bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Post-Scholastic Writers
Authors: Englard Izhak
Published: November 2023

THE TRANSITION FROM SCHOLASTICISM TO POST-SCHOLASTICISM WAS evidently a gradual matter. It signifies on the one hand, a critical approach toward medieval scholastic thought by a direct return to the classical thinkers of the antiquity. It is the period of the so-called Renaissance characterized by the activity of the humanists.534 But, on the other hand, it could also mean a critical approach to Aristotle himself.535 The critique of Aristotle was considerably enhanced during the succeeding era of the Enlightenment.536 In the limited framework of our study, we will concentrate on the Aristotelian distinction of justice.537 Naturally, not all humanist scholars added original ideas to the classical distinction; many limited themselves to a rather succinct description of Aristotle’s writings.538 This is especially true for the literary genre of compendiums for students of Aristotle’s Ethics, works that concentrated on the original text.539 Besides the reliance on Greek and Roman sources, one finds in the post-reformation theological-moral literature an enhanced reference to biblical quotations in support of the Aristotelian notions of justice.540
Beckett’s Machinations
Authors: North Michael
Published: November 2023

Modern comedy in the middle of the twentieth century was more or less defined by the works of Samuel Beckett. Recycling costumes, props, and routines from vaudeville and the circus by bringing them into a bleak, postapocalyptic atmosphere, Beckett established a kind of black comedy as one of the dominant aesthetic forms of the century. For the appreciative world that awarded Beckett the Nobel Prize in 1969, bleakness and comedy made a seductive and powerful combination, as the comedy helped to take much of the sting out of the apparent pessimism that had established Beckett’s credentials as a serious thinker. Humor, as Paul Sheehan has recently suggested, is the means by which “antihumanist pessimism and alienation” become therapeutic and even heroic.
A More Than Infinite Jest
Authors: North Michael
Published: November 2023

Infinite Jest is an enormous, transfixingly complex novel about a film, also called Infinite Jest, that is so compelling, those who sit down to watch it never stand up again.1 Among the possible prototypes for this unusual plot device, Beckett’s Film may seem one of the least likely, but the similarities are striking nonetheless. In Film, all the characters who look into the camera are struck down in some mysterious way, including O, who is finally paralyzed by the image of himself as E, staring fixedly out of the camera lens. In fact, another work in the filmography of the creator of Infinite Jest resembles Film even more closely. Partly animated, this film features a carnival attraction in which one group of spectators is induced to “watch performers undergo unspeakable degradations so compelling that the spectators’ eyes become larger and larger until the spectators themselves are transformed into gigantic eyeballs in chairs,” while another group is invited to perform unspeakable degradations so that they can watch “ordinary persons gradually turn into gigantic eyeballs” (IJ, 988).
Tibetan Indigenous Myths and Rituals with Reference to the Ancient Bön Text The Nyenbum (Gnyan’bum)
Authors: Karmay Samten G
Published: November 2023

It was in Kyoto University, in 2006, while working on the sources of a fourteenth-century Bön text, 1 that I stumbled upon a collection of Bön canonical works. There are four texts in this collection: They are concerned with four types of spirits believed to dwell in the natural environment, such as water, mountain, ground, and rocks. The Lubum, the first of the four texts, is in three volumes. It is about the lu or water spirits (nāga in Buddhist texts). This text is known to scholars from the studies of A. Schiefnerand R. A. Stein,but the remaining three of the four have hardly been investigated by any scholars until now. It is the second, the Nyenbum, The Nyen Collection, that is the.
Continuity and Change in Tibetan Mahāyoga Ritual:Some Evidence from the Tabzhag (Thabs zhags) Manuscript and Other Dunhuang Texts
Authors: Cantwell Cathy , Mayer Rob
Published: November 2023

As with so many other archaeological sources from around the world, it is always tempting to try to use the Dunhuang manuscripts as a basis for significant historical generalizations far beyond their direct remit. However, we must accept that this will always remain a potentially perilous undertaking, because these manuscripts, dating to the early eleventh century or before, wonderful though they are, in fact comprise only a partial and possibly unrepresentative sample of the total manuscript corpus of their time, since all are taken from a single multiethnic location situated at a geographical and political extremity of the Tibetan cultural world. Nevertheless, it is quite proper that we do try to derive some broader meaning from such an extraordinary historical treasure as the Dunhuang Tibetan texts: there is little doubt they can shed a brilliant if partial light on the wider Tibetan world before the “New [Translation]” (Gsar ma pa) period.
Chilu (‘Chi bslu):Rituals for “Deceiving Death”
Authors: Mengele Irmgard
Published: November 2023

