Pastoral Romance Research Articles

A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British : Godwin's Rewriting of Comus

A Pastoral Romance, From the Ancient British : Godwin's Rewriting of Comus

Renaissance pastoral and its English developments

Part 1 Pastoral in the Continental Renaissance: Virgil allegorized allusive and didactic pastoral - the neo-Latin, French and Italian eclogue art-pastoral - Boccaccio and Sannazaro pastoral and the Renaissance lyric. Part 2 English pastoral poetry: English pastoral before Spenser - Giles Fletcher, Barclay's eclogues, the Tudor lyric Shepheardes Calender the Elizabethan pastoral lyric the pastoral of allusion - Spenser, allusive pastoral from Peele to Quarles Drayton and his circle - Idea the Shepheards Garland, Poly-Olbion, Shepheards Pipe and other poems the diffusion of pastoral in the earlier 17th century. Part 3 The extension of pastoral - narrative, drama and spectacle: pastoral romance - the cyclic structure Cervantes - Galatea, Don Quixote as pastoral D'Urfe's L'Astree Sidney's Arcadia other English romance - Faerie Queene, Britannia's Pastorals pageants and entertainments English pastoral drama - Elizabethan drama, Shakespeare, Jacobean and Caroline drama more court spectacles and the Masque. Part 4 Last fruits - three versions of pastoral: Drayton's late pastorals Milton - Lycidas, Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained Andrew Marvell. Appendices: allusions in neo-Latin art-pastorals months and seasons in Shepheardes Calender Sidney and the Elizabethan pastoral lyric Protestantism in the Spenserian poets Protestant pastorale.

Ineffability: Naming the Unnamable from Dante to Beckett (review)

Reviews355 La Fontaine dealing with superstition. In die concluding chapter (pp. 145-55) De Ley reviews his principal findings and contends that the investigation he has carried out dirough a series of comparative textual analyses "may have significant general application," so diat what he has discovered in a relatively small number ofcases "may weU be characteristic of the movement of French inteUect between 1557 and 1719 and beyond" (p. 148). Noneuieless, being aware that every text "is a discrete textual artifact," he refrains from proclaiming a grand but artificial diachronic syndiesis (p. 154). From a literary critic's perspective, die book's foremost merit is its patient, peUucid elaboration of a set of arguments rooted in close readings. For instance, De Ley's examination of two apparendy simUar sixteenui-century poems leads him to detect an important shift: ". . . words of an epistemologicaUy categorizing sort" are much more prevalent in die Ronsard sonnet dian in die earlier one by Du BeUay (p. 20). De Ley precisely appraises contrastive epistemologica! modes in L'Astrie before linking such preoccupations in Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral romance to theories ofKuhn, Piaget, and Foucault. Despite simUarities between die plays of Auvray (1609) and Racine (1677), De Ley notes diat Auvray's "metaphors . . . group themselves into a relatively limited number of categories" locked within the text, whereas the Racinian metaphors "relate to die plot or to other play themes through a preselected key, the legend of Phaedra's ancestors or die legend of the Minotaur" (pp. 127, 128). The discussion of two poems by La Fontaine ("L'Astrologue qui se laisse tomber dans un puits" and "Un Animal dans la lune") sheds light on a much-observed phenomenon: structural differences between die Fables of 1668 and those of 1678-79. Frequent cross-references remind die reader that issues raised in die various chapters continue to be relevant beyond their immediate context. Some of Professor De Ley's dieoretical suppositions are likely to prove controversial . The most provocative hypouieses advanced in his fine study certainly deserve to be tested further. Ohio UniversityRichard Danner Ineffability: Naming the Unnamablefrom Dante to Beckett, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Anne Howland Schotter; ? & 202 pp. New York: AMS Press, 1984, $32.50. How does one write about what is beyond language? This central question serves as die focus for this coUection of fourteen essays on various literary figures. The contributions are arranged chronologicaUy, spanning the period 356Philosophy and Literature from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, and taken togedier they offer something of a taxonomy of literary sUence. For a book this slim to deal widi so formidable a topic (and exclusively with major texts) is to court disaster: die several chapters might easüy become redundant on die one hand or die book diffuse on die odier. Instead, the contributors to this book maintain a nice balance between defining the positions unique to dieir several authors, whUe extending the book's continuing discussion of die nature of die ineffable. This book, in brief, is a delight to read and, especiaUy because of die surprising coherence diat emerges from the entire coUection, is best read as a whole. In the first of two essays on fourteenth-century poets, Peter Hawkins discusses Dante's perception of die inadequacy oflanguage to express his Paradisal vision and the rhetorical strategies to which diis leads him. Anne Schotter, in her essay on Pearl, shows diat language in diat poem is not only insufficient, but irrelevant (witness the salvation of an infans). In two of die later essays, WUliam ShuUenberger discusses Wordsworth's yearning for die sublime that can be expressed only in a language which inadequately displaces immediacy of vision widi interpretive reaction, while Stuart Peterfreund reveals what is in effect SheUey's contrasting view of the ineffable, perceived and expressed in a joy which "draws the speaker closer to his object rather than distancing him from it." These latter two chapters also suggest somediing of this volume's surprising coherence. If Wordsworth's frustration about die discontinuity between vision and language begs comparison with Dante's similar uneasiness, SheUey's attitude toward the ineffable is specificaUy contrasted in Peterfreund's essay with Dante's...

