1-деңгейлі сұрақтар:

1. English Language
English is a West Germanic language of the Indo-European language family, with its earliest forms spoken by
the inhabitants of early medieval England. It is named after the Angles, one of the ancient Germanic peoples
that migrated to the island of Great Britain. English is genealogically West Germanic, closest related to the
Low Saxon and Frisian languages; however, its vocabulary is also distinctively influenced by dialects of
French (about 29% of modern English words) and Latin (also about 29%), plus some grammar and a small
amount of core vocabulary influenced by Old Norse (a North Germanic language). Speakers of English are
called Anglophones. The earliest forms of English, collectively known as Old English, evolved from a group
of West Germanic (Ingvaeonic) dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the 5th century
and further mutated by Norse-speaking Viking settlers starting in the 8th and 9th centuries. Middle English
began in the late 11th century after the Norman conquest of England, when considerable French (especially
Old Norman) and Latin-derived vocabulary was incorporated into English over some three hundred years.[9]
[10] Early Modern English began in the late 15th century with the start of the Great Vowel Shift and the
Renaissance trend of borrowing further Latin and Greek words and roots into English, concurrent with the
introduction of the printing press to London. This era notably culminated in the King James Bible and plays of
William Shakespeare. Modern English grammar is the result of a gradual change from a typical Indo-
European dependent-marking pattern, with a rich inflectional morphology and relatively free word order, to a
mostly analytic pattern with little inflection, and a fairly fixed subject–verb–object word order. Modern
English relies more on auxiliary verbs and word order for the expression of complex tenses, aspect and mood,
as well as passive constructions, interrogatives and some negation. Modern English has spread around the
world since the 17th century as a consequence of the worldwide influence of the British Empire and the
United States of America. Through all types of printed and electronic media of these countries, English has
become the leading language of international discourse and the lingua franca in many regions and professional
contexts such as science, navigation and law. English is the most spoken language in the world and the third-
most spoken native language in the world, after Standard Chinese and Spanish. It is the most widely learned
second language and is either the official language or one of the official languages in 59 sovereign states.
There are more people who have learned English as a second language than there are native speakers.

2. Old English
Old English is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern
Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It was brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th
century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman conquest of
1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman (a relative of French) as the language of the upper
classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English
language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in
England and Early Scots in Scotland. Old English developed from a set of Anglo-Frisian or Ingvaeonic
dialects originally spoken by Germanic tribes traditionally known as the Angles, Saxons and Jutes. As the
Germanic settlers became dominant in England, their language replaced the languages of Roman Britain:
Common Brittonic, a Celtic language; and Latin, brought to Britain by Roman invasion. Old English had four
main dialects, associated with particular Anglo-Saxon kingdoms: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish and West
Saxon. It was West Saxon that formed the basis for the literary standard of the later Old English period,
although the dominant forms of Middle and Modern English would develop mainly from Mercian, and Scots
from Northumbrian. The speech of eastern and northern parts of England was subject to strong Old Norse
influence due to Scandinavian rule and settlement beginning in the 9th century. Old English is one of the West
Germanic languages, and its closest relatives are Old Frisian and Old Saxon. Like other old Germanic
languages, it is very different from Modern English and Modern Scots, and largely incomprehensible for
Modern English or Modern Scots speakers without study. Within Old English grammar nouns, adjectives,
pronouns and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms, and word order is much freer. The oldest Old
English inscriptions were written using a runic system, but from about the 8th century this was replaced by a
version of the Latin alphabet.

3. Middle English
How Middle English developed from Old English, changing its grammar, pronunciation and spelling and
borrowing words from French and Latin. ‘Middle English’ – a period of roughly 300 years from around 1150
CE to around 1450 – is difficult to identify because it is a time of transition between two eras that each have
stronger definition: Old English and Modern English. Before this period we encounter a language which is
chiefly Old Germanic in its character – in its sounds, spellings, grammar and vocabulary. After this period we
have a language which displays a very different kind of structure, with major changes having taken place in
each of these areas, many deriving from the influence of French following the Norman Conquest of 1066. The
history of Middle English is often divided into three periods: (1) Early Middle English, from about 1100 to
about 1250, during which the Old English system of writing was still in use; (2) the Central Middle English
period from about 1250 to about 1400, which was marked by the gradual formation of literary dialects, the use
of an orthography greatly influenced by the Anglo-Norman writing system, the loss of pronunciation of final
unaccented -e, and the borrowing of large numbers of Anglo-Norman words; the period was especially
marked by the rise of the London dialect, in the hands of such writers as John Gower and Geoffrey Chaucer;
and (3) Late Middle English, from about 1400 to about 1500, which was marked by the spread of the London
literary dialect and the gradual cleavage between the Scottish dialect and the other northern dialects. During
this period the basic lines of inflection as they appear in Modern English were first established. The difference
between Old and Middle English is primarily due to the changes that took place in grammar. Old English was
a language which contained a great deal of variation in word endings; Modern English has hardly any. And it
is during the Middle English period that we see the eventual disappearance of most of the earlier inflections,
and the increasing reliance on alternative means of expression, using word order and prepositional
constructions rather than word endings to express meaning relationships. All areas of grammar were affected.
Among the new kinds of construction were the progressive forms of the verb (as in I am going) and the range
of auxiliary verbs (I have seen, I didn’t go, etc.). The infinitive form of a verb starts to be marked by the use of
a particle (to go, to jump). A new form of expressing relationships such as possession appeared, using of (as in
the pages of a book). Several new pronouns appeared through the influence of Old Norse.

4. Dialects
The term dialect (from Latin dialectus, dialectos, from the Ancient Greek word διάλεκτος, diálektos
'discourse', from διά, diá 'through' and λέγω, légō 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types
of linguistic phenomena: One usage refers to a variety of a language that is a characteristic of a particular
group of the language's speakers.[1] Under this definition, the dialects or varieties of a particular language are
closely related and, despite their differences, are most often largely mutually intelligible, especially if close to
one another on the dialect continuum. The term is applied most often to regional speech patterns, but a dialect
may also be defined by other factors, such as social class or ethnicity.[2] A dialect that is associated with a
particular social class can be termed a sociolect, a dialect that is associated with a particular ethnic group can
be termed an ethnolect, and a geographical/regional dialect may be termed a regiolect [3] (alternative terms
include 'regionalect',[4] 'geolect',[5] and 'topolect'[6]). According to this definition, any variety of a given
language can be classified as a "dialect", including any standardized varieties. In this case, the distinction
between the "standard language" (i.e. the "standard" dialect of a particular language) and the "nonstandard"
(vernacular) dialects of the same language is often arbitrary and based on social, political, cultural, or
historical considerations or prevalence and prominence.[7][8][9] In a similar way, the definitions of the terms
"language" and "dialect" may overlap and are often subject to debate, with the differentiation between the two
classifications often grounded in arbitrary or sociopolitical motives.[10] The term "dialect" is however
sometimes restricted to mean "non-standard variety", particularly in non-specialist settings and non-English
linguistic traditions. The other usage of the term "dialect", specific to colloquial settings in a few countries
like Italy[15] (see dialetto[16]), France (see patois), much of East Central Europe,[17] and the Philippines,[18][19]
carries a pejorative undertone and underlines the politically and socially subordinated status of a non-national
language to the country's single official language. In this case, these "dialects" are not actual dialects in the
same sense as in the first usage, as they do not derive from the politically dominant language and are therefore
not one of its varieties, but they evolved in a separate and parallel way and may thus better fit various parties'
criteria for a separate language. These "dialects" may be historically cognate with and share genetic roots in
the same subfamily as the dominant national language and may even, to a varying degree, share some mutual
intelligibility with the latter. However, in this sense, unlike in the first usage, these "dialects" may be better
defined as separate languages from the standard or national language and the standard or national language
would not itself be considered a "dialect", as it is the dominant language in a particular state, be it in terms of
linguistic prestige, social or political (e.g. official) status, predominance or prevalence, or all of the above. The
term "dialect" used this way implies a political connotation, being mostly used to refer to low-prestige
languages (regardless of their actual degree of distance from the national language), languages lacking
institutional support, or those perceived as "unsuitable for writing". The designation "dialect" is also used
popularly to refer to the unwritten or non-codified languages of developing countries or isolated areas, [21][22]
where the term "vernacular language" would be preferred by linguists. Features that distinguish dialects from
each other can be found in lexicon (vocabulary) and grammar, as well as in pronunciation (phonology,
including prosody). Where the salient distinctions are only or mostly to be observed in pronunciation, the
more specific term accent may be used instead of dialect. Differences that are largely concentrated in lexicon
may be creoles in their own right. When lexical differences are mostly concentrated in the specialized
vocabulary of a profession or other organization, they are jargons; differences in vocabulary that are
deliberately cultivated to exclude outsiders or to serve as shibboleths are known as cryptolects (or "cant") and
include slangs and argots. The particular speech patterns used by an individual are referred to as that person's
idiolect. To classify subsets of language as dialects, linguists take into account linguistic distance. The dialects
of a language with a writing system will operate at different degrees of distance from the standardized written
form. Some dialects of a language are not mutually intelligible in spoken form, leading to debate as to whether
they are regiolects or separate languages.

5. Roman Britain
Roman Britain was the period in classical antiquity when large parts of the island of Great Britain were
under occupation by the Roman Empire. The occupation lasted from AD 43 to AD 410.[1]: 129–131 [2] During that
time, the territory conquered was raised to the status of a Roman province. Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55
and 54 BC as part of his Gallic Wars.[3] According to Caesar, the Britons had been overrun or culturally
assimilated by other Celtic tribes during the British Iron Age and had been aiding Caesar's enemies. [4] He
received tribute, installed the friendly king Mandubracius over the Trinovantes, and returned to Gaul. Planned
invasions under Augustus were called off in 34, 27, and 25 BC. In 40 AD, Caligula assembled 200,000 men at
the Channel on the continent, only to have them gather seashells (musculi) according to Suetonius, perhaps as
a symbolic gesture to proclaim Caligula's victory over the sea.[5] Three years later, Claudius directed four
legions to invade Britain and restore the exiled king Verica over the Atrebates.[6] The Romans defeated the
Catuvellauni, and then organized their conquests as the Province of Britain (Latin: Provincia Britannia). By
47 AD, the Romans held the lands southeast of the Fosse Way. Control over Wales was delayed by reverses
and the effects of Boudica's uprising, but the Romans expanded steadily northward. The conquest of Britain
continued under command of Gnaeus Julius Agricola (77–84), who expanded the Roman Empire as far as
Caledonia. In mid-84 AD, Agricola faced the armies of the Caledonians, led by Calgacus, at the Battle of
Mons Graupius. Battle casualties were estimated by Tacitus to be upwards of 10,000 on the Caledonian side
and about 360 on the Roman side. The bloodbath at Mons Graupius concluded the forty-year conquest of
Britain, a period that possibly saw between 100,000 and 250,000 Britons killed. [7] In the context of pre-
industrial warfare and of a total population of Britain of c. 2 million, these are very high figures. Under the
2nd-century emperors Hadrian and Antoninus Pius, two walls were built to defend the Roman province from
the Caledonians, whose realms in the Scottish Highlands were never controlled. Around 197 AD, the Severan
Reforms divided Britain into two provinces: Britannia Superior and Britannia Inferior.[9] During the Diocletian
Reforms, at the end of the 3rd century, Britannia was divided into four provinces under the direction of a
vicarius, who administered the Diocese of the Britains.[10] A fifth province, Valentia, is attested in the later
4th century. For much of the later period of the Roman occupation, Britannia was subject to barbarian
invasions and often came under the control of imperial usurpers and imperial pretenders. The final Roman
withdrawal from Britain occurred around 410; the native kingdoms are considered to have formed Sub-Roman
Britain after that. Following the conquest of the Britons, a distinctive Romano-British culture emerged as the
Romans introduced improved agriculture, urban planning, industrial production, and architecture. The Roman
goddess Britannia became the female personification of Britain. After the initial invasions, Roman historians
generally only mention Britain in passing. Thus, most present knowledge derives from archaeological
investigations and occasional epigraphic evidence lauding the Britannic achievements of an emperor. Roman
citizens settled in Britain from many parts of the Empire.

6. Anglo-Saxon England
The Anglo-Saxons were a cultural group who inhabited England in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their
origins to settlers who came to Britain from mainland Europe in the 5th century. However, the ethnogenesis of
the Anglo-Saxons happened within Britain, and the identity was not merely imported. Anglo-Saxon identity
arose from interaction between incoming groups from several Germanic tribes, both amongst themselves, and
with indigenous Britons. Many of the natives, over time, adopted Anglo-Saxon culture and language and were
assimilated. The Anglo-Saxons established the concept, and the Kingdom, of England, and though the modern
English language owes somewhat less than 26% of its words to their language, this includes the vast majority
of words used in everyday speech. Historically, the Anglo-Saxon period denotes the period in Britain between
about 450 and 1066, after their initial settlement and up until the Norman Conquest.[2] The early Anglo-Saxon
period includes the creation of an English nation, with many of the aspects that survive today, including
regional government of shires and hundreds. During this period, Christianity was established and there was a
flowering of literature and language. Charters and law were also established. [3] The term Anglo-Saxon is
popularly used for the language that was spoken and written by the Anglo-Saxons in England and
southeastern Scotland from at least the mid-5th century until the mid-12th century. In scholarly use, it is more
commonly called Old English. The history of the Anglo-Saxons is the history of a cultural identity. It
developed from divergent groups in association with the people's adoption of Christianity and was integral to
the founding of various kingdoms. Threatened by extended Danish Viking invasions and military occupation
of eastern England, this identity was re-established; it dominated until after the Norman Conquest. [5] Anglo-
Saxon material culture can still be seen in architecture, dress styles, illuminated texts, metalwork and other art.
Behind the symbolic nature of these cultural emblems, there are strong elements of tribal and lordship ties.
The elite declared themselves kings who developed burhs, and identified their roles and peoples in Biblical
terms. Above all, as archaeologist Helena Hamerow has observed, "local and extended kin groups
remained...the essential unit of production throughout the Anglo-Saxon period."[6] The effects persist, as a
2015 study found the genetic makeup of British populations today shows divisions of the tribal political units
of the early Anglo-Saxon period. The term Anglo-Saxon began to be used in the 8th century (in Latin and on
the continent) to distinguish "Germanic" groups in Britain from those on the continent (Old Saxony and
Anglia in Northern Germany).[8][a] Catherine Hills summarised the views of many modern scholars in her
observation that attitudes towards Anglo-Saxons, and hence the interpretation of their culture and history,
have been "more contingent on contemporary political and religious theology as on any kind of evidence.

7. Beowulf
Beowulf (/ˈbeɪəwʊlf/;[1] Old English: Bēowulf [ˈbeːowuɫf]) is an Old English epic poem in the tradition of
Germanic heroic legend consisting of 3,182 alliterative lines. It is one of the most important and most often
translated works of Old English literature. The date of composition is a matter of contention among scholars;
the only certain dating is for the manuscript, which was produced between 975 and 1025. [2] Scholars call the
anonymous author the "Beowulf poet".[3] The story is set in pagan Scandinavia in the 6th century. Beowulf, a
hero of the Geats, comes to the aid of Hrothgar, the king of the Danes, whose mead hall in Heorot has been
under attack by the monster Grendel. After Beowulf slays him, Grendel's mother attacks the hall and is then
defeated. Victorious, Beowulf goes home to Geatland and becomes king of the Geats. Fifty years later,
Beowulf defeats a dragon, but is mortally wounded in the battle. After his death, his attendants cremate his
body and erect a tower on a headland in his memory. Scholars have debated whether Beowulf was transmitted
orally, affecting its interpretation: if it was composed early, in pagan times, then the paganism is central and
the Christian elements were added later, whereas if it was composed later, in writing, by a Christian, then the
pagan elements could be decorative archaising; some scholars also hold an intermediate position. Beowulf is
written mostly in the West Saxon dialect of Old English, but many other dialectal forms are present,
suggesting that the poem may have had a long and complex transmission throughout the dialect areas of
England. There has long been research into similarities with other traditions and accounts, including the
Icelandic Grettis saga, the Norse story of Hrolf Kraki and his bear-shapeshifting servant Bodvar Bjarki, the
international folktale the Bear's Son Tale, and the Irish folktale of the Hand and the Child. Persistent attempts
have been made to link Beowulf to tales from Homer's Odyssey or Virgil's Aeneid. More definite are Biblical
parallels, with clear allusions to the books of Genesis, Exodus, and Daniel. The poem survives in a single
copy in the manuscript known as the Nowell Codex. It has no title in the original manuscript, but has become
known by the name of the story's protagonist. [3] In 1731, the manuscript was damaged by a fire that swept
through Ashburnham House in London, which was housing Sir Robert Cotton's collection of medieval
manuscripts. It survived, but the margins were charred, and some readings were lost. [4] The Nowell Codex is
housed in the British Library. The poem was first transcribed in 1786; some verses were first translated into
modern English in 1805, and nine complete translations were made in the 19th century, including those by
John Mitchell Kemble and William Morris. After 1900, hundreds of translations, whether into prose, rhyming
verse, or alliterative verse were made, some relatively faithful, some archaising, some attempting to
domesticate the work. Among the best-known modern translations are those of Edwin Morgan, Burton Raffel,
Michael J. Alexander, Roy Liuzza, and Seamus Heaney. The difficulty of translating Beowulf has been
explored by scholars including J. R. R. Tolkien (in his essay "On Translating Beowulf"), who worked on a
verse and a prose translation of his own.

8. Old English Language

Old English is the earliest recorded version of the English language spoken in England and Scotland during
the Middle ages. Old English was spoken throughout England and the southeastern parts of Scotland during
the Middle ages. It was used during the Germanic invasions, after the collapse of Roman Britain, through the
Norman Conquest of 1066, and into Norman Rule in England. It is considered the language of the Anglo-
Saxons. Before its use, the population spoke Celtic languages. Definition and Explanation of Old English.
Old English is distinguished from later versions through the use of more inflections in verbs, adjectives, and
pronouns. The word order was less fixed than it is today. If a contemporary English speaker were to come
across a passage of Old English text, they would be incapable of reading it. It appears like an entirely different
language. History of Old English. Old English developed from Anglo-Frisian, and Ingvaeonic dialects spoke
by Germanic tribes. It had four main dialects as it developed: Mercian, Northumbrian, Kentish, and West
Saxon. The latter became the most important in the development of the language later on. Old English was
first written in runes, a specific rule set known as the futhorc, derived from the Germanic elder futhark. It was
transformed with the use of the Latin alphabet introduced by Irish Christian missionaries. Old English words
contain letters that are no longer used today, such as ðæt (called eth today) æ, æsc, and þ (also known as
thorn). They also lacked several letters that are in the contemporary Eng Today, it is thought that around 85%
of Old English words are no longer in use. Those that survived have been incorporated into the Middle,
Modern, and Contemporary English vocabulary. Why is Old English Important? Old English is worth
studying due to the influence it had on the way we speak today. Without an understanding of the rich and
complex history that led to the creation of contemporary English, lovers of language would be at a loss in
regards to where certain sounds, letters, and entire words originated. Old English provides contemporary
readers with a line into the past, a way to understand how men and women lived, thought, and wrote hundreds
of years ago. lish alphabet. 

9. The coming of the Anglo-Normans

The coming of the Anglo-Normans at the end of the 12th century from the coast of West Wales to the coast of
South-East Ireland initiated a long period of involvement of England with Ireland. The English language
became established on the east coast in a band from Dublin down to Waterford. English was above all present
in the towns. Anglo-Norman – and of course Irish – were to be found in the countryside. Increasing
Gaelicisation in the centuries after the initial invasion led to the demise of English outside the major towns.
The low point for English lies in the 16th century with Irish in a correspondingly strong position. The Pale is
the area around medieval Dublin where English influence was greatest. This influence lasted from the late
12th to the late 15th century, but even in Dublin the influence of Irish was increasingly felt the regaecilisation
which reached its zenith during the 16th century. The English phrase ‘beyond the Pale’ derives from this time
when the English population regarded the native culture outside of the Pale as barbaric. The status of Anglo-
Norman. Anglo-Norman remained the language of the ruling landlords for at least two centuries after the
initial invasion in 1169. The English rulers of the time were themselves French-speaking: Henry II, who came
to Ireland in 1171 and issued the Charter of Dublin in the same year, could not speak English according to
Giraldus Cambriensis (Cahill 1938: 164). There would appear to have been a certain tension between French
and English in Ireland and not just between Irish and English. This is later attested quite clearly by the
Statutes of Kilkenny (1366, Lydon 1967: 155), a set of regulatory laws which prohibited, among other things,
Irish in public dealings and recommended English. The Normans also exerted a considerable ecclesiastical
influence in Ireland. Before their arrival, the religious focus of the country was Clonmacnoise on the River
Shannon in the centre of the country. This waned in status after the introduction to Ireland of new continental
religious orders (Watt 1972: 41ff.) such as the Cistercians (founded in 1098 in Cîteaux near Dijon) and the
Franciscans. The extent of the Norman impact on Ireland can be recognised in surnames which became
established. Such names as Butler, Power, Wallace, Durand, Nugent and all those beginning in Fitz-, e.g.
Fitzpatrick, Fitzgibbon, testify to the strength of the Normans in Ireland long after such events as the loss of
Normandy to England in 1204. Anglo-Norman influence on Irish is considerable in the field of loanwords but
the reverse influence is not attested, although official documents exist to almost the end of the 15th century
which were written in Anglo-Norman or Latin (Cahill 1938: 160). The high number of everyday loans (see
below) would suggest close contact between Anglo-Norman speakers and the local Irish. The Anglo-Norman
landlords established bases in the countryside as clearly attested by the castles they built. These Normans were
granted land by the English king and in principle had to render service or pay scutage. These in their turn had
others on their land who would also have been of Norman or English stock while the native Irish were on the
level of serfs. Because of this organisation there were clear lines of contact between the natives and the new
settlers which account for the linguistic influence of Anglo-Norman on Irish.
10. The situation in late medieval Ireland
The situation in late medieval Ireland. The history of English in Ireland is not that of a simple substitution of
Irish by English. When the Anglo-Normans and English arrived in Ireland the linguistic situation in Ireland
was quite homogeneous. In the 9th century Ireland had been ravaged by Scandinavians just like most of
northern Britain. The latter, however, settled down in the following three centuries. The decisive battle against
the Scandinavians (Clontarf, 1014) is taken to represent on the one hand the final break with Denmark and
Norway and on the other to have resulted in the complete assimilation of the remaining Scandinavians with
the native Irish population much as happened in other countries, such as large parts of northern Britain and
northern France. For the period of the initial invasion one can assume, in contradistinction to various older
authors such as Curtis (1919: 234), that the heterogeneity which existed was more demographic than
linguistic. Old Norse had indeed an effect on Irish, particularly in the field of lexis (see module on Old Norse),
but there is no evidence that a bilingual situation obtained any longer in late 12th century Ireland. As one
would expect from the status of the Anglo-Normans in England and from the attested names of the warlords
who came to Ireland in the late 12th century, notably Strongbow, these Anglo-Normans were the leaders
among the new settlers. The English were mainly their servants, a fact which points to the relatively low status
of the language at this time. As in England, the ruling classes and the higher positions in the clergy were
occupied by Normans soon after the invasion. Their language was introduced with them and established itself
in the towns. Evidence for this is offered by such works as The Song of Dermot and the Earl and The
Entrenchment of New Ross in Anglo-Norman as well as contemporary references to spoken Anglo-Norman in
court proceedings from Kilkenny (Cahill 1938: 160f.). Anglo-Norman seems to have been maintained in the
cities well into the 14th century as the famous Statutes of Kilkenny (1366) attest (Lydon 1967, 1973: 94ff.;
Crowley 2000: 14-16). These were composed in Anglo-Norman and admonished both the French-speaking
lords and the native Irish population to speak English. The statutes were not repealed until the end of the 15th
century but they were never effective. The large number of Anglo-Norman loanwords in Irish (Risk 1971:
586ff.), which entered the language in the period after the invasion, testifies to the existence of Anglo-Norman
and the robustness of its position from the mid 12th to the 14th century (Hickey 1997). In fact as a language of
law it was used up to the 15th century as evidenced by the Acts of Parliament of 1472 which were in Anglo-
Norman. The strength of the Irish language can be recognised from various comments and descriptions of the
early period. For instance, Irish was allowed in court proceedings according to the municipal archives of
Waterford (1492-3) in those cases where one of the litigants was Irish. This would be unthinkable from the
17th century onwards when Irish was banned from public life. Still more indicative of the vitality of Irish is
the account from the 16th century of the proclamation of a bill in the Dublin parliament (1541) which
officially declared the assumption of the title of King of Ireland by Henry VIII (Dolan 1991: 143). The
parliament was attended by the representatives of the major Norman families of Ireland, but of these only the
Earl of Ormond was able to understand the English text and apparently translated it into Irish for the rest of
the attending Norman nobility (Hayes-McCoy 1967). Needless to say, the English viewed this situation with
deep suspicion and the Lord Chancellor William Gerrard commented unfavourably in 1578 on the use of Irish
by the English ‘even in Dublin’ and regarded the habit and the customs of the Irish as detrimental to the
character of the English. Furthermore, since the Reformation, Irishness was directly linked to Popery.
Accordingly, the Irish and the (Catholic) Old English were viewed with growing concern. Anglo-Norman
documents There are a few literary pieces in Anglo-Norman (Risk 1971: 589), notably The Song of Dermot
and the Earl (Orpen 1892, Long 1975) and The Entrenchment of New Ross (Shields 1975-6). The former
piece is about the relationship between Dermot MacMurrough and Strongbow and the second deals with the
building of a fortification for the medieval town of New Ross in the south east of the country, see the
annotated excerpts of these works by Terence Dolan in Deane (ed., 1991: 141-51).

11. Chaucer’s Contribution to Language

Chaucer’s Contribution to Language. One of the most important contributions that Chaucer made is his
contribution to the English language. It was all due to his treatment of English language in his poetry that
English secured a prominent position amongst the languages of the world not only today but in that time as
well. It was Chaucer, who preferred English language over Latin and French. It was a fashion and vogue of
the time to use Latin and French languages in church, courts and in any literary work, but Chaucer refused to
adopt these languages for his poetry. Though, the English language was in raw form, yet he ventured upon
using the English Language for his poetry. It was not as polished and full of vocabulary as Latin and French.
Lowell says in this regard: “Chaucer found his English a dialect and left it a language.” He transformed the
East Midland dialect into a full-fledged language of England. Chaucer knew that Latin and French, due to its
complex grammar, would lag behind English language. He was pretty sure about the bright future of English
language. That is why; he adopted English language in his poetry. Sir Walter Raleigh remarks that “he
purified the English of his time from its dross! He shaped it into a fit instrument for his use.”Chaucer’s second
and prominent contribution to the English language & literature is his contribution to the English poetry. In
the age of Chaucer, most of the poets used to compose allegorical poetry. It was a poetry, which had no
relationship with the reality of the time. In the beginning, Chaucer also followed his predecessor and wrote
poetry in their manner. But later on, he came to know that any piece of literature must deal with real life. That
is why; The Canterbury Tales is the product of this change. It deals directly with life as it was in his age. He
describes every character in its true colours. He does not exaggerate or underrate any character. Rather, he
paints every character in words as it was before him. Grierson and Smith are of the opinion that Chaucer’s
pilgrims “are all with today, though some of them have changed their names.

12. Chaucer’s Contribution to Poetry

Chaucer’s second and prominent contribution to the English language & literature is his contribution to the
English poetry. In the age of Chaucer, most of the poets used to compose allegorical poetry. It was a poetry,
which had no relationship with the reality of the time. In the beginning, Chaucer also followed his predecessor
and wrote poetry in their manner. But later on, he came to know that any piece of literature must deal with real
life. That is why; The Canterbury Tales is the product of this change. It deals directly with life as it was in his
age. He describes every character in its true colours. He does not exaggerate or underrate any character.
Rather, he paints every character in words as it was before him. Grierson and Smith are of the opinion that
Chaucer’s pilgrims “are all with today, though some of them have changed their names. The king now
commands a line regiment, the squire is in the guards, the shipman was a rum-runner, while prohibition
lasted and is active now in the black market, the friar is a jolly sporting publican, the pardoner vends quack
medicines or holds séances, and the prioress is the headmistress of a fashionable girl’s school.”

13. Chaucer’s Contribution to Versification

Chaucer’s contribution to English versification is no less striking than to the English language. Again, it is an
instance of a happy choice. He sounded the death-knell of the old Saxon alliterative measure and firmly
established the modern one. Even in the fourteenth century the old alliterative measure had been employed by
such a considerable poet as Langland for his “Piers khe Plowman”, and the writer of “Sir Gawayne and the
Grene Knight”. The important features of the old measure which Chaucer so categorically disowned: - There
is no regularity in the number of syllables in each line. One line may have as few as six syllables and another
as many as fourteen. - The use of alliteration as the chief ornamental device and as the lone structural
principle. All the alliterative syllables are stressed. - The absence 01 end-rimes; - Frequent repetition to
express vehemence and intensity of emotion. Chaucer had no patience with the “rum, ram, ruf’ of the
alliterative measure. So does he maintain in the Parson’s Tale: But trusteth wel, I am a southern man, I
cannot geste-rum, ram, ruf,-by lettere, Ne, God wot, rym holde I but litel bettere. For that old-fashioned
measure he substituted the regular line with end-rime, which he borrowed from France. The new measure has
the following characteristics: (i) All lines have the same number of syllables, (ii) End-rime, (iii)Absence of
alliteration and frequent repetition. After Chaucer, no important poet ever thought of reverting to the old
measure. Thus, Chaucer may be designated “the father of modern English versification.” Chaucer employs
three principal metres in his works. In The Canterbury Tales he mostly uses lines of ten syllables each (with
generally five accents); and the lines run into couplets; that is, each couple of lines has its end-syllables
rhyming with each other. For example: His eyes twinkled in his heed aright As doon the sterres in the frosty
night. In Troilus and Cryseyde he -uses the seven-line stanza of decasyllabic lines with five accents each
having the rhyme-scheme a b abb c c. This measure was borrowed by him from the French and is called the
rhyme-royal or Chaucerian stanza. The third principal metre employed by him is the octosyllabic couplet with
four accents and end-rime. In The Book of the Duchesse this measure is used. The measures thus adopted by
Chaucer were seized upon by his successors. The decasyllabic couplet known as the heroic couplet, was to be
chiselled and invigorated to perfection three centuries later by Dryden and Pope. Apart from those three
principal measures Chaucer also employed for the first time a number of other stanzaic forms in his shorter
poems. He made English a pliant and vigorous medium of poetic utterance. His astonishingly easy mastery of
the language is indeed remarkable. With one step the writings of Chaucer carry us into a new era in which the
language appears endowed with ease, dignity, and copiousness of expression and clothed in the hues of the
imagination.

14. Chaucer’s Contribution to Drama

Chaucer wrote at a time when, like the novel, secular drama had not been born, and yet his works have some
dramatic elements which are altogether missing in the poetry before him. His mode of characterization in the
Prologue to The Canterbury Tales is, no doubt, static or descriptive, but in the tales proper it is dynamic or
dramatic. There the characters reveal themselves, without the intervention of the author, through what they
say and what they do. Even the tales they narrate, in most cases, are in keeping with their respective
characters, avocations, temperaments, etc. In this way Chaucer is clearly ahead of his “model” Boccaccjo,
who in his Decameron allots various tales to his ladies and gentlemen indiscriminately, irrespective of their
conformity or otherwise to their respective characters. The stories in The Decameron could without violence
be re-distributed-among the characters. But not in The Canterbury Tales where they-serve as a dramatic
device of characterization: and in the drama, pace Aristotle, character is all-important. In their disputations
and discussions and comments upon each others tales and their general behavior, too, the pilgrims are^made
by Chaucer to reveal themselves and to provide finishing touches to the character-portraits already statically
(or non-dramatically) set forth in the Prologue. Chaucer is abundantly showing here the essential gift of a
dramatist. A critic goes so far as to assert that Chaucer is “a dramatist in all but the fact”, and again : “If the
drama had been known in Chaucer’s time as a branch of living literature, he might have attained as high an
excellence in comedy as any English or Continental writer.”

