Bertinetti in italiano e inglese

FROM THE ORIGINS TO THE RENAISSANCE

For centuries England was a land of conquests.

The most important poem written in the so-called Old English, is Beowulf. It was composed during the 8th century and 3182
lines long, Beowulf sings of the heroic world of the north from which the English had come to Britain.
He was the Lord of the Geats and he confronted a terrible dragon which had attacked his people. He killed the dragon but in
the battle he was mortally wounded. The poem ends with Beowulf’s solemn funeral.
The tone of the poem is legendary and typical of the epic, as befits a story of heroes in “superhuman opposition” to fantastic
monsters who incarnate evil.
Beowulf describes a pagan world which does not know the Bible. The poet does know it, but he also knows that Christianity is
a recent acquisition and therefore confines himself to inserting in among the heroic deeds of his ancestors a handful of
Christian references.

The world of the ancestors, when it is the world of the heroes, belongs to what Hegel calls the absolute past, with no links to
the historical past and therefore to the present, even through, like the Iliad and the Aeneid, the story is written for the present
day, with the point of view and values of the present.

The most important surviving prose work is due to King Alfred, who came to the throne in 871, when the Danes had seized
control of all the English kingdoms except his own. Alfred translated St Augustine’s Soliloquies, St Gregory’s Rules for
Pastors, and Bede’s Ecclesiastical Histories from Latin into English, establishing the latter as a literary language.

In 1066 England was invaded for the last time. William the Conqueror, Duke of Normandy, landed at Hastings on 28
September. On Christmas Day he was crowned King in Westminster Abbey.
With the Normans, thousands of French words invaded England and English, giving rise to a semi-inflected language which
however remained fundamentally English, except in the areas of law and cuisine.

For convenience the written and spoken English in use between 1100 and 1400 is referred to as Middle English, but in reality
no standard literary language existed at all.
We can start with Sir Gawain because it is the most distinguished example of the other decisive cultural change brought about
by the Conquest.

Chanson de gestes → songs of deeds.

“Song” because this was the form in which the stories being told were presented, celebrating the acts, or “deeds”, of a
character or a lineage in feudal warfare and most of all the wars against Islam, especially the reconquest of Spain.
Particularly popular was the Chanson de Roland → Ronald’s heroic fight against the Saracens at Roncesvalles and his death
and Charlesmagne’s vengeance against the enemy and the traitor Grenelon.
The Chanson de Roland and the other chansons singing of the paladins and their deeds performed by feudal lords of southern
France against the Saracens constitute “the matter of France”.

A similar quality pervades the Roman de Brut, written by Norman poet Robert Wace and dedicated in 1155 to Queen Eleanor
of Aquitaine. Drawing on Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin chronicle the Historia Regum Britanniae, it tells in 15.000 lines the
avìdventures of Brutus. The story is situated in the past, has overtones of the epic, the tale of the
This romance aspect is accentuated in the Middle English version of Wace’s poem, Layamon’s Brut.

Romance
The name romance derives from the Old French word romanz, which means vernacular. Arthur’s court is a centre of courtoisie,
love stories are interwoven with chivalric and venture, and brave knights fight to defend damsels in distress. The knight is a
paragon of bravery, honour and courtesy, and his duty is to serve God and his King even at the cost of his own life.

Decisively importance in its diffusion was La Morte Darthur, the prose version of the Arthurian legend written by Sir
Thomas Malory and completed in 1469 or 1470, drawing on both French and English versions in order to produce a sort of
definitive version of the Arthurian romance.
Following the fortunes of the Arthurian legend has brought us to the end of the 15th century. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
are poems written in allitterative verses, reminiscent of Old English poetry but more sophisticated in form, and in compendium
of the chivalric vision proper to romance.

Gawain’s integrity and honour are symbolised by the heraldic blazon on his shield, a five-pointed star representing the highest
of his virtues, trawthe, that is to say loyalty and fidelity, but here associated to the five wounds of Jesus and thereby
designating Gawain as the bearer of a knightly code that was deeply religious and dedicated to Christ.

The difference between reality and chivalric principles in which the knights sought to find their own reflection was without
doubt considerable. In the years when Gawain was written, Richard II had to face up to ruthless opposition from earls and
dukes. And when, after a period of truce, he thought he could get rid of them, Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, rallied
the nobility around himself and forced the King to abdicate.
The year in which Henry VII ascended the throne was also the year in which Le Morte Darthur went to press. The principles of
chivalric, along with Arthur, Merlin, the sword in the stone, and the noble Ancelot, were consigned to fantasy and the
fantasising of adults and children.

