Why does Hieronimo kill Duke Castile just before the end of the play (The Spanish Tragedy)? It is Lorenzo that murdered Horatio. Castile is completely exempt from the suspicion of the murder. It appears then to be a mere non-sensical cruelty, for which reason Hieronimo the real tragic revenger might suddenly turn out to be a villain. But is it true? We have a famous chorus, "Revenge" and "Ghost", in this play. The "Ghost" is Andrea's who is informed by himself to have been killed by Balthazar on the battle-ground. The "Ghost" returns to the world led by "Revenge". What for? It must be apparently for some revenge, for the guide is "Revenge". But Andrea was evidently killed in the duel with Balthazar, however mean it may have been. His death is not sufficient enough for the cause of revenge. Besides, the main plot of the play is Hieronimo's revenge upon Lorenzo. The protagonist superficially has nothing to do with the "Ghost" of Andrea. It seems to mean that the presence of the "Ghost" and "Revenge" is irrelevant as the chorus of the play. But is it true? The "Ghost" tells that the infernal judges wonder whether he died as a martialist or as a lover. What does it mean? If Andrea died in the battle, his ghost should be instantly judged 'martialist' and directly sent into 'martial fields' in Hades. The "Ghost" is a "wandering ghost" who knows nothing about his own fate either. It is Proserpine the queen of Hell and "Revenge" her servant that know the 'misterie'. There is something mysterious about the manner of Andrea's death. "Revenge" is committed by the queen to the work to resolve the mystery to the "Ghost", so that their presence on the stage is required throughout the play. The chorus is neither irrelevant nor obtrusive, but essential to the play. Hieronimo's killing of Castile is demanded also within the compass of the function of the chorus. It is not a non-sensical murder, but closely connected with the 'misterie' of the whole play. The Spanish Tragedy is called the first Elizabethan revenge tragedy from which various forms of revenge plays are derived. But we have nothing so strenuous in following the logic of "wild justice". After this play "Revenge" the chorus disappears from the stage or converges into the "Ghost". And then the "Ghost" begins to be questioned of its existence by the revenger-protagonist, with Shakespeare's Hamlet. It must be indeed a psychological refinement in dramatic writing. The more psychologically refined, however, the more vague the logic and action of revenge. The "Ghost" will then be liable to be considered a mere illusion or mental derangement by the revenger himself to whom it has appeared. This is not a long way from the next stage that the "Ghost" also completely disappears. The decline and fall of the "Ghost" can be said the metamorphosis of Revenge Tragedy. What does the phenomenon morally stand for?

View full abstract

While working on Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison, Richardson often denounces the saying that a reformed rake makes the best husband. At the same time, he is very nervous about the doctrine of moderate rakery suggested by Lady Bradshaigh. She says in one of her letters to Richardson that is is quite all right for him to accuse an abandoned profligate, but she wonders why he cannot show some leniency toward such a man as moderate rake. For him, however, a rake is a rake, whether abandoned or moderate ; or so he gives his admirers to understand. The above saying or the doctrine of moderate rakery seems to have reminded him of his own Pamela, which, it appears, is partly based upon these ideas. Now the use of the reformed rake convention is often found, not only in the so-called Sentimental Comedy or Genteel Comedy of his days, but also in prose literature such as the Spectator or the Tatler. In this connection, it seems rather interesting to the present writer that, while defending himself against the doctrine of moderate rakery, Richardson refers to Colley Cibber, who, he says, holds this doctrine and once laughed at him for his defence of male-virgin or what Fielding calls male-chastity. This is interesting in view of the fact that Cibber is one of the representative writers of the Sentimental Comedy, where the doctrine which Richardson hates is often taken for granted, and, as is seen in Cibber's works, the happy ending is brought about by the more or less doubtful repentance of the moderate rake in the last act. Richardson cannot accept such morally ambiguous solution seen in what Allardyce Nicoll calls moral-immoral comedies. Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers represents the new trends in drama against these moral-immoral comedies. Its strong moralizing tendency reminds us of Parson Adams' words in Fielding's Joseph Andrews that "there are some things almost solemn enough for a sermon" in this play. The present writer suspects that Richardson's words against Cibber and Lady Bradshaigh in his letter are based upon the dialogue between Mr. Sealand and Sir John Bevil on similar topic in The Conscious Lovers. This comedy of Steele's seems to have furnished Richardson with valuable hints in fighting against the moral ambiguity of the Sentimental Comedy as is seen in Cibber's works.

