Is there anything more to say on Hamlet? Hide fox, and all after, a casual quip of the Prince, as he and his enemy the King start to hunt each other down, is taken as the title for this closely-considered survey of the play. J D Winter finds question after question in it raised and unanswered, as if the plays dramatic method were in part to create uncertainty in its audience and so draw them in. He adopts three phrases from the text to provide a context for his approach: the plays the thing, a rhapsody of words, and the invisible event. The first phrase suggests the spectacle itself, without regard to what has been written about it. There is no reference to outside opinion nor is another literary work named. The second indicates an awareness of the text as poem. While the tremendous sweep of Shakespearean blank verse, the prose-paragraphs on fire with their own poetry, the whispering gallery of metaphor, can scarcely be accorded proper respect in a prose commentary, certain rhapsodic effects are everywhere noted. Finally, the play is contained within a mystery. So much seems to happen; so little seems to happen. Almost all the major characters are subject to a pattern of error in their dealings as they are swept on from one catastrophic misjudgement to another. The level to which the play is focussed upon the blind time between events is unusually high. This too draws in the audience; it is a part of the spectators own internal experience. There can be no definitive answer to Hamlet or Hamlet. But like a signpost in a swarming mist, the third phrase may offer a faint clue: the invisible event.

An epic poem is a performance. The telling of Beowulf carries something of the days of its pre-literary composition, as it evolved as something memorised, half spoken and half sung, over many generations. The single manuscript we have, from about 1000 AD, is the end result of a great chain of poetic adaptation. Of all new versions Seamus Heaneys (1999) has made the most striking impact, in part for his willingness to experiment, to be a new scop or oral poet, to depart at times from the exact text and join the tradition when there was no such thing. The licence such an approach adopts can make for a riveting poem in itself, a work of wonder. But there is a different route to the flame of the original. J.D. Winters rendering of the Beowulf song accepts the text as historical fact, and by a gradual revelation of its deeper music, discovers an illumination from within. The voice is less his and more nearly of the time and world of the poem itself. But this is without recourse to an archaic register. It is the modern language and yet not the modern man speaking. The phrases of the text, like phrases of music with their crescendos and diminuendos, steadily and unhurriedly move towards the culmination of a powerfully fulfilling symphony. It is the expression of a simpler time than ours, and perhaps a more plain-speaking one. Yet its art was at least as sophisticated as the modern worlds. The clarity and concentration of meaning in the brilliantly alliterated half-lines can never be properly reconstructed. But a suggestion of that force and beauty, together with an underlying sense of the inexorable, may always be rediscovered. In the knock and flow of the lines, too, one can sense the poetry of a sea-faring nation. The nation is not England or Sweden or Denmark. It is an intermingled part of Northern Europe using the West Saxon dialect of the language in England to convey a mix of Scandinavian history and Teutonic legend. In this evocative transcreation the reader may come, no doubt as did the early listeners, to a simple truth behind the medley of international borders: the inevitable journey of the universal human.

Pearl occupies a special place in the English canon. Together with Gawain and the Green Knight and two minor poems, the late fourteenth-century manuscript came to light after nearly 500 years of being tucked away in one private library or another. While Gawain (which may or may not be by the same hand) received early acclaim as a marvellously-written tale of magic and derring-do, Pearl has yet fully to gain the popularity it richly deserves. In terms of psychological discovery, theological debate, and an unmatched technical brilliance in the joint deployment of alliteration and rhyme, it is a thing of wonder. A dream-vision for almost its entire length, Pearl has a direct relation to the narrators real world. Whether or not the situation it depicts is a fictional one, the poem stands as a commemoration of the deepest personal experience. While the descriptive passages of a heaven-made world are remarkable, the exchange between a grieving man and the pearl he has lost and found pitched almost in terms of a quickfire argument is irresistible. A young female character, taking her time, demolishes a learned male opponent. Yet love speaks throughout, in a Christian presentation of the struggle to relinquish self-will, so that by the deftest of literary strokes the reader finally is one with the dreamer as he comes to terms with the beauty of what must be. This translation meticulously preserves a highly-demanding formal structure and lexical meaning while operating with a freedom which ideally, in this kind of poetry, is that of a conversational song. Dream-poems were not uncommon in the fourteenth century; and Pearl not only is a perfect example of the genre, but offers a poetic experience to reach beyond genre and time.