1DI1ING LIST APR 1 1922,
MODERN PHILOLOGY
THE UNIVERSITY OP OHIO AGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON
THE MARUZEN-KABUSfflKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO, FUKUOKA, BENDAI
THE MISSION BOOK COMPANY
SHANGHAI
»'
MODERN PHILOLOGY
EDITED BY
JOHN M. MANLY, General Editor CHARLES R. BASKERVILL, Managing Editor
WILLIAM A. NITZE STAKE W. CUTTING TOM PEETE CROSS
KARL PIETSCH FEANCIS A. WOOD GEORGE W. SHESBUBN
GEORGE T. NORTHUP JAMES R. HULBEBT JEFFERSON B. FLETCHER
T. ATKINSON JENKINS EBNEST H. WILKINS
ADVISOBY BOAED
JAMES W. BRIGHT GEORGE L. KITTREDGE
GEORGE HEMPL FREDERICK M. WARREN
FEEDEEIC I. CAEPENTEB
VOLUME EIGHTEEN 1920-1921
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
M7 v.lt
* % \ Published
May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December, 1920 January, February, March, April, 1921
Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois. U.S.A.
CONTENTS
A. LEROY ANDREWS. Studies in the Fornaldarsogur Nordrlanda . 93 CHARLES READ BASKERVILL. The Genesis of Spenser's Queen of
Faerie 49
JACOB N. BEAM. Hermann Kirchner's Sapientia Solomonis . . . 101 ARTHUR C. L. BROWN. The Grail and the English Sir Perceval 201 and 661
W. F. BRYAN. The Midland Present Plural Indicative Ending -e(n) . 457
FREDERICK A. G. COWPER. The New Manuscript of Ilk et Gderon . 601
TOM PEETE CROSS. Alfred Tennyson as a Celticist .... 485
. "The Psalter of the Pig," an Irish Legend .... 443
STARR WILLARD CUTTING. Calvin Thomas, 1854-1919 . . .119
. A Hitherto Unpublished Poem by Friedrich von Schiller . 343
MARIO ESPOSITO. A Ninth-Century Astronomical Treatise . . 177
EDWIN W. FAY. Professor Prokosch on the IE. Sonant Aspirates . 109 M. B. FINCH AND E. ALLISON PEERS. Walpole's Relations with
Voltaire 189
R. S. FORSYTHE. A Plautine Source of The Merry Wives of Windsor . 401
THORNTON S. GRAVES. Richard Rawlidge on London Playhouses . 41
. Some Allusions to Richard Tarleton . . . . . . 493
JAMES HOLLY HANFORD. The Arrangement and Dates of Milton's
Sonnets . . 475
GEORGE R. HAVENS. The Abbe* Le Blanc and English Literature . 423
HAROLD N. HILLEBRAND. The Early History of the Chapel Royal . 233
A. R. HOHLFELD. Pact and Wager in Goethe's Faust .... 513 J. R. HULBERT. The Problems of Authorship and Date of Wynnere
and Wastoure 31
JOHN S. KENYON. On the Date of The Owl and the Nightingale . . 55
W. KURRELMEYER. Niflant, Iflant 557
H. CARRINGTON LANCASTER. La Calpren£de Dramatist . 121 and 345
SAMUEL MOORE. New Life-Records of Chaucer. Addendum . . 497
GEORGE TYLER NORTHUP. Caballo de Ginebra 157
ALOIS RICHARD NYKL. Old Spanish Girgonga 597
K. PIETSCH. The Madrid Manuscript of the Spanish Grail
Fragments . 147 and 591
JOHND. REA. Longfellow's "Nature" .48
. A Note on Romeo and Juliet, II, i, 1-2 675
EDITH RICKERT. A New Interpretation of The Parlement of Foules . 1
F. SCHOENEMANN. Friedrich Lienhards Literaturbetrachtung . . 545
vi CONTENTS
» JOHN WILLIAM SCROLL. The Cave Scene in Die Familie Schroffen-
stein 537
MARTIN SCHUTZE. The Fundamental Ideas in Herder's
Thought 65 and 289
J. E. SHAW. "And the Evening and the Morning Were One Day" . 569
E. S. SHELDON. Some Roland Emendations 143
JOHN S. P. TATLOCK. The Epilog of Chaucer's Troilus . . .625 GUSTAVE L. VAN RoosBROECK. Corneille's Early Friends and Sur- roundings *. 361
HERMANN J. WEIGAND. Heine's Return to God 309
RALPH C. WILLIAMS. Epic Unity as Discussed by Sixteenth-Century
Critics in Italy 383
STANLEY J. WILLIAMS. Some Versions of Timon of Athens on the
Stage 269
FRANCIS A. WOOD. Germanic w-Gemination . . . . 79 and 303
REVIEWS AND NOTICES:
Allason: Caroline Schlegel, Studio sul Romanticismo Tedesco
(T. P. Cross) 678
Aron: Traces of Matriarchy in Germanic Hero-Lore (T. P. Cross) 679 Babbitt: Rosseau and Romanticism (E. Preston Dargan) . . 162 Bayfield: A Study of Shakespeare's Versification (John S. P.
Tatlock) 504
Brown: A Register of Middle English Didactic and Religious
Verse. Part II (J.M.M.) 287
Burnham, ed. : A Classical Technology (Charles H. Beeson) » 623
Carre*: Goethe en Angleterre (T. P. Cross) 678
Cohen: ficrivains franc, ais en Hollande dans la premiere moitie*
du XVII' siecle (T. P. Cross) 680
Crane: Italian Social Customs in the Sixteenth Century and Their
Influence on the Literatures of Europe (William A. Nitze) . 609 Cross: The History of Henry Fielding (T. P. Cross) ... 677 Gollancz, ed.: A Good Short Debate between Winner and Waster
(J. R. Hulbert) 499
Grandgent: Old and New, Sundry Papers (T. P. Cross) . . 231 Gue*rard: French Civilization from Its Origins to the Close of the
Middle Ages (William A. Nitze) 609
Hayens: TheodorFontane: A Critical Study (Harvey W. Thayer) 561 Hewitt: Paul Gerhardt as a Hymn Writer and His Influence on
English Hymnody (T. P. Cross) . . . . . . .678
Hoare: A Short Italian Dictionary (Ernest H. Wilkins) . . 623 Jones: Lewis Theobald. His Contribution to English Scholar- ship (George Sherburn) 57
CONTENTS
vu
Leuvensche Bijdragen op het Gebied van de Germaansche Phi-
lologie en in 't bijzonder van de Nederlandsche Dialectkunde
(T. P. Cross) 679
Moore: Historical Outlines of English Phonology and Middle
English Grammar (J. R. H.) 63
Moore and Knott: The Elements of Old English (J. R. H.) . 63
Osgood, ed.: The Pearl (J. R. Hulbert) 499
Pinger: Laurence Sterne and Goethe (T. P. Cross) . . . 678 Recent Works on Phases of the English Renaissance (C. R.
Baskervill) 505
Revue de LittSrature Compared (T. P. Cross) 680
Riddell: Flaubert and Maupassant: A Literary Relationship
(George R. Havens) 617
Rodriguez y Marin, ed.: El Diablo Cojuelo, Luis Ve*lez de Guevara
(E. R. Sims) 620
Rudwin: The Origin of the German Carnival Comedy (Louise
Mallinckrodt Kueffner) 565
Schofield: Mythical Bards and the Life of William Wallace (T. P.
Cross) 229
Simmons: Goethe's Lyric Poems in English Translation Prior to
1860 (0. W. Long) 677
Simons: Waltharius en de Walthersage (T. P. Cross) 680
Weston: From Ritual to Romance (T. P. Cross) . 679
Winkler: Franzosische Dichter des Mittelalters: II. Marie de
France (Foster E. Guyer) 171
Wright: French Classicism (William A. Nitze) . • 609
Modern Philology
VOLUME XVIII
May IQ2O
NUMBER i
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF THE PARLEMENT OF FOULES
PRESENT STATUS OF THE PROBLEM
It is with proper diffidence that I venture upon a battlefield so hotly contested as the meaning of this poem. In 1877 Koch1 intro- duced Anne of Bohemia as the "formel" and Richard II, William of Hainaut (Bavaria), and Frederick of Meissen as the three eagle- suitors. In 1910-11, Professor 0. F. Emerson, with the assistance of Dr. Samuel Moore, threw out William of Hainaut (Bavaria), pushed Frederick of Meissen into second place, and introduced as a formid- able rival of King Richard, his adversary of France,2 Charles VI. This revised hypothesis, according to Dr. Moore, "rests upon grounds of proof that come little short of amounting to a demonstration."3 But in 1913 Professor Manly4 challenged the right of these historic figures to be in the poem at all, and after showing up the cracks in their armor, knocked them off their pedestals as unworthy to bear a part in its interpretation. In 1914 Professor Emerson5 tried to set them up again, with a few more props. In 1916 Mr. Hugo
1 Englische Studien, I, 287 ff., and Essays on Chaucer (Chaucer Society Publications) . Part IV, pp. 400 ff.
* Mod. Phil., VIII, 45 ff.; Mod. Lang. Notes, XXVI, 8ff., 109 ff.
3 /&*<*., XXVI, 12.
« Stud, zur eng. Phil., Heft L, pp. 279 ff.
« Journal of English and Germanic Philology, XIII, 566 ff. 1] 1 [MoDBBN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920
2 EDITH RICKERT
Lange1 in a short paper argued further for the Koch-Emerson theory. In 1917 Mr. W. E. Farnham2 entered the field, maintaining that while it might not be necessary to banish these historical per- sonages altogether, as Professor Manly would do, they must be kept strictly in the background, as the poem could be interpreted perfectly well without them.
In 1918 Mr. Viktor Langhans3 published an interpretation of the poem as an exposition of the nature of love, designed for St. Valentine's Day.
In this intensified polarity of opinion I venture to present a study of my own begun many years ago and left unfinished because of the inaccessibility of foreign libraries, and published now because it suggests a new line of investigation.
COMPARISON WITH II Paradiso degli Alberti
In the first place, Giovanni da Prato's II Paradiso degli Alberti, translated by Mr. Farnham, does not parallel or explain The Parle- ment of Foules in its lack of definite ending, as will be seen by detailed comparison :
PARLEMENT OF FOULES PARADISO DEGLI ALBERTI4
There are three suitors, the first There are four suitors of equal admittedly of higher rank and rank and merit, greater attractions.
All the characters are allegorized All the characters are human as birds, the leading persons as except the heroine, who has been eagles. enchanted into a sparrow hawk.
The first suitor claims most The first suitor sees the bird ardent love, the second longest drowning and calls out, the second service, the third greatest faithful- saves her, the third admires her ness. beauty, cherishes her in his bosom,
and says that she must be well cared for, and the fourth disen- chants her.
i Anglia, XL, 395 fl. 2 PM LA, XXV, 492 ff.
8 Untersuchungen zu Chaucer, pp. 19 ff.
« This is based upon Mr. Farnham's translation; I have not seen the original.
2
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES"
PARLEMENT OF FOULES
To settle the argument, Nature, who presides over the parliament of birds assembled to choose mates, allows each class to appoint a spokesman to voice their opinion as to the merits of the three suitors.
The tercelet of the falcon and Nature herself (who says that she speaks for Reason also) support the claim of the first eagle; the others are not supported.
The representatives of the three classes of common birds discuss what the first eagle shall do if the formel does not take him, and are unmercifully jeered at by the noble birds.
The formel, although the plea of the first eagle has made her blush like a rose, refuses to decide, asks a year's "respit," and then her "choys al fre."
PARADISO DEGLI ALBERT!
To settle the dispute, an old peasant suggests that it be referred to Jove.
Saturn, Mars, Apollo, and Mer- cury— each in turn argues for one of the four lovers; Venus and Minerva leave the choice to the girl.
The heroine chooses at once, and the gods attend the wedding; but the audience is left to guess which suitor wins.
It is clear that the Paradiso is merely an example of the demande d 'amours, the very point of which was to leave the ending unknown, so as to arouse discussion in the audience. Unquestionably Chaucer had in mind this literary type1 in the central situation of The Parle- ment of Foules, but in no other demande d 'amours, as far as I have been able to observe, has the balance of the argument been com- pletely upset by throwing all the stress on the first suitor, and the problem shifted from Which will she choose? to Why does she not choose the first ? And in no other demande d' amours is the love problem intertwined2 as here with satire on the common birds, who ; do not agree with the "foules of ravyne" about the match but are I willing that the first suitor should marry someone else. What will
1 Cf. Manly, loc. cit., pp. 283 flf.
2 Cf. 11. 491-518 and 554-616.
4 EDITH RICKERT
•
explain this absolute twist of the poem from the type to which it belongs ?
Such a variation might be due to artistic purpose; but no critic has attempted to explain the purpose here. Langhans indeed main- tains that the general aim of the poem — to contrast pure love1 with lawless love — shuts out the possibility of historical interpretation; but he does not touch upon the problem suggested above — the use of the demande dj amours with the balance of the argument entirely toward one of the suitors.
POLITICAL ALLEGORY AND COURT POETRY
The problem, then, reduces to this: If the type of source upon which the poem is based fails to explain this peculiarity, what grounds have we for supposing that the clue lies in a historical interpretation ?
We have, for one thing, the common use of bird and beast allegory by Deschamps and Machaut. Deschamps expected the French court to understand his frequent allusions to prominent persons as birds or animals.2
Moreover, Deschamps wrote an elaborate bird allegory (La Fiction de I'aigle), satirizing the court of Charles VI, in which he represents the young king as an eagle, one of his uncles as a falcon, the nobility as the "gentle birds," the upstart courtiers as various kinds of common birds, and so on.3
Machaut in Le Dit de Valerian (before 1350) uses bird allegory in a love poem, disguising four women as eagles and falcons.4
It was the fashion in court poetry of the fourteenth century, as may be illustrated abundantly from the works of Machaut,
1 Op. dt.; from pp. 36 and 40 wedded love would be inferred.
2 In accordance with fable lore, he uses both the eagle and the lion as symbols for different kings of Prance, especially Charles V and Charles VI. At other times he draws upon heraldry, as in referring to Richard II as the Leopard, and to Charles VI as the Wing6d Deer. And again he has in mind the famous allegorical prophecies in using the Heavy Ass (I'dne pesant) for Richard II, and the Wild Boar for the Black Prince.
In the use of the Fox for Charles the Bad of Navarre and of Tybert, the Cat, for John of Gaunt, the satirical intent is obvious.
For numerous political references in the form of animal allegory, see the Index to Deschamps (GSuvres, SociSte" des Anciens Textes Francais, Vol. X); and for the extensive use of birds and animals in political prophecy see Rupert Taylor's The Political Prophecy in England.
> Op. cit., VI, 147 ff. The poem may be a little later than The Parlement of Foules, but it belongs to the beginning of Charles VI's reign.
* Ed. Hoepffner (Society des Anciens Textes Francais), II, 239 ff.
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 5
Deschamps, Gower, and Chaucer himself, to refer to and discuss, directly and indirectly, political situations and personal affairs of princes.
OBJECTIONS TO THE RICHARD-ANNE THEORY
Although Professor Manly has shown that the Richard-Anne theory is untenable, and has discussed the contradictions and absurdities involved in trying to date and motivate the poem on this basis, the later articles of Emerson1 and Lange make further attack necessary.
In this paper I shall try to add to the argument that the Richard- Anne theory must be discarded by showing that (1) it does not explain Chaucer's divergence from the demande d'amours type or the inconclusive ending; (2) it does not explain the interweaving of satire — a bird House of Commons — with the love story; (3) it is not at present supported by historical evidence.
1. In the long history of the Richard-Anne theory2 only two explanations have been offered for the formel's denial of the suitor favored by Nature, Reason, and herself. One is Emerson's sugges- tion of maiden coyness,3 which is scarcely argument. The other is
1 The chief new points introduced in Emerson's latest paper (Jour, of Eng. and Germ. Phil., XIII) are the following: (1) He offers The Book of the Duchess as a parallel for the year's delay (pp. 570 f.). But surely "another year" need not mean "next year at the same time." The text says merely that after enduring his woe a long time the lover plucked up courage to try again at some later time. As Professor Emerson notes, the Duchess had refused him flatly, with no suggestion of asking for "respit." (2) He offers Dunbar's The Thistle and the Rose (ibid., pp. 580 f.) as a parallel for the omission in the Parlement of all reference to the marriage. But why should we suppose that Dunbar, who wrote in May while the marriage arrangements were being made, should have waited until August to present his poem ? Would he not have sent it at once in the season that suggested the form it took ? Certainly no argument can be based upon the circumstances under which it was presented, as these are unknown. (3) He, indeed, admits that he cannot explain satisfactorily why Chaucer did not develop his poem to a more definite conclusion, but he seems to find comfort in the fact that the birds themselves are content with the conclusion (ibid., pp. 578f). This is merely saying that Chaucer as an artist had his own reasons for the inconclusive ending; it is not an argu- ment for the use of the poem upon an occasion connected with a wedding.
2 For the most detailed summary of its development, see Langhans, op. cit., pp. 48 ff.
*Loc. cit., pp. 573 f. If a this-is-so-sudden Victorian convention prevailed in the fourteenth century, Anne must have blushed with shame — if the poem was translated to her — upon remembering how she had joined with her mother and brother in authoriz- ing negotiations for the marriage, and how, without a hint of irresolution on her part, it had been settled in England and in Bohemia, delayed only by the time required for the journeys of the ambassadors, so that she was on her way to England within nine months and married within the year after formal negotiations had begun. What a blow to her maidenly modesty if the behavior of the formel was correct!
5
I
6 EDITH RICKERT
Lange's assertion that Chaucer deliberately departs from the facts in order to avoid a tactless reference to Anne's quick acceptance of Richard's offer, which the King of France had refused — in other words, to save her imperial dignity!1
2. The satirical element, one-seventh of the poem, the Richard- Anne theory does not attempt to explain.
3. If, in addition, it can be shown that the balance of historical evidence swings even slightly toward the conclusion that Frederick of Meissen was out of the race by 1377, or that Charles VI was never in it at all, then more props must be found if the theory is to be maintained. But in fact the evidence is strongly against both these suitors.
FREDERICK OF MEISSEN
In the case of Frederick, Professor Emerson's chief argument is that as the money pledged for the fulfilment of the contract between Frederick and Anne had not been paid by 1397, which is indicated by Frederick's seizure of the towns of Briix and Laun, offered as security for the payment, the engagement, therefore, must have lasted until 1382, when it was nullified by Anne's marriage to Richard.2
The seizure of the towns proves one thing only, that the forfeit money had not then been paid. It tells nothing whatever about the date or the circumstances of the breaking of the contract.
According to Pelzel, as Professor Emerson admits, the engage- ment was arbitrarily broken by Anne's relatives about 1377, on account of the Mainz affair. We do not know the authority for Pelzel's statement, but Lindner accepts it; and surely Professor Emerson's opinion that there was not reason enough for breaking the engagement is no argument that it was not broken. Until
1 Loc. cit., pp. 395 f. But to argue a certain historical basis for the poem because of resemblances, and then to confirm this argument by a purely subjective explanation of admitted disagreement between the historic facts and the details of the poem is a curious logic.
Lange's other contribution to the theory — his suggestion that the formel is Anne because the two-headed eagle of the Empire is on her tomb in Westminster Abbey must have occurred to many students of the theory; but it does not work. The eagle-suitors were not sons of the Empire, nor was the formel double-headed! If the allegory were heraldic, it would have been impossible to get away from the leopards of England and the lilies of France.
2 Mod. Phil., VIII. 49 ff.
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 7
Pelzel is discredited by substantial evidence to the contrary, his statement, based upon sources to which we have not access, must outweigh an unsupported assumption that the contract of which, Pelzel and Lindner discounted, we know nothing after 1373, continued to exist until Anne's marriage to Richard.1
CHARLES VI OF FRANCE
Professor Emerson's identification of Charles VI as the third suitor depends upon (1) a passage in Valois; (2) an extract from a letter written by the Cardinal de Sortenac; (3, 4) two passages in Froissart; and (5) a passage in Adam of Usk's Chronicle.2
1. The quotation from Valois reads in full (italics mine):
Let us note, however, a last hope, or rather, a last illusion, entertained at this moment by some Clementists. During a visit of Wenzel at Aix-la-Chapelle there was talk of a marriage between the dauphin, son of the king of France, and Anna of Luxemburg, sister of the King of the Romans. An interview was to take place between Charles V and Wenzel. Who could say whether by virtue of the matrimonial conferences which were going to be undertaken at Rheims another agreement might not come about in the religious domain ? At the very worst it would suffice (at least they chose to believe so) to persuade Wenzel that a change of policy would not be incompatible with the respect that he owed the memory of Charles IV [his father]. The Court of Avignon counted much on the result of that conference. Among other persons who promised to be there, I shall mention the envoys of the King of Portugal and at their head the Bishop of Lisbon, who was already preparing the discourse with which he meant to convert Wenzel.
This interview did not take place; the King of the Romans, turning his back upon Rheims, resumed his route to Cologne. He, it is true, had him- self represented at Paris by four ambassadors; but the document, un- doubtedly prepared in advance, of which they were bearers, treated only of the renewal of the alliance between the two houses, without whispering a word of the marriage of the dauphin with Anne of Bohemia. Too deep a difference of opinion separated thenceforth the Valois and the Luxemburgs. Anna was going to be betrothed not to the son but to the hereditary foe of Charles V, to Richard II, King of England. A marriage should seal the accord of the two great Urbanist kingdoms.
1 Particularly in an age when such contracts were made with one hand and broken with the other. Lange's assertion (italics mine): "In oiler munde war ja auch das langj&hrige verldbnis Annas mit Friedrich von Meissen, das zur Zeit ihres 'engagement' mit Richard II formel uberhaupt noch nicht gelost war" (loc. cit., p. 396) is sheer imagination.
* Mod. Phil., VIII, 51 ff.
7
8 EDITH RICKEBT
It was all over: it was useless to dream longer of an agreement on the question of the schism between France and Germany.1
The italicized phrases show unmistakably that, in the opinion of Valois, the talk grew out of a desperate effort on the part of the Clementists to win Wenzel for their pope, and that even this hope was dead when the old treaty between the Empire and France was renewed at Paris2 without a word about the marriage.8
2. The letter from the Clementist Cardinal de Sortenac, written in May or June, 1380,4 was evidently one of Valois' authorities, and therefore is not additional testimony.