La fingida arcadia: Tirso's Disenchantment with Pastoral

Tirso de Molina's play, La fingida Arcadia (1622), is a work which draws its inspiration from Lope de Vega's pastoral romance La Arcadia (1598). Yet, in his re-creation of the pastoral world, Tirso presents a highly self-conscious literary text in which he examines the impulses giving rise to bucolic literature and the artifice on which this world is constructed. His pastoral retreat is a complex fabrication based on rôle-playing, pseudoidentities and illusion, and the work itself is structured upon multiple layers of artifice. This study examines the essence of Tirso's pastoral world and its subtle ties to the literary and political satire evident in the work. The ultimate convergence of his fictive Arcadia with the political schemes and literary excesses he denounces reveals Tirso's attitudes toward the pastoral as well as his views on the nature of art and its articulation in dramatic form. (DC)

The Dramatization of Double Meaning in Shakespeare's "As You like It"

As You Like It is a dramatic adaptation of a well-known pastoral romance, and as such it testifies to the irresistible wave of shepherds that engulfed the literary scene of the Renaissance.' The pastoral world embraced all genres of the age, and changed the system of genres by introducing a new one in the shape of the pastoral romance, which broke down the boundaries within which the eclogue had been confined. But even the traditional form of the eclogue had not used its shepherds merely to depict rustic life they always served to designate something other than themselves. In the pastoral romance, this purpose was fulfilled by the representation of two different worlds: Arcadia would either reflect the social and political world, or be confronted by it. And as Arcadia was, from the very beginning, a product of art with its origins in Virgil's Eclogues the romance also made it possible for the reader to observe the relation of art to reality as well as the effects brought about by this relation. Furthermore, Renaissance pastoral was considered to be a product of the feigning process through which reality could be repeated as a game, allowing a sort of replay of those courses of action excluded by the real actions of the social and political worlds. Thus the pastoral world remained tied to one outside itself, and by linking the two the pastoral romance took on its generic pattern.

A New Version of Pastoral: Developments in Michael Wilding’s Fiction

Michael Wilding's Pacific Highway is his pastoral romance; a true descendant of Longus's Daphnis and Chloe and similar antique prose narratives, incorporating Theocritan and Arcadian elements and informed by an awareness of the traditions and connotations of pastoral in the renaissance. Like Daphnis and Chloe it is a pastoral clouded with foreboding, but Wilding's story is more sombre. It does not actually recreate an idyll, but uses elements of the pastoral mode allusively, to hint at underlying contradictions and ironies which the protagonists themselves only partly comprehend.

