and proposing instead a blended theory of character that recognises both structural and person-like qualities. The final section of the Introduction narrows focus to theatrical contexts and considers how stage performance affects the presentation and reception of fictional character.

Chapter 4 discusses autonomy (or its lack) as a key element in characters’ fictional ontology. It divides the topic into three themes - freedom, revenge, and suicide - each of which plays a vital role in Seneca’s dual concept of personal and fictional independence. The first section addresses Stoic isolationism as an assertion of individual sovereignty and demonstrates that this trait is shared by Seneca’s sapiens and tragic characters alike. The second section examines revenge as, simultaneously, an amplification and limitation of characters’ autonomy. Finally, the chapter considers Senecan suicide as an expression of free agency in the midst of misfortune, charting its importance across both the prose and the dramatic works.

Chapter 3 charts the prevalence of physical description in Senecan tragedy, arguing that this is not a symptom of Rezitationsdrama, but a consequence of Seneca’s interest in physiognomy and pathogonomy, both of which use bodily signals to evaluate the quality of people’s internal psychological / emotional / mental states. Like coherence and exemplarity, physiognomic analysis unites the quasi-personal and purely fictional elements of character, on the one hand by encouraging audiences to infer a psychology behind characters’ surfaces, and on the other by focusing attention on textual signs and symbols. This chapter discusses the confluence of bodily and mental states in Seneca’s Phaedra and Oedipus.

Now that we have come to the end, I would like you to turn back, dear reader, to the front cover of this book, or, in the more likely event of your reading it in digital form, to scroll back to the top. Take a close look. The image is of a face carved from the pages of an old volume, a piece of art combining the plastic forms of sculpture and mask with hints of more abstract fictional representation. As sculpture, the work’s medium and its content coincide in being fully three-dimensional: this is not a physically flat description in print, or a (slightly less flat) painting, but a material, graspable visage, and the very fact of its materiality draws a particularly close analogy to an actual human face. It is, however, a face with no back; the head stops abruptly at the book’s cover. Unlike more traditional sculpted portraits, this is not a bust, it has no neck and shoulders; it is a detached, free-floating face, and this incompleteness evokes, to my mind at least, the theatrical mask.

Xenophon’s Life and Times