Good Angel Research Articles

Marlowe and Prayer

This article argues that Marlowe's persuasive dramatic poetry, the admired but also ridiculed “mighty line,” is closely related to Marlowe's theological training in general and to prayer in particular. The conventions of sincere prayer alluded to in the Good Angel’s line to Faustus in II.i.16 seem deliberately to be pitted against the friars’ traditional or “Catholic,” prayer-like incantation to expell him. Why there has been little focus on this aspect of Marlowe’s grounding in biblical style is hard to tell, especially when there has been such interest in contemporary theological issues in general. This may be so because of Marlowe’s preference for daring topics and because of his reputation as a “reckless” young man about town and a figure associated more readily with the spectacular accusations launched by Robert Greene or John Baines, than with his years of study in theology and related subjects at Corpus Christi in Cambridge.

СТВОРЕННЯ ЦІННІСНОГО СЕРЕДОВИЩА ЗАКЛАДУ ВИЩОЇ ОСВІТИ ЯК УМОВА ОСОБИСТІСНО-ПРОФЕСІЙНОГО ЗРОСТАННЯ МАЙБУТНІХ ВИХОВАТЕЛІВ

The topicality of creating value environment of higher educational institutions as a condition for personal and professional growth of future educators in preschool education is substantiated in the article. The significance of the problem is argued by the Law of Ukraine «On Education», «On Higher Education», by the Standard of Higher Education of Ukraine at the first (bachelor's) level of specialty 012 – Preschool Education, by scientific works of teachers and psychologists. The purpose of the article is to present the results of the author's research in the problem of development of the personal and motivational components for the readiness of higher education students in specialty 012 – Preschool Education to the development of benevolence in children of senior preschool age. The peculiarities of implementation of various forms and methods of work are revealed, namely trainings «Goodness begins with you», «Benevolent teacher – benevolent children», «How do we perceive ourselves?», «Road to ourselves as a teacher», «Benevolent communication – the basis of humanity», «Doing good together»; volunteer activities «There's no such thing as other people's children», «Random acts of kindness day», «Being a good Angel for a week» etc.; extracurricular communication (consultations, excursions, travels, leisure activities); keeping diaries in the context of developing your practice of self-awareness; drawing up a program of self-improvement «I am a benevolent person»; organizing of joint activities of students and teachers. Emphasis is placed on the fact that emotional well-being in the process of obtaining higher education is a prerequisite for personal development, the key to the success in educational activities and professional development of future professionals. It is concluded that the above mentioned forms and methods of work contribute to the development of benevolent relationships and value orientations of participants in the educational process which is a determining factor in preparing future educators to development of benevolence in senior preschool children. The substantiation of pedagogical principles of personal and professional self-improvement is considered as a promising area of scientific research as well as continuous self-education of future educators of preschool education.

Shell egg pasteurization using radio frequency in combination with hot air or hot water

This study investigated the effectiveness of three thermal treatments; hot air (HA), hot water immersion (HWI), and hot water spraying (HWS); alone and in combination with radio frequency (RF) on the inactivation of Salmonella Typhimurium in shell eggs. In addition, the physical quality of the treated eggs and their functional capability to produce angel food cakes were determined. The results showed that HWI and HWS were significantly (P < 0.05) more effective at pasteurizing shell eggs than HA, and the pasteurization time was significantly reduced when eggs were first processed with RF. The times needed for RF/HWI and RF/HWS to achieve 5-log reductions of S. Typhimurium were 19.5 and 24.5 min, respectively. Yolk index was unaffected by heating, but Haugh unit and albumen turbidity were increased dependent on the length of treatment. Eggs after HWI, combined RF/HWI, and RF/HWS treatments were able to make good angel food cakes if whipping times were extended. The results of this study demonstrated that combined RF/HWS treatment was comparable to RF/HWI treatment in terms of shell egg pasteurization without damaging egg quality. Therefore, both HWS and HWI may be used as the second step of radio frequency pasteurization.

