New Facts and Theories About the Parnassus Plays

PMLA ◽  
1959 ◽  
Vol 74 (4-Part1) ◽  
pp. 325-335
Author(s):  
Marjorie L. Reyburn

Students of English drama have long been interested in the Parnassus trilogy, produced in St. John's College, Cambridge, at the turn of the sixteenth century. The third play, The Reiurne from Parnassus, or The Scourge of Simony, was the only one published contemporaneously. Since the Reverend W. D. Macray's edition of the entire series in 1886, following his discovery in the Bodleian of a manuscript copy of the long-lost first two plays, the trilogy has been acclaimed as “the most brilliant product of the Tudor university stage.” Successive scholars have analyzed its sources, argued the problems of its authorship and dating, and variously interpreted its personal satire and allusion. Still unsolved, however, is the problem of authorship; still uncertain the answer to a famous crux in Shakespearean scholarship—the identification of Shakespeare's “purge” of Jonson, alluded to in the third play. It is the purpose of this paper (1) to introduce a new name in connection with the authorship of the trilogy; (2) by means of previously unused internal evidence to establish beyond any possibility of doubt J. B. Leishman's well-reasoned, but nevertheless inconclusive, identification of the “purge” with Dekker's Satiro-Mastix, despite the Parnassus poet's attribution of it to Shakespeare; and (3) to use this same internal evidence to reveal the Cambridge playwright's hitherto unsuspected satire of Jonson.

PMLA ◽  
1918 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 244-268
Author(s):  
David Klein

In the winter of 1567–8 five gentlemen of the Inner Temple presented befor the queen a tragedy entitled Gismond of Salerne. In 1591–2 Robert Wilmot, author of the fifth act, publisht a revision of the entire work under the name Tancred and Gismund. This was reprinted by Dodsley. The erlier version has cum down to us in two ms. copies, both in the British Museum: Hargrave 205, knoen as H, and Landsdowne 786, knoen as L, the former dating from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, the latter from the end of the sixteenth or the beginning of the seventeenth century. L has been reprinted by Brandl in volume LXXX of Quellen und Forschungen and by Cunliffe in his Early English Classical Tragedies. Renewed study of the work finds a stimulus in the recent publication of a fotografic reproduction of H in Farmer's facsimile edition of The Old English Drama.


Author(s):  
Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

By exploring the wide range of names given to the ‘new’ sexually transmitted disease—the Great Pox—this chapter dispels notions held for two centuries or more. Instead, no tit-for-tat-naming war among nations accused of carrying the disease ensued. The ‘French disease’ alone became standard in medical texts, but not among commoners and not after the late sixteenth century for physicians. The chapter challenges a second truism of the historiography: that naming meant blaming. Although the disease was named after the French, no laws or pogroms ensued against them or any other ‘other’. However, physicians increasingly identified humans as the essential carriers of this new disease and became concerned with tracking human contacts. By the end of the sixteenth century, medical texts had renamed it the territorially neutral lues venerea. Coincidently, with the rise of this new name, blame placed on women, the poor, and victims of the disease increased.


1955 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-41
Author(s):  
Eleanor B. Adams

The island of Trinidad was discovered by Columbus on the third voyage in 1498. One of the largest and most fertile of the West Indian islands, for many years it remained on the fringe of European activity in the Caribbean area and on the coasts of Venezuela and Guiana. A Spanish settlement was founded there in 1532, but apparently it disintegrated within a short time. Toward the end of the sixteenth century Berrio and Raleigh fought for possession of the island, but chiefly as a convenient base for their rival search for El Dorado, or Manoa, the Golden Man and the mythical city of gold. Throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries explorers, corsairs, and contraband traders, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch, passed near its shores, and many of them may well have paused there to refresh themselves and to make necessary repairs to their vessels. But the records are scanty and we know little of such events or of the settlements that existed from time to time.


2005 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Mack

Abstract This paper presents a critical assessment of Vives's major rhetorical treatise, De ratione dicendi (1533). In terms of structure it shows that the first book is concerned with the linguistic basis of style, that the second deals with the qualities of style, the four aims of rhetoric, decorum and disposition and that the third presents guidance on composing ten genres of writing practised by humanists. The paper describes Vives's original contributions to the analysis of the linguistic basis of style, the qualities of style, emotional manipulation, decorum, and the composition of history and commentary. In assessing Vives's work it makes comparisons with rhetoric texts by Agricola, Erasmus, Melanchthon, and Ramus. It finds that Vives's reform of rhetoric is based in his encyclopaedic grasp of human learning but that this very encyclopaedism can cause weaknesses in his discussions of particular topics. De ratione dicendi tells us a great deal about Vives's perceptiveness and breadth of reading but, with only three sixteenth century editions, it was not a successful textbook.


1968 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 111-149
Author(s):  
Stafford Poole

The study of the opposition to the Third Mexican Council of 1585 provides a fascinating picture, not only of the determined efforts to undo the work of the most important ecclesiastical meeting of colonial New Spain but also of the various hostilities and animosities, intrigues and rivalries, that were at work in New Spain toward the end of the sixteenth century In the Third Council, the bickering of secular and religious priests, the opposition of bishops to the exorbitant privileges of the religious orders, the encroachments of the civil authority into the domain of the ecclesiastical, and the determination of clerics to defend their privileges and jurisdiction, all converged on the questions of (1) should the Council be permitted to publish its decrees and (2), once published, could they be put into execution?