View full abstract

The stories of Walter Pater are divided in a broad way into the autobiographical and the historical. The autobiographical stories must have the common theme "time" as the process of growth and the historical ones have to be concerned with "time" as history itself. Curious to say, however, Pater seems to try to eliminate "time" from these stories. In "The Child in the House", Pater recollects the old house in which he "had passed his earliest years, but which he had never since seen," and yet the passage of "almost thirty years which lay between him and that place" is consciously eliminated. The scene of Marius the Epicurean is laid in Rome of the 2nd Century, and many historical persons enter the stage of various historical events. It is doubtful, however, whether the true aim of Pater is to depict a chronological story. In this novel, too, it seems to me, Pater tries to eliminate the chronological order ; indeed, his interest is rather in the fact that Marius's age and his own have much in common, and he makes, in fact, an excuse and says "let the reader pardon me if here and there I seem to be passing from Marius to his modern representatives-from Rome, to Paris or London." Another aspect of Pater's stories which deserves consideration is his attitude towards diseases. Almost all the heroes are disposed to suffer from diseases : they are in some cases afflicted with real consumptive diseases, and in others, with intellectual maladies. In both cases, diseases are the essential, part of Pater's view of life. And this is apparently symbolized in the fact that Pater starts his career with an essay on "Coleridge" and ends with one on "Pascal". In these essays Pater goes on further to emphasize the positive meanings of their diseases, which had no small effect on their literary works. As for the background of Marius the Epicurean, Pater explains it and says: "That was an age of valetudinarians, in many instances of imaginary ones." Pater traces the bodily and spiritual disease of Marius in this novel, contrasting him with Cornelius who symbolizes healthiness, having" a youthful voice, with a reassuring clearness of note, which completed his [Marius's] cure." Pater eliminates the chronological order in Marius the Epicurean as stated above, and Marius is depicted as a man who has not any growth in his life and who ends it without any hopes in the future. But as for "the marvellous hopefulness of Cornelius," it is gradually proved to be "Christianity" and it is explained as : "his seeming prerogative over the future, that determined, and kept alive, all other sentiment concerning him. A new hope had sprung up in the world of which he, Cornelius, was a depositary,...." We find then the following sentence in Plato and Platonism to be most significant : "Motion discredited, motion gone, all was gone that belonged to an outward and concrete experience, thus securing exclusive validity to the sort of knowledge,..., which corresponds to the 'Pure Being,' that after all is only definable as 'Pure Nothing,' that colourless, formless, impalpable existence to use the words of Plato....' We may recollect that Pater uses this definition of 'Pure Nothing' to describe the distemper of Coleridge. So by substituting the word "time" for "motion," we can read the above quotation as the explanation by Pater of the relation between his elimination of "time" and his favourite theme of "disease." Thus it necessarily follows that such a characteristic of Pater's stories shows clearly his anti-Christian tendency.

View full abstract

This paper is an attempt to examine some affinity between Melville's "The Encantadas" and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. This idea in germ lies in Richard Chase's introduction to Selected Tales and Poems by Herman Melville, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1950. There, in regard to "The Encantadas," Chase says, "There is a certain Dantean quality in this picture of an enchanted Hell," and also "The Encantadas is Melville's wasteland, in which as T. S. Eliot says in his famous poem, there is rock and no water." The former view to see the story as Melville's version of the Inferno was taken up for further consideration in I. Newberry's "'The Encantadas': Melville's Inferno" (American Literature, Vol. 38, No. 1, March 1966). The latter, the idea of "The Encantadas" as Melville's The Waste Land, has not been examined so far. The paper does not propose to investigate the influence of Melville on Eliot. It does check similarities, obvious and implied, between the two, but, at the same time, tries to see them through the perspective of American literature as a whole so that one may, hopefully, find a clue to the structure of the American imagination. Similarities, indeed, abound in the two works. Both present the sterile paysage moralise where "there is rock and no water," and when there is water, there is "death by water." The reigning color in both is black, with occasional fire of red. Both are often humorous in tone, contrary to the dark subject they are dealing with. When Melville says, "Here at the summit [of Rock Rodondo] you and I stand," one can almost hear Eliot saying, "Let us go then, you and I," and this "you" is close to the "you" in "You! hypocrite lecteur!-mon semblable,-mon frere!" in The Waste Land. The dog in Eliot's ambiguous line, "Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men," is, if one follows Elizabeth Drew's interpretation, close to that found in "Sketch Seventh" and "Sketch Eighth" (an enemy to men under the Dog-King, a friend under the Chola widow). The style of each sometimes goes out of the boundary of the proper genre (prose and verse). Above all the following three points should be emphasized. First, their allusion to, or reliance on, the heritage of literature, which, typically, will be seen in their quotations and choice of names. A quotation without giving its source (a means to set up a close and closed relation between the author and the reader who identifies it) as in case of the first quotation of each work was to be skillfully used by other American writers too (Hemingway for example). The choice of names like Melville's "Sycorax" or Eliot's "Tiresias," as effective as a quotation, is a technique utilized widely from Cooper ("Ishmael Bush" in The Prairie) to Salinger ("Sybil Carpenter" in "A Perfect Day for Bananafish"). Related to this, one cannot ignore American writers' general concern with names which may go back to the Puritan psychology in the seventeenth century when "the Puritan elegist might well believe that in a man's name God had inserted evidence of his nature and his fate" (Roy Harvey Pearce, The Continuity of American Poetry, Princeton University Press, 1961, Chapt. II, "Origins: Poetry and the Puritan Imagination"). Secondly, they share the device of anticipating what comes later in the work. Eliot uses this device in the famous Tarot cards in Madame Sosotoris's hand. In Melville's case, it is to be found in the description of the creatures at Rock Rodondo. The penguin, "grotesquely misshapen," "pertaining neither to Carnival nor Lent," anticipates "Fatherless Oberlus."

(View PDF for the rest of the abstract.)

View full abstract

With the advent of Chomsky's Transformational Generative Grammar (TGG), all the grammars other than that have been condemned as Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) outdated or even harmful. The writer, however, poses a serious question about the charge and tries to file a convincing contradiction against it by delving into the matter in the light of the fundamental character of formalized grammar. The conclusions: (i) PSG and TGG are not heterogeneous but homogeneous, the difference being only that of methodologies, (ii) Either of them has the domain of its own and the two are complementary to each other, (iii) Some new schools of PSG are expected to prove their competencies to the explication of linguistic mechanisms.

View full abstract