A Way to Design the Miniaturized Dual-Stopbands FSS Based on the Topology Structure

The miniaturized frequency selective surface (FSS) obtained by connecting a number of limbs with two flexible adjustable transmission zeros is proposed in this paper. The proposed FSS has two transmission zeros on both sides of the passband. The effects of the geometrical parameters on the bandwidth of transmission zeros and pole are analyzed. Adjusting the numbers of the limbs in the FSS can make a great difference to the ratio of the frequencies of the two working transmission zeros, and the coupling between the adjacent FSS unit cells is used to adjust the ratio of the frequencies of the two working transmission zeros slightly. The simulated results show that the ratio of the frequencies of the two working transmission zeros has wide adjustable range. The effects of the ways to connect the limbs on the ratio of the frequencies of the two working transmission zeros are analyzed. The prototype of the FSS with two limbs is fabricated and tested to verify the feasibility of the proposed method. The measured results show that the FSS designed by the proposed method has good polarization and angel stabilities, and this proves the proposed way is effective. This FSS is a good candidate to isolate the communication systems with two working bands.

ETNOOBRAZY I STEREOTYPY NARODOWE W POWIEŚCI FANTASY NIKI RAKITINEJ GONITWA I POWIEŚCI SENSACYJNEJ ANDRZEJA KURKOWA DOBRY ANIOŁ ŚMIERCI

Artykuł dotyczy funkcjonowania etnoobrazów i stereotypów narodowych w rosyjskojęzycznej literaturze Białorusi i Ukrainy na przykładzie powieści fantasy młodej pisarki białoruskiej Niki Rakitinej Gonitwa oraz powieści sensacyjnej znanego pisarza ukraińskiego Andreja Kurkowa Dobry anioł śmierci. Wybrane do analizy utwory należą do różnych literatur narodowych i reprezentują odmienne gatunki literackie, mimo to przekonująco świadczą o artystycznym potencjale związanym z wykorzystaniem przez pisarzy współczesnych tradycji narodowych oraz podejmowaniem gry literackiej z narodowymi kodami i obrazami.

Doctor Faustusand the Art of Dying Badly

<i>Doctor Faustus</i>and the Art of Dying Badly

J.B. Priestley: Bradford and a provincial narrative of England, 1913–1933

J.B. Priestley's writing has been used to explore aspects of landscape and Englishness. Through an analysis of Priestley's early journalism in the Bradford Pioneer and the Yorkshire Observer, we argue that his critical disengagement to most of the landscapes of England was based on a connection to the landscapes of his youth in Bradford where he first developed his fictional and documentary narrative style. In his early journalism, Priestley articulated a sense of dwelling in Bradford that was rooted in the experience of two distinct local landscapes: the spaces of the city and the nature of the surrounding upland and moorland. Priestley's geographical ideal balanced the civility of the Edwardian city embedded in a landscape that offered escape to and commune with nature. The existential balance between the two was, we argue, central to the narrative geographies developed by Priestley in his fiction which is illustrated through an analysis of his two early novels: The Good Companions (1929) and Angel Pavement (1930). We suggest that the ways in which Priestley's interwar writing expressed dwelling in local landscapes might be thought of as a critical provincialisation of London and England.

