bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Introduction
Authors: Hawley John Stratton
Published: November 2023

Ask someone who lives in the West to name an Indian classic, and the answer is almost foreordained: the Bhagavad Gītā. This poetic work, depicting a didactic encounter between an exemplary human being and the god Krishna, has been translated into European languages hundreds of times. Yet surprisingly few inhabitants of the populous states of north India can recite more than a phrase or two of the Sanskrit original. The Krishna they know as the subject of classic poetry is apt to come from quite another source: Hindi poet-singers of the early modern period, and the greatest of these is Sūrdās. Like Homer, he is remembered as having been blind. Like Shakespeare, he has infused a tradition of living performance. And the Krishna to whom he sings is largely the god of love rather than the key to life’s other battles, as in the Gītā. Why then is Sūrdās still so little known outside his homeland? It has to do with the definition of a classic. When European scholars and colonial administrators tried to make cultural sense of India in the late-eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they typically started their quest by studying Sanskrit. Latin and Greek were what made for a serious education in Europe, so as it became clear that these two had a sister language in Sanskrit—”more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either,” as Sir William Jones famously proclaimed in 1786—it was natural that this ancient tongue
A Special Theological Problem Divine Justice
Authors: Englard Izhak
Published: November 2023

INTERESTINGLY, THE SUBSTANCE of and the relationship between distributive and corrective justice was discussed by theologians in relation to Divinity. This discussion constituted the natural continuation of the fundamental general problem concerning the relationship between Divinity and justice. In other words, the general question was whether mankind had a legitimate claim of justice toward Divinity.
Jewish Commentators
Authors: Englard Izhak
Published: November 2023

IT IS A MOST NOTEWORTHY FACT that in the whole classical Jewish (rabbinic) literature one does not find an attempt of defining the notion of justice, neither that of law. Generally, it appears that the rabbis were considerably more interested in concrete solutions than in abstract legal concepts.490 Moreover, the Jewish scholars first learned the ideas contained in Aristotle’s Ethics through the intermediary of the Arab philosophers, probably only in the twelfth century.491
Camera Men
Authors: North Michael
Published: November 2023

The scene is a screening room, the nervous filmmaker in the first row of seats, dead-center in more ways than one, with his skeptical colleagues filling up the rear. As soon as the projector starts, their worst suspicions are confirmed: the film is a disaster. A swimmer dives into and then, somehow, back out of the water. A battleship is double-exposed over a city street so that it seems to be sailing on the pavement. Finally, the screen is quartered, with four exposures running at once, cars careening into one another, crowds of pedestrians folded in two and then in four, running into and then back out of one another in the center of the frame. The filmmaker is crushed, his career doomed at the very start by a set of rookie mistakes.
Mickey’s Mechanical Man
Authors: North Michael
Published: November 2023

I E. M. Forster’s observation, made in 1934, that “at present Mickey is everybody’s god” is a statement that seems, at this late date, to support itself, for if even so removed an aesthete as Forster could have become conversant enough to discuss several Mickey Mouse cartoons and enthusiastic enough to speculate, even archly, about Mickey’s future, then it would seem that “everybody” was indeed devoted to Disney’s trademark character.1 At this time, when Mickey was still primarily a cartoon, before he became a merchandising juggernaut, a corporate symbol, the focus of American copyright law, the face of a theme park empire, the host of a series of TV programs, and an ironic, derogatory adjective, he was in fact one of a tiny number of movie figures whose prestige among writers, artists, and intellectuals equaled their general appeal.
The Performance-Ensemble
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

So, at the beginning of Henry V, the Chorus dreams of his ideal theatre for the play to come. The key word is ‘fire’. Like fire, his dream reaches irrepressibly upward and outward. It swells. Its playhouse expands from a wooden O to kingdom-sized proportions; its actors and spectators are raised to the highest ranks of nobility; and beyond that its presiding Muse is exalted to divine heights. Only then may the dream-theatre do justice to the swelling scene the Chorus heralds; only ‘then should the warlike Harry, like himself, / Assume the port of Mars’.
The Playwright in the Play
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

If one asks in a general sort of way what is identifiably ‘Shakespearian’ about a play by Shakespeare, one is in familiar territory. One may think of an extraordinary breadth in his scope and depth in his insight, a wonderful vitality and variety in his characters and a supercharged energy in their actions, an eloquence and memorableness in his dialogue at its best, an amazing ability to match character and language that is celebrated in T. S. Eliot’s paradox: ‘Each character speaks for himself, but no other poet could have found these words for him to speak.’ All of these arc included in a view of human nature that makes a unique blend of truth and compassion-at once hard¬ headed and soft-hearted.
The Theatre-Poet and the Players: Four Rehearsals
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