To counteract the “degeneration” of their life-force, and to remove adverse conditions (rkyen sel) that befall them, Tibetans seek the help of a variety of religious virtuosos. These specialists have at their disposal a wide array of sophisticated rituals serving one or more of the following purposes: (1) protection, (2) purification of negative deeds, (3) increase of merit, (4) elimination of obstacles, (5) fulfillment of wishes, (6) long life or prolonging of the life span, (7) health and (8) enhancement of the healing power of medicine. Astrological calculations to determine propitious stellar configurations also play a role in the elimination of obstacles, allowing one to carefully choose the day and time to set out on a journey, to marry, to start a new business, and so forth. Tibetans believe that every twelfth year in one’s life, when the animal sign of one’s birth year reoccurs, is an obstacle-year (lo keg). One is advised to avoid any risky undertakings during that year, and before the beginning of the year one visits a lama who may advise one to go on a pilgrimage, or to have certain rituals—like the tsetar (tshe thar) or “liberation of the lives of animals”—performed.
Texts as Deities: Mongols’ Rituals of Worshipping S¯utras, and Rituals of Accomplishing Various Goals by Means of S¯utras
Authors: Wallace Vesna A
Published: November 2023

From an impressively large variety of Mongolian Buddhist rituals, I have selected for discussion in this chapter two types of rituals: (1) those involving the veneration of popular Maha¯ya¯na su¯ tras that are accepted as tutelary deities (yi dam) by the Mongols and that promise various mundane and spiritual blessings to those who venerate, copy, and recite them, and (2) the protective and healing rituals that integrate the recitation of these su¯ tras for the sake of pragmatic aims. I hope that this brief analysis will shed light on some of the ways in which these rituals illuminate Mongolian Buddhist culture and prevailing attitudes toward ritual, particularly toward the ritual role of certain Maha¯ya¯na scriptures.
The Ritual Veneration of Mongolia’s Mountains
Authors: Lindahl Jared R
Published: November 2023

Despite the obvious influence of Tibetan Buddhism upon the religious landscape of Mongolia, Mongolian Buddhism is not simply Tibetan Buddhism in Mongolia, just as Tibetan Buddhism is not simply Indian Buddhism in Tibet. Previous scholarship on the ritual manuals that engage Mongolia’s local deities has tended to consider these rituals as instances of the corruption of Buddhism by “Shamanism.”Rather than argue that the introduction of Buddhism to Mongolia resulted in an unfortunate hybrid tradition of ritual practice, I suggest that ritual was an oblique strategy that Buddhists intentionally used “in order to emplace themselves within a local society”2—in the process, converting indigenous practices into Buddhist practices. Although ritual theorists unanimously acknowledge that place is a significant component to the understanding of ritual, there is a difference of opinion regarding exactly how significant place is.
Shakespeare the Theatre-Poet
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare the theatre-poet is a maker of theatre-events. Elizabethans invariably called the author of a play a ‘poet’, in the Greek sense of ‘maker’. I call Shakespeare a ‘theatre-poet’ in that sense: he makes theatre. In using the term I am not thus referring to the fact that he wrote most of his dialogue in the form of verse. The ‘theatre’ in ‘theatre-poet’ refers to what is now commonly called a ‘theatre¬ event’, the coming together of players and playgoers to imagine the world outlined in the playwright’s script, complete with characters, plot, dialogue, and atmosphere. Obviously the making of a theatre-event is a collaborative act. The playwright, the players, and the playgoers comprise a performance¬ ensemble, to which each makes a distinctive and necessary contribution. It is a partnership within which each participant has a considerable degree of autonomy.
Point of View and Viewpoint
Authors: Hapgood Robert
Published: November 2023

The illusion that the life of a play is, like real life, taking place before our eyes, at that very moment, is one of the most powerful of dramatic appeals. It has often been cheapened by the modern literalist theatre, which has sought to create this effect through mere slice-of-life fidelity to surfaces. But at best it has kept its powers intact. For this first-hand point of view is an appeal unique to the dramatic form. Other forms can only aspire to it. Flaubert and Henry James, and their followers, have sought to adopt a dramatic point of view in the novel; yet in the nature of the form we can never actually see or hear their characters: we can only read their words. Film and television come closer; yet the camera’s eye, however privileged, never seems as free and trustworthy as our own eyes. For full effect, we must feel that we are seeing for ourselves, without intermediary, as in life.
Taking Johnson Seriously
Authors: Parker G F
Published: November 2023

Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern writers, the poet of nature. Johnson’s experience of Shakespeare as the poet of nature animates the whole of his account in the Preface to Shakespeare; on that central perception he rests his claim for Shakespeare’s abiding greatness, and from it all his other observations flow. The present study inquires what it is to read Shakespeare in that way; it endeavours to grasp Johnson’s meaning sympathetically enough to begin to see Shakespeare through Johnson’s eyes, and to reflect on the implications of his appreciation for our own ways of reading.
Updated Approaches to the Classics: William of Aragon, Nicholas Trevet, Giovanni del Virgilio, and Pierre Bersuire
Authors: Minnis A J , Scott A B , Wallace David
Published: November 2023

