Game Of Love Research Articles

Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the Cancionero de Baena to the Cancionero General

Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain: From the Cancionero de Baena to the Cancionero General. Eds. E. Michael Gerli and Julian Weiss. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1998. 297 pages. This volume represents a collection of essays given at a conference held at Georgetown University, Washington, DC February 11-14, 1993. As Julian Weiss states in the volume's Introduction, the volume's editors have tried to gather together a representative cross-section of current work, produced by scholars writing at different stages in their careers, some of them renowned specialists in medieval lyric, others publishing for the first time on the subject (3). methodological and thematic scope of the critical works contained in Poetry at Court in Trastamaran Spain is indeed wide, however there is an overall coherence to the book as a whole. This coherence is achieved through the general focus upon the socio-political context of cancionero verse in fifteenth-century Iberia that one finds throughout the volume as well as through the editors' decision to group the articles under more specific thematic rubrics. first section, Compilation and Cultural Meaning, begins with Vicenc Beltran Pepio's The Typology and Genesis of the Cancioneros: Compiling the Materials. this study, Beltran offers a detailed analysis of what he terms the genetic typology of the cancioneros themselves, focusing on the various processes of compilation that they represent. section ends with Michel Garcia's In Praise of the Cancionero: Considerations on the Social Meaning of the Castilian Garcia argues for a critical shift of focus from the contents of the anthologies to the manuscript 'container' itself (5) in order to gain a better understanding of their social meaning. next section, Traditions: Rupture and Renewal, begins with Marina S. Brownlee's Francisco Imperial and the Issue of Poetic Genealogy, in which she details Imperial's by no means disinterested handling of literary tradition, specifically the work of Dante. Aurora Hermida Ruiz's Silent Subtexts and Cancionero Codes: On Garcilaso de la Vegas Revolutionary Love investigates the underlying ideological codes in courtly lyric. Ian Macpherson's The Game of Love: Letra, Divisa, and Invencion at the Court of the Catholic Monarchs heads the next section, Courtly Games. His detailed analysis of specific cancionero texts is nicely complemented by Victoria A. Burrus' Role Playing in the Amatory Poetry of the Cancioneros. …

Texts and the Self in the Twelfth Century (review)