A premonition of pastoral inAmadís de Gaula

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image sizeBSS Subject Index: AMADÍS DE GAULA [G. ORDÓÑEZ DE or RODRÍGUEZ DE MONTALVO]CERVANTES SAAVEDRA, MIGUEL DE (1547–1616) DON QUIJOTEMONTALVO, GARCI ORDÓÑEZ DE or RODRÍGUEZ DE (c.1440–before 1505?)PASTORAL/PASTORAL NOVELROMANCES/NOVELS OF CHIVALRYSPAIN — LITERATURE — MEDIEVAL PERIOD — PROSE Notes 1. Thus in the earlier standard histories of the Spanish pastoral romance by J. B. Avalle-Arce and F. López Estrada, and most recently by A. Solé-Leris, The Spanish Pastoral Novel (Boston 1980), 26. Of course, as a literary phenomenon which spanned the Ancient world, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, pastoral had other forms and phases, of great richness and complexity. I am not concerned here with mediaeval bergerie, but with the Arcadian version, the ‘abstracted love-melancholy, played out in a pastoral world of the imagination’, as Helen Cooper puts it in Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance (Ipswich and Totowa, N.J. 1977), 100. Sannazaro's Arcadia was the model. Love, ‘almost invariably rejected, miserable and self-regarding’, is the primary characteristic of Renaissance Arcadian pastoral (105). She remarks in her Introduction (note 4 on p. 214) that ‘apart from a couple of works by Boccaccio that contain very little true pastoral material nothing resembling the pastoral romance was written during the Middle Ages’. 2. See Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (London 1953), 195ff. 3. All quotations are from Amadís de Gaula, ed. E.B. Place, II (Madrid 1962). Roman figures refer to the chapter, Arabic ones to the page. 4. C. S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love (New York 1965), 352. 5. One of the best accounts of this ‘escapist’ aspect is in Peter V. Marinelli, Pastoral (London 1971), 57ff. 6. In Part II, Chapter 67. Where Don Quixote's imitation of the Peña Pobre episode is concerned, it goes briefly pastoral after the final decision to imitate Amadís rather than Roland (Pt. I, Ch. 26). His writing verses to his lady on trees is more of a bucolic than a chivalric habit. Cf. Garcilaso, Eclogue III, sts. 30–31.

Sir Philip Sidney and the Castilian Tongue

VIDENCE that Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) was able to read Spanish would cast new light on his Arcadia (ca. 1580-86), a work fashioned, at least originally, in the mold of the Spanish pastoral romance. There is, of course, nothing new in the claim that Sidney knew and was affected by the very popular and seminal Diana (ca. 1559) of Jorge de Montemayor and its principal continuation, the Diana enamorada (1564) of Gaspar Gil Polo, but no careful study of Sidney's use of the Castilian originals has yet been made.' Those commentators

On Reading The Shepheardes Calender

For most twentieth-century readers The Shepheardes Calender is a less accessible work than The Faerie Queene, mainly because it draws on three distinct literary genres more familiar to sixteenth-century readers: classical eclogue, medieval moral almanac, Renaissance pastoral romance. These three genres share a pastoral scenario, but they differ markedly in formal structure, in the nature of the hero, in perceptions of time, in the sense of an ending, and, most importantly, in the intellectual and emotional responses they demand from a reader. The demands they make are, in fact, contradictory. A reader of the work is made to arrive at a reconciliation by working through three conflicting roles. The delicate poise of responses experienced at the end—sympathy for Colin Clout’s passion and yet a detatched awareness of the larger issues that Colin’s career entails—reproduces exactly the artistic irony that Spenser the epic poet has achieved toward Spenser the amorous versifier. A reader finishes The Shepheardes Calender possessed of the special skills needed to read The Faerie Queene.

Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century by Frances A. Yates, and: Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach by Frances A. Yates

REVIEWS Frances A. Yates. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Pp. xvi + 233. 44 pp. of plates. $21.75. ---------------- . Shakespeare’s Last Plays: A New Approach. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975. Pp. xi + 140. 8 pp. of plates. $10.25. Frances Yates’s Astraea offers a collection of related essay's, written at different periods, and presenting the monarchy in France and England in the sixteenth century as a unifying symbol in a world threatened by chaos. The phantom of universal empire, revived in the Renaissance, found such wide currency because of “a psychological need of the times, the need for order” in a period when the walls were crumbling. For the subtitle of this book, “The Imperial Theme,” read: “l’espérance impériale.” The dramatizing of good hope manifest in the sovereign is the essential and important business with which Miss Yates is concerned. In the middle of the sixteenth century the Holy Roman Empire, long moribund in fact, is resuscitated in theory in the person of the Emperor Charles V. The empire does not survive its creator. But the ideal it embodies, the return of the Golden Age in the auspicious figure of Virgo, the goddess of justice—Astraea, after she had fled to heaven—is trans­ mitted to the rising monarchies of Europe, in particular those of England and France. The symbolism with which Queen Elizabeth I is invested attests the effort of selfconscious propagandists to prosecute the goal of imperial reform, so to reverse the old and dispiriting school tag, familiar from Shakespeare: “Terras Astraea reliquit.” The conversion and acces­ sion to the French throne of Henri IV—in hope the pacifier of religious and political strife— also reflects the return of Astraea, emblematized in art and literature, for example in Honoré d’Urfé’s pastoral romance, LAstrée. A Spanish bishop and historiographer to the Emperor Charles composes a work on imperial virtue which gains wide currency through­ out Europe and is translated into English by Sir Thomas North as The Dial of Princes. Yearning for a better or more “ecumenical” past as against the fractured present—Charles as the new Charlemagne— in­ spirits the currency of the book of Antonio Guevara. At the court of Ferrara, Ariosto, composing his Orlando furioso, makes the identification explicit. The chivalrous epic is a modern manifesto. Charlemagne the antique hero is the once and future king, now renascent as “re Carlo imperator romano.” Basically it is to validate the destinies and origins of his time and place that Ronsard, in his unfinished epic, the Franciade, attempts to link them with imperial Rome, as by providing Charles IX with a Trojan 273 274 Comparative Drama counterpart to Aeneas, the ancestor of Augustus. Brut, the English par­ allel to Francus, enables the Tudor dynasty to derive its line from Troy, in this way to impose a fictive order on flux. In the search for continuity—Spenser’s romantic epic certainly par­ ticipates in it—there is infinite pathos. For the search grows more insis­ tent as burgeoning disorder gives it the lie. The unity of medieval Catholicism is shattered. So Elizabethan Protestantism depicts itself not as annulling but resuming the past. (Of course it does no such thing.) The monarch is figured under this aspect. In an illustration published in the year of the Armada, Elizabeth grasps and wields the concentric spheres of the Ptolemaic universe, even as the sustaining God of the Middle Ages interfuses the world with His beneficent presence, on the walls of the Campo Santo at Pisa. But already Copernicus has super­ vened. Latin verses gloss the diagram, identifying the Queen as the Virgin Astraea. “The Return of Astraea must always be a renovatio, a renewal or rebirth or rediscovery of the past through which a new future is created.” On one side this emphasis on renewing means syncretism, not the persistence of the past in the present but the abrading and therefore spurious reconciling of contrarities in the past and present. The restora­ tion of the Golden Age which is held to be accomplished in the reign of François 1er and his unlucky successors, the last...