Henri o’ ANDELI’S worries that grammar(and hence the study of the classics) had been ousted by logic were somewhat exaggerated, as is witnessed by the materials collected in this chapter. The classification of poetry under logic (which has been described in Ch. VII) was generally accepted and developed in commentaries on the classics produced in the late thirteenth century and in the fourteenth century. For instance, an anonymous Ovid commentary explains that in general the Jonna tractandi comprises a ‘fivefold mode, that is, dividing, defining, providing examples, proving, refuting, and inferring’, while in particular the Metamorphoses has a threefold mode, ‘that is, dividing, defining, and providing examples’. Similarly, Giovanni del Virgilio describes Ovid’s mode of treatment in that work as being multiple because it ‘offers definitions, is discursive and inferential’, and so forth. Here logical concepts are being employed in a loose sense, certainly, but without any feeling that their application is incongruous. These comments form part of the discussions of the formal causes of literary texts: the ‘Aristotelian Prologue’ (as defined above in Ch.VI) is frequently found at the beginning of expositions of the classics. Two sophisticated examples, by Nicholas Trevet and Giovanni del Virgilio, are offered below. Within the new conceptual frameworks many traditional glosses continued to be transmitted Giovanni del Virgilio’s account of the ‘three forms of metamorphosis’ being a case in point-and certain interpretative systems which were well established in the twelfth century received further adaptation and amplification, asin the fourfold method of interpreting pagan fables used by Pierre Bersuire.
Religion
Authors: Newlyn Lucy
Published: November 2023

It is central to the structure and meaning of Paradise Lost that there exists a disjunction between the linear conception of time which is accorded to the human characters mvolved and the eternal perspective from which God sees, all at once, the repetitions and cycles of history. Verbal echo may invite the reader to make links between different parts of the unfolding narrative, blurring temporal distinctions and causing successive versions of the Fall to converge; but these connections are made at the expense of the limited perspectives of characters caught up m events as they unfold. At each new reading of the narrative, It becomes possible to make more connections, and to make them with greater authority.
Radicals and the Law: Blasphemous Libels and the Three Trials of William Hone
Authors: Wood Marcus
Published: November 2023

In 1817 Hone became a figure of national celebrity as a result of his three trials. Throughout March and April he had written violently anti-government articles in his periodical Hone’s Reformist’s Register. These attacked the Cabinet’s recent suspension of Habeas Corpus and Lord Sidmouth’s circular letter sent out to Magistrates in March To prevent, as far as possible, the circulation of blasphemous and seditious pamphlets and writings’.
Introduction
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

‘The prostitution of Language has lately, been so glaring, and notorious, that ... it requires a nice discrimination, to distinguish ... the true intent, and signification, of many Phrases, now in general use.’1 With these words, the author of A  Political  Dictionary  for  the  Guinea-less  Pigs introduced, in I79 5, what he described as ‘A Glossary of Emphatical Words’ selected from the vocabulary of ‘Deep Will’, the then Prime Minister, William Pitt.
The Last Interview
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The Earl of Moira was, to British loyalists, a hero of the war against the American Republic; he had been aide-de-camp to George III and was one of the Prince of Wales’s most intimate friends; in 1793 he had led an expedition to aid the royalist rebels in north-west France.

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‘When Kings are Hurled from their Thrones’
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

In February I793 Burke informed the Commons-though such was his delicacy that he felt, he insisted, ‘an almost insuperable objection’ to doing so-that the main object of the National Convention in condemning Louis to death was to terrorize George into imagining his own death.1 Whatever the strength of the objection, it was one he had managed to overcome several times before, for of all loyalists he was the fondest of the extreme rhetorical effects which could be achieved by inviting his audience in parliament, and his readers outside, to join him in the thrills, the terrors, the tears provoked by imagining the death of George III.
The Trials of Tooke and Thelwall
Authors: Barrell John
Published: November 2023

The prosecution had embarked on the trial of Hardy with public opinion certainly on their side. In the months following the arrests of early May, most of the newspapers had treated the case against the defendants as virtually proved-all the more so after the publication of the Commons’ Second  Report, and still more when the trial of Watt had revealed what appeared to be a planned insurrection in support of universal suffrage. The notion, widely expected no doubt to be proved literally true, that the societies had been intending the death of George III, must, as Erskine acknowledged, have caused widespread outrage, the more so when, in late September, the Government had announced the discovery of the Pop-Gun Plot, a conspiracy supposedly hatched by members of the LCS to assassinate the king. Eyre’s charge had apparently confirmed that, even taking the case at its weakest, the activities of the reform societies would come within the scope of the lav; of treason.
Cosmic Scenery
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

Looking back now, it may seem inevitable that the first of his scenic images to be realized in the theatre was the empty open road of Waiting for Godot where a cryptic moon rises on cue at the end of each act, harbinger of a longed-for night. Not so long ago before the first production of the French original in 1953 Beckett had travelled with Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil on a painfully real road, travel ling by night and sleeping by day, escaping from the Gestapo into Vichy France: a time of trauma. Behind that, in sharpest contrast, lay the beloved roads of childhood, winding up into the Dublin hills. The road in the play is fraught with these memories. It was chance that brought Godot to the stage before Eleutheria, a quintessential play of the ‘room’ which Suzanne had also tried to place in 1949. But how inevitable it seems now that audiences should first meet Beckett through a play which has turned its back on rooms, where there is nothing to break the emptiness but a single tree, nowhere to sit down but a mound of earth (later to become a stone).
Be Again, Memory!
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

