Reviews 267 psychology, morality, and metaphysics. And its language is different from what Synge in a phrase that once and for all discredited Archer’s transla tions called “Ibsen’s joyless and pallid words.” For Ibsen’s fatal error during the last part of his career, according to Gray, was that he surrendered to a popular taste for realism in drama that frustrated the poet he had been in Brand and Peer Gynt (pp. 20, 23-24) Gray’s late Ibsen is a nihilistic, guilt-ridden, uncharitable solipsist “bounded in a nutshell” (p. 199), endlessly defying the Ultimate from dim heights he is unable to stay on, both a realist manqué and a poet manqué. Perhaps it is possible to look at Ibsen in this way, but the limited view Gray invites us to share doesn’t make it seem so. Both what Gray sees and dislikes in Ibsen and what he misses of what is really there are parts of the distinctive, essential Ibsen. The name of his Muse was Scepticism. OTTO REINERT University of Washington l A fair example of Gray’s style. Why “may be found”? The pistol has been found, and the only uncertainty is whether the police will discover its owner. . . found by Lovborg’s body” is an awkward ambiguity. Dale B. J. Randall and George Walton Williams, ed. Studies in the Con tinental Background of Renaissance English Literature: Essays Pre sented to John L. Lievsay. Durham: Duke University Press, 1977. Pp. xiii + 235. $11.75. John L. Lievsay retired at Duke University in 1975, bringing to a close the academic part of a career that has been and continues to be devoted to scholarly investigation of the relations, principally literary, between Italy and England during the later years of the Renaissance. The volume contains a listing of Professor Lievsay’s published work, a warm tribute by Louis B. Wright, and eleven essays by friends, former colleagues, and associates at the Folger, all of whom respect both Lievsay and the disinterested scholarship which he has supported throughout his career by precept and by example. Understandably some of the essays have nothing whatever to do with drama. This is true of the interesting piece by S. K. Heninger, Jr., on Oronce Finé and his influence on Renaissance textbooks for the mathematical sciences, and of G. B. Park’s essay on Reginald Pole, Henry VIII’s cousin, who became a cardinal before he became a priest. Both of these are worth a second look. Then there are also relatively short articles by Isidore Silver on the poet Ronsard’s steadfast dedica tion to the Greek notion that poetry, music, and dance are all aspects of a single art; by Richard R. Predmore, in which a modern instance is adduced to suggest that Don Quixote’s madness be taken seriously as “a coherent and meaningful experience”; and by Bruce W. Wardropper 268 Comparative Drama on the continental practice, imported into England by Robert Southwell, of adapting secular poems to create religious ones. Another useful essay on nondramatic material is O. B. Hardison’s “Petrarch and Modem Lyric Poetry.” Hardison’s thesis is that Petrarch, having committed himself to Horace’s view of the poet as the supreme craftsman, anony mous and godlike, encountered one experience in his life so compelling that it demanded to be memorialized but so intense that it continued to resist all his attempts to convert it into an artifact with a fixed form. The rest of his life, therefore, become a war between understanding and feeling with neither ever emerging completely triumphant; and the uneasy form of human awareness objectified in successive revisions of the Canzoniere became the context for works by Wyatt, Surrey, Gascoigne, Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, and Eliot. Other poets before Petrarch, Hardison notes, had undoubtedly encountered feelings that were too powerful to yield to formulation; but the unique thing about Petrarch was that he could neither forget his experience nor give up trying to make poetry out of it. Still unrelated to drama but even more closely related to contem porary concerns is Craig R. Thompson’s essay, perhaps the most im portant one in the book, “Scripture for the Ploughboy...