The rehearsals in this chapter are imaginary in more ways than the obvious one that they never actually took place, except in my mind. Only to a degree are they meant to be like actual rehearsals. My players are not concerned with lighting, costume, set, and the rest of the features that actual players need to incorporate in their performances. They can concentrate on the movements of mind and body that express the relationships of the characters and the progress of the action. Even here I have not felt it necessary to give a complete ‘blocking’ of their movements but only so much as to indicate especially significant developments. More than would ever become explicit in actuality, I provide an account of the currents of thought and feeling that run-in a given interpretation-beneath and between the words. Whether or not Shakespeare or Burbage or an Elizabethan groundling would have been conscious of a Stanislavskian subtext, any coherent interpretation seems to me to require that such undercurrents be imagined by everyone involved.
The Latitudes and Limits of Performance: The BBC Television
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

Untill recently, the analysis of Shakespearian performance has been extremely difficult. The would-be analyst has had to depend upon a given live production or the commercial presentations of a film or television show. Only under special circumstances were the necessary repeated viewings possible. With the advent of videotape and the greater availability of films for non-commercial use, these difficulties have largely been removed. The tapes and films can be run and rerun at will. Of course, the complete rapport of a live performance¬ ensemble is not possible because there is no chance for the players to respond to the audience’s responses. That is a limitation to be kept in mind in what follows.
General Introduction: The Significance of the Medieval Commentary-Tradition
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

There are many branches of medieval literary theory and criticism, only one of which has received the attention it deserves, namely the ‘arts’ of composition (artes poeticae, artes praedicandi, artes dictaminis ). This anthology concentrates on another branch, the most fundamental and important of them all within the medieval educational system, and one which has a lot to say about a far wider range of literary matters than those which fall within the terms of reference of the pragmatic and prescriptive ‘arts’. For the texts translated below comprise sophisticated discussions of such topics as fiction and fable (in classical works and in the Bible); the ethical effects and purpose of literature; authorship and authority; the function of biography in interpreting a writer’s work; stylistic and didactic modes; literary form and structure; allegory and ‘literal’ or historical sense; symbolism; imagination and imagery; the semiotics of words and things; the moralization of classical texts; the status of poetry within the hierarchy of the human arts and sciences. Quite obviously, this rich array of literary discussion and analysis falls within the sphere of ‘literary theory and criticism’ as normally understood.
An Anthology of Literary Prefaces: Introductions to the Authors
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

Graammar is not simply a matter of learning how to write and speak well, declared Thierry of Chartres (who became chancellor of Chartres in 1141), echoing a Jong-established definition: it also has as its proper task the explication and the study of all the authors. The principles which governed that task are revealed in the introductory lectures to the grammarians’ commentaries on their authors, which are sometimes called accessiis. There, each and every schoolbook was analysed in a systematic way, in terms of its author, the style and structure of its material, and the educational ends which it served. The precise number of headings under which the various aspects of the text are discussed vary somewhat from accessus to accessus; in our selection the most comprehensive set is offered by the introduction to the Paschale Carmen of Sedulius: the life of the poet (vitapoetae), the title of the work (titulusoperis), the nature of the verse (qualitas canninis), the intention of the writer (intentio scribentis), the number of the books (numenu librorum), the order of the books (ordo librorum), and the textual exposition (explanatio). This paradigm, the ‘type B’ introduction as described in R. W. Hunt’s pioneering study of academic prologues, was associated with the fourth-century grammarian Servius because it is found at the beginning of manuscript copies of his commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid.
Scriptural Allegory and Authority: Hugh of Saint-Victor1 Peter Abelard, and Peter Lombard
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

‘THE idea that the sacred Scriptures have (aside from their literal value) a symbolic value is ancient and not irrational’,1 declares Jorge Luis Borges, offering this insight into the motivation of those who sought to plumb the depths of divinely-inspired writing: To some extent this is true of twelfth-century biblical exegesis. The present section has as its subject the way in which three outstanding scholars of that period, Hugh of Saint-Victor (c.1og6-1141), Peter Abelard (1079-1142 or 1144), and Peter Lombard (c. 1100-6o), approached their ‘absolute text’, striving to trace the blueprint of its ‘mechanism of infinite purposes’ in a way which illustrated and confirmed its supreme authority in the world of books. About 1118 Hugh entered Saint-Victor, the house of Augustinian canons recently founded in Paris by William of Champeaux (who had once instructed Abelard in the arts and subsequently became his bitter rival). After studying under William, Hugh remained at Saint-Victor to teach the elements of the liberal arts and scriptural commentary.3
The Dionysian Imagination: Thomas Gallus and Robert Grosseteste
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