&lt;i&gt;Doctor Faustus&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Reviewed by: Doctor Faustus Kirk Melnikoff Doctor Faustus Presented by Little Goblin Productions at The Rose Bankside Theatre, London. June 19, 2011. Directed by Vince Tycer. Produced by Claire Craig. With Christopher Diacopoulos (Faustus), Cheska Moon (Mephistophilis), Zimmy Ryan (Devil, Evil Angel, Seven Deadly Sins, Friar, Emperor, Duchess, Helen of Troy), Mark Kavanagh (Devil, Good Angel, Clown, Beelzebub, Friar, Alexander the Great, Duke of Vanholt, and Third Scholar), Chris Slater (Devil, Second Schlolar, Lucifer, Lord of Lorrain, Knight), Tim Fordyce (Devil, First Scholar, Pope, Horse-Courser), and Holly Clark (Chorus, Wagner, Devil, Paramour, Old Man). On the face of it, the present Rose Bankside theatre has no business being anything other than a kitschy labor of love bolstered by a dankly illuminated past and an etch-a-sketch future. Advertised by a diminutive sandwich board 150 yards from the glitzy, overrun New Globe, this newly launched venue can only offer an oblong 40' by 15' seating-area/stage perched under a huge office building and alongside the Rose's cavernous archeological remains. Coffee, tea, stolid pastries, postcard history, and membership info for the anti-Stratfordian "Marlowe Society" (not to be confused with the Marlowe Society of America) greet patrons in the theatre's cramped waiting area, as do enthusiastic docent musings and paper flyers advertising the coming of a fabulous new Rose Theatre (funding yet to be determined). And like Henslowe's venue, this Rose lacks a resident troupe, and is compelled instead to populate its scaffold with small start-up theatrical companies from around London. But despite all of this, the Doctor Faustus that I saw on a Sunday afternoon amid sanguine Renaissance theatre buffs, lost Globe patrons, and friends and families of the cast, did not disappoint. It offered a provocative portrait of Faustus and the world amidst smart doubling and inspired choreography. Eschewing even two hours of traffic, this Faustus ran 75 minutes without intermission, and it enacted a cut A text (sans Robin, sans Rafe) with no borrowings from the B. Performed by a company with only seven actors, the production was also heavily doubled, with five of the seven performers playing multiple roles. From the opening, all of the players remained visible on stage, making costume changes, scene "exits," and set changes in full view of the audience. Given the limitation of the Rose's one-exit stage, this was undoubtedly a choice born of practicality, but it also helped underscore Faustus's predicament as a man living his life on a scaffold ever manipulated by dark forces from without. And with few exceptions, scenes flowed seamlessly from one to the next, giving the [End Page 218] production a forward momentum that well complimented this Faustus's inevitable progress towards damnation. Whereas many of the best productions of Marlowe's masterpiece have fully committed to the play's incessant ironies, Tycer's Faustus proved more one-dimensional in its approach. Here, a familiar good struggled with a familiar evil, but even before Faustus sold his soul, Hell's denizens were shown enjoying a stark rule, confidently lounging in Faustus's chair and desk at the protagonist's first entrance. Neither the promises of the Good Angel nor the pleas of the Old Man could do much in Wittenberg's gothic mis-en-scene, dominated as it was by the Devil and his minions. At times, this evil had a distinctly vampirish feel, with Mephistophilis and the demons hissing and staring at Faustus with aplomb in the grand tradition of Hollywood's Stoker; at other times, this threat was more Night of the Living Dead, the demons moving around Faustus with the fits, starts and moans of zombies past and present. If there ever was a moment of suspense in the production it came during the Helen of Troy scene when Holly Clark's bag-lady Old Man rose up to plead loudly for Faustus's attention. Thirty seconds of light, however, ended quickly with Clark being pounced upon by demons while Mephistophilis prepared Faustus for the entrance of Helen. Faustus's move to embrace "the face that launched a thousand ships" was ultimately accompanied on the other side of the stage by the Old Man...

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (review)