Pearl is a poem of 1212 lines which is preserved in the same manuscript as Sir Gawain. It is a dream poem with an extremely
complex metrical structure and a sophisticated rhetorical construction. There appears to him in a dream a beautiful woman, the
pearl that he has mislaid, and also the daughter she lost, who died when two years old.

Piers Plowman, also a dream poem in the alliterative style, is written in Worcestershire English, a dialect more easily
comprehensible to readers in London, where its author, William Langland, a married cleric in minor orders, lived for a long
while.

Geoffrey Chaucer
In the England of the second half of the 14th century there flourished the genius of Geoffrey Chaucer, regarded by many
scholars as second only to Shakespeare as England’s greatest poet. He served with the English army in France in 1359-60 and
again in 1369, was entrusted with various diplomatic missions for Edward III and continued to carry out important public
functions in the following reigns of Richard and Henry.
His most original contribution to English literature derived from his encounter with Italian culture. It was Dante who both
provided the model of the poem as vision used in House of Fame and inspired in him the belief that great poetry could be
written in vernacular, while Petrarch, who proclaimed the nobility and dignity of poetry and therefore of the poet.

Troilus and Criseyde is an anomalous romance. Constructed in rhyme-royal it tells the story of two lovers of the title, following
the schema which in the Middle Ages went under tragedy, but it has an ending designed to be on-tragic.
Chaucer’s masterpiece, to which he dedicated his work in poetry for the last fifteen years of his life, is The Canterbury Tales.
As in a number of medieval texts, Chaucer framed a set of stories by entrusting to different tellers.
Before his death Chaucer had completed only 22 of them, which are traditionally grouped into ten “Fragments”.
The most numerous group is made up of so-called Fabliaux, comic tales, in a popular setting, often centred around the triangle
wife, old or jealous husband, and lover.
The best of all is The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, which belongs to the genre of beast fable, the moral of which is entrusted to two
animal characters, the cock Chauntecleer and the hen Pertelote.

For the modern reader, however, possibly even more fascinating than the tales are the Prologues, first the General Prologue
with its descriptions of all the pilgrims and then the individual prologues in which each pilgrim presents himself.
The narrator describes the characters, including their defects, with an appealing good humour which secretly masks a
formidable irony. The two figures which display Chaucer’s art at its most resplendent and which have entered most fully into
the English imaginary are the Wife of Bath and the Pardoner. Her attitude to existence is the opposite of that of the moralists.
Chaucer paints her portrait with psychological acuteness and with evident sympathy, foregrounding her exuberant sexuality
with pyrotechnic imagery and caustic comment.

In his prologue, the Pardoner boasts of his skill in selling indulgences and, after a few drinks, owns up to using fake relics and
all sorts of devices to squeeze money even out of the poor. He is an out-and-out swindler and not ashamed to describe himself
as “a ful vicious man”. The Pardoner’s Tale is an exemplary story. Three rowdy youths set out in search of Death to kill him,
and they find him or, as the Pardoner himself puts it in Latin, radix malorum est cupiditas.
The poem concludes with the The Parson’s Tale, which is not a tale but a long sermon on penitence. The final “Retraction” in
which Chaucer repudiates all his works which do not have a moral intention, and enumerates them one by one, including the
“tales of Canterbury” themselves, is the logical outcome of his sermon.
After the death of Chaucer, English literature experienced a long period of mediocrity. Chaucer was a model to imitate.
It was a century which began with Henry’s brief vistories , followed by a succession of defeats in the war against France and
by the thirty years of the Wars of the Roses.

An opposite literary conception was that espoused by Thomas Wyatt, whose poetic works were only published a number of
years after his death. Wyatt was a courtier and a diplomat, serving Henry VIII on several missions.
In actual fact his most famous poem, which imitates Petrarch’s “Una candida cerva”, might contain a covert reference to the
ill-fated queen, as the deer on whose diamond collar is written “Noli me tangere, for Caesar’s I am”.
Wyatt developed the lesson of Petrarch in an original way. On the formal level he took on the discipline of the sonnet, so that
instead of two parts of eight and six lines respectively he divided it into three quatrains and a final couplet, rhymed abba-abba
cddc ee.