Forgetting is a fact of life that Beckett turns into a treasure hoard, connecting it by fine threads to acts of remembering; those that come of their own accord, swimming up as if from nowhere, and those methodically sought, collected, sorted, as Krapp collects and sorts his ‘retrospects’. Writing as a young man on Proust,1 Beckett followed him in being caustic about the latter kind, the inferior ‘voluntary’ memory which Proust had categorized as ‘turning the leaves of an album of photographs’. Beckett’s own image was even more caustic: the person who claims ‘I remember as well as I remember yester day’ cannot remember yesterday, he said; he only contemplates it, ‘hung out to dry with the wettest August bank holiday on record a little further down the clothes-line’. ‘Involuntary’ memory was the only true ‘instrument of evocation’ and evocation was the purpose of the artist. Beckett jibbed a little at Proust’s habit of reiterating the idea ‘ad nauseam’, but like him he pursued it in wonderfully free and varied form-not omitting the washing on the clothes-line.
Shared Words: The Camaraderie of Quotation
Authors: Worth Katharine
Published: November 2023

It will be clear,][ hope, that I am not attempting to trace sources or chart quotations comprehensively: that herculean task is already well advanced by Beckett scholars, his editors in particular. My wish is to illustrate Beckett’s subtle and varied uses in his plays of the common stock, and the pains he takes to make it accessible as well as to tease us (one aspect of camaraderie).
The Desert’s Purge: 1939-1944
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

Macneice’s Trip To Ireland with Ernst Stahl in the late summer of 1939, a stay protracted until the end of the year, and his departure for America at the beginning of 1940 marked the start of the most turbulent period in the poet’s career, by the end of which his work was to be decisively reorientated. That world events were equally turbulent at the time is a truism, but the question of how far external circumstances might impinge upon the nature and direction of artistic activity was by no means a dead issue for MacNeice then, and may be seen as a pressure which often bore significantly upon the work itself. If the outbreak of the Second World War marks a suspiciously neat point for the literary history of the 1930s to end, that neatness is missing in MacNeice’s development, even though the period 1939-41 is, properly speaking, still a turning-point in his work. This is not to say that the poet had no part in the general rush to tidy up the 1930s, for praise or blame, which was already evident before the departure of Auden and Isherwood for America in January 1939; MacNeice’s own Autumn Journal, appearing in May of that year, contributed to the sense of ending and account-balancing already prevalent in England.
Parable
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

The centrality of the idea of parable to MacNeice’s writing is clear, and was often insisted upon by the poet himself, especially in his later years. The nature of this idea, however, is more difficult to clarify, and even MacNeice found ‘parable’ an awkwardly wide term for critical analysis; yet ‘a kind of double-level writing, or, if you prefer it, sleight-of-hand’ is at the heart of much of his post-war work. This ‘parable’, for MacNeice, concentrates elements that had always been of crucial importance-identity, the limits of self, the experience of time-but does so by existing in a context that compounds the contemporary with longer mythic and literary perspectives, and ultimately with those of deep personal memory. The notion of parable and its implications change for MacNeice in the course of his career: the present chapter examines certain points in this development, and attempts to make clearer the contexts against which MacNeice’s parable is defined as well as those upon which it tends to draw.
The ‘Ould Antinomies’: Ireland
Authors: McDonald Peter
Published: November 2023

Although MacNeice is now read increasingly as a major AngloIrish writer rather than as an adjunct to the Auden group, a change in labels should not be mistaken for a leap in critical insight. ‘AngloIrish’ is in itself of little use in this context, perhaps aligning MacNeice with the class to which Yeats laid claim which embodied, for the younger poet, ‘nothing but an obsolete bravado, an insidious bonhomie and a way with horses’. Even so, ‘Anglo-Irish’ does at least bring to the fore the inevitable connection between MacNeice’s and Yeats’s poetry; this primarily literary issue in fact leads into the broader implications of the poet’s relation to Ireland generally, and the role that the country played in his work. In one sense, Ireland was necessarily crucial in the poet’s imaginative world as the scene of a difficult childhood in which periods of happiness were contrasted with those of melancholy and fear. In a memoir, MacNeice’s sister recalled an underlying sense of displacement in even the earlier years:
Opportunity and Need
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

It is reasonable to think that at about the age of15 or 16 Shakespeare helped his father, and that for an interlude he even found alternative employment. In the seventeenth century, John Aubrey was by no means certain that Ben Jonson’s report of the Stratford poet’s ‘small’ Latin could be valid. ‘He understood Larine pretty well’, Aubrey wrote of Shakespeare, ‘for he had been in his younger yeares a School master in the Countrey. ‘ This is a fairly well authenticated report. Using living sources of information, Aubrey was told of the school mastering by William Beeston, whose father Christopher Beeston the player had been a member of Shakespeare’s company and had acted with him in Ben Jonson’s Every Man in his Humour. Memories were long in the profession of the stage, in which recruitment was largely a matter of hereditary castes, and the elder Beeston had been an early member of the Lord Chamberlain’s men. The ‘Schoolmaster’ report is not particularly surprising, unlikely, or merely gossipy.
New Place and the Country
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