The Comedy of Swift's Scatological Poems

Five of Jonathan Swift’s scatological poems of the early 1730’s—A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed, The Lady’s Dressing Room, Strephon and Chloe, Cassinus and Peter, and A Panegyrick on the D–n—are comic masterpieces. In the case of A Beautiful Young Nymph, appreciation of the comedy involves recognition of its grimness, lightened only by the precarious successes of Corinna’s daily struggles for survival, indeed, for resurrection. With the other poems, this appreciation depends on a perception of the basic incongruities between fantasy and fact, sublimation and reality, the standards of pastoral romance or polite society and the need to evacuate waste. Although Swift satirizes those who would ignore or deny this need, his own willingness to face its results and his mock-heroic allusiveness in the scatological poems suggest the tolerance and playfulness characteristic of and conducive to a comic outlook.

Bartholomew yong, mannerist translator of Spanish pastoral romances

Bartholomew yong, mannerist translator of Spanish pastoral romances

Spenser and the Renaissance Ideal of Christian Heroism

WITH THE REEMERGENCE of the classics in the Italian Renaissance, particularly Homer, the concept of a Christian hero as distinct from the Christian champion arose to shape an enormous body of European literature. Broadly speaking, we may describe Christian heroism as aspiring to create an ideal figure, reminiscent of both the chivalric knight and the Christian Everyman, who might fit into a heroic poem that should at the same time rival and eclipse the epics of classical antiquity.1 Perhaps the first poem approaching such dimensions was Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, a superlative romance, but with more tenuous claims to either Christian or heroic values. Ovid, not Virgil, remains clearly the main inspiration for Ariosto's playfully pagan sensuosity, and only by strenuous allegorical interpretation can Christianity be construed as a major force in the poem. Significantly, however, such interpretation was by no means lacking in sixteenth-century Italy, where a host of commentators eagerly supplied it. Concurrently in Portugal Camoens could describe Vasco da Gama's daring voyage with a truly missionary zeal and so create a narrative where heroic action genuinely dramatizes the virtues of the Christian faith. But except for one peculiar episode the Lusiadas lacks the dimension of romance. The curious allegory of the Island of Love with which the epic concludes is apparently evidence of Camoens' felt need to define however hastily his military hero's relation to a world of pastoral romance, where hero and lover are inseparable.

Pastoral Patterns and Pastoral Variants in Lady Chatterley's Lover

Lady Chatterley's Lover is more than sexual: it is pastoral. D. H. Lawrence wrote to Catherine Carswell in 19292, I think one must for the moment withdraw from the world, away toward the inner realities that are real: and return, maybe, to the world later, when one is quiet and sure.' In this letter Lawrence, perhaps unconsciously, struck upon the pastoral pattern that he was to embody imaginatively in Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). Because critical interest in pastoral seemed once to have languished, it is hardly surprising that critics have never attempted to analyze the pastoral patterns and pastoral variants in Lawrence's last novel. The novel has for too long been thought a fictionalized treatise on morality or a guidebook to sexual freedom or a work prophetic of an emancipated society. We should, instead, begin to see the novel in its proper perspective: as a pastoral novel that embodies the attitudes, techniques, and patterns of traditional pastoral romance. In an important essay, Julian Moynahan comes close to seeing a pastoral pattern in Lady Chatterley's Lover; and Harry T. Moore, although he does not develop the idea, suggests that the novel is a romance.2 David Cavitch comes closer to seeing the relationship of the novel to pastoral when he calls Lady Chatterley's Lover a pastoral romance and writes that Connie and Mellors live in the formal scheme of a pastoral idyll.' But

The Shifted "Centre of Altruism" in The Woodlanders: Thomas Hardy's Third "Return of a Native"

Among the major novels of Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (1887) is something of an anomaly. Perhaps because it is so little like the tragic Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the d'Urbervilles which flank it, it has long been seen (in a sense, dismissed) as a transitional work-a peculiar version of pastoral whose mixture of rustic setting and character with social criticism marks it as a pivotal work in Hardy's progress from pastoral romance toward Jude the Obscure and the end of fiction writing.' However, critics of The Woodlanders have generally overlooked, or underestimated, two things about the novel. First, they have failed to explore in its full significance the fact that The Woodlanders is only in part a work of the 1880's. Hardy conceived and outlined in 1874 the story which he completed in 1885-1887 as The Woodlanders.2 The significance of an 1874 date of conception