Just as Greek theatre has its origin in ritual, so the theatre of the Christian world has its origin in the Mass.
The Church can be seen as having an interest in ensuring that the teachings of religion were communicated in a simple and
attractive form to all the faithful, even the least educated.
Each episode was entrusted to one of the guilds present in the town and the representation of the episodes was often performed
on carts and mobile platforms which moved through the town streets with agreed stopping points.
Religious and moral teachings through theatre also takes place by means of the morality plays, which staged an allegorical
conflict between figures of Good and of Evil as they struggled to capture the soul of the characters who symbolically
represented humanity as a whole.

ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE

History
Henry Tudor came to the throne in 1509.
In 1521 he was proclaimed Defender of the Faith by the Pope and then he married Christine d’Aragon.
In 1534 the Act of Supremacy had proclaimed him head of the Church of England.
In 1536 Anne Boleyn was executed for alleged adultery and Henry married Jane who died in childbirth giving birth to Henry’s son
Edward, who succeeded him at his death in 1547.
Edward died in 1553, and the succession passed to Mary Tudor, Henry’s daughter by Catherine of Aragon. She was a fervent
Catholic, Mary carried out a ferocious policy of persecution against the Protestants, which led to her nickname Bloody Mary.
Faced with a social, religious and political situation that was extremely complex and unstable, the young queen proved able to act
both prudently and decisively. As time went on Elizabeth managed to focus on her figure, the image of a nation finally united under
her crown, in the full flood of economic expansion and on course to become the major power of the Old World.
In order to better understand the cultural dimension underlying the world of the Elizabethan aristocracy, it is worth drawing attention
to the role played by the most famous contemporary treatises on the manners of the true gentleman.

Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney is the poet in whom this correspondence appeared to find its highest expression, though only after his tragically early
death. As an aristocratic poet, Sidney never published his literary works. A Defence of Poetry is a vindication of the superiority of
literature against history and philosophy, characterized by purity of style.
Astrophil and Stella is a sequence, in the Petrarchan manner, of 108 sonnets and eleven songs which describes the love of Astrophil
(star-lover in Greek) for Stella (star in Latin). Arcadia is a prose romance, containing some verses based on the prototype of
Sannazaro’s Arcadia. This is Sidney’s own pastoral romance. The central story is that of two princes in love with two princesses,
mixed in with which are various comic moments, dramatic episodes and, in the second version known as The New Arcadia, a number
of passages of tragic intensity.

Edmund Spenser
The greatest poet of his generation and, at least until the Romantic Age, the English poets’ poet. In 1587 he became secretary
to the Bishop of Rochester, in 1579 he obtained a place in the Earl of Leicester’s household (where he became familiar with
Sidney), and in 1580 he was appointed secretary to the Lord Deputy of Ireland. He lived in Ireland, regarding it as a place of
exile, until 1598, when his house was plundered and burnt during Tyrone’s insurrection. The following year he died in London,
apparently in poverty. Chaucer drew numerous obsolete words and expressions and quite a few archaisms. Works: The
Shepherd’s Calendar dedicated to Sidney, which consists of 12 eclogues, one for each month of the year, was strongly
allegorical: the dialogues among the shepherds mask real personages, bishops and earls, to develop themes of a general
character such as love, morality, religion or poetry.
The Faerie Queene: 6 books, even if he planned 12 books. It is an epic/Anglican epic poem, in which the enemy is
Catholicism. The Church of England has restored primitive purity to the Church; Queen Elizabeth, who is its Supreme
Governor, is the Virgin Queen. Spenser harks back to the fantastic world of King Arthur and his Knights, but viewed from a
rigorous moral position and responding to a revived taste at the Elizabethan court for the attitude and symbols (even
tournaments) typical of Chivalry. Six Knights are the heroes of the six “adventures” narrated in each book, each exemplifying a
virtue: Truth, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justice, and Courtesy. Spenser blends heroic poetry with romance, using as
models, in particular the former’s Orlando Furioso: his metre is based on the ottava rima of his Italian models, but he adds to it
a ninth line so that his stanza rhymes abab bcbc. Allegory was his way.

Amoretti, a sonnet sequence dedicated to his second wife Elizabeth and published with Epithalamion, a marriage hymn in 24
stanzas, in which, like Orpheus, he resounds his “own love’s praises” to his bride. Spenser is by no means the only poet who
sought fame through public poems on the grand scale and instead is chiefly remembered today for the delicacy of his “private”
poetry.

Theatre
The form in which Elizabethan culture expressed itself in all its originality and greatness was the theatre. The theatre spread
from being an occasional entertainment for a small minority to becoming the most socially widespread of the arts. The Queen
loved the theatre: she took great delight in it and recommended it to the enjoyment of the court. The Protestants hated it,
seeing in it the most diabolical form of imitation of reality.