Reviewed by: The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Alan Armstrong The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus Presented by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival at the Elizabethan Theatre, Ashland, Oregon. June 8–October 7, 2005. Directed by James Edmondson. Set by Richard L. Hay. Costumes by Marie Anne Chiment. Lighting by Robert Peterson. Sound by Todd Barton. Fights by John Sipes. With Demetra Pittman/Robynn Rodriguez (Chorus), Jonathan Haugen (Doctor Faustus), Ray Porter (Mephistophilis), Shad Willingham (Wagner), Juan Rivera LeBron (Robin), Julia Pace Mitchell (Good Angel), Catherine Lynn Davis (Evil Angel), Kenneth Albers (Valdes), Abdul Salaam El Razzac (Cornelius), Brent Harris (Lucifer), James J. Peck (Beelzebub), Josiah Phillips (Pope Adrian), Laura Morache (Lechery, Helen of Troy), Sarah Rutan (Envy, Old Woman), Tyrone Wilson (Second Scholar, Gluttony) and others. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival waited twenty-five years to begin performing the work of Shakespeare's contemporaries. After a 1960 performance of Webster's The Duchess of Malfi, OSF went on to produce plays by Jonson, Marlowe, Dekker, Beaumont, Ford, and Tourneur, until a fine 1993 production of Webster's The White Devil failed to fill the Elizabethan Theatre on weeknights. OSF has since avoided Shakespeare's contemporaries altogether, judging even Shakespeare plays with numbers in their titles to be better box-office bets than plays that lacked his name. On learning that Artistic Director Libby Appel would break the drought by including a Marlowe play in the 2005 repertory, I was disappointed that Doctor Faustus (a play already staged by OSF, in 1979) had gotten the nod rather than Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, or Edward II. But the production realized by the company's actors, designers, and director James Edmondson (an actor in the 1979 OSF production) richly justified the choice. From the outset the show's technical demands taxed the resources of a repertory company even as large as OSF, with ten other plays in various stages of production. Nineteen people took part in the design meeting to determine how to build the show. Edmondson decided early on to scratch the horse-courser and leg-stealing scenes and to cut much of the Benvolio/Frederick material for want of actors (despite a cast of twenty-six). Five devils were pulled because of costume-shop limitations, and only in rehearsal did it become apparent that the production had exceeded the resources needed for the "headless Faustus" scene, which Edmondson reluctantly cut. Audiences watching Doctor Faustus were delighted nevertheless by special effects which shared the exuberant spirit of the play's original staging, with its roaring devils, firecrackers, artificial thunder and lightning, and Henslowe's dragon-machine. The production turned the center-stage trap into a frightening Hell mouth, from which a fiery glow and billowing smoke emanated. To thin the congealing blood Faustus needed to sign his fatal pact, Mephistophilis casually shot a flame from his hand. The production used its enormous, spectacular dragon to represent not Lucifer but Mephistophilis in his first hideous apparition, before he [End Page 78] returned in the guise of a Franciscan friar. The equally astonishing Lucifer, appearing on the balcony with Mephistopheles and Beelzebub, above, looked like a rock star, resplendent in Rod Stewart hair, a feathery white cape, mid-thigh white boots, and an enormous lime-green codpiece. The Good and Evil Angels, too, appeared initially in alcoves above the stage, like paired, static illustrations in a medieval diptych. A few actors created the impression of a large swarm of agile devils, as menacing as the smaller raptors in a Jurassic Park movie. Their fancifully varied costumes, in darker hues of brown and green with leather masks and scattered hints of fur, tails, and oversized ears, shared a bestial theme. Several of these actors doubled as the Seven Deadly Sins, in equally ingenious costumes unified by vivid gold, yellow, and brown fabrics. The dress of mortal characters also pleased the eye with splashes of brilliant color, such as the red robes of the Roman cardinals and the ermine-shouldered dark purple cape of Pope Adrian, trimmed like his glittering crown in gold and colorful jewels. Faustus, too, appeared occasionally in a richly embroidered gown, but his basic costume was black trousers and jacket and white...

Edinburgh: Lyell Cresswell's ‘Good angel, bad Angel’

Good angel, bad angel is a new 1-act opera, premièred in Edinburgh on 20 May and toured to Glasgow, Peebles and Inverness on 21, 23 and 25 May; it received four performances in all. It lasts almost exactly an hour, and is scored for the slenderest forces imaginable – three singers covering six roles, and an orchestra of four players (bass clarinet doubling B flat clarinet, violin, viola, cello). The story is nasty, centring on the pointless murder of a miserly old shopkeeper on Christmas Day; it slightly reminds one of A Christmas Carol, except that it completely lacks Dickens's optimism and hope. The opera supposedly ends with the central character's redemption, but this is ambiguous and pretty hard to follow.