Spain's Restless Golden Age - The Collapse of a Dream

The student of Spanish letters is aware that the Golden Age was a period of great writers and intensive cultivation of literature; not always is he equally familiar with the fact that the period underwent a series of numerous and profound changes both literary and social. This paper aims at explaining some of these changes. The few decades which immediately preceded her Golden Age had seemed to promise a future of increasing power and wealth for Spain. With the marriage of Ferdinand and Isabel in 1469 unified rule was established in the nation for the first time in centuries. Control of the Aragonese possessions in Italy gave the country important foreign outposts. The expulsion of the Moors in 1492 paved the way for the discovery of America with its potentialities for great wealth as well as political and religious expansion. When young King Carlos, the grandson of Ferdinand and Isabel, became Holy Roman Emperor in 1519, optimistic views that the nation had been chosen by Providence to assume the leadership of the Christian world seemed to be justified., The Golden Age was a period of change and upheaval, characterized by animation, restlessness and instability. The development of such heterodox groups as the alumbrados, who rejected the sacraments and other precepts of the Church, and the erasmistas, who cared little for the supernatural element in religion, during the reign of Carlos V, and the Baroque art of a few decades later are manifestations of the prevailing restlessness of spirit. One phase of this spirit was positive in nature, and expressed itself in an outburst of great intellectual activity. One need only mention four of the outstanding writers of the age-Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Quevedo and Calder6n-to give an indication of the productiveness and excellence which can be noted in its men of letters. Dramas were written by the hundreds, realistic fiction experienced a remarkable development, and writers on mystic subjects alone are said to have numbered more than three thousand. Between 1472 and 1572 twenty universities were founded in the nation. Equally impressive were Spain's contributions in geography, astronomy, mathematics, navigation and allied fields. The Golden Age began just when a change of major proportions was taking place in Spanish literature-the naturalization of the Italian eleven-syllable verse by Boscain and the introduction of such new Italian strophes as the sonnet, cancidn, octava real and tercetos. With the passage of time, other changes in literary style and taste can be noted. The five acts of Torres Naharro had been reduced to three by 1600. The picaresque novel and the pastoral romance developed in the sixteenth century, while the seventeenth century saw the wide acceptance of culteranismo and conceptismo, with their cultivated obscurity of style and thought. Especially striking were the changes that took place in the strophes used by dramatists starting with the year 1575. We are now on the threshold of a decade which witnessed abrupt and complete revolution in dramatic versification. The suddenness of these changes is indeed amazing and apparently without due preparation.2 The desire for change in this dynamic,

Eros and the Lesbian Pastorals of Longos

‘Daphnis & Chloe: A most sweet & pleasant Pastoral Romance for Young ladies by George Thornley, Gent. … 1657.’ The well-known title-page of the first English translation of Longos from the original is characteristic of the attitude which has always prevailed towards this work. If we turn to the present day we find that the latest translator into English writes in his introduction ‘Daphnis and Chloewas only meant to be “a source of pleasure for the human race”, and might have been described by a second-century Graham Greene as an “entertainment”’. The intervening three centuries provide some acknowledgments of Longos' skill in individual departments—the description of nature, for example, or the management of plot—but taking the work as a whole scarcely any reader seems to have regarded it as more than an amorous triviality with a country setting; enjoyable in its pastoral descriptions; enjoyable in its amorous passages (or shocking, according to the taste of the reader); essentially trivial.It is my object to argue that this view, by taking account of only one side of the book, misrepresents it as a whole. Longos meant us to find in his work a serious import, as well as entertainment, and the way in which he realises this intention in all the details of the story makes of it a serious work of art.