15. Classicism and Romanticism

The Classicism and the Romanticism are literary movements. The term Classicism refers to the admiration
and imitation of Greek and Roman literature, art, and architecture. Order, maturity, harmony, balance and
moderation are important qualities of Classicism. The Romanticism might best be described as anti-
Classicism. This movement stressed human emotion and thoughts and emphasized the individual, the
imaginative, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental. Popular romantic authors
include people like Burke, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Keats, Byron, Gordon, Burns, Southey, Cowper,
Shelley, Scott, Goethe, Lamb, De Quincey, Carlyle, Bronte sisters and Jane Austen. Classicism and
Romanticism developed so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a perfect definition is not possible. In
general, Classicism can be defined as a style in literature that draws on the styles of ancient Greece and Rome.
Classicism is based on the idea that nature and human nature could be understood by reason and thought. It
has attached much more importance to reason than imagination. More broadly, Classicism refers to the
adherence to virtues including formal elegance and correctness, simplicity, dignity, restraint, order, and
proportion. It is often opposed to Romanticism. The Romanticism can be viewed as an artistic movement, or
state of mind, or both. It is a revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries and rebellion against
established social rules and conventions. Toward the end of the eighteenth-century, Romanticism emerged as
a response to Classicism. While the Classicists thought of the world as having a rigid and stern structure, the
romanticists thought of the world as a place to express their ideas and beliefs. Classicists and Romanticists
differed in their views of nature. Classicism was based on the idea that nature and human nature could be
understood by reason and thought. On the other hand, Romanticists viewed nature as mysterious and ever
changing. Classicist and Romanticists also differed on their approaches towards reason and imagination.
Classicism attached much more importance to reason than imagination because imagination could not be
explained by their laws. The Romanticists, however, emphasized that reason was not the only path to truth. To
the Romantic writers, imagination was ultimately superior to reason. Classicists thought that it was literature’s
function to show the everyday values of humanity and the laws of human existence. The Romantics stressed
the human potential for social progress and spiritual growth.” This discussion can be concluded by saying that
both the movements played significant role in the development of literature. The classicism showed its strong
effect in the field of writing in Augustan period. This ideal was followed by Dryden, Pope, Johnson and Swift.
The term Romantic as a designation for a school of literature opposed to the Classic was first used by the
German critic Schlegel at the beginning of the 19th century. From Germany, this meaning was carried to
England and France. Wordsworth and other literary figures of the 19th century strengthened the Romanticism
in England.

16. Secular and religious origin of drama

The origin of the drama is deep-rooted in the religious predispositions of mankind. Same is the case not only
with English drama, but with dramas of other nations as well. The ancient Greek and Roman dramas were
mostly concerned with religious ceremonials of people. It was the religious elements that resulted in the
development of drama. As most of the Bible was written into Latin, common people could not understand its
meanings. That’s why the clergy tried to find out some new methods of teaching and expounding the
teachings of Bible to the common people. For this purpose, they developed a new method, wherein the stories
of the Gospel were explained through the living pictures. The performers acted out the story in a dumb show.
The history of drama is deeply rooted in lay and religious annals of history. It may be well at this point to
sketch the main lines of development, before dealing in greater detail with the early plays that merged
gradually into Elizabethan drama. Pausing them to consider the lines of development shown by the drama
from Plantagenet times down to the era of Elizabeth, we find certain distinctive stages, whilst underlying the
entire movement is a twofold appeal. The drama appeals to two instincts deeply rooted: i. The craving for
amusement ii. The desire for improvement. This twofold appeal accounts for the complex origin of the drama,
and enables us to differentiate the lay from the sacred element

17. Traditional Literary Criticism

"Literary theory" is the body of ideas and methods we use in the practical reading of literature. By literary
theory we refer not to the meaning of a work of literature but to the theories that reveal what literature can
mean. Literary theory is a description of the underlying principles, one might say the tools, by which we
attempt to understand literature. Literary theory is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer Theory," are
"in;" other literary theories, like "Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to exert an influence on the field.
"Traditional literary criticism," "New Criticism," and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held to the view
that the study of literature has an objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary
theory, to varying degrees, embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question
the objective referent of literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they
mutually exclusive, but they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century. Academic literary
criticism prior to the rise of "New Criticism" in the United States tended to practice traditional literary history:
tracking influence, establishing the canon of major writers in the literary periods, and clarifying historical
context and allusions within the text. Literary biography was and still is an important interpretive method in
and out of the academy; versions of moral criticism, not unlike the Leavis School in Britain, and aesthetic
(e.g. genre studies) criticism were also generally influential literary practices. Perhaps the key unifying feature
of traditional literary criticism was the consensus within the academy as to the both the literary canon (that is,
the books all educated persons should read) and the aims and purposes of literature. What literature was, and
why we read literature, and what we read, were questions that subsequent movements in literary theory were
to raise.

18. Formalism and New Criticism

"Formalism" is, as the name implies, an interpretive approach that emphasizes literary form and the study of
literary devices within the text. The work of the Formalists had a general impact on later developments in
"Structuralism" and other theories of narrative. "Formalism," like "Structuralism," sought to place the study of
literature on a scientific basis through objective analysis of the motifs, devices, techniques, and other
"functions" that comprise the literary work. The Formalists placed great importance on the literariness of
texts, those qualities that distinguished the literary from other kinds of writing. Neither author nor context was
essential for the Formalists; it was the narrative that spoke, the "hero-function," for example, that had
meaning. Form was the content. A plot device or narrative strategy was examined for how it functioned and
compared to how it had functioned in other literary works. Of the Russian Formalist critics, Roman Jakobson
and Viktor Shklovsky are probably the most well known. The Formalist adage that the purpose of literature
was "to make the stones stonier" nicely expresses their notion of literariness. "Formalism" is perhaps best
known is Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization." The routine of ordinary experience, Shklovsky
contended, rendered invisible the uniqueness and particularity of the objects of existence. Literary language,
partly by calling attention to itself as language, estranged the reader from the familiar and made fresh the
experience of daily life. The "New Criticism," so designated as to indicate a break with traditional methods,
was a product of the American university in the 1930s and 40s. "New Criticism" stressed close reading of the
text itself, much like the French pedagogical precept "explication du texte." As a strategy of reading, "New
Criticism" viewed the work of literature as an aesthetic object independent of historical context and as a
unified whole that reflected the unified sensibility of the artist. T.S. Eliot, though not explicitly associated
with the movement, expressed a similar critical-aesthetic philosophy in his essays on John Donne and the
metaphysical poets, writers who Eliot believed experienced a complete integration of thought and feeling.
New Critics like Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, Robert Penn Warren and W.K. Wimsatt placed a
similar focus on the metaphysical poets and poetry in general, a genre well suited to New Critical practice.
"New Criticism" aimed at bringing a greater intellectual rigor to literary studies, confining itself to careful
scrutiny of the text alone and the formal structures of paradox, ambiguity, irony, and metaphor, among others.
"New Criticism" was fired by the conviction that their readings of poetry would yield a humanizing influence
on readers and thus counter the alienating tendencies of modern, industrial life. "New Criticism" in this regard
bears an affinity to the Southern Agrarian movement whose manifesto, I'll Take My Stand, contained essays
by two New Critics, Ransom and Warren. Perhaps the enduring legacy of "New Criticism" can be found in the
college classroom, in which the verbal texture of the poem on the page remains a primary object of literary
study.

19. Marxism and Critical Theory

Marxist literary theories tend to focus on the representation of class conflict as well as the reinforcement of
class distinctions through the medium of literature. Marxist theorists use traditional techniques of literary
analysis but subordinate aesthetic concerns to the final social and political meanings of literature. Marxist
theorist often champion authors sympathetic to the working classes and authors whose work challenges
economic equalities found in capitalist societies. In keeping with the totalizing spirit of Marxism, literary
theories arising from the Marxist paradigm have not only sought new ways of understanding the relationship
between economic production and literature, but all cultural production as well. Marxist analyses of society
and history have had a profound effect on literary theory and practical criticism, most notably in the
development of "New Historicism" and "Cultural Materialism."The Hungarian theorist Georg Lukacs
contributed to an understanding of the relationship between historical materialism and literary form, in
particular with realism and the historical novel. Walter Benjamin broke new ground in his work in his study of
aesthetics and the reproduction of the work of art. The Frankfurt School of philosophers, including most
notably Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse—after their emigration to the United States
—played a key role in introducing Marxist assessments of culture into the mainstream of American academic
life. These thinkers became associated with what is known as "Critical theory," one of the constituent
components of which was a critique of the instrumental use of reason in advanced capitalist culture. "Critical
theory" held to a distinction between the high cultural heritage of Europe and the mass culture produced by
capitalist societies as an instrument of domination. "Critical theory" sees in the structure of mass cultural
forms—jazz, Hollywood film, advertising—a replication of the structure of the factory and the workplace.
Creativity and cultural production in advanced capitalist societies were always already co-opted by the
entertainment needs of an economic system that requires sensory stimulation and recognizable cliché and
suppressed the tendency for sustained deliberation. The major Marxist influences on literary theory since the
Frankfurt School have been Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton in Great Britain and Frank Lentricchia
and Fredric Jameson in the United States. Williams is associated with the New Left political movement in
Great Britain and the development of "Cultural Materialism" and the Cultural Studies Movement, originating
in the 1960s at Birmingham University's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Eagleton is known both
as a Marxist theorist and as a popularizer of theory by means of his widely read overview, Literary Theory.
Lentricchia likewise became influential through his account of trends in theory, After the New Criticism.
Jameson is a more diverse theorist, known both for his impact on Marxist theories of culture and for his
position as one of the leading figures in theoretical postmodernism. Jameson’s work on consumer culture,
architecture, film, literature and other areas, typifies the collapse of disciplinary boundaries taking place in the
realm of Marxist and postmodern cultural theory. Jameson’s work investigates the way the structural features
of late capitalism—particularly the transformation of all culture into commodity form—are now deeply
embedded in all of our ways of communicating.

20. England and English Literature

England is an island, and the sea washes its litera-ture as much as its shores. It is a cold, stormy sea, quite
unlike the placid Mediterranean or the warm waters of the tropics. Its voice is never far away from the music
of English poetry, and it can be heard clearly enough even in the novels of a 'town' writer like Dickens. The
landscape of England is varied—mountains and lakes and rivers—but the uniform effect is one of green
gentleness—downs and farms and woods. The English landscape made Wordsworth; tropical jungles could
never have produced a poet like him, and, often, when we read him in the tropics, we find it hard to accept his
belief in a kindly, gentle power brooding over nature—it does not fit in with snakes and elephants and tigers
and tor¬rential rain. We have to know something about the English landscape before we can begin to
appreciate the English nature poets. English literature is literature written in English. It is not merely the
literature of England or of the British Isles, but a vast and growing body of writings made up of the work of
authors who use the English language as a natural medium of communication. In other words, the ' English' of
'English literature' refers not to a nation but to a language. This seems to me to be an important point. There is
a tendency among some people to regard, for instance, American literature as a separate entity, a body of
writings distinct from that of the British Isles, and the same attitude is beginning to prevail with regard to the
growing literatures of Africa and Australia. Joseph Conrad was a Pole, Demetrios Kapetanakis was a Greek,
Ernest Hemingway was an American, Lin Yutang was a Chinese, but English is the medium they have
in.common, and they all belong— with Chaucer and Shakespeare and Dickens—to English literature. On the
other hand, a good deal of the work of Sir Thomas More and Sir Francis Bacon—both Englishmen—is written
not in English but in Latin, and William Beckford and T. S. Eliot have written in French. Such writings are
outside the scope of our survey. Literature is an art which exploits language, English literature is an art which
exploits the English language. But it is not just an English art. It is international, and Chinese, Malays,
Africans, Indians reading this book may well one day themselves contribute to English literature.

21. The drama before Shakespeare

English Drama before Shakespeare surveys the range of dramatic activity in English up to 1590. The book
challenges the traditional divisions between Medieval and Renaissance literature by showing that there was
much continuity throughout this period, in spite of many innovations. The range of dramatic activity includes
well-known features such as mystery cycles and the interludes, as well as comedy and tragedy. Para-dramatic
activity such as the liturgical drama, royal entries and localised or parish drama is also covered. Many of the
plays considered are anonymous, but a coherent, biographical view can be taken of the work of known
dramatists such as John Heywood, John Bale, and Christopher Marlowe.Peter Happé's study is based upon
close reading of selected plays, especially from the mystery cycles and such Elizabethan works as Thomas
Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. It takes account of contemporary research into dramatic form, performance
(including some important recent revivals), dramatic sites and early theatre buildings, and the nature of early
dramatic texts. Recent changes in outlook generated by the publication of the written records of early drama
form part of the book's focus. There is an extensive bibliography covering social and political background, the
lives and works of individual authors, and the development of theatrical ideas through the period. Throughout
the Middle Ages the English drama, like that of other European countries, was mainly religious and didactic,
its chief forms being the Miracle Plays, which presented in crude dialogue stories from the Bible and the lives
of the saints, and the Moralities, which taught lessons for the guidance of life through the means of allegorical
action and the personification of abstract qualities. Both forms were severely limited in their opportunities for
picturing human nature and human life with breadth and variety. With the revival of learning came naturally
the study and imitation of the ancient classical drama, and in some countries this proved the chief influence in
determining the prevalent type of drama for generations to come. But in England, though we can trace
important results of the models given by Seneca in tragedy and Plautus in comedy, the main characteristics of
the drama of the Elizabethan age were of native origin, and reflected the spirit and the interests of the
Englishmen of that day.

22. The chronicle history

Of the various forms which this drama took, the first to reach a culmination was the so-called Chronicle
History. This is represented in The Harvard Classics by the “Edward II” 1 of Marlowe, the greatest of the
predecessors of Shakespeare; and Shakespeare himself produced some ten plays belonging to the type. These
dramas reflect the interest the Elizabethans took in the heroic past of their country, and before the vogue of
this kind of play passed nearly the whole of English history for the previous three hundred years had been
presented on the stage. As a form of dramatic art the Chronicle History had many defects and limitations. The
facts of history do not always lend themselves to effective theatrical representation, and in the attempt to
combine history and drama both frequently suffered. But surprisingly often the playwrights found opportunity
for such studies of character as that of the King in Marlowe’s tragedy, for real dramatic structure as in
Shakespeare’s “Richard III,” or for the display of gorgeous rhetoric and national exultation as in “Henry V.”
These plays should not be judged by comparison with the realism of the modern drama. The authors sought to
give the actors fine lines to deliver, without seeking to imitate the manner of actual conversation; and if the
story was conveyed interestingly and absorbingly, no further illusion was sought. If this implied some loss, it
also made possible much splendid poetry

23. Elizabethan tragedy

Closely connected with the historical plays was the early development of Tragedy. But in the search for
themes, the dramatists soon broke away from fact, and the whole range of imaginative narrative also was
searched for tragic subjects. While the work of Seneca accounts to some extent for the prevalence of such
features as ghosts and the motive of revenge, the form of Tragedy that Shakespeare developed from the
experiments of men like Marlowe and Kyd was really a new and distinct type. Such classical restrictions as
the unities of place and time, and the complete separation of comedy and tragedy, were discarded, and there
resulted a series of plays which, while often marked by lack of restraint, of regular form, of unity of tone, yet
gave a picture of human life as affected by sin and suffering which in its richness, its variety, and its
imaginative exuberance has never been equaled. The greatest master of Tragedy was Shakespeare, and in
Tragedy he reached his greatest height. “Hamlet,” “King Lear,” and “Macbeth” are among his finest
productions, and they represent the noblest pitch of English genius. Of these, “Hamlet” was perhaps most
popular at the time of its production, and it has held its interest and provoked discussion as perhaps no other
play of any time or country has done. This is in part due to the splendor of its poetry, the absorbing nature of
the plot, and the vividness of the drawing of characters who marvelously combine individuality with a
universal and typical quality that makes them appeal to people of all kinds and races. But much also is due to
the delineation of the hero, the subtlety of whose character and the complexity of whose motives constitute a
perpetual challenge to our capacity for solving mysteries. “King Lear” owes its appeal less to its tendency to
rouse curiosity than to its power to awe us with an overwhelming spectacle of the suffering which folly and
evil can cause and which human nature can sustain. In spite of, or perhaps because of, its intricacy of motive
and superabundance of incident, it is the most overwhelming of all in its effect on our emotions. Compared
with it, “Macbeth” is a simple play, but nowhere does one find a more masterly portrayal of the moral disaster
that falls upon the man who, seeing the light, chooses the darkness. Though first, Shakespeare was by no
means alone in the production of great tragedy. Contemporary with him or immediately following came
Jonson, Marston, Middleton, Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and others, all producing brilliant work; but the man
who most nearly approached him in tragic intensity was John Webster. “The Duchess of Malfi” is a favorable
example of his ability to inspire terror and pity; and though his range is not comparable to that of Shakespeare,
he is unsurpassed in his power of coining a phrase which casts a lurid light into the recesses of the human
heart in moments of supreme passion.

24. Elizabethan comedy

In the field of comedy, Shakespeare’s supremacy is hardly less assured. From the nature of this kind of drama,
we do not expect in it the depth of penetration into human motive or the call upon our profounder sympathies
that we find in Tragedy; and the conventional happy ending of Comedy makes difficult the degree of truth to
life that one expects in serious plays. Yet the comedies of Shakespeare are far from superficial. Those written
in the middle of his career, such as “As You Like It” and “Twelfth Night,” not only display with great skill
many sides of human nature, but with indescribable lightness and grace introduce us to charming creations,
speaking lines rich in poetry and sparkling with wit, and bring before our imaginations whole series of
delightful scenes. “The Tempest” does more than this. While it gives us again much of the charm of the earlier
comedies, it is laden with the mellow wisdom of its author’s riper years. “The Alchemist,” representing the
work of Ben Jonson, belongs to a type which Shakespeare hardly touched—the Realistic Comedy. It is a vivid
satire on the forms of trickery prevailing in London about 1600—alchemy, astrology, and the like. The plot is
constructed with the care and skill for which its author is famous; and though its main purpose is the exposure
of fraud, and much of its interest lies in its picture of the time, yet, in the speeches of Sir Epicure Mammon,
for instance, it contains some splendid poetry. Dekker’s “The Shoemaker’s Holiday” in a much good mood,
shows us another side of London life, that of the respectable tradesfolk. Something of what Jonson and
Dekker do for the city, Massinger does for country life in his best known play, “A New Way to Pay Old
Debts,” one of the few Elizabethan dramas outside of Shakespeare which have held the stage down to our own
time. Massinger’s characters, like Jonson’s, are apt to be more typical embodiments of tendencies, less
individuals whom one comes to know, than Shakespeare’s; yet this play retains its interest and power of
rousing emotion as well as its moral significance. The “Philaster” of Beaumont and Fletcher belongs to the
same type of romantic drama as “The Tempest”—the type of play which belongs to Comedy by virtue of its
happy ending, but contains incidents and passages in an all but tragic tone. Less convincing in characterization
than Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher yet amaze us by the brilliant effectiveness of individual scenes, and
sprinkle their pages with speeches of poetry of great charm. The dramas of the Elizabethan period printed in
The Harvard Classics serve to give a taste of the quality of this literature at its highest, but cannot, of course,
show the surprising amount of it, or indicate the extreme literary-historical interest of its rise and
development. Seldom in the history of the world has the spirit of a period found so adequate an expression in
literature as the Elizabethan spirit did in the drama; seldom can we see so completely manifested the growth,
maturity, and decline of a literary form. But beyond these historical considerations, we are drawn to the
reading of Shakespeare and his contemporaries by the attraction of their profound and sympathetic knowledge
of mankind and its possibilities for suffering and joy, for sin and nobility, by the entertainment afforded by
their dramatic skill in the presentation of their stories, and by the superb poetry that they lavished so profusely
on their lines.

25. Shakespeare’s writing Style

William Shakespeare, often called the English national poet, is widely considered the greatest dramatist of
all time. William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. From
roughly 1594 onward he was an important member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men company of theatrical
players. Written records give little indication of the way in which Shakespeare’s professional life molded his
artistry. All that can be deduced is that over the course of 20 years, Shakespeare wrote plays that capture the
complete range of human emotion and conflict. Mysterious Origins.Known throughout the world, the works
of William Shakespeare have been performed in countless hamlets, villages, cities and metropolises for more
than 400 years. And yet, the personal history of William Shakespeare is somewhat a mystery. There are two
primary sources that provide historians with a basic outline of his life. One source is his work—the plays,
poems and sonnets—and the other is official documentation such as church and court records. However, these
only provide brief sketches of specific events in his life and provide little on the person who experienced those
events. Early Life.Though no birth records exist, church records indicate that a William Shakespeare was
baptized at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon on April 26, 1564. From this, it is believed he was
born on or near April 23, 1564, and this is the date scholars acknowledge as William Shakespeare's birthday.
Writing Style.William Shakespeare's early plays were written in the conventional style of the day, with
elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that didn't always align naturally with the story's plot or characters.
However, Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting the traditional style to his own purposes and creating a
freer flow of words. With only small degrees of variation, Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern
consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse, to compose his plays. At the same time,
there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use forms of poetry or simple prose. Early
Works: Histories and Comedies.With the exception of Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare's first plays
were mostly histories written in the early 1590s. Richard II, Henry VI (parts 1, 2 and 3) and Henry V
dramatize the destructive results of weak or corrupt rulers, and have been interpreted by drama historians as
Shakespeare's way of justifying the origins of the Tudor Dynasty. Shakespeare also wrote several comedies
during his early period: the witty romance A Midsummer Night's Dream, the romantic Merchant of Venice,
the wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming As You Like Itand Twelfth Night. Other
plays, possibly written before 1600, include Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the
Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

26. Colloboration and competition

27. Shakespeare’s early romantic comedies

.William Shakespeare, often called the English national poet, is widely considered the greatest dramatist of all
time. William Shakespeare was baptized on April 26, 1564, in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. From roughly
1594 onward he was an important member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men company of theatrical players.
Written records give little indication of the way in which Shakespeare’s professional life molded his artistry.
All that can be deduced is that over the course of 20 years, Shakespeare wrote plays that capture the complete
range of human emotion and conflict. Writing Style.William Shakespeare's early plays were written in the
conventional style of the day, with elaborate metaphors and rhetorical phrases that didn't always align
naturally with the story's plot or characters. However, Shakespeare was very innovative, adapting the
traditional style to his own purposes and creating a freer flow of words. With only small degrees of variation,
Shakespeare primarily used a metrical pattern consisting of lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank
verse, to compose his plays. At the same time, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from this and use
forms of poetry or simple prose. Early Works: Histories and Comedies.With the exception of Romeo and
Juliet, William Shakespeare's first plays were mostly histories written in the early 1590s. Richard II, Henry VI
(parts 1, 2 and 3) and Henry V dramatize the destructive results of weak or corrupt rulers, and have been
interpreted by drama historians as Shakespeare's way of justifying the origins of the Tudor Dynasty.
Shakespeare also wrote several comedies during his early period: the witty romance A Midsummer Night's
Dream, the romantic Merchant of Venice, the wit and wordplay of Much Ado About Nothing, the charming
As You Like Itand Twelfth Night. Other plays, possibly written before 1600, include Titus Andronicus, The
Comedy of Errors, The Taming of the Shrew and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Later Works: Tragedies and
Tragicomedies.It was in William Shakespeare's later period, after 1600, that he wrote the tragedies Hamlet,
King Lear, Othello and Macbeth. In these, Shakespeare's characters present vivid impressions of human
temperament that are timeless and universal. Possibly the best known of these plays is Hamlet, which explores
betrayal, retribution, incest and moral failure. These moral failures often drive the twists and turns of
Shakespeare's plots, destroying the hero and those he loves. In William Shakespeare's final period, he wrote
several tragicomedies. Among these are Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. Though graver in
tone than the comedies, they are not the dark tragedies of King Lear or Macbeth because they end with
reconciliation and forgiveness.

28. Restoration
The Restoration period in English history lasted from 1660 until 1700. It began when the exiled king, Charles
II, came back from France and was restored to his throne. Once the Puritans were defeated and the monarchy
was restored, English society saw a complete rejection of the Puritan way of life. The result was a style of
poetry, as represented in the works of John Dryden that emphasized moderation, reason and realism. John
Dryden is so much the dominant figure of Restoration poetry that the period is often referred to as the Age of
Dryden. His poetry, like the rest of Restoration poetry, is realistic, satirical and moderate. It is written in the
form of heroic couplets, rhyming pairs of iambic pentameter lines, also characteristic of epic poetry.
Restoration poetry is considered moderate in the way it emphasizes precision, or the economical use of
language and words. The two lasting contributions of the Restoration period on English literature are realism
and preciseness which opposed each other in England over a range of cultural, religious and political issues.
One group, members of royalty or royal sympathizers, supported the reign of Charles I. The other group
consisted of deeply religious people who were mostly middle class and sympathetic to a Puritan form of
Protestantism. The religious poets were referred to as "Metaphysical poets", and the royalists were known as
"Cavalier poets". The best-known Metaphysical poets are John Donne ("Holy-Sonnets''), Andrew Marvell,
Richard Crashaw and George Herbert. John Milton, the author of "Paradise Lost," is sometimes included
in the ranks of Metaphysical poets and at other times is specifically excluded. The principal Cavalier poets are
Ben Jonson ("Tribe of Ben"), Sir John Suckling, Robert Herrick, Thomas Carew and Richard Lovelace.
Writers focused on creating vivid and realistic portrayals of the corruption they saw in their society. Precision
in words and simplicity of language, a reaction to the exaggerations popular during the Elizabethan and
Puritan periods, helped emphasize this theme of realism. Influenced by the French, English writers tried to
create a style that most resembled the way that people actually spoke and wrote. Furthermore, they stopped
incorporating classical allusions, Latin quotations and romantic extravagances. The language of Restoration
poetry also contains many well-constructed and well-supported arguments as these three main themes -
moderation, realism and reason - made Restoration poetry’s classical style, also known as the classical school
of poetry, dominate English literature for more than a century.

29. Dryden as chronicler

JOHN DRYDEN (1631 – 1700). John Dryden is rightly considered as “the father of English Criticism”. He
was the first to teach the English people to determine the merit of composition upon principles. With Dryden,
a new era of criticism began. Before, Dryden, there were only occasional utterances on the critical art. (Eg.
Ben Jonson and Philip Sidney) Though Dryden’s criticism was of scattered nature; he paid attention to almost
all literary forms and expressed his views on them. Except An Essay of Dramatic Poesy, Dryden wrote no
formal treatise on criticism. His critical views are found mostly in the prefaces to his poetical works or to
those of others. Nature of poetry: Dryden upholds Aristotle’s definition of poetry as a process of imitation. It
imitates facts past or present, popular beliefs, superstitions and things in their ideal form. Dryden defends
Shakespeare’s use of the supernatural founded on popular beliefs. For, it is still an imitation though of other
men’s fancies. According to him, poetry and painting are not only true imitations of nature but of the best
nature (i.e) a much greater criticism. Function of poetry: The final end of poetry, according to Dryden is
delight and transport rather than instruction. To realize it, it does not merely imitate life, but offers its own of
it – ‘a beautiful resemblance of the whole’. The poet is neither a teacher nor a bare imitator – a photographer –
but a creator. He is one who, with life or nature as his raw material, produces a new thing altogether,
resembling the original in its basis but different from it in the super structure – a work of art rather than a
copy. Dramatic poetry: Drama claimed most of Dryden’s attention.On the introduction of unpalatable or
incredible scenes such as battles and deaths on the stage, he says that death can never be imitated to a just
height and it can be avoided. He sees nothing wrong in other physical action – battles, duels and the like.
Dryden does not subscribe to the accepted interpretation of the three Unities; that the plot should be single, the
time of action twenty four hours, and the place the same everywhere (where scene leads to scene in unbroken
chain). He favours the weaving of a sub plot into the main plot. He feels that the plot time can be increased a
little more to allow for greater maturity of the plot. In the same way, the unity of place cannot be maintained
as the time taken by the events of the play determines the location of the scene and the unity of place can be
waived. Dryden considers the unites of Time and Place too rigorous and they leave little scope for the
development of plot and character. Tragedy: Dryden’s definition of tragedy is the same as Aristotle’s: ‘an
imitation of one, entire, great and probable action; not told but represented, which by moving in us fear and
pity is conducive to the purging of those two emotions in our minds’. Dryden merely follows Aristotle and
Horace in his remarks on the tragic hero and other characters in Tragedy. Dryden has no use for the group of
characters called ‘chorus’ in the Greek Tragedy. Comedy: Dryden has not much of his own to say on comedy.
Following Aristotle, he calls it ‘a representation of human life in inferior persons and low subjects. To the
question whether comedy delights or instructs, Dryden says that the first end of comedy is delight and
instruction only the second. The persons in comedy are of a lower quality, the action is little and the faults and
vices are but the sallies of youth and frailties of human nature; they are not premeditated crimes. Dryden
wanted English comedy to be more refined than it was. According to him, Ben Jonson had only specialized in
‘humour’ and what it lacked was ‘wit’. As repartee is ‘one of the chiefest graces of comedy’, the greatest
pleasure of the audience is ‘a  chance exchange of wit, kept up on both sides, and swiftly managed’.
Beaumont and Fletcher were adept in the art. What Dryden wanted in comedy was ‘refined laughter’ rather
than the coarse one arising out of the display of ‘humours’ or eccentric traits in individuals. While in a
comedy of ‘humours’ the spectators laughed at the ‘humourous’ character, in a comedy of wit (or comedy of
manners as it grew) they laughed with the witty one. Epic: Dryden is with the French critics in considering
the epic superior to the tragedy. He asks, ‘what virtue is there in a tragedy which is not contained in an epic
poem. He stresses that the epic is certainly the greatest work of human nature. Aristotle had preferred the
tragedy to the epic. Regarding the visual appeal of the tragedy, Dryden urges three points: that it is the actor’s
work as much as the poet’s and so the poet alone cannot deserve credit for it that the stage is handicapped to
show many things – big armies, for instance – in words; and that while we have leisure to digest what we read
in the epic, we miss many beauties of a play in the performance. Dryden disagrees with Aristotle again in
insisting on a moral in the epic. Satire: In the first instance, the satire must have unity of design, confining
itself for that purpose to one subject or principally one. In other words, the satirist should choose one vice or
folly for his target, as the epic poet chooses one character for his specialpraise and make all others subservient
to it as the epic poet does the other characters. In the same way, he should extol ‘someone precept of moral
virtue’. For the manner of the satire, Dryden would prefer ‘fine raillery’. Criticism. According to Dryden, a
critic has to understand that a writer writes to his own age and people of which he himself is a product. He
advocates a close study of the ancient models not to imitate them blindly as a thorough going neo-classicist
would do but to recapture their magic to treat them as a torch to enlighten our own passage. It is the spirit of
the classics that matters more than their rules. Yet these rules are not without their value, for without rules,
there can be no art. Besides invention (the disposition of a work), there are two other parts of a work – design
(or arrangement) and expression. Dryden mentions the appropriate rules laid down by Aristotle. But it is not
the observance of rules that makes a work great but its capacity to delight and transport. It is not the business
of criticism to detect petty faults but to discover those great beauties that make it immortal. The Value of his
criticism. Dryden’s criticism is partly a restatement of the precepts of Aristotle, partly a plea for French neo-
classicism and partly a deviation from both under the influence of Longinus and Saint Evremond. From
Aristotle he learnt a respect for rules. French Neo-classicism taught him to prefer the epic to tragedy, to insist
on a moral in it and many of the things. And to Longinus and Saint Evremond he owed a respect for his own
judgement. Dryden is a liberal classicist who would adjust the rules of the ancients to the genius of the age, to
which a poet writes.
30. The re-birth
The re-birth. Renaissance means re-birth. From about 1500 to 1600 the world was reborn in many ways. The
Renaissance began in Italy, especially in art and architecture, in the fifteenth century. As England became the
most powerful nation in Europe in the late sixteenth century, new worlds were discovered and new ways of
seeing and thinking developed. Columbus discovered America in 1492, Copernicus and Galileo made
important discoveries about the stars and planets, Ferdinand Magellan sailed all round the world. The
Renaissance was worldwide. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND In England there was an important change in
religion and politics when King Henry VIII made himself the head of the Church of England, bringing church
and state together (1529-39). He cut all contact with Catholic Church and the Pope in Rome, part of a reaction
against the Catholic Church in many parts of Europe. Protestantism became more and more important and
gave a whole new vision of man’s relations with God. The king or queen became the human being on earth
who was closest to God, at the head of the Great Chain of Being which led down to the rest of mankind,
animals, insects and so on. The Dutch thinker, Erasmus, wrote of mankind as central to the world, and this
humanist concern was the basis of most Renaissance thought. The Tudors inherited much of the medieval
view of the world which consisted of numberless but linked ‘degrees’ of being, from the four physical
elements ( air, fire, earth and water) up to the pure intelligence of angels. Also, the whole universe was
governed by divine will; Nature was God’s instrument, the social hierarchy a product of Nature. Everything
had their natural place in the unity of the whole: both within the family and state (which it is believed, should
be governed by a single head). At the same time, this order, which was founded on Nature, existed for man’s
benefit, and man was an integral part of it. His godlike qualities had, unfortunately been ruined by the Fall (as
described in the Bible) and he was constantly troubled by such things as wars and plaques. Nevertheless,
provided that he treated this world as preparation for the next, and, with the help of human reason, he kept his
body subject to his soul; he had it within his powers to enjoy civilized happiness.

