Mr. Ray Heffner's article, “Shakespeare, Hayward, and Essex,” is confused and at times self-contradictory; but the main points which he attempts to maintain against my paper, “Shakespeare's Richard II and the Essex Conspiracy,” seem to be these:

1. That the play, founded on Hayward's history of Henry IV, which Essex is said, in Item 5 of the “Analytical abstract of the evidence in support of the charge of treason against the Earl of Essex,” to have witnessed, could not have been the play on the deposition of Richard II which the Essex conspirators are known to have attended in a group on February 7, 1601, the day before the rebellion; and that the performances referred to in this Abstract were not of a play by Shakespeare, nor acted by his company, but of an unknown play, performed perhaps by Essex's own actors at his house on some unknown occasion, which Mr. Heffner dates first as necessarily “after February, 1599,” later, as “in February, 1599,” and, in conclusion, as “in January, 1599.”

The material available for picturing to us the performances of the popular religious plays of mediæval France is so meagre that any possible addition to it seems worth investigating. Some valuable plates, reproducing the miniatures that accompany the Passion plays of Arras and Valenciennes, have been published by G. Cohen in his Théâtre en France au moyen âge, I (Paris: Rieder, 1928). The same author had previously given us a comprehensive treatment of the whole subject, with a full bibliography and a few other plates, in his Histoire de la mise en scène dans le théâtre religieux (2nd ed., Paris: Champion, 1926). Many suggestive hypotheses regarding the possible contributions of the mediæval stage to the art of the middle ages have been advanced by Émile Mâle in the two beautifully illustrated volumes, L'Art religieux duxiiesiècle (3rd ed., Paris: Colin, 1928), chap. IV and L'Art religieux de la fin du moyen âge (3rd ed., Paris: Colin, 1925), chap. II. In both of these, various iconographical innovations are plausibly traced to the influence of the liturgical and vernacular plays. Except for the works just mentioned, however, we are largely left to descriptive material and conjecture for our ideas about the costuming, staging, and other conventions of the mediæval religious drama. This is the more to be regretted in view of M. Mâle's important conclusions, and it would therefore seem that any illustrations that may give us a conception of the popular iconography of the Passion in the middle ages possess a dual claim upon our attention.

The present paper offers the text of a hitherto unknown manuscript version of the ballad, “King John and the Abbot of Canterbury,” which was discovered a number of years ago by Professor Carleton Brown in the library of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. MS. 255, in which the ballad is preserved, forms the second of the four volumes of Collectanea gathered by Brian Twyne, fellow of Corpus Christi College, who died in 1644. In the printed Catalogue of Manuscripts MS. 255 is described as “sæc. xvi exeuntis et xvii.” The date could hardly be given in more definite terms since the compiler has bound up in this volume separate articles and even single leaves from many MSS.

My first introduction to the mediæval story of King Horn came through reading in the Year Book 1914–1924, published by the Viking Club of London, a review of Dr. Henry Goddard Leach's Angevin Britain and Scandinavia. The reviewer in discussing the story of Horn referred to the difficulty of fixing the location of “Suddene” where the action of the story had its beginning and end, and suggested that it may have been situated in South Wales. My first real acquaintance with the Horn story, however, as well as the problems with which it is involved, came through reading the scholarly essay, “The Story of Horn and Rimenhild,” by Professor William Henry Schofield.

In a singular ignorance of mediæval cabalistic writings and even of much that is Rabbinical, faint and far commerce only with Rabanus Maurus, and a little closer with Averroës and Avicenna, I was reminded lately in a somewhat retarded grand tour in the more Latin countries of Europe of Disraeli's famous declaration of being on the side of the angels. Like our French interpreter friend, M. Maurois, I began to wonder what he really meant: in general it seemed to me that a good many of Disraeli's race and countrymen, not at all because they were markedly of progressive politics, were less faithful to him than one might have looked to see or even have wished, in any obvious sense of his phrase. They led to bad punning even on the relative attractions in Italy of two cheeses at dinner known as bel paese and Gorgonzola, the Laborite and Conservative of it. I began to think that the cleavage could not be staged for my own party's exclusive enjoyment, and bearing in mind those things of verbal abstention I saw engraved “For the Honor of Italy,” I began to consult the ancient worthies of the joint heirs of the antique honneur des hommes à la longue robe, Tasso's antico onor and antico esempio, again.

In the familiar oration of Prince Hal over the body of the slain Percy occur the lines:

“Favours” in this passage is usually glossed as a scarf or riband, perhaps a glove. The lines are taken to imply a stage direction of some sort. It would seem, however, that Shakespeare here intended more than a conventional chivalric gesture on the part of the regenerate Prince. From a chain of textual evidence it is demonstrable that the playwright had in mind for his climax a far more dramatic, more tacitly ironic move—Hal's disengaging his royal plumes (the “budding honours” of his own helmet) to shroud the face of his dead rival. In three earlier passages the quarto text supports this interpretation.

What would an epic be without simile? Its tone and landscape would be too often austere and bleak but for these fleeting views of an earth we know, these apt reminders of things men have done, endured, or imagined. Homer would diminish by a thousand lines, Paradise Lost by some four hundred; and what lines! Without them how could we picture Satan, his infernal host, his punishment, his revenge, or the actors in Paradise?

The “Anonymous Riming Chronicle” has long been known through the text printed by Ritson from B.M. MS. Royal 12. C. xii. The first serious attempt to study the sources of this poem and establish the relationships of the several MSS. was made by R. Sternberg, in two papers in Englische Studien XVIII, 1 ff. and 356 ff. In the first of these papers, Sternberg presents a scheme of MS. relations based upon the first and last fifty lines of the text as contained in five MSS. In the second paper he examines the sources of the Chronicle and shows that it depended upon Robert of Gloucester's Chronicle with supplementary use of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum.