REVIEW Spence, Sarah. TextsandtheSelfinthe Twelfth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996. Pp. xi+ 167. This is another book which follows the prevailing fashion of exploringthenotionofthe'selfinrelationtomedievalliterature(cf. Gerald Bond's TheLovingSubject). But, giventhatthe field isalargeoneand opentotheadoptionofdifferentcriticalandtheoreticalstances,thisstudy isdistinctive. Theargumentwhichrunsthroughitisthat"thereexistsadirect correlationnotonlybetweentext andbody [inLatin,corpusinreference toboth],butalsobetweenlanguageandself: notlinguisticaffinities,/^/·se, but conceptual possibilities offered by - and between - Latin and the vernacular"(2). Theconceptofthe"spaceofagency"isanimportantfeaturesince itispresent oncethe selfandthevernaculartextdevelop. Thisself, made possible bythetwelfth-centuryvernaculartext, isalsotheresult, inpart, oftherelationshipofLatintothevernacular. Thebookfollowsaninterestingpattern,withchaptersdevotedto Suger'sDeadministrationeandqualifiedas 'writing outofthebody', a comparisonofthethoughtofAbelardandGuibertdeNogent,entitled'text ofthe body', the next, 'text ofthe self, devoted to a discussion ofthe openingofthespaceofagencyintheworkofthetroubadours,GuilhemIX, Jaufre Rudel, BernartdeVentadornandRaimbautd'Aurenga The last, 'writing inthe vernacular', looksattheLaisofMañede France. Thetitleofeachchapterdemonstratestheprogressofthedevelopmentofthoughtandattitudeleadingfromthecentralnotionofthebody inSuger,thealmostinsidiouswayinwhichAbelard,particularly,prefigures theapproachinthetroubadoursandMariedeFrance, where, bycomposinginthevernacular ,thereisconfrontationbetweenbodyandworld. 72 REVIEW There is, therefore, considerable emphasis on the texts which derivefromtheLatintradition,andrightlyso.Thediscussionrangesover mattersrelatingto etymologyandrepercussionsforshiftofmeaningand emphasiswhenthelexemeistakenupinthevernacular, suchashoraand ora, where,henceforth,"tempusest spatium"(WilliamofConches)(22). Inevitably,too,thenotionofthebuildingasspacefiguresimportanthyinthe chapterdevotedto Suger. Whentheselfbecomesimportant so doesthe domainoftheemotions,asshowninthefascinatinginterplayofemotions found in Abelard, whose Historia Calamitatum is a key document. Invidia and cupiditas are analysed in the context of Abelard's own personalexperience. Inthevernaculartexts,thetheoreticalpositiontakenupisthatthe poetryisat onceofthebodyandyet not. Here, Guilhemisdistinguished fromfoliowingpoets:"asthefirsttroubadour,GuilhemIXexperiencesa unique freedom. Text for him is ... a body that is whole and intact, not imperfectandmutilated,evenasitisabodythatcananddoesexistequally well inboththeworld and hismind" (87-88). Thisisto putanawesomeresponsibilityonGuilhemandonemay be led to wonder whetherthe position, as set out, can be a reflection of reality. Firstand foremost, what assurance istherethat he was"the first troubadour"?Scholarsareinagreementthathewasprecededbyothers. Hemaywellhave rejectedthetenetsofthese,but hewascertainlynotthe freeagentrepresentedhere. Hisuseoftechnicalterminologyissuchasto suggestthathewasat least followinganestablishedcanon. Alliedto this point, Spence addsthe remark that LauraKendrick notes howmodern criticismpresentshimas"two-fàced"(86). Hardlymodern: PioRajna in 1 928, wrote anow famousarticle inwhichhe is the "trovatore bifronte", and, incidentally, uses this dualism to prove that he cannot be the first troubadour. It isclearthattheapproachinthisbookdoesnotprecludetheneed forattentiontodetail.Certainly,too,onecangoalongwithapsychoanalytic interpretationprovided that it does not become anachronistic (andthis 73 REVIEW bookdoesnotallowthat,onthewhole),but,ifthisinterpretationdominates sothatwordsarechosentomeanwhatfitsthetheory,thenthisisnotgood forscholarship. Takethediscussionofthewell-knownanddifficult line, "nosn'avemlapessae-1coutel". Whileit ispossiblethatthetwotermsare comparable to Abelard's key terms ofpraecitium 'cliff and gladium 'sword', is it likely? The earthy, proverbial use ofthe expression is the answer to the posturings ofpeople whose basis for love is in words ("paraulas"),"quetalsevand'amorgabán"(and,incidentally,not"gaber", foundinthetext(93)). Indeed,inthisrespect,Guilhemadoptsastandpoint whichisnotthatofhisfellowpoetsbuthe,too,existsaspartofatradition, evenifheretainssomeofthecharacteristicswhichwillnot befollowedby successive poets. Again, to say that "his works, unlike those of the troubadourswhofollow,aredeliberatelynotintertextual"and, "inasense, impossible"because"hispointistoredefinetext inawaythatemphasizes itsalliancewiththe feminine" seemsto missouttheessentials. Howcanwe knowwhetherthereisintertextualityornotwithoutantecedents?Who is to saythatthealliancewiththefemininewasexcludedotherthaninAbelard, withwhomlinksarebeing soughtbySpence?Similarcommentscanbe made inrelation to the othertroubadours studied. Thetoneoftheseremarkswillindicate sufficientlythedifficulty experienced inattemptinganappreciationofthiswork. This isalearned book,inwhichtheknowledgeoftextandauthorisapparent. Butthedanger init isthat ofenunciating atheoryandthenapplyingit toawiderangeof materialratherthanproceedinginductivelyinrespectofeachaspect. It is not a large volume; the chapter devoted to the four troubadours, for example,covers33pages,whichscarcelypermitsanydeepexplorationof detail. This study is defined uniquely in terms ofthe theory being put forward. Itis, however,thought-provoking,well-writtenandattractively presented. It may well be that Sarah Spence will wish to return to the troubadours in a wider context and that will be welcome. Peter T. Ricketts University ofBirmingham 74 REVIEW WORKSCITED Bond, Gerald. The Loving Subject: Desire, Eloquence andPower in Romanesque France. Philadelphia: University ofPennsylvania Press, 1995. Kendrick, Laura. The Game ofLove: Troubadour WordPlay. Berkeley : University ofCalifornia Press, 1988. Rajna Pio. "Guglielmo, conte de Poitiers, trovatore bifronte". Mélanges de linguistique et de littérature offerts à M. Alfred Jeanroy. Paris: Droz, 1928: 349-60. 75 ...