The foreground of Bosch's Death and the miser

One of the very few representations of Hieronymus Bosch placed in an internal setting is the Death and the miser. The image is painted on a long, narrow and thinned panel which had originally formed part, as the outside of the left wing, of a triptych (fig. i). The painting shows a bare and narrow, woodenvaulted room where a naked man is seated in a testered bed. Death, aiming his long arrow at the dying man, enters the room at the left. An angel props the man upright and urges him to recognize the emanating crucifix in the gothic arched window.1 The depiction is derived from a scene from one of the mortality books which, under the title Ars moriendi ('the book that educated all of Europe', as Mâle put it), circulated throughout the late Middle Ages in most of the countries of the continent, having originally appeared in manuscript form. From the middle of the fifteenth century, they were published as block-books, initially in Germany and the Southern Netherlands and later, too, in the Northern Netherlands. The prototype of th t Ars moriendi is the struggle between Heaven and hell for the soul of the dying man, usually described and illustrated in five pairs of contrasting chapters, and concluding with the portrayal and illustration of the 'blessed death'. They were written in Latin for the clergy or in the vernacular for the lay public. The first Dutch Ars moriendi block-book dates from circa 1460. The depiction on Bosch's panel, featuring an angel and devils, is clearly inspired by an illustration in one of the Artes moriendi. There the dying man knows that his end is approaching and he resigns himself to his fate; amidst the ritual of dying, he lies naked on his back, his countenance looking, as it must, upwards to Heaven. In all these mortality books, he is twice admonished about attachment to worldly goods {Avari tia); first in chapter nine and then again in chapter ten. In the former, entitled Temptacio djaboli de avaricia , the dying man is shown, being tempted by the devil of avarice, as the title states. His riches are illustrated by costly representations of worldly pleasures, which he is being called upon to conserve; for example, a cellar containing many casks of wine and a steed with an attendant groom. Chapter ten is entitled Bona inspirado angeli contra avariciam (Inspiration of the angel against avarice). The angel warns him with the words: 'Protect yourself against the putrid and deadly words of the devil, for he is nothing but a liar. ... In the end everything he does is deceitful.' The figure of Christ on the Cross is an abiding feature of the illustration included in this chapter, serving to remind the stricken mortal of the extreme detachment from worldly things with which Our Lord approached His death. A little devil at the foot of the bed poses the question: Quid faciami (What am I to do?) A choice example of this particular illustration is the woodcut included in a block-book published circa 1450 in Cologne (fig. 2). Standing beside the devil is the good angel, who, pointing to the crucifix, has come to console and support the dying man, who

