Review of The Oxford Antholog:i,r of l!;nglish Literature, Vol. I George t. ScheRer Department of Essex Community College Baltimore County, Mt'i . 21 237 I shoul d say at the outset t. hat I regard the Oxford Anthology ·tree ..._ s clearly the best anthology of literature on the market , for r eas• ons I shall explain below. I shall, however, or course concentrate on what l trust will be constructive cx·i ticisms in the following rema rks. To begin with the physical book itself', l would say that the Oxford Anthology has a mos t distinguished and practical appearance and format. Its largal.• si1e pag e· in comparison with the Norton, and 1 ts generous upper and lower marglns and generally greater wh.ite ... spa ce lends a pleas- Lvig, uncluttered appearance (and leaves roo m for marginal glossing). The Norton, by comparison, seems era mp aci and cluttered. Ona typical page of' Chaucer, for exa.mple . 1 the No rton will run about 42 lines compa red to Oxford's 35 or so; the di fference seems slight but I think the Oxford is thereby much more readable, and I would guess the Oxford is less weari - some to the eye and thus more conduci1re to comp rehension. This is height- ened, in the text of the General Prologue- for instance, by t he Oxford' s use of subtitles to introduce each of the characters: a glance at pp . 134. 135 of the Oxford in co mparison with pp. 106- 107 of the Nor ton (thir d ed.) .! fo r exampl. e, mak. es it obvious how far superior is the Oxford in readabil ty -- and taaehability. In the No rton I find myself hunting not only for line ·numbers but even to locate the verse-paragraphing, where- as this is immedia. tely visible in the Oxford. The next m ost obvious d istinctive feature of the Oxf'ord, to me, is the illustrative mat ter, which l think is excellent. Unlike some other anthologies which seem to go in for landscape and authorial portraits, the Oxford Vol. I illustrations are ruu:.:t. of the anthology, di rectly rele ... vant to the teaching of the texts. There is of course room :for some modi· fication: I thin k plates ' & 6, while typical of certain techniques, eould be replaced by other images, compa rable but mo re closely related to some of the poetry (e . g., an illus . of the temp tation of Ct1rist in B. M. Cotton MS. Tib. C. VI, which has some interesting A-S ima ge ry); and the Ruthwell Cross detail {pl. 23) should he supplemen te d with a picture of the whole cross . But generally, for the OE period the maps, the MS . illuminations and the Sutton Hoo material beautifully supplement the texts. The middle English material is equally worth- while, esp. the Hllesme:re and plates 34, 38, 39, 40 and 41, which all directly illustrate Chaucerian imag es 1 and the pictures from the Books of Hours, which are esp. relevant to oi:r Gawain. The renaissance illustr a tions s eem to me somewhat mo re con venti ona l, first 14; l think there's a lot of lattitude there for econo ... miz.ing . On the other hand , the illustrations on melancholy and the emblem book mat erial is brilliantly selected (though I think somewhat more exciting and relevant examples could be substitute d for plates 24 & 25). The 17th century i ll ustrations are generally less successful ....... except for plates 33 & 34 -- partly because oil painting, esp . in the . Dutch stj!'le, comes across so poorly in black and wh1 te repro duc tion. In the century t the architectural illustrations, the 2 landscapes as In-house