3. But Professor Emerson quotes a passage from Froissart to show that Charles V on his deathbed in September, 1380, still had hopes of a marriage between his son and Anne. The King is speak- ing: "Seek in Germany for the marriage of Charles my son, by which alliances there may be stronger. You have heard how our adversary must and will marry there: it is all to have more alliances."5
1 "Notons cependant une derniSre esperance, ou plutdt une derniere illusion, entretenue a ce moment par quelques cUmentins, Durant un sej'our de Wenceslas a Aix-la-Chapelle, on avail parle d'un mariage entre le dauphin, fils du roi de Prance, et Anna de Luxem- bourg, soeur du roi des Remains. Une entrevue devait avoir lieu entre Charles V et Wenceslas. Qui pouvait dire si, a la faveur des pourparlers matrimoniaux qui allaient s'engager a Reims, un autre rapprochement ne s'opSrerait pas sur le terrain religieux ? Au bout du compte il sufflsait (du mains on se plaisait A le croire) de persuader a Wen- ceslas qu'un changement de politique n'gtait pas inconciliable avec le respect du a la m&noire de Charles IV. La cour d' Avignon comptait beaucoup sur le resultat de cette conference. Entre autres personnages qui promettaient de s'y rendre, je citerai les envoyes du roi de Portugal et, a leur t§te, I'6v6que de Lisbonne, qui d6ja prgparait le discours avec lequel il devait convertir Wenceslas.
"Cette entrevue n'eut pas lieu: le roi des Remains, tournant le dos a Reims, reprit la route de Cologne. II se fit, il est vrai, repr&senter a Paris par quatre ambassadeurs: mais 1'acte, sans doute r6dig6 d'avance, dont ces derniers Staient porteurs ne traitait que du renouvellement des alliances entre les deux maisons, sans souffler mot du mariage du dauphin avec la bohSmienne Anna. Un trop profond dissentiment sSparait d6sor- mais les Valois et les Luxembourg. Anna allait 6tre fiancee non pas au flls, mais a 1'ennemi hergditaire de Charles V, a Richard II, roi d'Angleterre. Un mariage devait sceller 1'accord des deux grands royaumes urbanistes.
"C'en 6tait fait: il ne f allait plus songer a une entente sur la question du schisme entre la France et 1'Allemagne" (La France et le grand schisme d' accident [1896], I, 300 f.).
2 Dated in another hand July 21, 1380 (Valois, op. cit., p. 301, n. 1).
• Professor Emerson's inferences are somewhat confusing: He says first (Mod. Phil, VIII, 52 f.): "As late as that time, therefore [April, 1380], the emperor was still considering the possible betrothal of his sister Anne and the heir of the French throne"; and later (ibid., p. 57): "As already shown, it was in the spring of 1380 that there had first been talk of a marriage of Anne and the Dauphin of France" (italics mine).
* Valois, op. cit., I, 319, n. 1.
6 "EnquerSs pour le mariage de Charle mon fll en Allemaigne, par quoi les aliances y soient plus fortes. Vous av6s entendu comment nostre aversaire s'i doit et voelt maryer: ce est tout pour avoir plus 1' alliances" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 285).
8
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 9
That Froissart, however, did not think Charles V referred to Anne is shown by what he wrote later in connection with the marriage of Charles VI to Isabel of Bavaria :
For King Charles of France, of blessed memory, on his deathbed had ordained that Charles his son should be settled and married, if place could be found for him in Germany, in order that the Germans might make closer alliances with the French, for he saw that the King of England was going to be married to the sister of the King of Germany, in order that he might be stronger.1
The second passage does not quote Charles V but interprets his words as Froissart understood them. It may be objected that his , interpretation is colored by the fait accompli of the marriage; but interval evidence in the speech bears him out: Charles V could not have used the word seek (Enqueres) in Germany if he himself had for j some time been working or hoping for a particular alliance there. Moreover, the second sentence in the first quotation was superfluous t 3 unless it meant exactly what Froissart in the second passage says it meant, that Charles V was anxious that his son should make a match that would offset (by maintaining balance of power) that of Richard to Anne, which he evidently foresaw.2 Compare also the expression "if a place could be found for him in Germany" with the purely general "and marry him in a place so high that the realm shall be stronger."8
If Charles V ever made any effort to court Anne for his son, evidence of it has yet to be produced.4
1 "Car 1 i rois Charles de France, de bonne m&noire, ou lit de la mort, avoit ordonnS que Charles ses flls fust assegnSs et mariSs, se on en pooit veoir lieu pour luy en Alemaigne, par quoy des Alemans plus grans aliances se fesissent as Francois, car il veoit que li rois d'Engletiere estoit maries a le soeur dou roy d'Allemaigne, dont il valoit mieux" (ibid., X, 344. Italics mine).
2 The religious alliance of England and Bohemia initiated by the decision of the parliament of Gloucester in 1378 continued with the letter of Wenzel to Richard, May 20,
1379. The idea of the marriage may have originated in the spring of 1379 when Michael de la Pole seems to have been sent to Wenzel's court to discuss it. Certainly the Cardinal de Prata, who was sent by Pope Urban to Wenzel in 1379, and who went on to England in 1380, was concerned with that alliance; and Burley, who went to Bohemia in June,
1380, went with a definite proposition. For detailed discussion of the negotiations between England and Bohemia at this time, see C. G. Chamberlayne, Die Heirat Rich- ards II von England mil Anna von Luxemburg (Halle, 1906), especially pp. 19 ff.; and J. J. Heeren, Do* Bundniss zwischen Kdnig Richard II von England und Kdnig Wenzel von Jahre 1381 (Halle, 1910), pp. 16 ff.
» This, according to Froissart, was also said by Charles V on his deathbed (op. cit., IX, 285).
« The initiative in renewing the old treaty, even, came from Wenzel.
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10 EDITH RICKERT
»
4. The active courtship, then, to which Professor Emerson refers, must have been conducted, if at all, by Charles VI himself after he came to the throne in September, 1380. On this point Professor Emerson again uses Froissart as authority. In order to make the objections to his inference clear I quote the passage in full:
So were these affairs conducted that the King of the Romans sent his sister to England, the Duke of Tassem in her company, and a great train of knights and squires, of dames and damsels, in state and array, as befitted such a lady; and they came to Brabant, to the city of Brussels. There the Duke, Wenceslas of Brabant, and the Duchess, Jeanne his wife, received the young lady and her train with great splendor; for the Duke was her uncle: she was the daughter of the Emperor Charles, his brother. And so Madame Anne of Bohemia remained at Brussels with her uncle and her fair aunt for more than a month without leaving; she did not dare budge —
f I will tell you the reason why. She and her council were informed that there were about XII armed vessels full of Normans on the sea, hovering between Calais and Holland, and robbing and pillaging on the sea everything that
\ they met, without regard for anyone; and a rumor ran up and down the sea- coast of Flanders and of Zeeland that they remained there waiting for the arrival of the young lady, and that the King of France and his council were going to have the lady carried off to break this marriage; for they were in great fear of alliances between the Germans and the English. And people said furthermore, when they were talking, that it was not honorable to seize or to carry off ladies in the wars of lords; but the answer made to color and make look better the quarrel of the King of France, was: "How is it you do not remember that the Prince of Wales, father of the present king of England, had carried off — and agreed to the deed — Madame de Bourbon, mother of the queen of France, who was seized and taken away by the prince's people, and all through that war was in the castle of Belle-Perce ? God help me, it was so; and she was taken to Guienne and ransomed. Now in a similar case, if the French, by way of revenge, should seize the wife of the King of England, they would not be wronging anyone."
Because of these doubts and the general look of affairs, the lady and all her train stayed at Brussels a whole month and until the Duke of Brabant, her uncle, sent to France his councillors, the Signeur de Rocelare and the Signeur de Bouquehort, to remonstrate about these things with the King of France and his uncles, who were nephews of the Duke of Brabant, being his sister's sons. These knights of Brabant so managed, and talked so well to the King of France and his council, that favor was shown them, and good safe-conducts were given to pass where they [Anne and her train] pleased — they and theirs — were it within the realm of France or along the frontier in going to Calais; and the Normans who were out at sea
10
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 11
were called home. All this the above-mentioned knights of Brabant reported to the Duke and to the Duchess; and the King and his uncles wrote them that at their request and in consideration of them and of no other, they [the French king and his uncles] had shown this favor to their cousin of Bohemia.1
Here we must distinguish between fact and rumor. Froissart states as facts the report about the Norman pirates, Anne's fear, the embassy to Paris to get safe-conducts, and the reply of Charles and his uncles. There is no reason to doubt any of this. Froissart was in a position to know what went on at Brussels,2 and no motive for such an elaborate invention appears. Moreover, it is a fact that on October 15, the Emperor Wenzel issued a commission to the Duke of Teschen to go to Paris to announce the marriage of Anne, and to offer the Emperor's services in prolonging the truce or in making
1 "Tant avoient est€ ces coses demerges que li rois des Rommains envoioit sa soer en Engletiere, li due de Tassem en sa compaignie et grant fuisson de chevaliers et d'es- cuiers, de dames et de damoiselles en estat et en arroy, enssi comme a tel dame apparte- noit; et vinrent en Braibant en le ville de Brousselles. La requelliefent li dus Wincelins de Braibant et la ducoise Jehane sa fern me la jone dame et sa compaignie moult grande- ment, car li dus en estoit oncles: elle avoit este1 fille de le'mpereur Charle son fr&re. Et se tint madame Anne de Behaigne §, Brousselles dalles son oncle et sa belle ante plus d'un mois sans partir, ne bougier, ne s'osoit, je vous diray raison pour quoy. Elle fu segnefye, et ses consaulx, que il y avoit environ XII vaissaulx armes plains de Normans sus la mer, qui waucroient entre Callais et Hollandes, et pilloient et desreuboient sus le mer tout ce que il trouvoient, et n'avoient cure sur qui; et alloit et couroit renommee sus les bondes de celle mer de Flandres et de Zellandes que il se tenoient la en attendant la venue de la jone dame, et que li rois de France et ses consaulx voloient faire ravir la dame pour brisier che mariage; car il se doubtoient grandement des alliances des Allemans et des Engles. Et dissoit-on encores avant, quant on parloit, que ce n'estoit pas honnerable cose de prendre, ne de ravir dames en guerres de signeurs, mSs on re- spondoit en coulourant et en faissant le querelle douroy de France plus belle: 'Comment ne veistes-vous pas que li princes de Galles, peres de che roy d'EngletiSre, que il fist ravir et consenty le fait de madame de Bourbonnois, m6re §, la royne de France, qui fu prise et embKJe des gens dou princes, et tout de celle guerre, ens ou castiel de Belle-Perce ? M'aist Dieu, si fu, et men6e ent en Gienne et ranc.onn6e. Ossi par pareille cose, se li Francois, pour eux contrevengier, prendoient le moullier dou roy d'Engletiere, il ne fe- roient a nulluy tort.'
"Pour ces doubtes et les apparans que on en veoit, se tint la dame et toute sa route a Brouselles un mois tout entier, et tant que li dus de Braibant ses oncles envoya en France son conseil le signeur de Rocelare et le signeur de Bouquehort pour remonstrer ces coses au roy de France et a ses oncles, liquel estoient ossi neveut dou due de Braibant et fils de sa soer. Oil chevalier de Braibant exploiti&rent tant, et si bellement parlfcrent au roy de France et a son conseil, que grace li fu faite et bons sauf-conduis donn&s de passer oft il li plaissoit, li et les siens, fust parmy le roiaulme de France ou sus les fronti&res en allant jusques a Callais, et furent li Normant qui se tenoient sus mer, remanded. Tout che raporterent li dessus dit chevalier en Braibant au due et S, la ducoise et leur escripsoient li rois et si oncle que, §, leur pryere et contemplation et non d'autrui, il faissoient celle grace a leur cousine de Behaigne" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 459 fl. Italics mine).
2 The Duke of Brabant was his patron and friend. He claims to have been "moult privS et acointe" with him (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, I, 246 ff.) ; and at this time Frois- sart lived at Lestines-sur-Mont, within easy riding distance of Brussels.
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12 EDITH RICKERT
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peace between France and England.1 Of this journey we have no details, but it may well have been partly responsible for Anne's long stay at Brussels.
Again, it is easy to see the basis of the report that frightened Anne. For four successive summers (1377-80) a French fleet under the admiral Jean de Vienne had raided the English coast and terror- ized Channel traffic. In August, 1380, they even went up the Thames and burned Gravesend, only a few miles from London. This fleet was Norman in that its headquarters was at Rouen, and it undoubtedly was manned largely by Normans.2 The only reason why it was inactive in 1381 was that Charles V on his deathbed had forced a truce with England by stopping supplies for war.3
For this reason if any Norman ships sailed from Rouen in 1381, they were pirates. Further, during the Great Rebellion in England that summer men were accused in London of taking money from Vienne to facilitate his landing on the south coast. Though this charge was almost certainly false — Vienne had no money for such a purpose — the report of it was enough to frighten Anne into asking for safe conduct.4
But the clauses italicized are used by Froissart to distinguish between fact and rumor. The rumor of the kidnaping plan evidently grew out of the well-known French fear of the alliance of the two great Urbanist kingdoms.5 That the rumor was unfounded scarcely needs argument. To kidnap Anne meant war with England and
1 E. Winkelmann, Acta Imperil Inedita Seculi XIII et XIV (1880, 1885), II, 641 f. It would seem as if he should have asked for the passports. Is he the "autrui" of the last sentence in the Froissart passage ?
2 Terrier de Loray, Jean de Vienne (1877), chaps, v-vii, with documents referred to. The Rolls of Parliament confirm this. In 1379, the Commons complained of the great harm done by "barges et balyngers de Normandie et autres ennemys sur la mier."
3 Cf. Mandements de Charles V, 1955.
* Cf. Oman, The Great Revolt of 1S81 (1906), p. 140, with n. 3, and Petit-Dutaillis, Introduction to R6ville's Soulevement des Travailleurs d' Angleterre (1898), LVIII, n. 2. That Anne was kept informed about the insurrection appears from the Town and Port Records of New Romney, which say that the men of that town who sent a barge to bring the Queen across began their preparations in October, "and the Queen (at this time) did not come to England, nor did she wish to come until peace should be made again of the rebels aforesaid" (Archaeol. Cant., XIII, 209). This might of course have been true, quite apart from any plans of Jean de Vienne, as all through the autumn the English government was harassed by rumors that rebellion was about to break out again (Oman, op. cit., p. 148).
5 See the words of Charles V quoted on pp. 8 f . above.
12
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 13
Bohemia, and the French war chest was empty.1 But Professor Emerson observes that mere talk of Charles's courtship might have given him a place in the poem. Is it conceivable that if such talk existed it would not at once have associated itself with the rumor quoted by Froissart and served to motivate it? Why should the gossips have gone back to the old case of the dowager Duchess of Bourbon, who was kidnaped for ransom, not "to break a marriage," if it was generally believed that the French King was a disappointed suitor of Anne ? And if it was not true, or even generally believed, how should Chaucer have heard of it, and why should he have made Charles the third suitor ?2
5. There is, however, one plain assertion that Anne was courted by the King of France. It is quoted by Professor Emerson from the Chronicle of Adam of Usk. If Adam was right, he had a "scoop" ! It is fair to ask how he got it. The source is suggested by the passage in which the statement occurs:
In this same year there came into England one Pileus, cardinal priest of Saint Praxedes, to treat, on behalf of the emperor of Germany and king of Bohemia, with the council of England of and about a marriage between our king and the lady Ann, sister of the same emperor; who afterwards became thereby our most gracious queen, howbeit she died without issue. At his coming, this cardinal, falsely feigning himself legate a latere and as having the power of the pope, then did exercise the papal offices. And among other things he made me notary, though to no purpose, in the house of the friars preachers of London, where he was then dwelling. Thus did he gather to himself countless money, and, the treaty of marriage being settled, he departed from England with his gains, to his own condemnation; idly trusting that the pope would approve these his acts. And, after his departure, the said lady Ann was bought for a great price by our lord the king, for she was much sought in marriage by the king of France; and she was then sent over into England to be crowned queen.3
1 See p. 12 above. In this connection should be noted the conciliatory attitude of the French when in the spring of 1381 Wenzel threatened on religious grounds to break the old alliance renewed in 1380 (Valois, op. cit., II, 274 fl.).
2 Cf . also Chamberlayne's argument, loc. cit.
8 "Isto eodem anno, venit quidam in Angliam diet us Pilius, tituli Sancte Praxedis presbiter cardinalis, ad tractandum cum concilio Anglie, ex parte imperatoris Almanie, regis Boemie, de et super matrimonio inter regem nostrum predictum et dominam Annam, dicti imperatoris sororem, postea ex eo capite Anglie reginam benignissimam. licet sine prole defunct am. Ineundo cardinalis iste, false se fingens legatum a latere esse ac potestatem pape habere, vices papales tune excercuit; me inter cetera notarium tune, licet inutiliter, in domo fratrum predicacionis Londonie, ubi tune morabatur, creavit. Inflnitam pecuniam sic collegit, et ab Anglia cum eadem pecunia, eodem tractatu
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14 EDITH RICKERT
*
Before examining this passage, it is necessary to observe that by his own assertion Adam is known to have written from memory all of his chronicle before the year 1394,1 and also that a reference under the year 1382 to an event of the year 14142 shows that in the case of Prata his memory was going back thirty-two years. This fact alone discredits his statements sufficiently. But what was the source of his idea ?
It is clear from the passage quoted that he had personal relations with Prata, which resulted in a bitter sense of having been cheated. We can infer almost with certainty what had happened. Adam tells us that Prata had made him "notary." It cannot be doubted that he means "papal notary/'3 and that the appointment was either not confirmed or was later canceled. Now Prata was the famous turncoat of the age, and when he went over to Clement VII in 1386 Adam would certainly have lost his office.4 But between 1378 and 1380 Prata was the chief rounder-up of the Urbanist forces, traveling from country to country;5 and if anyone was likely to hear of the Clementist "illusion" of the spring of 1380 he was the man. Thus it might easily have reached Adam at the time of their personal association.6
I But in any case the unsupported assertion of a thoroughly unre- 'i liable witness,7 made confessedly from memory thirty-two years after the event, is scarcely convincing evidence of the activity of Charles VI as a suitor for Anne. The case, then, reduces to the desper- ate hope of some of the Clementists in the spring of 1380. Further,
matrimonii expedite, ad sui recessit dampnacionem; credens tamen, licet in vanum, facta sua hujusmodi per papam ratiflcari. Post cujus recessum, dicta domina Anna, per domimim regem magno precio redempta, quia a rege Francie in uxorem affectata, in Angliam et Anglie reginam transmittitur coronanda" (Chronicon Adae de Usk, 1S77-1421 [ed. Maunde Thompson, 1904], pp. 2 f.).
1 Chronicon Adae de Usk, 1877-1481 (ed Maunde Thompson, 1904), p. 8.
2 Ibid., p. 4.
» Cf. Du Cange, s.v. Notarii Apostolici.
* Prata may have been playing a double game for some time. Urban suspected him in 1385 (cf. Valois, op. cit., II, 118, n. 2).
5 He was in England in 1380 (cf. Rymer, Foedera, VII, 256).
• Sir Edward Maunde Thompson suggests (op. cit., p. 140, n. 1) that Adam's "scoop" may have grown out of the Froissart rumor that the French king meant to kidnap Anne; but in that case why should it have remained a "scoop" ?
f Note the continual corrections in the footnotes to Maunde Thompson's translation, pp. 137 flf.
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 15
it appears that, as Hofler1 suggests, not even they took the plan very seriously. The truth was that as neither pope would agree to a Church council2 the marriage of Anne with the Dauphin of France was not a practicable way of ending the schism.
As the Richard-Anne theory, then, neither fits nor explains The Parlement of Foules, and as the evidence submitted in support of the identification of Frederick of Meissen and Charles VI of France as the second and third suitors does not show that either of these princes could have been regarded as Richard's rivals when he was courting Anne,3 I conclude that if we are to have a historical expla- nation of the poem, we must look elsewhere for it.
MARRIAGE PLANS FOR PHILIPPA OF LANCASTER
Such a situation suggests itself in 1381 in the three possibilities of marriage associated with the name of Philippa of Lancaster, eldest daughter of John of Gaunt. They involved: (1) her first cousin, King Richard; (2) her second cousin, William of Hainaut (or Bavaria) ; (3) John of Blois, one of the rival claimants to the duchy of Brittany.
KING RICHARD
1. For the existence of the first plan a single passage in Froissart is sole authority:
At that time there were great councils in England of the King's uncles, the prelates, and the barons of the land for marrying the young king Richard, and the English would have liked to see him married in
1 Anna von Luxemburg (Denkschr. der Kais. Acad. der Wisaensch. Phil.-Hist. Classe 1871), XX. 131. .
2 Valois, op. cit., I, 318 f.
3 An argument of which I have made no use is that of the order of precedence of the suitors. It should be summed up if only because so much is made of the subject in the poem itself.
Nature says that the "tercel egle" who is above the other birds "in degree" shall choose his mate first, and after him the other birds "by order" (11. 379 fl.). Later, it is made clear again that the first eagle is highest in rank (1. 552), and the second "of lower kinde" (1. 450). Although nothing is said about the rank of the third eagle, it is impos- sible for me to agree with Professor Emerson that this omission is intentional ambiguity because of the anomalous position of Charles VI. As the birds are to speak in the order of their rank, the third must be of "lower kinde" than the second. However much Charles's title was challenged by the English, they could not have denied that by the medieval theory of precedence, he was on three counts at least entitled to speak before Frederick: he was the head of the House of Valois, he was a reigning king, and he was older than the heir of Meissen. However much Richard hated his "adversary," he could not have been pleased by a subversion of court etiquette which placed his second cousin after a younger prince of lower rank.