Love games that insects play

Love games that insects play

How Justice Brennan Freed Novels and Movies During the Sixties

In June 1963, New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wrote a piece for Esquire magazine entitled Sex... and the Supreme Court. In it, Lewis, who was then working the Times's Supreme Court beat, observed that the nine not-so-old men sitting on the Court seemed to be quietly liberating the country from puritanism. Equally surprising was the fact that the liberation was proceeding from a landmark decision rendered in 1957, called Roth v. United States, in which the High Court had seemingly canonized the Comstockian attitude toward sexually-oriented expressive by holding that i.e., material having a tendency to excite lustful thoughts, was not protectable by the Constitution's free speech or free press guarantees. The reason it was not, said Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., speaking for the Court, was because obscenity was utterly without redeeming social importance. In other words, obscene expression was worthless and so unworthy of 1st Amendment protection. The contradictory encouraging evidence cited by Lewis consisted in largely unnoticed Supreme Court decisions, after Roth, that had resulted in the freeing from State or federal censorship of two French films, The Game ofLove and Lady Chatterley's Lover, both based on well-known risque literary works, plus a nudist magazine called Sunshine and Health, and three gay-oriented magazines titled MANual, Trim and Grecian Guild Pictorial. (Today such would not even raise Jesse Helms's eyebrows.) What the Court seemed to say in freeing those works was that, in its view, they did not meet the Roth test for obscenity, that is, the Brethren could not believe that they aroused the average person's lust, and so they ought to be deemed constitutionally protected from government suppression. In the gay-oriented magazines case, Justice Harlan, speaking for the Court, observed that, to be properly counted obscene, had not only to be calculated to arouse its auditor's lust, it also had to be patently offensive, terminology that some Court-watchers supposed meant it

Chaucer's Ovidian arts of love

More than any other poet in Chaucer's library, Ovid was concerned with the game of love. Chaucer learned his sexual poetics from Ovid, and his fascination with Ovidian love strategies is prominent in his own writing. This book is a full study of Ovid and focusing on love, desire and the gender-power struggles that Chaucer explores through Ovid. Michael Calabrese begins by recounting medieval biographical data on Ovid, indicating the breadth of Ovid's influence in the Middle Ages and the depth of Chaucer's knowledge of the Roman poet's life and work. He then examines two of Chaucer's most enduring and important works - Troilus and The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale - in the light of Ovid's turbulent corpus, maintaining that both poems ask the same Ovidian question: What can language and game do for lovers? Calabrese concludes by examining Chaucer's views of himself as a writer and of the complex relations between writer, text and audience. Chaucer, like Ovid, saw himself as vulnerable to the misunderstanding and woe that can befall a maker of fictions, he writes. Like Ovid, Chaucer explores both the delights and also the dangers of being a 'servant of the servants of love' ...Now he must consider the personal, spiritual implications of being a verbal artist and love poet.

The Game of Love and Chance

The Game of Love and Chance

Kiwi rock: popular music and cultural identity in New Zealand

The New Zealand popular music scene has seen a series of high points in recent years. Published in 1989 were John Dix's labour of love, Stranded in Paradise, a comprehensive history of New Zealand rock'n'roll; an influential report by the Trade Development Board, supportive of the local industry; and the proceedings of a well-supported Music New Zealand Convention held in 1987 (Baysting 1989). In the late 1980s, local bands featured strongly on the charts, with Dave Dobbyn (‘Slice of Heaven’, 1986), Tex Pistol (‘The Game of Love’, 1987) and the Holiday Makers (‘Sweet Lovers’, 1988) all having number one singles. Internationally, Shona Laing (‘Glad I'm Not A Kennedy’, 1987) and Crowded House (‘Don't Dream It's Over’, 1986) broke into the American market, while in Australia many New Zealand performers gathered critical accolades and commercial success.

Russian Folk Lyrics

Preface EditorOs Introduction The Russian Folk Lyric by V.Ja. Propp EditorOs Notes to The Russian Folk Lyric Peasant Songs Ritual Songs of the Agricultural Calendar Songs of Peasant Slavery Vocal Songs about Love Xorovod, Game, and Dance Songs about Love Wedding Songs Vocal Songs about Family Life Xorovod, Game, and Dance Songs about Family Life Joking and Satirical Vocal Songs: Xorovod, Game, and Dance Songs ChildrenOs Songs Barge Hauler Songs Robber Songs Soldier Songs Songs of Prison, Penal Servitude, and Exile Worker Songs ProppOs Sources of Folk Lyrics Selected Bibliography Index