In these years, the poet who supplied repertory with works as effective as Romeo and Juliet, the Dream, and Henry IV did not hang up his hat after morning rehearsals. He appeared on the stage himself, and with his writing, rehearsing, acting, planning with his fellows, and vetting of scripts he was very unlikely to leave London often. His income was substantial by 1596. As a matter of record ‘William Shackspere’ was one of the seventy-three rateable residents at St Helen’s parish that October, but since he forgot or neglected by the next February to pay his tax-just 5s. on goods valued at£5-the Petty Collectors of Bishops gate ward sent his name to the Exchequer. No doubt the low assessment of £5 was simply nominal.
The King’s Servants
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

Hmlet’s success doubtless encouraged Shakespeare, and might have led his troupe to believe their solvency and prestige were assured. Yet their situation offered little ground for optimism in 1602. They had no representative at court, and if the ageing, irritable Queen died they could be closed down once and for all. Their patron was incapacitated (Baron Howard of Walden carried out duties at the Lord Chamberlain’s office) and actors were obliged to plan for a dark, worrisome future. A costly Spanish war dragged on, and extremes of wealth and poverty glared in London-where inflation was as relentless as it had been in the 1590s.
Tales and Tempests
Authors: Honan Park
Published: November 2023

An alert traveller riding into Stratford around 1607 would not have found the townspeople invariably sombre or the local trades hopelessly depressed. Puritanical feeling was strong among aldermen who met at ‘halls’, but old festivals were still honoured. There was jollity enough, and merchants had more to celebrate than in the lean years of the 1590s. Despite fears about the ungodly, some thirty alehouses were to be allowed at Stratford, along with the three inns—the Crown, Bear, and Swan—all on Bridge Street. There were tensions in the local council which illuminate the dramatist’s late years (as does fresh evidence about his son-in-law). But after leaving dusty London, Shakespeare would have returned to a place of natural beauty.
Introduction
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

The last fifteen years have seen a fruitful investigation into the symbiotic relationship between seasonal festivity and peasant rebels who adopted mock king titles, organizing their defiance of government into festive patterns. The questions and answers which have resulted have radically altered critical views as to the ‘safety valve’ theory of festive games. The other well-known way of looking at these customs is in the tradition of Mikhail Bahktin, in which the mock king is seen as part of a saturnalian impulse, the roi pourrire in medieval carnival who, in Rabelais, was the essence of the indestructible world of folk humour, and who, C. L. Barber perceived, was part of a ritualized disorder which led to social regeneration in some Shakespearean comedy. The two areas of study are concerned with mock kings as they appear either in festive games or as leaders of peasant rebellions. However, E. L. G. Stones’s article on fourteenth-century robber barons makes clear that they too adopted a mock king style. These were men from a different social class, and it seems as improbable that they copied their inferiors as that the association was pure coincidence.
Outlaws, Rebels, and Civil War
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

In the society Langland wrote for and about, disorder was endemic. The background to a complex use of mock king titles and name calling was one where the forces of disorder, or misrule, were more effectively in control than were those of rule. The impression of near-mayhem is confirmed by John Bellamy in the opening chapter of Crime and Public Order in the Middle Ages: ‘In the England of the later middle ages the preservation of public order was very often the biggest problem the king had to face. It was not just a police matter. At heart were the crucial issues of royal authority and the structure of the state.’ Bellamy refers to wilful flouting of authority rather than to the more justified peasant rebellions, and he finds the problem extensive. Out of localized studies of different areas at different periods ‘not one investigator has been able to indicate even a few years of effective policing in the period 1290-148s’.1 The point at which the law broke down was at the top. Justices of the peace and sheriffs were dependent on lordly patrons who, more frequently than not, applied the law according to their own vested interests. It was not until the gentry broke free of patronage in the mid-sixteenth century that open crime decreased and was, perhaps, replaced by subtler forms of corruption.
Summer Kings and Queens, and Kings of Fortune
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

Records and pejorative comment show that lords of misrule were popular in provincial towns and houses throughout the sixteenth century. Yet the evidence of the winter king’s activities frequently lacks detail, and tends only to exist as a record if it witnesses a patron’s expenses or generous spirit. By contrast, summer games were also mentioned for romantic or, alternatively, disapproving reasons by men unconnected with the events. And a third source of evidence is church records, since most parishes became involved with summer customs as a means of increasing their revenues. As a result, the evidence for summer kings is surprisingly full and it is possible to identify some of their major features, and to assess how they influenced the later drama. However, the larger amount of evidence does also lead to greater problems of coherence, since variations in seasonal customs also become that much more evident, and while accounting for them it becomes crucial to remember that what was traditional in one place might in fact have been quite different from what customarily took place a few miles away.
A Critical Introduction
Authors: Billington Sandra
Published: November 2023

