bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Company
Authors: Worth Katharine 
Published: November 2023

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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

Abstract
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.