The play commonly known as Shakspere's Pericles first appeared in 1609, in a version so corrupt that it was clearly a piracy. Whether this was identical with the drama of the same title which was entered on the Stationers' Register in company with Antony and Cleopatra, on May 20, 1608, cannot be determined. This, however, is certain: the entry was made by Edward Blount, but the play was published by Henry Gosson, to whom no record of transfer is to be found. As to the composition of Pericles, it is now generally admitted that, with the possible exception of a few phrases, the first two acts are not by Shakspere but in all probability by George Wilkins.

The chief difficulty in tracing the origin of the secular drama in Germany is the lack of texts to prove the performance of other than religious plays. Nevertheless a sufficient number of secular texts have been brought to light to contradict the old belief that expansion of the comic scenes in the religious dramas resulted in the early Carnival play. M. J. Rudwin, in his notable study, proved the Carnival play to have been “the natural outgrowth of the Carnival customs themselves.” Modern historians of literature agree with him on this point but discuss the development of the Fastnachtspiel in Nuremberg no further than to declare its origin to have been in the most important masque of the time, the Schembartlauf. Yet in the recent special work on the history of the German drama, Das deutsche Drama, F. Michael disclaims any immediate connection between the Schembartlauf and the plays. Up to the present no detailed examination of the manuscripts in which the Schembartlauf was recorded, the so-called Schembartbücher, has appeared. It will be of advantage to study the actual content of the manuscripts in order to estimate their importance for the history of German literature. Conclusions may then be drawn as to the possible relation of the Schembartlauf to the Fastnachtspiele.

There are four volumes of Balzac's letters: two volumes of miscellaneous letters known as the Correspondance and two very substantial octave volumes containing the master's messages to Madame Hanska during the seventeen years they were engaged. The latter collection has been poetically entitled Lettres à l'Etrangère. All four volumes have always been considered a rich store of biographical information. The Correspondance has been twice edited: in the two-volume edition published by Calmann-Lévy in 1877, and in an octave volume which forms part of what is known as the édition définitive of the Œuvres Complètes (Calmann-Lévy, 1876). The Lettres à l'Etrangère were published by Calmann-Lévy in 1906. None of these volumes contains information as to its editors or their method of procedure.

Another paper on Keats may be pardoned if by a readjustment of the familiar materials, it makes possible a new interpretation of the poet's mind and work. The present essay ventures to suggest that the literary problem admitted and analyzed by Keats in Sleep and Poetry contains a clue for the study of his verse, which, although recognized in some of its implications by Keats's critics, has not hitherto been understood in its full significance. The following argument attempts to prove that by April, 1819, the poet, having settled, at least for a period, a very difficult question dating back to the autumn of 1816, was so released from his mental bondage that his creative genius, long restrained, broke forth into that glorious series of poems which included the great Odes and Lamia.

Some of the most fruitful modern Hawthorne criticism is that which endeavors to correct and supplement the older, somewhat distorted picture of a solitary Puritan anachronism living in an “owl's nest” by recognizing Hawthorne's immediate connection with the fundamental issues of his own day. What Hawthorne owed to his immediate predecessors and contemporaries cannot be adequately evaluated in terms of “influence” or parallel passages. A more rewarding approach to the problem would be to examine part of the climate of opinion in Hawthorne's time in connection with a detailed study of his work. The present paper, intended to be suggestive rather than definitive, is an attempt to reveal some of the possibilities of this approach.

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?

In 1986 Leo Bersani published a book entitled The Freudian Body. I love that title. From the first time I heard it, over two decades ago, up through this very moment, I have continued to love that title. To be honest, I wish it were mine—which is why I borrowed it for my essay here. I'm not exactly sure what I take this title to mean—probably something like a definitive delineation of a Freudian theory of the body. I'm not exactly sure what I take it to promise—probably something like a reconceptualization of the body beyond positivism, beyond Christian views of nature, beyond biologistic ideology. It sounds like something I really want. One thing is for sure: the title made me want to read the book.

And so the first time I read this book, I was disappointed, frustrated, and even a little angry. I did not find “the Freudian body” promised by the title. “Bait and switch,” I thought bitterly. “You fucking tease!”

Is there a new “religious turn” in early american studies? or do declensions and revivals in scholarly attention to Religious matters suggest something about how religion and spirituality are lived? Witness an episode from the life of Olaudah Equiano, as recorded in his Interesting Narrative (1789), one of the new classics of early American literary study. It is October 1773, and the twenty-eight-year-old Equiano finds himself once again home in London. London, of course, is home in name only. Where is home for Equiano, really? Is it Igbo West Africa, the Carolinas, Philadelphia, London, or the black Atlantic itself? Did Equiano himself even know?