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16 EDITH RICKERT
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Hainaut for love of Good Queen Philippa, their lady, who had been to them so kind, so generous, and so honorable, and who had been born in Hainaut; but Duke Albert at that time had no daughter old enough to be married. The Duke of Lancaster would have been glad to see the King his cousin take the daughter that he had by Madame Blanche of Lancaster, his first wife; but the country would by no means consent to it for two reasons: one was that the lady was his cousin german and therefore too nearly related to him, and the other that it was desired that the King should marry over seas in order to have more alliances. So was put forward the sister of the young king Charles [Wenzel] of Bohemia and Germany, daughter of the late emperor of Rome. Of this opinion were all the councils of England. So was commissioned to go into Germany and to treat for this marriage a very brave knight of the King, who had been his tutor, and who had been very intimate with the Prince of Wales, his father. This knight was called Sir Simon Burley, a wise man and experienced in treaty-making. Sir Simon was granted every- thing that was necessary for his mission, money, and other things; so he left England and arrived at Calais, thence came to Gravelines and to Bruges, and from Bruges to Ghent, and from Ghent to Brussels; and there he found Duke Wenceslas of Brabant, and Duke Albert, the Count of Blois, the Count of Saint-Pol, Sir Robert de Namur, Sir William de Namur, and a great host of knights of Hainaut and of Brabant; for there was going on a great fete of jousting and pleasure; and for this had all these lords assembled. The Duke and Duchess of Brabant in honor of the King of England received the knight very cordially, and when they knew the reason why he was going into Germany, they were very glad and said that this was a thing well undertaken between the King of England and their niece. They delivered to Sir Simon Burley at his departure special letters addressed to the iCing of Germany, declaring that they had great liking for this match. So the knight left Brussels, and took the Louvain road on his way to Cologne.1
i " En celle saison eut grans consaulx en Engletierre des oncles don roy, des prelas et des barons dou pals pour le jone roy Richart d'Engletierre maryer, et euissent volen- tiers li Engles veu que il se fuist marygs en Haynau pour 1'amour de la bonne royne Phelippe leur dame, qui leur fu si bonne, si large et si honnerable, qui avoit est6 de Haynnau; mais li dus Aubiers en che tamps n'avoit nullo fllle en point pour marier. Li dus de Lancastre euist volentiers veu que li rois ses cousins euist pris an fills que il eut de madame Blance de Lancastre, sa premiere femme; mais li pats ne le voloit mies con- sentir pour deus raisons: li une estoit que la dame estoit sa cousine giermainne, che par quoy estoit trap grant proxsmete, et li autre que on voloit que li rois se mariast oultre le mer pour avoir plus de aliances. Si fu mist avant la soer dou jone roy Charle [Wenzel] de Boesme et d'Allemaigne, fille a I'empereur de Romme qui avoit est6. A tel avis se tinrent tout li consaulx d'Engletierre. Si en fu cargies pour aller en Alemaigne et pour tretier che mariage uns moult vaillans chevaliers dou roy, qui avoit estfi ses maistres et fu toudis moult prochains dou prince de Galles son pSre. Si estoit nomm6s li chevaliers messires Simons Burlg, sage homme et grant tretieur durement. Si fu a messire Simon ordonne tout che que a li appartenoit, tant de mises comme de autres coses; si se parti d'Engleterre et arriva a Calais, et de la vint-il a Gravelines et a Bruges, et de Bruges a Gand, et de Gand a Brouselles, et la trouva le duck Wencelin de Braibant et le duck Aubiert, le conte de Blois, le conte de Saint-Pol, messire Robert de Namur, messire
16
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 17
In regard to this passage it must be granted that Froissart could have obtained his information at first hand from either the Duke of Brabant1 or Burley. It is patent that Froissart wrote immediately after the event described. He knows all about the route taken to Brussels and the fete there, but he leaves the envoys on the road to Cologne without a hint as to what was the result of their mission.2
The content of the first part of the paragraph is credible and to some extent supported: that the English were devoted to Queen Philippa and would have liked a Hainaut match for her sake; that Albert of Bavaria had at this time no marriageable daughter; that the English people were anxious for "aliances" abroad;3 and that if the proposal was made the objection of consanguinity would certainly have been raised.4
Froissart, presumably voicing Burley, does not say that a definite plan for the marriage of the royal cousins was ever proposed in Parliament and rejected; he merely expresses a general attitude on the part of Lancaster and two clearly stated objections on the part of the "country" — how made clear we are not told.
This ambition is in entire accord with all that we know of Lancaster. It was an almost inevitable middle step between his early attempts to divert the succession to his own line5 and his efforts in
Guillaume de Namur et grant fuisson de chevaliers de Haynnau et de Braibant; car 1& avoit une grosse feste de joustes et de behourt: pour ce y estoient tout cil signeur asamble. Li dus de Braibant et la dugoise rechurent, pour 1'onneur dou roy d'Engletierre, le cheva- lier moult liement, et quant il sceurent la cause pour quoi il aloit en Allemaigne, sy en furent tout resjoi et dissent que ce estoit une cose bien prise dou roy d'Engletierre et de leur niSce. Si cargi&rent S, messire Simon Burl6 a son dSpartement lettres especiaulx adrechans au roy d'Allemaigne, en remonstrant que il avoient grant affection en ce mariage. Si se party de Brouselles li chevaliers, et prist le chemin de Louvain pour aler & Coulongne" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 212 f. Italics mine).
1 See p. 11 above.
2 Froissart does not name the other envoys; but Burley was the leader of the embassy, and the one in whom for personal reasons, the chronicler was interested.
» Witness the earlier marriage negotiations for Richard: with Visconti and twice with his "adversary," the King of France.
4 As happened in 1394, when Gloucester wished Richard to marry his daughter (Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, XV, 155).
* For an extreme statement, see Chronicon Angliae 1328-88 (Rolls ed.), pp. 92 f. Cf. also Ramsay, The Genesis of Lancaster (1913), II, 55; Longmans, The Life and Times of Edward III (1869), II, 255 f.; Trevelyan, England in the Age of Wycliffe (1900), p. 28; but cf. Armitage-Smith, John of Gaunt (1904), p. 130.
17
• •
18 EDITH RICKEKT
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; old age to assure the succession to his son.1 By marrying Philippa to Richard he would gain for himself much more control over the king and the succession for his line.
On these grounds it is practically certain that he desired the match, highly probable that he worked for it, and equally probable that the "country" — the middle and lower classes, who hated and feared him as the leader of the feudal nobility2 — would have had none of the plan. But knowing how often royal marriage negoti- ations fell through, notably in the case of Richard, he might well have entertained some hope of the alliance until the King was actually married to another.3 And unless he had this ambition, why had he allowed his eldest daughter to reach the mature age of twenty-one unmarried ?
WILLIAM OF HAINAUT
2. In connection with the account of the marriage of William of Hainaut with Marie of Burgundy in the spring of 1385, Froissart relates an embassy from Lancaster to William's father, Duke Albert, as follows (italics mine) :
The master of the wool staple of all England spoke first, showing his credentials and uttering many compliments from the Duke of Lancaster to his cousin Albert, and then speaking of many matters with which they had been commissioned. Among other things he asked Duke Albert, as I was informed at the time, whether it was his intent to persevere in this marriage with the children4 of the Duke of Burgundy. At this word Duke
1 Hardyng declares that Lancaster had a chronicle forged to prove that Edmund Crouchback, ancestor of his wife (Blanche), was the elder son of King Henry III and King Edward I, the younger. This would give his son a claim to the throne through the mother.
Hardyng says further that he had often heard the Earl of Northumberland declare he had heard Lancaster ask in Parliament to be made Richard's heir, "consyderynge howe the kynge was like to have no issue of his bodie" (Archaeologia, XX, n. 186).
Another chronicler (writing before 1471) reports that in 1390-91 Lancaster tried to get Parliament to declare his son heir to the throne (An English Chronicle of the Reigns of Richard I, Henry IV, Henry V, and Henry VI [Camden Society, 1856], p. 7).
2 This is thoroughly established. The feeling was voiced in Piers Plowman, "Belling the Cat." For its further bearing on the interpretation of The Parlement of Foules, see p. 28 below.
* It is a curious coincidence that the very first business proposed in Parliament after the King's wedding was Lancaster's demand for money to go to Portugal (Rolls of ParL, III, 113 f.). The league with Portugal had been concluded at the very time when Richard's marriage became a certainty; and immediately afterward Lancaster turned his ambitions to Spain again. As soon as he could get money and men, he went to the Peninsula and straightway married one daughter to the king of Portugal, the other to the king of Castile.
* It was a double match: William's sister was married at the same time to the heir of Burgundy.
18
A NEW INTERPKETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES
19
Albert changed color a little and said: "Yes, sir. By my faith! Why do you ask?" "My lord," said he, "I speak of it because my lord, the Duke of Lancaster, has aliyays hoped until now that Mademoiselle Philippa, his daughter, would have my lord, your son." Then Duke Albert said: "Friend, tell my cousin that when he has married or will marry his children, I will not meddle with the matter. Nor has he any business to interfere about my children — as to when I shall marry them, nor where, nor how, nor to whom. " This was the reply which the English had at that time from Duke Albert. This master of the wool staple and his companions took leave of the Duke after dinner, and went to Valenciennes to spend the night, and in the morning they returned to Ghent. Of them I shall say no more; I believe that they returned to England.1
Here again Froissart seems to be on firm ground. The marriage of William to Marie of Burgundy had been engineered by the Duchess of Brabant, the widow of Froissart 's friend and patron.2 The elabo- ration of detail, with conversations and explanations, shows that the account came either from the Duchess herself or from someone intimate with her, an eyewitness of the dinner scene, who noticed the Duke's change of color.3
In this account there are two significant points: (1) even with his change of color, which may have been due to either anger or embar- rassment, Albert does not deny the compact; (2) the English speaker uses the word always. Whether this is to be taken literally as meaning "from birth," or refers to 1372, when Lancaster asked an
1 "Li maistres de 1'estaple des lainnes de toute Engleti&re parla premiers, quant il ot monstr6 ses lettres de crSance, et recommanda moult grandement le due de Lan- castre et son cousin le due Aubert, et puis parla de pluiseurs coses dont il estoient cargiet. Entre les autres coses il demanda au due Aubert, sicom je fuy adont infourmgs, se ce estoit se entente de perseverer en che mariage as enffans le due de Bourgongne. De ceste parolle li dus Aubers mua un petit couleur et dist: 'Oil, sire. Par ma foy! pour- quoi le demanded- vous ?' 'Monsigneur,' dist-il, ' j 'en parolle pour ce que monsigneur le due de Lancastre d tousjours espSre jusques & chi que mademoiselle Phelippe sa fille aroit Guillaume monsigneur vostre fil.' Lors dist li dus Aubers: 'Compains, dites a mon cousin que quant il a mariet ou mariera ses enflans, que point je ne m'en ensonnieray. Ossi ne s'a-il que faire d'ensonnyer de mes enffans, ne quant je les voel marier, ne ou, ne comment, ne a qui.' Che fu la response que li Engles orent adont dou due Aubert. Chil maistre de Testable et si compaignon prisent congiet au due apriSs disner, et s'en vinrent jesir a Valenchiennes, et a 1'endemain il s'en retournerent a Gand. De eux je ne say plus avant, je croy bien que il retournerent en Engletiere" (ed. Kervyn de Letten- hove, X, 313 f.).
2 She twice mentions Lancaster's hope (op. cit., X, 307 flf.). She assures Albert, "je say de verite."
* Froissart himself was not present. He is careful to say "sicom je fuy adont in- form6s," and "je croy bien que il retournerent en EngletiSre"; but his very care to distinguish between fact and conjecture strengthens belief in the narrative.
19
20 EDITH RICKERT
i
aid "pour nostre fille marier,"1 it is not important to determine. The point is that in 1385 he claimed, uncontradicted by Albert, that he had "always" hoped to marry his daughter to William. In that case he entertained this hope in 1381, but undoubtedly with the mental reservation that it would be forgotten if a better match offered.2
JOHN OF BLOIS
3. The story of John of Blois, Froissart tells three times, in each account stressing different details. It is worth while to place them parallel :
ABC
It is true that at this
time these two lords,
John and Guy of Brit- And John of Brittany So was the said John
tany, who were chil- of Brittany
dren of Saint Charles
of Blois, and who were
prisoners in England
and shut up in a castle
in the keeping of Sir
John
d'Aubrecicourt, were was brought into the brought into the pres-
sent for and summoned presence of the King ence of the King and
fair and courteously and his uncles and the lords
by the council of the council, King of England, and
1 John of Gaunt' s Register (Camden Society), I, No. 245 (April 22). Mr. Armitage- Smith (op. dt., p. 214) thinks that this plea may have been merely an excuse to raise money ; but it should be noted that Lancaster did not scruple to raise money simply "in relief of his great necessities." This suggests a real basis for the other excuse. The arrangement may have dated back to 1367, when Albert was in England (William being two years old and Philippa seven).
William like Anne had had previous engagements. In fact he (more probably than his brother Albert) was engaged to Anne herself from 1371 to 1373 (Pelzel, Lebensgesch. des rdm. u. b8hm. Kais. Wenceslaus [1788], p. 110). Prom 1374 to 1377 he was con- tracted to the French princess Marie (Devillers, Cartul. des Comtes de Hain. [1881], II, 218 ff.). But in the making and breaking of these royal marriages many diplomatic threads were intertwined, which were acknowledged and disregarded according to the policy of the moment. For instance, Richard himself seems to have negotiated for the princess Marie while she was contracted to William. In any case, if Lancaster had had an early understanding with Albert, even if only informal (cf. Froissart, "a tout le mains on ly avoit fait et donng si entendre" [op. dt., X, 312]), he could have forgotten it and neglected Albert's efforts to marry his son while his own schemes were looking in other directions, and remembered it when it suited his purpose to do so.
2 The author of an anonymous French chronicle (MS 11139) says that William loved the daughter of the Duke of Lancaster, but that the Duchess of Brabant prevented the marriage (Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, X, 553 f.); but I am not basing any argument upon this because from this statement I cannot tell whether or not the Chronicle is derived from Froissart. The word "loved," indeed, suggests further information.
20
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 21
A
it was said to them that if they would take as fief the duchy of Brittany from the King of England, and would recognize him as king in fealty and homage, they would be restored to their heritage,
and John the elder should have in marriage Madame Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of the Duke, whom he had by the duchess Blanche of Lancaster. They answered that they would do nothing of the sort, and that they would remain good Frenchmen if they had to die in prison. Thus the matter rested at that point, and when their firm resolve was known, they were not asked again.1
B
and it was said to him: "John, if you will take as fief the duchy of Brittany and hold it of the King of England, you shall be freed from prison and established in the lordship of Brit- tany,
and you shall be mar- ried well and nobly in this land," as would, have happened, for the \ Duke of Lancaster i wished to give him i his daughter Philippa \ — she who was later \ queen of Portugal. John of Brittany re- plied that he would not make this treaty, or become hostile or op- posed to the Crown of France ; he would gladly marry the daughter of the Duke j of Lancaster, but on { condition that he ' should be freed from England. Then he was sent back to prison.2
C
and it was said to him that he should be made duke of Brittany and that for
him should be recov- ered all his heritage of Brittany,
and he should have to wife Madame Philippa of Lancaster, daughter of the Duke of Lan- , caster, but that he7 should be willing to hold the duchy of Brittany in fealty and homage of the King of England, which thing he would not do. He was well content to take in mar- , riage the lady daughter < of the Duke, but that ^ he should take oath against the Crown of France, that he would never do, even if he should remain in prison as long as he had been there, and as long as he lived they should
1 "Voirs est que en ce tamps chil doy signeur, Jehan et Guy de Bretaigne, qui furent enfant 8, saint Charle de Blois, liquel estoient prisonnier en EngletiSre et enclos en un castiel en la garde de messire Jehan d'Aubrecicourt, furent requis et appel!6 bellement et doucement dou conseil dou roy d'EngletiSre, et leur fu dit que, se il voloient relever la duc6 de Bretaigne dou roy d'Engletiere et recongnoistre en foy et en hommage dou roy, on leur feroit recouvrer leur hiretage, et aroit Jehans li aisnes en mariage madame Phelippe de Lancastre, fllle dou due que il eut de la ducoise Blance de Lancastre. II respondirent que il n'en feroient riens, et que, pour morir en prison, il demoroient bon Francois. Si demora la cose en eel estat, ne depuis, quant on sceut leur ferme entente, il n'en furent point requis" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, IX, 462 f.).
2 "Et fut Jehan de Bretaigne amenS en la presence du roy et de ses oncles et du conseil, et luy fut dit: 'Jehan, se vous vou!6s relever la duchie" de Bretaigne et tenir du roy d'Angleterre, vous seres delivrS hors de prison et remis en la possession et seignourie de Bretaigne, et sere's marie1 bien et haultement en ce pays,' sicomme il eust este\ car le due de Lancastre luy vouloit donner sa fllle Phelippe, celle qui fut puis royne de Portingal. Jehan de Bretaigne respond! que ja ne feroit ce traittiS, ne ne seroit ennemy, ne con- traire §, la couronne de France; il prendroit bien a femme la fllle au due de Lancastre, mais que il fust deiivre" d'Angleterre. Or fut-il remys en prison" (ibid., XII, 62 f.).
21
22 EDITH RICKERT
ABC
get nothing different from him. When the King and his council saw this, they grew cold in showing him favor, and he was sent away in the keeping of Sir John d ' Aubreci- court, as is told at greater length here be- low.1
Once more Froissart was in a peculiarly favorable position to get facts at first hand. After the death of the Duke of Brabant in 1383, he entered the service of Guy of Blois, cousin and nearest kinsman of the very John of Blois in question.
The three versions of the offer in Froissart entirely agree in essentials, but each has a different emphasis.
A gives a brief summary of the situation of John and Guy in explaining how John de Montfort's wife (Richard's half-sister) happened to be in England in 1382.
B, in explaining how the Constable Clisson had John of Blois freed in 1387 and married him to his daughter, quotes the offer made to him of the hand of Philippa and summarizes his reply.
C, in explaining the quarrel between Clisson and Montfort, summarizes the offer, but gives in indirect quotation apparently the very words of John's reply. It alone gives the significant detail that afterward "they grew cold in showing favor to him," which implies that for a time, however short, he was remanded from prison.
A careful comparison of these three versions suggests strongly that Froissart had a first-hand report of the scene at the council;
i "Si fut le dit Jehan de Bretaigne amene en la presence du roy et des seigneurs, et luy fut dit que Ton le feroit due de Bretaigne, et luy seroit tout recouvre 1'eritaige de Bretaigne, et aroit a f emme madame Phelippe de Lancastre, fille au due de Lancastre, mais que la duche" de Bretaigne voulsist tenir en foy et hommaige et tout relever du roy d'Angleterre, laquelle chose il ne voult faire. II estoit ass6s content de prendre par mariage la dame fllle du due, mais que il eust jur6 centre la couronne de France, il ne 1'eust jamais fait pour demourer en prison autant comme il i avoit este, et au fort toute sa vie n'en sceut-1'en avoir autre chose. Quant le roy et son conseil veyt ce, Ton se reflroida de luy faire grace, et fut renvoi6 en la garde de messire Jehan d'Aubrecicourt, ainsi que cy-dessus est plus au loing contenu" (ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, XII, 157).
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 23
and it is difficult to see how this could have reached him except through either Guy or John of Blois, or some one in their confidence.
It is noteworthy that in this very connection he states emphati- cally that he is telling the exact truth, as his patron was anxious that his history should not be colored by the hostility between the houses of Blois and Montfort.1
The idea of marrying Philippa to John of Blois could scarcely have arisen before January 15, 1381. At that date Montfort, although he was married to Richard's half-sister, forsook the English and returned to his allegiance to the French king. Lancaster as generalissimo of the English army must have been immediately informed of the defection of Montfort, but although the latter signed a treaty with Charles VI on January 15, this was not ratified by the Breton estates until April 10; whereupon the English army sailed home.2 Only during the winter of 1381 could this plan have been talked about, as it must have terminated abruptly with the declaration of John that he would be asses content to marry Philippa but that he would never renounce his allegiance to France.3
By St. Valentine's Day, 1381, it is altogether probable that all three possibilities were in the mind of Lancaster. True, the ambas- sadors of Wenzel were on their way, but no one knew with what terms and conditions; there was still a chance that the negotiations might come to nothing, as had happened in earlier attempts to marry Richard to a foreign princess. If the Bohemian marriage should be determined upon, there was still the old contract with William of Hainaut; and there was the new project of making John of Blois his son-in-law and of establishing him as duke of Brittany, in order to hold that country in allegiance to England, and especially to himself.4
i Ibid., XII, 154.
«76id., IX, 332 ff.; also Dom Morice, Hist, de Bretagne (1835), V, 297 ff.
8 Although we do not know the exact date of the council meeting, it would naturally have taken place soon after the defection of Brittany was certain, that is, after April 10, 1381.
« There is a possible objection to St. Valentine's Day. If as De la Borderie says (Hist, de Bretagne [1906], IV, 66) the English did not suspect Montfort's defection until April 10, the marriage plan must have come after that date. But Montfort had been vacillating in his allegiance to England ever since the death of Charles V (September, 1380). It is difficult to believe that his attitude was a secret to the initiated.
24 EDITH RICKERT
•
PHILIPPA AND THE FORMEL
How far does this historical situation fit and explain the poem ? The suitability of Philippa of Lancaster to the part of the formel needs no elaborate argument. About this time or very little later she was mentioned by name in a poem by Deschamps1 as patroness of the Order of the Flower. The compliments suggest a very at- tractive woman :
Et qui vouldra avoir la congnoissance
Du tresdoulx nom que par oir congnoy
Et du pais ou est sa demourance
Voist en Tille d'Albyon en recoy,
En Lancastre le trouvera, ce croy.
P.H. et E.L.I.P.P.E. trace,
Assemble tout; ces. VIII. lettres compasse,
S'aras le nom de la fleur de valour,
Qui a gent corps, beaux yeux et douce face.
Au droit jugier je me tien a la flour.
L'ENVOY
Royne d'amours, de douce contenance, Qui tout passez en senz et en honnour, Plus qu'a fueille vous faiz obeissance: A droit jugier je me tien a la flour.2
The identification of the first suitor as Richard remains, and the complimentary nature of the description has been sufficiently pointed out.3
The second suitor, if identified as William of Hainaut, was certainly "of lower kinde" and had "served" Philippa longer — "always," according to John of Gaunt's statement (see p. 19 above).4
But the most interesting point of agreement between the poem and historic fact is in the case of the third suitor. Professor Emer- son's efforts to establish half a year of courtship for Charles VI5
» Professor Kittredge says that the poem was written before, perhaps several years before, 1386 (Mod. Phil., I, 4 f.).
2 (Euvres (SociSte des Anciens Textes Francais), IV, 260 f.
3 It is of course not impossible that the ardent, impulsive boy of fourteen may have had a romantic affection for his cousin of twenty-one; but it is not necessary to suppose so. A court poet of Chaucer's intelligence, would have had the tact to assume this state of mind if he was complimenting the Princess.
4 He begins to say that he loves her better than the first suitor; then changes to "Or atte leste I love hir as wel as ye" (11. 451-52). This is interesting in view of the state- ment of the anonymous chronicler (see p. 20, n. 2, above) that William was in love with Philippa.
» Mod. Phil., VIII, 58; and cf. Manly, loc. cit., p. 281, n. 1.
24
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 25
are rendered needless by the fact that the text does not say that he had courted the formel half a year. It reads:
Of long servyse avaunte I me no-thing But as possible is me to dye to-day For wo, as he that hath ben languisshyng Thise twenty winter, and wel happen may A man may serven bet and more to pay In half a yere, al-though hit were no more Than som man doth that hath served ful yore.
/ ne say not this by me,1 for I ne can
Do no servyse that may my lady plese;
But I dar seyn I am hir trewest man,
As to my dome, and feynest wolde hir ese;
At shorte wordes, til that deth me sese,
I wol ben hires, whether I wake or winke,
And trewe in al that herte may bethinke [11. 470-83].
The third suitor jeers at the idea of length of service as showing devotion — hah0 a year will do as well as twenty. His figures are merely for illustration. But, he continues, the argument does not apply to himself, for he cannot do any service at all to please his lady; for all that, he is her most loyal lover, and will remain faithful until death. But why could he not serve her ? If he represents ,/' John of Blois, obviously because he was in prison.2
If the known facts about the marriages discussed for Philippa in 1381 are in harmony with the descriptions in The Parlement of Foules* the next question to be considered is, How does the /\jl
1 Italics mine.
2 As he and his brother were hostages, they were of course treated like gentlemen. John may have seen and had some acquaintance with Philippa — may even have been attracted to her and still unwilling to relinquish his allegiance to the King of France for her sake.
