PUBLICATIONS Phill 340 OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA EDITED BY. WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD SECRETARY OF THE ASSOCIATION VOL. XXVII, NO. 4 NEW SERIES, VOL. XX, NO. 4 DECEMBER, 1912 PUBLISHT QUARTERLY BY THE ASSOCIATION AT 383 HARVARD STREET, CAMBRIDGE, MASS. SUBSCRIPTION PRICE $3.00 A YEAR; SINGLE NUMBERS $1.00 BALTIMORE Enterd November 7, 1902, at Boston, Mass., as second-class matter CONTENTS XXI.-The Source of Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite. By EDGAR 461-485 486-523 XXII.-The Shaksperean Mob. By FREDERICK TUPPER, JR., B. WOODS, ACTS OF THE EXECUTIV COUNCIL, 524-567 lxxv-lxxvii MEMBERS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA (including Members of the Central Division of the Association), lxxviii-cxxxiv The annual volume of the Publications of the Modern Language Association of America is issued in quarterly instalments. It contains chiefly articles which hav been presented at the meetings of the Association and approved for publication by the Editorial Committee. Other appropriate contributions may be accepted by the Committee. The first number of each volume includes, in an Appendix, the Procedings of the last Annual Meeting of the Association and its Divisions; the fourth number of each volume contains a list of the members of the Association and its Divisions. The complete sets of the first seven volumes of these Publications ar all sold. The subsequent volumes, comprizing all the New Series, may be obtaind of the Secretary. The subscription for the current volume is $3.00. The price of single numbers is $1.00 each. Copies of the Report of the Committee of Twelv on Admission Requirements may be obtaind of the Secretary. The price is ten cents a copy. All communications should be addrest to WILLIAM GUILD HOWARD, Secretary of the Association, 46 Ware Hall, Cambridge, Mass. The next meeting of the Association wil be held at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., on December 26, 27, and 28. The meeting of the Central Division wil be held at Indianapolis, Ind., on the same days. Attention is cald to the regulations printed on the third page of this cover. XXI. THE SOURCE OF CHAUCER'S ANELIDA The question as to the source of Chaucer's unfinished. poem Anelida and Arcite is an unsolved problem. Professor Skeat points out in his introduction to this poem 1 that the first three stanzas are from Boccaccio's Teseide, as are also stanzas 8, 9, and 10; and that stanzas 4 to 7 are partly from Statius. The origin of the rest of the poem, which is far the greater part, is unknown. The poem belongs among that class of lyrics known technically as complaints, as its title indicates, The Compleynt of feire Anelida and Fals Arcite. Chaucer begins with a proem of three stanzas taken largely from Boccaccio. This proem ends with a verse giving his authorities: "First folow I Stace and after him Corinne." The story then opens with an adaptation of some verses from Statius's Thebaid, XII, 519, etc. The eighth, ninth, 1 Oxford Chaucer, Vol. 1, p. 77. and tenth stanzas again are from Boccaccio. After line 70, we have no further trace of a source, and for three reasons we may fairly consider the story itself to be an original attempt. First, Chaucer takes his setting, the court of Theseus, from the Teseide of Boccaccio; but that source does not furnish the story which he here tells. It is improbable that he would have taken this setting from the Teseide if he had had another source for his story. Second, the names, Anelida and Arcite, come from different cycles of stories, Anelida apparently originating in the Arthurian romances,1 and Arcite coming from the Alexandrian cycle. Third, the story was left unfinished. If Chaucer had been following a definite source, he would no doubt have finished the story. Schick, in his edition of the Temple of Glas, E. E. T. S., p. cxx, says in a note upon the list of lovers given in the Intelligenza: This list is interesting as giving, amongst others, the following pair of lovers (stanza 75, 1. 2): 'La bella Analida et lo bono Ivano.' This seems to point to one of the Romances treating of Iwain and the Round Table for the origin of the name Anelida, which would at once upset Bradshaw's and Professor Cowell's ingenious etymologies from 'Avaïris and Anahita: for I do not believe that both the poet of the Intelligenza and Chaucer mistook a t for an l. We have also in Froissart's Dit du bleu Chevalier the line (ten Brink, Chaucer-Studien, p. 213): 'Ywain le preu pour la belle Alydes.' One and the same personage is evidently indicated by the two names Analida and Alydes for Iwain's paramour: I am not, however, sufficiently acquainted with the Arthur-romances to know of the occurrence of such a name. Laudine in Chrestien's Chevalier au Lion is not very like it." On the name Anelida being a misreading of the name of the goddess Anahita of the Zoroastrian religion in some Latin text see Professor Cowell's article on Chaucer's Queen Anelyda in Essays on Chaucer, Chaucer Society, 1892, p. 615. This would seem a simple enough theory and so we might let the matter rest, but there are two troublesome questions which refuse to down. These are: first, why should Chaucer insist upon giving us an authority, Corinne, whom he apparently never followed; and second, why is this complaint so different from the ordinary complaints of the period? Let us consider first the possibilities of such an authority as Corinne. There are two whom it has been conjectured Chaucer might have had in mind, Corinnus, a reputed Greek author, and Corinna,1 a Theban poetess. Either one of these names would assume, of course, the form that we find in Chaucer's verse. Modern historians of Greek literature, such as Christ and Croiset, make no mention of Corinnus. But from Roscher 2 we find that Corinnus was supposed to be an epic poet, a native of Ilium who lived before Homer, and during the Trojan war wrote an Iliad from which Homer borrowed the argument for his poem. He wrote in the Doric characters which had been invented by Palamedes; for he was a pupil of Palamedes. He also wrote the story of the war of Dardanus against the Paphlagonians. Roscher cites Suidas as his authority. The mere recital of the reputed facts about Corinnus seems to remove him from the range of possibility. Certainly Suidas is poor dependence in the way of an 1 See Lounsbury, Studies in Chaucer, Vol. II, pp. 402-5; Skeat, Oxford Chaucer, Vol. 1, p. 531; Globe Chaucer, p. 336. Miss Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual, p. 88, has, "I have queried if a MS. could have given Chaucer Corinnus instead of Corippus: see Sandys, Hist. of Classical Scholarship, 436; but there appears no evidence of Corippus' influence." 2 See Roscher, Ausführliches Lexikon der Griech. u. Röm. Mythologie, under Korinnos. Fabricius in his Bibliotheca Graeca, Vol. 1, p. 16, gives something about Corinnus based also only upon Suidas. |