A friend, long deceased, once told me how he had decided to specialize in Japanese literature. In the early 1970s, he heard a talk by a well-known Japanologist, who contrasted China study and Japan study by citing the opening lines of two primers for foreign students. The Chinese primer began with the line “I am hungry”; the Japanese one began with the line “The cherry blossoms are falling from the sky.” My friend chose to go the way of the cherry blossoms.

In 1933, while rummaging about in the mediaeval records of Lincoln, I found a whole series of new entries concerning the Church plays of Lincoln Cathedral for the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Previously one could survey the few known items concerning them in the appendix to E. K. Chambers' Mediaeval Stage. One could add to these a few more details by going to Chambers' sources, Mr. A. F. Leach and Bishop Christopher Wordsworth, whose Notes on Mediaeval Services in England contains a section devoted to Lincoln customs. The extant records, however, contain a consecutive series of entries which outline with remarkable fullness the drama within the Cathedral Church from 1318 to the accession of Elizabeth.

“Voici,” wrote Corneille in his dedication of L'Illusion comique 1636) to the unidentified M. F. D. R., “un étrange monstre que je vous dédie. Le premier acte n'est qu'un prologue, les trois suivants font une comédie imparfaite, le dernier est une tragédie: et tout cela, cousu ensemble, fait une comédie.” Most critics of the play have not looked beyond the first part of this indulgent characterization by its author: with varying degrees of indulgence on their own part, they have regarded L'Illusion comique primarily as “un étrange monstre.” It has been dismissed as a youthful whim; taxed with superficiality and inconsistency; seen primarily as an étude dramatique; believed interesting only as a document of theatrical life in the period, a backstage curio; viewed as a dramatization of Corneille's relations with the actor Mondory. Whatever the critical point of view (biographical, esthetic, historical or moral), the views of the play have all been partial. Yet many of these views are right, but right only when taken altogether: this early play is an élude dramatique; a document of the stage controversy of the period; a backstage drama; a dramatization of Corneille's relations with actors; a whim. It is, in short, a play about the theater.

In the last weeks of World War II when the battle front swayed to and fro around Vienna, Ida Orloff died practically forgotten, in the nearby hamlet of Tullnerbach, in the fifty-seventh year of her life. Few among the villagers knew her as a once-famous star of the foremost theaters in Berlin and Vienna. In the confusion of those climactic days of the war when all newspapers had suspended publication, no notice was taken of her death and her biography has remained unwritten. Inasmuch as Gerhart Hauptmann patterned the heroines of a number of his works after the youthful actress, a brief documented account of her most unconventional life and of her relations with the great Silesian poet may be of some interest to students of the German theater of the first half of the twentieth century.

Paradise lost, in spite of all the critical and scholarly acknowledgements that it is a “typical” seventeenth-century epic, has not often enough been seriously considered in the context of the Restoration, when, of course, it appeared. The audience that read it was also reading Dryden. And while it was obviously not a “party poem” in the way that Absalom and Achitophel was, it certainly was not detached from its age. In his own way, Milton was responding to contemporary events and issues with something of Dryden's hardness of mind and spirit. Indeed, certain aspects of Paradise Lost may appear in an altogether new perspective when we consider how closely Dryden used Milton's epical material in his own small epic. We may, to pursue one aspect in detail, even turn up a plausible model for Satan.

That there are figures in all things is a notion which in the Renaissance, certainly no less than in any other period, demonstrated both its potential sublimity and its potential absurdity. Like many other sublime commonplaces, we find it in Shakespeare; and in Shakespeare, too, we find the quintessence of at least one kind of allegorical interpreter, for “there is figures in all things” is spoken by that redoubtable combination of learning and bravery, the valorous Welsh captain Fluellen in Henry V. To Fluellen's mind, as he pursues the universal figurative correspondences, Macedon and Monmouth are as “alike as my fingers is to my fingers.” He not only perceives such allegorical richness, he is eager to communicate it. Ancient Pistol cannot complete his tirade against “that goddess blind / That stands upon the rolling restless stone” before Fluellen must break in with an explication in which iconographic and thematic elements are finely balanced: “By your patience, Aunchient Pistol, Fortune is painted blind, with a muffler afore her eyes, to signify to you that Fortune is blind; and she is painted also with a wheel, to signify to you, which is the moral of it, that she is turning and inconstant and mutability and variation; and her foot, look you, is fixed upon a spherical stone, which rolls, and rolls, and rolls; in good truth, the poet makes a most excellent description of it. Fortune is an excellent moral.” But Shakespeare does not allow us to dismiss Fluellen, in his comical character, as a mere bundle of clichés and correspondences, the theorist of a river in Macedon (though it is out of his brains what is the name of it) and also moreover a river at Monmouth, and salmons in both.