The match was not unsuitable for Philippa. The rival claimant to Brittany was married to King Richard's half-sister. Another half-sister, Joan Courtney, married at Easter, 1380, the Count of St. Pol, who had been captured in 1374 and had since that time been a prisoner in England. And this was a love match based upon acquaintance.
» Two lines may need explanation: The tercelet of the falcon (11. 547 fif.) speaks of the first suitor as "worthieste of knighthode, and longest hath used hit."
Richard was knighted in 1377. William of Hainaut was not knighted until he was twenty (at the siege of Dam, 1385). John of Blois was much older. His parents were married in 1337, and he was born between 1338 and 1345. He was at least forty years old in 1381. But he had been in prison since 1356; there is no evidence that he had been knighted then.
In the literal sense of the words, then, the lines fit; but I am inclined to think that they are a mere complimentary generalization.
In reply to Professor Manly's objection that it is absurd to apply such description to mere children, I should say that in Chaucer's tune these boys in their teens were
25
I
26 EDITH RICKERT
i
historical situation of Philippa and her father explain the inconclusive ending of the poem? Politically speaking, Philippa was in danger of being jilted for a foreign princess. Yet Richard was so much the best match that she could not save her pride by immediately choosing one of the other suitors. In such a complicated and irritating position, the most delicate flattery would be the suggestion that, with due appreciation of the merits of the royal suitor, the princess was not yet ready to make up her mind. He might be pointed out by Nature and Reason; his claim might be strongly urged by the nobility; she could only ask for "respit"1 and — in view of the extreme uncertainty of the outcome of Lancaster's schemes for his daughter2 — her "choys al free."
In this interpretation the personal relationship of the royal cousins, Richard and Philippa, plays no part.3 The poem is regarded merely as a court poet's balm for the hurt pride of the prince for whom on a more tragic occasion he wrote the Book of the Duchess.4
THE SATIRE
But what of the satire? One-seventh of the poem describes a mock parliament in which the common birds discuss, not love in general, not the formel's decision, but whether or not the first eagle shall marry another if the formel will not have him. And in this discussion every remark by one of these birds, with the striking exception of the turtle-dove, is unmercifully ridiculed5 by the noble
regarded as men and played the parts of men. Henry IV had a son before he was sixteen, Edward III before he was seventeen. The Black Prince was sixteen at CrScy; John of Gaunt went to war at the age of ten. In Ipswich at this time boys were made citizens at the age of twelve (Mrs. Green, Town Life in the Fifteenth Century, I, 184). The very Richard to whom Professor Manly thinks this description unsuited only three months later seems to have behaved like a man, in dealing with Wat Tyler's rebellion; but cf. Dr. Kriehn's "Studies in the Sources of the Social Revolt in 1381," in the American Historical Review, VII, 254 fl., 458 ff.
1 The year is a part of the bird convention; it means until the next mating season.
* They all fell through, and she married the King of Portugal in 1387.
» In 11. 433 ff . of the poem the formel seems to express personal preference, or at least to be especially moved by the plea of the first eagle; but we know nothing of Philippa' s attitude toward Richard. The formel's blush may be mere tribute to his charm.
4 Why was Lancaster's younger brother, the Earl of Cambridge, asked to put through the negotiations for Richard's marriage with Anne when the senior uncle would naturally have been expected to look after his nephew's affairs? Was Lancaster's objection to the marriage so voiced that it was impossible or impolitic to ask him to undertake this duty, or did he refuse it ?
5 As every reader will prefer to see these speeches in their context, no detailed analysis of them is given here.
26
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 27
birds. What has this situation to do with the conventional demande d 'amours, or with the analysis of lawful and lawless love ?
The two questions to be answered are: Do the birds represent men ? and, For whom was such a satire intended ?
That the birds represent classes of men is made practically certain by the continual use of bird and beast allegory in all forms of medieval thinking. In England as early as 1330 the preacher Robert Holkot had allegorized as birds different classes of men.1 There is frequent reference to allegorical political satire in the chronicles and elsewhere.2 Langland used it; Gower used it in his Tripartite Chronicle; it appears in Richard the Redeless; Deschamps is full of it, and his Fiction de I'aigle (cf. p. 4 above), which cannot be much later than The Parlement of Foules, and for all we know may be a little earlier, uses birds to satirize classes as well as to represent individuals. In similar mood to Chaucer, if not imitative of the allegory of the Parlement, is the later political satire: The gees han mad a parlement, Toward the eron [Henry IV] are they went.3
On this basis, then, the "foules of ravyne" are the nobility (as in Holkot and commonly elsewhere), but identification of the classes of men ridiculed as the goose, duck, and cuckoo is less certain. A few points of characterization are, however, clearly pointed out. They are divided into three classes : Water fowl, seed fowl, and worm fowl, of which only the water fowl and worm fowl are ridiculed. The turtle who is "vantparlour" for the seed fowl is a modest bird whose views on love are treated with respect by the noble birds; but the water birds are fools to be laughed at, and the cuckoo is a plain villain, who is not laughed at but is reprimanded with bitter contempt. The views of the water birds are mere practical common sense, which is quite foreign, of course, to the ideas of courtly love; and the views of the worm fowl are that as long as they have what they want they do not care what the royal birds do. It is difficult to resist the suggestion that the water fowl represent the great merchants, whose fortunes were founded on the import and export
i Super Libroa Sapientie (Reutlingen-Colmar, 1489), Lectio Ixv &. » See Taylor, op. cit.
'Wright, Political Poems and Songs (Rolls, Series), I, 365.
27
I
28 EDITH RJCKERT
trade; the seed fowl, the simple country gentry, whose views naturally echo those of the lords with whom they are associated in the holding of land, and whose livelihood depends directly upon the earth; and the worm fowl, the citizenry, the working classes whose chief interest in life is so bitterly summed up by the merlin (11. 610- 16) and whose food consists of the casual and disgusting worm — whatever they can pick up.
Without pressing this point, however, we may proceed to the observation that if the poem is satirizing the great bourgeoisie and the " ribald" citizenry, it is satirizing the two classes of men whom John of Gaunt, more than any other great lord in England, had particular reason to hate.1
CONCLUSION
1. It is clear that the political allegory heretofore adduced to motivate the existence of the poem and to explain its meaning is not only historically unsubstantiated but if it were substantiated explains neither the girl's failure to choose among the suitors nor the extensive satire on the common birds.
2. The plans of John of Gaunt for the marriage of his daughter Philippa seem from the evidence to have taken such shape in the late winter of 1381 as to make the production of such a poem as The Parlement of Foules a compliment which would have been particularly grateful to him, and the special development of the situation in the poem offered a plausible interpretation of the collapse of the most desirable plan, which the proud Duke could hardly have failed to appreciate.2
This study was suggested to me many years ago by Professor Manly, who in expressing his disbelief in the Richard-Anne theory, observed that if a historical interpretation was needed it should
1 See p. 17, n. 5, above. For vivid expression of the mob's hatred of him shown at the burning of the Savoy in 1381, cf. Hist. Vit. Ji Regni Ric. II (ed. Hearne, 1729), pp. 25 f .
2 Without resting any part of the argument upon Chaucer's relation in general to John of Gaunt, I may point out here that through the position of his wife as lady-in-waiting to Constance of Castile, he had the best opportunity of knowing not merely court gos- sip but much of the attitude of the principals whom it concerned. Thus he was in a position peculiarly favorable for writing a complimentary poem. Furthermore, in May, 1381, John of Gaunt paid £51 8s. 2d. for the establishment of Elizabeth Chaucy in Barking Abbey. The hypothesis that she was Chaucer's daughter or sister suggests a particular motive for an occasional poem which thus found its reward soon after; but this of course cannot be proved.
A NEW INTERPRETATION OF "PARLEMENT OF FOULES" 29
be possible to find a situation that would fit better; for instance, a courtship of one of John of Gaunt's daughters. Without commit- ting myself beyond the possibility of " Retracciouns " to belief in the necessity of any historical interpretation, I feel at present that the peculiar features of the poem are not self-explanatory as be- longing to either a triple demande d' 'amours or a mere exposition of natural as opposed to illicit love. I am confident, moreover, that I have outlined a situation which, as far as the evidence goes, not only fits the poem but supplies an occasion which serves to interpret its unique structure and a patron from whom Chaucer, both logically and psychologically, might at that time have expected a reward for such a poetical compliment. In accordance with the principles of historical investigation, this hypothesis should be accepted until one that fits and interprets still better is produced.1
EDITH RICKERT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
i In another paper I hope to show that the structure and style of the poem, as well as the condition of the MSS, warrant the further hypothesis that the poem was begun in 1374 — on the basis of astronomical interpretation of 1. 117, May 12, 1374 — and finished with an entirely changed conception adapted to the particular situation which arose in the winter of 1381.
29
THE PROBLEMS OF AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF WYNNERE AND WASTOURE
I. AUTHOKSHIP
When in 1897 Professor Gollancz first edited The Parlement of the Thre Ages and Wynnere and Wastoure, for the Roxburghe Club, he suggested that the two were the work of one author. For this conclusion he gave seven reasons: (1) The poems have lines in common, and (2) passages in one are strongly reminiscent of passages in the other. (3) The general framework is the same. (4) Both use verbal forms in -ande as nouns. (5) Both show careless confu- sion in details. (6) "Tests of language and meter do not tell against the identity of authorship." (7) The general impression conveyed by the two pieces tells strongly in favor of the view. Kolbing in his review of Gollancz' edition accepted this conclusion, saying that the use of alliteration was practically the same in both poems.1 In his second edition of the Parlement,2 Professor Gollancz said: " No criteria gainsay the theory that would assign it [the Parlement] to the author of Wynnere and Wastoure."
If we look at the evidence for this opinion, however, we find it not strong. The similarities in phrasing and idea are not more remarkable than those which connect these poems with Piers the Plowman and Sir Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit. As a test of author- ship such similarities are valueless, as Mr. George Neilson's reductio ad absurdum has demonstrated. As to the third point, the frame- work is the vision as found in Piers the Plowman and many other Middle English poems. In regard to the fourth point, the use of forms in -ande as nouns is extraordinary, but only one instance is found in each poem, and in one of these the B-Manuscript of Parle- ment reads make instead of makande. The use is also found sporadi- cally elsewhere, for example, in the reports of the Guilds, to ye
1 Englische Studien, XXV, 273. He did note one difference between the two: Parlement has forty-eight lines using vowel alliteration, nine of which rhyme on the same vowel. In Wynnere only eight cases of vowel alliteration occur, of which one uses the same vowel.
2 Oxford, 1915, p. 2 of Preface.
31] 31 [MODBBN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920
32 J. R. HULBERT
offrende;1 in the York Plays, to make oure offerand,2 By-cause of wakand you unwarly* Sende yhou som seand of pis* in The Seven Sages, ofrand,* in Piers the Plowman, and is trusti of his tailendef and in Sir Perceval, travellande7 (established by rhyme). In our case, the peculiarity is probably scribal because in the Parlement it is found only in Thornton's copy. The fifth point — careless confusion in details — would apply to many medieval poems, and the seventh — in regard to general impression — means nothing. Wynnere is so much more interesting than Parlement that "general impression" might be said to argue against identity of authorship. The similarity in the use of alliteration is only negative evidence ; plenty of allitera- tive poems show the same uses.8
What of the language ? Of course it is impossible to speak with certainty about the dialect of a poem which exists in only one copy because the scribe of that manuscript may have altered the dialectal forms of the original. We know this to have been done in many cases, for example, in certain manuscripts of Piers the Plowman and of Chaucer. Perhaps all that can be determined is whether or not the transmission of two given works is the same. If we find that two poems existing in a certain manuscript have not been copied from the same exemplar, or at some earlier point in the trans- mission have come from different sources, we learn at least that their presence together in the same manuscript has no significance in establishing authorship.9
Now a little study of the two poems shows a marked difference in one of the most noticeable criteria of dialect, verbal inflexion.
1 E.E.T.S., Vol. 40, p. 107.
2 Ed. L. T. Smith, p. 59, 1. 99; p. 60, 1. 138.
a Ibid., p. 281, 1. 270. * Ibid., p. 109, 1. 235. « Ed. Campbell, 1. 2656.
« B-text, VIII, 82. See Skeat's note in the Glossary of the E.E.T.S. edition.
» Camden Society, 1. 1325.
8 See K. Schumacher, Studium fiber den Stabreim in der m.e. Alliterationsdichtung, 1914, Summary, pp. 212-13.
» It seems to me necessary to make these obvious statements because there is still a strong tendency to regard poems which appear in the same manuscript as works of one author. Many examples could be cited, from the old days when all contents of the Exeter Book were thought to have been written by Cynewulf to the present tune when the opinion is generally expressed that the four poems in manuscript Nero A X (Gawayne and the Grene Kny%t, Pearl, etc.) were written by one man. As a matter of fact, their presence in the same manuscript, written by the same hand, ought to make us suspicious of surface similarities.
AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 33
Parlement has a fairly consistent series of forms of the type ordinarily called West Midland; that is, the first person singular present indic- ative ends in -e or - , the second and third singular in -es, -ys, -is, the plural in -en, -yn; the present participle appears only twice, once in -ynge, the other time in -ande.1
Wynnere, on the other hand, shows mixed forms. It has endings like those found in Parlement, but in addition it has another set. The second singular ends in -este, -st five times, in -is, -es, -ys six times. The third singular ends in -eth, ethe, -4th twelve times, in -es, -is, -ys twenty-six times. The plural ends once in -eth, once in -ith, a few times in -es, but mostly in -e or -en. Forms in -th appear also in the imperative (dothe, 1. 220) and in the inflexion of the verb have, where hathe is used as plural and singular; thou haste also appears three times. The forms in -este appear in the preterite of auxiliaries (scholdeste, 1. 258; woldeste, 1. 375; woldest, 1. 442), and of ordinary verbs (madiste, 1. 264; louediste, 1. 304). The present participle appears more often than in Parlement, three times in -ynge, twelve times in -ande.
With regard to the distribution of these forms, it should be noted that the -st, -th endings appear chiefly in the early part of the poem : th appears in 11. 3, 6, 7, 16. The first appearance of the third singu- lar in -es is in 1. 68. Up to 1. 201 there are fifteen forms in -th and seventeen in -es or its variants. Similarly the first three appear- ances of the second singular are in -este (11. 260, 264, 265), and the three -ynge forms appear in the first two hundred lines. One might perhaps infer from these facts that the manuscript before Robert Thornton, or some predecessor in the line of transmission, used the -st, -th, -ynge forms more extensively or even exclusively, and that the copyist at the beginning of his work copied it more literally but as he progressed became less attentive and used his own forms.2
1 MS B shows four instances of the third singular in -ith, and one instance of the form hath apparently used as a plural. What the significance of this slight difference between MSS A and B may be is problematical. B may have been transcribed by a Southern or East Midland man at some time after it was copied from the ancestor of A , or these traces of Southern influence may have been in the ancestor of A. In any case they do not affect the fact that Robert Thornton's copy of the Parlement shows no such forms, whereas his copy of Wynnere has many of them.
2 It is possible that a minute study of the language of the two poems would show other differences. Granting some alteration by scribes, however, one cannot trust greatly the criteria of difference between Northern and East Midland.
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34 J. R. HULBERT
In any case it is certain that Robert Thornton did not add the East Midland or Southern forms. He was a northern man, and his ordinary practice seems to have been to alter the language of his originals in the direction of his own dialect.1 Furthermore, as the author of Wynnere certainly knew London it is not improbable that the -st, -th endings, which are correct London forms, belong to the original draught of the poem.2 Of course such judgments are merely possibilities; but it is to be noted that from different points of view the same conclusion is reached — that the original of Wynnere was more southern than that of Parlement.
II. DATE
In his first edition of Parlement, Professor Gollancz argued that the date of Wynnere was 1347 or early in 1348. In support of this date he used the references to the Order of the Garter, the Black Prince, heraldry, discontent with the Friars, the twenty-fifth year of Edward III, and "Scharshull" — and the failure to mention the Black Death.3 In the second edition of Parlement, Professor Gollancz changed his date to "not much later than 1350, "4 appar- ently because of a controversy with Mr. George Neilson which appeared in The Athenaeum for 1901. As far as I can make out, he chose the first date primarily because of the lack of reference to the Black Death, and the second because of the statement that the King had reigned twenty-five years, which would not be true until 1351. Certainly the last-named fact is sufficient to disqualify Mr. Gollancz' first date: in 1347 Edward III had been on the throne but twenty-one years. Let us look more closely, however, at Mr. Gollancz' evidence. The references to the Garter, the Black Prince, and the heraldic devices of the King give only a date a quo. Discontent with the Friars was voiced throughout the latter half
1 Horstmann, Alt.-engl. Legenden, N.P., 1881, p. 454, speaking of Thornton's Lincoln manuscript, says: "Die urspriinglich in einem anderen Dialect abgefassten Gedichte sind in dem Yorkshire Dialect umschrieben."
2 Probably the same remark applies if the author's reference to the West means some such locality as Staffordshire or Shropshire.
3 1 have not included the (doubtful) references to a famine followed by a great fire and to a drought because Mr. Gollancz finds no nearer dates than 1315-16, 1322, and 1325 for them.
* Parlement, 1915, p. 2.
34
AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 35
of the fourteenth century. The one important piece of evidence is the reference to "Scharshull," which is as follows: Wastoure wishes that
alle schent were those schalkes and Scharshull it wiste
That saide I prikkede with powere his pese to distourbe [11. 317-18].
Gollancz shows that Scharshull was Justice of the King's Bench in 1333, that he was dismissed in 1340 but restored to office in 1342, two years later was made Chief Baron of the Exchequer, and in 1350 was appointed Chief Justice of the King's Bench. He then says: "The reference in 'Wynnere and Wastoure' is evidently to Scharshull as Chief of the Exchequer. Wastoure's disregard of his capital, seeing that the taxes were paid on actual possessions, might well have disturbed the Chancellor of the Exchequer's peace of mind."1 Mr. George Neilson has already answered this strange statement as follows: "A reference to a judge in connection with breach of the peace ('his pese to distourbe') cannot possibly indicate the baron of the Exchequer."2 If that is not convincing, attention may be called to a fact not mentioned by Professor Gollancz: Scharshull was Baron of the Exchequer for only sixteen months, from July, 1344, to November, 1345, when he was removed to the Court of Common Pleas.3 According to Mr. Gollancz' methods this fact would require dating the poem 1345. But that date would not agree with the reference to the twenty-fifth year of Edward Ill's reign (1351) or to the Order of the Garter, which was not in existence in 1345.4 In truth Mr. Gollancz wishes to date the poem earlier than 1350 if possible so as to account for the failure to refer to the Black Death. To account for that, the date really ought to be 1348, for if it is put at 1350 the failure to mention the Black Death is surely much more extraordinary than it would be ten years later. But as the poet would not have referred to the "five and twenty winters" of the King's reign when there were only twenty-one or two, that date is impossible.
The deduction from this discussion is evidently that the argu- mentum ex silentio is a poor thing. It is no more necessary for us to
1 Parlement, Roxburghe Club, p. xiii.
2 Huchown of the Awle Ryale, Glasgow, 1902, p. 95, note. » E. Foss, Biographia juridica, 1870, p. 610.
« See article by Sir Harris Nicolas in Archaeologia, XXXI, 104 flf.
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36 J. R. HULBERT
explain the poet's failure to refer to the Black Death than to account for his failure to describe Wastoure's army in detail. Furthermore, the poem is incomplete; it may have mentioned the pestilence in the part now lost. The point from which to start then is the refer- ence to the twenty-five years of the King's reign. This is a " round number," of course, and would be appropriate at any time after 1351. The next thing to consider is the reference to "Scharshull." As Professor Gollancz says, the exact meaning of the reference is not clear.1 At any rate, Wastoure states that Scharshull "saide I prikkede with powere his pese to distourbe." Mr. Neilson's effort to connect the reference with a particular incident of the year 1358 is a failure.2 Mr. Neilson shows that Scharshull was suspended from his office in 1357, but remarks a propos of the fact that a chronicler at his death in 1368 referred to him as capitalis justitiarius, "it can hardly be inferred that he had resumed his office."8 If this were true it would be very apt for Neilson's date, 1358. But it is not. Reference to the Patent and Close Rolls shows that Scharshull was Chief Justice as late as 1361.4 After 1361 he was on many com- missions of the peace (especially in Staffordshire and Warwick) until December 24, 1366, when his patent was revoked.6 If the mention of Scharshull refers to him as Chief Justice, therefore, it may have been made at any time up to 1361. But the poet, espe- cially if he was a western man, may have had in mind some deci- sion made by Scharshull when he was on commissions of oyer and terminer in Staffordshire. If so, the period is extended until the end of 1366.
There is one other piece of evidence to be considered. At the end of the poem, the King sends Wynnere to Rome and Wastoure to London. Then he says:
& wayte to me Jm Wynere if }>u wilt wele chese when I wende appon werre my wyes to lede
1 Roxburghe edition, p. xiii.
2 Huchown, pp. 96-98. Athenaeum, 1901, Part2,pp. 157,254,319,351. His further statement that there is an allusion to the war in Prance "as still in progress" and hence that the date of the poem is before the signing of the Peace of Brgtigny in 1360 is invalid because the poet does not state that the war is in progress.
» Huchown, p. 98, n. 2.
« CaL Pat. Roll, 1358-61, p. 547; Close Roll, 1360-64, p. 113. For earlier references to him in that capacity see the indexes to the proper volumes of the Calendars.
8 Close Roll, 1364-68, p. 289. For the earlier references see the indexes to the Calendars.
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AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 37
ffor at }>e proude pales of parys J>e riche
I thynk to do it in ded & dub J?e to knyghte
And giff giftes full grete of golde & of s[ilver]
To ledis of my legyance \>i lufen me in herlj
& sithe kayren as I come with knyghtes J>at me foloen
To J>e kirke of Colayne l?er J>e kynges ligges.
This is certainly not evidence that the King was actually at war with France. Rather, it seems to indicate a period when the King was not active in war and could not use Wynnere for fighting, but was planning a great attack on France.1 Such a state of affairs can be found during the truces at the end of the fifties or even after the signing of the Treaty of Bre"tigny in 1361. This treaty was not satisfactory to either party, and the French never carried out their part of it.2 It might be supposed that as Edward by the Treaty of Bre*tigny gave up his claim on the throne of France he must have ceased quartering the arms of France with those of England on his coat-of-arms and that therefore the heraldic description in Wynnere would fix the date before 1361. But that is not true, as the effigies on his tomb and on that of the Black Prince still show the quartering. Hence even after 1361 it would be entirely proper to represent the King as meditating another great campaign in France.