2- деңгейлі сұрақтар:
1. Bede
Almost everything that is known of Bede's life is contained in the last chapter of his Ecclesiastical History of
the English People, a history of the church in England. It was completed in about 731, and Bede implies that
he was then in his fifty-ninth year, which would give a birth date in 672 or 673. A minor source of
information is the letter by his disciple Cuthbert (not to be confused with the saint, Cuthbert, who is
mentioned in Bede's work) which relates Bede's death. Bede, in the Historia, gives his birthplace as "on the
lands of this monastery".He is referring to the twinned monasteries of Monkwearmouth and Jarrow, in
modern-day Wearside and Tyneside respectively; there is also a tradition that he was born at Monkton, two
miles from the site where the monastery at Jarrow was later built. Bede says nothing of his origins, but his
connections with men of noble ancestry suggest that his own family was well-to-do.Bede's first abbot was
Benedict Biscop, and the names "Biscop" and "Beda" both appear in a list of the kings of Lindsey from
around 800, further suggesting that Bede came from a noble family. Bede's name reflects West Saxon Bīeda.It
is an Old English short name formed on the root of bēodan "to bid, command".The name also occurs in the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, s.a. 501, as Bieda, one of the sons of the Saxon founder of Portsmouth. The Liber
Vitae of Durham Cathedral names two priests with this name, one of whom is presumably Bede himself.
Some manuscripts of the Life of Cuthbert, one of Bede's works, mention that Cuthbert's own priest was named
Bede; it is possible that this priest is the other name listed in the Liber Vitae. At the age of seven, Bede was
sent as a puer oblatus to the monastery of Monkwearmouth by his family to be educated by Benedict Biscop
and later by Ceolfrith. Bede does not say whether it was already intended at that point that he would be a
monk. It was fairly common in Ireland at this time for young boys, particularly those of noble birth, to be
fostered out as an oblate; the practice was also likely to have been common among the Germanic peoples in
England. He was an author, teacher (Alcuin was a student of one of his pupils), and scholar, and his most
famous work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People, gained him the title "The Father of English
History". His ecumenical writings were extensive and included a number of Biblical commentaries and other
theological works of exegetical erudition. Another important area of study for Bede was the academic
discipline of computus, otherwise known to his contemporaries as the science of calculating calendar dates.
One of the more important dates Bede tried to compute was Easter, an effort that was mired in controversy.
He also helped popularize the practice of dating forward from the birth of Christ (Anno Domini – in the year
of our Lord), a practice which eventually became commonplace in medieval Europe. Bede was one of the
greatest teachers and writers of the Early Middle Ages and is considered by many historians to be the most
important scholar of antiquity for the period between the death of Pope Gregory I in 604 and the coronation of
Charlemagne in 800. In 1899, Pope Leo XIII declared him a Doctor of the Church. He is the only native of
Great Britain to achieve this designation; Anselm of Canterbury, also a Doctor of the Church, was originally
from Italy. Bede was moreover a skilled linguist and translator, and his work made the Latin and Greek
writings of the early Church Fathers much more accessible to his fellow Anglo-Saxons, which contributed
significantly to English Christianity. Bede's monastery had access to an impressive library which included
works by Eusebius, Orosius, and many others.

2. Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the second son of David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth
Arnold Poe, both stage actors. The family lived in abject poverty and moved frequently during Poe's first
years, during which time his parents pursued acting engagements in New York, Maryland, and Virginia. Poe's
father abandoned the family when Poe was still a small child, and his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in
December 1811. Shortly after his mother's death, Poe was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy Richmond
merchant, and his wife, Frances. In 1815 the young boy went with the Allans to Great Britain, living in
Scotland and London for the next five years. In spite of his academic accomplishments, Poe remained
relatively isolated. Scholar Eric W. Carlson has argued that Poe's humble origins remained a source of shame
throughout his life and that because of his background he never gained acceptance among Richmond's social
elite. In 1826, Poe became a student at the University of Virginia, studying classical and modern languages.
Although his adoptive father paid Poe's tuition and lodging, he refused him additional funds for books and
other basic expenses. To cover his living costs, Poe turned to gambling, incurring massive debts that forced
him to withdraw from the university. Unable to repair his fractured relationship with Allan, Poe moved to
Boston and enlisted in the army. He published his first book of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems: By a
Bostonian (1827), around this time. A second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf Tamerlane, and Minor Poems,
was published in 1829. To modern commentators Poe remains best known for his short stories, almost all of
which were collected in three volumes published during his lifetime: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque,
The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, and Tales by Edgar A. Poe. Many scholars divide Poe's short fiction
into two categories: horror tales and detective stories. Poe's horror tales typically revolve around characters
who have reached states of extreme alienation, terror, and madness and often contain elements of the
supernatural. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), a murderer is plagued by the persistent echo of his victim's
heartbeat, compelling him to confess his crime; "The Black Cat" (1843) features a protagonist who becomes
obsessed with killing his beloved pet cat; the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), tormented by the
"thousand injuries" inflicted upon him by an old rival, achieves his long-awaited vengeance by burying his
victim alive in a brick tomb. The sense of menace in other stories is far more subtle. In "Some Words with a
Mummy" (1845), a revivified Egyptian mummy, speaking to a group of modern scientists, offers an ominous
indictment of nineteenth-century democracy. The narrator of "Ligeia" (1838), distressed by the death of his
first wife, imagines her soul's resurrection in the body of his second wife. "Ligeia" is also noteworthy in that it
contains the poem "The Conqueror Worm," a dark vision of the power and inevitability of death. The best
known of these works include "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget"
(1842), and "The Purloined Letter" (1845). These three stories feature the character C. Auguste Dupin, an
amateur sleuth whose powers of imagination and deductive reasoning enable him to recognize crucial details
that elude more conventional police inspectors. A number of scholars have asserted that Dupin became the
prototype of the modem fictional detective and served as the model for such characters as Sherlock Holmes
and Hercule Poirot. In addition to his fiction, Poe authored a number of important poems over the course of
his career. Although his poems are not widely read today, several are still familiar to modem readers; among
the most famous are "To Helen" (1831), "Lenore" (1843), and "The Raven" (1845).

3. Robert Burns
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet
and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best
known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a "light Scots
dialect" of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these
writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest. He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic
movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and
socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of
his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his
influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the
Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV. As well as making original compositions,
Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song)
"Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "Scots Wha Hae" served for a
long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well
known across the world today include "A Red, Red Rose", "A Man's a Man for A' That", "To a Louse",
"To a Mouse", "The Battle of Sherramuir", "Tam o' Shanter" and "Ae Fond Kiss". He had little regular
schooling and got much of his education from his father, who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic,
geography, and history and also wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief.[6] He was also taught by John
Murdoch (1747–1824), who opened an "adventure school" in Alloway in 1763 and taught Latin, French, and
mathematics to both Robert and his brother Gilbert (1760–1827) from 1765 to 1768 until Murdoch left the
parish. After a few years of home education, Burns was sent to Dalrymple Parish School in mid-1772 before
returning at harvest time to full-time farm labouring until 1773, when he was sent to lodge with Murdoch for
three weeks to study grammar, French, and Latin.

4. Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson FRS (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was
the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's
Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". He published his first solo collection of
poems, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical, in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which remain some of Tennyson's most
celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although described by some critics as overly sentimental, his
verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including
Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Tennyson's early poetry, with its medievalism and powerful visual imagery, was a
major influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Tennyson also excelled at short lyrics, such as "Break,
Break, Break", "The Charge of the Light Brigade", "Tears, Idle Tears", and "Crossing the Bar". Much of his
verse was based on classical mythological themes, such as "Ulysses". "In Memoriam A.H.H." was written to
commemorate his friend Arthur Hallam, a fellow poet and student at Trinity College, Cambridge, after he died
of a stroke at the age of 22.[2] Tennyson also wrote some notable blank verse including Idylls of the King,
"Ulysses", and "Tithonus". During his career, Tennyson attempted drama, but his plays enjoyed little success.
A number of phrases from Tennyson's work have become commonplace in the English language, including
"Nature, red in tooth and claw" ("In Memoriam A.H.H."), "'Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to
have loved at all", "Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die", "My strength is as the strength of
ten, / Because my heart is pure", "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield", "Knowledge comes, but
Wisdom lingers", and "The old order changeth, yielding place to new". He is the ninth most frequently quoted
writer in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. Early life. Tennyson was born on 6 August 1809 in Somersby,
Lincolnshire, England.[4] He was born into a successful middle-class family of minor landowning status
distantly descended from John Savage, 2nd Earl Rivers, and Francis Leke, 1st Earl of Scarsdale. An
illustration by W. E. F. Britten showing Somersby Rectory, where Tennyson was raised and began writing.
His father, George Clayton Tennyson (1778–1831), was an Anglican clergyman who served as rector of
Somersby (1807–1831), also rector of Benniworth (1802–1831) and Bag Enderby, and vicar of Grimsby
(1815). He raised a large family and "was a man of superior abilities and varied attainments, who tried his
hand with fair success in architecture, painting, music, and poetry. He was comfortably well off for a country
clergyman, and his shrewd money management enabled the family to spend summers at Mablethorpe and
Skegness on the eastern coast of England". George Clayton Tennyson was elder son of attorney and MP
George Tennyson (1749/50-1835), JP, DL, of Bayons Manor and Usselby Hall, who had also inherited the
estates of his mother's family, the Claytons, and married Mary, daughter and heiress of John Turner, of
Caistor, Lincolnshire. George Clayton Tennyson was however pushed into a career in the church and passed
over as heir in favour of his younger brother, Charles Tennyson d'Eyncourt. Alfred Tennyson's mother,
Elizabeth (1781–1865), was the daughter of Stephen Fytche (1734–1799), vicar of St. James Church, Louth
(1764) and rector of Withcall (1780), a small village between Horncastle and Louth. Tennyson's father
"carefully attended to the education and training of his children". Tennyson and two of his elder brothers were
writing poetry in their teens and a collection of poems by all three was published locally when Alfred was
only 17. One of those brothers, Charles Tennyson Turner, later married Louisa Sellwood, the younger sister of
Alfred's future wife; the other was Frederick Tennyson. Another of Tennyson's brothers, Edward Tennyson,
was institutionalised at a private asylum. Education and first publication. Statue of Lord Tennyson in the
chapel of Trinity College, Cambridge. Tennyson was a student of King Edward VI Grammar School, Louth
from 1816 to 1820.[11] He entered Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1827, where he joined a secret society called
the Cambridge Apostles.[12] A portrait of Tennyson by George Frederic Watts is in Trinity's collection. At
Cambridge, Tennyson met Arthur Hallam and William Henry Brookfield, who became his closest friends. His
first publication was a collection of "his boyish rhymes and those of his elder brother Charles" entitled Poems
by Two Brothers, published in 1827. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at
Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". [14][15] Reportedly, "it was thought to be no slight honour for
a young man of twenty to win the chancellor's gold medal". [11] He published his first solo collection of poems,
Poems Chiefly Lyrical in 1830. "Claribel" and "Mariana", which later took their place among Tennyson's most
celebrated poems, were included in this volume. Although decried by some critics as overly sentimental, his
verse soon proved popular and brought Tennyson to the attention of well-known writers of the day, including
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

5. Geoffrey Chaucer
Geoffrey Chaucer (/ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1340s – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and civil servant best
known for The Canterbury Tales.[1] He has been called the "father of English literature", or, alternatively, the
"father of English poetry".[2] He was the first writer to be buried in what has since come to be called Poets'
Corner, in Westminster Abbey.[3] Chaucer also gained fame as a philosopher and astronomer, composing the
scientific A Treatise on the Astrolabe for his 10-year-old son Lewis. He maintained a career in the civil
service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, and member of parliament. Among Chaucer's many other works
are The Book of the Duchess, The House of Fame, The Legend of Good Women, and Troilus and Criseyde. He
is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in
England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin.[4] Chaucer's contemporary Thomas Hoccleve hailed him
as "the firste fyndere of our fair langage". Almost two thousand English words are first attested to in
Chaucerian manuscripts. Arms of Geoffrey Chaucer: Per pale argent and gules, a bend counterchanged.
Chaucer was born in London most likely in the early 1340s (by some accounts, including his monument, he
was born in 1343), though the precise date and location remain unknown. The Chaucer family offers an
extraordinary example of upward mobility. His great-grandfather was a tavern keeper, his grandfather worked
as a purveyor of wines, and his father John Chaucer rose to become an important wine merchant with a royal
appointment.[5] Several previous generations of Geoffrey Chaucer's family had been vintners[6][7] and
merchants in Ipswich.[8] His family name is derived from the French chaucier, once thought to mean
'shoemaker', but now known to mean a maker of hose or leggings. In 1324, his father John Chaucer was
kidnapped by an aunt in the hope of marrying the 12-year-old to her daughter in an attempt to keep the
property in Ipswich. The aunt was imprisoned and fined £250, now equivalent to about £200,000, which
suggests that the family was financially secure. John Chaucer married Agnes Copton, who inherited properties
in 1349, including 24 shops in London from her uncle Hamo de Copton, who is described in a will dated 3
April 1354 and listed in the City Hustings Roll as "moneyer", said to be a moneyer at the Tower of London. In
the City Hustings Roll 110, 5, Ric II, dated June 1380, Chaucer refers to himself as me Galfridum Chaucer,
filium Johannis Chaucer, Vinetarii, Londonie, which translates as: "Geoffrey Chaucer, son of the vintner John
Chaucer, London". Career. Chaucer as a pilgrim, in the early 15th-century illuminated Ellesmere manuscript
of the Canterbury Tales. While records concerning the lives of his contemporaries William Langland and the
Gawain Poet are practically non-existent, since Chaucer was a public servant his official life is very well
documented, with nearly five hundred written items testifying to his career. The first of the "Chaucer Life
Records" appears in 1357, in the household accounts of Elizabeth de Burgh, the Countess of Ulster, when he
became the noblewoman's page through his father's connections, [12] a common medieval form of
apprenticeship for boys into knighthood or prestige appointments. The countess was married to Lionel, Duke
of Clarence, the second surviving son of the king, Edward III, and the position brought the teenage Chaucer
into the close court circle, where he was to remain for the rest of his life. He also worked as a courtier, a
diplomat, and a civil servant, as well as working for the king from 1389 to 1391 as Clerk of the King's Works.
In 1359, the early stages of the Hundred Years' War, Edward III invaded France and Chaucer travelled with
Lionel of Antwerp, 1st Duke of Clarence, Elizabeth's husband, as part of the English army. In 1360, he was
captured during the siege of Rheims. Edward paid £16 for his ransom,[14] a considerable sum equivalent to
£12,261 in 2021,[15] and Chaucer was released. Chaucer crest A unicorn's head with canting arms of Roet
below: Gules, three Catherine Wheels or (French rouet = "spinning wheel"). Ewelme Church, Oxfordshire.
Possibly funeral helm of his son Thomas Chaucer. After this, Chaucer's life is uncertain, but he seems to have
travelled in France, Spain, and Flanders, possibly as a messenger and perhaps even going on a pilgrimage to
Santiago de Compostela. Around 1366, Chaucer married Philippa (de) Roet. She was a lady-in-waiting to
Edward III's queen, Philippa of Hainault, and a sister of Katherine Swynford, who later (c. 1396) became the
third wife of John of Gaunt. It is uncertain how many children Chaucer and Philippa had, but three or four are
most commonly cited. His son, Thomas Chaucer, had an illustrious career, as chief butler to four kings, envoy
to France, and Speaker of the House of Commons. Thomas's daughter, Alice, married the Duke of Suffolk.
Thomas's great-grandson (Geoffrey's great-great-grandson), John de la Pole, Earl of Lincoln, was the heir to
the throne designated by Richard III before he was deposed. Geoffrey's other children probably included
Elizabeth Chaucy, a nun at Barking Abbey,[16][17] Agnes, an attendant at Henry IV's coronation; and another
son, Lewis Chaucer. Chaucer's "Treatise on the Astrolabe" was written for Lewis. According to tradition,
Chaucer studied law in the Inner Temple (an Inn of Court) at this time. He became a member of the royal
court of Edward III as a valet de chambre, yeoman, or esquire on 20 June 1367, a position which could entail
a wide variety of tasks. His wife also received a pension for court employment. He travelled abroad many
times, at least some of them in his role as a valet. In 1368, he may have attended the wedding of Lionel of
Antwerp to Violante Visconti, daughter of Galeazzo II Visconti, in Milan. Two other literary stars of the era
were in attendance: Jean Froissart and Petrarch. Around this time, Chaucer is believed to have written The
Book of the Duchess in honour of Blanche of Lancaster, the late wife of John of Gaunt, who died in 1369 of
the plague. Chaucer travelled to Picardy the next year as part of a military expedition; in 1373 he visited
Genoa and Florence. Numerous scholars such as Skeat, Boitani, and Rowland [20] suggested that, on this Italian
trip, he came into contact with Petrarch or Boccaccio. They introduced him to medieval Italian poetry, the
forms and stories of which he would use later. [21][22] The purposes of a voyage in 1377 are mysterious, as
details within the historical record conflict. Later documents suggest it was a mission, along with Jean
Froissart, to arrange a marriage between the future King Richard II and a French princess, thereby ending the
Hundred Years' War. If this was the purpose of their trip, they seem to have been unsuccessful, as no wedding
occurred. In 1378, Richard II sent Chaucer as an envoy (secret dispatch) to the Visconti and to Sir John
Hawkwood, English condottiere (mercenary leader) in Milan. It has been speculated that it was Hawkwood on
whom Chaucer based his character the Knight in the Canterbury Tales, for a description matches that of a
14th-century condottiere.

6. John Keats
John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic
poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years
when he died of tuberculosis at the age of 25. They were indifferently received in his lifetime, but his fame
grew rapidly after his death.[1] By the end of the century, he was placed in the canon of English literature,
strongly influencing many writers of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; the Encyclopædia Britannica of 1888
called one ode "one of the final masterpieces". Jorge Luis Borges named his first encounter with Keats an
experience he felt all his life. Keats had a style "heavily loaded with sensualities", notably in the series of
odes. Typically of the Romantics, he accentuated extreme emotion through natural imagery. Today his poems
and letters remain among the most popular and analysed in English literature – in particular "Ode to a
Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", "Sleep and Poetry" and the sonnet "On First Looking into Chapman's
Homer".

7. William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical
Ballads (1798). Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semi-
autobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was
posthumously titled and published by his wife in the year of his death, before which it was generally known as
"the poem to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death from pleurisy on 23 April
1850. Early life. The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William
Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in what is now named Wordsworth House in Cockermouth,
Cumberland, (now in Cumbria),[1] part of the scenic region in northwestern England known as the Lake
District. William's sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was
born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest,
who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he
was captain, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the
youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge. Wordsworth's father
was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, and, through his connections, lived in a
large mansion in the small town. He was frequently away from home on business, so the young William and
his siblings had little involvement with him and remained distant from him until his death in 1783. [3] However,
he did encourage William in his reading, and in particular set him to commit large portions of verse to
memory, including works by Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser. William was also allowed to use his father's
library. William also spent time at his mother's parents' house in Penrith, Cumberland, where he was exposed
to the moors, but did not get along with his grandparents or his uncle, who also lived there. His hostile
interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide. Wordsworth was taught to read by
his mother and attended, first, a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth, then a school in Penrith for the
children of upper-class families, where he was taught by Ann Birkett, who insisted on instilling in her students
traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter,
May Day and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was
at the school in Penrith that he met the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who later became his wife. Early
career. First publication and Lyrical Ballads. The year 1793 saw the first publication of poems by
Wordsworth, in the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. In 1795 he received a legacy of
£900 from Raisley Calvert and became able to pursue a career as a poet. It was also in 1795 that he met
Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. For two years
from 1795, William and his sister Dorothy lived at Racedown House in Dorset—a property of the Pinney
family—to the west of Pilsdon Pen. They walked in the area for about two hours every day, and the nearby
hills consoled Dorothy as she pined for the fells of her native Lakeland. She wrote, "We have hills which, seen
from a distance almost take the character of mountains, some cultivated nearly to their summits, others in their
wild state covered with furze and broom. These delight me the most as they remind me of our native wilds."
In 1797, the pair moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether
Stowey. Together Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798),
an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor
Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in this
collection, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800,
had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems.[14] It was augmented
significantly in the next edition, published in 1802.[15] In this preface, which some scholars consider a central
work of Romantic literary theory, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of verse,
one that is based on the ordinary language "really used by men" while avoiding the poetic diction of much
18th-century verse. Wordsworth also gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility", and calls his own poems in the
book "experimental". A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805. Marriage and
children. In 1802, Lowther's heir, William Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale, paid the £4,000 owed to
Wordsworth's father through Lowther's failure to pay his aide. [20] It was this repayment that afforded
Wordsworth the financial means to marry. On 4 October, following his visit with Dorothy to France to arrange
matters with Annette, Wordsworth married his childhood friend Mary Hutchinson. [8] Dorothy continued to
live with the couple and grew close to Mary.

8. John Milton
John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic
poem Paradise Lost, written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense
religious flux and political upheaval. It addressed the fall of man, including the temptation of Adam and Eve
by the fallen angel Satan and God's expulsion of them from the Garden of Eden. Paradise Lost is widely
considered one of the greatest works of literature ever written, and it elevated Milton's widely-held reputation
as one history's greatest poets.[1][2] He also served as a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under
its Council of State and later under Oliver Cromwell. Writing in English, Latin, and Italian, Milton achieved
global fame and recognition during his lifetime; his celebrated Areopagitica (1644), written in condemnation
of pre-publication censorship, is among history's most influential and impassioned defences of freedom of
speech and freedom of the press. His desire for freedom extended beyond his philosophy and was reflected in
his style, which included his introduction of new words (coined from Latin and Ancient Greek) to the English
language. He was the first modern writer to employ unrhymed verse outside of the theatre or translations.
Milton is described as the "greatest English author" by biographer William Hayley,[3] and he remains generally
regarded "as one of the preeminent writers in the English language", [4] though critical reception has oscillated
in the centuries since his death often on account of his republicanism. Samuel Johnson praised Paradise Lost
as "a poem which...with respect to design may claim the first place, and with respect to performance, the
second, among the productions of the human mind", though he (a Tory) described Milton's politics as those of
an "acrimonious and surly republican".[5] Milton was revered by poets such as William Blake, William
Wordsworth, and Thomas Hardy. Phases of Milton's life parallel the major historical and political divisions in
Stuart Britain at the time. In his early years, Milton studied at Christ's College at the University of Cambridge,
one of the world's most prestigious universities, and then travelled, wrote poetry mostly for private circulation,
and launched a career as pamphleteer and publicist under Charles I's increasingly autocratic rule and Britain's
breakdown into constitutional confusion and ultimately civil war. While once considered dangerously radical
and heretical, Milton contributed to a seismic shift in accepted public opinions during his life that ultimately
elevated him to public office in the England. The Restoration of 1660 and his loss of vision later deprived
Milton much of his public platform, but he used the period to develop many of his major works. Milton's
views developed from extensive reading, travel, and experience that began with his days as a student at
Cambridge in the 1620s and continued through the English Civil War, which started in 1642 and continued
through 1651.[6] By the time of his death in 1674, Milton was impoverished and on the margins of English
intellectual life but famous throughout Europe and unrepentant for political choices that placed him at odds
with governing authorities.

9. John Steinbeck
John Ernst Steinbeck Jr. (/ˈstaɪnbɛk/; February 27, 1902 – December 20, 1968) was an American writer and
the 1962 Nobel Prize in Literature winner "for his realistic and imaginative writings, combining as they do
sympathetic humor and keen social perception."[2] He has been called "a giant of American letters." During his
writing career, he authored 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16
novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels
Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas
The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize–winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939)[5]
is considered Steinbeck's masterpiece and part of the American literary canon.[6] In the first 75 years after it
was published, it sold 14 million copies. Most of Steinbeck's work is set in central California, particularly in
the Salinas Valley and the California Coast Ranges region. His works frequently explored the themes of fate
and injustice, especially as applied to downtrodden or everyman protagonists. Early life. Steinbeck was born
on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California.[8] He was of German, English, and Irish descent.[9] Johann Adolf
Großsteinbeck (1828–1913), Steinbeck's paternal grandfather, was a founder of Mount Hope, a short-lived
messianic farming colony in Palestine that disbanded after attackers killed his brother and raped his brother's
wife and mother-in-law. He arrived in the United States in 1858, shortening the family name to Steinbeck.
The family farm in Heiligenhaus, Mettmann, Germany, is still named "Großsteinbeck". His father, John Ernst
Steinbeck (1862–1935), served as Monterey County treasurer. John's mother, Olive Hamilton (1867–1934), a
former school teacher, shared Steinbeck's passion for reading and writing. [10] The Steinbecks were members of
the Episcopal Church,[11] although Steinbeck later became agnostic.[12] Steinbeck lived in a small rural valley
(no more than a frontier settlement) set in some of the world's most fertile soil, about 25 miles from the
Pacific Coast. Both valley and coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. [13] He spent his
summers working on nearby ranches including the Post Ranch in Big Sur.[14] He later labored with migrant
workers on Spreckels sugar beet farms. There he learned of the harsher aspects of the migrant life and the
darker side of human nature, which supplied him with material expressed in Of Mice and Men. He explored
his surroundings, walking across local forests, fields, and farms.[15] While working at Spreckels Sugar
Company, he sometimes worked in their laboratory, which gave him time to write. He had considerable
mechanical aptitude and fondness for repa Writing. Steinbeck's first novel, Cup of Gold, published in 1929, is
loosely based on the life and death of privateer Henry Morgan. It centers on Morgan's assault and sacking of
Panamá Viejo, sometimes referred to as the "Cup of Gold", and on the women, brighter than the sun, who
were said to be found there. [21] In 1930, Steinbeck wrote a werewolf murder mystery, Murder at Full Moon,
that has never been published because Steinbeck considered it unworthy of publication. [22] Between 1930 and
1933, Steinbeck produced three shorter works. The Pastures of Heaven, published in 1932, consists of twelve
interconnected stories about a valley near Monterey, which was discovered by a Spanish corporal while
chasing runaway Indian slaves. In 1933 Steinbeck published The Red Pony, a 100-page, four-chapter story
weaving in memories of Steinbeck's childhood.[21] To a God Unknown, named after a Vedic hymn,[16] follows
the life of a homesteader and his family in California, depicting a character with a primal and pagan worship
of the land he works. Although he had not achieved the status of a well-known writer, he never doubted that
he would achieve greatnessiring things he owned

10. Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was a Nobel Prize-winning American writer who touched the pinnacle of fame with his
novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ which catapulted him to international glory. Over the course of his writing
career, he published seven novels, six short story collections, and two non-fiction works which greatly
influenced later generation of writers. Many of his works were published posthumously and most of them are
considered classics of American literature. Born as the first son to well-educated and well-respected parents in
Illinois, he had a comfortable childhood during which he developed a keen interest in reading and writing. As
a school student, he excelled in English and was a regular contributor to his school newspaper ‘Trapeze’ and
the yearbook ‘Tabula.’ An athletic boy, he also took part in boxing, track and field, water polo, and football.
He decided early on that he wanted a career in writing and started off as a journalist before becoming a writer
of short stories and novels. He went on to serve in ‘World War I’ as an ambulance driver in the ‘Italian Army’
before returning to America and establishing himself as a distinguished fiction writer. In spite of his
professional success as a writer, Hemingway’s personal life was a constant struggle with numerous broken
marriages and bouts of depression. Deeply troubled by his personal sufferings, he committed suicide in 1961.
Childhood & Early Life. Ernest Miller Hemingway was born on July 21, 1899, in Oak Park, Illinois. His
father, Clarence Edmonds Hemingway, was a physician and his mother, Grace Hall Hemingway, was a
musician. Both his parents were greatly respected in their conservative community. He had an interesting
childhood as his father taught him to hunt, fish, and camp in the woods and lakes of Northern Michigan. His
mother’s insistence that he receive music lessons, however, irritated the young boy. He attended ‘Oak Park
and River Forest High School’ from 1913 to 1917. He excelled in English and actively contributed to his
school newspaper ‘Trapeze’ and the yearbook ‘Tabula.’ He also participated in a variety of sports like boxing,
track and field, water polo, and football. Major Works. His novel ‘A Farewell to Arms,’ set during the Italian
campaign of ‘World War I,’ is considered one of his first major critically acclaimed success. The book, which
revolves around a love affair between the expatriate American Henry and Catherine Barkley against the
backdrop of ‘World War I,’ became his first best-seller. ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ is one of his best-known
works. The novel tells the story of a young American attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the
‘Spanish Civil War.’ Death is the primary theme of the novel. His novel ‘The Old Man and the Sea’ was his
last major work of fiction to be published in his lifetime. It is also one of his most famous works. The story
revolves around an aging fisherman who manages to catch a huge fish but is unable to enjoy his success as his
catch gets eaten up by the sharks. Personal Life & Legacy. Ernest Hemingway was married four times. His
first wife was Elizabeth Hadley Richardson whom he married in 1921. The couple had one son. Hemingway
was involved in an affair with Pauline Pfeiffer during this marriage. When his wife came to learn of it, she
divorced him. Soon after his divorce, he married Pauline Pfeiffer in 1927. They had two sons. Hemingway
was not faithful to Pauline either and developed a relationship with Martha Gellhorn which led to his divorce
from Pauline in 1940. Shortly after his second divorce, he tied the knot with Martha Gellhorn. A successful
journalist in her own right, Gellhorn resented being referred to as Hemingway’s wife. Over the course of this
marriage, she started an affair with U.S. paratrooper Major General James M. Gavin and divorced Hemingway
in 1945. His fourth and final marriage was to Mary Welsh in 1946. The couple remained married till
Hemingway’s death. Ernest Hemingway’s final years were marked by ill health and depression. He was
treated for numerous conditions, such as high blood pressure and liver disease, and also struggled with
deteriorating mental health. He became increasingly suicidal in 1961 and shot himself to death on the morning
of July 2, 1961. Career. After leaving high school, he joined ‘The Kansas City Star’ as a cub reporter. He
worked there for only six months but learned several valuable lessons that would help him in developing his
own unique style of writing. When the ‘World War I’ broke out, he enlisted as an ambulance driver for the
‘American Red Cross.’ Though he was grievously injured while serving in the ‘Austro-Italian Front,’ he
assisted others to safety. He was honored with the ‘Italian Silver Medal of Bravery.’ He returned home in
1919 and then accepted a job in Toronto where he worked as a freelancer, staff writer, and foreign
correspondent for the ‘Toronto Star Weekly.’ He continued writing stories for the publication even after
moving to Chicago in September 1920.

11. Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron FRS; 22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), simply known as Lord
Byron, was an English poet and peer.[1][2] One of the leading figures of the Romantic movement,[3][4][5] Byron is
regarded as one of the greatest English poets. [6] He remains widely read and influential. Among his best-
known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage; many of his shorter
lyrics in Hebrew Melodies also became popular. He was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and later
travelled extensively across Europe, especially in Italy, where he lived for seven years in Venice, Ravenna,
and Pisa after he was forced to flee England due to lynching threats. [7] During his stay in Italy, he frequently
visited his friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.[8] Later in life Byron joined the Greek War of
Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire and died leading a campaign during that war, for which Greeks
revere him as a folk hero.[9] He died in 1824 at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First and Second
Sieges of Missolonghi. His only legitimate child, Ada Lovelace, was a founding figure in the field of
computer programming based on her notes for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine.[10][11][12] Byron's
extramarital children include Allegra Byron, who died in childhood, and possibly Elizabeth Medora Leigh,
daughter of his half-sister Augusta Leigh. Family and early life. An engraving of Byron's father, Captain
John "Mad Jack" Byron, date unknown George Gordon Byron was born on 22 January 1788, on Holles Street
in London, England – his birthplace is now supposedly occupied by a branch of the department store John
Lewis. Byron was the only child of Captain John Byron (known as 'Jack') and his second wife Catherine
Gordon, heiress of the Gight estate in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Byron's paternal grandparents were Vice-
Admiral John Byron and Sophia Trevanion.[13] Having survived a shipwreck as a teenage midshipman, Vice
Admiral John Byron set a new speed record for circumnavigating the globe. After he became embroiled in a
tempestuous voyage during the American Revolutionary War, John was nicknamed 'Foul-Weather Jack'
Byron by the press Byron's father had previously been somewhat scandalously married to Amelia,
Marchioness of Carmarthen, with whom he had been having an affair – the wedding took place just weeks
after her divorce from her husband, and she was around eight months pregnant. [15] The marriage was not a
happy one, and their first two children – Sophia Georgina, and an unnamed boy – died in infancy. [16] Amelia
herself died in 1784 almost exactly a year after the birth of their third child, the poet's half-sister Augusta
Mary.[17] Though Amelia succumbed to a wasting illness, probably tuberculosis, the press reported that her
heart had been broken out of remorse for leaving her husband. Much later, 19th-century sources blamed Jack's
own "brutal and vicious" treatment of her. Jack then married Catherine Gordon of Gight on 13 May 1785,
by all accounts only for her fortune.[19] To claim his second wife's estate in Scotland, Byron's father took the
additional surname "Gordon", becoming "John Byron Gordon", and occasionally styled himself "John Byron
Gordon of Gight". Byron's mother had to sell her land and title to pay her new husband's debts, and in the
space of two years, the large estate, worth some £23,500, had been squandered, leaving the former heiress
with an annual income in trust of only £150. [18] In a move to avoid his creditors, Catherine accompanied her
profligate husband to France in 1786, but returned to England at the end of 1787 to give birth to her son.
While not at school or college, Byron dwelt at his mother's residence Burgage Manor in Southwell,
Nottinghamshire.[21] While there, he cultivated friendships with Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and her brother John,
with whom he staged two plays for the entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of
Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was encouraged to write his first volumes of poetry.
Fugitive Pieces was printed by Ridge of Newark, which contained poems written when Byron was only 17. [38]
However, it was promptly recalled and burned on the advice of his friend the Reverend J. T. Becher, on
account of its more amorous verses, particularly the poem To Mary. Hours of Idleness, which collected many
of the previous poems, along with more recent compositions, was the culminating book. The savage,
anonymous criticism this received (now known to be the work of Henry Peter Brougham) in the Edinburgh
Review prompted his first major satire,[40] English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809).[25] It was put into the
hands of his relation R. C. Dallas, requesting him to "...get it published without his name." [41] Alexander
Dallas gave a large series of changes and alterations, as well as the reasoning for some of them. He also stated
that Byron had originally intended to prefix an argument to this poem, and Dallas quoted it. [42] Although the
work was published anonymously, by April, R. C. Dallas wrote that "you are already pretty generally known
to be the author".[43] The work so upset some of his critics they challenged Byron to a duel; over time, in
subsequent editions, it became a mark of prestige to be the target of Byron's pen.

12. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a noted poet, philosopher and critic, born in the late eighteenth century in
England. The youngest of fourteen siblings, he was sent to live and study at Christ’s Hospital after his father’s
death. Although his brothers took care of him, he was very lonely most of the time. Unable to visit home
during his holidays, he made many friends, not all of whom had good influence on him. It is not known why
or when, but sometime during his college years, he became used to opium, an addiction that he could never
shrug off. Starting to write poems from the age of fifteen, he wrote his most memorable poems in his twenties.
In his twenties, he also cofounded the ‘Romantic Movement’ with his friend William Wordsworth, writing
poems in everyday language. In his later years, as his dependency on the drug increased, his literary capability
began to decrease. Alienated from his family, he spent the last eighteen years of his life with his physician,
who was able to help him control his addiction, thus restoring his literal competence and social acceptance. By
the time of his death at the age of sixty-one, he was considered a legend of his time. Childhood & Early
Years. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772, in Ottery St Mary, a rural town in East
Devon, England. At the time of his birth, his father, John Coleridge, was the head master of Henry VIII's Free
Grammar School at Ottery and a respected vicar of the parish. His mother, Ann (nee Bowden), was his
father’s second wife. Samuel was born the youngest of their ten children, having seven surviving brothers
named John, William, James, Edward, George, Luke, Francis, and a sister named Ann. From his father’s first
marriage, he had four half-sisters; Elizabeth, Florella, Mary and Sarah. Young Samuel was very close to his
father, but his relationship with his mother was distant; he often had to provoke her to gain some attention. He
did not like boyish sports but loved to read; he had read books like ‘Robinson Crusoe’ and ‘The Arabian
Nights’ by the age of six. In 1781, when Samuel was eight years old, his father, with whom he shared a close
relationship, passed away, leaving him distraught. However, his brothers had started earning by then and
George now took up his charge, becoming his “father, brother and everything”. In 1782, Samuel entered
Christ’s Hospital, an independent day and boarding school in Horsham, meant for the children of poor gentry.
Here he became friends with future essayist Charles Lamb and squib writer Charles Valentine Le Grice.
Another of his close friends during this period was Tom Evans. During his school years, he hardly ever went
home, experiencing acute loneliness, especially during holidays when most of his friends were away. The
situation became better when George and Luke moved to London. Slowly, he became close to Luke, but once
again felt lonely when the latter returned to Devon. While in school, he often suffered from a mild feverish
condition, forcing him to spend his time at the sanatorium where he occupied himself with reading classics.
Soon, he started writing poetry, with ‘Easter Holidays’ and ‘Dura Navis’, both of which was written in 1787,
being his earliest known poems. In 1788, he visited Tom Evans’ home in London, experiencing motherly love
from Mrs. Evans, writing ‘To Disappointment’ in 1792, where he put her in his mother’s place. He also
became infatuated with Tom’s elder sister, Mary, for five years. He loved her “almost to madness,” but never
proposed to her. In September 1791, Coleridge entered Jesus College, Cambridge, on a yearly scholarship of
seventy pounds. In addition, as the son of a deceased clergyman, he also received the Rustat Scholarship of
thirty pounds. But he spent a large part of it on drugs and prostitutes, incurring large amounts of debt. Initially,
wishing to follow in his father’s footsteps, he aimed for a career at the Church of England. But very soon, he
was introduced to radical ideas in theology and politics, becoming a supporter of William Frend, a fellow at
the college. In 1792, while continuing to write poems while attending classes in mathematics and classics, he
received the Browne Gold Medal for a poem he wrote on the slave trade. But in December 1793, oppressed by
a large debt, he joined the 15th (The King’s) Regiment of (Light) Dragoons, a mounted infantry. Although he
called himself “Silas Tomkyn Comberbache” to hide his true identity, his brothers soon came to know of it
and arranged to have him discharged and readmitted to Jesus College. Soon after that, in June 1794, while
traveling to Wales, he met a student named Robert Southey, striking an instant friendship with him. In
December 1794, he left Jesus College without a degree. The year 1795 was spent in planning to create
‘pantisocracy’ in the New World with Southey, a project that never saw the light of the day. Also in
September 1795, he befriended William Wordsworth. Career As Poet. In 1796, Coleridge launched ‘The
Watchman’, a liberal political journal he planned to print every eight days. The first issue was published in
March 1796 and the last one in May. Also in 1796, he published his first collection of poems, ‘Poems on
Various Subjects’. In 1797, Coleridge moved to Somerset, hiring a cottage in Nether Stowey. Here he had a
happy time, being surrounded by many friends, including Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy, writing many of
his famous poems. This period was highly productive for him. In 1797, on being left alone after an accident
and sitting under a lime tree, he wrote ‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’. Also in the same year, he started
writing his longest poem, 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and ‘Kubla Khan; or, A Vision in a Dream: A
Fragment’. Sometime now, he set out on a new venture with Wordsworth, trying to do away with the old style
of composing poetry, which they considered to be prudish. Writing verses in everyday language, they jointly
published 'Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems' in 1798, marking the beginning of the Romantic
Movement. In 1798, he was offered a life annuity of £150 by his friend Josiah Wedgwood II on the condition
that he give up the ministerial career that he was trying to establish and instead concentrate on writing.
Coleridge happily accepted it, leaving for Germany with Wordsworth in autumn. Remaining in Germany until
1799, Coleridge studied philosophy at Göttingen University and mastered the German language. On their
return to England, they spent some time in Thomas Hutchinson's farm near Darlington, writing his ballad-
poem ‘Love’. In 1800, Coleridge settled down at Keswick while Wordsworth moved to Grasmere, both in
Lake District. Sometime now, he lived as Wordsworth’s houseguest for eighteen months, creating tension in
the household with his nightmares and increasing opium addiction. In early 1800, Coleridge began to suffer
from ill health. In addition, he also went through a period of marital problems, increased opium dependency,
regular nightmares and tension. As a result, he could not write much though he produced ‘Dejection: An Ode’
in 1802. Last Years. In 1814, Coleridge moved to Calne in Wiltshire, remaining there until 1816. During this
period, he started his work on ‘Biographia Literaria’ and also accepted a commission to translate ‘Faust,’ a
tragic play by Goethe. However, he is believed to have abandoned the later work after six weeks. By April
1816, his drug addiction became worse and he started feeling depressed. He now shifted to Highgate, at that
time a suburb north of London and moved in with his physician, Dr. James Gillman, remaining there until his
death in 1834. Under Gillman’s treatment, Coleridge was able to control his drug addiction, finishing
‘Biographia Literaria’ in 1817. ‘Lay Sermons’ (1816), ‘Sibylline Leaves’ (1817), ‘Hush’ (1820), ‘Aids to
Reflection’ (1825) and ‘On the Constitution of the Church and State’ (1830) are some other notable works of
this period. Family & Personal Life. In 1795, possibly persuaded by Southey, who had by then become
engaged to Edith Fricker, Coleridge married her sister Sara Fricker. Never loving her, he married her simply
because marriage was an integral part of the commune they planned to set up in America. The couple
separated in 1808. The couple had four children: three sons named Hartley, Derwent, Berkeley, and a
daughter named Sara. Among them, Hartley grew up to be a distinguished poet, biographer, essayist, and a
teacher, while Derwent made his name as a scholar and author. Sara became an author and translator. As
Coleridge was away most of the time, having little communication with his wife, Southey took charge of the
family, acting as the head of the family. The children also had close relationships with Wordsworth, and Greta
Hall, where Wordsworth lived, was Sara’s home until her marriage. Coleridge first became used to laudanum,
a tincture form of opium, when he was a student at Jesus College, an addiction that remained with him
throughout his life, making him entirely dependent on it. Later in life, as his dependence on the drug
increased, his creativity began to decrease.

13. Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe ( born Daniel Foe; c. 1660 – 24 April 1731) was an English writer, trader, journalist,
pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed
to be second only to the Bible in its number of translations. He has been seen as one of the earliest proponents
of the English novel, and helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Aphra Behn and Samuel
Richardson.Defoe wrote many political tracts, was often in trouble with the authorities, and spent a period in
prison. Intellectuals and political leaders paid attention to his fresh ideas and sometimes consulted him. Defoe
was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than three hundred works—books, pamphlets, and journals
— on diverse topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He was
also a pioneer of business journalism and economic journalism. Daniel Foe (his original name) was probably
born in Fore Street in the parish of St Giles Cripplegate, London. Defoe later added the aristocratic-sounding
"De" to his name, and on occasion made the false claim of descent from the family of De Beau Faux.[8] "De"
is also a common prefix in Flemish surnames.[9] His birthdate and birthplace are uncertain, and sources offer
dates from 1659 to 1662, with the summer or early autumn of 1660 considered the most likely. His father,
James Foe, was a prosperous tallow chandler of Flemish descent, and a member of the Worshipful Company
of Butchers. In Defoe's early childhood, he experienced some of the most unusual occurrences in English
history: in 1665, 70,000 were killed by the Great Plague of London, and the next year, the Great Fire of
London left only Defoe's and two other houses standing in his neighbourhood In 1667, when he was probably
about seven, a Dutch fleet sailed up the Medway via the River Thames and attacked the town of Chatham in
the raid on the Medway. His mother, Alice, had died by the time he was about ten. Defoe was educated at the
Rev. James Fisher's boarding school in Pixham Lane in Dorking, Surrey. His parents were Presbyterian
dissenters, and around the age of 14, he was sent to Charles Morton's dissenting academy at Newington
Green, then a village just north of London, where he is believed to have attended the Dissenting church there.
He lived on Church Street, Stoke Newington, at what is now nos. During this period, the English government
persecuted those who chose to worship outside the Church of England. As many as 545 titles have been
ascribed to Defoe, ranging from satirical poems, political and religious pamphlets, and volumes. Novels: The
Consolidator, or Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon: Translated from the Lunar
Language (1705); Robinson Crusoe (1719) – originally published in two volumes; Captain Singleton (1720);
Memoirs of a Cavalier (1720); A Journal of the Plague Year (1722); Colonel Jack (1722); Moll Flanders
(1722).

14. Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born near Hodgenville, Kentucky on February 12, 1809. His family moved to Indiana
when he was seven and he grew up on the edge of the frontier. He had very little formal education, but read
voraciously when not working on his father’s farm. A childhood friend later recalled Lincoln's "manic"
intellect, and the sight of him red-eyed and tousle-haired as he pored over books late into the night. In 1828,
at the age of nineteen, he accompanied a produce-laden flatboat down the Mississippi River to New Orleans,
Louisiana—his first visit to a large city--and then walked back home. Two years later, trying to avoid health
and finance troubles, Lincoln's father moved the family to Illinois. After moving away from home, Lincoln
co-owned a general store for several years before selling his stake and enlisting as a militia captain defending
Illinois in the Black Hawk War of 1832. As a captain, he developed a reputation for pragmatism and
integrity. After the war, he studied law and campaigned for a seat on the Illinois State Legislature. Although
not elected in his first attempt, Lincoln persevered and won the position in 1834, serving as a Whig. Abraham
Lincoln met Mary Todd in Springfield, Illinois where he was practicing as a lawyer. They were married in
1842 over her family’s objections and had four sons. Only one lived to adulthood. The deep melancholy that
pervaded the Lincoln family, with occasional detours into outright madness, is in some ways sourced in their
close relationship with death. Lincoln, a self-described "prairie lawyer," focused on his all-embracing law
practice in the early 1850s after one term in Congress from 1847 to 1849. He joined the new Republican party
—and the ongoing argument over sectionalism—in 1856. A series of heated debates in 1858 with Stephen A.
Douglas, the sponsor of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, over slavery and its place in the United States forged
Lincoln into a prominent figure in national politics. Lincoln’s anti-slavery platform made him extremely
unpopular with Southerners and his nomination for President in 1860 enraged them. On November 6, 1860,
Lincoln won the presidential election without the support of a single Southern state. After started his career
on it. The 16th president of the United States, Abraham Lincoln worked as a lawyer and served in the Illinois
General Assembly for eight years and in the House of Representatives for a year before winning the
Republican nomination for president in 1860. As president during the Civil War, Lincoln issued the
Emancipation Proclamation and delivered the Gettysburg Address in 1863. He was re-elected as president in
1864 and served until his assassination in 1865, a few weeks after the Civil War ended. Lincoln wrote poetry
as a teenager, mostly satirical verse and short stanzas on the flyleaves of books. He worked on a longer poem
in quatrains in 1846, “My Childhood Home I See Again,” which he sent in a letter to Andrew Johnston, a
fellow lawyer in Illinois. In 1863, Lincoln wrote lines of verse on the occasion of Lee’s invasion of the North.
In a 2004 article for the Abraham Lincoln Association’s newsletter, Richard Lawrence Miller attributed an
unsigned poem titled “The Suicide’s Soliloquy” to Lincoln. The poem, a melodramatic persona poem,
originally appeared in the Sangamo Journal, a Springfield, Illinois, newspaper, in 1838. Essays by Abraham
Lincoln: The Gettysburg Address; Poems by Abraham Lincoln; Abraham Lincoln; Abraham Lincoln Is
My Name; Memory; My Childhood Home I See Again; The Bear Hunt; The Suicide’s Soliloquy; To
Linnie; To Rosa; Verse On Lee’s Invasion Of The North.

15. Jack London

Jack London, pseudonym of John Griffith Chaney, (born January 12, 1876, San Francisco, California, U.S.—
died November 22, 1916, Glen Ellen, California), American novelist and short-story writer whose best-known
works—among them The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906)—depict elemental struggles for
survival. During the 20th century he was one of the most extensively translated of American authors. Deserted
by his father, a roving astrologer, he was raised in Oakland, California, by his spiritualist mother and his
stepfather, whose surname, London, he took. At age 14 he quit school to escape poverty and gain adventure.
He explored San Francisco Bay in his sloop, alternately stealing oysters or working for the government fish
patrol. He went to Japan as a sailor and saw much of the United States as a hobo riding freight trains and as a
member of Charles T. Kelly’s industrial army (one of the many protest armies of the unemployed, like
Coxey’s Army, that was born of the financial panic of 1893). London saw depression conditions, was jailed
for vagrancy, and in 1894 became a militant socialist. London educated himself at public libraries with the
writings of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche, usually in popularized forms. At 19 he
crammed a four-year high school course into one year and entered the University of California, Berkeley, but
after a year he quit school to seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush. Returning the next year, still poor and
unable to find work, he decided to earn a living as a writer. London studied magazines and then set himself a
daily schedule of producing sonnets, ballads, jokes, anecdotes, adventure stories, or horror stories, steadily
increasing his output. The optimism and energy with which he attacked his task are best conveyed in his
autobiographical novel Martin Eden (1909). Within two years, stories of his Alaskan adventures began to win
acceptance for their fresh subject matter and virile force. His first book, The Son of the Wolf: Tales of the Far
North (1900), a collection of short stories that he had previously published in magazines, gained a wide
audience. Jack London: The Sea-Wolf. During the remainder of his life, London wrote and published
steadily, completing some 50 books of fiction and nonfiction in 17 years. Although he became the highest-
paid writer in the United States at that time, his earnings never matched his expenditures, and he was never
freed of the urgency of writing for money. He sailed a ketch to the South Pacific, telling of his adventures in
The Cruise of the Snark (1911). In 1910 he settled on a ranch near Glen Ellen, California, where he built his
grandiose Wolf House. He maintained his socialist beliefs almost to the end of his life. Jack London’s output,
typically hastily written, is of uneven literary quality, though his highly romanticized stories of adventure can
be compulsively readable. His Alaskan novels The Call of the Wild (1903), White Fang (1906), and Burning
Daylight (1910), in which he dramatized in turn atavism, adaptability, and the appeal of the wilderness, are
outstanding. His short story “To Build a Fire” (1908), set in the Klondike, is a masterly depiction of
humankind’s inability to overcome nature; it was reprinted in 1910 in the short-story collection Lost Face, one
of many such volumes that London published. In addition to Martin Eden, he wrote two other
autobiographical novels of considerable interest: The Road (1907) and John Barleycorn (1913). Other
important novels are The Sea-Wolf (1904), which features a Nietzschean superman hero, Humphrey Van
Weyden, who battles the vicious Wolf Larsen; and The Iron Heel (1908), a fantasy of the future that is a
terrifying anticipation of fascism. London’s reputation declined in the United States in the 1920s, when a new
generation of writers made the pre-World War I writers seem lacking in sophistication. But his popularity
remained high throughout the world after World War II, especially in Russia, where a commemorative edition
of his works published in 1956 was reported to have been sold out in five hours. A three-volume set of his
letters, edited by Earle Labor et al., was published in 1988.

16. Alfred
Old English Period (450 – 1066 )also known as the Anglo-Saxon period, the old English period was
marked by the influx of the Saxons and the Angles tribes invading Celtic England. The invasion
extended to the conquest of England in 1066 which was led by William the Conqueror. The conquest
was given birth by the Norman French under the leadership of William. The Anglo Saxons were then
converted to Christianity in the 7th century. It was only after this transition that the Anglo Saxons
could shift to the development of written literature apart from their literature being oral in nature.
Christian writers dealt with the pagan past with dexterity. Alfred the Great, another patron of literature
translated Latin prose into old English, and also initiated important documentary translations executed by him
and practically completed by other writers employed by the warrior-cum-writer. King Alfred (c. 849) is justly
claimed to be the "father of English prose". When he came to the throne of Wessex in 871, the English
learning suffered a great deal due to the repeated raids of the Danes. Monasteries had been destroyed, books
had been burnt, and clerks had forgotten their Latin. The monks had written in Latin, which was unintelligible
to the masses. King Alfred is the only king in English history to be deemed worthy of the title of ’the Great’.
There are reasons for that and these reasons lie not only in his campaigns against the Vikings and the
establishing of the navy but also much deeper, in the reforms Alfred passed in his lands that enabled the
populace to educate themselves. The roots of his actions are set in his visits to Rome (in 853 and 855) where
he learned much and saw even more but aforemost, the concept of a centralized state, and that was his wish to
create in England also. Alfred’s first literary endeavour was the gathering and writing of the legal code. He
first set up gathering the ancient Anglo-Saxon laws of Mercia, Wessex and Kent and from those he wrote his
own code that became the law in the lands that he ruled. He also wrote a lenghty prologue to the code and that
was a show of power and wisdom. This was the beginning of the first phase of educating his people. He next
continued with translating various Latin books to English for the commoners to be able to learn from them –
he selected specifically such books that were useful by nature. Amongst his translations are Gregory the
Great's ’Pastoral Care’, Boethius's ’Consolation of Philosophy’, St. Augustine's ’Soliloquies’, and the first
fifty psalms of the Psalter. Also, at the direction of Alfred were translated Gregory's ’Dialogues’, Orosius's
’Histories against the Pagans’, and Bede's ’Ecclesiastical History’. The actual greatness of Alfred also shows
in his decisions – he gathered to his court a number of intellectuals and was ready to help them in their work.
Secondly, he also established schools by which the children of his courtiers and nobles, plus a number of
commoner children, were educated. This opened up the way for more people who could write and read and
therefore were egligible for the ruling of the land. Alfred also hoped to have an administration who could use
the code as a reference and would not need to ask for help from professional writers. This enabled the
governmental system to work more efficiently. His biographer, Asser, has written that Alfred’s sole purpose
was to make it possible for the youth, born of free men, to learn until such time when they can read English.
This, and his other actions, for example the concept of kingship he created and the common English law he
imposed, may be seen as his steps towards creating an ’English’ culture.

17. Ben Jonson

 Ben Jonson.The poet, essayist, and playwright Ben Jonson was born on June 11, 1572 in London, England.
His father, a minister, died shortly before his birth and his mother remarried a bricklayer. Jonson was raised in
Westminster and attended St. Martin’s parish school and Westminster School, where he came under the
influence of the classical scholar William Camden. He left the Westminster school in 1589, worked briefly in
his stepfather’s trade as a bricklayer, then served in the military at Flanders, before working as an actor and
playwright for Philip Henslowe’s theater company. In 1594, Jonson married Anne Lewis and began to work
as an actor and playwright. Jonson and Lewis had at least two children, but little else is known of their
marriage. In 1598, Jonson wrote what is considered his first great play, Every Man in His Humor. In a 1616
production, William Shakespeare acted in one of the lead roles. Shortly after the play opened, Jonson killed
Gabriel Spencer in a duel and was tried for murder. He was released by pleading “benefit of clergy” (i.e., by
proving he could read and write in Latin, he was allowed to face a more lenient court). He spent only a few
weeks in prison, but shortly after his release he was again arrested for failing to pay an actor. Under King
James I, Jonson received royal favor and patronage. Over the next fifteen years many of his most famous
satirical plays, including Volpone (1606) and The Alchemist (1610), were produced for the London stage. In
1616, he was granted a substantial pension of 100 marks a year, and is often identified as England’s first Poet
Laureate.His circle of admirers and friends, who called themselves the “Tribe of Ben," met regularly at the
Mermaid Tavern and later at the Devil’s Head. Among his followers were nobles such as the Duke and
Duchess of Newcastle as well as writers including Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, Sir John Suckling,
James Howell, and Thomas Carew. Jonson was also friends with many of the writers of his day, and many of
his most well-known poems include tributes to friends such as Shakespeare, John Donne, and Francis Bacon.
Ben Jonson died in Westminster on August 8, 1637. A tremendous crowd of mourners attended his burial at
Westminster Abbey. He is regarded as one of the major dramatists and poets of the seventeenth century.

18. John Ford

John Ford (1586 – c. 1639) was an English playwright and poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras born in
Ilsington in Devon, England. John Ford was baptised 17 April 1586 at Ilsington Church, Devon, and was the
second son of Thomas Ford (1556–1610) of Bagtor in the parish of Ilsington, by his wife Elizabeth Popham
(died 1629) of the Popham family of Huntworth in Somerset. Her monument exists in Ilsington Church.
Thomas Ford's grandfather was John Ford (died 1538) of Ashburton (the son and heir of William Ford of
Chagford,) who purchased the estate of Bagtor in the parish of Ilsington, which his male heirs successively
made their seat. The Elizabethan mansion of the Fords survives today at Bagtor as the service wing of a later
house appended in about 1700. Life and work.Ford left home to study in London, although more specific
details are unclear — a sixteen-year-old John Ford of Devon was admitted to Exeter College, Oxford on 26
March 1601, but this was when the dramatist had not yet reached his sixteenth birthday. He joined an
institution that was a prestigious law school but also a centre of literary and dramatic activity — the Middle
Temple. A prominent junior member in 1601 was the playwright John Marston. (It is unknown whether Ford
ever actually studied law while a resident of the Middle Temple, or whether he was strictly a gentleman
boarder, which was a common arrangement at the time). It was not until 1606 that Ford wrote his first works
for publication. In the spring of that year he was expelled from Middle Temple, due to his financial problems,
and Fame's Memorial and Honour Triumphant soon followed. Both works are clear bids for patronage: Fame's
Memorial is an elegy of 1169 lines on the recently deceased Charles Blount, 1st Earl of Devonshire, while
Honour Triumphant is a prose pamphlet, a verbal fantasia written in connection with the jousts planned for the
summer 1606 visit of King Christian IV of Denmark. It is unknown whether either of these brought any
financial remuneration to Ford; yet by June 1608 he had enough money to be readmitted to the Middle
Temple. Prior to the start of his career as a playwright, Ford wrote other non-dramatic literary works—the
long religious poem Christ's Bloody Sweat (1613), and two prose essays published as pamphlets, The Golden
Mean (1613) and A Line of Life (1620). After 1620 he began active dramatic writing, first as a collaborator
with more experienced playwrights — primarily Thomas Dekker, but also John Webster and William Rowley
— and by the later 1620s as a solo artist. Ford is best known for the tragedy 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (1633), a
family drama with a plot line of incest. The play's title has often been changed in new productions, sometimes
being referred to as simply Giovanni and Annabella — the play's leading, incestuous brother-andsister
characters; in a nineteenth-century work it is coyly called The Brother and Sister. Shocking as the play is, it is
still widely regarded as a classic piece of English drama. It has been adapted to film at least twice: My Sister,
My Love (Sweden, 1966) and 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (Belgium, 1978). He was a major playwright during the
reign of Charles I. His plays deal with conflicts between individual passion and conscience and the laws and
morals of society at large; Ford had a strong interest in abnormal psychology that is expressed through his
dramas. His plays often show the influence of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. While virtually
nothing is known of Ford's personal life, one reference suggests that Ford's interest in melancholia may have
been more than merely intellectual.