Though formal verse satire was a major genre in the Augustan age, students of satire have generally been reluctant to define its essential traits. Perhaps the most illuminating study is Mary Claire Randolph's “The Structural Design of the Formal Verse Satire.” She remarks that the satire of Lucilius, Horace, Persius, and Juvenal was “bi-partite in structure,” that a particular vice or folly was attacked in “Part A,” and its opposite virtue praised in “Part B.” There is always more attack than praise in satire “since, paradoxically, in the very act of presenting the negative or destructive side of human behavior the satirist is establishing a positive foundation on which he can base his specific recommendation to virtue.” Whether introduced by direct exhortation, implication, or quotable proverb, the “admonition to virtue” is inevitably present in formal verse satire: “it must be there, spoken or unspoken, if the piece is to be more than mere virulence and fleeting invective. … In any case, whatever the plan, the positive rational mode of procedure advocated or unmistakenly implied in a satire will be the precise opposite of the vice or folly ridiculed.”

The three scholars, J. M. Hart, F. S. Boas, and L. R. Merrill, who have in recent years done most to call the Christus Redivivus to the attention of general readers and scholars have without exception emphasized especially the element of the Miles Gloriosus utilized in the early drama by Grimald with astonishing elaborateness and effectiveness. The four soldiers stationed by Pilate to guard the sepulchre of Christ are used by Grimald in apparently a more original manner than in any other single situation in the religious drama of the sixteenth century in England. Hart merely calls attention to the presence of the Miles Gloriosus elements in the play. Boas makes a great deal of it, emphasizing Grimald's ability to vary his style to suit the changing speakers and occasions. He gives an elaborate description of the most interesting scenes of the play in which the four bragging soldiers appear. “It would be interesting,” he says, “to know whether Grimald confided to Airy that he had later models than Plautus, and that in his tragi-comic treatment of a Biblical theme he had been influenced by at least one of the continental humanist playwrights, Barptholomaeus Lochiensis, whose Christus Xylonicus, first published at Paris in 1529, had been re-issued at Antwerp in 1537, and by Johan Gymnicus at Cologne in 1541. . . . . The action of Christus Xylonicus ends with the burial in the garden tomb, . . . .” Merrill in his very valuable contribution to the Grimald field of scholarship lays considerable emphasis upon the element of the bragging soldiers around the grave of Christ, and points out convincing evidence of the indebtedness of one of Sebastian Wilde's plays to this portion of the Christus Redivivus.

Although both Wordsworth and Coleridge were strongly influenced by the popular ballad, they were attracted by this form for very different reasons and affected by it in very different ways. The one point in common is that this influence was in both cases mainly for good. Wordsworth was drawn to the ballad by its directness and simplicity of style, and by the fact that it often treats of the lower classes of men in what Rousseau would have called a natural state of society. Coleridge took up the ballad for a nearly opposite reason; i. e., because of its remoteness from modern life, a remoteness that left him free play for his imagination. Thus, oddly, Wordsworth cultivated the ballad because it had once been close to common life; Coleridge because it was now remote from common life and gave him a form remarkably susceptible of that strangeness which the romantic genius habitually adds to beauty. Wordsworth preferred the domestic, or occasionally the sentimental-romantic, ballad; Coleridge markedly adhered to the supernatural ballad.

Henry James tells us in his preface to the revised edition of his novels, with what interest and emotion he renewed acquaintance with his book, Roderick Hudson, after a quarter of a century had elapsed since its first appearance, in 1875. He takes up its failings and its defects, of which he is fully conscious and which he sees with very keen perspicacity. He writes:

The autobiographical novel Arabesques presents a complex double self-portrayal of an Israeli Arab as an artist. The narrator's gravitation toward the cultural center conflicts with his loyalty to his ethnic periphery. His search for identity as a minority writer intertwines with his search for identity as an individual. The tension of the unresolved identity split emerges in the work's fragmented structure and inconsistent story line. I argue that the centrality of Hebrew in Arabesques communicates the possibility of overcoming the split. Such reconciliation requires that instability and pluralism be accepted as forces that shape the lives of individuals and of nations. The use of Hebrew explodes both the cultural stagnation of the minority and the intransigence of the majority. The hybridization of language and lore destabilizes the definition of nationalism, bringing, for both the dominating and the dominated, the hope of cultural revitalization and of ideological rapprochement.

Critical reactions to the denouement of Corneille’s Le Cid are generally divided between the comic notion of a complete and happy union of Rodrigue and Chimène and the tragic notion of the impossibility of their marriage. However, it is possible to incorporate the two views into an interpretation of the play that emphasizes in the ambivalence of this ending the complexity of Corneille’s vision of man’s possibilities and limitations. Rodrigue represents the heroic order of humanity; Chimène and her mirror image, the Infante, exemplify the common order. The representation of the heroic quest in Le Cid not only portrays Rodrigue’s triumph but also depicts the women’s failures. Heroism and frailty coexist and interact; and it is essential to note that in the different outcomes of Rodrigue’s, Chimène’s, and the Infante’s efforts to unite hand, heart, and mind respectively, Le Cid offers a complex vision of humanity.