It is generally agreed that had either Hyperion or The Fall of Hyperion: A Vision been completed, the result would have been a lofty utterance of Keats' best wisdom in fundamental matters. As to what these matters and this wisdom comprised there has been wide difference of opinion, particularly in respect to Hyperion.* In The Fall the poet, speaking in his own person, gives us some pretty clear hints; in Hyperion we must guess the meaning from the nature of the story and the characters. Hyperion, the longer of the two, is usually held to be the better poem; it is certainly the more cryptic. It has been variously explained as signifying: “the unity of all existence”; “a self-destructive progress toward good … that beauty and not force is the law of this change … light and song passing into union and perfection out of elemental crudeness”; as “the old dynasty of formless powers, driven into oblivion by new creators of form and order”; as “the epic of the Revolutionary Idea”; and as the apotheosis of “disciplined imagination” and “a state in mental stature where all facts, pleasant or otherwise, will appear in their proper perspective.”

A rendition by nayif kharma of michael etherton's theatrical adaptation of john reed's english translation, the arabic version of Ferdinand Oyono's novel Une vie de boy is at three removes from the original French. Under the title Al-khādim (“The Servant”), the play appeared in 1982 in the series Min al-masrah al-'ālami (“From World Theater”), published by Kuwait's Ministry of Culture. Since to all effects and purposes Etherton's theatrical adaptation is Kharma's original, it is necessary to begin by describing how the Zambian-born British writer who taught drama at the University of Zambia in the 1960s adapted his source, Reed's Houseboy, before discussing how the play was later Arabized.

This essay begins by showing how the criticisms of neologism that Dante in-herited from ancient and medieval rhetoric, especially those that decry the supposed barbarity of invented words, provide counterintuitive insight into the motives behind Dante's lexical experimentalism in the Commedia. It then turns to the metaphoric link between Horace's defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica (The Art of Poetry [18 BCE]) and Adam's speech on the origin of language in Paradiso 26, a relation whose Homeric and Vergilian resonances inflect Dante's understanding of linguistic cycles. I argue that Dante's rewriting through Horace of the infernal, Vergilian simile of the falling leaves establishes a poetics of regeneration in Paradiso that joins the process of word creation to the miracle of the Resurrection and to the time‐bound, cyclic nature of what Adam calls the linguistic “uso d'i mortali” ‘usage of mortals.’

In 1866 Hardy bought a small volume published the year before in “The Cottage Library” series at Halifax called Queen Mab and Other Poems by Percy B. Shelley. The “other poems” are “Alastor,” “The Revolt of Islam,” and “Prometheus Unbound.” This book is now in the possession of Frederick B. Adams, Jr., who has most kindly allowed me to copy the numerous markings Hardy made in the text of “The Revolt of Islam” and “Prometheus Unbound.” Under Hardy's autograph, address, and the date “1866” on the title-page is the following inscription written by Sir James Barrie in 1933: “This Shelley and another volume like it were given to me by Mrs Hardy after Τ H's death. In his early days when he was in an architect's office (Blomfields) in Adelphi Terrace he carried these two books in his pockets and often read them aloud and discoursed on them to [sic] the other clerks. All the linings and marks on them were made by him in those days.” “Another volume like it” suggests a matching selection from Shelley's lyrics, but such a book has not come to light and Mr. Adams thinks that the other volume Barrie referred to was the Swinburne that Hardy is known to have carried about with him at the same time.

There is much independent and debonair criticism of contemporary English literature in the Mémoires littéraires de la Grande Bretagne, written for the information of continental Europeans by the Swiss Georges Deyverdun and his very close friend Edward Gibbon. Unfortunately volumes for 1767 and 1768 only were published, although, as Gibbon remarks in his personal Memoirs, “the materials of the third volume were almost completed, when I recommended Deyverdun as governor to Sir Richard Worsley. … They set forwards on their travels; nor did they return to England till some time after my father's death.” The number printed was so small that copies of the first volume are very infrequently to be met with, and of the second very rarely indeed. For Gibbon, the Mémoires littéraires were to some extent the fruit of his studies during a sojourn at Lausanne between 1753 and 1758; for Deyverdun they were a means of livelihood, hit upon only after Gibbon had sought suitable employment for him far and wide in England. Inasmuch as they confirm what became a life-long connection, an account of how they came to be written may very well include a few remarks upon the early friendship of the collaborators.

The Friar’s Tale is replete with distinct verbal echoes of the Wife of Bath’s Tale that point to subtler structural similarities: clear parallels exist between the Friar’s green Yeoman and the Wife’s Loathly Lady in their mysterious shape-shifting, their knowledge of unearthly secrets, and their radical metamorphoses as each tale ends. The Friar’s quiet parody of the Wife’s romantic idealism contributes to a pattern familiar in the architectonics of the Canterbury Tales. The consecutive tales of Wife, Friar, and Summoner form a dramatic triad exactly parallel to the well-known triad involving the Knight, Miller, and Reeve where, as here, the unity of the three turns upon the parody in the pivotal second tale. The Friar’s parody of the Wife also suggests that the thematic center of the Third Fragment is in the idea of maistrie, and coincidentally, suggests that the Friar’s and the Summoner’s Tales do not interrupt the Marriage Group but advance its chief theme.

