In spite of E. Tillyard, we can find some playwrights, some exceptional few, in the days of Elizabeth, who are, in a sense, the forerunners of modern dramas. These playwrights may consciously have been on the same level with most of the playwrights of their time, and may still have believed, say, the 'order' or 'the chain of being', as Tillyard maintains; yet they wrote, as they really did, some new kinds of dramas which must be said quite akin in their essentials to some modern dramas of a certain kind rather than to the Elizabethan dramas. Among these few was Christopher Marlowe. In Edward II, it seems, as A. L. Rowse or W. Sanders says, that the writer's chief interests are always laid on, and ever confined to such earthly or humanly problems as the conflict between the king and Mortimer, or the sodomy between the king and Gaveston, or again the love between Mortimer and Isabella. Of these three problems the first is of course the biggest one and makes the motif of the play. In this sense, this is a play which tries to depict Edward II's reign, not as a 'record of God's Providence' as R. W. Battenhouse maintains, but as a history of 'the stronger prey upon the weaker' theory. This theory is, though the writer may not have been conscious of it, yet an embrye of a certain modern philosophy. The king tries to hold on to the golden crown, by which to squander anything, everything on Gaveston, his sole favourite or paramour; while Mortimer, the king's antagonist, tries to usurp the throne from the king, by which to satisfy or surfeit his boundless ambition 'that aspires heauen.' Gaveston is the counterpart of the king; Isabella, that of Mortimer. Here can we hardly find any man of 'justice' in the mediaeval sense of the word. One may name Edmund, the king's brother, as such a man of justice, but he is given too weak a part in the play to carry out God's justice. M. C. Bradbrook says in her Themes and Conventions of Elizabethan Tragedy, 'Edward II is generally acclaimed as Marlowe's greatest dramatic success; but this is only possible by ignoring Elizabethan standard,...' and 'In Edward II there is no central feeling or theme; it is merely a history.' I don't think she wrote these two statements with much sympathy with Edward II, but these are the main points of view from which I try to analyze Edward II. It is, I think, not always necessary for us to stand upon Elizabethan standard when we view such a play as Edward II, because the play is a mere history and not a historical play in a narrowest sense possible. From the aspect of dramatical composition, Edward II has nothing to do with the 'sin-and-punishment' theory which lies behind the tragedies of his time. Edward II is, and thinks he is, murdered 'without cause.' He is merely killed by the hand of a Machiavellian, not by the hand of God. This is the point of the play. The process of the play is quite interesting. First, Edward is deprived of Gaveston, his favourite, who loves the king 'more then all the world', and then, he is again deprived of the two Spensers, the substitutes of Gaveston, and at last, the king who is now deprived of everything to turn to, and who is left all alone in the world, is killed by Mortimer and the false queen. The soliloquies and speeches of the king at the death scene are psychologically very interesting because they suggest something new, something existentialistic. Here the conditions of Edward II are in no sense those of a king but of one poor individual. He is murdered merely as an individual. If Shakespeare's Richard II is one of the typical 'historical plays' of the day, then we can say Marlowe's Edward II is one of the forerunners of modern plays, in the form of a historical play.

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Recent stuides in the theory of the novel have established that the narrative method known as 'the ominiscient author' is not the primitive and clumsy mode of narration which the novel had to outgrow, but a legitimate convention with its own standards of success. This paper proposes to examine some of the more important ways in which George Eliot handles this convention in Middlemarch. Unlike the first-person narrator, the ominiscient author is not a character in the story. The impersonal and stylized language used by the omniscient author reflects his status as a being who transcends the story and has no recognizable individual traits. In novelists like Thackeray, who has a more personal and colloquial style, omniscient narration tends to become a succession of narrative postures with more or less characterization. It is not until late in her career that George Eliot mastered the impersonal stylization in her omniscient narration. Her early novels used a masculine persona, and there is an unmistakable presence of personal recollection which gives them their idyllic charm. This personal tone vanishes from Felix Holt, which opens with the objective, scientific analysis of a rural society in a tone in sharp contrast to that of loving recall of the earlier novels. Middlemarch completes this process. Its omniscient author is quite impersonal, and nowhere in the text are the author's sex, age, or circumstances revealed. (As for 'the gentle schoolmistress's tone' detected by some critics, it is impossible to estimate how much their judgment was influenced by their knowledge of the author's identity.) Different versions of the 'Finale' show that in the edition of the novel George Eliot excised sentences expressing her more personal opinions, such as feminism and progressive social views. Another characteristic of the omniscient author convention in Middlemarch is that passages of authorial commentary has a unity both conceptual and metaphorical. In this novel commentary is no longer, as in the earlier novels, a series of occasional observations hung on the string of the plot. It envisages the world of the novel as a complex totality of minute processes, and this, reinforced by the key image of the web, provides the structural principle for the entire novel. Related to it, there is another cluster of images associated with scientific technique for extending our perception, lenses, experiments, etc., which define the intensified powers of perception with which the novel pursues remote social ramifications and hidden psychological depths. Further, authorial commentary uncovers subtle distortions in the characters' view of themselves and the world, and identifies their source as egoism. Thus the omniscient author in Middlemarch is an impersonal function, both formulating and exemplifying the power of human perception at its highest state of perfection. The authorial commentary shows that the extension of our perception and the deepening of our moral sense is ultimately one and the same thing. Yet the supreme perceptive powers of the omniscient author do not finally dwarf the characters or their acts. There are limits to the authority of the commentary, and the omniscient author acknowledges this by admitting that shallow minds may sometimes arrive at correct judgment by their very shallowness. Also in one passage we find a sustained parody of authorial foresight. And in scenes like the one in Chaper LXXX, where Dorothea's vision establishes its own truth without any authorial intervention, the omniscient, author withdraws and lets the characters act out their intuitive perception. Thus in the final analysis it is the characters who attain true knowledge, but this knowledge shines out all the more clearly because the author's commentary has eliminated any possibility of a crude or easy attitude towards it.