In London, at the beginning of the 16th century, there was an enormous potential public. Ranged
against it, alongside the Protestant bourgeois of the City opposed to the theatre on religious grounds. The problem was
“resolved” in 1572 with the Vagrancy Act which established very severe penalties, including hanging, for those found guilty.
Companies: Lord Admiral’s Men, Queen’s Men, Chamberlain’s Men.

The theatrical companies were small but they were able to stage plays with a large number of characters by means of the
practice of doubling. Girls’ roles were performed by young actors, since the very idea of women performing on stage was
regarded as totally shocking. This convention too had major consequences for the playwright, who was obliged to limit the
number and scope of female parts.

The “pit” at ground level was standing room only and spectators paid one penny for entrance. The play was performed in
daylight, in front of a permanent background, with no scene changes and no possibility of recreating the space and time of the
action other than through the words of the text. A platform with behind it a zone hidden by curtains which functioned as a
backstage area, either placed on one side of the courtyard of an inn or erected in the open at a fairground, with the public on
three sides. It was by its nature a space which encouraged a direct relationship between the public and the actor, who directed
to it his “asides” and took it into his confidence for the words of the soliloquies.
In London at the end of the 16th century, the so-called private theatre, modelled on the great halls in the houses of the nobility
where plays were performed. The audience of the private theatres tended to come from a more restricted social class, which
could afford the higher price of admission. The playwright and the theatre company knew that they had to design a
performance which could be staged either indoors or in the open air and for an audience which, in “public” and “private”
theatres alike, was attuned to the same type of dramatic conventions and, at least in part, to the same idea of theatre.

The Elizabethan public remained basically a unitary one. But during the reign of James I (1603-25) this unitary public began to
split up, with the more cultured sections of the public increasingly choosing the private theatres; and in the reign of Charles I
(1625-1642) it effectively disappeared, as the theatre addressed itself more and more to an elite public.

Play
Throughout the entire period when Shakespeare was active, however, theatre companies knew that the demand they were
expected to satisfy was basically uniform. There was also a demand for novelty and diversity, with the public theatres putting
on a different show every day, which meant, at least thirty new plays a year. The inspirational sources for the new plays were:
romances and Italian novellas, the mythical and legendary heritage of the classical world and Roman history and, from the
1580s onwards, English history itself. It was often the case that writers worked together on the same text.
The theatrical genres were:
1. Comedy
2. Tragedy
3. History play
4. Tragicomedy

Comedy: was generally a romantic comedy. Its ingredients were misunderstandings and mistaken identities, with a plot often
motivated by love initially misdirected but eventually focused on the right object. It was then Ben Jonson who first rejected the
romantic comedy and drew his characters from the contemporary world around him and shifted the emphasis from love to
money, from gentle smiles to harsh satire. The first English comedy was Ralph Roister Doister.

Tragedy: was on the whole a less widely (meno diffusi) practised genre than comedy. Its model was Seneca but interpreted in a
partial and rather bloodthirsty (sanguinario) way. It was from Seneca too that the most characteristic form of the period was
derived – the “revenge tragedy”. The first English tragedy, Gorboduc (1562).

History play: Shakespeare, Marlowe and other authors of history plays followed the traditional conception of the time in
presenting past events in the guise of a “mirror for magistrates”, a mirror which contained a lesson which offered an exemplary
narration of the fall of the powerful. It was a conception of history which read past events as a sanction of the full legitimacy of
present day rulers and as a source of national pride and which enabled the dramatists to contribute to strengthening Elizabeth’s
role as guarantor of the unity and prosperity of the nation. The first known example of a history play was John Bale’s King
John (1538).

Tragicomedy: a genre which came to the fore later, in the Jacobean period.

Marlowe
University Wit and spy in the service of Her Majesty. At a certain point, however, the secret services decided he was no longer
reliable and it was probably they who had him killed by setting up a tavern brawl in the London suburb of Deptford in which
he was mortally wounded.
Marlowe was a great writer for the theatre and a great poet: his greatest merit was to have entrusted his poetic talent to blank
verse in creating his theatrical texts and to have demonstrated to the playwrights of his time what form of language best
resonated on their stage. Without him the Elizabethan theatre would have been a much lesser thing.

His characters are monolithic (this is also their limitation) and grandiose in their wickedness.
These qualities amazed and fascinated the public of the time, which found there a perfect match for their taste for
sensationalism and excess.