19. Cyril Tourneur

Cyril Tourneur (died 28 February 1626) was an English soldier, diplomat and dramatist who wrote The
Atheist's Tragedy (published 1611); another (and better-known) play, The Revenger's Tragedy (1607),
formerly believed to be by him, is now more generally attributed to Thomas Middleton. Cyril Tourneur was
the son, or possibly the grandson, of Edward Tournor of Canons, Great Parndon (Essex), and his second wife,
Frances Baker. He served in his youth Sir Francis Vere and Sir Edward Cecil. His literary activities seem to be
concentrated in the period 1600-1613. In 1613 and 1614 he was employed in military and diplomatic service
in the Low Countries. In 1625 he was appointed to be secretary to the council of war for the Cádiz Expedition.
This appointment was cancelled, but Tourneur sailed in Cecil's company to Cádiz. On the return voyage from
the disastrous expedition, he was put ashore at Kinsale with other sick men and died in Ireland on 28 February
1626. Writings: A difficult allegorical poem called The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600) is Tourneur's
earliest extant work; an elegy on the death of Prince Henry, son of James I of England, is the latest (1613).
Tourneur's other non-dramatic works include a prose pamphlet, Laugh and Lie Down (1605), some
contributions to Sir Thomas Overbury's Book of Characters and an epicede on Sir Francis Vere. This poem
conveys the poet's ideal conception of a perfect knight or happy warrior. Tourneur's primary dramatic work is
The Atheist's Tragedy, or The Honest Man's Revenge which was published in 1611. A case has been made by
Johan Gerritsen that Tourneur is the author of the first act of The Honest Man's Fortune (1613), a play from
the Beaumont & Fletcher canon usually attributed to John Fletcher, Philip Massinger and Nathan Field.[ In
addition there is a lost play, The Nobleman, and the lost Arraignment of London written with Robert Daborne.
The Revenger's Tragedy (1607), which was once attributed to Tourneur, has now been securely reassigned to
Thomas Middleton. Tourneur's current reputation however rests on The Atheist's Tragedy. It confidently
reproduces themes and conventions which are characteristic of medieval morality plays and of Elizabethan
memento mori emblems. More interestingly perhaps, it uses these conventions in the context of Calvin's
Protestant theology. This and Tourneur's other uncontested works, show him to be "a traditional Christian
moralist, with a consistent didactic bent." As regards The Revenger's Tragedy, formerly attributed to
Tourneur, "there now appears to be an overwhelming case for the authorship of Thomas Middleton". The play
was published anonymously, and Tourneur was only described as the author in a 1650s booklist. External and
internal evidence strongly suggests that the true author was the more distinguished Middleton. In the
Stationers' Register of 1607, The Revenger's Tragedy and A Trick to Catch the Old One can be found in the
same double entry. In every other double entry of this register, the plays prove to be by the same author, and
we are certain that A Trick was written by Middleton. It is also known from contemporary records that
Middleton composed another play called The Viper and her Brood, of which nothing survives. Some scholars
think that Viper and The Revenger's Tragedy are in fact one and the same play. Modern stagings of The
Atheist's Tragedy remain few and far between. Works of Tourneur: • The Atheists Tragedie; or, The Honest
Mans Revenge (1611), • A Funeral Poeme Upon the Death of the Most Worthie and True Soldier, Sir Francis
Vere, Knight.. (1609), • A Griefe on the Death of Prince Henrie, Expressed in a Broken Elegie ..., printed with
two other poems by John Webster and Thomas Haywood as Three Elegies on the most lamented Death of
Prince Henry (1613), • The Transformed Metamorphosis (1600), an obscure satire, • The Nobleman, a lost
play entered on the Stationers Register (Feb. 15, 1612) as "A Tragecomedye called The Nobleman written by
Cyrill Tourneur", the MS. of which was destroyed by John Warburton's cook, • Arraignment of London
(1613), stated in a letter of that date from Robert Daborne to Philip Henslowe that Daborne had commissioned
Cyril Tourneur to write one act of this play

20. Thomas Midlleton

Thomas Middleton (1580 – July 1627) was an English Jacobean playwright and poet. Middleton stands with
John Fletcher and Ben Jonson among the most successful and prolific playwrights who wrote their best plays
during the Jacobean period. He was one of the few Renaissance dramatists to achieve equal success in comedy
and tragedy. Also a prolific writer of masques and pageants, he remains one of the most notable and
distinctive of Jacobean dramatists. Life. Middleton was born in London and baptised on 18 April 1580. He
was the son of a bricklayer who had raised himself to the status of a gentleman and who, interestingly, owned
property adjoining the Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. Middleton was just five when his father died and his
mother's subsequent remarriage dissolved into a 15-year battle over the inheritance of Thomas and his
younger sister – an experience which must have informed and perhaps incited his repeated satire at the
expense of the legal profession. In the early 17th century, Middleton made a living writing topical pamphlets,
including one –Penniless Parliament of Threadbare Poets – that was reprinted several times and became the
subject of a parliamentary inquiry. At the same time, records in the diary of Philip Henslowe show that
Middleton was writing for the Admiral's Men. Unlike Shakespeare, Middleton remained a free agent, able to
write for whichever company hired him. His early dramatic career was marked by controversy. His friendship
with Thomas Dekker brought him into conflict with Ben Jonson and George Chapman in the War of the
Theatres. The grudge against Jonson continued as late as 1626, when Jonson's play The Staple of News
indulges in a slur on Middleton's great success, A Game at Chess. It has been argued that Middleton's Inner
Temple Masque (1619) sneers at Jonson (then absent in Scotland) as a "silenced bricklayer." In the 1610s,
Middleton began a fruitful collaboration with the actor William Rowley, producing Wit at Several Weapons
and A Fair Quarrel. Working alone he produced his comic masterpiece, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, in 1613.
His own plays from this decade reveal a somewhat mellowed temper. Certainly there is no comedy among
them with the satirical depth of Michaelmas Term and no tragedy as bloodthirsty as The Revenger's Tragedy.
Middleton was, at the same time, increasingly involved with civic pageants. This last connection was made
official in 1620, when he was appointed chronologer of the City of London. He held this post until his death in
1627, when it passed to Jonson. Works. Middleton wrote in many genres, including tragedy, history and city
comedy. His bestknown plays are the tragedies The Changeling (written with William Rowley) and Women
Beware Women, and the cynically satirical city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Earlier editions of The
Revenger's Tragedy attributed the play to Cyril Tourneur, or refused to arbitrate between Middleton and
Tourneur. Since the statistical studies by David Lake and MacDonald P. Jackson, however, Middleton's
authorship has not been seriously contested, and no further scholar has defended the Tourneur attribution. The
Oxford Middleton and its companion piece, Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture, offer
extensive evidence both for Middleton's authorship of The Revenger's Tragedy, for his collaboration with
Shakespeare on Timon of Athens, and for his adaptation and revision of Shakespeare's Macbeth and Measure
for Measure. It has also been argued that Middleton collaborated with Shakespeare on All's Well That Ends
Well. Middleton's plays are marked by their cynicism about the human race, which is often very funny. True
heroes are a rarity: almost every character is selfish, greedy, and self-absorbed. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside
offers a panoramic view of a London populated entirely by sinners, in which no social rank goes unsatirised.
In the tragedies Women Beware Women and The Revenger's Tragedy, amoral Italian courtiers endlessly plot
against each other, resulting in a climactic bloodbath. When Middleton does portray good people, the
characters have small roles and are presented as flawless. Due to a theological pamphlet attributed to him,
Middleton is thought by some to have been a strong believer in Calvinism.

21. George Chapman

George Chapman, (born 1559?, Hitchin, Hertfordshire, Eng.—died May 12, 1634, London), English poet and
dramatist, whose translation of Homer long remained the standard English version. Chapman attended the
University of Oxford but took no degree. By 1585 he was working in London for the wealthy commoner Sir
Ralph Sadler and probably traveled to the Low Countries at this time. His first work was The Shadow of
Night . . . Two Poeticall Hymnes (1593), followed in 1595 by Ovids Banquet of Sence. Both philosophize on
the value of an ordered life. His poem in praise of Sir Walter Raleigh, De Guiana, Carmen Epicum (“An
Epic Poem about Guiana,” 1596), is typical of his preoccupation with the virtues of the warrior-hero, the
character that dominates most of his plays. The first books of his translation of the Iliad appeared in 1598. It
was completed in 1611, and his version of the Odyssey appeared in 1616. Chapman’s Homer contains
passages of great power and beauty and inspired the sonnet of John Keats “On First Looking into Chapman’s
Homer” (1815). Chapman’s conclusion to Christopher Marlowe’s unfinished poem Hero and Leander (1598)
emphasized the necessity for control and wisdom. Euthymiae Raptus; or the Teares of Peace (1609),
Chapman’s major poem, is a dialogue between the poet and the Lady Peace, who is mourning over the
chaoscaused by man’s valuing worldly objects above integrity and wisdom. Chapman was imprisoned with
Ben Jonson and John Marston in 1605 for writing Eastward Ho, a play that James I, the king of Great Britain,
found offensive to his fellow Scots. Of Chapman’s dramatic works, about a dozen plays survive, chief of
which are his tragedies: Bussy d’Ambois (1607), The Conspiracie, and Tragedie of Charles Duke of Byron . . .
(1608), and The Widdowes Teares (1612).

22. Sir Thomas More

Sir Thomas More (/ˈmɔːr/; 7 February 1478 – 6 July 1535), venerated by Roman Catholics as Saint Thomas
More,[1][2] was an English lawyer, social philosopher, author, statesman and noted Renaissance humanist. He
was also a councillor to Henry VIII, and Lord High Chancellor of England from October 1529 to 16 May
1532. He also wrote Utopia, published in 1516, about the political system of an imaginary ideal island nation.
Utopia More's best known and most controversial work, Utopia is a novel written in Latin. More completed
and theologian Erasmus published the book in Leuven in 1516, but it was only translated into English and
published in his native land in 1551 (16 years after his execution), and the 1684 translation became the most
commonly cited. More (also a character in the book) and the narrator/traveller, Raphael Hythlodaeus (whose
name alludes both to the healer archangel Raphael, and 'speaker of nonsense', the surname's Greek meaning),
discuss modern ills in Antwerp, as well as describe the political arrangements of the imaginary island country
of Utopia (a Greek pun on 'ou-topos' [no place] and 'eu-topos' [good place]) among themselves as well as to
Pieter Gillis and Hieronymus van Busleyden. Utopia's original edition included a symmetrical "Utopian
alphabet" omitted by later editions, but which may have been an early attempt at cryptography or precursor of
shorthand. Utopia contrasts the contentious social life of European states with the perfectly orderly,
reasonable social arrangements of Utopia and its environs (Tallstoria, Nolandia, and Aircastle). In Utopia,
there are no lawyers because of the laws' simplicity and because social gatherings are in public view
(encouraging participants to behave well), communal ownership supplants private property, men and women
are educated alike, and there is almost complete religious toleration (except for atheists, who are allowed but
despised). More may have used monastic communalism (rather than the biblical communalism in the Acts of
the Apostles) as his model, although other concepts such as legalizing euthanasia remain far outside Church
doctrine. Hythlodaeus asserts that a man who refuses to believe in a god or an afterlife could never be trusted,
because he would not acknowledge any authority or principle outside himself. Some take the novel's principal
message to be the social need for order and discipline rather than liberty. Ironically, Hythlodaeus, who
believes philosophers should not get involved in politics, addresses More's ultimate conflict between his
humanistic beliefs and courtly duties as the King's servant, pointing out that one day those morals will come
into conflict with the political reality. Utopia gave rise to a literary genre, Utopian and dystopian fiction,
which features ideal societies or perfect cities, or their opposite. Early works influenced by Utopia included
New Atlantis by Francis Bacon, Erewhon by Samuel Butler, and Candide by Voltaire. Although Utopianism
combined classical concepts of perfect societies (Plato and Aristotle) with Roman rhetorical finesse (cf.
Cicero, Quintilian, epideictic oratory), the Renaissance genre continued into the Age of Enlightenment and
survives in modern science fiction.

23. Sir Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban, PC KC (/ˈbeɪkən/; 22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English
philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist, orator, and author. He served both as Attorney General and as Lord
Chancellor of England. After his death, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as
philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution. Bacon has
been called the father of empiricism. His works argued for the possibility of scientific knowledge based only
upon inductive reasoning and careful observation of events in nature. Most importantly, he argued this could
be achieved by use of a sceptical and methodical approach whereby scientists aim to avoid misleading
themselves. While his own practical ideas about such a method, the Baconian method, did not have a long
lasting influence, the general idea of the importance and possibility of a sceptical methodology makes Bacon
the father of scientific method. This marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science,
the practical details of which are still central in debates about science and methodology today. Bacon was
generally neglected at court by Queen Elizabeth, but after the accession of King James I in 1603, Bacon was
knighted. He was later created Baron Verulam in 1618 and Viscount St. Alban in 1621.Because he had no
heirs, both titles became extinct upon his death in 1626, at 65 years of age. Bacon died of pneumonia, with
one account by John Aubrey stating that he had contracted the condition while studying the effects of freezing
on the preservation of meat.Philosophy and works Francis Bacon's philosophy is displayed in the vast and
varied writings he left, which might be divided into three great branches:• Scientific works – in which his
ideas for an universal reform of knowledge into scientific methodology and the improvement of mankind's
state using the Scientific method are presented. • Religious and literary works – in which he presents his moral
philosophy and theological meditations. • Juridical works – in which his reforms in English Law are proposed.

24. Edmund Spenser

Edmund Spenser (/ˈspɛnsər/; 1552/1553 – 13 January 1599) was an English poet best known for The Faerie
Queene, an epic poem and fantastical allegory celebrating the Tudor dynasty and Elizabeth I. He is recognized
as one of the premier craftsmen of nascent Modern English verse, and is often considered one of the greatest
poets in the English language. He was deeply affected by Irish faerie mythology, which he knew from his
home at Kilcolman and possibly from his Irish wife Elizabeth Boyle. His genocidal tracts against Gaelic
culture were war propaganda. His house (ruins remain) was burned to the ground during the war, causing him
to flee Ireland. The Shepherd's Calendar.Title Page of a 1617 Edition of The Shepherd's Calendar printed by
Matthew Lownes, often bound with the complete works printed in 1611 or 1617.The Shepherd's Calendar is
Edmund Spenser's first major work, which appeared in 1579. It emulates Virgil's Eclogues of the first century
BCE and the Eclogues of Mantuan by Baptista Mantuanus, a late medieval, early renaissance poet. An
eclogue is a short pastoral poem that is in the form of a dialogue or soliloquy. Although all the months
together form an entire year, each month stands alone as a separate poem. Editions of the late 16th and early
17th centuries include woodcuts for each month/poem, and thereby have a slight similarity to an emblem book
which combines a number of self-contained pictures and texts, usually a short vignette, saying, or allegory
with an accompanying illustration. The Faerie Queene.The epic poem The Faerie Queene frontispiece, printed
by William Ponsonby in 1590.Spenser's masterpiece is the epic poem The Faerie Queene. The first three
books of The Faerie Queene were published in 1590, and a second set of three books were published in 1596.
Spenser originally indicated that he intended the poem to consist of twelve books, so the version of the poem
we have today is incomplete. Despite this, it remains one of the longest poems in the English language. It is an
allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably intended) on several levels of allegory, including as
praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an
examination of several virtues. In Spenser's "A Letter of the Authors," he states that the entire epic poem is
"cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises," and that the aim behind The Faerie Queene was to "fashion a
gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline.”

25. John Donne

John Donne (/ˈdʌn/ DUN) (22 January 1573 – 31 March 1631) was an English poet and cleric in the Church
of England. He is considered the pre-eminent representative of the metaphysical poets. His works are noted
for their strong, sensual style and include sonnets, love poems, religious poems, Latin translations, epigrams,
elegies, songs, satires and sermons. His poetry is noted for its vibrancy of language and inventiveness of
metaphor, especially compared to that of his contemporaries. Donne's style is characterised by abrupt
openings and various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or
everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the
smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and
mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English society
and he met that knowledge with sharp criticism. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true
religion, something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He is particularly
famous for his mastery of metaphysical conceits. Writings. Donne's earliest poems showed a developed
knowledge of English society coupled with sharp criticism of its problems. His satires dealt with common
Elizabethan topics, such as corruption in the legal system, mediocre poets, and pompous courtiers. His images
of sickness, vomit, manure, and plague reflected his strongly satiric view of a world populated by all the fools
and knaves of England. His third satire, however, deals with the problem of true religion, a matter of great
importance to Donne. He argued that it was better to examine carefully one's religious convictions than
blindly to follow any established tradition, for none would be saved at the Final Judgment, by claiming "A
Harry, or a Martin taught [them] this." Towards the end of his life Donne wrote works that challenged death,
and the fear that it inspired in many men, on the grounds of his belief that those who die are sent to Heaven to
live eternally. One example of this challenge is his Holy Sonnet X, "Death Be Not Proud", from which come
the famous lines "Death, be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not
so." Even as he lay dying during Lent in 1631, he rose from his sickbed and delivered the Death's Duel
sermon, which was later described as his own funeral sermon. Death's Duel portrays life as a steady descent to
suffering and death, yet sees hope in salvation and immortality through an embrace of God, Christ and the
Resurrection.

26. John Dryden

John Dryden (/ˈdraɪdən/; 19 August [O.S. 9 August] 1631 – 12 May  [O.S. 1 May] 1700) was an English
poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate.[1][2]
He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be
known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious
John". Early life. Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire,
where his maternal grandfather was the rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to
Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–
1632), and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament.
He was a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy, Dryden lived in the nearby village of
Titchmarsh, where it is likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School
as a King's Scholar where his headmaster was Dr. Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe
disciplinarian.[4] Having been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very
different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden's
response to this was, he clearly respected the headmaster and would later send two of his sons to school at
Westminster. As a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained pupils in the
art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue. This is a skill which would
remain with Dryden and influence his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical
patterns. The Westminster curriculum included weekly translation assignments which developed Dryden's
capacity for assimilation. This was also to be exhibited in his later works. His years at Westminster were not
uneventful, and his first published poem, an elegy with a strong royalist feel on the death of his schoolmate
Henry, Lord Hastings from smallpox, alludes to the execution of King Charles I, which took place on 30
January 1649, very near the school where Dr. Busby had first prayed for the King and then locked in his
schoolboys to prevent their attending the spectacle. Later life and career. After the Restoration, as Dryden
quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day, he transferred his allegiances to
the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more
panegyrics: To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662) and To My Lord Chancellor
(1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a
living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public. These, and
his other nondramatic poems, are occasional—that is, they celebrate public events. Thus they are written for
the nation rather than the self, and the Poet Laureate (as he would later become) is obliged to write a certain
number of these per annum. In November 1662 Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society,
and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled
for non-payment of his dues. Dryden, by John Michael Wright, 1668. On 1 December 1663 Dryden married
the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady Elizabeth. Dryden's works occasionally contain outbursts
against the married state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate side of his
marriage. Lady Elizabeth bore three sons and outlived her husband. With the reopening of the theatres in 1660
after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was
not successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for
the King's Company in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was
his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la
Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love
(1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were
wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same
time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the
English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was a modern epic in
pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his
attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670). Dryden was the dominant
literary figure and influence of his age. He established the heroic couplet as a standard form of English poetry
by writing successful satires, religious pieces, fables, epigrams, compliments, prologues, and plays with it; he
also introduced the alexandrine and triplet into the form. In his poems, translations, and criticism, he
established a poetic diction appropriate to the heroic couplet—Auden referred to him as "the master of the
middle style"[24]—that was a model for his contemporaries and for much of the 18th century. The considerable
loss felt by the English literary community at his death was evident in the elegies written about him. [25]
Dryden's heroic couplet became the dominant poetic form of the 18th century. Alexander Pope was heavily
influenced by Dryden and often borrowed from him; other writers were equally influenced by Dryden and
Pope. Pope famously praised Dryden's versification in his imitation of Horace's Epistle II.i: "Dryden taught to
join / The varying pause, the full resounding line, / The long majestic march, and energy divine." Samuel
Johnson[26] summed up the general attitude with his remark that "the veneration with which his name is
pronounced by every cultivator of English literature, is paid to him as he refined the language, improved the
sentiments, and tuned the numbers of English poetry." His poems were very widely read, and are often
quoted, for instance, in Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Johnson's essays. Poetic style. What Dryden achieved
in his poetry was neither the emotional excitement of the early nineteenth-century romantics nor the
intellectual complexities of the metaphysicals. His subject matter was often factual, and he aimed at
expressing his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated manner. Although he uses formal structures such
as heroic couplets, he tried to recreate the natural rhythm of speech, and he knew that different subjects need
different kinds of verse. In his preface to Religio Laici he says that "the expressions of a poem designed purely
for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic... The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the
passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion.... A man is to
be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth."

27. Oliver Goldsmith

Goldsmith's birth date and year are not known with certainty. According to the Library of Congress authority
file, he told a biographer that he was born on 10 November 1728. The location of his birthplace is also
uncertain. He was born either in the townland of Pallas, near Ballymahon, County Longford, Ireland, where
his father was the Anglican curate of the parish of Forgney, or at the residence of his maternal grandparents, at
the Smith Hill House near Elphin in County Roscommon, where his grandfather Oliver Jones was a
clergyman and master of the Elphin diocesan school, and where Oliver studied. [1] When Goldsmith was two
years old, his father was appointed the rector of the parish of "Kilkenny West" in County Westmeath. The
family moved to the parsonage at Lissoy, between Athlone and Ballymahon, and continued to live there until
his father's death in 1747. In 1744, Goldsmith went up to Trinity College, Dublin. His tutor was Theaker
Wilder. Neglecting his studies in theology and law, he fell to the bottom of his class. In 1747, along with four
other undergraduates, he was expelled for a riot in which they attempted to storm the Marshalsea Prison.[2] He
was graduated in 1749 as a Bachelor of Arts, but without the discipline or distinction that might have gained
him entry to a profession in the church or the law. His education seemed to have given him mainly a taste for
fine clothes, playing cards, singing Irish airs, and playing the flute. He lived for a short time with his mother,
tried various professions without success, studied medicine desultorily at the University of Edinburgh from
1752 to 1755, and set out on a walking tour of Flanders, France, Switzerland, and Northern Italy, living by his
wits (busking with his flute). He settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an
apothecary's assistant and an usher of a school. Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling, Goldsmith
produced a massive output as a hack writer on Grub Street for the publishers of London, but his few
painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding member of
"The Club". There, through fellow Club member Edmund Burke, he made the acquaintance of Sir George
Savile, who would later arrange a job for him at Thornhill Grammar School. The combination of his literary
work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet "inspired idiot". During this period
he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity) to publish his 1758
translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe. In his 'Life', Washington Irving states that
Goldsmith was between 5'4" and 5'6" in height, not heavily built but quite muscular and with rather plain
features. In character he had a lively sense of fun, was totally guileless, and never happier than when in the
light-hearted company of children. The money that he sporadically earned was often frittered away or happily
given away to the next good cause that presented itself so that any financial security tended to be fleeting and
short-lived. Goldsmith's talents were unreservedly recognised by Samuel Johnson, whose patronage –
somewhat resented by Boswell – aided his eventual recognition in the literary world and the world of drama.
Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and disorganised
personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his ship. At some point
around this time he worked at Thornhill Grammar School, later basing Squire Thornhill (in The Vicar of
Wakefield) on his benefactor Sir George Savile and certainly spending time with eminent scientist Rev. John
Mitchell, whom he probably knew from London. Mitchell sorely missed good company, which Goldsmith
naturally provided in spades. Thomas De Quincey wrote of him "All the motion of Goldsmith's nature moved
in the direction of the true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle". His premature death in 1774 may have been
partly due to his own misdiagnosis of his kidney infection. Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church in
London. The inscription reads; "HERE LIES/OLIVER GOLDSMITH". A monument was originally raised to
him at the site of his burial, but this was destroyed in an air raid in 1941. A monument to him survives in the
centre of Ballymahon, also in Westminster Abbey with an epitaph written by Samuel Johnson. Among his
papers was found the prospectus of an encyclopedia, to be called the Universal dictionary of the arts and
sciences. He wished this to be the British equivalent of the Encyclopédie and it was to include comprehensive
articles by Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Sir William
Jones, Fox and Dr. Burney. The project, however, was not realised due to Goldsmith's death. Works. The
Citizen of the World: In 1760 Goldsmith began to publish a series of letters in the Public Ledger under the
title The Citizen of the World. Purportedly written by a Chinese traveller in England by the name of Lien Chi,
they used this fictional outsider's perspective to comment ironically and at times moralistically on British
society and manners. It was inspired by the earlier essay series Persian Letters by Montesquieu.
28. Richard Brinsley Sheridan
Richard Brinsley Butler Sheridan (30 October 1751 – 7 July 1816) was an Irish satirist, a politician, a
playwright, poet, and long-term owner of the London Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. He is known for his plays
such as The Rivals, The School for Scandal, The Duenna and A Trip to Scarborough. He was also a Whig MP
for 32 years in the British House of Commons for Stafford (1780–1806), Westminster (1806–1807), and
Ilchester (1807–1812). He is buried at Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. His plays remain a central part of
the canon and are regularly performed worldwide. Sheridan was born in 1751 in Dublin, Ireland, where his
family had a house on then fashionable Dorset Street. His mother, Frances Sheridan, was a playwright and
novelist. She had two plays produced in London in the early 1760s, though she is best known for her novel
The Memoirs of Miss Sidney Biddulph (1761).[1] His father, Thomas Sheridan, was for a while an actor-
manager at the Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, but following his move to England in 1758 he gave up acting
and wrote several books on the subject of education, especially the standardisation of the English language in
education.[2] While his family was in Dublin, Richard attended the English Grammar School in Grafton Street.
In 1758, when he was seven years old, the Sheridans moved permanently to England. [3] He was a pupil at
Harrow School from 1762 to 1768.[4] At the end of his 1768 school year, his father employed a private tutor,
Lewis Ker, to direct his studies in his father's house in London, while Domenico Angelo instructed him in
fencing and horsemanship.[4] In 1772, aged 20 or 21, Sheridan fought two duels with Captain Thomas
Mathews, who had written a newspaper article defaming the character of Elizabeth Ann Linley, whom
Sheridan intended to marry. In the first duel, they agreed to fight in Hyde Park, but finding it too crowded
they went first to the Hercules Pillars tavern (on the site where Apsley House now stands at Hyde Park
Corner) and then on to the Castle Tavern in Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.[5] Far from its romantic image,
the duel was short and bloodless. Mathews lost his sword and, according to Sheridan, was forced to 'beg for
his life' and sign a retraction of the article. [6] The apology was made public and Mathews, infuriated by the
publicity the duel had received, refused to accept his defeat as final and challenged Sheridan to another duel.
Sheridan was not obliged to accept this challenge but could have become a social pariah if he had not. [citation
needed]
The second duel, fought in July 1772 at Kingsdown near Bath, [7] was a much more ferocious affair. This
time both men broke their swords but carried on fighting in a 'desperate struggle for life and honour'. [8] Both
were wounded, Sheridan dangerously, and he had to be 'borne from the field with a portion of his antagonist's
weapon sticking through an ear, his breast-bone touched, his whole body covered with wounds and blood, and
his face nearly beaten to jelly with the hilt of Mathews' sword'.[9] Mathews escaped in a post chaise. Eight days
after the bloody affair the Bath Chronicle was able to announce that Sheridan was out of danger. Later that
year, Elizabeth and the 21-year-old Richard eloped and set up house in London on a lavish scale. Sheridan had
little money and no immediate prospects of any, other than his wife's dowry. The young couple entered the
fashionable world and apparently held up their end in entertaining. Sheridan was a patron of Margaret Cuyler
and she was his presumed mistress. Under his wing she appeared at Drury Lane in January 1777 despite being
a poor actress. Literary career. In 1775 Sheridan's first play, The Rivals, was produced at London's Covent
Garden Theatre. It was a failure on its first night, and John Lee’s performance as Sir Lucius O'Trigger was
criticised for rendering the character "ridiculous and disgusting". Sheridan rewrote the play and presented it
again a few days later, with Laurence Clinch replacing Lee in the role.[11] In its reworked form it was a huge
success, immediately establishing the young playwright's reputation and the favour of fashionable London. It
went on to become a standard of English literature. Shortly after the success of The Rivals, Sheridan and his
father-in-law Thomas Linley the Elder, a successful composer, produced the opera The Duenna. This piece,
warmly received, played for seventy-five performances. His most famous play, The School for Scandal,
premiered at Drury Lane on 8 May 1777. It is considered one of the greatest comedies of manners in English.
It was followed by The Critic (1779), an updating of the satirical Restoration play The Rehearsal. Having
quickly made his name and fortune, in 1776 Sheridan bought David Garrick's share in the Drury Lane patent,
and in 1778 the remaining share; his later plays were all produced there. [12] In 1778 Sheridan wrote The Camp,
which commented on the ongoing threat of a French invasion of Britain. The same year Sheridan's brother-in-
law Thomas Linley, a young composer who worked with him at Drury Lane Theatre, died in a boating
accident. Sheridan had a rivalry with his fellow playwright Richard Cumberland and included a parody of
Cumberland in his play The Critic. On 24 February 1809 (despite the much vaunted fire safety precautions of
1794) the theatre burned down. On being encountered drinking a glass of wine in the street while watching the
fire, Sheridan was famously reported to have said, 'A man may surely be allowed to take a glass of wine by
his own fireside.'[13] Sheridan was the manager of the theatre for many years, and later became sole owner with
no managerial role.
 29. George Bernard Shaw
George Bernard Shaw was an Irish playwright, literary critic and a fervent socialist who won the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1925. Born into a lower-middle class family in Dublin to an alcoholic father, George
Bernard Shaw had a an irregular education and started working at the age of 15. After serving as a junior clerk
for a while, Shaw moved to London to live with his mother and began writing plays and novels.to pursue a
career in literature. Later, he established himself as an art and theatre critic, and also became a prominent
member of the Fabian Society, a highly dominant British socialist organization. Most of his early plays
focused on existing social problems and were not well-received by the audience but from 1895 onwards,
Shaw’s work started gaining public recognition due to its comic relief. Some of his plays during this period
such as ‘Caesar and Cleopatra’, ‘Major Barbara’, ‘The Doctor's Dilemma’, ‘Saint Joan’ and ‘Pygmalion’
received much appreciation and proved to be some of his greatest successes on the stage. Being an outright
socialist, Shaw openly expressed his disapproval regarding the First World War, facing criticism for his
opinions but after the war, he returned as a dramatist and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature for
his outstanding contribution. He lived the rest of his life as an international celebrity, continually involved in
dramatics until his death. Shaw still remains one of the most significant playwrights in the English language
who helped shape the theatre of his time. Childhood & Early Life. George Bernard Shaw was born on July
26, 1856, in Dublin, Ireland, to George Carr Shaw, a civil servant, and Lucinda Elizabeth Gurly Shaw, an
aspiring singer and music teacher. He was the third and youngest child in the family with two elder sisters. He
had an irregular education because he disliked any organized training. After receiving early tuitions from his
clerical uncle, he attended several local schools but eventually ended his formal education. Subsequently, he
developed an interest towards art and literature due to his mother’s influence. In 1872, his mother left her
husband and moved to London to live with her music teacher and longtime lover George Vandeleur Lee. She
also took bother her daughters with her. Meanwhile George Bernard Shaw stayed back in Dublin with his
father and worked as a land agent in a estate office. But, he was not content with his job. In 1876, Shaw
moved to London with her mother and decided to pursue a career in writing and journalism. For the next few
years, Shaw spent most of his time in the British Museum reading room and wrote several novels but was
unable to get them published. During this period, he struggled financially and suffered constant
embarrassment while living off of his mother and sister. Career. While failing in the attempt to become a
novelist, George Bernard Shaw gravitated towards progressive politics and became a socialist spokesperson.
Thereafter, he embraced socialism and joined the ‘Fabian Society’, a socialist political organization dedicated
to transforming the English society. Shaw lectured for the Fabian Society and wrote pamphlets on the
progressive arts, later getting involved in most of its activities. Meanwhile, in 1885, he found steady
journalism work as a book reviewer as well as an art critic. In 1895, he was appointed to the Saturday Review
as theatre critic, where he served until his resignation due to illness in 1898. In the meantime, he wrote several
plays but failed to convince the theatre managers to produce them. In 1904, H. G. Barker and J.E. Vedrenne
managed a successful production of Shaw's play titled ‘Candida’ at the Royal Court Theatre in London. Its
success prompted them to form a partnership with Shaw, who wrote several plays for them over the next few
years, resulting in a series of brilliant productions. By 1910, Shaw had established himself as a playwright
through his marvelous works including ‘John Bull’s Other Island’ (1904), ‘Major Barbara’ (1905), and ‘The
Doctor’s Dilemma’ (1906). In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, Shaw’s popularity declined considerably
after he published an essay titled ‘Common Sense about The War’, describing the war as a tragic waste of
young lives under the guise of patriotism. The essay met with much criticism and proved to be a disaster for
his social stature. Major Works. In 1912-13, Shaw came up with his most popular play, a comical
masterpiece titled ‘Pygmalion’, a gentle comedy about love and the English class system. Pygmalion was a
great success and achieved further fame when it was later made into a film, in 1938, for which Shaw wrote the
screenplay, winning an Oscar for his work. The play was also adapted into an immensely famous musical
titled ‘My Fair Lady’ (1956). Awards & Achievements. In 1925, George Bernard Shaw was awarded the
Nobel Prize for Literature for his pioneering contribution to the field. In 1938, Shaw shared an Academy
Award for the Best Adapted Screenplay category for the film adaptation of his most popular play ‘Pygmalion’
(1912-13).