In a single passage in his novel The Name of The Rose, Umberto Eco manages to allude to a great many of the thought-patterns and problems which medieval scholars found in the works of Pseudo-Dionysius, a Neoplatonic Monophysite of c.500, who successfully passed himself off as the ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’ whose conversion by St Paul is recorded in Acts 17: 34. Eco’s character William of Baskerville has remarked that ‘in sermons, to touch the imagination of devout throngs it is necessary to introduce exempla, not infrequently jocular’; this argument also serves to justify the monstrous images sometimes produced by manuscript illuminators. He proceeds to cite the testimony of Pseudo-Dionysius and his great twelfth-century commentator Hugh of Saint Victor: The opposing viewpoint is put forcibly by ‘Jorge of Burgos’, who will turn out to be the villain of the piece, the narrow-minded monk who is attempting to suppress the second book of Aristotle’s Poetics, a treatise on comedy (now lost, if it ever existed): ’the man who depicts monsters and portents of nature to reveal the things of God per speculum et in aenigmate’, he argues, ‘comes to enjoy the very nature of the monstrosities he creates and to delight in them’, thus warping his conception of God and creation alike. There in a nutshell is the very essence of the challenge presented by Pseudo-Dionysius. The present chapter will illustrate how two of his most avid thirteenth-century readers, Thomas Gallus (Abbot of St Andrew’s, Vercelli, 1219-46) and Robert Grosseteste (Bishop of Lincoln, 1235-53), warmly supported the ideas which Eco put in the mouth of William of Baskerville, while taking some note of the objections of the Jorges of their world.
Radical Puffing: Parodic Advertising and Newspapers
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

Hone’s publications from 1815 until 1821 frequently use advertising. They incorporated all major forms of press advertisement and many types of illustrated product advertising outside the press including handbills, pamphlets, broadsides, pasteboard handouts, and even illuminated windows. Hone’s experiments with advertising reached a climax from 1820 to 1821.
Convention and Conspiracy
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

In the last months of 1794 Hardy and Thelwall of the LCS, and the philologist John Horne Tooke of the SCI, were tried on a charge of having compassed and imagined the death of the king. The societies had been planning to summon a convention of reform societies in pursuit, they declared, of a reform of parliament based on the plan developed in the early 1780s by the Duke of Richmond, now a member of Pitt’s cabinet, for universal manhood suffrage and annual parliaments.1 As we have seen, however, the Government claimed that this demand had been adopted only to mask the true aim of the societies: the convention, they insisted, was intended to subvert the constitution and to usurp the functions of government; perhaps even to depose the king and to declare a republic. There was evidence that members of the LCS, and of other societies in Sheffield, Edinburgh, and Norwich, had been acquiring or attempting to acquire arms, with which it was alleged they intended either to initiate an insurrection or to resist the sovereign power in the event of an attempt by the Government to disperse the convention by force.
The Trial of Thomas Walker
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

This chapter is based on a conjecture, that by April 1794 the law officers in London were already beginning to concern themselves with the question of whether, if a conspiracy could be described as intended to over throw the constitution, it could be represented as a conspiracy to levy war directly against the king. If this conjecture could be shown to be wrong, it would not much affect my general account of how ‘modern’ treason was invented; if correct, it adds another stage to that process, and would help explain the extraordinary-and disgraceful-behaviour of Edward Law, later Lord Ellenborough and Lord Chief Justice of England, in his prosecution of Thomas Walker and others, in Lancaster, for a treasonable conspiracy.
The Arming of the LCS
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The conspiracy the secret committee of the Commons claimed to have discovered-to overthrow the constitution and to usurp the power of government-seemed to make no sense unless it could be established that the societies had assembled a substantial paramilitary force, or would have assembled one in time for a summer convention. In the words of Pitt, the conspiracy could never have been thought of, without the idea of having recourse to violence.
Parliament and Prejudication
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The Second  Report of the secret committee of the House of Commons came to the firm conclusion that the leaders of the reform societies had been imagining the king’s death. If we read this report as creatively as the committee read the papers it had seized, we might, however, be tempted to conclude that even the committee itself suspected that what it described as the ‘extravagant designs’ of the reform societies were designs to which the imagination of the committee itself had contributed its share. The report acknowledged that its final conclusion, that the activities of the societies ‘obviously and necessarily’ tended to the entire destruction of the constitution, might ‘at first be difficult to be credited’.

.
The Charge to the Grand Jury
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The formal proceedings against the leaders of the London reform societies began at the Session House in Clerkenwell on 2 October I794, when a Grand Jury of the county of Middlesex assembled to consider the bill of indictment against thirteen of the prisoners: Hardy, Richter, Moore, Thelwall, Hodgson, Baxter, and Lovett of the LCS, Tooke, Bonney, Kyd, Joyce, Wardle and Holcroft of the SCI. The other LCS prisoners were the subject of separate bills which were to be considered by the Grand Jury later in the month.
‘A Conspiracy without Conspirators’
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