When one turns to Renaissance drama one finds that king games of various kinds are incorporated in a large proportion of them, as the anonymous poet in Annalia Dubrensia observed soon after their peak had passed. It is even possible to suggest that, at the point where English playwrights successfully broke from Morality drama and from classical imitation into a freely interpreted, extended play structure, the achievement was through the use of summer king patterns. Their adoption makes sense from both commercial and, as analysis shows, critical points of view. Firstly, a strong rapport was needed between professional companies and audiences, since the ability to make or break a play lay in the reaction of the two or three thousand people who flocked to the Theatre, Curtain, and Rose.
The Music Of Toga Drama
Authors: Preston Katherine
Published: November 2023

A study of toga dramas cannot be complete without some discussion of the musical component, for such music was (and is) an essential clement of all melodrama. It is unfortunate, therefore, that very little research has been conducted by music historians into this interesting topic. Reasons for this lacuna become abundantly dear as soon as one initiates such an investigation, for the sources are, at best, meagre. Theatre historians often have scripts with which to commence their research, which can be fleshed out with additional information from reviews, financial records, contemporary commentary, and the like. This basic source of information, however, is often Jacking for the music historian. Very little of the incidental music to theatrical works mounted in the nineteenth century was ever published, and manu script scores are scarce. Judging by the dearth of musical manuscripts, one can only conclude that the music to such productions was rarely notated: evidence suggests that the accompaniment to many melo dramas were pastiches-cobbled together from pre-existing scores.
The Charioteers
Authors: Moore Marshall
Published: November 2023

The timing of Ben-Hur—performances in America from 1899 and in London from 1902—coincides with the moment that popular entertainment comes to a fork in the road. Straight ahead is further development of the stage play. Leading to one side is the faint trail of cinema. The stage history of Ben-Hur and Ben-Hur ‘borrowings’ is brief. The history of Ben-Hur motion pictures continues up to 1959, but in each instance the first stage and filmic ventures after the Klaw and Erlanger production reveal much about the current perception and reception of toga drama.
Hampstead
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

In 1852 the Hopkinses moved from the eastern marshlands of Stratford to the northern height of Hampstead. From the highest point of Hampstead, Whitestone Pond, you could see St Paul’s and the City, framed by the oaks and beeches of the Heath, and the southern rim of the London basin, from Black heath to the Surrey hills. It would not legally become part of London until the end of the century, but Hampstead was never a typical village.
Freshman Allegiances
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

First came the meeting with his tutor, which took the form of a breakfast in the tower-room of Professor Benjamin Jowett. Hopkins shook the hand (said to be ‘finny’) of a cherubic man, who had ‘a delicately rounded face, with its small mouth and chin, its great brow, and frame of snowy hair’; a mixture of ‘revered schoolmaster’ and an ‘abbe of the old French type’, a man with a high-pitched, piping voice, who was said to be ‘hardly a man’.
Useful Information
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Hopkins always needed someone with whom he could share creative discoveries. If there were no obvious candidate, he would force the role on someone. Opposition was sometimes more valuable than agreement. The acquiescent Canon Dixon would prove a less valuable critic than the robustly sceptical Bridges. During the long vacation of 1863 Mowbray Baillie was bullied into becoming Hopkins’s sparring partner.
Perversion and Estrangement
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

The Sussex Downs was a seductive place to go for a reading party, Walter Pater suggested to Hopkins. Hopkins put forward Salisbury as an alternative, because it was near a cathedral, with good country, and not far from George Herbert’s Bemerton, Lord Herbert’s church, Salisbury Plain, Stonehenge, and Avebury. But he and his friends took Pater’s advice and rented Whiting’s Farm, near Horsham, from Mr Henry Ings, for the last fortnight in July 1866. In bed on the night of 17 July, Hopkins ‘saw clearly the impossibility of staying in the Church of England’, but resolved ‘to say nothing to anyone till three months are over’. He also decided that he would not be received into the Roman Catholic Church until after he had taken his degree.
Decision: Bovey Tracey and Birmingham
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

In the morning of Friday 23 August, Hopkins’s parents and Milicent left for Brittany, which they had visited the previous year. After seeing them off on the boat-train, Hopkins went to call on Baillie’s friend, Mrs Cunliffe, but as she was out walked a little in Hyde Park, noticing ‘a fine oblate chestnut-tree with noble long ramping boughs more like an oak’. From there he went to Notting Hill, and in the chapel of the Poor Clares-Colettines took the first step in making the decision ‘to be a priest and religious’. It was taken in a ‘cautiously conditional form’, and in his journal he qualified it: ‘but now, Sept. 4, nothing is decided’. That evening, searching for company in the absence of his parents, he spent at Aunt Kate’s. There was a fiery sunset.
Swiss Swan-Song
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Edward Bond and Hopkins had arranged to start in the early hours of Friday 3 July for a month’s tour of Switzerland.’ Alpine scenery had played a part in the education of the Romantic poets, and it would be Hopkins’s last opportunity to see Switzerland because (Bond said) Jesuits were forbidden to enter the country. The day before they were due to depart Hopkins was still worried about how he would pay for the tour. With his previous earnings from Once a Week in mind, he had started an article on the medieval school of poets and, in particular, William Morris’s The Earthly Paradise, published two months previously.
Seascapes: The Isle of Man
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

