Charles Lamb, in the whimsical autobiographical sketch which he wrote in 1827, boasted that he “was the first to draw the public attention to the old English Dramatists, in a work called ‘Specimens of English Dramatic Writers,‘ who lived about the time of Shakespeare.” Lamb's first biographer, Talfourd, pictures the Specimens as slowly and almost imperceptibly working out “the genial purpose of the editor in renewing a taste for the great contemporaries of Shakespeare.” Ainger describes Lamb as a dispeller of ignorance and remarks of the Specimens:

Professor Morris W. Croll at the end of his excellent article, “The Cadence of English Oratorical Prose,” says in a note: “Sir Thomas Browne, like his master Seneca, was fond of the cadence of oratory, and a profitable study of his form might be made by one who should be capable of interpreting the subtleties of a great master in variations.” This article is an attempt to carry out Professor Croll's suggestion, an attempt already made to some extent by Norton R. Tempest in his article, “Rhythm in the Prose of Sir Thomas Browne.” Tempest confuses the reader by including many things besides the cursus forms. I propose in this paper to limit myself to the cursus forms and their English variations as pointed out by Professor Croll, and to take as my working example only the Fifth Chapter of Hydriotaphia. There, I believe, will be found practically every variation Browne used, and the condensation of the material will enable the reader to follow the discussion conveniently, with the chapter before him.

About a decade after Kyd's Spanish Tragedy had introduced the revenge-play to the English stage, there appeared almost simultaneously two tragedies which presented a somewhat different treatment of revenge—Shakespeare's Hamlet and Marston's Antonio's Revenge. Although neither play departed entirely from the traditions established by Kyd, both contained a profounder philosophy than the earlier plays of their type. Immediately thereafter followed a succession of tragedies of revenge obviously influenced by the new philosophical treatment. A. H. Thorndike in his “Relations of Hamlet to Contemporary Revenge Plays” attributes the revival of interest wholly to Marston; indeed, he maintains that Shakespeare did not “set the fashion from 1599 on, for Marston almost certainly preceded him.” The other scholars who more recently have interested themselves in this problem, Dr. Friedrich Radebrecht and Sir. E. K. Chambers, share Thorndike's opinion. Yet, as a result of evidence discovered in connection with a study of the influence of Hamlet on the dramatic literature of the period, I question giving Marston credit for the renewed interest in the revenge-play.

In determining more narrowly the date of A Session of the Poets, commonly ascribed to John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, c. 1676, the dating of the play Wits Led by the Nose has proved to be of preliminary concern, since it contains the first known reference to A Session. Wits Led has on the title-page verso “August 1677,” the date when it was licensed for printing, but there is no external evidence for the date of composition or of its acting at the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane. Falling back on internal evidence, we find this not explicit, but of a significance beyond the dating. The internal evidence for the acting date offers a clue to an unsettled question of identity: who made up the “younger part” of the King's or Duke's Company that acted in Lent, and what relation if any did these actors bear to the Nursery? The answer to this may provide another principle for determining the acting date of certain Restoration plays—the principle, namely, that a particular set of actor's names in a dramatis personæ may have a seasonal significance.

When Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery, turned in his intervals of gouty leisure to dramatic composition, he made his plays supplement the political manœuvers of his active periods by embodying in them the crescent love-and-honor theme, which, rooted in pre-Commonwealth drama, was being sponsored by the Frenchified Charles II. But while thus pleasing the King and the Court by being alertly à la mode, he remembered the dramatic associations of his Cavalier days and revived after the Puritan depression certain elements of Jacobean and Caroline drama. Among them was the friendship theme, so frequently and significantly employed in plays of those former decades. If he had merely repeated the old situations and rephrased the worn clichés, there would be little point in analyzing his plays for his use of the theme except to show continuity between pre-Commonwealth drama and Restoration drama. But he modified it and made it an aid in his persistent king-worship. And more important still, he used the theme in developing the love-and-honor conflict.