Tamburlaine the Great (1587): heroic and cruel story of a “Scythian shepherd” who rises to become emperor by destroying
whoever stands in the way of his march to power, and it thrilled spectators precisely by means of the excessive quality of the
protagonist and his deeds. Tamburlaine is the play which has the most passages in which Marlowe’s poetic power manifests its
strength most eloquently.
The Jew of Malta (1592): Barabas, the central character is wicked and he was brutal in the crimes he commits to achieve
vengeance. The grotesque dimension in the portrayal of Barabas makes him resemble a villain in a horror cartoon. But his
denunciation of the hypocrisy and greed of the Christians and their “fruitful” prejudice against the Jews is worthy of a true
tragic character (and of a great tragic playwright).
Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1590): Like Tamburlaine, Faustus challenges God: but his challenge is even more sinful,
because he makes a bargain with the Devil to obtain power, honour and boundless knowledge in exchange for his soul. This is
a morality play. He is regularly torn between sin and repentance.

Edward II (1592): Marlowe’s best constructed theatre work which transformed the history play into a historical tragedy, as
Shakespeare was also to do with his Richard III produced in those years. The tragedy revolves around four characters of
notable dramatic force: Edward, his lover Gaveston, his wife Queen Isabella, and her lover Mortimer. The clash between their
private feelings and their quest for power brings the nation to the verge of catastrophe. The revolt of the barons leads to the
murder of Gaveston, and the successful rebellion of Isabella and Mortimer to Edward’s confinement in Berkeley Castle and his
murder. With The hero is a king with limited political and military capacities who throughout his reign tried to assert his
authority over insubordinate and powerful barons, and re-imagined him as an intriguing and disquieting tragic figure whose
desire for power and sexual desire combine to lead him to his ruin. He poses the problem of the legitimacy of royal power:
Shakespeare would probably have had Marlowe’s example in mind in conceiving his Richard II.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Life
William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon. At the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway and they had a
daughter and twins, a girl and a boy. William’s early life is shrouded in mystery. At some point he left Stratford, his wife and
his children, but we do not know when or what he did next. After a long and successful career, in 1611 Shakespeare left
London and its theatres and returned to Stratford, where he died in 1616, at the age of 52.

In 1594, when the plague had subsided, the theatres reopened. In this year the company of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was
formed, which Shakespeare joined. As well as an actor and shareholder in the company, Shakespeare was the prolific author of
texts for Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform. In 1608 a fresh outbreak of plague led yet again to the closing of the public
theatres and the King’s Men moved to the private Blackfriars theatre.
The public was no longer the mixed one they were used to at the Globe. It was more refined, with a particular taste for the new
genre of tragicomedy. Shakespeare developed this genre in a new way, with the romances that he wrote between 1608 and
1611: Pericles, Prince of Tyre, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest.

That Shakespeare was a man of considerable culture is certain. He had a brilliant memory, as befitted a man who was an actor
by profession, he had an extraordinary ability to connect the situations, circumstances and sensations of the characters he
created for the stage with the manifold inspirations coming from every corner of the culture of his time.
In Shakespeare’s works, even those situated in a dimension highly marked by fantasy, we always have the feeling of being
confronted by the solidity of life, its concrete and immediately recognisable reality. Shakespeare is an extraordinary storyteller.
This form of “telling” is not realised through the form of narrative but rather in the form of drama, which requires a physical
setting, with people in flesh and blood who communicate the tale being told: the customers for this spectacle, the audience, will
recognise it as true only on the basis of theatrical conventions which are familiar and assure them that it is credible. The
theatrical conventions in place in the Elizabethan theatre were a necessary condition for the explosion of Shakespeare’s
dramatic genius.
His characters speak with the words of everyday speech, but suddenly they will come out with unexpected locutions, strange
emphases or hidden rhetorical figures which give an unusual tone to the content, or unusual words which belong more
naturally to the philosophical thread hidden in the dialogue and emerge with apparent naturalness. The theatrical conventions
required that whatever was said on the stage should be assumed to be true, or because, in the case of Shakespeare, whatever
was said could also count on the most powerful gift possessed by language.

Like every classic writer his plays leap across time and space and can say different things to different people, as indeed already
happened in Elizabethan times. Naturally, he was a man of his time, and some of his convictions and beliefs belong to his
time and not to ours – and need to be understood as such.
Shakespeare alone, however, has given us Hamlet, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Falstaff. He has given us characters
who constitute the archetype of an attitude and a form of experience which could be common to each of us or at least contains
within it its meaning: jealousy, the anguish of doubt, limitless love, thirst for power, reckless vitality. It is no accident that the
names of those characters have become synonymous with a particular mode of being.