Othello is a domestic tragedy of the English Renaissance—Renaissance in its source as well as in the dramatist's conception, and therefore a reflection of Renaissance concepts of marriage, infidelity, and personal honor; and, from this background, the present paper proposes to interpret the character of Iago. Since Rymer's day, Iago has been cursorily dismissed as a villain of the deepest dye: so thought Johnson, Lord Kames, and Twining in the eighteenth century; so thought Coleridge, Mrs. Jamieson, Clarke, Campbell, Dowden, Swinburne, Hudson, and George Bernard Shaw in the nineteenth; so, Herford, Canning, Bradley, Stoll, and Miss Winstanley in the twentieth. In general agreement are Schlegel, Ulrici, Bodenstedt, von Friesen, Bulthaupt, Brandi, and Schücking in Germany; and Guizot, de Vigny, Hugo, and Taine in France. One difficulty, however, with such an attitude is that it proves too much; and many of its proponents, Swinburne, Hudson, Herford, and Schücking, for example, find that it takes Iago quite out of human reality. As Herford remarks, Shakespeare has deepened and given verisimilitude to most of the figures in Cinthio's novel; but, in Iago, he “deliberately set aside what was normal and plausible in his prototype.” Is Iago, then, the great exception to Shakespeare's supreme dramatic reality? The critics, moreover, who impute to the dramatist so extra-human a creation must either explain how an Elizabethan audience could have understood it, or else put Iago, as would Professor Stoll, into the class of mere dramatic conventions, pious frauds of stagecraft easily recognized and understood by the audience, but without counterpart in contemporary life. The present study escapes both horns of this dilemma by denying the initial premise and contending that the character of Iago and all his major acts are woven of the very warp and woof of Elizabethan conditions and ideals.

The first dramatic treatment of the story of Dido and Aeneas on the Spanish stage, preceded in world-literature only by Alessandro Pazzi's Dido in Cartagine (1524), is the anonymous Tragedia de los amores de Eneas y de la Reyna Dido, preserved in what seems to be a unique copy, formerly belonging to the library of D. Francisco Manoel da Câmara, now in the National Library at Lisbon, under the signature: Varios reservados 177. Although described by Gallardo, Cañete, and, more recently, by Proença and Anselmo, this copy has remained practically inaccessible to Hispanists.

One of the allegorical motifs in the Vision of Piers Plowman which has often been specially noted on account of its boldness and picturesqueness is the description of Christ jousting against Satan upon the Cross clad in armor and embodying the chivalric virtues.

Since the appearance of Professor Berdan's edition of Cleveland's poems little has been added to our knowledge concerning the poet's biography. The purpose of this paper is to present certain biographical data which supplement those given by Professor Berdan.

Throughout his life Ronsard continued the practice of taking his dedications away from those whom the years had estranged or whom he had forgotten, offering them to others who stood higher in his affections at the moment of publishing each successive edition of his works. Considering his poems his own property, of which he alone had the right to dispose, and feeling, with a certain amount of reason, that it was within his power to render immortal those whose names he included in his works, Ronsard's poetic pride could easily justify any change in dedication. He even went so far as to dedicate to Cassandre, in the edition of 1578, fifteen sonnets which had formerly been addressed to Marie. This practice, we may be sure, led him into more than one ticklish situation, but probably on no such occasion was he himself more embarrassed nor his friends more amused than by his recall of the Hymne de la Mort.

In an article published elsewhere I have explained my method of verse-sentence analysis and have presented in tabular form its application to a considerable number of English poems, ranging in time from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to Browning's My last Duchess. In that article I pointed out that by the use of this method it was possible to trace the evolution of Shakespeare's style in the interweaving of line and sentence. In his early plays there is a high degree of parallelism between the line and the grammatical units of the sentence; in the late plays there is a marked tendency toward divergence between line and sentence.

Study of the Gawain-poet in recent years has greatly increased: and with increase it has also grown more intelligent and appreciative. In 1922 there appeared the late Professor Emerson's ‘Notes on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ (JEGPh. XXI) and ‘Some Notes on the Pearl’ (PMLA. XXXVII), two suggestive and penetrating studies which anticipated many of the emendations and notes of the edition that was to follow three years later. In 1925 there appeared what scholars had long been hoping for, a carefully edited text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This edition, the work of two British scholars, Professors Tolkien and Gordon, provides the reader with good notes and a competent working glossary. The notes, however, it must be said, are sometimes too brief in their discussion and give too little recognition to the work of previous annotators, where credit was justly due. Professor J. R. Hulbert's review of the new edition, which appeared later in the same year (Mod. Phil. XXIII. 246–249), though brief, contains a number of comments which succeeding scholars must take into account. In 1927 Professor Emerson published a further study of the Pearl (PMLA. XLII), and more important for our purpose, his review of the new edition (JEGPh. XXVI) which threw further light on many a textual crux and clarified some details of the story. Nor have studies of Sir Gawain been confined to criticism of the text. Fräulein von Schaubert (Engl. Stud. LVII), has postulated an English rather than a French origin for the poem, thus taking issue with the views of Kittredge. Also translations of the poem have been published by S. O. Andrew and T. H. Banks which keep the alliterative measure of the long line and endeavor not unsuccessfully to maintain the bob and wheel arrangement at the stanza's end.

The term “moral sense” is generally credited to Shaftesbury; in any case he is the one who gave it currency. At the time he introduced it the reigning authorities in ethical theory were, on the one hand, Hobbes, who declared: “Justice is the keeping of valid convenants; injustice the non-performance of them;” and, on the other, Locke and the orthodox party, generally, who held that “the true ground of morality can only be the Will and Law of God.”