30. William Shakespeare

Literature without Shakespeare is like an aquarium without fishes. Though it would have all the adoration and
kinds, a look at it would tell you that it is lifeless and dead. The world’s greatest playwright and writer of
English language, William Shakespeare has been conferred with the honour of being England’s national poet
and ‘Bard of Avon’. An author of 38 plays and 154 sonnets, his work was much more appreciated by the
 world after his lifetime. Plays written by Shakespeare have been translated into every major language of the
world and have been performed extensively than those of any other playwright. Interestingly, such a power
profile of a prolific writer went under the knife many a times after his death. Since there is no substantial
information regarding the birth, life and death of Shakespeare, his education and his ‘supposed’ literary
connection, critics raised a controversy number of times as to whether or not he is the ‘real’ author behind the
works, most of them believing that the work was written by someone else. Across his career, this literary
genius has touched various genres of playwriting including comedy, romance, tragedy and history. A
respected poet and playwright, it was only in the 19th century that Shakespeare’s reputation rose
astronomically. While the Romantic considered him genius, the Victorians revered him. Even in the present
21st century, Shakespeare’s works are being studied and performed in various cultures. Without a doubt, he is
the most prodigious and cherished contributor to the world of literature! Childhood & Early Life. William
Shakespeare was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. Though his actual date of birth is not known, it
is traditionally observed on April 23, 1564. As per church records, he was baptized on April 26, 1564. He was
the third child and the eldest son of the couple who had eight offspring. Little is known of Shakespeare’s
childhood and education. It is speculated that he attended the King’s New School in Stratford, where he
learned to read and write. Since all the grammar schools then followed the same curricula, it is believed that
he received intensive education in grammar based upon Latin classical authors. Theatrical Beginnings.
Before records which state the commencement of Shakespeare’s theatrical career, there is a period of seven
years from 1585 until 1592, of which little or no information is known. While some speculate his involvement
at the poaching game, others estimate his taking up the job of an assistant schoolmaster. Though it’s not
exactly known as to when did Shakespeare begin his writing career, records of performances show that his
plays started to feature on the London stage by 1592. A famous man by then, Shakespeare attracted the
attention of both critics and fans alike. Robert Greene is one of the earliest critics of Shakespeare who was
irked by Shakespeare’s attempt to match university-educated writers Since 1594, almost all of Shakespeare
plays were performed by the Lord Chamberlain's Men. The group, in no time, reached to the topmost position
and became a leading playing company in London so much so that they bought their own theatre in 1599 and
named it Globe. Meanwhile, Shakespeare’s reputation as a playwright and actor grew by leaps and bounds to
the extent that his name itself had become a strong selling point. The success of the company strengthened the
financial stability of Shakespeare as well. His Works & Style. Talking about the style that Shakespeare
adopted for his work, he was extremely innovative. He adapted the traditional and convention style in his own
way by adding metaphors and rhetorical phrases. However, the additions hardly ever aligned to the plot or the
characters of the story. Most of his plays have the presence of a metrical pattern consisting of lines of
unrhymed iambic pentameter, or blank verse. Furthermore, there are passages in all the plays that deviate from
this and use forms of poetry or simple prose. In the initial years of his writing, i.e. during the 1590s,
Shakespeare mostly took the theme of his work from history, ‘Richard II’, ‘Henry V’, ‘Henry VI’ and so on.
The only work which was an exception during this phase was ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Personal Life & Legacy.
As was the tradition of the early decades, Shakespeare tied the knot early in life to Anne Hathaway. He was
18 while she was 26 at the time of marriage. The couple was blessed with three children, a daughter born six
months after marriage named Susanna and twins born two years later, a son Hamnet and daughter Judith.

3- деңгейлі сұрақтар:
1. Beowulf
Beowulf, heroic poem, the highest achievement of Old English literature and the earliest European vernacular
epic. The work deals with events of the early 6th century, and, while the date of its composition is uncertain,
some scholars believe that it was written in the 8th century. Although originally untitled, the poem was later
named after the Scandinavian hero Beowulf, whose exploits and character provide its connecting theme.
There is no evidence of a historical Beowulf, but some characters, sites, and events in the poem can be
historically verified. The poem did not appear in print until 1815. It is preserved in a single manuscript that
dates to circa 1000 and is known as the Beowulf manuscript. Plot: Beowulf falls into two parts. It opens in
Denmark, where King Hrothgar has a splendid mead hall known as Heorot, a place of celebration and much
merriment. However, the joyous noise angers Grendel, an evil monster living in a nearby swamp. For 12 years
the creature terrorizes Heorot with nightly visits in which he carries off Hrothgar’s warriors and devours them.
After learning of the Danes’ trouble, young Beowulf, a prince of the Geats in what is now southern Sweden,
arrives with a small band of retainers and offers to rid Heorot of its monster. Hrothgar is astonished at the
little-known hero’s daring but welcomes him. After an evening of feasting, much courtesy, and some
discourtesy—at one point, one of Hrothgar’s men insults Beowulf—the king retires, leaving Beowulf in
charge. During the night, Grendel comes from the moors, rips open the heavy doors, and devours one of the
sleeping Geats. He then grapples with Beowulf, who refuses to use a weapon. Beowulf grips one of Grendel’s
hands with such force that the monster finally wrenches himself free only when his arm is torn off at the
shoulder. Mortally wounded, Grendel returns to his swamp and dies. Beowulf then displays the monster’s arm
in Heorot for all to see. The next day is one of rejoicing in Heorot, and a feast is thrown in Beowulf’s honour.
However, as the warriors sleep that night, Grendel’s mother, another swamp monster, comes to avenge her
son’s death, and she kills one of Hrothgar’s men. In the morning Beowulf dives into her mere (lake) to search
for her, and she attacks him. They struggle in her dry cave at the mere’s bottom, and Beowulf finally kills her
with a sword. In the cave, Beowulf discovers Grendel’s corpse, whose head he cuts off and takes back to
Heorot. The Danes rejoice once more. Hrothgar makes a farewell speech about the character of the true hero,
and Beowulf, enriched with honours and princely gifts, returns home to King Hygelac of the Geats. The
second part passes rapidly over Hygelac’s subsequent death in a battle (of historical record), the death of his
son, and Beowulf’s succession to the kingship and his peaceful rule of 50 years. However, the tranquility ends
when a fire-breathing dragon becomes enraged after a man steals from its treasure-filled lair. The creature
begins ravaging Geatland, and the brave but aging Beowulf decides to engage it, despite knowing that he will
likely die. The fight is long and terrible—a painful contrast to the battles of his youth. Painful too is the
desertion of all his retainers except for his young kinsman Wiglaf, who comes to his aid. They ultimately kill
the venomous dragon, but Beowulf is mortally wounded from a bite in the neck. Before he dies, he names
Wiglaf his successor. Beowulf is cremated on a funeral pyre, and his remains are buried in a barrow built by
the sea. As his people mourn his death, they also express the fear that, without Beowulf, Geatland will be
invaded by nearby tribes. Analysis: Beowulf belongs metrically, stylistically, and thematically to a heroic
tradition grounded in Germanic religion and mythology. It is also part of the broader tradition of heroic
poetry. Many incidents, such as the tearing-off of the monster’s arm and the hero’s descent into the mere, are
familiar motifs from folklore. The ethical values are manifestly the Germanic code of loyalty to chief and tribe
and vengeance to enemies. Yet the poem is so infused with a Christian spirit that it lacks the grim fatality of
many of the Eddaic lays or the sagas of Icelandic literature. Beowulf himself seems more altruistic than other
Germanic heroes or the ancient Greek heroes of the Iliad. It is significant that his three battles are not against
men, which would entail the retaliation of the blood feud, but against evil monsters, enemies of the whole
community and of civilization itself. Many critics have seen the poem as a Christian allegory in which
Beowulf, the champion of goodness and light, fights the forces of evil and darkness. His sacrificial death is
seen not as tragic but as befitting the end of a good (some would say “too good”) hero’s life. That is not to say
that Beowulf is an optimistic poem. English writer and Old English scholar J.R.R. Tolkien suggested that its
total effect is more like a long lyrical elegy than an epic. Even the earlier, happier section in Denmark is filled
with ominous references that would have been well understood by contemporary audiences. Thus, after
Grendel’s death, King Hrothgar speaks sanguinely of the future, which the audience would know will end
with the destruction of his line and the burning of Heorot. In the second part the movement is slow and
funereal: scenes from Beowulf’s youth are replayed in a minor key as a counterpoint to his last battle, and the
mood becomes increasingly sombre as the wyrd (fate) that comes to all men closes in on him.

2. Robin Hood
Summaries: A war-hardened Crusader and his Moorish commander mount an audacious revolt against the
corrupt English crown. Robin of Loxley, a lord living in Nottingham, enjoys a good life with his lover,
Marian, before he is drafted by the corrupt Sheriff of Nottingham to fight in the Third Crusade against the
Saracens. After four years away from England, Robin becomes disillusioned with the Crusades when he fails
to prevent his commander, Guy of Gisbourne, from executing prisoners, namely a teenage boy, despite the
pleading of the boy's father, which prompts Gisbourne to send Robin back home. When he returns to
Nottingham, Robin learns from his old friend Friar Tuck that the Sheriff had him officially declared dead two
years prior in order to seize Robin's land and wealth to continue funding the war effort at the behest of the
corrupt Cardinal, kicking the citizens from the city and into the coal mine town across the river. Investigating
'the Slags', Robin witnesses the commoners planning to rise against the government that oppresses and
exploits them and learns that Marian is now involved with their aspiring leader, Will Tillman. Robin is
prevented from making contact with her by the Arab whose son he tried to save. The man introduces himself
as Yahya - which he says can be translated to "John" - and proposes that he and Robin work to end the war by
stealing the money taken from the people to fund the church's war. Marian seeks Robin upon learning that he
is alive, but he chooses not to tell her of his plans for her own protection. Synopsis: Set in England in the
Middle Ages, the film starts with a young thief named Marian (Eve Hewson) entering a stable to steal a horse.
Lord Robin of Loxley (Taron Egerton) catches her, but he quickly becomes enamored with her, so he allows
her to take a horse. The two continue a relationship until Robin is summoned by the Sheriff of Nottingham
(Ben Mendelsohn) to be drafted for the Crusades wars. Thus, Robin must leave Marian behind. Four years
later, Robin is fighting alongside his fellow soldiers against Moors while trying to rescue a fellow Crusader.
Robin is found and attacked by a Moor soldier named Yahya (Jamie Foxx). He nearly kills Robin until Guy of
Gisborne (Paul Anderson) chops off Yahya's hand. Yahya is later captured alongside his son. He pleads with
Gisborne to let him go in exchange for information, but Gisborne still orders the young man's execution.
Robin attempts to stop the Crusaders, but Yahya's son is unfortunately decapitated in front of both of them.
Gisborne strikes Robin with an arrow and orders him to be sent on a medical boat back to England. Robin
returns home to England to find his place is ruins. He goes to church to speak to Friar Tuck (Tim Minchin),
who tells him that the Sheriff had him declared dead two years earlier, and that Marian arranged a memorial
for him. Additionally, the Sheriff is taxing citizens by claiming to provide it toward the war, but Tuck says
that he's driven most of the commoners out of Nottingham. Robin goes off to find Marian and sees her
handing out supplies in town, but he is heartbroken to find that she has moved on with a new man, Will
Tillman (Jamie Dornan). Robin is then found by Yahya. He thinks Yahya is going to kill him, but he instead
wants to show him gratitude for attempting to save his son by training him to fight back against the Sheriff.
Since Robin cannot pronounce Yahya's name, he tells him to call him by his translated name, John. The
Sheriff holds a town meeting where he tries to sway others into paying taxes for his war bill. Marian and Will
call out the fact that the townspeople have little to nothing to support themselves and their families. Friar Tuck
steps out and mentions that Robin is alive, to the surprise of the townspeople, but especially Marian. Little
John takes Robin to better his skills at archery. Although a bit bumpy at first, Robin quickly gets the hang of it
and proves to be deadly with the bow and arrow. Marian goes to the ruins of Robin's home to try and find him,
as he and John are training there, but John advises Robin not to let Marian know as to what they are up to, or
else she may suffer the consequences should he get caught. For the time being, Robin makes his livelihood
known, and he resumes his position as a lord, working alongside the Sheriff despite working against him.
When Marian does finally see Robin in the flesh, their reunion is expectedly awkward. Soon, Robin takes his
training to the streets where he ambushes the Sheriff's men and fights them off before pilfering their coins. He
continues to rob them, earning himself the nickname "The Hood." At a meeting of lords, Robin suggests that a
bounty be put out for the capture of this mysterious thief. The Sheriff and Friar Tuck then meet with the
Archdeacon (Ian Peck), who informs the Sheriff that the Cardinal (F. Murray Abraham) is none too pleased to
hear how he is handling the Hood situation, and he will be making his appearance in town soon. It is shown
that even the Sheriff must answer to the church. After the Archdeacon leaves, the Sheriff appears to plan
something with Gisborne. The Sheriff arranges for a party to take place for the Cardinal's arrival. Robin, John,
and now Marian attend, surrounded by all the other haughty rich folks. Tuck sneaks some keys off of a guard
and gives them to Marian. Robin uses Tuck and pretends to bring him in by force to the Sheriff and Cardinal.
Robin convinces them to kick Tuck out of the church, so now he won't have qualms working against the
Sheriff. Not long after, the Sheriff then sends Gisborne and his soldiers to raid and pillage the town. Robin
chases after Gisborne, and his identity as the Hood is made known to Marian. Robin fails to stop the bad guys,
and John is captured. The Sheriff interrogates John and taunts him with the memory of seeing his son
murdered. He tries to get information out of John, but he refuses to give anything up. Will speaks to a
gathering of townsfolk to try and act against the Sheriff. Robin steps in and reveals himself to everyone as the
Hood to try and inspire them to rally and take back their town. With Tuck's help, they conspire to take over
the Sheriff's wagon full of riches. Robin and the townspeople carry out their plan, causing the Sheriff's wagon
to fall through a hole in the road. The men take all the riches away from the wagon to distribute among the
citizens. John is freed from his captors. A battle ensues among the soldiers and the revolters. Robin fights
Gisborne and has an opportunity to kill him but decides to spare him due to how much he helped in the war.
Robin and Marian end up together and share a kiss, which is noticed by Will. When they find him, now burnt
from an explosion, he angrily tells Marian that Robin can have her. Eventually, the fighting gets so bad that
Robin steps in and reveals himself to everyone else to try and stop the innocent people from getting hurt.
Robin is brought in captive inside the church to face the Sheriff. Before he can punish Robin, John reveals
himself to be among the soldiers inside, so he helps Robin fight the other soldiers and tie the Sheriff by the
neck to a rope, which Robin then shoots off its anchor to hang the Sheriff. Robin later goes to find and be with
Marian. The Cardinal approaches a scarred Will with a proposition. Will then becomes the new Sheriff and
issues an arrest warrant for the Hood. Robin responds by firing an arrow at the wanted sign that Will is
holding.

3. Romeo and Juliet

Romeo and Juliet is set in Verona, Italy, where there is an ongoing feud between the Montague and Capulet
families. The play opens with servants from both houses engaged in a street brawl that eventually draws in the
family patriarchs and the city officials, including Prince Escalus. The Prince ends the conflict by issuing a
decree that prohibits any further fighting at the risk of great punishment. Meanwhile, Romeo, a young man
from the Montague house, laments his unrequited love for a woman named Rosaline, who has vowed to
remain chaste for the rest of her life. Romeo and his friend Benvolio happen to stumble across a Capulet
servant, Peter, who is trying to read a list of invitees to a masked party at the Capulet house that evening.
Romeo helps Peter read the list and decides to attend the party because Rosaline will be there. He plans to
wear a mask so that he will nobody will recognize him as a Montague. Romeo arrives at the Capulets' party in
costume. He falls in love with young Juliet Capulet from the moment he sees her. However, Juliet's cousin
Tybalt recognizes Romeo and wants to kill him on the spot. Lord Capulet intervenes, insisting that Tybalt not
disturb the party because it will anger the Prince. Undeterred, Romeo quietly approaches Juliet and confesses
his love for her. After exchanging loving words, they kiss. Afterwards, Juliet's Nurse tells Romeo that Juliet
is a Capulet, which upsets the smitten youngster. Meanwhile, Juliet is similarly distraught when she finds out
that Romeo is a Montague. Later that night, Romeo climbs the garden wall into Juliet's garden. Juliet emerges
on her balcony and speaks her private thoughts out loud. She wishes Romeo could shed his name and marry
her. Upon hearing her confession, Romeo appears and tells Juliet that he loves her. She warns him to be true
in his love, and he swears by his own self that he will be. Before they part, they agree that Juliet will send her
Nurse to meet Romeo at nine o'clock the next day, at which point he will set a place for them to be married.
The Nurse carries out her duty, and tells Juliet to meet Romeo at the chapel where Friar Laurence lives and
works. Juliet meets Romeo there, and the Friar marries them in secret. Benvolio and Mercutio (another one of
Romeo's friends) are waiting on the street later that day when Tybalt arrives. Tybalt demands to know where
Romeo is so that he can challenge him to a duel, in order to punish him for sneaking into the party. Mercutio
is eloquently vague, but Romeo happens to arrive in the middle of the verbal sparring. Tybalt challenges him,
but Romeo passively resists fighting, at which point Mercutio jumps in and draws his sword on Tybalt.
Romeo tries to block the two men, but Tybalt cuts Mercutio and runs away, only to return after he hears that
Mercutio has died. Angry over his friend's death, Romeo fights with Tybalt and kills him. Then, he decides to
flee. When Prince Escalus arrives at the murder scene, he banishes Romeo from Verona forever. The Nurse
tells Juliet the sad news about what has happened to Tybalt and Romeo. Juliet is heart-broken, but she realizes
that Romeo would have been killed if he had not fought Tybalt. She sends her Nurse to find Romeo and give
him her ring. That night, Romeo sneaks into Juliet's room, and they consummate their marriage. The next
morning, he is forced to leave when Juliet's mother arrives. Romeo travels to Mantua, where he waits for
someone to send news about Juliet or his banishment. During Romeo and Juliet's only night together,
however, Lord Capulet decides that Juliet should marry a young man named Paris, who has been asking for
her hand. Lord and Lady Capulet tell Juliet of their plan, but she refuses, infuriating her father. When both
Lady Capulet and the Nurse refuse to intercede for the girl, she insists that they leave her side. Juliet then
visits Friar Laurence, and together they concoct a plan to reunite her with Romeo. The Friar gives Juliet a
potion that will make her seem dead for at least two days, during which time Romeo will come to meet her in
the Capulet vault. The Friar promises to send word of the plan to Romeo. Juliet drinks the Friar's potion that
night. The next morning, the day of Juliet and Paris' wedding, her Nurse finds her "dead" in bed. The whole
house decries her suicide, and Friar Laurence insists they quickly place her into the family vault.
Unfortunately, Friar John has been unable to deliver the letter to Romeo informing him of the plan, so when
Romeo's servant brings him news in Mantua that Juliet has died, Romeo is heart-broken. He hurries back to
Verona, but first, buys poison from an Apothecary and writes a suicide note detailing the tragic course of
events. As soon as Friar Laurence realizes that his letter never made it to Romeo's hands, he rushes to the
Capulet tomb, hoping to arrive before Romeo does. Romeo arrives at the Capulet vault and finds it guarded by
Paris, who is there to mourn the loss of his betrothed. Paris challenges Romeo to a duel, and Romeo kills him
quickly. Romeo then carries Paris' body into the grave and sets it down. Upon seeing Juliet's "dead" body
lying in the tomb, Romeo drinks the poison, gives her a last kiss - and dies. Friar Laurence arrives to the vault
just as Juliet wakes up. He tries to convince her to flee, but upon seeing Romeo's dead body, she takes her
own life as well. The rest of the town starts to arrive at the tomb, including Lord Capulet and Lord Montague.
Friar Laurence explains the whole story, and Romeo's letter confirms it. The two families agree to settle their
feud and form an alliance despite the tragic circumstances.

4. Hamlet
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet (/ˈhæmlɪt/), is a tragedy written by
William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words.
Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has
murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother. Hamlet is considered among
the "most powerful and influential tragedies in the English language", with a story capable of "seemingly
endless retelling and adaptation by others". There are many works that have been pointed to as possible
sources for Shakespeare's play—from ancient Greek tragedies to Elizabethan plays. The editors of the Arden
Shakespeare question the idea of "source hunting", pointing out that it presupposes that authors always require
ideas from other works for their own, and suggests that no author can have an original idea or be an originator.
When Shakespeare wrote there were many stories about sons avenging the murder of their fathers, and many
about clever avenging sons pretending to be foolish in order to outsmart their foes. This would include the
story of the ancient Roman, Lucius Junius Brutus, which Shakespeare apparently knew, as well as the story of
Amleth, which was preserved in Latin by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum,
and printed in Paris in 1514. The Amleth story was subsequently adapted and then published in French in
1570 by the 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest. It has a number of plot elements and major
characters in common with Shakespeare's Hamlet, and lacks others that are found in Shakespeare.
Belleforest's story was first published in English in 1608, after Hamlet had been written, though it's possible
that Shakespeare had encountered it in the French language version. Three different early versions of the play
are extant: the First Quarto (Q1, 1603); the Second Quarto (Q2, 1604); and the First Folio (F1, 1623). Each
version includes lines and passages missing from the others. he Prince of Denmark, Hamlet is in Germany in
pursuit of education. Suddenly he is called to Denmark to attain the funeral of his father. When he comes
home, he is shocked to see his mother Gertrude already to his uncle, Claudius and he himself has declared the
king. Claudius has neglected the fact that the rightful heir to the throne is Prince Hamlet. After observing the
situation, Hamlet smells a rat and doubts his uncle. One night, the ghost of his father visits Prince Hamlet and
tells him that he was murdered by his uncle Claudius when he was in sleep. He further says that he was
poured poison in his ears while in deep sleep. The ghost entrusts Hamlet with a work of revenge the murderer
Claudius and leave Gertrude in the hand of Heaven. Hamlet plans to put on the fake mask of madness in the
castle so as to observe the interaction and get to the truth. But he discovers himself in the great confusion and
bewilderment. As he is a philosophical Prince, he keeps on thinking and raises the existence of the ghost and
its truth. His behavior is changed because of his confusion and becomes moody. He thinks of staging a play
putting the same murder scene that the ghost has described to him. He adds the scene of the murder, calling it
The Mousetrap, in the middle of the play The Murder of Gonzago. He had expected that if the ghost is right,
then it scene would work on the king and he would certainly show some odd behavior. As expected, the king
could not breathe and wants the light, so he leaves the room. Now, Hamlet is fully convinced that he is the
real killer of his father. He vows to kill him, but the problem with him is that he is too conscious and thinks a
lot. His thought and philosophy immobilize him. His passive and reluctant act of taking revenge takes the
lives of six innocent people. When Hamlet and the queen are in the private chamber, Polonius spies on them.
Hamlet discovers this fact and stabs him. Hamlet is punished for killing Polonius and he is sent to England.
There he is spied by his school friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. When he knows about this, he arranges
the hanging of these two friends instead. When Ophelia, whom Hamlet loves, comes to know that Hamlet has
killed her father Polonius, she becomes mad and dies singing sad songs. Laertes, her brother comes from
France, witnesses the death of his father and sister, gets angry on Hamlet and both fight. Laertes has a
poisoned sword with which he cuts Hamlet and Hamlet too gets the same poisoned sword and kills Laertes.
Meanwhile, Hamlets gets the message that his mother dies eating the toast form the poisoned bowl that is
intended for Hamlet by Claudius. Before Laertes dies, he tells that Claudius is responsible for the death of
Queen Gertrude as the poison is kept in the cup by Claudius. In anger, Hamlet stabs the poisoned sword and
pours the last poisoned drink from the cup on his throat. Hamlet is at the last moment of his life as he is also
cut by the poisoned sword. Before e his death, he declares that the throne must be given to the Prince
Fortinbras of Norway. At the end of the play, the new appointed king of Denmark orders a royal funeral for
the slain Prince Hamlet.

5. Macbeth
Macbeth (/məkˈbɛθ/, full title The Tragedie of Macbeth) is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is thought to
have been first performed in 1606.[a] It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political
ambition on those who seek power. Of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote during the reign of James I,
Macbeth most clearly reflects his relationship with King James, patron of Shakespeare's acting company.[1] It
was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book, and is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.[2]
A brave Scottish general named Macbeth receives a prophecy from a trio of witches that one day he will
become King of Scotland. Consumed by ambition and spurred to action by his wife, Macbeth murders King
Duncan and takes the Scottish throne for himself. He is then wracked with guilt and paranoia. Forced to
commit more and more murders to protect himself from enmity and suspicion, he soon becomes a tyrannical
ruler. The bloodbath and consequent civil war swiftly take Macbeth and Lady Macbeth into the realms of
madness and death. Shakespeare's source for the story is the account of Macbeth, King of Scotland, Macduff,
and Duncan in Holinshed's Chronicles (1587), a history of England, Scotland, and Ireland familiar to
Shakespeare and his contemporaries, although the events in the play differ extensively from the history of the
real Macbeth. The events of the tragedy are usually associated with the execution of Henry Garnet for
complicity in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In the backstage world of theatre, some believe that the play is
cursed, and will not mention its title aloud, referring to it instead as "The Scottish Play". The play has
attracted some of the most renowned actors to the roles of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, and has been adapted
to film, television, opera, novels, comics, and other media. Act I: On a bleak Scottish moorland, Macbeth and
Banquo, two of King Duncan's generals, discover three strange women (witches). The witches prophesy that
Macbeth will be promoted twice: to Thane of Cawdor (a rank of the aristocracy bestowed by grateful kings)
and King of Scotland. Banquo's descendants will be kings, but Banquo isn't promised any kingdom himself.
The generals want to hear more, but the "weird sisters" disappear. Soon afterwards, King Duncan names
Macbeth Thane of Cawdor as a reward for his success in the recent battles. The promotion seems to support
the prophecy. The King then proposes to make a brief visit that night to Macbeth's castle at Inverness. Lady
Macbeth receives news from her husband about the prophecy and his new title. She vows to help him become
king by whatever means are necessary (*ominous music*). Is this a dagger which I see before me? —
Macbeth, Act 2 Scene 1. Act II: Macbeth returns to his castle, followed almost immediately by King Duncan.
The Macbeths plot together to kill Duncan and wait until everyone is asleep. At the appointed time, Lady
Macbeth gives the guards drugged wine so Macbeth can enter and kill the King. He regrets this almost
immediately, but his wife reassures him. She leaves the bloody daggers by the dead king just before Macduff,
a nobleman, arrives. When Macduff discovers the murder, Macbeth kills the drunken guards in a show of rage
and retribution. Duncan's sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, flee, fearing for their own lives; but they are,
nevertheless, blamed for the murder. Act III: Macbeth becomes King of Scotland but is plagued by feelings
of insecurity. He remembers the prophecy that Banquo's descendants will inherit the throne and arranges for
Banquo and his son Fleance to be killed. In the darkness, Banquo is murdered, but his son escapes the
assassins. At his state banquet that night, Macbeth sees the ghost of Banquo and worries the courtiers with his
mad response. Lady Macbeth dismisses the court and unsuccessfully tries to calm her husband. Act IV:
Macbeth seeks out the witches who say that he will be safe until a local wood, Birnam Wood, marches into
battle against him. He also need not fear anyone born of woman (that sounds secure, no loop-holes here).
They also prophesy that the Scottish succession will still come from Banquo's son. Macbeth embarks on a
reign of terror, slaughtering many, including Macduff's family. Macduff had gone to seek Malcolm (one of
Duncan's sons who fled) at the court of the English king. Malcolm is young and unsure of himself, but
Macduff, pained with grief, persuades him to lead an army against Macbeth. By the pricking of my thumbs,
something wicked this way comes — Macbeth, Act 4 Scene 1. Act V: Macbeth feels safe in his remote castle
at Dunsinane until he is told that Birnam Wood is moving towards him. Malcolm's army is carrying branches
from the forest as camouflage for their assault on Macbeth's stronghold. Meanwhile, an overwrought and
conscience-ridden Lady Macbeth walks in her sleep and tells her secrets to her doctor. She commits suicide.
As the final battle commences, Macbeth hears of Lady Macbeth's suicide and mourns. In the midst of a losing
battle, Macduff challenges Macbeth. Macbeth learns Macduff is the child of a caesarean birth (loophole!),
realises he is doomed, and submits to his enemy. Macduff triumphs and brings the head of the traitor Macbeth
to Malcolm. Malcolm declares peace and goes to Scone to be crowned king. Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and
tomorrow. — Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5

6. Othello
Othello (full title: The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice) is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare,
probably in 1603, set in the contemporary Ottoman–Venetian War (1570–1573) fought for the control of the
Island of Cyprus, a possession of the Venetian Republic since 1489. The port city of Famagusta finally fell to
the Ottomans in 1571 after a protracted siege. The story revolves around two characters, Othello and Iago.
Othello is a Moorish military commander who was serving as a general of the Venetian army in defence of
Cyprus against invasion by Ottoman Turks. He has recently married Desdemona, a beautiful and wealthy
Venetian lady much younger than himself, against the wishes of her father. Iago is Othello's malevolent
ensign, who maliciously stokes his master's jealousy until the usually stoic Moor kills his beloved wife in a fit
of blind rage. Due to its enduring themes of passion, jealousy, and race, Othello is still topical and popular and
is widely performed, with numerous adaptations. Introduction: Written in 1603, Othello by Shakespeare is
considered to be one of the best classic tragedies of all times. Othello, the protagonist of the tragedy, the moor
of Venice is trapped in the conspiracies of his competitors and subordinates. The play ends with the suicide of
Othello and raises the feeling of pity among the readers and those who watch the play. The play Othello
comprises 5 acts each playing a significant part in the development of the plot. Brief Summary: The play
opens up with a conversation between Roderigo (Desdemona’s suitor), and Iago who is a soldier. Both of
them have their own reasons for enmity with Othello and thus they decide to take revenge against him. As the
story moves forward we come to know that Othello and Desdemona (the Senator’s daughter), are secretly
married. Rodrigo, who had asked Desdemona’s father for her hand in marriage plans to get her by his evil
plans. He is accompanied by Iago who is angry with Othello because he has promoted Cassio above him.
Towards the end of the third act, the seed of doubt is sown in Othello’s mind when Desdemona’s mistakenly
loses her handkerchief (a gift given by Othello) which is later found by Emilia, Iago’s wife. Iago convinces his
wife to give him the handkerchief as he wishes to use it for the execution of his evil plans. He places the
handkerchief in Cassio’s possession and tells Othello that Desdemona and Cassio are having an illicit affair.
To make him believe he asks Othello to notice Cassio’s reactions when his affair is mentioned. Othello
mistakenly takes the conversation to be about Desdemona though it actually is about Cassio’s beloved Bianca.
Bianca also accuses Cassio of gifting her a second-hand gift. All of this makes his doubt firm against
Desdemona and he gets enraged. He decides to kill his wife. Being sick of Desdemona’s love, Roderigo
blindly acts on Iago’s idea of killing Cassio. However, he manages to survive. Lodovico and Gratiano rush to
help Cassio. Fearing that his plans may get exposed, Iago silently stabs Roderigo who dies. In the final act,
Othello kills Desdemona in the bed where they once made love. Emilia appears in the scene and reveals the
true story and innocence of Desdemona. On knowing the truth, Othello regrets his actions. Overpowered by
the guilt, he commits suicide. Key Thoughts: The tragedy Othello by Shakespeare throws light on the
protagonist’s Hamartia (the tragic flaw) that ultimately becomes the reason for his death. Unfaithfulness and
jealousy go hand in hand in this story. Enraged by the mere thought of an illicit affair of his wife with another
man, Othello goes to the extent of killing his own beloved.