On Saturday 3 August 1872, when the second-year examinations were over, the seminarians, with Fr Parkinson, their Spiritual Prefect, set out to the Isle of Man for the Villa at Douglas, the island’s main town and a popular resort for the manufacturing towns of northern England and the Potteries. Hopkins’s group of about thirty was to stay at Derby Castle, at the northern end of Douglas Bay. Derby Castle (pronounced Dirby) was sheltered under the cliff, on the water’s edge, at the Onchan end of Douglas, quieter and more select, beyond the popular promenade. A winding path led to the cliff’s summit through a mass of shrubs and flowering hedges. The shore was shingle, with jagged rocks which made it dangerous for bathing, but a secluded nearby cove was suitable for gentlemen bathers.
Teaching: London and Devon 1873-1874
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

Some German Jesuit students of theology, expelled by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, were spending their Villa at the College, and put on concerts for their hosts; and on 21 August the seminarians returned the compliment with an after-supper entertainment consisting of ‘music, comic and half-comic pieces etc’, which the beadle’s log reported ‘was mainly got up by Mr G. Hopkins, and was a decided success’. On 27 August Hopkins went down to Whalley to see off the Germans, who were returning to Ditton Hall near Widnes, and afterwards walked with Herbert Lucas by the river, and ‘talked Scotism with him for the last time’. He had known for some time that in September he would be posted to teach for a year in one of the Jesuit schools, perhaps Stonyhurst College. His Provincial had decided that the year’s teaching would be a rest, and Hopkins thought it ‘as good an arrangement as could have been made’. That evening he received orders to go to Roehampton, to teach rhetoric to the juniors, and the next day set out for Manresa House.
‘I wish then for death’
Authors: White Norman
Published: November 2023

The year 1889 started at Tullabeg, thirty miles or so from Monasterevan, where Hopkins went on Christmas Eve. Everything about this Tullabeg retreat was inauspicious. On Christmas Eve he had written: He had to break away from Monasterevan to journey to the bleak austerity of the geometrical, utilitarian barracks which housed the Irish novitiate at Tullabeg. It was set in the flat stretches of Irish midland bogs, where there were no walks except along plain roads, with rare tufts of black trees. In summer the countryside was pleasant enough, but in winter it was ‘the right place for a composition of Hell’. Hopkins was on retreat from r-6 January.
Bodies, Souls, and Minds
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

Disease, as well as violence and war, was a continuing threat to life (and leaves traces in the literature as well). Visitations of the plague, though not as disastrous as that of 1348, continued. Suggested remedies are usually religious or magical, but the advice included burning herbs (because of the belief that corrupt air was a cause), shutting the windows against the south, as well as the wearing of amulets, the ringing of church bells, or praying to ‘plague saints’ (St Sebastian, who, having been martyred by being shot with arrows, could ward off the darts of the pestilence, or the more recent St Roche (born c.1295 in Montpellier), who had nursed victims in Italy, and become infected himself) or to the Virgin Mary, who is sometimes depicted protecting the faithful from the arrows of the plague with her mantle.
Religious Prose II: Mystical and Visionary Writing; Religious Narratives; Devotional Texts; the Eve of the Reformation
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

At first sight, the period might seem more notable for the absence of ‘mystics’ than for their presence. It has indeed been reproved for the absence of ‘original’ mystical writing. That there is no equivalent of the fourteenth-century masters must be admitted, but it is unlikely that any one single simple cause can be identified. A number of points deserve to be considered. Perhaps as in other areas of literary history (notably the history of the drama) creative interest is not always present. This is not to say that one cannot speculate about context or influences, favourable or otherwise. A ‘mystical tradition’ often seems to be rather a number of ‘schools’ associated with a particular individual.
Hawes, Barclay, and Skelton
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

At the end of the period three poets stand out—Hawes, Barclay, and Skelton. Stephen Hawes (c.1475–?early 1520s) was a groom of the chamber of Henry VII (and wrote ‘a joyful meditation’ on the coronation of Henry VIII); little is known of his life—tradition has it that he was educated at Oxford, perhaps at Magdalen College, and travelled in England, Scotland, and France. He was the heir of the fifteenth-century tradition of ‘courtly’ and learned poetry, especially that of Lydgate, with all its enthusiasms and its occasional stylistic excesses; and the fact that excerpts were often made from his work suggests that it was popular.
Introductory
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

Literature in Scotland has had a number of high-points—the eighteenthcentury Enlightenment, the Romantic period, the twentieth century, and others, including the corpus (spread over various periods, and universally acknowledged) of the popular ballads—but it is arguable that Scottish poetry achieved in the later fifteenth and earlier sixteenth century a flowering of dazzling brilliance, which outshone almost every poetic work written in England in this period. Its relative neglect is equally amazing.
Mystery Cycles II: New Testament
Authors: Gray Douglas
Published: November 2023