What if in the final minutes of your heavying
descending

the landing strip kept lying
changing you back
into the air the way a white

backs away in anger when you approach with the directions you've been asked?
—Ed Roberson, “The Aerialist Narratives”

The fate of the nation is foretold in the arcs of birds, in the flight patterns of the ruling class, in the strip of runway hard to see in the fog. Only through the scrutiny of all such lines will our fates grow clear.

—Joseph Donahue, “Metaphysical Shivers: Reading Ed Roberson”

In “My Kinsman, Major Molineux,” Robin enters Boston after negotiating the cost of a ferry ride across the Charles River, a negotiation complicated by the precipitous depreciation of the provincial bill he carries. His night in Boston therefore unfolds under the volatile sign of paper money. The story is one of several Hawthorne works to join the paper-gold debate of the nineteenth century, and it historicizes that debate with persistent allusions to related eighteenth-century currency disputes. The story's famous ambivalence springs in part from Hawthorne's cognizance of a historical irony: in the nineteenth century, Jacksonian Democrats attacked paper money as the instrument of a neoaristocratic moneyed power; in the eighteenth century, royalists stigmatized it as the instrument of the “Popular or Democratick Part of the Constitution.” The story is informed by the discomfiting fact that the eighteenth-century Tory and the nineteenth-century Democrat equally privileged gold over paper.

In the early 1960s two editions of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart were published with competing sets of illustrations. The first, by Dennis Carabine, illustrates a realist novel, the second, by Uche Okeke, a modernist one. Reading Achebe's iconic novel through its early publication history and for its visual images shows how the famous ending of Things Fall Apart turns, stylistically, to the impenetrable flatness of the modernist surface. At mid-century, modernist style could be made to serve realist imperatives, and Achebe's flat style challenges colonial modes of literary representation and the myth of modernist primitivism in the visual arts. This essay stresses the importance of the visual image to mid-century anglophone literature and the importance of modernist style to the poetics of decolonization.

Jeanette Winterson's beautiful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is a biography of a reader, a book about reading—reading for your life. In addition to the Bible, there are six books in the Plymouth Brethren Winterson household, and they are all nonfiction. Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Winterson, bans the reading of fiction, so young Jeanette reads in secret, in the outside lavatory or under covers at night, carefully depositing each read book under her mattress until it floats so dangerously high that it threatens to reveal the habit considered so vicious by her mother but that is sustaining Jeanette. Mrs. Winterson reads the Bible; young Jeanette has a memory of Jane Eyre read aloud in her mother's good reading voice, but Mrs. Winterson doctors it (with the skill of a clever reader, an astute stylist) so that Jane marries St. John Rivers and goes off to the mission with him. T. S. Eliot makes her cry in Accrington Public Library because his lines “This is one moment / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy” (from Murder in the Cathedral; qtd. in Winterson 39) give her hope that she will survive the moment she is in, and so does Gertrude Stein saying to Alice B. Toklas: “Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it” (from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; qtd. in Winterson 130). Jeanette Winterson claims that she “puts herself inside books for safe-keeping” and that “a tough life needs a tough language” (36, 40). The people around her have that tough language. She hears lines that she later locates in Shakespeare, a writer she regards as “not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour” (115). When she is homeless and living in her Mini, supporting herself at the local sixth-form college by working at the weekend market and the local library, she reads “English Literature A-Z,” in the order in which it is shelved at the Accrington Public Library (115–30). Books are home when she is homeless (61); they are doses of medicine (42), saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of human.

This essay approaches the Silk Road as a modern narrative of China's connected past, rather than as a historical fact. The Chinese term Silk Road (sichou zhi lu; 丝绸之路) first gained currency after the 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung as part of the lexicon of anticolonial solidarity. During the Cold War, China's Afro-Asian Silk Road, different from the West's Europe-Asia Silk Road, prompted new interest in the linguistic dimension of connected history. Language contact traditionally held limited significance in European and Chinese philology because linguistic divisions were understood in terms of nation or language family. For Afro-Asian scholars and writers, however, precolonial language contact became a portent of postcolonial exchange. They shifted attention from genetic word roots to historical routes (e.g., loanwords). Within a longer history of what I call “contact philology,” China's short-lived collaborations refashioned the Orient as Afro-Asia and presented an (unfinished) critique of the tropes with which we narrate the connected past.

This essay examines theater's role in recording public history, positing a performance-sensitive approach to historiography against the singularity of both monuments and canons. The recent removal of monuments has drawn renewed attention to the problem of singular public histories. I argue for a polyvocal, repertory model of public history as theorized through the collectively written 2016 play The Fall, which records the events of the 2015–16 student protests in South Africa. The essay begins by contextualizing the play in the longer history of workshop theater and educational inequality in South Africa before specifically examining its approach to public history. Such performance-sensitive historiography enacts anticolonial epistemologies by replacing the singular representation of monumentalism with copresence amid contested histories.