The Tempest as Pastoral Romance

HE problem of the source of The Tempest has long intrigued scholars, because a single entirely satisfactory work has never been uncovered to account for its origin. Many significant contributions to the solution of the problem have, however, been offered. In i817 Ludwig Tieck pointed to Die schone Sidea, a play by Jacob Ayrer, as a source or close analogue. Its plot parallels The Tempest in that it centers on a prince-magician, served by a spirit, father of a daughter whose hand is won when the son of an enemy carries logs. Die schdne Sidea was surely written before i605, the date of Ayrer's death, but since it went unpublished until i6i8, seven years after the composition of The Tempest, a common ancestor is conjectured for the two.' The Italian commedia dell' arte, a form of entertainment very popular in Shakespeare's England, is also thought to have been a suggestive force for The Tempest. Several of the comedies dealt with the theme of men shipwrecked on an island ruled by a Mago. Love intrigues between the crew and the natives formed the plot materials, and often the greed of the sailors provided the comic situation.2 A possible source for the political intrigue which resulted in Prospero's banishment has been found in William Thomas' History of Italy.3 The plot has also been linked to the Spanish Noches des Invierno of Antonio Eslava, in which a dethroned king raises a magic castle in mid-ocean, where he lives with his daughter until, also by magic, he brings about a marriage between her and the son of an enemy.4 The AEneid of Virgil is credited with inspiring both the storm and the meeting of the lovers.5 Many contemporary accounts of storms and shipwrecks have also been offered as sources for the storm of the first act, and in many there can be found a few similarities to the storm of the play.6 Even after careful study of all these suggested influences, different as each may be, none seems to rule out another, for the prime factor in Shakespeare's art is its marvelous composite quality. Indeed, a realization of its composite nature is the essential key to the understanding of his genius; thus, it is without questioning the value of these recognized sources or analogues that Longus' romance of Daphnis and Chloe is suggested as another important influence on the genesis of the play.

The Spanish Pastoral Romances

The introduction of the pastoral romance into Spain in the middle of the sixteenth century, and the extreme favor with which it was received, may, in view of the social condition of the country, seem at first sight paradoxical. At the time of the accession of Philip II, Spain was at the zenith of her military greatness: her possessions were scattered from the North Sea to the islands of the Pacific; and her conquests had been extended over both parts of the western world. The constant wars against the Moors, during a period of over seven hundred years, and the stirring ballads founded upon them, had fostered an adventurous and chivalric spirit,—a distinguishing trait of the Spanish character. Arms and the church were the only careers that offered any opportunity for distinction, and every Spanish gentleman was, first of all, a soldier.

IV.—How to Use Modern Languages as a Means of Mental Discipline

I come before you this morning to represent the unornamental, prosaic side of our work—the under-current, so to speak. Pedagogical papers have been read and discussed before this Association till it would seem that little could be left to say in this department; yet I feel encouraged to present another, for the very reason that the discussion of these papers has been more active and universal than that of any other class of papers whatever. And I regard this as a most wholesome sign of our professional spirit. For no teacher ought ever to forget, however attractive he finds the search for the principle of the Germanic accentuation, or the meaning of the second part of ‘Faust,’ that he is not by profession in the first place a philologist or a man of letters, but a teacher, whose first duty is toward his pupils, and whose work is to apply whatever he can find in philology or literature to the task of supplying, to the best of his power, these bright young minds which come to him for instruction, with that which will most help them to fill their future place in the world. And so I ask you to listen to another chapter of prose, in confidence that, however much we may be interested,—as I am sure we all are,—in the “Stressed Vowels in Beowulf,” or the “Spanish Pastoral Romances,” every one who is worthy to be a member of this Association is eager for any new idea which will help him to do this important work in a better manner; and if I can present any such ideas, or start a discussion which shall bring them, I shall feel that the under-current has not come to the surface in vain.