Tooke, after his trial, managed to evade the crowds waiting for him in the street, but Erskine and Gibbs were once more drawn to Serjeant’s Inn, to be greeted by cries of ‘ERSKINE for ever, for ever-ERSKINE AND LIBERTY’. Lord Mayor Skinner spoke too, promising to rely only on the constabulary to police the celebrations. Similar scenes and similar cries followed the acquittal of Thelwall, whose precautions to avoid an elaborate triumph were frustrated by the vigilance of his supporters. A much more elaborate procession was organized in Sheffield on the return of two of the members of the Sheffield SCI who had been arrested on suspicion of treason and detained in London as Crown witnesses.
Epilogue: ‘Fire, Famine, and Slaughter’
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

In a letter to the Moral and Political Magazine of the LCS in November 1796, a pseudonymous contributor, ‘Paramythion’, warns his fellow-citizens of the dangers of attending 'public dinners, free and easy clubs, and other societies, wherein singing is introduced as a relaxation from serious business’.
Heaven, Hell, and the Space Between
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

Do we see it so, imagine the unseen manipulator amusing himself in the way of Hardy’s President of the Immortals who brought poor Tess to death by hanging before he ‘had finished his sport’ with her? Hanging comes near in Act Without Words but the rope offered from ‘above’ is withdrawn as the player reaches for it: a more benign frustration. When the solitary figure onstage sits down at the end is he simply giving up in despair, or, as some have thought, broken free of illusion (a word much emphasized in the stage directions)? We have to decide for ourselves. What Beckett does for us is register the urgent questioning, the not knowing, the contradictory possibilities; states of mind well known to people today brooding on the meaning of life, perhaps at times of crisis.
Rhythms
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

At my first meeting with Beckett on 30 April 1976, sitting in the bar of the Royal Court Hotel, we almost at once went into a Yeatsian rhythm. I was telling him of the video recordings I had arranged to have made of two productions of Yeats’s plays- The Cat and the Moon and At the Hawk’s Well-when at the mention of the latter he instantly broke into its great opening line, ‘I call to the eye of the mind’. It seemed natural to join in and we continued the extempore reading to the end of the first stanza, on the line ‘The salt sea wind has swept bare’. It was an exhilarating, three-party conversation.
Company
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

Yet into this silent, night-time situation a throng of company makes its way, beginning with the un comprehended voice. It is company in itself, says the narrator, but ‘not enough’. More must be conjured up out of the dark (‘Voices in the Dark’ was the working title at an early stage of the writing). Memories come into play; fantasies, deep thoughts and imaginings; we are let into the process by which they are shaped and sculpted till they live, become true company for the narrator and for us. The narrator himself is part of the imaginative process: ‘Devised deviser devising it all for company’. The ‘test’ is always the company. I think of it as a test that has in mind those outside the fable who will react to it as readers; the company must ring true for them, as for the ultimate deviser, the author.
Introduction: Canons and Contexts
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

Any study of a fairly well-known modern poet which announces itself as contextual might well seem to be a cautious enough exercise, a filling-in of ‘background’ valuable mainly to the particular poet’s admirers. That this is unlikely to be true in Louis MacNeice’s case is neither the fault of the poet nor entirely the responsibility of his critics: to begin an examination of MacNeice in his contexts is to encounter, very quickly, the limitations and forceful orthodoxies of more than one critical canon. The suggestion that a critical reevaluation of MacNeice is in order, and indeed that it has to some extent already begun, need not mean that the two principal canons within which the poet tends to be interpreted-that of the so-called ‘Auden group’ of 1930s poets, and that of Anglo-Irish literatureare necessarily invalid: what it does mean, however, is that their status and conditioning have to be examined, that their apparently discrete areas of ‘context’ have to be critically related to each other. It could be plausibly maintained that the difficulties from which MacNeice’s reputation has always suffered have their origin in his poetic violation of certain canonical (and contextual) norms: a 1930s poet who insisted on his Irishness; an Irish-born poet who lived most of his life in England.
Introduction
Authors: Kay Dennis
Published: November 2023

I’d like to begin with the events of two consecutive days in the spring of 1559, the first spring of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Henry Machyn, a London undertaker, recorded two contrasting funerals in his diary. On 6 April, at St Clement’s Without Temple Bar, the funeral took place of Lady Cary, a woman of about 30 who had been married first to Sir William Walsingham and then to Sir John Cary. Machyn notes the quantity of candles and banners displayed in the church, and that the ceremony concluded with ‘masse and or communyon’. The account indicates that there was nothing unusual or remarkable about what occurred.
The English Tradition Of Elegy
Authors: Kay Dennis
Published: November 2023

While generalized laments—’elegy’ in Gray’s sense—have a lengthy history in English letters, the personal elegy appears first at the close of the Middle Ages. And these pre-Reformation obituary verses may be classified under five headings. The hierarchy properly begins with laments for monarchs: the model was Geoffrey de Vinsauf’s archetypal threnody for Richard I. Such poems, which praise their subject and proclaim the instability of human glory, tend to be virtuoso exercises in amplificatio. A poet showed his skill by avoiding repetition despite treating a subject exhaustively: as Geoffrey put it, ‘varius sit et tamen idem’ (Poetria Nova, p. 225). In the fifteenth century such techniques were increasingly applied to contemporary events.
The Elegies Of Spenser And Sidney
Authors: Kay Dennis
Published: November 2023