Among the playwrights of the Elizabethan age, Thomas Heywood stands in a peculiar position. He is not as interesting as Webster or Chapman; he is far below Jonson or Marlowe or Lyly in artistic power; he has proved less attractive to scholars than Massinger or Beaumont and Fletcher or Marston. He wrote too much, it is said, and he was too eager to flatter the 'prentices to care about the quality of his work, either as poetry or as drama. Charles Lamb, to be sure, called him a prose Shakespeare, but Lamb could find something kind to say about any Elizabethan, and men like Heywood and Dekker were of that gentle and friendly disposition which would particularly endear them to Elia. And yet one play of Heywood's, A Woman Killed With Kindness, is reprinted in every anthology of plays of the period, always as a masterpiece of its kind. If literary immortality consists in having written a work which is always in print, of being known by name and by at least the title of that work to all historians of literature, Heywood has achieved immortality with A Woman Killed With Kindness.

Molière's career as an actor-manager would be largely a matter of conjecture today but for the preservation of four account books now in the archives of the Comédie-Française. Of these documents, the two earliest have been published in extenso; first, the “Registre de La Grange” entitled Extraict des Receptes et des Affaires de la Comédie depuis Pasques de l'année 1659, appartenant au Srde La Grange, l'un des Comédiens du Roy, with a biographical notice by Édouard Thierry, published by the Comédie-Française in 1876; and secondly, Le Premier Registre de La Thorilliére (1663–64), published in 1890 in an edition of 340 copies in the Nouvelle Collection Moliéresque of D. Jouaust, with preface and notes by Georges Monval, archivist of the Comédie-Française in 1878 and librarian in 1885. I assume that Monval intended to publish the two account books remaining in the archives of his theater, known traditionally as the Second Registre de La Thorilliére (1664–65), and the Registre d'Hubert (1672–73), for Monval announced the former as in press in 1890, and in 1897 it was still advertised as in preparation. However, Damase Jouaust, Monval's publisher, died in 1893, and his successor, the Flammarion firm, only completed the publication of a series of plays by Molière edited by Vitu and Monval. The last volume of this edition, Monval's Chronologie Moliéresque, appeared in 1897.

Students of poetry have long regretted that John Livingston Lowes did not include in his remarkable The Road to Xanadu a study of Christabel. It would have been only fitting for the story of the origin of this poem to have appeared side by side with those of Kubla Khan and The Ancient Mariner. Professor Lowes thus explained the omission:

Henry Playford in his note to the reader in Orpheus Britannicus felt free to say:

THE main struggle between the French Romanticists and Classicists occurred in the third decade of the nineteenth century. Hostilities, however, had begun much earlier. MM. Edmond Egglie and Pierre Martino in the first volume of their work Le Débat romantique en France have described the conflict from 1813 to 1816.

Dryden's profits from the publication of his translation of Virgil have long been a topic of considerable interest and speculation. Malone, in 1800, pieced together as much information as he could gather from secondary sources then available to him; but he was explicit in regarding as fragmentary his interpretations of Dryden's profit from this work. The whole question is indissolubly bound up with the agreement between Dryden and his publisher, Jacob Tonson, for the publication of the translation.

Fifty years ago Edmund Gosse observed: “We should know little or nothing of what happened to Congreve between 1700 and 1710 if it were not for the Keally letters.” The further statement must be made that in over two hundred years little or nothing has been discovered concerning the friend to whom those letters were addressed. Gosse knew only that Joseph Keally was of “Keally Mount, Kilkenny” and that he was “a relative of Bishop Berkeley.” Congreve's recent biographer, Mr. D. Crane Taylor, unaware of Keally's early death, deplores the “most regrettable” loss of letters later in date than those of Berkeley's Relics but concludes that Congreve and Keally “unquestionably remained close friends.”

Friedrich Hebbel, nächst Ibsen der grösste Dramatiker der germanischen Welt im 19. Jahrhundert, ist oft der Dramatiker des Realismus genannt worden. Nun ist es bezeichnend, dass Edna Purdie in ihrem Buch über Hebbel sich jeder geistesgeschichtlichen oder stilgeschichtlichen Einordnung von Hebbels Werk enthält und vor allem Wort und Begriff des Realismus meidet. Vielleicht mit Recht, wenn man bedenkt, wie sehr das Wort missbraucht und wie schillernd der Begriff geworden ist. Aber gerade bei Hebbel Hesse sich zu einer Vertiefung des Begriffes durchstossen, wenn man nämlich Realismus nicht als einen äusserlich-stilistischen Terminus fasst, der ein Mehr oder Minder an Tatsachenfreude, an Detail der Umweltschilderung bezeichnet, sondern unter Realismus eine prinzipiell bejahende Haltung zu den Realitäten des Lebens versteht.