7. King Lear
King Lear is a tragic play which revolves around a King’s life that undergoes a massive change due to his
impulsive decision. It is written by William Shakespeare and this article will help you in learning about the
King Lear summary efficiently. King Lear was an elderly king who decides to divide his kingdom between his
three daughters before retirement. Thus, he asks them to express their love for him. The oldest two flatter him
a lot but the third one stays silent. This angers King Lear and he banishes her. Moreover, he divides the
kingdom only between the two. After that, the eldest daughters reject him and force him to flee. The third
daughter, who loves him dearly, fights for justice for her father. However, she loses the battle and is executed.
Lear also dies of sorrow. Hence, King Lear summary tells us what a tragedy the story is. King Lear is one of
the greatest tragedies written by William Shakespeare. It tells us a story about a king whose ego gets the better
of him. King Lear Summary will help us get a better understanding of it. King Lear is an elderly king whose
time for retirement is near. He decides to split the kingdom amongst his three daughters. Before the division,
he conducts a contest. It requires all three daughters to express their love for their father. He expects his
youngest daughter, Cordelia to win as she loves him the most. The two older ones, Goneril and Regan, start
flattering him. However, Cordelia doesn’t say anything as she cannot express her love in words. King Lear
gets furious at her for saying nothing. After that, he divides the land amongst his two elder daughters only.
The King of France still marries Cordelia despite her having no land. On the other hand, Gloucester is also
facing problems at home. His illegitimate son, Edmund, convinces him that his legitimate son, Edgar, wants
him dead. Thus, Edgar flees and disguises as a crazy beggar. After the division by Lear, both the daughters
start treating him badly. This drives him mad so he runs off into a storm. Kent and his fool join Lear there.
Moreover, Edgar also joins them and together they lead him out of the storm. Finally, he reunites with
Cordelia who is upset at her father’s condition. She decides to go at war to bring justice to her father. Back at
the kingdom, Goneril and Regan are falling in love with Edmund. Goneril poisons her sister Regan so she
does not get together with Edmund. Cordelia loses the war and is taken a prisoner along with her father.
Edmund conspires to have her killed. Further, Edmund fights a duel with Edgar. He kills Edgar in the duel.
On the other hand, Goneril kills herself due to the guilt of killing her sister. They execute Cordelia for treason
and thus, King Lear also dies out of grief at her death. So, we see how Lear becomes a tragic hero. To sum it
up, King Lear summary takes us through the transformation brought in Lear’s life. Moreover, it also explains
the reasons which lead to his death. Besides, it is also a perfect example of where one receives a punishment
exceeding his crime. Conclusion of King Lear Summary: King Lear summary tells us a great deal about
flawed relationships we have with our parents. In addition, it also throws light on the personal greed of
humans and the extent to which one is willing to go for it.

8. Robinson Crusoe
Robinson Crusoe, often called the first English novel, was written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1719.
The novel is the tale of one man’s survival on a desert island following a shipwreck. Published in 1719, the
book didn’t carry Defoe’s name, and it was offered to the public as a true account of real events, documented
by a real man named Crusoe. But readers were immediately sceptical. AD: In the same year as the novel
appeared, a man named Charles Gildon actually published Robinson Crusoe Examin’d and Criticis’d, in
which he showed that Crusoe was made up and the events of the novel were fiction. The name ‘Crusoe’, by
the way, may have been taken from Timothy Cruso, who had been a classmate of Defoe’s and who had gone
on to write guidebooks. Robinson Crusoe: summary. The novel, famously, is about how the title character,
Robinson Crusoe, becomes marooned on an island off the north-east coast of South America. As a young
man, Crusoe had gone to sea in the hope of making his fortune. Crusoe is on a ship bound for Africa, where he
plans to buy slaves for his plantations in South America, when the ship is wrecked on an island and Crusoe is
the only survivor. Alone on a desert island, Crusoe manages to survive thanks to his pluck and pragmatism.
He keeps himself sane by keeping a diary, manages to build himself a shelter, and finda a way of salvaging
useful goods from the wrecked ship, including guns. Twelve years pass in this way, until one momentous day,
Crusoe finds a single human footprint in the sand! But he has to wait another ten years before he discovers the
key to the mystery: natives from the nearby islands, who practise cannibalism, have visited the island, and
when they next return, Crusoe attacks them, using his musket salvaged from the shipwreck all those years ago.
He takes one of the natives captive, and names him Man Friday, because – according to Crusoe’s (probably
inaccurate) calendar, that’s the day of the week on which they first meet. Crusoe teaches Man Friday English
and converts him to Christianity. When Crusoe learns that Man Friday’s fellow natives are keeping white
prisoners on their neighbouring island, he vows to rescue them. Together, the two of them build a boat. When
more natives attack the island with captives, Crusoe and Friday rescue the captives and kill the natives. The
two captives they’ve freed are none other than Friday’s own father and a Spanish man. Crusoe sends them
both off to the other island in the newly made boat, telling them to free the other prisoners. Meanwhile, a ship
arrives at the island: a mutiny has taken place on board, and the crew throw the captain and his loyal
supporters onto the island. Before the ship can leave, Crusoe has teamed up with the captain and his men, and
between them they retake the ship from the mutineers, who settle on the island while Crusoe takes the ship
home to England. Robinson Crusoe has been away from England for many years by this stage – he was
marooned on his island for over twenty years – and his parents have died. But he has become wealthy, thanks
to his plantations in Brazil, so he gets married and settles down. His wife dies a few years later, and Crusoe –
along with Friday – once again leaves home. Robinson Crusoe: analysis. Robinson Crusoe is a novel that is
probably more known about than it is read these days, and this leads to a skewed perception of what the book
is really about. In the popular imagination, Robinson Crusoe is a romantic adventure tale about a young man
who goes to sea to have exciting experiences, before finding himself alone on a desert island and accustoming
himself, gradually, to his surroundings, complete with a parrot for his companion. In reality, this is only
partially true (although he does befriend a parrot at one point). But the key to understanding Defoe’s novel is
its context: early eighteenth-century mercantilism and Enlightenment values founded on empiricism (i.e.
observing what’s really there) rather than some anachronistic Romantic worship of the senses, or ‘man’s
communion with his environment’. And talking of his environment, Crusoe spends the whole novel trying to
build a boat so he can escape his island, and leaves when the first ship comes along. While he’s there, he
bends the island’s natural resources to his own ends, rather than acclimatising to his alien surroundings. In this
respect, he’s not so different from a British person on holiday in Alicante, who thinks speaking English very
loudly at the Spanish waiter will do the job very nicely rather than attempting to converse in Spanish. And, of
course, the very reason Robinson Crusoe ends up shipwrecked is because he’s making a business trip, to
purchase slaves. As Gilbert Phelps observes (in his now rather outdated but still brilliantly readable
Introduction to Fifty British Novels, 1600-1900 (Reader’s Guides) ), the moment in the novel when
Robinson Crusoe shows the most emotion is probably when he’s back in England and discovers how rich his
plantations have made him. This tells us a great deal about Robinson Crusoe the man but also Robinson
Crusoe the novel. It was written at a time when Britain was beginning to expand its colonial sights, and it
would shortly become the richest and most powerful country on earth, thanks to its imperial expeditions in the
Caribbean, Africa, and parts of Asia, notably India. Crusoe embodies this pioneering mercantile spirit: he is
obsessed with money (he even picks up coins on his island and keeps them, even though he cannot spend
them), and takes great pleasure in the physical objects, such as the guns and powder, which he rescues from
the wreck. Man Friday is, in the last analysis, his own private servant. But was Robinson Crusoe the first such
‘Robinsonade’? Not really. This, from Martin Wainwright: ‘There is a tale for our troubled times about a man
on a desert island, who keeps goats, builds a shelter and finally discovers footprints in the sand. But it is not
called Robinson Crusoe. It was written by a wise old Muslim from Andalusia and is the third most translated
text from Arabic after the Koran and the Arabian Nights.’ That book is The Improvement of Human Reason:
Exhibited in the Life of Hai Ebn Yokdhan, known as the first Arabic novel (just as Robinson Crusoe is often
cited as the first English novel), written in the twelfth century by a Moorish philosopher living in Spain. Yes,
Robinson Crusoe wasn’t the first fictional narrative to take place on a desert island, although it has proved the
most influential among English writers. Although Defoe is widely believed to have been influenced by the
real-life experiences of the Scottish man Alexander Selkirk (who spent over four years alone on a Pacific
island, living on fish, berries, and wild goats), one important textual influence that has been proposed is Hai
Ebn Yokdhan’s book. Indeed, Defoe’s debt to the story of Alexander Selkirk as his source material for
Robinson Crusoe is almost certainly overplayed. Numerous scholars and historians, including Tim Severin in
his book Seeking Robinson Crusoe , have challenged this widely held belief. Severin cites the case of a
man named Henry Pitman, who wrote a short book recounting his adventures in the Caribbean (not the
Pacific, which is where Selkirk was marooned) following his escape from a penal colony and his subsequent
shipwrecking and survival on a desert island. AD: Pitman appears to have lived in the same area of London as
Defoe, and Defoe may have met Pitman in person and learned of his experiences first-hand. It is also
revealing that both men had taken part in the Monmouth Rebellion of 1685 (in the wake of which, at Judge
Jeffreys’ infamous ‘Bloody Assizes’, Defoe was lucky not to be sentenced to death).

9. Gulliver Travels
Gulliver’s Travels, first published in 1726 and written by Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), has been called one of
the first novels in English, one of the greatest satires in all of literature, and even children’s classic. Gulliver’s
Travels: summary. Gulliver’s Travels is structurally divided into four parts, each of which recounts the
adventures of the title character, a ship’s surgeon named Lemuel Gulliver, amongst some imaginary
fantastical land. In the first part, Gulliver is shipwrecked and knocked unconscious on the island of Lilliput,
which is inhabited by tiny people. They take Gulliver prisoner, tying him to the ground, and he encounters the
rival factions among the Lilliputians, such as the Big Endians and Little Endians, whose enmity started
because they disagree over which side of a boiled egg to cut. Then, he is enlisted into a campaign the
Lilliputians are waging against a neighbouring island, Blefuscu. Gulliver drags the enemy fleet ashore so their
invasion is foiled, and the Lilliputians honour and thank him – that is, until he refuses to be further drawn into
the two countries’ war, at which moment they turn against him. It doesn’t help when he urinates on a fire to
help put it out. Gulliver takes refuge on Blefuscu, until a boat is washed ashore and he uses it to return to
England, where he raises money for his family before embarking on a second voyage. This time, in the second
part of Gulliver’s Travels, our hero finds himself in Brobdingnag, a country which is inhabited by giants,
rather than miniature people. When his ship runs aground, it is attacked by giants, and Gulliver is taken
prisoner and given to the princess of Brobdingnag, a forty-feet-high girl named Glumdalclitch, as her
plaything. After arguing with the King over political matters – with Gulliver defending English attitudes and
the King mocking them – Gulliver is picked up by a giant eagle and plopped into the sea, where he is rescued
by a ship. In the third part of the novel, Gulliver finds himself taken prisoner once again, this time by pirates,
and taken to the floating island of Laputa. On a nearby island, Balnibarbi, he meets mad scientists and
inventors who are engaged in absurd experiments: trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers, or building a
house from the roof down. On a neighbouring island, Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver meets some magicians who can
summon the dead; they summon numerous historical figures for him, including Julius Caesar, Homer, and
Aristotle. After this, on the island of Luggnagg, Gulliver meets the Struldbrugs: creatures who are immortal.
However, this simply means they are foolish and weak than old men back in England, because they’ve had
much longer to develop more folly and more illnesses. Gulliver leaves Laputa behind, becoming a ship’s
captain and continuing his voyages. Next, he encounters apelike creatures who, when he attacks one of their
number, climb a tree and start discharging their excrement upon his head. (Excrement turns up a lot on
Gulliver’s Travels, and Swift seems to have been obsessed by it.) Gulliver is saved from a literal shower of sh
… dung by the arrival of a horse, but this turns out to be a horse endowed with reason and language. Indeed,
Gulliver soon learns that these horses rule this strange land: the horses, known as Houyhnhnms, are the
masters, and the apelike creatures, known as Yahoos, are their semi-wild slaves. What’s more, Gulliver is
horrified to learn that the Yahoos bear more than a passing resemblance to him, and to the human form! What
follows in this fourth part of the novel is a lengthy debate between Gulliver and the Houyhnhnms, who
repeatedly show up the folly or evil of human behaviour as Gulliver describes it to them: war, money, and the
legal system are all calmly but firmly taken apart by the intelligent horses. However, Gulliver comes to prefer
the company of the Houyhnhnms to the Yahoos, especially when he discovers, to his shock, that female
Yahoos are attracted to him as one of their own kind. Gulliver resolves to stay with his new equine friends and
shun humanity forever. He admires, above all else, the Houyhnhnms’ devotion to reason over baser instincts
or desires. But he is not allowed to stay with them for long. Fearing that he may inspire the Yahoos to rise up
against their horsy overlords, they tell him to leave, and Gulliver regretfully builds a boat, is picked up by a
Portuguese ship, and makes his way back to England. However, he struggles to readjust to human society,
after he has spent time among the Houyhnhnms, and he prefers to pass his time in the company of the horses
in his stable.

10. Portray of Dorian Gray

The Picture of Dorian Gray, moral fantasy novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde, published in an early form in
Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine in 1890. The novel, the only one written by Wilde, had six additional chapters
when it was released as a book in 1891. The work, an archetypal tale of a young man who purchases eternal
youth at the expense of his soul, was a romantic exposition of Wilde’s own Aestheticism.
Summary: The story begins in the art studio of Basil Hallward, who is discussing a current painting with his
witty and amoral friend Lord Henry Wotton. Henry thinks that the painting, a portrait of an extraordinarily
beautiful young man, should be displayed, but Basil disagrees, fearing that his obsession with the portrait’s
subject, Dorian Gray, can be seen in the work. Dorian then arrives, and he is fascinated as Henry explains his
belief that one should live life to the fullest by indulging one’s impulses. Henry also points out that beauty and
youth are fleeting, and Dorian declares that he would give his soul if the portrait were to grow old and
wrinkled while he remained young and handsome. Basil gives the painting to Dorian. Henry decides to take
on the project of molding Dorian’s personality. A few weeks later, Dorian tells Henry that he has fallen in
love with an actress, Sibyl Vane, because of her great beauty and acting talent. Henry and Basil go with him to
a dingy theatre to see Sibyl, but her performance is terrible. Sibyl explains to Dorian that now that she knows
what real love is, she can no longer pretend to be in love on stage. Dorian is repulsed and wants nothing
further to do with her. When he returns home, he sees a cruel expression on the face of his portrait, and he
decides to seek Sibyl’s forgiveness. Henry arrives the next day, however, with news that Sibyl committed
suicide the previous night, and he convinces Dorian that there is no reason for him to feel badly about it.
Dorian has the portrait removed to his attic. Henry sends Dorian a book that he finds poisonous and
fascinating (critics have suggested that it might be Against the Grain by Joris-Karl Huysmans). Under the
book’s influence, Dorian spends the next 18 years in the pursuit of capricious and sybaritic excess, and he
becomes increasingly drawn to evil. He frequently visits the portrait, noting the signs of aging and of
corruption that appear, though he himself remains unblemished. One evening he runs into Basil, who tells him
that there are rumours that he has destroyed the lives and reputations of many people. Dorian, however,
refuses to accept blame. Basil declares that he clearly does not know Dorian, who responds by taking him to
the attic to see the portrait. The painting has become horrifying. Basil tells Dorian that if this is a reflection of
his soul, he must repent and pray for forgiveness, and a suddenly enraged Dorian murders Basil. He
blackmails another former friend into disposing of the body. Dorian goes to an opium den, where Sibyl’s
vengeful brother, James, finds him, but the fact that Dorian still appears quite young dissuades him from
acting. However, another patron of the den later divulges Dorian’s age. At a subsequent hunting party at
Dorian’s country estate, one of the hunters accidentally shoots and kills James, who was hiding in a thicket.
Some weeks later Dorian tells Henry that he has decided to become virtuous and recently decided against
taking advantage of a young girl who was smitten with him. Dorian goes to see if the portrait has improved
because of his honourable act, but he sees rather that it has acquired a look of cunning. He decides to destroy
the portrait and stabs it with a knife. His servants hear a scream, and, when they arrive, they see a loathsome
old man dead on the floor with a knife in his chest and a portrait of the beautiful young man he once was.
11. Missis Warren’s Profession
Mrs. Warren's Profession is a play written by George Bernard Shaw in 1893, and first performed in London in
1902. The play is about a former prostitute, now a madam(brothel proprietor), who attempts to come to terms
with her disapproving daughter. It is a problem play, offering social commentary to illustrate Shaw's belief
that the act of prostitution was not caused by moral failure but by economic necessity. Elements of the play
were borrowed from Shaw's 1882 novel Cashel Byron's Profession, about a man who becomes a boxer due to
limited employment opportunities. Summary: The story centres on the relationship between Mrs Kitty
Warren and her daughter, Vivie. Mrs. Warren, a former prostitute and current brothel owner, is described as
"on the whole, a genial and fairly presentable old blackguard of a woman." Vivie, an intelligent and pragmatic
young woman who has just graduated from university, has come home to get acquainted with her mother for
the first time in her life.[1]The play focuses on how their relationship changes when Vivie learns what her
mother does for a living. It explains why Mrs. Warren became a prostitute, condemns the hypocrisies relating
to prostitution, and criticises the limited employment opportunities available for women in Victorian Britain.
Plot Vivie Warren, a thoroughly modern young woman, has just graduated from the University of Cambridge
with honours in Mathematics (equal Third Wrangler), and is available for suitors. Her mother, Mrs. Warren
(her name changed to hide her identity and give the impression that she is married), arranges for her to meet
her friend Mr. Praed, a middle- aged, handsome architect, at the home where Vivie is staying. Mrs. Warren
arrives with her business partner, Sir George Crofts, who is attracted to Vivie despite their 25-year age
difference. Vivie is romantically involved with the youthful Frank Gardner, who sees her as his meal ticket.
His father, the (married) Reverend Samuel Gardner, has a history with Vivie's mother. As we discover later,
he may be Vivie's out-of-wedlock father, which would make Vivie and Frank half-siblings. Mrs. Warren
successfully justifies to her daughter how she chose her particular profession in order to support her daughter
and give her the opportunities she never had. She saved enough money to buy into the business with her sister,
and she now owns (with Sir George) a chain of brothels across Europe. Vivie is, at first, horrified by the
revelation, but then lauds her mother as a champion. However, the reconciliation ends when Vivie finds out
that her mother continues to run the business even though she no longer needs to. Vivie takes an office job in
the city and dumps Frank, vowing she will never marry. She disowns her mother, and Mrs. Warren is left
heartbroken having looked forward to growing old with her daughter.

12. Oliver Twist

Oliver Twist, or the “Parish Boy's Progress”, is the second novel by Charles Dickens, and was first published
as a serial in 1837 until 1838. The story had some influence on social policy and contributed to the creation of
the modern system of workhouses. Oliver Twist is one of Dickens' most well-known novels and has been
adapted into various stage and screen versions. Many notable actors have portrayed the orphan Oliver
including Sir Alec Guinness in 1948 and Mark Lester who starred alongside Ron Moody as Fagin in 1968.
Here is our Oliver Twist summary, to help you understand the plot and its many ‘twists’ and turns:The story
begins in a Victorian workhouse. Oliver Twist is a young orphan. His life in the workhouse is lonely and sad.
Oliver becomes an apprentice for an undertaker but runs away after he gets into a fight with another
apprentice. When Oliver arrives in London, he meets Jack, also known as the Artful Dodger, who offers him a
place to stay. Unfortunately, Jack and his gang are pickpockets, who work for an unscrupulous career criminal
called Fagin. When Oliver sees the others pick the pocket of an elderly gentleman, he is horrified and runs
away. A kind man called Mr Brownlow takes Oliver in and looks after him. Sadly it isn’t “happily ever after”
for poor Oliver as Fagin and his gang reappear and capture him. They force Oliver to take part in a robbery
and he gets shot. A family called the Maylies nurse Oliver back to health. They take him to see Mr. Brownlow
when he's well enough, but they discover his home deserted—he has emigrated to the West Indies.
Meanwhile, Fagin and his elusive associate Monks are still looking for Oliver, to no avail. One day, after
having a nightmare in which he sees them through his window, Oliver wakes up to find them gazing at him.
He raises the alarm, but they flee before he can stop them. Nancy hears Fagin and Monks talking. She decides
she needs to tell Rose what she knows. Nancy tells the truth to Rose that Monks is Oliver's half-brother, who
has been trying to hurt him so he can get all of his inheritance money. Rose tells Mr Brownlow and he goes to
tell Oliver's other caretakers. They decide they need to meet Nancy again so they can find Monks. Nancy
meets them on London Bridge at a prearranged time, but Fagin is suspicious and has sent Noah Claypole to
spy on her. Nancy still won't betray Fagin or Sikes, but she tells Rose and Mr Brownlow how to find Monks.
Noah tells Fagin about every piece of information that he knows. Fagin then tells Sikes even though he knows
that telling him what he knows will result in Sikes trying to kill her. Mr Brownlow finds Monks and Monks
admits that Oliver's birth was not what first appeared to be true. Sikes is trying to run away, but people are
looking for him. He falls off a building and dies. Fagin gets arrested and gets a visit from Oliver, after which
he is executed. Oliver, Mr Brownlow, and the Maylies end up living peacefully in a small village in England.
Oliver is between nine and twelve years old when the main action of the novel occurs. Though treated with
cruelty and surrounded by coarseness for most of his life, he is a pious, innocent child, and his charms draw
the attention of several wealthy benefactors

13. Jane Eyre

Jane Eyre, novel by Charlotte Brontë, first published in 1847 as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, with Currer
Bell (Brontë’s pseudonym) listed as the editor. Widely considered a classic, it gave new truthfulness to the
Victorian novel with its realistic portrayal of the inner life of a woman, noting her struggles with her natural
desires and social condition.When the novel begins, the title character is a 10-year-old orphan who lives with
her uncle’s family; her parents had died of typhus. Other than the nursemaid, the family ostracizes Jane. She is
later sent to the austere Lowood Institution, a charity school, where she and the other girls are mistreated;
“Lowood,” as the name suggests, is the “low” point in Jane’s young life. In the face of such adversity,
however, she gathers strength and confidence.In early adulthood, after several years as a student and then
teacher at Lowood, Jane musters the courage to leave. She finds work as a governess at Thornfield Hall,
where she meets her dashing and Byronic employer, the wealthy and impetuous Edward Rochester. At
Thornfield Jane looks after young Adèle, the daughter of a French dancer who was one of Rochester’s
mistresses, and is befriended by the kindly housekeeper Mrs. Alice Fairfax. Jane falls in love with Rochester,
though he is expected to marry the snobbish and socially prominent Blanche Ingram. Rochester eventually
reciprocates Jane’s feelings and proposes marriage. However, on their wedding day, Jane discovers that
Rochester cannot legally marry her, because he already has a wife, Bertha Mason, who has gone mad and is
locked away on the third floor because of her violent behaviour; her presence explains the strange noises Jane
has heard in the mansion. Believing that he was tricked into that marriage, Rochester feels justified in
pursuing his relationship with Jane. He pleads with her to join him in France, where they can live as husband
and wife despite the legal prohibitions, but Jane refuses on principle and flees Thornfield. Jane is taken in by
people she later discovers are her cousins. One of them is St. John, a principled clergyman. He gives her a job
and soon proposes marriage, suggesting that she join him as a missionary in India. Jane initially agrees to
leave with him but not as his wife. However, St. John pressures her to reconsider his proposal, and a wavering
Jane finally appeals to Heaven to show her what to do. Just then, she hears a mesmeric call from Rochester.
Jane returns to Thornfield to find the estate burned, set on fire by Rochester’s wife, who then jumped to her
death. Rochester, in an attempt to save her, was blinded. Reunited, Jane and Rochester marry. Rochester later
regains some of his sight, and the couple have a son. The book was originally published in three volumes as
Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, with Currer Bell listed as the editor. (The Lowood section of the novel was
widely believed to be inspired by Charlotte Brontë’s own life.) Though some complained that it was anti-
Catholic, the work was an immediate success. Jane Eyre’s appeal was partly due to the fact that it was written
in the first person and often addressed the reader, creating great immediacy. In addition, Jane is an
unconventional heroine, an independent and self-reliant woman who overcomes both adversity and societal
norms. The novel also notably blended diverse genres. Jane’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty
belongs very firmly to the mode of moral realism. However, her close escape from a bigamous marriage and
the fiery death of Bertha are part of the Gothic tradition.

14. Vanity Fair

William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) was a British novelist, author and
illustrator. He is known for his satirical works, particularly his 1848 novel Vanity Fair, a panoramic portrait of
British society, and the 1844 novel The Luck of Barry Lyndon, which was adapted for a 1975 film by Stanley
Kubrick. Thackeray, an only child, was born in Calcutta,[1] British India, where his father, Richmond
Thackeray (1 September 1781 – 13 September 1815), was secretary to the Board of Revenue in the East India
Company. His mother, Anne Becher (1792–1864), was the second daughter of Harriet Becher and John
Harman Becher, who was also a secretary (writer) for the East India Company.His father was a grandson of
Thomas Thackeray (1693–1760), headmaster of Harrow School. Vanity Fair is an English novel by William
Makepeace Thackeray, which follows the lives of Becky Sharp and Amelia Sedley amid their friends and
families during and after the Napoleonic Wars. It was first published as a 19-volume monthly serial from 1847
to 1848, carrying the subtitle Pen and Pencil Sketches of English Society, which reflects both its satirisation of
early 19th-century British society and the many illustrations drawn by Thackeray to accompany the text.
Vanity Fair follows the lives of Becky Sharp, a strong-willed, penniless young woman, and her friend Amelia
'Emmy' Sedley, a good-natured wealthy young woman. Set against the backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars,
Vanity Fair charts the girls' misadventures in love, marriage and family. Becky, manipulative, witty, and
amoral, is Emmy's opposite, while Emmy, initially presented as the novel's heroine, is passive, sweet, likeable
and a pawn to her family's wishes. Becky, forced to become a governess by circumstances, marries wealthy,
while Emmy marries George a man disinherited by his prejudiced father. Critics of the time discussed Vanity
Fair's misanthropic view of society, while later critics have called attention to the novel's depiction of the
commodification of women in a capitalist society.

15. Don Juan

In English literature, Don Juan (1819–1824), by Lord Byron, is a satirical, epic poem that portrays the Spanish
legend of Don Juan not as a womaniser, but as a man easily seduced by women. As genre literature, Don Juan
is an epic poem, written in ottava rima and presented in sixteen cantos.Don Juan, fictitious character who is a
symbol of libertinism. Originating in popular legend, he was first given literary personality in the tragic drama
El burlador de Sevilla (1630; “The Seducer of Seville,” translated in The Trickster of Seville and the Stone
Guest), attributed to the Spanish dramatist Tirso de Molina. Through Tirso’s tragedy, Don Juan became an
archetypcal character in the West, as familiar as Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust. Subsequently, he became
the hero-villain of plays, novels, and poems; his legend was assured enduring popularity through Mozart’s
opera Don Giovanni (1787), and it would continue to live on, by the 20th century, in movies and other media.
The legend of Don Juan tells how, at the height of his licentious career, he seduced a girl of noble family and
killed her father, who had tried to avenge her. Later, seeing a commemorative effigy on the father’s tomb, he
flippantly invited it to dine with him, and the stone ghost duly arrived for dinner as a harbinger of Don Juan’s
death. In the original Spanish tragedy, Don Juan’s attractive qualities—his vitality, his arrogant courage, and
his sense of humour—heighten the dramatic value of the catastrophe. The power of the drama derives from its
rapid pace, the impression it gives of cumulative tension as Don Juan’s enemies gradually hound him to
destruction, and the awareness that the Don is goaded to defy even the ghostly forces of the unknown. In the
end he refuses to repent and is eternally damned.
Lord Byron’s Don Juan is a satiric poem inspired by the legendary story of Don Juan, the famous womanizer.
Byron, however, changes the focus and paints Don Juan as a figure who is easy prey to women’s romantic
advances. The poem consists of sixteen cantos although an unfinished seventeenth was in progress at the time
of Byron’s death in 1824. When early parts of the poem first appeared, they were popular and, at the same
time, branded as immoral by some. The format of the poem is a rhyme scheme of ababab cc in eight-line
iambic pentameter with the rhyme pattern falling under the tradition known as ottavarima. The opening Canto
finds Don Juan living in Seville with his parents: Jose, his father, and Donna Inez,his mother. The married
Donna Julia, who, at twenty-three, is seven years Don Juan’s senior, falls in love with Juan and begins an
affair with him. Julia’s husband, Don Alfonso, is suspicious and bursts into the bedroom where he does not
find Juan who is hiding in the bed. Later, Alfonso finds Juan’s shoes and a fight takes place. As a result, Juan
is sent by his mother to travel to learn better conduct, while Julia is banished to a nunnery. Juan heads for
Cadiz with servants and Pedrillo, his tutor, in tow. Juan has not moved on from his love for Julia. When the
ship he is on sinks in a storm and food on its accompanying long boat runs out, the crew draws lots to decide
who will be eaten. After eating Juan’s dog, Pedrillo is selected. Those who eat him die from a resulting
madness. Juan is the only survivor, and once he gets to land,he is taken in by Haidee and Zoe, her maid.
Haidee is the daughter of Lambro, a pirate who makes his living capturing slaves. Although Haidee and Juan
cannot understand each other’s language, they fall in love. Upon returning from a voyage, Lambro and his
fellow pirates attack Juan. Juan is sent off on a ship to Constantinople, where he finds himself in a slave
market. Meanwhile, a pregnant Haidee dies of a broken heart for the loss of Juan. While in the slave market,
Juan is sold to a black eunuch named Baba from the palace who takes him to a chamber. He threatens to
castrate Juan if he does not dress as a woman. Juan is later brought to meet Gulbeyaz, the beautiful fourth
wife, and the favorite, of the sultan. It turns out that it was she who noticed Juan in the market and had Baba
secretly purchase him for her, without regard to the wrath of the sultan that would ensue should she be found
out. She offers herself to Juan who rejects her, still being in love with Haidee. She considers having him
beheaded but just reacts tearfully to her situation. Shortly, the sultan enters the scene. When the sultan and
Gulbeyaz retire for the evening, Juan, in his disguise as a woman, is taken to the crowded seraglio, the
women’s quarters in the palace. As the evening unfolds, Juan, calling himself Juanna, is assigned to share a
bed with seventeen-year-old Dudu, an attractive young woman who has an unsettling dream during the night.
When again Juan is threatened with death due to reactions the next day, he, another man named John, and
two women escape and make their way to Ismail, a Turkish fort at the Danube on the Black Sea. A battle is
taking place; Suvaroff, a Russian army field marshal, has orders to take Ismail, doing whatever the task
requires. Juan and John are prepared to join Suvaroff in battle against the Turks. The two men are active in
the rampage against Ismail, which leads to the deaths of forty thousand Turks. When Juan rescues a Muslim
girl of ten from Cossacks who were going to kill her, he decides to adopt her. A hero of war, Juan, along with
the young girl, is sent to Saint Petersburg. When Catherine II sees Juan in her court, she immediately desires
him. He finds her attention flattering and receives a promotion. Juan continues to take care of the girl he
rescued. In time, Juan is taken ill as a result of the Russian climate and is sent to England where conditions
are more agreeable. He is given the title special envoy; the move is really just a way for Catherine to have
him regain his health and for her to continue lavishing him with gifts. In London, Juan has an altercation with
a mugger, whom he shoots. He feels responsible for the man and attempts to care for him, but to no avail; the
mugger dies in the street. Juan begins looking for an acceptable guardian for the orphan from Ismail, Leila.
He selects Lady Pinchbeck. Juan meets Lady Adeline Amundeville and Lord Henry Amundeville. Issues of
diplomacy bring Juan and Lord Henry together frequently and celebrations take place at the Amundeville
home. Juan does well in a fox hunt and continues to win the favor of the women around him, including the
flirtatious Duchess Fitz-Fulke, who makes Lady Adeline jealous. Juan also meets and is taken with sixteen-
year-old Aurora Raby, who reminds him of Haidee. In bed one night Juan hears a noise in the hall and sees a
monk. He cannot decide if it is a ghost or a dream. From his look the next day, Lord Henry assumes Juan has
seen the Black Friar. At a banquet following the incident, Aurora and Juan exchange looks. In bed that night,
he thinks of her and of the feelings he has suppressed in himself since Haidee. Again he hears footsteps in the
hall and finds the Friar wearing a hood. The “ghost” Juan finds out, is the Duchess Fitz-Fulke.