Both Spenser and Sidney appear to have grasped from the outset that the funeral elegy (especially the pastoral elegy) is an essay in poetic tradition, that, as ancient writers and many later commentators recognized, ‘pastoral poems are made of other pastoral poems’; and they conceived of a tradition immeasurably more elevated and more ancient than anything seen in England before. Just as much as with every other literary kind they attempted, the elegy was rediscovered, reinvented, and transformed by the age’s most formally innovative writers. The elegy itself—or even the very act of writing—is a central concern of each of their laments. Both poets, as I hope to show, appear to use the form in highly self-conscious ways.
Shakespeare A Life
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

In the most complete, accurate, and up-to-date narrative of Shakespeare's life ever written, Park Honan uses a wealth of fresh information to dramatically alter our perceptions of the actor, poet, and playwright. The young poet's relationships, his early courtship of Anne Hathaway, their marriage, his attitudes to women such as Jennet Davenant, Marie Mountjoy, and his own daughters, are seen in a new light, illuminating Shakespeare's needs, habits, passions and concerns. Park Honan examines the world of the playing companies -- the power of patronage, theatrical conditions, and personal rivalries -- to reveal the relationship between the man and the writing, and using previously unpublished material explores the causes of Shakespeare's success; Stratford childhood, his parents' capabilities, and his preparations for a London career. Shakespeare: A Life casts new light on the complexity and fascination of Shakespeare's life and his extraordinary development as an artist.
Mother of the Child
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

When her first son was born, Mary Shakespeare’s town lay in the path of the worst plague since the Black Death. Yetthe town’s corporate council had been warned about the contagion, and for years the aldermen and chief burgesses had been trying to keep the streets clean. As early as April 1552 John Shakespeare had paid a small fine for keeping an unauthorized muck-heap (or sterquinarium) on Henley Street. At the town’s northern end, this was an old, built-up street, traversed by horsemen riding through on the way up to Henley-inArden. Wagons drawn by oxen bumped over a cross-gutter in front of Gilbert Bradley’s house, a few doors to the east of his fellow glover John Shakespeare. Once, in 1560, nearly every tenant had to pay for pavings broken by the damaging wagons.
To Grammar School
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare knew his advantages well enough to take large risks in the early 1570s, and he won local notoriety as an entrepreneur. Once he was accused of illegally sharing in a joint purchase of 200 tods (5,600 lb.) of wool. Even before applying for a coat of arms, he must have looked with immense hope to his son and heir. As a deputy bailiff, he was unlikely to have sent William to any school but the borough one, the only grammar school for miles around. This was the King’s New School on Church Street —scriveners refer to it as the ‘free scole’ or ‘Kynges free Schoole’. Its registers are missing, but Nicholas Rowe writes in 1709 that ‘Mr. John Shakespear’ was a ‘considerable Dealer in Wool’ who bred William ‘for some time at a Free School’-and, though he was not always reliable,
Love and Early Marriage
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

In a Tudor parish one’s life was under review by parents, friends, and neighbours so that almost no change in one’s fate went unnoticed. One’s private behaviour tended to be observable, too. A young man in the ‘May of youth and bloom of lustihood’ might, of course, sow his wild oats, but he was likely to hear from the vicar’s apparitor and have to explain his fornication and apologize for it. Anyone’s sexual affairs, outside marriage, concerned the community, and William’s involvement with the Hath ways affected his career even as it touched on a web of social relationships.
Attitudes
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare’s likely evolving duties in a troupe, as well as his attitudes to Marlowe and Kyd, his own plays, and even what is known of his London milieu, give us a chance to examine him rather closely. What is unique in his inward development? After some experience as an actor and theatre-poet, how did he make the most use of his talents? Even in comparison with John Lyly, he bursts into flower as a poet with astonishing suddenness. Lyly had had the two elegant prose romances of Euphues and Euphues and his England behind him when he wrote his first play. Soon after school, Shakespeare must have penned something other than epistles and orations; his amateurish ‘hate away’ sonnet, no. 145, is not beyond the skill of a bright grammar school boy, and it is likely that he wrote more ambitious works during his courtship; a few years later in London he may have revised or added to works by other writers. .
A Patron, Poems, and Company Work
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Well aware of a sophisticated readership among courtiers, lawyers, and others in the professional and mercantile ranks, Shakespeare published two erotic works in the plague years. These poems were meant for readers of either sex. Yet they were especially well suited to young men with leisure to admire tales of rape, seduction, and female grief told with Ovidian grace and wit. With Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, he made a strong bid to be recognized as a poet by refined society. And the poems contrast with a bleak, plague-ridden London. Early in 1593 Shakespeare had done much. If he had suffered as an upstart ‘Shake-scene’, he had Chettle’s apology in print. And now for a few weeks actors resumed work in London, until plague closed the theatres on 28 January. Strange’s and Sussex’s players lingered near a wintry city before returning to the road.
A Servant of the Lord Chamberlain
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