Zograf ◽  
2014 ◽  
pp. 153-163
Author(s):  
Dragan Vojvodic

In the katholikon of the monastery of Praskvica there are remains of two layers of post-Byzantine wall-painting: the earlier, from the third quarter of the sixteenth century, and later, from the first half of the seventeenth century, which is the conclusion based on stylistic analysis and technical features. The portions of frescoes belonging to one or the other layer can be clearly distinguished from one another and the content of the surviving representations read more thoroughly than before. It seems that the remains of wall-painting on what originally was the west facade of the church also belong to the earlier layer. It is possible that the church was not frescoed in the lifetime of its ktetor, Balsa III Balsic.


1927 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. K. Johnson

A summary view of the main evidence at our disposal may be soon obtained. Three traditions appear at the outset. The first depends on a MS. once at Mainz, and now no longer extant, but of which part, at any rate, still existed in the sixteenth century; the second on an eleventh century MS. at Bamberg; and the third on a number of later MSS. in Rome, Florence, Paris, the British Museum, Oxford, Holkham, and other places. The fact that (at any rate for preliminary investigation) these three traditions must be regarded as separate may be seen first from the parts of the decade which they each omit.


2008 ◽  
Vol 26 (12) ◽  
pp. 3897-3912 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. D. DeJong ◽  
A. J. Ridley ◽  
C. R. Clauer

Abstract. During steady magnetospheric convection (SMC) events the magnetosphere is active, yet there are no data signatures of a large scale reconfiguration, such as a substorm. While this definition has been used for years it fails to elucidate the true physics that is occurring within the magnetosphere, which is that the dayside merging rate and the nightside reconnection rate balance. Thus, it is suggested that these events be renamed Balanced Reconnection Intervals (BRIs). This paper investigates four diverse BRI events that support the idea that new name for these events is needed. The 3–4 February 1998 event falls well into the classic definition of an SMC set forth by Sergeev et al. (1996), while the other challenge some previous notions about SMCs. The 15 February 1998 event fails to end with a substorm expansion and concludes as the magnetospheric activity slowly quiets. The third event, 22–23 December 2000, begins with a slow build up of magnetospheric activity, thus there is no initiating substorm expansion. The last event, 17 February 1998, is more active (larger AE, AL and cross polar cap potential) than previously studied SMCs. It also has more small scale activity than the other events studied here.


1971 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Clay

The Lords Petre were always one of the most prominent of English Catholic families, and they were also one of the richest. Their landed estates had been built up in the middle of the sixteenth century by Sir William Petre, Secretary of State to three Tudor sovereigns. Sir William's son, John, was created a Baron in 1611, but in the early 17th century the family properties ceased to grow in size, partly because Catholicism excluded them from the profits of office, and partly because provision for younger sons offset such new acquisitions as were made. But even so the estates inherited by the third Lord Petre in 1637 were large enough to place him clearly in the ranks of the great landed magnates. In Essex he had a well-consolidated belt of land lying to the west and south-west of Chelmsford, and centred on the two family residences of Ingatestone Hall and Thorndon Hall. Altogether in Essex Petre had about 11,000 acres of freehold land and the lordship of seventeen manors, and these produced some £5,500 per annum or considerably more than half his total income from land. In addition he had a large estate on the opposite side of the country, in Devon. This lay in two distinct areas, one centred on Axminster and extending down the Axe valley and its tributaries, and the other in the southerly projection of the county on the southern edge of Dartmoor, where the principal possession was the vast moorland manor of South Brent. Besides the main estates in Essex and Devon, there were some isolated properties: the manor of Osmington down on the Dorset coast; Toddenham and Sutton in Gloucestershire; Kennett and Kentford on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border.


Traditio ◽  
1961 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 323-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Reeves

The question of the dramatis personae in the last great act of history was a subject of perennial interest in the Middle Ages. Parts, both good and bad, had to be cast and it is not surprising that national hopes and rivalries frequently crept into the various attempts to assign these tremendous cosmic roles. Although both the pessimistic expectation of a mounting crescendo of evil and the hope of a millennium had existed in Christian thought since its beginning, it was the Joachimist structure of history which most clearly brought together the final crisis of evil and the final blessedness in a last great act which was yet within history, separated from eternity by the Second Advent. The concept of an age of blessedness had three strands in it: first, the idea of the millennium, derived from the Apocalypse (20.1–3), in which Satan is bound for a thousand years; secondly, the concept of a Sabbath Age, symbolized in the Seventh Day of Creation when God rested from His labors; thirdly, the Trinitarian interpretation of history, finally worked out by Joachim, in which history was expected to culminate in the Third Age of the Holy Spirit. The first two ideas did not necessarily lead to the expectation of a last age of blessedness within time: the millennium was frequently interpreted as covering the whole period between the First and Second Advents, or again, as constituting a rule of Christ and His Saints beyond history; the Sabbath Age could be seen as a Sabbath beyond the Second Advent and Last Judgment and therefore also beyond history. It was only when these two concepts became linked with the Trinitarian view of history that they clearly symbolized a crowning age of history, set in the future and therefore not yet attained, whilst unmistakably within the time process, preceding the winding-up of history in the Second Advent and Last Judgment. The full force of Joachim's concept of the Third Age was rarely grasped, appearing usually in a much-debased form, but the program of Last Things, as worked out by Joachites of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, profoundly influenced the form which these expectations took in the later Middle Ages and, indeed, right down to the end of the sixteenth century.


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