16. Restoration comedy

Restoration literature is the English literature written during the historical period commonly referred to as the
English Restoration (1660–1689), which corresponds to the last years of the direct Stuart reign in England,
Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In general, the term is used to denote roughly homogeneous styles of literature
that center on a celebration of or reaction to the restored court of Charles II. It is a literature that includes
extremes, for it encompasses both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high-spirited comedy
of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of The Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Treatises of
Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments and holy meditations of Robert Boyle, the
hysterical attacks on theaters from Jeremy Collier, and the pioneering of literary criticism from John Dryden
and John Dennis. The period witnessed news become a commodity, the essay developed into a periodical art
form, and the beginnings of textual criticism. The dates for Restoration literature are a matter of convention,
and they differ markedly from genre to genre. Thus, the "Restoration" in drama may last until 1700, while in
poetry it may last only until 1666 (see 1666 in poetry) and the annus mirabilis; and in prose it might end in
1688, with the increasing tensions over succession and the corresponding rise in journalism and periodicals, or
not until 1700, when those periodicals grew more stabilized. In general, scholars use the term "Restoration" to
denote the literature that began and flourished under Charles II, whether that literature was the laudatory ode
that gained a new life with restored aristocracy, the eschatological literature that showed an increasing despair
among Puritans, or the literature of rapid communication and trade that followed in the wake of England's
mercantile empire.

17. The new orthodoxy

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual
movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the
approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and
individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the
classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature - all components of modernity. It was
embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,
education, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, and while for much of
the Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effect on the growth of
nationalism was perhaps more significant. The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source
of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe
—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of
nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable
characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the
Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as
authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.

18. Influence of France and Germany

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new
emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe—especially that experienced in
confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient
custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In
contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and
elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth,
early urban sprawl, and industrialism. Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang
movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and
ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the
achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of
society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical
notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the
representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to
Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including
social and political changes and the spread of nationalism.

19. Social problems in drama

Towards the end of the Victorian age the drama of social problems came into prominence in England. The
problem play was the presentation of a contemporary question through realistic technique. The dramatists
writing plays of social criticism made a conscious effort to deal with problems of contemporary society and
morality. The drama which was directly inspired by the social ferment of the time could be effective only if it
adopted a realistic form or medium, because problem drama required a high level of craftsmanship and
dramaturgic skill. The problem play was a new experiment in form and technique, and dispensed with the
conventional devices and expedients of the Victorian era, was closely related to the growth of the realistic
movement in the field of English drama. Realism in English drama is as old as the ‘mysteries’ and ‘moralities’
which sometimes introduced realistic situations and characters from humble rustic life. Dekker’s The Honest
whore and The shoemakers Holiday are realistic drama. The Elizabethan tradition of realistic drama was
revived in the sentimental drama in the 18th century. Racism once again became a revitalizing current in
English drama in the second half of Victorian era. It was largely felt that the essence of drama was the faithful
presentation of life. The term “problem play” was coined by Sydney Grundy who used it in a disparaging
sense for the intellectual drama of the nineties. Shaw defined it as “The presentation parable of the conflict
between man’s will and his movement”. The problem play deals with problems. Eric Bentley finds the
justification of the world’ problem’ on the ground that the play ends with a question mark. He says that the
dramatist’s business is to state his problem clearly and effectively, and not to present a readymade solution or
to suggest a specific remedy. The problem play is supposed to have arisen out of the sentimental drama of the
18th century and often been identified with” serious drama”. The problem drama essentially differs from
tragedy, even though it deals with serious issues it normally exhibits ideas, situations and feeling that lack
tragic dimensions. Henry Arthur Jones believed that the drama should parade social criticism. He began a
light probing at Victorian convention as early as the eighties with Breaking a Butterfly (1885) based on
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879). He further produced Saints and sinners (1894), The crusaders (1893) and The
case of Rebellious Susan (1894).

20. Modern British drama

Modern British Drama is a period of literature that can be difficult to place within a distinct beginning and
end. Although the beginning of Modern British Drama has no specific start date, Christopher Isben, the author
of Modern British Drama The Twentieth Century, provides an untried timeline of events that follows Modern
British Drama's history. According to Isben, 1890 marks the beginning of Modern British Drama with George
Bernard Shaw’s attack on the most previous, Victorian era. Around this time, the arts were expressing the
need for a change in the disposition and role of theatre. Britain no longer wanted to follow the traditional
genres seen on stage; they rejected logical structures and reasoning. Rather, writers wanted to use an approach
that went beyond sheer entertainment; something that generated a message and spoke about society. On stage,
Modern British Drama began to mirror everyday life. It took on an "anti-illusionistic" portrayal of the world.
The characters tended to embody characteristics that epitomized humankind as a whole. Clearly, realism
appears to be the ultimate driving theme throughout Modern British Drama. Almost every play I saw in
London, during the summer of 2011, demonstrated some element of social realism. For instance, Betrayal,
Pygmalion, Act without Words, II and War Horse are plays that posses elements of realism and naturalism;
they link characters, setting, and props to various social contexts. Specifically, Samuel Beckett’s Act without
Words, II is so blatantly vague, that his desire to address all humankind is made undisguised. Betrayal, based
off of Harold Pinter’s real life love affair, instinctively highlights the play’s realistic nature. Furthermore, the
overall plot is one that anyone could easily relate to and understand. The play's costumes, props, and setting
were simple, average, and reflected everyday life. Pygmalion is entirely focused on the British social
structure, from language to etiquette. The basic storyline questions values, materialism, and social status, all
of which are actual issues the average person must deal with, in society. War Horse touches on a more
political subject matter through the depiction of war and its effects on nature, humankind, and an entire nation.
Throughout War Horse, Michael Morpurgo displays the terrible after effects of war and its damage to people,
nature, and society. Morpurgo utilizes his story to highlight the devastating effects of a corrupt and flawed
culture, government, and social structure.

21. The Utopian novel

The years around the termination of World War II (1945) constitute something like a watershed in the history
of the English novel. Both Virginia Woolf and James Joyce, who were among the greatest of the Modernists,
died in 1941. And it seemed that a great era had come to an end with them. Thereafter is a perceptible decline
in the British novel. The post-Ulysses novel lacks, what Karl Calls, “the moral urgency of a Conrad, the
verbal gifts and wit of a Joyce, the vitality and all-consuming obsession of a Lawrence.” On the whole, there
has been less of experiment and innovation in the post-1950 English novel and more and. more of
parochialization and what is called “Little Englandism,” Lacking the force and originality of their great
Modern predecessors, the English novelists of recent years sometimes look like feeble imitators of the giants
gone by. “One common characteristic” of most novelists of recent years is, in Karl’s words, “their inability to
deepen and develop with time. When Elizabeth Bovven, for example, experiments in The Heat of the Day, she
does little more than what Virginia Woolf had tried in Mrs Dallowayfifteen years earlier. When Joyce Gary in
The Horse’sMouth and elsewhere tampers with language, he barely scrapes the surface of what Joyce
attempted with words. When Durrell talks about love in his Alexandria Quartet, he points towards but hardly
reaches Lawrence’s examination of love. When Graham Green uses moral issues without a religious frame of
reference, he is dealing with a subject that many nineteenth-century novelists wrote about extensively and
with greater range.” Provincialization: Karl’s wholesale deprecation of the recent and contemporary English
novelists seems to ignore the work of some genuine and bold experimenters and innovators like Beckett,
Fowles, B.S. Johnson, and Golding who have made solid contributions to both the range and technique of the
novel. We shall consider these novelists later. Here let us point out a feature of recent British novel—its
growing provincialism and tendency to sever international links. Interestingly, while the novel in other
countries—such as France, America. Germany, and even India to some extent—is becoming more
international, the novel in England is becoming parochial and provincial. Earlier English novelist were much
more catholic than their descendents. Take Lawrence for example— the most English of English novelists.
And yet look at his range and the breadth of his mind. He has written novels set in please about Mexico.
Australia, and Italy. The growing narrow English outlook is well represented by Kingsley Amis in his novel
with the suggestive title I Like It Here (1958) which in,the words of Bradbury and Palmer “deveoted itself to
mocking the experimental and expatriate tradition in the novel, blamed on Henry James, and celebrating the
common-sensical realist. English virtues of Henry Fielding while indicating how much better England was
than anywhere fancy abroad.” Most new English novelists were not much bothered by the dilemmas of
Existentialism and Absurdism, nor were they keen to experiment with new fictional forms. Karl trenchantly
remarks : “The novel in Joyce’s hands was internationalized; in Gary’s and Waugh’s Anglicized.”

22. The war novel

Samuel Beckett (1906-89) is indeed among the most daring of recent novelists. According to Andrew Piasecki
“Beckett is one of the most singular and original writers to appear in English, or possibly in France, since
1945.” A friend and associate of the Irish expatriate James Joyce, he was greatly influenced by him as also by
the French novelist Marcel Proust. His fascination for words and his use of the stream-of-consciousness
technique are strongly suggestive of the influence of Joyce. Beckett is better known as a dramatist than as a
novelist: his play Waiting for Godot is a modern classic, a locus classicus of Modernist Absurd drama. His
vision as a novelist too is strongly laced with Absurdism and even Nihilism. In his 1950s trilogy
comprisingMolloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable aged outcasts tell their own stories with grimness and
black humour which underline the futility of their pastime. Beckett’s novels, in the words of Andrew Roberts,
“represent the ultimate breakdown of the classic realist novel.” John Fowles (1926- ) carries on Beckett’s
exploration of the possibilities and nature of narrative and fictionality. His distinguished work The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) is of the nature of a pastiche combining passages in the nineteenth-century
novelistic style, quotations from sociological reports, frequent authorial comments, passages from Darwin,
Marx, Arnold, and Tennyson, and so on. In the course of the “novel” (if it may be called one), the author
himself becomes a character. And last but not least, Fowles offers two alternative endings, inviting the reader
to choose the one he likes. B. S. Johnson (1933-73) went farther than Fowles in making daring experiments
with the form of the novel. His overwhelming interest in the nature of narrative and fictionality together with
his penchant for Postmodernist techniques makes him an avant-garde author of recent times. He is credited
with the attempt to write a “non-fictional novel” in See the Old Lady Decently (1979) by making use of
authentic documents and photographs.The Unfortunates (1969) is another path-breaker. It comprises twenty-
seven loose-leaf sections, twenty-five of which may be read in any order, almost like the five sections of
Eliot’s The Waste Land. Johnson’s intention seems to highlight the arbitrariness of the structure of fictionality
as also the radical circularity of the mind. The two directions in which English experimental novel of recent
years have progressed are, according to Andrew Roberts, “documentary objectivity” and “perspectivism.” The
Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) of Lawrence Durrell (1912-90) represents both these directions. The intricate
relationships within a community are intimated by a variety of narratives with different perspectives.

23. Historical novel

Retaining the socio-moral moves of the novel and its classic form, the traditionalists, too, made substantial
contribution to the English novel. Let us consider a few of them. First, we have the group Of novelists like
Angus Wilson (1913-91), and C.P. Snow (1905- 80) who carried on the tradition of social analysis, criticism,
and satire of their predecessors like Huxley and Waugh. Wilson’s characters have a vast variety and all of
them are rooted in the soil. Snow is known for his series of eleven novels Strangers and Brothers (1940-70).
He is good at delineating the conflict between personal ambition and social conscience. He was a great
champion of science and technology as against literature. This made him the bete noire of writers like F. R.
Leavis. The 1950s also saw the emergence of the so-called “angry young men” who employed both drama and
the novel for ventilating their criticism of English middle-class values and institutions. In the 1950s middle-
class respectable values were getting eroded by a large number of disaffected youth who were jobless and
were becoming angry with almost everything time-honoured— morality, religion, parental authority, social
stratification, and so on. The “angry young men” include novelists like Alan Sillitoe (1928- ), John
Braine( 1922- ), John Wain (1925-), Stan Barstow( 1928- ), and David Storey (1933- ).

24. Commonwealth novelists

Moral Philosophers: Finally, there is the important group of novelists like Graham Greene (1904-91), William
Golding (1911-93), Iris Murdoch (1919-), and Muriel Spark (1918- ) who are partly experimentalists and
partly traditionalists, but whose main contribution is their deep metaphysical exploration of the foundations of
morality and the nature of good and evil both in human and nonhuman contexts. Greene does not merely
depict right and wrong but fundamental good and evil. Instead of Original Sin he seems to believe in Original
Charity as the chief characteristic of man. Golding has shown impressive technical virtuosity as well as
metaphysical profundity in his novels. While novels likePincher Martin (which attempts to delineate the post-
mortem. experiences of the protagonist) manifest the fonner, others like Lord of the Flies amply show the
latter. The novels of Iris Murdoch, who is a philosopher as well as a novelist, have considerable variety. She
addresses herself to the existential issues of identity and freedom as also ethical problems. Andrew Roberts
observes about her: “Although her works are novels of ideas, they combine this with exciting and sometimes
macabre plots, elements of the grotesque and supernatural and touches of social comedy.” Muriel Spark
appropriately started her career as a novelist with The Comforters (1957) which, in her own words, is “a novel
about writing a novel.” Her later fiction combines the comic and the sinister. Her novellas such as The
Driver’s Seat (1970) are extremely precise and concise in form and style and still some others show the
influence of Golding.

25. Literary Theory

"Literary theory," sometimes designated "critical theory," or "theory," and now undergoing a transformation
into "cultural theory" within the discipline of literary studies, can be understood as the set of concepts and
intellectual assumptions on which rests the work of explaining or interpreting literary texts. Literary theory
refers to any principles derived from internal analysis of literary texts or from knowledge external to the text
that can be applied in multiple interpretive situations. All critical practice regarding literature depends on an
underlying structure of ideas in at least two ways: theory provides a rationale for what constitutes the subject
matter of criticism—"the literary"—and the specific aims of critical practice—the act of interpretation itself.
For example, to speak of the "unity" of Oedipus the King explicitly invokes Aristotle's theoretical statements
on poetics. To argue, as does Chinua Achebe, that Joseph Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness fails to grant full
humanity to the Africans it depicts is a perspective informed by a postcolonial literary theory that presupposes
a history of exploitation and racism. Critics that explain the climactic drowning of Edna Pontellier in The
Awakening as a suicide generally call upon a supporting architecture of feminist and gender theory. The
structure of ideas that enables criticism of a literary work may or may not be acknowledged by the critic, and
the status of literary theory within the academic discipline of literary studies continues to evolve. Literary
theory and the formal practice of literary interpretation runs a parallel but less well known course with the
history of philosophy and is evident in the historical record at least as far back as Plato. The Cratylus contains
a Plato's meditation on the relationship of words and the things to which they refer. Plato’s skepticism about
signification, i.e., that words bear no etymological relationship to their meanings but are arbitrarily "imposed,"
becomes a central concern in the twentieth century to both "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism." However,
a persistent belief in "reference," the notion that words and images refer to an objective reality, has provided
epistemological (that is, having to do with theories of knowledge) support for theories of literary
representation throughout most of Western history. Until the nineteenth century, Art, in Shakespeare’s phrase,
held "a mirror up to nature" and faithfully recorded an objectively real world independent of the observer.
Modern literary theory gradually emerges in Europe during the nineteenth century. In one of the earliest
developments of literary theory, German "higher criticism" subjected biblical texts to a radical historicizing
that broke with traditional scriptural interpretation. "Higher," or "source criticism," analyzed biblical tales in
light of comparable narratives from other cultures, an approach that anticipated some of the method and spirit
of twentieth century theory, particularly "Structuralism" and "New Historicism." In France, the eminent
literary critic Charles AugustinSaint Beuve maintained that a work of literature could be explained entirely in
terms of biography, while novelist Marcel Proust devoted his life to refuting Saint Beuve in a massive
narrative in which he contended that the details of the life of the artist are utterly transformed in the work of
art. (This dispute was taken up anew by the French theorist Roland Barthes in his famous declaration of the
"Death of the Author." See "Structuralism" and "Poststructuralism.") Perhaps the greatest nineteenth century
influence on literary theory came from the deep epistemological suspicion of Friedrich Nietzsche: that facts
are not facts until they have been interpreted. Nietzsche's critique of knowledge has had a profound impact on
literary studies and helped usher in an era of intense literary theorizing that has yet to pass. Attention to the
etymology of the term "theory," from the Greek "theoria," alerts us to the partial nature of theoretical
approaches to literature. "Theoria" indicates a view or perspective of the Greek stage. This is precisely what
literary theory offers, though specific theories often claim to present a complete system for understanding
literature. The current state of theory is such that there are many overlapping areas of influence, and older
schools of theory, though no longer enjoying their previous eminence, continue to exert an influence on the
whole. The once widelyheld conviction (an implicit theory) that literature is a repository of all that is
meaningful and ennobling in the human experience, a view championed by the Leavis School in Britain, may
no longer be acknowledged by name but remains an essential justification for the current structure of
American universities and liberal arts curricula. The moment of "Deconstruction" may have passed, but its
emphasis on the indeterminacy of signs (that we are unable to establish exclusively what a word means when
used in a given situation) and thus of texts, remains significant. Many critics may not embrace the label
"feminist," but the premise that gender is a social construct, one of theoretical feminisms distinguishing
insights, is now axiomatic in a number of theoretical perspectives. While literary theory has always implied or
directly expressed a conception of the world outside the text, in the twentieth century three movements
—"Marxist theory" of the Frankfurt School, "Feminism," and "Postmodernism"—have opened the field of
literary studies into a broader area of inquiry. Marxist approaches to literature require an understanding of the
primary economic and social bases of culture since Marxist aesthetic theory sees the work of art as a product,
directly or indirectly, of the base structure of society. Feminist thought and practice analyzes the production of
literature and literary representation within the framework that includes all social and cultural formations as
they pertain to the role of women in history. Postmodern thought consists of both aesthetic and
epistemological strands. Postmodernism in art has included a move toward non-referential, non-linear,
abstract forms; a heightened degree of self-referentiality; and the collapse of categories and conventions that
had traditionally governed art. Postmodern thought has led to the serious questioning of the so-called
metanarratives of history, science, philosophy, and economic. Under postmodernity, all knowledge comes to
be seen as "constructed" within historical self-contained systems of understanding. Marxist, feminist, and
postmodern thought have brought about the incorporation of all human discourses (that is, interlocking fields
of language and knowledge) as a subject matter for analysis by the literary theorist. Using the various
poststructuralist and postmodern theories that often draw on disciplines other than the literary—linguistic,
anthropological, psychoanalytic, and philosophical—for their primary insights, literary theory has become an
interdisciplinary body of cultural theory. Taking as its premise that human societies and knowledge consist of
texts in one form or another, cultural theory (for better or worse) is now applied to the varieties of texts,
ambitiously undertaking to become the preeminent model of inquiry into the human condition. Literary theory
is a site of theories: some theories, like "Queer Theory," are "in;" other literary theories, like
"Deconstruction," are "out" but continue to exert an influence on the field. "Traditional literary criticism,"
"New Criticism" and "Structuralism" are alike in that they held to the view that the study of literature has an
objective body of knowledge under its scrutiny. The other schools of literary theory, to varying degrees,
embrace a postmodern view of language and reality that calls into serious question the objective referent of
literary studies. The following categories are certainly not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive, but
they represent the major trends in literary theory of this century.

26. The First English Literature

The history of English Literature begins with the Germanic tradition of the Anglo-Saxon settlers. Beowulf is
the earliest and most popular work in Old English Literature. As the Normans conquested England, Middle
English replaced the Old English and was used by the father of English Literature, Geoffrey Chaucer in his
famous work, The Canterbury Tales. William Shakespeare came to be considered as the most iconic and
greatest writer in the history of English Literature as he is revered for his legendary plays and sonnets. Also,
download the history of English Literature PDF to read about the exciting history and evolution of the greatest
literary works.The oldest English literature was in Old English which is the earliest form of English and is a
set of Anglo-Frisian dialects. The history of English Literature is spread over different eras including Old
English or Anglo Saxon, The Renaissance, Victorian Era, Modern Era, Postmodern era, amongst others.
The most important 8 periods of English Literature are: 1. Old English (Anglo-Saxon Period): 450–1066; 2.
Middle English Period: 1066-1500; 3. Renaissance: 1500-1600; 4. Neoclassical Period: 1600-1785; 5.
Romantic Period: 1785-1832; 6. Victorian Age: 1832-1901; 7. Edwardian Period: 1901-1914; 8.
Georgian Period: 1910-1936; 9. Modern Period: Early 20th century; 10. Postmodern Period: Mid-20th
century. Geoffrey Chaucer Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1340s – 25 October 1400) was an English poet, author, and
civil servant best known for The Canterbury, who is the first father of English literature.

27. Anglo-Norman literature

Anglo-Norman literature was a verse literature in which we find a love for word play. The tone was lighter
and the themes romantic. Even when the subject was an imaginary historical or religious figure, the overall
effect remained romantic. Imagination and fancy ruled the day. These were stories of love and adventure.
Geoffrey of Monmouth related the tale of King Arthur. Soon other found the Arthurian legend great fodder for
their stories. Even historical accounts lost their “factual” presentation. Layamon told the history of Britain in
rhyme. “Layamon’s Brut (ca. 1190-1215) is a Middle English poem. At a little over 16,000 lines, it was the
first historiography written in English since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.The story line for Brut follows the
mythical founder of Britain, Brutus of Troy. It is based on the Anglo-Norman poem, Roman de Brut by Wace,
which was a version of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin Historia Regum Britanniae. “The versification of the
Brut has proven extremely difficult to characterise. Written in a loose alliterative style, sporadically deploying
rhyme as well as a caesural pause between the hemistichs of a line, it is perhaps closer to the rhythmical prose
of Ælfric of Eynsham than to verse, especially in comparison with later alliterative writings such as Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight and Piers Plowman. Layamon’s alliterating verse is difficult to analyse,
seemingly avoiding the more formalised styles of the later poets.“Layamon’s Middle English at times includes
modern Anglo-Norman language: the scholar Roger Loomis counted 150 words derived from Anglo-Norman
in its 16,000 long-lines. It is remarkable for itsabundant Anglo-Saxon vocabulary; deliberately archaic Saxon
forms that were quaint even by Anglo-Saxon standards. Imitations in the Brut of certain stylistic and prosodic
features of Old English alliterative verse show a knowledge and interest in preserving its conventions.”

28. Geoffrey Chaucer and English Literature

Geoffrey Chaucer, (born c. 1342/43, London?, England— died October 25, 1400, London), the outstanding
English poet before Shakespeare and “the first finder of our language.” His The Canterbury Tales ranks as one
of the greatest poetic works in English. He also contributed importantly in the second half of the 14th century
to the management of public affairs as courtier, diplomat, and civil servant. In that career he was trusted and
aided by three successive kings—Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. But it is his avocation—the writing of
poetry—for which he is remembered. Perhaps the chief characteristics of Chaucer’s works are their variety in
subject matter, genre, tone, and style and in the complexities presented concerning the human pursuit of a
sensible existence. Yet his writings also consistently reflect an all-pervasive humour combined with serious
and tolerant consideration of important philosophical questions. From his writings Chaucer emerges as poet of
love, both earthly and divine, whose presentations range from lustful cuckoldry to spiritual union with God.
Thereby, they regularly lead the reader to speculation about man’s relation both to his fellows and to his
Maker, while simultaneously providing delightfully entertaining views of the frailties and follies, as well as
the nobility, of mankind. Forebears and early years Chaucer’s forebears for at least four generations were
middle-class English people whose connection with London and the court had steadily increased. John
Chaucer, hisfather, was an important London vintner and a deputy to the king’s butler; in 1338 he was a
member of Edward III’s expedition to Antwerp, in Flanders, now part of Belgium, and he owned property in
Ipswich, in the county of Suffolk, and in London. He died in 1366 or 1367 at age 53. The name Chaucer is
derived from the French word chaussier, meaning a maker of footwear. The family’s financial success derived
from wine and leather. Although c. 1340 is customarily given as Chaucer’s birth date, 1342 or 1343 is
probably a closer guess. No information exists concerning his early education; although doubtless he would
have been as fluent in French as in the Middle English of his time. He also became competent in Latin and
Italian. His writings show his close familiarity with many important books of his time and of earlier
times.Chaucer first appears in the records in 1357, as a member of the household of Elizabeth, countess of
Ulster, wife of Lionel, third son of Edward III. Geoffrey’s father
presumably had been able to place him among the group of young men and women serving in that royal
household, a customary arrangement whereby families who could do so provided their children with
opportunity for the necessary courtly education and connections to advance their careers. By 1359 Chaucer
was a member of Edward III’s army in France and was captured during the unsuccessful siege of Reims. The
king contributed to his ransom, and Chaucer served as messenger from Calais to England during the peace
negotiations of 1360. Chaucer does not appear in any contemporary record during 1361–65. He was probably
in the king’s service, but he may have been studying law—not unusual preparation for public service, then as
now—since a 16th-century report implies that, while so engaged, he was fined for beating a Franciscan friar in
a London street. On February 22, 1366, the king of Navarre issued a certificate of safe-conduct for Chaucer,
three companions, and their servants to enter Spain. This occasion is the first of a number of diplomatic
missions to the continent of Europe over the succeeding 10 years, and the wording of the document suggests
that here Chaucer served as “chief of mission.”By 1366 Chaucer had married. Probably his wife was Philippa
Pan, who had been in the service of the countess of Ulster and entered the service of Philippa of Hainaut,
queen consort of Edward III, when Elizabeth died in 1363. In 1366 Philippa Chaucer received an annuity, and
later annuities were frequently paid to her through her husband. These and other facts indicate that Chaucer
married well.

29. English Drama

The drama which had suffered a steep decline during the Victorian Age was revived with great force at the
beginning of the 20th century and the course of six decades has witnessed many trends and currents in the
20th-century drama The drama of the Modernist Movement in England was much less innovative in technique
than it was its poetry and novel.English Drama during the Modernist Period (1845-1945)A.D. falls into three
categories: 1. The first and the earliest phase of modernism inEnglish Drama is marked by the plays of G.B.
Shaw (read Summary of Candida) and John Galsworthy,which constitute the category of social drama
modeled on the plays of Ibsen and. 2. The 2 nd and the middle phase of Modernist English drama comprise
the plays of Irish movement contributed by some elites like Yeats. In this phase, the drama contained the spirit
of nationalism. 3. The 3rd and the final phase of the Modernist English Drama comprise plays of T.S. Eliot
and Christopher Fry. This phase saw the composition of poetic dramas inspired by the earlier Elizabethan and
Jacobean tradition.The three categories reflect the three different phases as well as the three different facets of
Modern English Drama.Drama was introduced to Britain from Europe by the Romans, and auditoriums were
constructed across the country for this purpose. But England didn't exist until hundreds of years after the
Romans left.
30. Shakespeare’s late comedies of Shakespeare’s plays, the First Folio, was published in 1623, its contents
page divided them into three categories: Comedies, Histories and Tragedies. The list of Comedies included
Measure for Measure and The Merchant of Venice, plays that modern audiences and readers have not found
particularly ‘comic’. Also included were two late plays, The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale, that critics often
now classify as ‘Romances’. If we ask ourselves what these four plays have in common with those such as As
You Like It or Twelfth Night, which we are used to calling ‘comedies’, the answer gives us a clue to the
meaning of ‘comedy’ for many of Shakespeare’s educated contemporaries. All of them end in marriage (or at
least betrothal). Marriage. Comedies head towards marriage. This is a useful place to start thinking about the
typical shape of comedies. Marriages conventionally represent the achievement of happiness and the promise
of regeneration. So important to Shakespeare is the symbolic power of marriage that some end in more than
one marriage. Both A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Twelfth Night end with three. In the final scene of As
You Like It, Hymen, the god of marriage, takes the stage to preside over no fewer than four nuptial couplings
and to celebrate ‘High wedlock’ (5.4.144) in song. All the play’s couples have achieved happiness through
misunderstanding. Orlando has wooed Rosalind in make believe, not grasping how his feelings were being
reciprocated. Orlando’s brother Oliver, having repented his previous vindictiveness to Orlando, has been
smitten by the apparently poor Aliena, not realising that she is Rosalind’s friend Celia. Phebe the shepherdess
had preferred Ganymede (in fact the disguised Rosalind) to the adoring but low-born Silvius, but has learnt
her error. Touchstone has won Audrey, the country girl, almost casually by impressing her with his mock
courtly talk. This last pairing, founded on vanity and ignorance, seems considerably less satisfying than the
other three: even here, in one of the lightest of Shakespeare’s comedies, we are invited not to feel easy about
every marriage. In other Shakespeare comedies, some concluding marriages – Claudio and Hero in Much Ado
about Nothing, the Duke and Isabella in Measure for Measure – seem designed to look convenient rather than
affectionate. In Shakespearean comedies much that is funny arises from the misconceptions of lovers. In
Much Ado about Nothing the friends of Benedick, whom we have seen mocking Beatrice and scorning love,
arrange for him to overhear them talking about how desperately Beatrice in fact loves him. The trick is
enjoyably justified when he next meets Beatrice and determinedly interprets her rudeness as concealed
affection. Yet the trick takes us further. Once Beatrice has been deceived by her friends in similar fashion,
these two characters, who both once disdained the follies of courtship, are on the path to love and marriage.
All this deception would not be amusing if we could not feel confident that it will produce a happyresolution
In the play’s sub-plot, the deception of Claudio by DonJohn indicates how a deceived lover might, in another
kind of play,be on his way to creating a tragedy. Interwoven with the plot of Benedick and Beatrice’s love
story is the drama of so-called‘love’ (Claudio for Hero) turned into murderous hate. However satisfying the
former courtship, it is shadowed by the vengefulnessof the untrusting Claudio.A Midsummer Night's Dream