Female Authors, Provincial Settings: The Re-versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript

"Female Authors, Provincial Setting: The Re-versing of Courtly Love in the Findern Manuscript." While the practice of examining medieval literature in its original manuscript context is always Important, it is particularly so in the case of the anonymous love lyrics of Cambridge University Library MS Ff.l.6, the "Findern Manuscript." Most of these lyrics have been classified as "courtly love lyrics," and the title many of them bear in modern anthologies and in the Index of Middle English Verse, "To his Mistress," informs us that they were written by men. But through an examination of the paleographical evidence and comparison with women's letters of the period, this article asserts that many of the lyrics were almost certainly written by women. Moreover, while the poems make use of the courtly idiom, their true nature is not "courtly" at all. They do not belong to the "game of courtly love," with its playful insincerity; they are, rather, sincere expressions of the thoughts and emotions of fifteenth-century English women living in the provinces. As such, they are not only among the first self-expressive specimens of the lyric in English; they also belong to a genre which has been held to be absent in the corpus of Middle English literature- the authentic woman's lament.

Richard Duke of York 1411-1460 (review)

Reviews 155 Justinian doing set within a Frankish disc brooch of c. 600 now found at Trier? Literary evidence is also used in suggestive ways: the juxtaposition of the negative evaluation of King Chilperic found in Gregory of Tours with Venantius Fortunatus' panegyric of him, and the discussion of Marculf s formulary are particularly effective. Occasionally Homer nods: the Ostrogoths were sent to Itdy by Zeno, not Anastasius (cf p. 95), and I would prefer to see Parthenius as the grandson, rather than son, of bishop Ruricius (p. 107). But these are smdl qdbbles which in no way diminish the enthusiasm with which this book is to be welcomed. John Moorhead Department of History University of Queensland Johnson, P. A., Richard Duke of York 1411-1460, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1988; pp. xii, 270; R.R.P. A U S $ 95.00. A politicd biography of Richard duke of York has been a desideratum for some time. H e must certdnly rate as one of the most important politicalfiguresof English history to lack any extended biographical treatment. The problem is not stricdy one of documention. There is a great ded of materid that bears, at least obliquely, on his career. The main difficulty is finding evidence about the man himself, or even discerning any clear thread which unifies a public career which began in Normandy and Ireland, included two terms as Protector of the redm, and ended as an uncrowned king at the batde of Wakefield. In this scholarly monograph P. A. Johnson gives Richard, Duke of York the attention that is his due. True enough, he was able to build on the work of others: J. Rosenthd's and C. Ross's surveys of York's estates and finances, R. L. Storey's pioneering use of the King's Benchfiles,and R. A. Griffiths's monumental study of the reign of Henry VI. Still, Johnson has done an impressive amount of research. His careful sifting through the public records, in particular, has added much new detail and precision to York's biography and to English politics in the 1450s. His readings of crucial episodes in York's career, from his shift into opposition in the late 1440s to his bid for the crown in 1460, will not easily be displaced. It must be said that Johnson does not meet all the chdlenges inherent in his subject. His book bears all the hallmarks of an excellent doctoral thesis. Though well polished for publication, it retains some of its original genre. There is an evident lack of balance. Too often Johnson gives cursory treatment to matters which are central to his topic but on which perhaps he feels he has nothing new to contribute. Sometimes, too, his concern to make an original contribution has lead him to adopt a rather negative tone to his predecessors' findings. Yet he rarely moves beyond them in such a way as to offer lines for 156 Reviews reinterpretation. There is no extended or systematic exploration of the key issues regarding York's career; such as, for example, M . K. Jones has recendy provided with regard to the nature of York's bitter feud with Somerset Perhaps Johnson is justified in his scholarly caution. Perhaps, knowing so much, he appreciates better than most both the complexity of the man and the limits to our knowledge of him. Yet he should have made his views on such matters plain. It is somehow symptomatic that his book has neither an introduction nor a conclusion. It begins with a birth in 1411 and ends with a death in 1460. Richard, Duke of York, still awdts his crown. Michael Bennett Department of History University of Tasmania Kendrick, L., The game of love: Troubadour Wordplay, Berkeley, U. of California P., 1988; pp. xiv, 237; 37 plates; R.R.P. ? This is an important book because the author points scholars and students towards a new way of reading troubadour poetry, searching for the equivocd, be it pun, vulgar innuendo, burlesque, rich rhymes, or scribal transcription as discerned in spelling and word division. The scribe, who reproduced a text from aural images which he heard, rather than from visual images which he read, gave...