"What Is Inspiration?": Emily Dickinson, T. W. Higginson, and Maria White Lowell

"What Is Inspiration?":Emily Dickinson, T. W. Higginson, and Maria White Lowell Katharine Rodier (bio) In 1862, Emily Dickinson initiated a sometimes flippant, sometimes beseeching, often enigmatic correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a reformer and man of letters who would co-edit her poems after she died in 1886. She met him only twice in her life. After their first meeting in 1870, Dickinson, evidently intrigued by references he had made, questioned him in two separate letters about the work of poet Maria White Lowell. The beloved first wife of James Russell Lowell, known for her spiritual beauty and her charm as well as for her art and dedication to abolition, Maria Lowell died of tuberculosis in 1853 at the age of thirty-two. Her poems appeared during her lifetime in journals like The Pioneer, The Broadway Journal, The Liberty Bell, and Putnam's, anonymous in most, and in anthologies like Rufus W. Griswold's Female Poets of America, Caroline May's The American Female Poets, and Charles Dana's The Household Book of Poetry, which Samuel Bowles had sent to Susan and Austin Dickinson.1 In addition, Lowell's husband compiled a posthumous edition of several poems for private distribution in 1855.2 [End Page 20] Although Maria Lowell's name was apparently new to Dickinson, she seemed interested in pursuing the recommendation.3 In the first letter, which reiterated her delight in Higginson's correspondence and affirmed "her solemn indebtedness to him" (L352), she reported, "After you went. . . I thought and went about my work." She continued, "You told me of Mrs Lowell's Poems. / Would you tell me where I could find them or are they not for sight?", possibly reflecting her own familiarity with producing poems "not for sight." In the other letter, perhaps unsent,4 Dickinson pondered, "You told me Mrs Lowell was Mr Lowell's 'inspiration.' What is inspiration?" (L353). The question may be intended as coy, defiant, or inscrutable, or as a prose instance of what Sharon Cameron might term "choosing not choosing."5 But whether Dickinson was feigning innocence, or taking issue with either Higginson's diction or a romanticized conception of a female helpmate and muse who was less important as a poet in her own right, his remarks about Maria Lowell piqued his correspondent sufficiently to make her recall Lowell's name to him. For Higginson's part, critics often fault him as insensitive toward Dickinson's work because he made just this sort of recommendation to her.6 Commonly criticized for his limited literary tastes, his dogged attempts to regulate her idiosyncratic art, and his failure to advocate her genius, especially during the reclusive poet's lifetime, Higginson plays for many literary scholars "an awkward Polonius to Dickinson's leading role[,]. . . the pedantic fool of Victorian criticism" (Mazurek 122). And in truth, his suggestion may imply what he saw as a corrective, which a sensibility like Dickinson's might construe as an alien if not abhorrent regime: a woman with your artistic inclinations should read "sweet singers" like Maria Lowell, marry a famous and successful husband who outshines you as a public presence, be to him a good angel in the house, and, until you die beautifully of consumption, emit an occasional heavenly strain, perhaps suitable for print in a respected liberal journal. However, considering more closely what Maria White Lowell and her work may have represented to Higginson reveals his advice as also rich, personal, and surprisingly apt in ways, a compassionate if [End Page 21] not perceptive choice on his side to offer the singular "Scholar" he had just met for the first time (L268). Born July 8, 1821, and raised in a Unitarian family in Watertown, Massachusetts, Maria White attended the Ursuline Convent School in Charlestown until August 11, 1834, when an anti-Catholic mob torched the buildings, incited by allegations of the nuns' severity, particularly by a Protestant student's claims of their cruel attempts to convert her.7 From 1839 to 1844, White joined Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Peabody's sisters Mary and Sophia (who would marry Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, respectively), Lydia Maria Child, Caroline Sturgis, and others whom Margaret Fuller called "well...

Doctor Faustus and Hamlet: Contrasting Kinds of Christian Tragedy

In the last hour of his life Doctor Faustus suffers his great psychomachia. He gives terrified expression to it as he awaits the ultimate fulfilment of his contract and deed of gift with Mephistophilis and Lucifer in one among the richest speeches in English dramatic literature. speech is designed especially to create the inevitability of the conclusion, to make the hearer experience the inexorable, relentless movement of the reluctant, frantic, despairing soul to satisfy the merciless and implacable powers to whom it has wilfully sold itself: The stars move still; time runs; the clock will strike;/ devil will come, and Faustus must be damned. Yet in spite of his terrible conviction, he snatches momentarily in his despair at other possibilities. By his Good Angel he is denied a resplendent throne and the company of those bright shining saints in heaven, or any triumph over hell; he cries out to God for mitigation of the only alternative: eternal suffering in hell, as shown by his Bad Angel. He calls upon the mountains and hills to fall on him or the earth to harbor him. Then

A Drama of Political Man: A Study in the Plays of Harley Granville Barker by Margery M. Morgan (review)