From these considerations it is clear that any date between 1351 and 1366 would accord with the reference in Wynnere. The only check upon a late date is the reference to the twenty-five years of Edward Ill's reign. But it is doubtful how much weight can be given to that matter. The poem is an allegory, and though the King doubtless stands for Edward III, statements made about him need not be so exact as they would be in a direct account. Further, the number twenty-five is obviously a "round number," suitable any time after the twenty-fifth year, perhaps even to the fiftieth. The manner of phrasing — he "hase vs foster de and fedde this fyve and twenty wyntere" — shows that it is not meant to give a definite date.
If merely the dating of Wynnere were concerned, the matter would not be worth so much discussion. But the entire chronology of
1 So Gollancz refers it to the truce which followed the capture of Calais, September, 1347, to June, 1348 (Roxburghe, p. xiv).
2 Longman, Edward III, pp. 61 ff.
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38 J. R. HULBERT
alliterative poetry in the fourteenth century and our ideas of the growth of its technique are involved. If a date such as 1351, or indeed any date before 1361, is accepted, Wynnere is one of the earliest extant examples of the alliterative long line, unrhymed, in Middle English.1 Of course if Parlement is, as Gollancz thinks, an earlier work of the same author, its position is still more notable. All this is very hard to believe. Professor Gollancz himself says: "One's first impression is that The Parlement is a sort of summary of longer poems — an epitome reminiscent of lines and passages in the chief alliterative poems of the second half of the fourteenth cen- tury."2 In his note she calls attention to the resemblance of the first lines of Parlement to those of Piers the Plowman, and of the hunting scenes to episodes in Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit. As to the prologue, he says that because Parlement is earlier than Piers, "it follows that the famous opening lines of the latter poem, far from being echoed in the present poem, must have been a conventional prelude long before Langland impressed it with his genius/'3 Mr. Neilson gives a long list of resemblances between Parlement and Gawayne and the Grene Kny$t*
Professor Manly reached practically the same conclusion as Gollancz. Both Wynnere and Parlement begin, he says, "in a man- ner suggestive of the beginning of Piers the Plowman, and both .... contain several lines closely resembling lines in the B-text of that poem. The lines in question seem, from their better rela- tion to the context, to belong originally to Piers the Plowman and to have been copied from it by the other poems; if there were no evidence, these poems would, doubtless, be placed among those suggested by it; but there is other evidence [the reference to Schar-
shull] The conclusion is apparently inevitable that the
imitation is on the part of Piers the Plowman."5
The first lines of Wynnere must remind any reader of the begin- ning of Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit. That these lines are original in Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit rather than in Wynnere seems prob- able because they are more natural and appropriate in the former.
1 Gollancz, Roxburghe, p. xi; Wells, Manual, p. 241.
2 Ed. 1915, p. 2 (Preface). » Roxburghe, p. xiv.
4 Huchown, pp. 72-73. Some of them are of course insignificant, s Cambridge History, II, 42-43.
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AUTHORSHIP AND DATE OF "WYNNERE AND WASTOURE" 39
In Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit the poet starts with the siege of Troy, and passes to the colonization of the west by Trojan exiles, mentioning Eneas, Romulus, and Brutus. Then, he says, since Britain was established by Brutus, more extraordinary things (ferlyes) have happened than in any other country. This is probably a forecast of the strange adventure of the Green Knight, but before he can proceed to that the poet must mention Arthur, his court, and the Christmas celebration. With the setting thus established he introduces the Green Knight and begins the story. Every step of the introduction is a logical advance to a definite goal.
In Wynnere, on the other hand, the poet mentions Brutus and Britain, then the taking of Troy, and finally says,
There hathe selcouthes bene sene in sere kynges tymes But never so many as nowe by the nyne dele.
But he proceeds from that to general comment on the decay of the time and the neglect of true poets, and finally falls asleep and dreams. His selcouthes connect with nothing that follows.
On comparison of the documents, Manly — and I think Gollancz also — felt that the scenes and lines were original where they were organic and imitated where they were inorganic. This judgment seems to be correct, but they disregarded it on account of Scharshull. Furthermore an early date for these poems would run counter to the opinion of Skeat as to the technical development of Middle English alliterative poetry. He says: "The law of progress in alliterative poetry is from lines cast in a loose mould to lines cast in a strict one; from lines with two alliterated letters to lines with three," etc.1 In this respect Wynnere and Parlement are not primitive. Their verse is far more polished and effective than that of William of Palerne (before 1361) or Joseph of Arimathie.
Since, as we have seen, the time references in Wynnere indicate merely a period between 1351 and 1366, and since the parallelisms in it suggest even to people who believe in an early date imitation
1 Preface to Joseph of Arimathie, p. x. Skeat's law, to be sure, is subject to exceptions; e.g., a person unfamiliar with recent pieces of alliterative verse might write an early type at a late date. Furthermore, the law may be incorrect, for it is based on only a few facts, chiefly the early dates of William of Palerne and of Joseph of Arimathie, which is in the Vernon manuscript, dated by Skeat "about 1370-80" (Preface to A-text of Piers, E.E.T.S., p. xv).
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40 J. R. HULBERT
of Piers and Gawayne and the Grene Knyfit, the logical date would seem to be some time after 1361, the date of Piers A.1
As to Parlement, we have no evidence. Even if it should be by the author of Wynnere, it may have been years later than that work. Gollancz' argument for priority is as follows: "The 'Parlement' may well have been written at a somewhat earlier date than ' Winnere and Wastoure'; in this latter effort the poet shows himself rather more practiced in his art; his touch seems firmer, his thoughts more rapid and intense; maybe the theme was more congenial, but under any circumstances no great interval could have separated the poems."2 Such argument hardly needs comment. Timon of Athens y Pericles, Troilus and Cressida, were not written at the beginning of Shakspere's career, nor were Richard Feverel and The Egoist produced at the end of Meredith's. So far as I can see, even if they were the work of one man, Parlement and Wynnere may have been separated from each other by forty years.
I have no desire to set up a hypothetical chronology like those which afflict students of Chaucer and Old English literature. But with several fixed dates, it seems to me that we can get some impression of the time order of a few early alliterative pieces. The following arrangement would not conflict with any facts or impressions of technical development: William of Palerne, 1350-60; Piers A, 1362; Gawayne and the Grene Kny$t before Wynnere^ Wynnere , after Piers A but not later than 1366. Parlement is later than Piers and Gawayne and the Grene Kny%t, and there is no evidence for a date ad quern.
J. R. HULBERT UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
» Any resemblances to Wynnere found in the B-text of Piers would then be regarded as the result of chance or imitation by the author of Piers B.
2 Roxburghe, p. xi.
» There is no date a quo for Gawayne and the Grene Kny%t. In the early volumes of the New English Dictionary, citations from Gawayne and the Grene Knyjt were accom- panied by the phrase " c. 1340," and from the other poems in the same MS. by " c. 1325.' ' Later volumes however have "13 . . . . "I presume the reason for the change is that the editors found so many words appearing for the first time in these documents that they came to doubt their antiquity. Morris on the title page of his E.E.T.S. edition of Gawayne and the Grene Knyjt estimated the date at about 1360. For another attempt to date the poem see Modern Philology, XIII, 136, n. 3. Wells gives the date "about 1370" without stating evidence.
40
RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON LONDON PLAYHOUSES
Among the obscure authors who have suffered in consequence of misquotation by reformers, few perhaps have been so consistently misrepresented as Richard Rawlidge. The writer of a brief and justifiable pamphlet setting forth the disadvantages to a common- wealth of immoderate drinking and other evils, he has been quoted by the zealous Prynne in such manner as to imply his bitter opposi- tion to the theater and to pleasure in general. Through Prynne's attention his utterance has found its way, in garbled form, into the productions of Jeremy Collier and other antagonists of the stage, until many persons have been accustomed to look upon Rawlidge as a Puritan militant in the fight against the theater. Furthermore, scholars who have bothered themselves with the history of early playhouses in London have consulted Prynne's quotation rather than Rawlidge's original, and in consequence Rawlidge has been brought into undue prominence — sometimes almost scolded — by those who have been perplexed by what he apparently said. Miss Gildersleeve,1 for instance, in endeavoring to assign an order to suppress the London theaters to the spring of 1582, writes as follows: " Moreover, Rawlidge's Monster Lately Found Out, published in 1628, in an account of the controversy states that it was soon after 1580 that the citizens expelled the players and 'quite pulled down and suppressed' the playhouses in the City"; and further on (p. 219) she cites his production along with such works as the Refutation of Hey wood's Apology and the Shorte Treatise against Stage-Playes as aiding in renewing "the literary onslaught which culminated in Prynne's Histriomastix." More recently, to limit myself to the citation of another excellent book, so careful a scholar as Professor J. Q. Adams states2 that "Richard Reulidge" wrote that "soon after 1580" the playhouses were suppressed in London, and then proceeds to quote Prynne instead of the original. Again, on dis- covering that the list of playhouses suppressed offers considerable
41]
1 Government Regulation of Elizabethan Drama, p. 163.
2 Shakespearean Playhouses, p. 8.
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[MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920
42 THORNTON S. GRAVES
difficulties, he asserts1 that "the whole passage written by a Puritan after the lapse of nearly half a century, is open to grave suspicion, especially in its details."
Before quoting Rawlidge's own words, which are indeed suffi- ciently vague and perplexing, let us hasten to say in these times of national prohibition that they are apparently not the result of overmuch zeal and that the man should not be stigmatized as a Puritan. Unquestionably he entertained puritanic tendencies, but his pamphlet contains a good deal more liberality and common sense than is found in numerous documents recently composed by persons entertaining similar tendencies. He does not give the impression that he is hostile to the drama as drama; he is not at all concerned primarily with the suppression of the playhouses; his reference to the theater and its evils is purely incidental in a production that deals with other subjects. Furthermore, he approves heartily of the old sports on the Sabbath, attributing the enormous number of "blind" alehouses and other objectionable resorts to the suppression, during the reign of James I, of the old-fashioned pas- times on Sunday. Instead of being a moral agitator or professional reformer, he is a man of some modesty, admitting that he has no real right to meddle with the making of books — the business of poets and scholars instead of " a mechanicall man such a one as I am."
To this honest protest on the part of a good citizen against real evils of the period was apparently2 given the title A Monster Lately Found Out and Discovered, or the Scourging of Tiplers. Although "tipling" is the author 's principal subject, the work touches upon the "three most grosse and open Sunnedaring vices hourely committed within the walls and precincts of this Cittie." These the author carefully lists as follows:
First, Drunkennesse, needlesse drinking, and Gaming permitted in Ale- houses, and Typling houses without restraint.
Secondly, Swearing, Lying, and open blaspeming the holy name of God without Checke, or controwle.
1 Shakespearean Playhouses p. 310, note.
2 So Prynne quotes the title (Histriomastix, p. 491), assigning the work to the year 1628. The copy of Rawlidge's pamphlet in the British Museum has no title-page. A former owner has written on a fly-leaf: "A Monster late found out and discovered, a discourse against Tipling Houses of the Citie of London by Richard Rawlidge 1606."
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RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON LONDON PLAYHOUSES 43
Thirdly, Ingrossing, Regrading, and forestalling the Marketts, so that hardly can any Victualls be bought, but at the third, or second hand at least.
Significant is the omission of playhouses from these three "raigning sinnes."
Rawlidge is not clamoring for the making of new laws but asking for the enforcing of old ones. Whereas, he writes, there are only 122 churches in the city and Liberties, there are "I dare say thirty hundred Ale-houses, Typling-houses, Tobacco-shops, &c. in London and the skirts thereof." These should be reduced to at least the number of churches. To do this "there needes neither mechanicall pollicies, nor new Sessions of Parliament, for all the laws be well and good already, there lacks nothing but execution."
Now for the casual reference to the theaters. In a passage of sermon-like eloquence, the opening of which sounds as if it might possibly be a " mechanicall" man's echo of a certain tribute in Richard II, he says:
This so renowned, so famous a Place, this peerelesse Citty, this London, hath within the memory of man lost much of hir pristine lustre, and renowne, by being pestered and filled with many great and crying sinnes, which were first hatched, and are ever since fostered and maintained, in Play-houses, Ale- houses, Bawdy-houses, Dicing-houses, otherwise stiled Ordinaries, of which, which are the most Reseptacles of all manner of baseness and ludenesse, is hard to be distinguish^, for all of them enterteined men and women of all sorts, come who would if they brought money with them: which houses of such Receipt flourish and keepe a great quoile in this famous Citty (the more is the shame) at this day: many a young Gentleman, and prodigall Citizen, being stript daily both out of lands, money, and wares, in these Dicing, Tipling, and Gaming houses, by Cheaters, Conny-catchers, and Shifters, who in the habits of Gentlemen (being indeede nothing lesse) are there harboured. All which houses, and traps for Gentlemen, and others, of such Receipt, were formerly taken notice of by many Citizens, and well disposed graue Gentlemen, who saw, and well perceiued the many incon- veniences, and great Damage, that would ensue vpon the long sufferance of the same, not only to particular persons, but that it would also bee a great disparagement to the Governours, and a dishonour to the Government of this honourable Citty, if some order were not speedily taken for the suppress- ing of common houses for Enterludes, and Dicing, and Carding, &c. within the Citty, and Liberties thereof: wherevpon some of the pious Magistrates made humble suit to the late Queene Elizabeth of ever-living memorie, and her privy covnsaile, and obteined leaue from her Maiesty to thrust those Players out of the Citty, and to pull downe the Dicing houses: which
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44 THORNTON S. GRAVES
.
accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in Gracious Street, Bishops- gate-street, nigh Paules, that on Ludgate hill, the White-Friars were put downe, and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties, by the care of those religious Senators: for they did their best to remoue all dis- orders out of their Citties Liberties; and surely had all their successors followed their worthy stepps, sinne would not at this day haue been so powerful, and raigning as it is [pp. 2-3].
Before commenting on the passage, let us get before us Prynne's "verbatim" quotation of the words above. On page 491 of Histrio- mastix he writes:
The Magistrates of the Citty of London, as M. lohn Field records, obteined from Queen Elizabeth, of famous memory, about the yeere 1580. that all Heathenish Playes and Enterludes should be banished upon Sabbath dayes; and not long after1 many godly Cittizens, and wel-disposed Gentle- men of London, considering that Play-houses and Dicing-houses, were traps for yong Gentlemen and others; and perceiving the many incon- veniences, and great damage that would ensue upon the long suffring of the same, not onely to particular persons, but to the whole Citty; and that it would also be a great disparagment unto the Governours, and a dishonour to the government of this honourable Citty, if they should any longer continue; acquainted some pious Magistrates therewith, desiring them to take some speedy course for the suppression of common Play-houses and Dicing-houses within the Citty of London and Liberties thereof. Who thereupon made humble suite to Queen Elizabeth and her Privy Councell, and obtained leave from her Maiesty to thrust the Players out of the Citty, and pull downe all Play-houses and Dicing-houses within their Liberties: which accordingly was effected: and the Play-houses in Gracious-street, Bishops-gate-street, that nigh Pauls, that on Ludgate-hill, and the White- Friers, were quite put downe and suppressed by the care of these religious Senators.
A reading of the passages above will reveal the fact that, unless Prynne is quoting from an edition of A Monster Lately Found Out other than that in the British Museum, he has misrepresented Rawlidge, for the latter says nothing about playhouses being put down "not long after" about 1580; consequently the passage is too vague and indefinite to be used, as has frequently been done, for dating certain legislative acts against the stage or showing that certain inn-yards "nigh Paules," in the Whitefriars, and elsewhere
*At this point Prynne refers the reader to Rawlidge, "where this is verbatim related."
44
RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON LONDON PLAYHOUSES 45
were used by players at an early date.1 As a matter of fact, if we believe — what is at least doubtful — that Rawlidge had in mind theaters only when he specified the particular "Play-houses" sup- pressed and if we are justified in attempting to restrict the passage to refer to any one act of legislation or any specific attack on the stage, then there is most reason for thinking that he is referring to the putting down of the theaters which took place apparently2 in 1580 rather than to the suppression vaguely referred to by Fleet- wood3 as taking place in 1584 or the stringent order of the Privy Council4 in 1597. The reason for such a statement is that Rawlidge implies that gamesters and actors suffered from simultaneous legisla- tion during a reform wave. In 1580 there was apparently launched a hot fight against gamblers and gambling-houses,8 though I do not know to what extent the City succeeded in ridding itself of the evil. A comparison of the quotations above will also show that Prynne in the fervor of his hatred against the stage has, by substituting "the Players" for "those Players" and by certain other small altera- tions and by slight omissions, given the impression that Rawlidge is
1 Cf., for example, Mr. Harold Child's remarkable interpretation of the passage in Cambridge History of English Literature, VI, 282.
* On the subject of this 1580 order and the bitter fight against the theater during 1580-82, see Mrs. Stopes in Vol. IV (Supplement) to Pumivall's edition of Harrison's Description of England, pp. 320, note, 320-22; Miss Gildersleeve's Regulation of Eliza- bethan Drama, pp. 160-64; E. K. Chambers in Malone Society Collections, Vol. I. Part 2, pp. 168-69; Graves in Studies in Philology, XIV, 90-94. Mrs. Stopes (p. 320, note) states that in 1580 the Common Council passed an order to pull down the London play- houses; and Chambers (Malone Soc. Collections, Vol. I, Part 1, p. 46), commenting on the Lord Mayor's petition (April 12, 1580) to the Privy Council, says that the appeal was effectual, "as the Privy Council ordered the Middlesex and Surrey Justices to sup- press plays by letters of April 17 and May 13 respectively." Miss Gildersleeve (p. 161) says that this legislation was due solely to the plague, but the plague was never serious in London during 1580.
» Gildersleeve, p. 169; Malone Soc. Collections, Vol. I, Part 2, pp. 165-66. « Gildersleeve, pp. 187-88; Malone Soc. Coll., Vol. I, Part 1, pp. 76-80.
* On September 5, 1580, Sir James Craft wrote regarding a "close alley," the comple- tion of which had been forbidden by the Lord Mayor. On September 13, the Mayor replied that he had "stayed" the building for various reasons and that it had been thought desirable not only to stay other bowling alleys of a similar nature where "dicing, carding, and table-play" were held, but also to call in question the licenses already granted to places of the sort. Mrs. Stopes (Harrison, Desc. of Eng., ed. Furnivall, IV, 321) cites a London regulation dated September 17, 1580: "A precept for a true cer- tificate [a return] of all common Bowling Allies and Dysinge and carding houses that be in London, to thende, speedie reformation male be taken for the suppressinge of the same." On September 24, the Lord Mayor wrote to the Privy Council bringing the dangers of bowling alleys to their notice and "requesting power to suppress all such bowling alleys, noth withstanding the Queen's licence granted for the same" (Overall and Overall, Analytical Index to Remembrancia, pp. 164—65).
45
46 THORNTON S. GRAVES
rejoicing primarily at the expulsion of the actors from London and the suppression of the theaters. A careful reading of what Rawlidge actually writes, however, vague as his words are, makes it pretty clear that by " those Players" he meant primarily the gamblers of the period and that he was opposed to theaters, not because of any scruples against the drama, but because they were used as effective resorts by the gamesters and sharpers of the time.
Indeed, it may be of interest in this connection to know that an old champion of the stage has argued that Rawlidge was referring solely to gaming-houses when he spoke of putting down " play- houses" in Whitefriars and elsewhere. In his Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage Jeremy Collier used Rawlidge without consulting the original,1 introducing the passage with the words, " About the Year 1580, there was a Petition made to Queen Elizabeth for suppressing Play-Houses." In a marginal note he refers the reader to Rawlidge's pamphlet, but he is obviously quoting from Prynne, whom he follows inaccurately. Collier's bit of carelessness did not escape the eyes of his opponents, for the author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry (1698) at once brought him to task for citing an authority whose work could not be located, criticized the vagueness of the quotation, and suggested that the mysterious author might be referring to the suppression of gaming-houses instead of theaters. "But," he writes, "where Play-houses and Dice-houses are so suspiciously joyn'd together by this unknown Author, what if these Play-houses should prove but Gaming-houses at least; it looks very shrewdly that way, all cir- cumstances consider'd" (p. 11). In the next year this explanation was accepted by the author of The Stage Acquitted (p. 43). In the meantime the writer of The Stage Condemn' d (1698) had rushed to Collier's assistance, admitting that whereas "Mr. Collier has been somewhat defective in his Quotation here," still Rawlidge and his Monster really existed once as proved by "Mr. Prin's" use of them. Then with the humorous looseness characteristic of many writers of zealous documents he proves his point by misquoting both Prynne and Rawlidge: "Our Author may be pleased to know, that Rawlidge says in the same place, 'That all the Play-houses within the City
i Cf. third edition, pp. 242-43.
46
RICHARD RAWLIDGE ON' LONDON PLAYHOUSES
47
were PulFd down, by Order of Her Majesty and Council upon this Petition, viz. One in Grace-church-street, one in Bishops-Gate- Street, one near Pauls, one on Ludgate-Hill, and one in White-Friers1 " (pp. 110-11).
If the author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry could have seen Rawlidge's original instead of Collier's garbled version of Prynne's inaccurate quotation, he would perhaps have believed more strongly than ever that gaming-houses were meant by the "suspicious join- ing" of "Play-houses and Dice-houses." Were it not for the absence in seventeenth-century English of instances of the use of the word playhouse in the sense of gambling-house, and had not Rawlidge employed the expression "houses for Enterludes" in the course of his discussion, we might accept the explanation offered by this old opponent of Collier and believe that Rawlidge was using the term "Play-house" to distinguish gambling-houses other than " Dicing-houses, otherwise stiled Ordinaries," especially since he makes such a distinction in the expression "these Dicing, Tipling, and Gaming houses." Yet in spite of what has just been said, I am not convinced that the author of A Defence of Dramatick Poetry was entirely wrong. It is at least possible that Rawlidge might have confused gambling-houses and theaters when, writing loosely and vaguely, he specified that certain worthy citizens obtained Queen Elizabeth's permission "to thrust those Players out of the Citty, and to pull downe the Dicing-houses: which accordingly was affected, and the Play-houses in Gracious-Street, Bishops-gate-street, nigh Paules, that on Ludgate hill, the White-Friars were put downe, and other lewd houses quite supprest within the Liberties."
Just what does the passage mean, and why was Prynne apparently so careful to insert the "that" before "nigh Paules" and the "and" before "the White-Friars" ? I have at least directed the attention of those who would use the passage to the original rather than to Prynne's interpretation of it, and have shown, I hope, that whereas Rawlidge may be censured perhaps for writing very vague English, it is not fair to classify him as one of those actively engaged in the suppression of the theaters.
THORNTON S. GRAVES
TRINITY COLLEGE, NORTH CAROLINA
47
LONGFELLOW'S "NATURE"
Among the ideas and studies for literary composition in Southey's Common-place Book (Fourth Series, p. 48) is the following epitaph:
As careful nurses to the bed do lay
Their children which too long would wanton play,
So to prevent all my ensuing crimes
Nature my nurse laid me to bed betimes.