Vallabhācārya on the Love Games of Kṛṣṇa

Vallabhācārya on the Love Games of Kṛṣṇa

The Game of Love: Troubadour Wordplay by Laura Kendrick

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER within the collection that takes the Pauline principle to heart. Would not this qualify him to be a "gentil"? And, finally, one cannot know whether a study such as this one reveals more to us about the medieval or the modern mind. Kendrick admits that we cannot easily determine "how much medieval people may have con­ sciously understood about the therapeutic possibilities of play or fiction" and that "we have a tendency to remake Chaucer in our own images." It is possible that her book does just that. Nevertheless, ChaucerianPlay seems to impart a deeper understanding to the reader ofChaucer's mind and art, and it is a book that medievalists will want to know. MARY FLOWERS BRASWELL University of Alabama at Birmingham LAURA KENDRICK. The Game a/Love: Troubadour Jfvrdplay. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1988. Pp. xiv, 238. $32.50. Kendrick posits a tradition of facetious wordplay which reached its apogee in the songs of the early troubadours, particularly in those of the first troubadour whose works survive, William IX, count ofPoitou and duke of Aquitaine. She claims that the tradition was anticipated as early as the seventh century by the parodist Virgil of Toulouse and the authors of the Hispericafamina and that it was revived in the fourteenth century by the members ofthe academy ofvernacular poetry at Toulouse which was called the Consistori de la subregaya companhia del gay saber. She finds support­ ing evidence of the tradition in the marginalia of certain troubadour and liturgical manuscripts, in Latin compositions in praise ofthe virgin, and in the history of performance practices. Her book is exciting because of its bold hypothesis, its historical breadth, and the diversity of evidence she introduces; both learned and provocative, it calls for discussion at length. For this reader, however, it is not persuasive, because too many of her arguments could easily be reversed and in particular because too many of her translations of Occitan and Latin are inaccurate. Therefore, it calls for discussion in detail. I am left with a feeling ofdisappointment that such an interesting attempt at an innovative synthesis cannot withstand scrutiny. 256 REVIEWS In chapter 1, "Contests and Contexts," Kendrick introduces the govern­ ing opposition ofthe book, a contrast between an acentric world view and a centered one. The former she tracesfrom classical authors such as Lucretius, Varro, and Ovid, down to the contemporary perspective (she alludes to Yeats, "The center cannot hold"); the latter she attributes to Saint Au­ gustine, the Inquisition, and the authoritarian mentality in any period. The contrast is clear, but its application is not. The classical tradition has been put in the opposite camp by recent scholars such as Howard Bloch, as Kendrick acknowledges (p. 5); Sarah Spence (Rheton·c of Reason and Desire: Vergi/, Augustine, and the Troubadours [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988]) reverses Kendrick's analysis, considering the rhet­ oric ofVirgil repressive, that ofAugustine nonantagonistic. Kendrick takes feudalism as a centered institution, overlooking the definition ofit as "the least possible government" which has often been bandied about. When she argues that in popular religion the relics of saints were considered not representative but real, or that vernacular charters were not meant to be authoritative, the strain becomespalpable. She assumes atavisticorigins of the acentric world view which have left little or no evidence and explains that the world view was intrinsically unlikely to produce evidence of its existence. Chapter 2, "Reading Troubadour Verse: The Adventure ofthe Signifier," makes the case for facetious reading of the early troubadors, based pri­ marily on a name and on variant readings in the manuscripts. The name is represented in the manuscripts as la troba neblo in Marcabru, interpreted hitherto as la troba n'Eblo, "the composition of Sir Eble," that is, Eble, viscount of Ventadorn, known as "the singer" (cantator), who was also mentioned as a poet by Beman de Ventadorn and Giraut de Bornelh even though none of his works are extant. Kendrick grants that this interpreta­ tion "is probably correct" but argues that "it might also be possible to understand neblo as 'foggy,' 'obscuring,' or 'obfuscating' or 'insubstantial, worthless' " (p. 25). Later in...

The game of love: troubadour word play

The game of love: troubadour word play

Vallabhācārya on the Love Games of Kṛṣṇa. By James D. Redington. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1983. xi, 492 pp. Rs. 140.