From the time of the miracle cycles and the morality plays songs have been used for the embellishment of English tragedy. As the drama developed, lyrics in plays came to have functional as well as decorative or merely divertive significance, until with Shakespeare their dramatic values acquired subtlety, and songs became an integral part of the technique of comedy and tragedy. The rôle of song in the plays of Shakespeare's predecessors and contemporaries to 1642, and especially in those of Shakespeare himself, has been analyzed with great detail, but there has been no account of the projection of songs into the drama of the Restoration, when with neo-classic emphasis on regularity and a body of tragedies essentially classical in form, one might expect altered usage of previously established conventions or even an astringent use of song itself.

De tous les dramaturges étrangers connus en France au XVIIIème siècle, Métastase soulève l'enthousiasme le plus général. Alors que Shakespeare, par exemple, n'obtient que des louanges fort mitigées, et restera, en somme, pendant tout le siècle “un génie plein de force et de fécondité,” mais “sans la moindre étincelle de bon goût,” le librettiste italien a pour lui la faveur à peu près sans réserve de la critique contemporaine. De fait, on voit presque en lui l'heureuse contrepartie de Shakespeare. L'abbé Raynal, par exemple, le juge “un écrivain diffus, mais délicieux, et qui joint à beaucoup d‘élégance et de délicatesse, du sentiment et du pathétique.” Si Shakespeare éveille un intérêt plutôt scandalisé, Métastase, par contre, plaît par la variété de son œuvre où chacun peut trouver quelque chose qui satisfasse son goût: certains s'attendrissent sur des situations touchantes et morales, dignes du drame bourgeois; Diderot cite de Métastase un passage “bien vrai et qui peint fortement la tendresse des mères.” La plupart voient en lui l'auteur de tragédies régulières. Certes, on le loue parfois pour ses qualités lyriques, et à ce point de vue, Saint-Lambert le met au dessus de Quinault; de même, l'enthousiasme débordant de J-J. Rousseau dans son Dictionnaire de Musique est causé par les qualités éminemment musicales de la poésie de Métastase et non par les procédés dramatiques de l'auteur. Saint-Lambert et Rousseau placent ainsi le poète dans son vrai jour. Mais, le plus souvent, on dégage les livrets de Métastase de toutes considérations musicales, et on les juge sur leur valeur dramatique: “Ses pièces, pleines d'esprit, de situations, de coups de théâtre et d'intérêt,” écrit le Président de Brosses, “feraient sans doute un plus grand effet si on les jouait en simples tragédies déclamées, laissant à part tout le petit appareil d'ariettes et d'opéra qu'il serait facile d'en retrancher.” Voltaire, après de Brosses, ne cesse de développer la même idée. Il loue la régularité des tragédies-opéra “du célèbre abbé Métastasio,” “comparables à tout ce que la Grèce a eu de plus beau, si elles ne sont supérieures;” supérieures parfois aux tragedies de Corneille; produits d'un talent “que, depuis les Grecs, le seul Racine a possédé parmi nous.” Palissot, et plus tard Le Prévost d'Exmes, font, après Voltaire, la même apologie et conservent le même point de vue. C'est ce qui explique que l'imitation de Métastase se soit fait sentir dans la tragédie régulière, avant d'envahir la scène de l'Académie Royale de Musique. En effet, ce n'est qu‘à partir de 1783 qu'apparaissent, sous forme d'opéras, des adaptations de Métastase. Bien avant cette date, les auteurs dramatiques français se sont emparés de l'ceuvre du poète italien, dans l'espoir de trouver chez lui des procédés qui puissent insuffler un peu de vie à la tragédie qui languit. La vogue pour Métastase se fera sentir surtout après 1751, date de la publication des premiers volumes de la traduction de Richelet.

In 1786 Gilbert Wakefield pointed out in a very specific way the similarity of certain passages in the poetry of Lucretius, Thomson, and Gray. In our own day, Miss A. L. Reed and Professor H. W. Garrod have indicated the same parallel passages in the three poets, as well as in Collins. My purpose here is to classify this Lucretian influence as definitely as possible, and to describe its genesis and diffusion as part of a broader Vergilian stream.