in the bleak, cold spring of1594, plague abated in southern England and players returned under grey skies to London. Few people could remember such an odd, dismal spring. The past two years had punished the acting troupes; none had thrived on the road and plague had brought total chaos to the entertainment world. Pembroke’s men had broken up and had sold their playbooks, which thus came into print like debris from a sinking ship. Keen to advertise themselves, it seems, and stay afloat, other troupes released plays for publication. Hertford’s small troupe faltered, and after losing their own patron, Sussex’s men disbanded.
South of Julius Caesar’s Tower
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Ho no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in supposition. He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies. I understand moreover upon the Rialto he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men. There be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves—I mean pirates—and then there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks. The man is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats. I think I may take his bond.
A Gentleman’s Choices
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

We cannot but know [your] dignity greater, than to descend to the reading of these trifles: and, while we name them trifles, we have depriv’d our selves of the defence of our Dedication. But since your Lordships have beene pleas’d to thinke these trifles some-thing ... we hope, that (they out-living [MR. Shakespeare], and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them. He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion’, wrote Nicholas Rowe in 1709 about Shakespeare, ‘and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford’.Rowe, one feels, is right in believing that the poet’s estate was ample, but the notion of retiring from all useful work was generally speaking
Kings of Winter Festive Groups
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

French medieval society was prolific in producing festive kings, who were elevated to their temporary eminence according to one of the two alternative ways that real kings were exalted; either by election or by fortune. Literary and dramatic confraternities appointed kings to lead them in both serious, learned debates and satirical sotties, while minstrel brotherhoods were governed by a king appointed from outside. In the church at New Year, a chief fool was elected as king, or rex stultorum, and, at Twelfth Night in kings’ courts, a rex fabarum was selected through the chance portion of cake containing the bean. Some of these Norman customs took root in the English court. I 277 is the earliest known date when a king of the minstrels.
Festive Tragedy Troilus and Cressida, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

Peter Alexander, in 1928, first suggested that Troilus and Cressida might have been written for an Inner Temple seasonal entertainment; a view sensitively pursued by W.W. Greg in 19 5 5, when he put forward the further possibility of ‘the habitual All Saints or Candlemas festivities of the Inner Temple’. Although he acknowledges ‘no shred of external evidence’, internal evidence from the printer’s Prefaces and the text makes it very likely that the Chamberlain’s Men performed the play for lawyers in the last Christmas season of Elizabeth’s reign, 1602-3. The recent editor of the Arden edition asks a further question which points specifically to Twelfth Night. Why, he asks, should Pandarus say in the Epilogue that ‘some two months hence my will shall here be made’, when he has already made it clear that he is dying, unless he means his final re-emergence on Shrove Tuesday before being extinguished by Lent? In which case Pandarus would be referring to himself as the lord of misrule who had presided over the now ended Christmas entertainment. Another enigmatic line in the Epilogue also suggests Pandarus’s exit from temporary, seasonal eminence.
The Last Days Of Pompeii
Authors: Pain James
Published: November 2023

Whilst toga drama was drawing audiences to theatres, a wholly distinct form of toga play, performed to audiences of more than J0,000 persons at a time, began to reach spectators in Britain, Amenea, Europe, South America, and throughout the British Empire. Conflicts between Christian and pagan, between civilizmg white and black, oriental, or red-skinned heathen, between good imperialists and bad imperialists- were being staged in pyrodramas, The Last Days of Pompeii was the most popular and longe t-enduring of these outdoor melodramas staged on a grand scale.
The Sign Of The Cross
Authors: Barrett Wilson
Published: November 2023

Whatever merit may be assigned to previous toga pieces, without The Sign of the Cross and its attendant success there would be conspicuously fewer toga plays, and Chance Newton’s double-edged term of disparagement and acknowledgement might have passed unremarked. The play still attracts hostility—now from critics who have neither read nor seen it—much as it did when it toured the North of England in late 1895 and began its London run early in 1896.
Balliol College
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