This book presents a translation from the Sanskrit of a traditional commentary on the six chapters of Book ten of the Bhagavata Purana which narrate Krsna's love games with the Gopis. The commentary is the Subodhini of the founder Saint Vallabhacarya. It has an introduction to explain Vallabhacarya's fundamental viewpoins on the love-games.

Perspectives on Kṛṣṇa's Various PersonalitiesThe Divinity of Krishna. Noel ShethVallabhācārya on the Love Games of Kṛṣṇa. James D. Redington

Perspectives on Kṛṣṇa's Various Personalities<i>The Divinity of Krishna</i>. Noel Sheth<i>Vallabhācārya on the Love Games of Kṛṣṇa</i>. James D. Redington

Ovid's Games of Love

Ovid's Games of Love

Wyatt and Chaucer: "They Fle from Me" Revisited

Wyatt's poems, as Alastair Fowler has observed, are so rooted in their society that their survival is incomplete: many of the characteristic qualities of the world from which they sprang are, inevitably, lost beyond hope of recovery.' To read his poems intelligently is to realize that the past, or at least the early Tudor court, is a foreign country. Yet Fowler has himself shown that some of the destruction wrought by time can be repaired, that it is possible to piece together some fragments of understanding that may serve to guide the reader through some of the difficulties and obscurities that Wyatt's verses now present to us. In a sense the very remoteness of the milieu from which Wyatt's verses emanate renders some of its elements accessible to investigation; this is especially true of the profoundly literary character of the world of the Game of Love, as Stevens described it, in which Wyatt and his associates participated.2 And it is not merely the obviously courtly poems, that by their very vocabulary and situation declare themselves beyond the immediate grasp of modem sensibilities. It is true also of works in which generations have delighted, pieces whose lean and sinewy masculinity appears to bridge the gulf of time, that we are confronted with an alien language and system of values, some of whose components may be identified and investigated in ways that can yield further clues as to the nature and scope of Wyatt's art.3 They Fle From Me is Wyatt's most repeatedly interpreted poem.4 Yet it seems clear enough that the qualities for which it has been prized are highly various, sometimes contradictory, and readers have reached markedly different conclusions about what it might mean and about how the speaker is to be apprehended. Fowler surmises that the explanation for the work's lasting appeal lies in its rhetorical conduct: argument, coordinating concetto, and what Hallett Smith has called 'general strategy,' in other words the movement from figurative musing through specific memorial narration to moral questioning.5 I should like to propose, however, that the original audience of the poem-whoever they were, but assuming they were members of the same circle as the poet-would have had rather more

Motives for Fiction

I. Fiction and Reality * Mimesis and the Motive for Fiction * History and the New American Novel * The American Political Novel * The Real and Imaginary Worlds of Norman Mailer * Nabokov and the Art of Politics * Ada, or the Perils of Paradise * Tristrant Shandy and the Game of Love * The Demons of History in Dickens's Tale * Flaubert Through His Letters * Proust and the Ideological Reader * Borges, Stevens, and Post-Symbolist Writing * Daniel Martin and the Mimetic Task II. The Stances of Criticism * The American Edmund Wilson * Literature and Ideology in the Thirties * The Education of Alfred Kazin * Literary Lives * Notes * Credits * Index

Pocahontas: Her Life and Times

New York theater in the fall of 1855 offered a variety of diversions. For the upper ten, New York's ruling class, there was opera, the first American appearance of the great French actress Rachel, the tempestuous American actor Edwin Forrest presenting his famous impression of the tempestuous Edwin Forrest in a variety of roles ranging from Hamlet to Metamora, and at Wallack's Theatre a repertory company--one of the best in memory-that opened the season with a new comedy, The Game of Love, by one of the company's greatest assets, John Brougham. For the middle and lower classes, there were circuses, waxworks, and Barnum's American Museum, at which the novelties seemed never-ending; the Ravel Family of gymnasts, jugglers, pantomimists, and other entertainers; singing families, both native and Tyrolean; popular European virtuosos like Ole Bull and Sigismund Thalberg; and, of course, minstrelsy. Three major troupes, headed respectively by Charley White, George Christy, and R. B. Buckley, had their own theaters. Other companies, including E. P. Christy's, visited frequently, often introducing new songs by the era's greatest American composer, Stephen Foster.1

Review. Marivaux. Up from the Country. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. Infidelities and The Game of Love and Chance. Translated with an introduction by David Cohen

Review. Marivaux. Up from the Country. Translated with an introduction by Leonard Tancock. Infidelities and The Game of Love and Chance. Translated with an introduction by David Cohen