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Though dialects are spoken freely in different parts of England, they are not haphazard at all but they have the uniformity and regularity of their own in phonology and syntax. Language is living, and naturally there are hard struggles for existence among words, protecting themselves from others to survive. There are struggles between old and new, and among words which have the same meaning and function. These phenomena of the survival of the fittest come from the vitality of language which makes it change and develop. We can find it more easily in English dialects than in standard English. Here are some remarkable examples to be seen in the verb of being which is formed from three different root-"Suppletion". Though different with regard to person and tense, the meaning is the same, and hereupon break out the struggles among present forms be, am, are, and is, the past was and were. Among them one would be enough to perform the function.

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Although John Gower has been highly estimated for the clarity, smoothness and simple beauty of his English, very few systematic studies of his language have ever appeared. Nor have, it seems, many noteworthy articles on specific themes been put forth since the beginning of this century when the admirable edition of the Confessio Amantis was published by G. C. Macaulay. Perhaps accumulation of an increased number of detailed investigation on various themes is needed, as in the case of Chaucer, before we can hope to have any form of systematic study of Gower's English; and here we shall be content to confine ourselves to drawing attention to a peculiar feature in the word-order of his Confessio Amantis. Macaulay's edition will be used throughout our investigation.

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This is the synopsis of the report of the symposium held in 1968 at the 40th national convention of the English Literary Society of Japan. The organization of the symposium and hence of this synopsis is as follows : 1. Tow papers read by two speakers, Kajita and Ikegami respectively 2. Prepared comments given by three discussants, Hasegawa, Inoue, and Yasui 3. Speakers' answers to the comments 1. PAPERS 1.1. Masaru Kajita, "The mechanism of embedding" The refinement of syntactic studies often leads to clarifying or confirming our vague, undefined intuition about meaning. As an example, let me cite the problem of sentence embedding. Chomsky says that what is recursively introduced in the base component is S(entence) only, but I assume that there are four sentence-like elements (call them S_1, S_2, S_3, S_4) which can be recursively introduced. They are introduced by the following rules: (1) i) S →(SAdv_1) S_2 ii) S_2 →(SAdV_2) S_3 iii) S_3 →Tense⌒S_4 SAdv_1 are such sentence-modifying adverbs as frankly, briefly; incidentally, however; etc. SAdv_2 are probably, certainly; fortunately, wisely; reportedly; therefore; etc. Tense is expanded by the following rules: (2) i) Tense→Tns (Tense-Adverbial) ii) Tns→{Past Present Future}(Perfect) SAdv_1, SAdv_2, and Tense are in hierarchical relation with each other in respect to the internal restriction imposed upon embedded sentences; that is to say, in an embedded sentence where SAdv_1 can occur, the other two can occur, but not conversely; in an embedded sentence where SAdv_2 can occur, Tense can also occur, but not conversely. See, for example, sentences listed in (4), (6) (p. 241), and (13) (p. 243). Accordingly, the following revision will be necessary in Chomsky's base component: (3) i) VP-V ({S_1 S_3 S_4}) ii) NP-(Det)N ({S_2 S_3 S_4}) As a result of this revision, such verbs as believe, think, etc. will be given a syntactic feature [+_ it S_2], request, demand, etc. [+_ it S_3], and begin, continue, cease, etc. [+it S_4_]. This classification of verbs based purely on syntactic evidence meshes well with our intuitive semantic classification of them. Also different statuses assigned to SAdv_1, SAdv_2, and Tense reinforce our vague intuition about the semantics of these constituents. 1.2. Yoshihiko Ikegami, "Syntax and semantics" I assume i) that 'semantics' defines the combinability of elements, ii) that 'syntax' defines the linear order of the elements, and iii) that there is some correlation between semantic elements and syntactic elements. Essentially in line with the stratificational grammar, i) will be called 'semotactics,' ii) 'lexotactics,' and iii) 'semo-lexemic realizational structure.' There is no one-one correspondence between the sememic and the lexemic strata; hence the phenomena explained in stratificational terms as 'diversification,' 'neutralization,' 'zero realization,' 'portmanteau realization,' The diagram given on p. 256 shows the (a?) structure in the sememic stratum that will be realized as 'sentence' in the lexemic stratum. For a sample analysis, see illustrative sentences (1) to (8) (pp. 254-255). Notice that there is a hierarchical relation between the constituents in the diagram; S^<verb> is combined first with Aspect, and then Agent is combined with the resultant constituent, Cause being combined with the constituent resulting from it, etc. There are also selectional restriction between the types of elements. For example, if 'certain' is selected in Mode, there is no restriction in Tense (Both 'The door must be open' and 'The door must have been open' are all right), but if 'necessary' is selected in Mode, the selection of Tense is limited to 'present,' 'future,' or 'zero' ('The door had to be

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