There were two scholarships on offer, the blue ribbon of Oxford awards. Over twenty candidates, ‘all the flower of England’s youth, from Rugby, Harrow, Eton, Marlborough, and I know not whence’,’ sat the examination, one of the stiffest in the university. They were put up for their three days’ stay in the students’ rooms, with two beds in a set of rooms instead of the usual one. The examinations, in Greek and Latin translation, Greek and Latin verse composition, and an English essay, were written on blue foolscap paper. Hopkins was fascinated by the looks of another candidate, a ‘dreadful and ghastly man’, possessed of a ‘haggard hideousness’. He had ‘grey goggle eyes’, he later told his mother, a ‘scared suspicious look as though someone were about to hit him from behind’, a ‘shuddering gait or shuffle’, and a ‘pinched face’. There was a viva voce, at which all the dozen or so Fellows of Balliol sat in a horseshoe, ‘all intent, all silent’ (according to another candidate), ‘except when the illustrious but suspected Jowett puts a question in his silvery, comfortable, but withal searching tones, and I respond ... not as I would, but as I can.’
Dolben
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Hopkins probably first met Robert Bridges, an undergraduate of Corpus Christi, at one of Canon Liddon’s Sunday evening lectures in the Michaelmas term of 1863. They became good friends, and in February 1865 Bridges introduced Hopkins to Digby Mackworth Dolben, who was entered for Balliol in 1866. Dolben was not quite seventeen, three-and-a-half years younger than Hopkins. He had ‘fine dark melancholy eyes’, was ‘tall, pale, and of delicate appearance, and though his face was thoughtful and his features intellectual, he would not at that time have been thought good-looking’. He dressed neglectfully, and had an abstracted manner. He was short-sighted but did not wear spectacles, and ‘though the dreaminess which it gave to his expression came to be a characteristic and genuine charm’, wrote Bridges, ‘it was, until it won romantic interpretation, only an awkwardness’.
Philosophate: St Mary’s Hall, 1870-1873
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Hopkins’s two years as a novice ended on Thursday 8 September 1870. At the close of an eight-day retreat, four out of the original seven novices, Thomas McMullin, Charles Wilcock, Frederick Hopkins, and Gerard Hopkins, took their vows. It was two years since their first full day in the Society: 8 September was the day each year dedicated by the Church to the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Welsh and Wells
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

One bright day soon after his arrival at St Beuno’s Hopkins had walked with Bacon to Ffynnon Fair,1 in a meadow by the Elwy. Ffynnon Fair or Mary’s Well was one of nearly a hundred wells dedicated to the Virgin Mary in Wales. She had been so real to the medieval Welsh that a tradition had arisen that she had come to Wales. Some of the roofless stone remnants of the chapel walls were still high enough to show the outline of simple gothic windows and doorways, with a profusion of fiercely competing tangled plants making a wilderness where its floor used to be. The well itself had formed the western arm of the cruciform medieval chapel; it was three sides of a square, with a large bath into which the well-water flowed, forming an irregular fourth side. At the centre of each of the three sides an extra triangle had been added, making, with the two corners of the square, five points towards which the spring-water gushed up from the bottom of the well, breaking the surface with wellings-up and bubbles. Steps led down into the bath, and a strong stream ran out of it, curving round until it flowed just inside the south wall of the chapel.
‘The Wreck of the Deutsch/and’
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

The story of the composition of ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ is familiar. Reading The Times one day in early December 1875, Hopkins was strongly affected by its account of the wreck: because of severe conditions and negligence, the Deutsch/and, carrying some nuns who had been expelled from Prussia, foundered on a notorious sandbank in the mouth of the Thames. ‘Happening to say so to my rector he said that he wished someone would write a poem on the subject.’ Using this hint as sanction, Hopkins ‘set to work’.1 With his age’s concern for factual details, his first thought was to collect eyewitness descriptions from The Times. Being unable to cut the house’s newspapers, he asked his mother to send him all she could find, but before the cuttings arrived from Oak Hill he was already writing and even planning the publication of an imaginative, inventive, and complex poem.
‘Careful and subtle fault-finding’: Patmore and Hopkins
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

At the end of July 1883 Hopkins’s first year of teaching classics at Stonyhurst was ended, and he did not expect to see his name on the next year’s appointment list, to be published on I August. On that day the old college year was to be rounded off by ‘Great Academies’, Stonyhurst’s annual speech-making and prize-giving ceremony, to which parents and distinguished speakers were invited. There were good reasons for doubting whether he would be kept on at Stonyhurst. Apart from his compulsory training periods-the novitiate at Roehampton, the philosophate at St Mary’s Hall, and the theologate at St Beuno’sHopkins had not once, since leaving Oxford sixteen years before, lived anywhere or held any professional position for longer than a year. He had lived in Spinkhill, Stonyhurst, London and Oxford in I 878, and in Liverpool, Glasgow, and Roehampton in 1881. It was to be one of the ironies of his life that the least congenial of his many postings, Dublin, would be his longest stay in one place.
‘Dark not day’
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

On 11 June 1885 Patmore wrote from Hastings. He was making plans for the summer and hoped there would be the chance of a meeting at Stonyhurst or Hastings. ‘I assure you’, wrote Patmore, ‘I shall always regard my having made your acquaintance as an important event in my life, and there are few things I desire more than a renewal of opportunity of personal intercourse with you.’ Hopkins was so harassed by examinations, as well as melancholy, that he could not reply at once, and, though he knew he badly needed a holiday, was too self-preoccupied to plan even a month ahead. He replied, on 23 June, that he expected to go to England ‘some time after the middle of next month and how long I may be there I do not know, but perhaps it might be possible to see you towards the end of it if you were then returned from the north’.
Tales, Jests, and Novelle in Prose
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