246 MODERN DRAMA September That these two plays should have been selected for such extensive treatment may surprise a few readers. Yet it is hardly questionable that no other plays written by Americans since the end of World War II have so affected American theater, and certainly no other plays have captured the imagination of the theater-going public as have these two. JOHN S. LEWIS University of Kansas A DRAMA OF POLITICAL MAN: A STUDY IN THE PLAYS OF HARLEY GRANVILLE BARKER, by Margery M. Morgan, Sidgwick and Jackson, London, 1961, 337 pp. Price 30s. C. B. Purdom's Harley Granville Barker-Man of the Theatre, Dramatist and Scholar, which appeared in 1956, was designed as the first full-length study of Barker's life and ''his work as a whole." Mr. Purdom's comments on the plays, however, were perfunctory, rather apologetic, and for the most part quite incidental to a biographical concern. In A Drama of Political Man, Margery M. Morgan now sets out "to do justice to the work of a very interesting and commonly underestimated playwright." Her study, the first to give Barker serious critical appraisal, admirably accomplishes its purpose. Miss Morgan begins by sketching in the social and intellectual background to which Barker's thought and art must properly be related. She describes his place among the Fabian Socialists and his general assumption (as her title suggests) that the individual's success or failure is to be understood in terms of some larger political context. She reviews his close friendship with Bernard Shaw-their affinities and differences and their indebtedness to each other. She indicates the extent to which Barker drew upon the Continental dramatists, especially Ibsen, Maeterlinck, Chekhov, and Strindberg. And she shows how his desire as actor to give a mental dimension to his roles and how his effort as director to bring a new fluidity and rhythm to the English stage affected the tone and form of his own drama. Yet she never allows her awareness of sources and influences to carry her far from her central object, the analysis of the plays as play~ as works of art which must be tested for their intrinsic strength or weakness. From a rapid discussion of Barker's early experiments Miss Morgan turns to a detailed examination of each of the longer works from The Marrying of Ann Leete, the highly artificial Symbolist piece written in 1899, to His Majesty, the ironic disenchanted tragicomedy completed nearly thirty years later. Her estimates are always sympathetic and sometimes enthusiastic; she ranks The Voysey Inheritance , for example, "among the finest and most complex dramatic structures to be found in the English language," and she declares that "there is hardly a word in the text of The Secret Life that is not as organic to the verbal carpetpattern as any single note to a musical score." Yet her sympathy does not blind her to many specific defects; she sees the inadequacy of Alice Maitland as the good angel of Voysey, and she finds The Madras House weakened by an intrusive didactic purpose. Miss Morgan is particularly sensitive to the aesthetic details that apparently preoccupied the playwright: the conscious use of musical analogy, the implications of the repetitive imagery, the elaborate punning, the careful choice of stage properties, the precise directions to the actors prescribing gesture and movement. Though we may perhaps think some of her readings oversubtle, she is usually able to marshal enough evidence to disarm our objections. Of The Madras House, she writes (after an adroit explication of its symbolism), "it is not necessary to identify every allusion, grasp every pun, elucidate the mention of Woking, 1962 BOOK REVIEWS 247 or recognise Hercules in the Drapery trade, in order to follow the play and its argument and enjoy much of the comedy. Whenever recognition of such devices does take place, it increases delight; and this is the final justification of the method.~' This is also the logic of Miss Morgan's own critical procedure. ffitimately we accept her ingenuities more readily than what from time to time may seem to us an element of excessive cleverness, a tedious brilliance, in Barker himself . ' The great virtue...

A Medieval Analogue to As You Like It II. vii. 137-166

l i9:E ECENTLY there has been considerable interest in possible sources and analogues of the Renaissance concept of the seven ages of man, a concept exploited with verve and vivacity by Shakespeare for Jaques' All the world's a stage speech in As You Like It II. vii. I37-i66. Since I have nothing of a speculative character to add to, or subtract from, the comprehensive essay on this topic by Professor Samuel C. Chew,1 I shall rest content with presenting a hitherto unpublished Middle English analogue of 6o lines in riming couplets.2 It is preserved in a fifteenth-century apograph fair copy in British Museum MS. Additional 37,049, fol 28v-29r, with no indication of authorship or provenance; it is reproduced and reprinted below, with editorial punctuation and capitalization, through the kindness of the authorities of the British Museum. The poem, which is entitled Of the Seven Ages,3 presents a disputatio between a good angel, the Devil, and a character who may be called Everyman, although his name changes to tally with the seven stages of his natural development. The prize, of course, is possession of the soul of Everyman; and, as is fitting in Christian didactics, the Devil is foiled. The poem thus employs the typical medieval allegorical technique of depicting objectively the subjective crisis of moral choice, which is incorporated later in the morality plays such as Mankind or The Castle of Perseverence.4 The presence of the good angel and the evil angel in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus, to cite but one illustration among many, demonstrates the persistence of this literary and cultural tradition in the later Renaissance. Of the Seven Ages may be compared with the Middle English verses entitled by their editor, Furnivall, The Mirrour of the Periods of Man's Life, or Bids of the Virtues and Vices for the Soul of Man, wherein personifications