In the close of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, several dark chords are sounding. There, describing his lovers’ final interaction, Marlowe makes several allusions to All Ovids Elegies, his English translation of Ovid’s libertine Amores. Recollections of specific words and phrases from All Ovids Elegies 1.5 and 1.13 signal the allusions. Recalling Elegy 1.5, Marlowe underscores the threat of violence that shadows Hero and Leander’s final scene; echoing Elegy 1.13, he contrasts Hero and Leander’s experience of daybreak with the pathos that attends the elegiac lovers’ parting at dawn. Each recollection is complex in and of itself. In the end, however,...

Now that my 1986 suggested validation of Lewis Theobald’s 1726 conjectural “’a babbled of green fields” is becoming accepted, it seems appropriate to ask what difference the discovery might make, assuming it stands, beyond discouraging further briefs for and against the F reading.¹ Here below then I address questions Stuart Gillespie, “John Eliot,” in Shakespeare’s Books, begs when he attributes the Theobald emendation to “enduring, though inconsequential, memories often created . . . in the course of language-learning” (137), and subsumes it among “apparent echoes in several other plays, notably Histories, mostly at the level of phraseology and usually of...

In addition to the official trial of Hermione (III.ii.1-140), The Winter’s Tale features a series of “trials” of women that are less formal but just as consequential. This essay treats five “trials,” loosely defined, of women’s speech, sexuality, and agency (I.ii, II.i, II.iii, III.ii.170ff, and IV.iv). In these scenes, men judge women’s guilt or innocence of crimes against the fictional social order on the basis of various proofs, signs, and testimonies. The women present their bodies and words as evidence; the men bring social assumptions and legal terms to bear, calling for additional testimony, accusing and sometimes interrogating the women,...

The year is 1615, and Donne and Herbert, according to Isaak Walton, exchange Latin poems exploring the cross-as-anchor emblem (Donne’s newly adopted crest)¹. The cross and its attendant paradoxes offer both wits ample room to exercise their peculiar brand of virtuosity both in Latin and in their own English translations—Donne’s “To Mr. George Herbert with One of My Seals of the Anchor and Christ” and Herbert’s “In Sacram Anchoram Piscatoris.” Gardner refers to Herbert’s contribution to this exchange as an “obscurely worded conceit,”² but I am not sure Donne’s is any less opaque. Both expound on just how the...

A public statement of John Donne’s views on the colonial project, his sermon preached to the Honorable Company of the Virginian Plantation on 13 November 1622 examines the motives inspiring the explorations of the Virginia Company, and demonstrates Donne’s own rhetorical management of the tensions that imbued that homiletic occasion.¹ The sermon relies for its effects on what Carrithers and Hardy call “the fact of dialogue”² with the new world, a theatre or arena to which both preachers and company men had been called as ambassadors of Christ focused on conversion of native Virginians into Christians rather than the conversion...

The current consensus on the early seventeenth-century English poet Richard Crashaw can best be summarized in the language of the Norton Anthology of English Literature, reading from the first volume of the seventh (and current) edition:

Crashaw differs greatly from Herbert and from every other English religious poet of the period in religious and aesthetic sensibility. He converted to Roman Catholicism and was deeply committed to its rituals and devotions. Also, he is the only major English poet in the tradition of the continental baroque, influenced by the poetics of the Catholic Counter-Reformation.¹

Central to this characterization are of course...

Some significant evidence in literary terms for Crashaw’s reverting in his last year at Rome to an Anglican tradition may lie in the concluding 24 verses of “The Flaming Heart,” which appeared in the 1652 edition, not in the 1648 edition. As far as I am aware, no close study of the bibliography of those lines has ever been undertaken, certainly nothing so close and persuasive as J.C. Maxwell’s study of the 1646/1648 editions.¹ Although the sample is small, some interesting ideas may be drawn from it to support Professor Wall’s proposition. Professor Wall has suggested that I might add...

For many students, the drama of Paradise Lost peaks early in the epic and wanes after Book IX. Not only does that book contain the central episode “Of man’s first disobedience” (I.1) announced at the outset of the epic, it neatly satisfies expectations set up by the narrator’s announcement “I now must change/Those notes to tragic” (IX.5-6). Within an emphatic frame provided by the opening and closing phrases, “No more” (IX.1) and “no end” (IX.1189), Milton presents the Fall in five easily perceived parts, a dramatic structure emphasized by recurrent theatrical images.¹ In their immediate context, the words “no end”...