The beginning of the New Testament section of the cycles is (like its equivalent in the liturgical year, the season of Advent) the end of a period of waiting, with a sense of expectation, penitential but full of potential joy. Prophecies and ‘figures’ are about to be fulfilled. This is a turning point in history, a ‘liminal’ period with mysterious manifestations of spiritual power. The early New Testament plays are fall of prophecy—from the Bible and from pious legend. The coming of the Messiah is announced in the first supernatural ‘intervention’—the Annunciation by the angel Gabriel. Two nicely contrasting treatments can be seen in the Coventry play and in the ‘N-Town’ cycle.
Lyrics
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

In the preceding pages we have occasionally come upon examples of songs or shorter ‘lyrical’ poems, such as the comic ‘The Man in the Moon’, the dialogue ‘De Clerico et Puella’, or the bird-debate ‘The Thrush and the Nightingale’. We have seen that Richard Rolle was a writer of religious lyrics as well as of religious prose, that Robert Mannyng took from Langtoft’s Chronicle topical satirical verses against the Scots, and that the Scots chronicler Barbour had an ear for the historical rhymes circulating in his country. These examples in themselves are sufficient to give some indication of a number of the most significant aspects of the surviving corpus of lyric poetry—that it is widespread; that it is closely related to, and often overlaps with, other literary forms; that it occurs in a variety of shapes and styles; that it is, in general, a humble kind of writing, meant to be used rather than to be admired for its self-conscious artistry; and that it is finally, a fugitive kind. These last two points in particular need to be stressed at the beginning of any survey.
Langland
Authors: Bennett J A W
Published: November 2023

It has taken a long time for the Liberde Petro Plowman, Langland’s Piers Plowman, to come into its own—at least for it to come into its own as a poem: it has long been quoted by social and economic historians as illustrating fourteenth-century life with greater particularity than Chaucer does; and in the sixteenth century it attracted notice, and reached print, because its complaints, its satire, its predictions (notably in a messianic passage that was misread as justifying Henry VIII’s role in the suppression of monasteries) seemed to anticipate the reformers’ polemic. There is to be sure plenty of protest in this poem, but that does not make its author a Protestant before his time. Rather, in every sense he is the most Catholic of poets. No poet, not even Dante, drew so much on the teaching, patristic and other, of Holy Church. No poet, not even Traherne, cared so little for the ‘dirty devices’ of the world of men and so much for the phenomenal world of Nature, including the marvels of conception, which figure in the great vision of Middle Earth (ix. 315 ff.*). No poet, not even David Jones, found in the calendar of the liturgical year such a fit framework for his faith.t So Piers Plowman stands out as the greatest testament of faith in English. In this vernacular work the creative conceptions of medieval religion are more truly assimilated than they are in any other single theological or philosophical work. If it cannot strictly be called an epic—though to be sure E. M. W. Tillyard begins with it his study of English Epic—it is of epic proportions: Northrop Fry4 cites it as the first major English treatment of ‘contrast-epic’, revolving round two opposite poles, Salvation and Resurrection, sombre judgement and Antichrist. These contrasts do appear at turning points in the narrative, but no single image will convey the articulation of the poem: it is sui generis.
Introduction
Authors: Leader Zachary
Published: November 2023

The subject of this book is the manner in which revision calls into question and complicates Romantic attitudes to authorship, attitudes which continue to influence writers, critics, and editors. Chief among these attitudes is a preference for what comes naturally (as the leaves to a tree, says Keats), with a concomitant devaluing of secondary processes, including second thoughts.
Millenarian Spenceans: Robert Wedderburn and Methodist prophecy
Authors: Mccalman Iain
Published: November 2023

For Robert Wedderburn Methodism was a stepping stone to political unrespectability and extremism. However odd this may sound to some modern historians, the idea would have occasioned little surprise in the early nineteenth century. Many Englishmen and women, including the ex-Jacobin commentators Reid and Place, believed that religious and political fanaticism were integrally connected and that Methodism usually lay at bottom of both. Reid’s further claim that Methodism was in league with radical freethought during the 1790s seems even less likely, particularly when we remember that he was inspired by Abbe Barruel’s theory that the French Revolution had been the product of a conspiracy between philosophes and mystics. English Methodism seems an unlikely counterpart of occult freemason lodges or cadres of fanatical illuminists.
Learning Philosophy
Authors: Raitt Suzanne
Published: November 2023

One day in the early 1870s, in a house in Il ford, East London, near the gloomy City of London cemetery, a lonely, studious little girl, the only sister of five older boys, sat down to read a book. Decades later the girl, now a well-known and wealthy novelist, recalled that day: Years and years ago, when I was a child, hunting forlornly in my father’s bookshelves, I came upon a small shabby volume, bound in yellow linen. The title-page was adorned with one bad wood-cut that showed a grim, plain house standing obliquely to a churchyard packed with tombstones, tombstones upright and flat, and slanting at all angles.... Tombstones always fascinated me in those days, because I was mortally afraid of them; and I opened that book and read it through. I could not, in fact, put it down. For the first time I was in the grip of a reality more poignant than any I had yet known, of a tragedy that I could hardly bear.