This is described as an epitaph found "in. some part of Yorkshire." There is evidently here the basis for a sonnet; but I do not know that Southey ever used the idea. The lines, however, have such a marked similarity to Longfellow's sonnet "Nature" that it would seem that he, presumably finding the suggestion going to waste in the Common-place Book, made it the basis for his poem:
As a fond mother, when the day is o'er,
Leads by the hand her little child to bed,
Half willing, half reluctant to be led,
And leave his broken playthings on the floor,
Still gazing at them through the open door,
Nor wholly reassured and comforted
By promises of others in their stead,
Which, though more splendid, may not please him more;
So Nature deals with us, and takes away
Our playthings one by one, and by the hand
Leads us to rest so gently, that we go
Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay,
Being too full of sleep to understand
How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
JOHN D. REA INDIANA UNIVERSITY
[48 48 MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920]
THE GENESIS OF SPENSER'S QUEEN OF FAERIE
Spenser's selection of the figure of a fairy queen to symbolize the glory pursued by the knights and humanists of the Renaissance — the idealism of the new England under Elizabeth — was for the period an anomalous one. Classic literature, on which most of the literature of the Renaissance was being modeled, has nothing nearer than goddesses like Venus protecting heroes like Aeneas, while Ariosto's epic, which Spenser was imitating and which was typical of the Italian influence in courtly poetry, offers little in the pictures of enchantresses with their power over the lives of heroes to explain the fairy queen of Spenser. Further, the attack of Ascham's Schole- master on Malory's Morte d' Arthur, through which the fairy queens of romance were probably best known to Elizabethans, may be taken as typical of the attitude of the learned to Arthurian romance in England just before Spenser wrote. To most humanists no doubt, as to Harvey in 1580, the "Faerie Queene" was the "Eluish Queene," in tales of whom "Hobgoblin [would] runne away with the Garland from Apollo."1 How then did Spenser come to adopt the Fairy Queen as the head of ancient chivalry, substitute her court and knights for the Round Table of Arthur, and make Arthur merely the chief figure in her realm? My belief is that his plan was partly influenced, as has been suggested more than once,2 by the entertain- ment at Kenilworth in 1575, but more significantly by the comple- mentary entertainment at Woodstock in the same year.
In the entertainment at Kenilworth,3 Leicester made his appeal to Elizabeth's known love of things English, and in all probability to a growing national sentiment as well. Those who devised his
1 "Three Letters," in Works of Harvey (ed. Grosart), I, 95.
2 Warton (Observations on the Fairy Queen [1807], I, 39-45) considered the "Ladyes of the Lake" repairing to Eliza in the April Eclogue of the Shepheardes Calender a refer- ence to the Kenilworth performance and indicative of the possible influence of pageants on Spenser's fairies. Greenlaw in an interesting study of the conventions of "Spenser's Fairy Mythology" in Studies in Philology, XV, 105 fl., thinks that the entertainment may have suggested a number of features of the Faerie Queene.
s Described in Gascoigne's Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle and Laneham's Letter. References to the first are to Cunliffe's edition of Gascoigne's Works, Vol. II. References to the second are to Furnivall's edition. 49] 49 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920
50 CHAKLES READ BASKERVILL
|
"shews" turned to account the romance of English history. The chief of them, Ferrers and Gascoigne, belonged to the school that produced the Mirror for Magistrates and Gorboduc, both of which use in poetic form events of English history. Even the folk diver- sions provided for Elizabeth at Kenilworth included a morris with Maid Marian, the associate of Robin Hood as national hero of the folk, and a Hox Tuesday play from Coventry, said to represent the courage of English women as contributing to the defeat of the invad- ing Danes in the days of Ethelred. The popular and the romantic elements met in the ballad which was to have been sung by an "auncient minstrell" dealing with the acts of the most glorious figure of England's past, Arthur, whose Round Table in the days of Leicester had passed to organizations of archers among the folk.1
This national sentiment Leicester was utilizing for his own pur- poses. The diversions at Kenilworth were arranged to suggest that the lord of the castle was of royal English ancestry and particularly that he was Arthur's heir. The ancient foundation of Kenilworth and Arthur's abode there were stressed; reference was made to the tenure of Roger Mortimer,
who first begun, (As Arthures heire) to keepe the table round;2
and above all the fairy queen as the Lady of the Lake and protectress of Arthur was represented as abiding with her nymphs in the lake at Kenilworth. Indeed it was through the use of genii locorwn that the greatest emphasis was given to the idea that at Kenilworth the traditions of the golden age of England were still alive. The giant trumpeters on thye wall "ment, that in the daies and Reigne of K. Arthure, men were of that stature." Genii of the woods were Sylvester, a savage man clad in ivy, who addressed Elizabeth on her return from hunting; his son Audax, clothed in moss; and Silvanus, god of the woods. As the Queen entered the castle the Lady of the Lake with her two " nymphs" came over the water, promising Elizabeth such love as she had given Arthur and yielding "the Lake, the Lodge, the Lord" to the royal command.3
1 Brydges, British Bibliographer, I, 125 ff. For the morris of the folk bridal, the Hox Tuesday play, and the ballad, see Laneham, pp. 20-32, 36-43.
2 For Mortimer's Round Table see Ellison, Early Romantic Drama at the English Court, p. 25; and Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen, I, 41, note, 63, note.
3 Gascoigne, Works, II, 92 ff. Giants as ancient inhabitants of sites of cities had been carried in many a civic pageant in which the glorious past was celebrated by enthusiastic
50
THE GENESIS OF SPENSER'S QUEEN OF FAERIE 51
Leicester overshot his mark in glorifying himself. Though each genius loci surrendered to Elizabeth and flattered her with the usual fulsome extravagance, she seems to have resented the implied glori- fication of her subject Leicester. Possibly she recalled the tradition that Arthur was to come from his abode with the Lady of the Lake or from the other world to rule England again. Laneham records that upon the Queen's entrance to the castle when the Lady of the Lake made tender of her domain, "It pleozed her highness too thank this Lady, & too ad withall, 'we had thought indeed the Lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow? Wei, we will he*erin common more with yoo heerafter'" (p. 7). Leicester was obtuse apparently. Futile attempts were made for several days to present Gascoigne's masque urging Elizabeth's marriage to Leicester. Gascoigne could not attribute the failure "to any other thing, then to lack of opportunitie and seasonable weather" (p. 120), but the Queen probably deliberately avoided hearing the masque. She finally left Kenilworth suddenly.
The devices and speeches at Kenilworth were echoed in many details of the entertainment presented before Elizabeth shortly afterward at Woodstock1 — for example, the use of Sibylla, the transformation of a man into an oak, with the voice issuing from the tree, the presence of a fairy queen, and particularly the tale and play dealing with the royal marriage. The performance at Wood- stock seems to have been intended to offset that at Kenilworth,2 whether it was inspired by hostility to Leicester or designed to restore him to the Queen's favor through evidence of a more self- effacing spirit. Another note was dominant, that of the willing service and sacrifice of Elizabeth's subjects without hope of reward, and in the dramatization of "Hemetes' Tale," which was "as well thought of, as anye thing euer done before her Maiestie, not onely of her, but of the rest" (p. 102), the good of the country was placed before the personal inclination of its princess in the matter of marriage.
citizens (Withington, English Pageantry, pp. 50 ff.). Apparently as spirits of wood or mount, wild men, or woodwose, appeared in connection with Henry VIII's pageants in which romantic mounts with caves and forests were represented (Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, II, 1494-1502). See also Boas, University Drama, p. 161, and Withington, op. cit., pp. 72-77, for other records of such figures in pageantry.
1 Under the title "The Queenes Majesties Entertainment at Woodstocke" Cunliffe reprints in PMLA, XXVI (1911), 92 ff., Cadman's volume of 1585 dealing with the entertainment .
2 Cunliffe, PMLA, XXVI. 130-31.
51
52 CHARLES READ BASKERVILL
The fairy motive was expanded at Woodstock for the flattery of the Queen with notable success. An arbor was formed of branches on a marvelous mount made round an oak, with a hollow chamber or cave beneath, from which music issued (p. 98). This "walke" of the Fairy Queen was the scene of an elaborate banquet to Eliza- beth. The crescent-shaped table mentioned was, I presume, for the royal Cynthia, and the round table, with its chair of crimson satin embroidered with pictures of trees and beasts, for the Fairy Queen. Any traditions which associated beings of the other world with the elvish, the dark, or the uncouth were disregarded. Love, said the Fairy Queen to Elizabeth,
hath caused me to transforme my face, and in your hue to come before your eyne, now white, then blacke, your frende the fayery Queene.
She arrived at the bower "drawen with 6. children in a waggon of state: the Boies brauely attired, & her selfe very costly apparrelled, whose present shew might wel argue her immortality." That this splendor was directly turned to the flattery of Elizabeth was indi- cated in the entertainments at Quarrendon,1 where the Woodstock show was pretty clearly described:
The place and persons were so fitlie shuted: For who a Prince can better entertaine Than can a Prince, or else a prince's vaine ? [p. 456].
Yet the whole conception of the Fairy Queen at Woodstock was appropriate to English fairy tradition — to which belonged the mound, the cave,2 the table of turf, the round table,3 the gifts, and even the royal pomp. She and her entourage were clothed in the splendor which the folk fancy in its lordliest flights gave to the other world and which appeared in the picture of the fairy court in the early
1 The "Speeches" at Quarrendon, 1592, are to be found in Nichol's Progresses of Elizabeth (1823), III, 193-213, and in Works of Lyly (ed. Bond), I, 453-70. References are to Lyly's Works. Cunliffe quotes the speeches in part in discussing their relation to the entertainment at Woodstock.
2 Scot, Discovery of Witchcraft (ed. Nicholson), p. 510: Fairies "do principally inhabit the Mountains, and Caverns of the Earth, whose nature is to make strange Apparitions on the Earth." See also the Daemonology of James I, Book iii, chap, v, for a reference to the belief of witches that "they haue bene transported with the Phairie" before a "faire Queene " in a hill that opened. But the mount with the cave was one of the chief romantic devices of earlier Tudor pageants (Mod. Phil., XIV, 470-71 ; Peuillerat, Revels Edward and Mary, pp. 3, 6, 7, 8, 255; and Withington, op. cit., pp. 192-93) as well as part of the popular conception of the fairy abode.
s For traditions of the Round Table and its connection with the world of magic, see Mott, PMLA, XX (1905), 231-64, and Brown, Harvard -Studies and Notes, VII, 183-205.
52
THE GENESIS OF SPENSER'S QUEEN OF FAERIE 53
lay of Sir Orfeo. In the dramatization of the tale of Hemetes, the Fairy Queen served as a guiding spirit, belonging not to the region of the Indus, the home of the mortal dramatis personae, but to the land whioh those wanderers sought — ruled by a "Lady in whom inhabiteth the most vertue, Learning, and beauty, that euer yet was in creature" (p. 96).
The fairy lore of royal progress and of court masque and play was probably launched at Woodstock on its successful career. The Fairy Queen with her "nymphs" appeared before Elizabeth at Norwich in 15781 with speeches and dances prepared by Churchyard, and fairies figured again and again in masques and plays of the suc- ceeding decades, especially in the nineties. The device at Wood- stock may have suggested the Fairy Queen who with her nymphs danced before Elizabeth at Elvetham in 1591, presenting a garland with an address to the Queen.2 The Old Knight's Tale of the Quarrendon "Speeches" in 1592 presumably describes the Wood- stock performance.
One feature of the banqueting bower at Woodstock may have a relation to Spenser's allegorical poem in a quite different fashion. The wall was hung with a "Number of fine Pictures with posies of the Noble or men of great credite." The "Allegories," says the writer, "are hard to be vnderstood, without some knowledge of the inuentors." The "Speeches" at Quarrendon declared seventeen years later the interest with which this personal allegory was received :
The fayrie Queene the fayrest Queene saluted
Of all the pleasures there, among the rest, (The rest were justes and feates of Armed Knightes), Within hir bower she biddes her to a feast, Which with enchaunted pictures trim she dightes, And on them woordes of highe intention writes:
Manie there were that could no more but vewe them, Many that ouer curious nearer pride. Manie would conster needes that neuer knewe them, Som lookt, som lyked, som questioned, some eyed, One asked them too who should not be denied.
J Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth (1st ed.), II. 84-87. 2 Works of Lyly (ed. Bond), I, 449-50.
53
54 CHARLES READ BASKERVILL
*
Elizabeth, according to the writer who describes the entertainment at Woodstock, was so pleased with the day's diversions that she ordered the whole to be delivered to her in writing, used the help of the devisors to decipher the meaning, and, her curiosity satisfied, had " of ten in speech some part hereof with mirth at the remem- brance" (p. 103).
Spenser's patriotism, his interest in the ancient English poets, and his love of allegory and romance were such as to make the entertain- ments at Kenilworth and Woodstock with their mixture of historical, mythological, and allegorical elements appeal to him from various angles. Indeed parallels can be found in them for many romantic elements of the Faerie Queene, though most of the parallels are commonplaces of romance. The Fairy Queen of Woodstock, with the feast in her bower preceded by the tourney of knights, may have suggested the conception of a great festival of the Fairy Queen and the gathering of knights for feats of arms at her court as a sub- stitute for Arthur's. But what seems more certain is that we have here support for the theory that Arthur in Spenser's allegory was intended to represent Leicester.1 Perhaps Spenser, coming into the service of Leicester, utilized the devices of the entertainment at Woodstock by flattering Elizabeth directly in the figure of the Fairy Queen as the symbol of national glory, and carried still further the idea of the entertainment at Kenilworth by representing Leicester in the figure of Arthur as the flower of chivalry in the service of the Fairy Queen, led on by a dream of union with her. The effect at Woodstock would be countered by Spenser's picture of Leicester as the "brave knight, perfected" in all the virtues, the succor and stay of other knights, and the ornament of the kingdom of the Fairy Queen. Spenser may have modified the plan of an epic already conceived, or from the plan for an occasional piece he iriay have been swept out by the romantic and historical materials with which he was dealing into his idea for a national epic that would embody in " allegories" at once the glorious traditions of the past and the splendor of contemporary England.
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO CHARLES READ BASKERVILL
1 See Kitchin, Faery Queene, Book I, p. xv, note (Holinshed's account of a representa- tion of Arthur to natter Leicester), and Oxford Spenser, pp. li-liii.
54
ON THE DATE OF THE OWL AND THE NIGHTINGALE
In Mr. Henry Barrett Hinckley's suggestive argument for the earlier date of The Owl and the Nightingale1 he says, "But the reading of the Cotton MS alone should have warned us against this con- clusion since the verb under-wat has the meaning of a present tense and shows that the scribe understood that Henry was still living when the prayer was offered." The evidence from the C reading undercoat has some extremely doubtful features. In the first place, the textual evidence is at least as strong against the correctness of the C reading as for it. It is a priori just as likely that the C scribe here should have mistaken a 5 in his original for a ^ as that the J scribe in writing under-yat mistook a f for a 5. (In line 1469 the C scribe mistook f for 5, writing %if for wif.) Moreover, Breier2 on a fresh examination of the MSS declares for under-pat as the reading in C 1091, assuming that the scribe has mistaken 5 for p, though it must be admitted that he might equally well have taken ^ for j>, as he did in 187.
But even if we accept under-wat, Mr. Hinckley's contention that it is a present tense rests upon the insecure assumption that the word is a compound of the preterit-present verb witan, wdt. Breier3 points out that Bradley-Stratmann's sole citation for the ME compound is this passage. It is usually assumed that the word is underwiten, in which case under-wat is preterit after all, not preterit- present. In a matter so important as this, other evidence should be furnished not merely for the existence of underwiten, but for a preterit- present underwdt.
Whether we read under-wat or under-yat, there is well-nigh con- clusive evidence that it is a past tense. And the same evidence points strongly to under-fiat as the original. Close attention to the highly dramatic nature of the debate at this point shows that in 1091,
J>at under-wat (yat) J>e king Henri,
the nightingale is turning against the owl her own statement in 1055: ]?e louerd fcat sone under-5at.
1 Modern Philology, XVII, 252.
2 Eule und Nachtiyal, Halle, 1910, p. 161. » Ibid., p. 37.
55] 55 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, May, 1920
56 JOHN S. KENYON
There the owl, after asserting that the nightingale had misled the lady to commit sin, says, "The lord at once discovered this [pat in unemphatic position] and laid a snare to catch you." The nightin- gale replies with great skill (cf. 1067-74) that the apparent triumph of this lord was really his ignominious defeat: "His own disgrace was brought about by his treatment of me, — that King Henry dis- covered and punished." Here the emphatic position of pat and king Henri gives the retort a peculiar a fortiori force: "his act was dis- covered by King Henry himself!" C 1055 is then not merely a parallel passage for under-wat in 1091, but is inseparably connected with it in the give and take of the two contestants. Either a differ- ent verb or a present tense in 1091 would quite obliterate the dramatic connection.
JOHN S. KENYON HIRAM COLLEGE
56
REVIEWS AND NOTICES
Lewis Theobald. His Contribution to English Scholarship. With Some Unpublished Letters. By RICHARD FOSTER JONES. New York: Columbia University Press, 1919. Pp. xi+363.
This interesting study, which has the twofold purpose of giving a biog- raphy and of demonstrating the derivation of Theobald's editorial method from Richard Bentley, acknowledges frankly a heavy indebtedness to Louns- bury's Text of Shakespeare, but fortunately excels that work in several respects. There is less of the clenched fist and flashing eye; and a greater brevity — perhaps it is tact — has suppressed some of Lounsbury's slashing conclusions. While Dr. Jones does not disagree with Lounsbury as often as he should, his volume is in general a safer book to consult than Louns- bury's, though the latter has a much greater wealth of documentation.
The relative slightness of the new material on Theobald's life and personality is disappointing. We should like more information as to the sources of his income, as to the basis of his friendly relations with Sir Robert Walpole; we should like to know why, in view of these relations, he appears from 1718 to 1728 more often in connection with the Tory Mist's journals than with any other newspapers; we are puzzled by the savageness of his attack on Pope, and cannot but wonder if he was urged to an aggressive tone by other influences than his undoubted love of truth. Did he con- sciously try to found his scholarly reputation on the ruins of Pope's ?
Dr. Jones has limned us a personality for the editor; but this portrait seems not to be his happiest achievement. He speaks of Theobald as a modest, sensitive person, lacking in self-reliance and " rudely shaken by Pope" (see pp. 167, 204, 215, 250). Evidence for this view is found in Theobald's reliance on Warburton and in the remark of Dr. Grey that Theobald, "'a person seemingly in other respects very modest,' treated Pope too harshly notwithstanding TheDunciad." As evidence of something very different from modesty and diffidence — which seem almost Theobald's greatest lacks — one may cite the title-page and tone of Shakespeare Restored, Theobald's treatment of Meystayer in connection with the Perfidious Brother, his habit of exaggeration (p. 175), his dogmatic manner of speaking (p. 213), and even his attitude toward Warburton — the laying upon him of one request after another involving much labor, and when Warburton, restive for lack of an invitation to honor either the title-page or at least the Preface of Theobald's Shakespeare with his name, showed signs of setting up as an independent critic, the calm announcement on Theobald's part that his 57] 57
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acknowledgment in the Preface of Warburton's services "has entail'd this rich Consequence, that it has given me a Right (through your generous Grant) to demand all your Capacities for my Service." (The italics are Theobald's.) These are not the words of a diffident man.
This matter of personality seems important, because the clash with Pope was largely a matter of personalities. In the war between the scholar and the bel-esprit, Pope, to be sure, early allied himself with 'the wits; but while his attack on "verbal criticism" is as explicit in his Essay on Criticism as in the Dunciad, the latter has an acridity born of personal dislikes. Not " blockheadry " but lack of wit and gentlemanly decorum was the hinge of Pope's satire on Theobald, as he plainly shows in the passage he adapts from La Bruyere concerning Theobald (see Dunciad of 1729, p. 184). If, on the other hand, Theobald had had a different personality, he would have listened to Pope's calls for help on Shakespeare, would have given some of his numberless emendations, would have received favors in return (for Pope could be generous in such cases), would have eventually become Pope's successor as editor of Shakespeare — and the world would have lost the Dunciad.
With regard to the vexed problems concerning this satire Dr. Jones is usually content with traditional views, especially those of Lounsbury. Most of these views have been based on the romantic assumption that Pope was as black as can be painted. Hence the malicious notion, generally accepted, that the "Bathos" was designed to serve as an agent provocateur to justify the Dunciad, a notion for which there is very little evidence. Presswork on the third, called the "last," volume of the Miscellanies had begun as early as June, 1727 (see the Elwin-Courthope Pope, IX, 524), and the expectation was to publish in the winter. The Dunciad was to conclude the volume. The "Bathos," which was "in great forwardness" in June, Pope intended for the fourth, called finally the "third," volume of the Miscellanies. Presently the poet determined to publish the Dunciad separately, and not having verses to fill the consequent gap in the "last" volume, he filled it with the "Bathos," the only one of the prose pieces fitted to appear in a volume devoted otherwise to verse. The agent provocateur theory demands the assumption that Pope feared the Dunces. Mystification with regard to the authorship of the Dunciad does not prove fear; for such mysti- fication was natural to Pope; many of his major works appeared anony- mously. He may have feared actions for libel, and he may have feared that his stooping to answer his lowly opponents — even though for twelve years their attacks had been frequent and (so far as we know) often unprovoked — would be a reproach to one of his standing; but his assurance of triumph over them is seen in his words to Swift (see the Elwin-Courthope Pope, VII, 124): "This poem will rid me of these insects." On the face of it, why should the "Bathos," which is predominantly an attack on the dulness of poets, be regarded as an attempt to provoke attacks to justify the Dunciad,
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which primarily attacks scholarship? If Pope had been scheming to pro- voke outbursts from Theobald and his like, he would have changed the "Bathos" much more extensively, and Philips and Blackmore would there have yielded to Theobald in importance. Furthermore, the Dunciad came out only ten weeks after the "Bathos," and hence friend and foe alike would have seen that the poem was in press before many had time to make con- sidered retorts to the prose attack. The "Bathos" is perhaps to be regarded as the first overt act in a Pope "offensive," but there is no post hoc relation- ship effectively established between it and the Dunciad. The current view of the matter, however, has even smaller grounds of credence if we accept it, as Lounsbury and Jones do, with the added notion that the "Bathos" failed to evoke any great quantity of attacks. Pope could easily have post- poned the Dunciad until two or three volumes of attacks were added. The Lounsbury- Jones idea of the inefficacy of the "Bathos" finds its only basis in an unwarranted belief that all such attacks were included in a volume called A Compleat Collection of all the verses, essays, Letters and Advertisements, which have been occasioned by the Publication of Three Volumes of Miscellanies, by Pope and Company (1728). From the relatively slender resources at hand the reviewer has been able to find at least six additional attacks printed within the ten weeks between the "Bathos" and the Dunciad, and there is every reason to believe that the larger resources of English libraries would furnish several other items of the same sort. At times in his career Pope was the aggressor; he was not so in the case of Theobald. So far as the grounds of the quarrel go, on the other hand, Theobald certainly had the better of it, except for the fact that the needless aggressiveness of Shakespeare Restored struck the first blow.