Beside the prose romances there exist a large number of shorter prose stories and anecdotes appealing probably to a wider audience. This large and important group can, it has been said, ‘almost be described as a fifteenth-century genre, the short story’ (Ian Gordon). Its antecedents are found in the exemplum, a distinctive kind of short tale used by preachers and moralists throughout the Middle Ages (and a typical form of religious prose narrative: see p. 259). These are used to entertain, to engage, and to instruct. Chaucer’s Pardoner knew of their popularity and success: ‘thanne telle I hem ensamples many oon | Of olde stories longe tyme agoon. | For lewed peple loven tales olde, | Swich thynges kan they wel reporte and holde.’ It would be wrong to label such antecedents as ‘literary origins’, however.
Learned, Encyclopedic, and Didactic Verse
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

Lydgate’s disciple Benedict Burgh (d. by 1483) is an example of a number of learned (and usually clerical) writers of the period––none of them outstanding poets, but all, in differing ways, making some contribution to the cultural history of the time. Burgh was an Oxford graduate who seems to have enjoyed a quiet and modestly successful ecclesiastical career, rising through a series of offices, mostly in East Anglia, to the posts of archdeacon of Colchester, canon of St Stephen’s chapel Westminster, and chaplain to the king (1470). Besides completing The Secrees, he translated the Distichs of Cato, a collection of proverbial advice and a popular schoolbook, for Lord Bourchier, son of the first earl of Essex.
‘Chaucerian’ Poems
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

The title of ‘“Chaucerian” poems’ is often given to a rather miscellaneous collection of works (some of which are very difficult to date), all in one way or another related to Chaucer, some which were attributed to him in manuscripts or early prints, some which are ‘imitations’ of him or directly inspired by his poetry, such as The Kingis Quair in Scotland or The Temple of Glass in England (see pp. 474, 320). These two are outstanding, but the whole group forms a most attractive anthology of late medieval ‘courtly’ verse.
Mystery Cycles I: Old Testament
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

The (admittedly fragmentary) records suggest that the English cycle plays began to emerge c.1375. About their genesis and development there is little agreement, and the plain truth is that conclusive evidence is lacking for any of the various theories that have been put forward. Among these are the suggestions that the mystery cycles represent a new kind of drama, distinct from liturgical drama and other kinds, which came into existence in the fourteenth century because of the stimulus given by the institution of the feast of Corpus Christi; that they did not spring parentless into existence, but developed from earlier liturgical plays; that the doctrinal Eucharistic connection with the feast of Corpus Christi is incidental, but that they develop from fourteenth-century festival processions.
Morality Plays and Interludes
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

They were long relegated to a particularly dusty corner of early literature, dismissed as didactic and dull—and for using the despised mode of allegory. It is only fairly recently that they have been given sympathetic attention: it is probably significant that, like the mystery plays, the best examples of the type have proved themselves to be extremely successful in performance. They share with the mystery plays a liking for strongly ‘typed’ characters and large expressive scenes. They have similar stage conventions, and techniques of language, and share the same religious concerns and preconceptions
Verse, Didactic and Homiletic
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare too will picture Wat on his hill. But as often as not Shakespeare (like Chaucer) saw Nature (pace Dryden) through the spectacles of books. The book they looked through was the Bestiary and its companion piece the Lapidary, which taught how to read sermons in stones. This is not to say that the Bestiary was always at hand; but its lore was so long and widely disseminated as to become indistinguishable from folk-belief, whilst at the same time it was absorbed into highly reputable encyclopaedias like Bartholomew the Englishman’s De Proprietatibus Rerum.
Layamon
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

Outside the literary histories Layamon (or, more properly, La3amon (Laghamon), that is ‘Lawman’) is almost unknown; not because he is a poor poet but because his magnum opus is lengthy, inaccessible, and for most readers today difficult or uncouth in appearance. His Brut (entitled ‘Hystoria Brutonum’ in the Cotton Caligula MS*) is the longest poem in English apart from The Faerie Queene, which in one sense it foreshadows, not only in giving Arthur an English context and. an English value, but also in its archaic, not to say archaistic, language and spelling, which may have been intended to serve much the same purpose as do those features in Spenser and Doughty. His unique interest lies in the fact that though a literate poet, he continually shows signs and vestiges of an oral tradition that must have still operated in twelfth-century England in ways not distinctly different from those that Milman Parry has taught us to recognize in Homer: which is why Milman Parry’s The Making of Homeric Verse, with its lucid and objective introduction by his son † is a good starting point for any study of the Brut.