So far as demeanor during the battle is concerned, we may readily agree with Dr. Jones that Theobald seems the more decorous. But we might have to revise this opinion if we knew as much about the small details of Theobald's career1 as we do of Pope's. It is disingenuous of Theobald to insist that
1 For example, if we knew the detailed activities of the so-called "Concanen Club." Dr. Jones, more judicious than Lounsbury, is frank to admit the existence of the Club. But both Lounsbury and he should have taken this Club and its connection with Mist's Journal more seriously. It is interesting to note that the leading article of (Mist's) Weekly-Journal or Saturday' s-Post for March 20, 1725 (which is an attack on the Shakespeare of Pope and Tonson) says in closing: "And we take this Opportunity of inviting you [Mr. Mist], to be a Member of a Club or Society of Authors, which is to meet once a Week, or oftner, as Occasion shall require, to consider of Ways and Means for keeping up and maintaining the Privileges of Authors, and defending our Rights and Properties against the Incroachments of Booksellers and Players." Theobald was a member of this Club just being formed; his dedication of Shakespeare Restored is dated two days before this letter attacking Pope and announcing the Club appeared in the Journal, Clearly he was not commencing his attack without "moral support," and one may suspect that his unfortunate tone concerning Pope's work came in part from this Club. Another passage in the letter just quoted assures the seller of Pope's Shakespeare that a new, better edition "would reward him in the Sale." This seems certainly to hint that as early as 1725 Theobald dreamed of editing the dramatist.
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"he had always treated Pope with deference and respect" (Jones, p. 112); but, so far as we know, he was guilty of nothing so bad as the "lies and half- lies" which Pope seems to, have told. In at least one case, however, the poet was not so guilty as has generally been thought. He does not accuse Theobald (in the note to Book I, line 106, of the 1729 Dunciad) of ingratitude but of bad manners. Pope had publicly advertised for aid on his edition of Shakespeare; and Theobald, while not giving aid, had at the same time asked favors of Pope. His later defense against a supposed charge of ingrati- tude, while it has satisfied commentators from Nichols to Dr. Jones, seems not to answer the charge really made. Theobald is further disingenuous in his defense of concealing his design on Shakespeare when Pope asked for aid. In one letter (see Nichols' Illustrations, II, 221) he says: "To say I concealed my design is a slight mistake : for I had no such certain design, till I saw how incorrect an Edition Mr. Pope had given the publick." Unfor- tunately in another letter (see Lounsbury, pp. 331-32), Theobald had already used a totally different defense: "It is a very grievous complaint on his side, that I would not communicate all my observations upon Shakespeare, tho' he requested it by public advertisements. I must own, I considered the labor of twelve years' study upon this author of too much value rashly to give either the profit of it to a bookseller whom I had no obligations to; or to the credit of an editor so likely to be thankless." Theobald was cer- tainly ready by 1725 to prosecute any design with regard to the text of Shakespeare that might yield most return in reputation. The prosecution was, on his side, entirely justifiable, but it was neither generous nor, in manner, quite gentlemanly. On the other hand we may grant that Pope distorted facts recklessly and often — as, for example, when he transferred the weekly crucifixion of Shakespeare from the Censor to Mist's Journal; but may one suggest that few commentators ever grant the possibility of an unintentional misstatement in Pope's work? The Dunciad seems fully as reckless as it does calculating in its malice.
Usually the effect of Pope's "libels" has been thought scathing; one hardly knows how to interpret Dr. Jones's view. On page 133 he says: "It is this variorum edition of The Dunciad that was largely responsible for the character of Theobald that has come down to recent times." On page 198, speaking of the period after Theobald's Shakespeare had appeared, Dr. Jones tells us that Theobald's "letters written at this time also show that his edition had entirely removed any stigma that might have been incurred from The Dunciad, and that he occupied a favorable position in the eyes of the public." Page 203 reiterates this view. If Theobald lived down the variorum Dunciad, it seems strange that after Pope deposed him in 1742, the odium should return. Has it ever been suggested that allied with Pope's satire was the fact that Theobald was neither a university man nor a clergy- man? Very few men of his century outside that potent dual tradition attained to better reputation than did Theobald. In leaving this phase
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of Dr. Jones's work one may remark that there is no occasion for amazement that Pope called the brilliant emendator dull; one need only remember that the bel-esprit from Solomon to Pope has tended to regard much study as a weariness and all editors as dull dogs. Theobald's letters here printed by Dr. Jones show more power of emendation than of personality.
The more valuable part of Dr. Jones's work is that which traces the methods of English scholarship in Theobald's day. The derivation of the method from Bentley is made so probable by Dr. Jones that few will dispute his conclusions. But having thus established the dependence of Theobald on the great classicist, Dr. Jones proceeds to forget Bentley at times and to heap all the credit upon his hero. We are told (p. 244) "that Jortin, Warton, Upton, and Church used a method which did not exist before Theobald." And on page 251 we read : " One reason why in the end Theobald 's reputation was unable to overcome the misrepresentations of Pope lay in the fact that as his method became more general its source was obscured." But, it may be urged, Theobald did not originate; he only adapted; and Jortin, Warton, Upton, and Church were also capable of independent adaptation. It is not entirely clear in what respects Theobald modified Bentley's method. We are not told much except that while Bentley drew parallels for purposes of annotation or emendation from all possible sources, Theobald sensibly made a specialty of expounding Shakespeare by parallels from the dramatist himself and from books that he might have read. Patrick Hume, however, in his 321 folio pages of notes on Milton had cited many parallels from Milton's reading — for purposes other than emendation, to be sure — and he should receive credit for at least hinting this adaptation. Similarly, while approv- ing in substance Theobald's claim that his work is "the first Assay of the kind on any modern Author whatsoever," one should consider at least Fenton's unsuccessful "assay" of Milton (1725) and possibly some editions of Continental authors. It is happiness in emendation that gives Theobald his soundest reputation today; he is less admirable for method. Dr. Jones tells us on page 192 that Theobald "blazed the trail succeeding editors have always followed"; and on page 219, that he "made popular a method which, with amplifications and modifications, has come down to the present day." If Dr. Jones had compared Theobald's methods with the brilliant textual methods that have recently been evolved for Shakespeare by Pollard, McKerrow, and other English scholars, he would have revised his account of the defects of Theobald's edition (pp. 189-91). Considered from a modern point of view Theobald's method was very bad for at least three reasons unstressed by Dr. Jones. Theobald chose the least authoritative text extant — Pope's — as the basis of his edition; he made no attempt, so far as Dr. Jones shows, to determine the interrelationships and relative authority of the different quartos and folios; and lastly he was far too eager to emend. It is very well to assert his insistence on proof for an emendation; he was not like Pope or Fenton in the matter. But one who boasts that he
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can make five hundred more emendations on Shakespeare than a rival editor; who fairly early in his career announces two thousand emendations on Beaumont and Fletcher, and later can "amend and account for above 20 thousand Passages in Hesychius" — such a scholar seems not a model of method in the "critical doubt." For his own day, Theobald's method was good; but we may be thankful that it has not "come down to the present day" without being thoroughly revolutionized.
The ground covered by this study is most varied, extensive, and difficult. Dr. Jones has displayed great industry and good judgment; but it is not to be expected that a doctoral dissertation on so complex a field should be free from error. It is, therefore, with no desire to depreciate this judicious industry that the following errors are indicated. In view of the existing evidence1 that "Book and the man" was a misprint in the first Dunciad, it is regrettable that Lounsbury's theory on the passage is accepted by Dr. Jones (p. 129). Again he follows Lounsbury and others in misdating the first appearance of Pope's "Fragment of a Satire," a misdating which would be harmless were it not for the unwarranted implications woven about the wrong date and Gildon's "venal quill" by Mr. Courthope. The proper date, with the first known version of the "Fragment," is found in the St. James Journal of December 15, 1722.2 In speaking of Fielding's attitude toward Theobald, one should certainly mention chapter viii of a Journey from This World to the Next.
Errors, probably typographical, have been noted as follows: Zachary Pearce's name is misspelled, p. 40, note 26; on p. 357 the Index should refer to Hawley, not Harley, Bishop. A number of references are faulty : Note 47, on p. 19, does not support the text in all the assertions made. On p. 87, note 35, for 160 read 161. On p. 93, note 52 should refer to p. iv rather than to vi. Page 116, note 33, for 20 read 181; p. 156, note 2, for 422 read 322; p.'160, note 11, for 241-45 read 341-45; p. 166, note 27, for September 17 read September 19; p. 182, note 60, for xliv read xlvi; on p. 349, the refer- ence concerning the Metamorphoses should be to Nichols' Illustrations, Vol. II, p. 711, not p. 708.
The bibliography of Theobald's works (Appendix D) is also susceptible of improvement. Complete bibliographical description of the works is never given, and title-pages are printed with unsystematic modifications. One would like statements as to how many times the various works were reprinted. Certainly the earliest editions should be listed, and this is not done in the case of the History of the Loves of Antiochus and Stratonice, here dated 1719, but apparently printed in 1717. Ban and Syrinx, an Opera, in one Act (so advertised in the Weekly-Journal or Saturday' s-Post for
i See the Elwin-Courthope Pope, IV, 271, n, 2, and VII, 110.
* Ibid., V, 445; see also for Mr. Aitken's discovery of this version the Academy for February 9, 1889.
REVIEWS AND NOTICES 63
March 22, 1718) is omitted from the bibliography altogether, though men- tioned on page 26. The Gentleman's Library, which Dr. Jones has " found no trace or mention of .... except in Theophilus Gibber's Lives of the Poets, vol. 5, p. 287," and which he consequently dates 1722, is frequently advertised, as are several of Theobald's works, in the Weekly- Journal early in 1718. The advertisement should be interesting to any who believe Theobald above equivocation, because it attempts to give the anonymous work the protection of Sir Richard Steele's name. The advertisement notices the Censor, the Gentleman's Library, and the Lady's Library. Yoked by an "Also" with a long description of the Censor comes the following:
The Gentleman's Library; containing Rules for Conduct in all Parts of Life, viz. Education, Learning, Dress, Conversation, and Choice of Friends, Love and Gallantry, Courage and Honour, Affectation, Idleness, Envy, Recrea- tions and Studies, Lying, Wit and Humour, Drinking, Marriage and conjugal Vertues, Religion, Detractions, Talkativeness, Impertinent Curiosity, Pride, Contentment, Retirement, &, Also
The Lady's Library, published by Sir Richard Steele.1
Dr. Jones's dissertation has been subjected to this detailed examination because, in spite of some few imperfections, it should displace much of the material in Lounsbury's brilliant but untrustworthy Text of Shakespeare. The imperfections seem due less to lack of ability on the part of Dr. Jones than to our American system which frequently imposes as the problem for a doctoral dissertation a task impossible of achievement in the time ordinarily allotted to such work.
GEORGE SHERBUBN
UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO
The Elements of Old English. By SAMUEL MOORE and THOMAS A.
KNOTT. Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr, 1919. Pp.
vii+209. Historical Outlines of English Phonology and Middle English Grammar.
By SAMUEL MOORE. Ann Arbor, Michigan: George Wahr,
1919. Pp. vii+83.
For nearly thirty years no new textbook for the use of university classes in elementary Old English has appeared in America. During that period the best and most widely used book has been a reader with a grammatical introduction. Because of the brevity and schematic arrangement of the "Grammar" in that work, the book has not brought about a standardization of instruction in Old English; in some universities instructors interested in the scientific study of language have supplemented the "Grammar" by much
i Weekly- Journal or Saturday's- Post, 8 February, 1718; repeated at least eleven times thereafter.
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detailed information and have given thorough drill in forms and phonology; but in too many, instructors have been satisfied with mere accuracy and quantity of translation. The new book of Professors Moore and Knott, if extensively used, will standardize the teaching of Old English. The first part ("Elementary Grammar") presents in a series of twenty-four lessons (each containing paradigms, grammatical explanations, and Old English text) a thorough survey of the sounds and forms of West Saxon. The information given is up to date (teachers of Old English will note with gratitude that at last we have a class book which explains that the so-called reduplicating verbs are based not on reduplication but on ablaut), and it is presented with the most painstaking definiteness. Everything that the student really needs to know is made clear. The last part of the book is a systematically arranged, succinct " Reference Grammar." The cost of print- ing unfortunately prevented the authors from providing a body of texts for reading; for most effective use, the book should be supplemented as soon as possible with enough texts to give material for the first course in Old English. The second of the books named above, like the first, is meant for use as a companion to university and college courses. It is divided into seven parts: (1) "The Elements of Phonetics," (2) "Modern English Sounds," (3) "The Language of Chaucer," (4) "The History of English Sounds," (5) "Historical Development of Middle English Inflections," (6) "Middle English Dialects," (7) "Middle English Spelling." At first glance the series of headings may seem heterogeneous and lacking in unity or plan. Careful reading of the book, however, shows that its plan is logical and that the book can be profitably used in connection with almost any course (not too advanced) in the history of the English language. Its chief functions appear to be to give a concise, accurate body of fundamental information and to afford a means for correlating courses in Old, Middle, and Modern English, or widening the scope of any one course so as to make the student comprehend the whole history of our language. As in the case of The Elements of Old English, this book is up to date in its information and pre- sents its material in the simplest and clearest terms. Professor Moore is to be congratulated on his phonetic alphabet, which looks to be comprehen- sible to an elementary student and successful as a means for the fairly exact recording of English and American sounds.
J. R. H.
Modern Philology
VOLUME XVIII
June IQ2O
NUMBER 2
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT. I
THE PRINCIPLE OF PERSONALITY
In the work of a writer who has produced a deep and far-reaching effect on the ideas and tendencies of his own and succeeding genera- tions, and who is universally recognized as one of the few principal authors of an epoch in the history of civilization, there must have been acting, within the many contradictions imbedded in particular conclusions, within the endless modifications and concrete adapta- tions caused by the fortunes of a busy life and the pull and push of his environment by which is brought forward a constant stream of interests and inhibitions, and within the temporary and superficial bewilderments and perplexities as to methods of procedure, by which every pathfinder is beset — there must have been acting in all this diversity of mental effort a significant individual force, which, no matter how complex, can be expressed in a term of unity. As in the work of Herder's philosophical contemporary and early teacher, Kant, this term is found as the systematic criticism of the analytic reason, conceived as an absolute standard of knowledge; and in that of his poetical contemporary and early disciple, Goethe, in the spon- taneous and harmonious response of all the faculties, emotional, imaginative, and intellectual, to the important concrete realities of life; so there must be attainable an integral conception of Herder, which may be regarded as the proper focus in which all the elements of his immensely rich product of ideas are joined.
65] 1 [MODERN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920
IS"
2 MARTIN SCHUTZE
It is with the mental character of Herder that we are concerned. That there is need for further study of this subject, there is no doubt. The monumental work of Haym, which will continue for many years to be the classic biography of Herder, limits itself in its theoretical parts to relating Herder to the chief currents of systematic philos- ophy, particularly the rationalism of Leibnitz and Kant. This method of orientation fixes the focus of the account outside of Her- der's thought, so that the latter's ideas appear as secondary forms of systems which have their unities in other minds, of which Herder inevitably appears as a more or less imperfect variant. No matter how sympathetic and large-minded such an account — and that of Haym is admirably so — it cannot present Herder's thought as an integral whole. It gives many of its principal aspects, but not as the expressions of the unified mental character, Herder, but rather as so many individual particulars plucked from, now this, now that, feature of the theoretical minds of various systematic philosophers.
It was perhaps in recognition of some of the shortcomings of this method, to which, however, he paid a disappointing allegiance in his introduction to Herder's Ideen1 that Professor Ktihnemann attempted to account for Herder's thought by his personality. He apparently did not realize that personality conceived as prior to mind — for it cannot be conceived as productive of mind unless it be prior to it — is devoid of meaning. Personality implies an indis- soluble reciprocal union of the two common abstractions, the concrete person and his mind.
Moreover, such an account, if it could be successful, would not solve the problem at issue, which is the theoretical unity of Herder's thought. All the concrete facts of the growth of Herder's personality become relevant to this problem only through being brought into its focus. The failure of Professor Kuhnemann's essay lies in his neither having brought out new essential facts nor having found the proper focus in which the old facts would acquire more significant meanings.
Other writers, who will be referred to in their proper places, limit themselves to relating particular theories of Herder to the
»In Kurschner's National- Litter atur, Vol. LXXVII, 1, 1; see also Eugen Kiihne- mann, Herder's Personlichkeit in seiner Weltanschauung, Berlin, 1893.
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THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 3
history of kindred theories, without attempting to investigate the foundations of Herder's thought as a whole.
Herder's dominant intellectual interests and his most potent critical energies moved in the fields of literature, particularly poetry, and of art, and in these his principal ideas developed first and with greatest force and clarity. They entered later, and with less cer- tainty and authority, though with great energy and comprehension, the fields of general history, which he regarded as the history of civilization or the human mind, education, systematic philosophy, ethics, even politics. He did not apply his original ideas even to religion, which was his profession, and which for a long time he even theoretically accepted naively in the form of Lutheran liberal orthodoxy, until he had done his most important work on literature, the arts, and history.
It is in these later fields that his thought occasionally suffers from a certain vagueness and from contradictions in theoretical construction. Most of his critics, especially those trained in system- atic philosophy, being more interested in the apparent weightiness of his later subjects, are inclined to regard these lapses as fundamental flaws in his thought.
Herder has thus come to be judged an inspirer, a stimulator, a sort of John in the Wilderness, offering many and fertile suggestions, and giving, by the fineness of his temper and the richness of his knowledge and language, a strong and abundant impulse to other minds, endowed with the more essential gifts of trained critical or inspired artistical genius, but not as himself the possessor of truly fundamental powers or the bearer of a definitive message.
Herder's views were arranged, in accordance with his intuitive and concrete genius, not like those of his later great antagonist, Kant, in systematic order from clearly defined abstract premises to theoretic unity, but pragmatically, in concrete progression from one problem to another which involved embodiments of his principal ideas. The lack of systematic disposition pertaining to this method has been generally, though with only partial justice, mistaken for lack of any essential order, and has produced, even in serious students of Herder, an impression of fragmentariness and incoherence, which has obscured the high degree of completeness and consistency of his ideas.
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4 MARTIN SCHUTZE
Externally, his ideas are often clothed in the bristling array of direct and indirect conflict, sometimes with various intellectual faults of his age, but most often and prominently with the then ruling rationalistic tendencies in literary and aesthetic theory and in systematic philosophy, and carry some of the passing debris of conflict with them. It is necessary to cast aside this now useless and confusing encumbrance before the underived substance of his thought comes to the surface.
Since Lessing, at the time of his Laokoon, was the most eminent representative of aesthetic rationalism (from which he turned almost immediately afterward, in his Dramaturgic, and still more in the practice of Emilia Galotti, approaching the position of Herder), and since Kant remained the leader of philosophical rationalism, it was natural, even if not in keeping with his true importance, that Herder, whose ideas were antagonistic particularly to rationalism, should single them out for his criticisms, and be carried even to the length of partly presenting his own ideas not in their real positive bearings on his position, but in the negative and not essential relations of exceptions to his adversaries7 conclusions and critical methods, with the result that he suffered the penalty, which the polemical author never wholly escapes, of having his positive products annexed as mere amendments to the body of the achievements of others. Even to the present day the general opinion regarding these critical essays has not been able to free itself from this illusion of the polemical aspect — an illusion which is one of the many shapes of that intellectual Proteus, overgeneralization.1
The first work in which, though limited to a particular aesthetical problem, there appeared in precise form the ideas whereon his theories were to rest in his Erstes Kritisches Waldchen, published in the beginning of 1769, in which he proceeded from a radical criticism of the conclusions published three years before by Lessing in his Laokoon to a statement of his own position.
An investigation of Herder's theory should therefore start with this essay. Since, however, the subject of this study is not Herder's
» See for instance, in addition to those already mentioned, Professor W. G. Howard's scholarly introduction to his edition of Laokoon, Lessing, Herder, Goethe, (New York, Holt, 1910), pp. cl, clviii, in which the first Waldchen is regarded chiefly as a criticism of Lessing's essay; Dr. Priedland, Uber das Verhaltniss von Herder's " Erstem Kritischen Waldchen" zu Lessing's "Laokoon" (Progr. Bromberg, 1905).
THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 5
aesthetical theory, but the fundamental complex of ideas underlying his aesthetical as well as all his other important theories, aesthetical detail will even in the chapter devoted to that Wdldchen be considered only as far as it lies in the focus of that complex.
SURVEY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATIONS OF MODERN AESTHETICAL THEORIES BEFORE LESSING
The chief importance of Lessing's Laokoon lies in its character as the most eminent attempt of the eighteenth century to combine the aesthetical element of the two principal philosophical currents of the era beginning with the Renaissance, the absolutistic-rationalistic, and the empirical-psychological, with its variant, the naturalistic- sensualistic. It foreshadows the attempt, represented by the Kant- ian philosophy, to. extend this harmonization to the entire field of knowledge.
The rationalistic elements of Lessing's theory center in the traditional conception of "imitation" of truth and nature; the naturalistic-sensualistic, in a changed view of nature and new ideas regarding the dependence of all knowledge, and consequently, of the matters and techniques pertaining to poetry and the arts, upon the functions of the senses.
RATIONALISM IN AESTHETICAL THEORY
The doctrine of "imitation," "mimesis," was first formulated by Aristotle, who in his Poetics taught that art "imitated" not indeed the literal details of nature, but more or less generalized conceptions based on natural realities. This idea entered modern theory through Vida's and Scaliger's Latin works in which the rules given by Aris- totle combined with those formulated by Horace were established as the absolute and ultimate canons of art and poetry.
This doctrine received its classical French form by Boileau, and thence was taken over into German literature, where it held sway almost until Lessing. The revolt of the Swiss, Bodmer and Breitinger, against the French influence as represented by Gottshed, was not directed against the principle of imitation as such, which was assumed to rest secure upon the authority of Aristotle, but against
6 MARTIN SCHUTZE
the French rationalistic interpretation of the nature which was to be imitated.
Boileau identified nature with truth of ideas, reason. According to him, truth is both nature and the beautiful. "Nothing is beauti- ful except the true." " Nature is true," et d'abord on la sent, i.e., "and nature brings with it its own evidence." The imitation of this trinity of truth-of-nature-which-is-beauty must, however, not be literal, yet it must be clothed in sufficient verisimilitude to produce the "illusion " of reality. But it must not give pain. The imitation even of things in themselves offensive should give pleasure. The rules for accomplishing this result are embodied in, and to be derived from, classical art.
If we ask for a discussion of the meaning of the term beauty, Boileau answers, that beauty and taste have rules "absolute, uni- versal, and necessary." This can only mean that they are superior to any conditions of environment or individuality and cannot be accounted for on any grounds of concrete empirical experience. The rationalistic conception excludes from its conception of beauty- nature-truth the character of individuality.
If we probe this conception farther, we find that it represents no ascertainable specific substance, but is a formal abstraction drawn from those works of classical art which have come down to us, and supported by classical and post-classical aesthetic theory. It is a conception without any authentic or original foundation. It rests not on the mental processes of creative art but of formal analysis at second hand.
Batteux' later doctrine that art should imitate only beautiful nature is largely a qualification of Boileau's formula.
Boileau's theory embraced the Horatian doctrine, "ut pictura poesis." For if general ideas are the proper subjects common to all the arts, there is no reason why the same laws of technique should not prevail in all.
NATURALISM IN AESTHETICAL THEORY
The naturalistic conception of reality produced two principal branches. The one, which concerned itself with the objective substance of nature, had its beginning with Bacon ; the other, which
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THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 7
specialized in the particular sense-processes by which the objective reality "out there," in accordance with the dualism of that age, a remnant of the medieval view of life, was supposed to be conveyed to the mind "in here," started with Locke. This branch is called in some of its representatives associationistic, in others sensualistic, philosophy.
Bacon's own purpose was a general natural science which rejected all a priori methods of generalization and proceeded exclusively by inductive analysis of nature. But he, too, could not free himself from the dualistic tradition of medieval theology. He believed, and Hobbes agreed with him, that only scientific truth was amenable to reason, but that poetry was ruled by the imagination. While thus ignoring the Cartesian dualism of conscious mind and dead matter, which was characteristic of French rationalism and which underlay the aesthetic theories of Boileau and French classicism, he in turn established a different dualism in the opposition of a superior scientific reality, drawn from nature by inductive reasoning, to an inferior poetical reality pertaining to obscure processes of the imagination, which were regarded as spontaneous, intuitive, unanalyzable, irresponsible, and irrelevant to the serious business of life, and in their entirety, as essentially disparate from those of "reason."
Bacon and Hobbes, however, laid, without suspecting it, in this dualism the foundation of a movement which was for a time to assume far greater dimensions than the scientific movement they desired to bring about, and which in philosophy throughout the eighteenth century and beyond, all but overwhelmed it. This was subjective naturalism. The imagination, once having been acknowl- edged as the subjective organ for the apprehension and expression of nature, as the bridge between the inner emotions and the outer being, came necessarily to be regarded as the exclusive aesthetic faculty. As the formalism of rationalism, its absoluteness and emotional poverty, its lack of empirical flexibility, individuality, and spontaneity, grew less satisfactory through repetition, the absorption in a subjective, spontaneous, emotional interpretation of nature became more and more ardent. This reaction is known in the history of literature, especially in England, Switzerland, France, and
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Germany, as the awakening of the nature-sense, the emotional revolt against rationalism, or the Romantic movement in its more general sense. It appeared, in one of its least extreme forms, in Shaftesbury's teaching that the highest test of worth is enthusiasm embodied in the aristocrat and man of the world, whose emotions have been trained to the highest degree of refinement. The revolt gave rise to the doctrine of the original genius as the sole standard of art and poetry, in Edward Young's Conjectures on Original Com- position and in Diderot's essays; to the theories on imagination and native individuality based on English theory and further developed by Bodmer and Breitinger; to the emphasis put on the passions in contrast to ideas by Dubos and Diderot; to the ever-growing insist- ence on individuality and spontaneous impulse as the fundamental forces of life, which reached its climax in Rousseau. Further, it became generalized in the transcendentalism of Hamann, Words- worth, and the Romantic poets and philosophers of Germany, the Schlegels, Wackenroder, Fichte, Schelling, Novalis, Grillparzer, and many others, the central idea of which is the absolute unity of nature and the soul of man in God, and in the conception of all truth as a unified ecstatic vision of spontaneous beatitudes unspoiled by worldly contacts. The identity of soul and nature, nature animism, Naturbe- seelung, is the test of subjective naturalism in all its later forms.1
Compared with the abstract rationalism of the classical school, this subjective naturalism, with all its chaotic variations, uncer- tainties, and arbitrariness represented individuality and spontaneity as opposed to fixed and monotonous conventionality. Boileau's conception of beauty excludes creative originality both as to content and form. The poet's and artist's genius is limited to the adapta- tion of absolute traditional rules and forms of expression to ideas which have no final roots in his individual experience but in an impersonal, universal, i.e., extra-individual, absolute realm of truth. This lack of authenticity, this cold and unimaginative formalism is the fatal defect of all systems of aesthetic classicism since Aristotle.
* For the details of this development see von Hein, Die Entstehung der neueren Aesthetik (Stuttgart, Cotta, 1886), Zweiter Abschnitt, pp. 81-271; Malcolm H. Dewey, Herder's Relation to the Aesthetic Theory of the 18th Century (University of Chicago Dissertation, George Banta Publishing Co., Menasha, Wis., 1920); W. G. Howard, Introduction to Witkowski, Georg. Lessing's Werke. Leipzig Bibliographisches Institut' Vol 4, Einleitung.
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THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 9
The aesthetic angers inherent in subjective naturalism, on the other hand, are those of the temptations of all subjectivity, which in its extreme forms leads to a self -centered disregard of objective reality, to impulsiveness and temperamental wilfulness and ethical irresponsibility — in short, to all the faults of Romanticism.
From the subjective naturalism of the eighteenth century we must distinguish the opposite tendency of purely objective natural- ism, called materialism, which developed simultaneously with the former, and whose most extreme representatives were de Lamettrie, Dietrich von Holboch (Systeme de la nature),1 and Helvetius. The materialists interpret nature as a purely physical mechanism, denying the reality of the soul, except as a symbol of physical forces. They are the direct opposite of the Romanticists. The form of nature, which materialistic art and poetry are supposed to imitate, is a literal aggregate of physical objects and their properties. The artistic naturalism which grew out of this movement rapidly succumbed to the triumph of the subjective-idealistic movement, which was to dominate European civilization for more than three generations. But it reappeared by the new scientific vehicle- of evolutionary biology, in the last generation of the nineteenth century, as a great force in art and literature.
THE SENSUALISTIC BRANCH OF NATURALISM
The sensualistic, or psychological, branch of naturalistic philos- ophy had as its chief representatives Condillac and Diderot. Les- sing was most directly influenced by Diderot, whose "lettre sur les sourds et les muets" offered a method for the sensualistic attack on the classical doctrine, "ut pictura poesis."
The sensualistic theory in aesthetics simply meant that since according to Locke the ideas contained in the mind are not innate but as it were in accordance with the dualism of the inner and outer realities peculiar to his age, carried there from the outer world by the senses, art and poetry must be differentiated in accordance with the particular sense which governs the means of expression pertaining to each. Consequently, poetry, which is communicated through
*Cf. Lange, "Geschichte des Materialismus," Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (1892), 5. Tell, p. 349.
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10 ARTIN SCHUTZE
the ear, must follow some particular order of association determined by the sense of hearing, and pictorial art, analogously, some particular order of association related to seeing.1
THE DEVELOPMENT OF HERDER'S CENTRAL IDEA
Lessing begins his argument in Laokoon with the assumption that the classical Greeks, while they permitted crying as an expression of pain in poetry, rejected it in sculpture, and that their motives for acting thus in apparent contradiction were considerations of beauty. Philoktetes, in Sophocles' drama, Mars, in the Iliad, when he is wounded by Diomed; Venus, in the Iliad, though but slightly scratched; Laokoon, in the Aeneid, when attacked by serpents, all cry out. The Trojans, on the other hand, are forbidden by their King Priam to cry. Lessing explains this difference by saying that Homer intended to make us realize the difference in civilization between Greeks and Trojans. The former could cry and yet retain their self-control, while the less-civilized Trojans, by giving way to their feelings, might be demoralized. Lessing adds that the modern man also refrains from giving free tongue to his feelings; but not, like the Trojans, from fear of losing his self-possession but from a deeply fixed habit of self -repression.
In Lessing's view, the fundamental difference between art and poetry is revealed by a comparison of the late-Greek sculptural group of the death of Laokoon, the Trojan high priest, who had warned his people against the wooden horse left by the Greeks, and of his two sons, in the coils of two serpents sent by Poseidon, with the passage in the Aeneid by which it had been inspired. In Virgil's account, Laokoon "lifts a fearful roar to the heavens," whereas in the group he is represented as a man who in an agonized struggle suppresses any outcry or at most emits a groan.
i Since the subject of this essay is not Herder's aesthetic theories but the funda- mental ideas underlying his view of reality, to which his criticism of Lessing's Laokoon simply opens the most direct road of approach, a discussion of the numerous theoretic details pertaining to the doctrine of aesthetic naturalism and sensualism up to Lessing and Herder, would only tend to disturb the focus of this inquiry.
The principal writers on aesthetic theory are the following: in England, Shaftesbury, Jonathan Richardson, Joseph Spence, Daniel Webb, James Harris, Hutcheson, Hume, Edward Young; in Prance, Dubos, Batteaux, Caylus, Condillac, Diderot, Rousseau; in Germany and German Switzerland, Bodmer and Breitinger, Baumgarten, Winkelma'nn, Sulzer, and many others. See bibliographical references above, p. 72, footnote; and Windelband, Gesch. d. Phil. (Freiburg, 1892), 5. Teil, pp. 345 fl.
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THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT
11
If, asks Lessing, men, and even gods cry out in Greek poetry without loss of dignity, why does the sculptor, who in making the statue of Laokoon followed the account of Virgil very closely, depart from the latter in the one particular of the crying? The reason cannot be in the unbecoming nature of crying as such, but must be in the difference of the means of expression pertaining to the two arts of poetry and picture-making. His final answer is that the Greeks depicted, or, to use his own term derived from Aristotle and French classical theory, "imitated" only schone Korper. The Greek artist portrayed nothing except the "beautiful." Crying should not be depicted in sculpture because it gives the mouth the appearance of a cavity and distorts the face.
By this principle of formal beauty the Greek sculptor was obliged to refrain from the representation of certain passions which produce distortions of face and body, like rage and despair. Wrath has to be toned down to seriousness, misery to sorrow. When grief is too strong to be thus reduced to lineaments of beauty, as in the scene of Agamemnon at the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, the Greek artist veils the father's face.
Herder takes exception to every one of Lessing's generalizations. Lessing is mistaken in assuming that Homer's heroes generally cry. Agamemnon, when wounded, convulsively controls himself without crying, Hector, the Trojan, when struck by a heavy rock, falls in silence; Menelaus, wounded by an arrow, draws out the weapon without a sound; Diomed, badly wounded, asks Sthenelus to draw the arrow from the wound, uttering imprecations against his enemies. Philoktetes, in Sophocles' play, does not cry lustily, but represses his pain, giving vent to it only occasionally. Moreover, his pain is not mainly physical but mental; it is the hopeless desolation of a life of complete solitude, helpless squalor, want of care, affection, and fellowship, of all that makes life human. The fifth chapter, which consists of the analysis of Sophocles' Philoktetes is one of the fine pieces of literary analysis which abound in Herder's writings.
Pherekles, in the Iliad, when he is caught in flight, clamors loudly, not because Greek heroes cried customarily, but because Homer intended to depict him as a coward. Mars, when wounded by the javelin of Diomed, roars like ten thousand warriors so that
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both armies are horrified, not because crying is a general law of Greek nature, but by virtue of his particular character as the gross, ferocious god of war raging in battle; and, analogously, Venus, though barely scratched, sets up a loud and piteous lament, not because all Greeks did likewise but because she is the tender, self-indulgent, petted goddess of love.
In thus showing that in Homer and other classical Greek poets the expression of pain is used as a means of characterization and not as a general formal convention, and that each different expression must be considered in its specific elements and relations to the character uttering it and to the circumstances in which that char- acter moves, Herder replaces Lessing's rationalistic generalization by the true principle of individualization, which should dominate both poetic and artistic analysis.
He applies this principle also to Priam and the Trojans. Priam forbids his people to weep, not because they are barbarians and must be kept in an insensate condition, but because he is heroic and tries to make them realize that they must indulge in no grief while their native land is invaded.
From this analysis there follows an important conclusion which Herder draws in a discussion of elegiac poetry (chaps, iii and iv). In reviewing the poetry of suffering produced by different peoples, Herder finds that it reveals characteristic differences. For instance, Ragnor Lodbrog's song of former victories uttered in unbearable physical torture is characteristic of the ruggedness of the Norse character. Priam's lament over Hector's body, on the other hand, is expressive of the more gentle and civilized nature of the Trojan people. National elegies embody the national spirit of a people. Herder thus expands his principle of individual personality to that of a collective, racial, and national personality.
However, Herder continues, while each people has its own indi- viduality, each is essential to the whole of humanity. It is wrong to suppose, as Lessing does, that the Greeks alone were truly human. From this it follows that the Greeks cannot be the sole possessors of the truth of the beautiful.
Moreover, it is wrong, as Lessing asserts, that the Greeks never represented anything but beauty. Lessing had said that the Greeks
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THE FUNDAMENTAL IDEAS IN HERDER'S THOUGHT 13
had never pictured a fury. But, retorts Herder, the Greeks did depict ugliness. Medusa, with snakes instead of hair, Venus in Moschus' poem, grieving over the death of Adonis, are abhorrent. He draws several conclusions, which, while they appear as mere modifications of Lessing's theory, are in fact new principles. The permanent characters of the personages of high Greek art, Herder concedes, were never ugly or terrible, but their passing states of mind may be both. Secondary characters, however, may be ugly by way of contrast with the principal ones, as the giants under the chariot of angry Jove, or Satyrs, Silenus, and Bacchantes surrounding Bacchus, or the head of Medusa in the shield of Pallas Athene. So much for the gods. The same is true of the heroes. Thersites in the Iliad is not merely ridiculous, as Lessing thought, but an ugly, odious blackguard. Now Herder takes up the picture of Agamemnon veiling his face at the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Again Herder indi- vidualizes by showing that Agamemnon does not represent a universal principle of art, as Lessing thought, but that he acts as the great king he was. Ajax, or Medea, would have acted differently each in accordance with his or her individuality.
The additional principle, however, which determines Herder's discussion of the ugly and underlies that of Agamemnon's veiling his face, though it is not yet clearly realized by him, is that of the focus of composition, another form of individualization. This principle demands the subordination of all secondary factors in a composition in such a manner that the central idea, character, or action receives from those factors additional emphasis and signifi- cance. Thus the Satyrs, Silenus, and Bacchantes are not depicted for their own sakes, either as ideas or as forms of composition, but for the purpose of adding meanings and pictorial enrichments which a single figure of Bacchus could not possibly express. In the Iphigenia group, she, not Agamemnon, is the focal character, and the figure of Agamemnon had to be subordinated in the interest of the unity of the composition.
His principle of individualization gives Herder his standard for judging the remaining generalizations of Lessing. The roaring of Laokoon in Virgil's account according to this principle is not as Lessing assumes good poetry but as faulty there as it would be in
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pictorial art. For it is not compatible with the dignity of his char- acter. It is false individualization. The sculptor of the group, in giving Laokoon the expression and posture of silent agony, deviated from Virgil not because the technique of his particular art constrained him but because in this particular he was the better artist, gifted with a finer feeling for individuality. The best Greek artists, as is shown in the example of Philoktetes and many Homeric characters, do not make their lofty characters roar. Virgil, in the Laokoon scene, loses himself in externalities of description.
From the principle of individualization as opposed to Lessing's principle of general imitation of external objects, Herder proceeds to the formulation of the purpose of art which is higher than that of formal and abstract beauty. The new purpose which owes its emergence to the modern interest in nature, is Wahrheit und Ausdruck, expressive truth or characteristic or individual truth. He did not, however, now any more than later, go the length of the naturalistic demands of the Storm and Stress movement for an exclusively char- acteristic art. Artists, he says, are at all times limited in the full freedom of expressing the truth as they see it by tradition and convention. Among the ancients, for instance, the official religion was one of these limiting forces. It demanded that Bacchus have horns and so the sculptors of figures of Bacchus gave to the brows of their beautiful Bacchic youths indications of horns just sufficiently definite to satisfy traditional religion.
MARTIN SCHUTZE UNIVERSITY OP CHICAGO
[To be continued]
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GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION. I
That w caused far more geminations than is usually admitted is, I believe, a matter of incontrovertible proof. It is also evident that the geminations so caused date from various periods. Some are Primitive Germanic inherited from pre-Germanic; others North or WGermanic; and others restricted to a single dialect. The reason of this is because the w did not always come in contact with the pre- ceding consonant. Given the right conditions an IE. py, in a w-stem might produce Germ, pp, ff, bb, /, 6, or by analogy even p. Such parallel forms are very common, especially those with pp, bb; tt, dd; kk, gg, beside those with single consonants. Naturally when such parallel forms were once established, they were greatly multiplied by analogy. This was especially true of the verbs in pp, tt, kk, which came to have an iterative or intensive force.
Many examples of consonant lengthening have been wrongly attributed to n. We may properly exclude from Germ, n-gemina- tions all words in which the loss of n cannot be explained. Even if OHG. chnappo, chnabo represent double paradigms from an original nom. *knabo, gen. pi. *knctf):bno (cf. Brugmann, Gr., I2, 715); ON. skabb, OE. sceabb l scab ' cannot be referred to a Germ. *sfca55na-, for in that case the n would have remained, just as I and r remain where they cause gemination. Much less can such forms as OHG fethdhah be explained as n-geminations. It is not here denied that n is responsible for many geminations: pp, tt, kk, this being a Prim. Germ, or pre-Germ. process in which the n was assimilated or absorbed. But in the later Germ, such a process cannot be claimed (with the exception noted above) in face of Goth, rign, taikns, wepn, and many similar forms in N. and W. Germ.
A ^-gemination may be suspected wherever related -yo-, ey,o-, or w-stems are found. In some instances the w-stem remains in Germ., as in ON. hottr from *qaty-, *qatu-, with the tt generalized just as we have nn in Goth. kinnusiGr. yews.
79] 15 [MODBBN PHILOLOGY, June, 1920
16 BRANCIS A. WOOD
The w- geminations are here divided into two groups: Prim. Germ, words with pp, mm, it, kk; and other, in most cases later, geminations of the labials, dentals, and gutturals. In the first group pp comes from IE. -py,-, -bh^-; tt from -ty,-, -dhy,-; kk from velar or palatal -ku-, -ghy,-. These gemmations must have taken place in pre-Germ. The process was about as follows: IE. -py,±, pre-Germ. pp-, Germ. 66 (stop not spirant), later pp; IE. -bhy,-, pre-Germ. bbh, Germ. 66, pp. Similarly with the dentals and gutturals. The gemination nn from ny, is here omitted as it is generally admitted.
In the second group are included the geminations ff, pp, hh (which may have been inherited from pre-Germ. -pp-, -U-, -kk-, but more probably arose in Germ, from -fw- etc.) ; pp, it, kk (which are likewise ambiguous, since they might proceed from pre-Germ. 66, dd, gg from by,, etc., or might have originated in Germ, or later from Germ, py, etc., to which the evidence in many cases points); and 66, dd, gg, which must have come from Germ, or later fiw, &w, gw.
IE. -py,-, -6%-:GEKM. -pp-
1. OE. upp(e) 'up/ ON. upp, uppi, OS. upp, up, OE. up, OHG. uf, Goth, iup, pre-Germ. *upy,a-, *eupy,a-: Lesb. hvrv, Lat. s-uppus (*supvos) ; Gr. ux6, Skt. upa, Goth, uf, OHG. oba. For the appended u compare Lesb. airv, ON. ofugr 'verkehrt/ OS. afouh, OHG. abuh, abur, abo:aba 'ab'; Goth. ibuks:ib~; Av. anu'.ana; Goth, inn, probably from *eny,a : in, Gr. &.
2. OE. Iceppa Hag, end, skirt; lobe (of ear, liver); district/ OLG. lappe 'Zipfel eines Kleides/ MLG. lappe 'Stuck, Fetzen Tuches oder Leders; das weiche Bauchfleisch der Tiere/ etc., *hpuon- 'flat piece, flap': Lat. lappa (*lapvd), Czech lopun, lopoun 'Klette/ lopdc 'flache Schaufel/ Slov. lopdr, Serb.-Cr. lopar 'Back- schaufel, Schieber/ LRuss. lopdr 'Spatel zum Lehmkneten/ OE. Icefer 'thin plate of metal; bulrush/ N.E. dial, liverack 'the English iris; the bulrush.' Cf. Nos. 46, 51.
3. MDu. ruppe, rupe 'Raupe/ MLG. rupe idem, roppen 'rupfen, zupfen/ MDu. roppen, ruppen 'pluck at, tear off; eat greedily/ MHG. rupfen, ropfen, Germ. *rupp-, pre-Germ. *rupu-:Lith.
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GERMANIC ^-GEMINATION 17
rupus 'grob, uneben, rauh/ rupuzv 'Krote/ Lett, rupuzis idem, rupuls 'em grobes Stuck Holz; ein Grobian/ Pol. rupic 'bite/ rypac 'scindere, friare/ OE. reofan 'break, tear/ etc. Cf. No. 53.
4. MDu. rappe, MHG. rapfe 'Kratze, Raude/ OHG. raphen, NHG. dial, rapfen ' verharschen/ OHG. raffi 'rauh/ Germ. *rapp-, rep-, pre-Germ. *ropy,-, repy,:No. 54.
5. MDu. MLG. stoppe, stoppel 'Stoppel/ MHG stupfe, stupfel, OHG. stupfila idem., stupf, stopfo, stopfa 'Punkt, Tupf, stimulus/ stupfen 'leicht bertihrend stossen, stacheln, antreiben/ MLG. stoppel 'Stachel/ Germ. *stupp-, pre-Germ. *stupy,-, whence also with later assimilation Germ. *stubb- from *s£w5w-:ON. stubbr, stubbe, 'stub/ ME., MLG. stubbe idem, NE. stubbleiGr. (rrvinnj 'tow/ Lett. stupure, stups 'das nachgebliebene Ende von etwas Gebrochenem/ ON. stufr 'Stumpf/ etc.
Here also I would add, as genuine Germ, words, OE. for-stoppian 'stop up, close/ OLG. stuppon, MDu., MLG. stoppen 'stop up, stop/ OHG. stopfon 'pungere/ MHG. NHG. stopfen, Germ. *stuppon, -djan 'stuff, stop up; stop/ pre-Germ. *stupy,d- sm.d *stupy,o- in Germ. *stuffa-, *stufwa- 'Stoff/ whence Ital. stoffa, stoffo, OFr. estoffe, Fr. etoffe, with reborrowing in Germ.
6. Norw. duppe 'tauchen/ OE. dyppan 'dip', baptize/ doppettan 'dive, plunge (of water-birds)/ MDu. doppen 'dip, sop, eintunken/ Germ. *dupp~; *dubw-:M.LG. dobbe 'Niederung, Vertiefung; Sumpf/ MDu.