Histories
Shakespeare wrote three interlinked historical dramas about the reign of Henry VI and a sequel about Richard III. Shakespeare
was interested in dealing with a set of crucial political problems. There are different themes in common to all his plays, such as
the responsibilities of the King, the disasters caused by opposing forces within the nation, the necessity of national unity, and
the legitimacy of kingship.
Shakespeare’s history plays had an important educational value for the large majority of the less cultured spectators and
contained a clear political message for all and sundry.

Richard III: remains one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays. Its protagonist possesses extraordinary rhetorical artistry
and is a figure of evil on a grand scale. Richard’s overarching aim is the conquest of power and it is his wickedness that
enables him to acquire it. He is a sublime actor who elevates imposture to an art of politics. Today Richard III can be compared
to tyrants of our own day.
Richard II: Shakespeare wrote about his reign to tackle the theme of kingship and legitimacy. The story of a king who was
obliged to give up his throne was therefore at the same time a topical political subject and a reflection on the nature and
prerogatives of sovereignty and the very basis of legitimacy.
The assassination of Richard was ordered by Bolingbroke, who had already seized power and taken the name of Henry IV, and
who, in typical politician fashion, laments his predecessor’s death and condemns his killers. Richard’s soliloquy just before his
murder is one of the most exalted moments of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry, and a final touch to the portrait the play has
painted of the unfortunate king. He is the figure of the unfortunate and weak king who gains the sympathy of the audience.

Henry IV: Part One and Part Two recount the travails of the new king, the usurper Bolingbroke and his son, the brave but
dissolute Prince Henry. But the great creation of these two history plays is the figure of Falstaff, leader of the “dissolute crew”
frequented by the young prince. Falstaff is a comic figure, a great liar and marvellous pretender, and eloquent spokesman of the
pleasures of eating, drinking and fornication. “Falstaff, who is free, instructs us in freedom – not a freedom in society, but a
freedom from society”. When Henry IV dies, Falstaff hurries to London to greet his former boon companion, now Henry V.
But the king responds, “I know thee not, old man… presume not that I am the thing I was”. This is the end of Falstaff’s merry
adventures.

Henry V: was a popular national hero. And yet, in a brief scene on the eve of battle, Henry, obviously in disguise, talks to
three soldiers who expose their fears and their doubts about the justice of that war, and an awareness that their death in battle
will have as its reward the misery of their wives and children. Henry, rhetorically but also honestly, expounds the reasons for
his “just cause” and urges them to battle. Shakespeare makes the point for him, but the words he puts in the mouth of the
soldiers remain a testimony of the cruel reality of war

Comedies
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a play within a play. This is Shakespeare’s most popular comedy throughout the
English-speaking world, because it is full of fairies, songs, witchcraft and magic spells. Act I and Act V take place in Athens,
where the Duke is about to celebrate his marriage to Hippolyta. Acts II, III and IV take place in the woods where two young
Athenians and the girls who are in love with them engage in pursuit of each other. And it is here, in the wood, that the magic is
performed which will resolve the conflict between Oberon and Titania, king and queen of the fairies, and which, after many
twists and turns of the plot, will sort out the amorous issues of the young people. Also in the wood are a group of craftsmen
who are rehearsing the play they will perform at the Duke’s wedding. One of them, Bottom, is transformed by a spell so that he
has the head of an ass, while Titania, victim of another spell, falls in love with the first person she sees.
When the spells wear off everything goes back to normal and Bottom returns to town just in time to act in the play performed
at the Duke’s palace to grace his nuptials. The four young people decide that the things that happened to them under the effects
of magic were just a dream. But we in the audience have seen these same things happen on the stage before our eyes and know
they were true, even if we do not believe in magic. For it is not the magic of the fairies that is at stake, but the magic of the
theatre.

Very often, the real protagonists of Shakespeare’s comedies are the women. Beautiful, intelligent, enterprising and decisive,
they dominate the stage with their initiative and their witty speech.

As You Like It: it takes place mainly in the Forest of Arden, where Orlando and Rosalind have separately taken refuge to
escape dangers at court. The forest is a place which pastoral literature presented as the site of a serene and simple life, where
love and innocence triumph. Shakespeare delicately unmasks the conventions of the pastoral genre in so far as the characters,
even if they subscribe to these conventions, in certain decisive moments reveal them to be fake.
As far as love is concerned, the unmasking is performed by Rosalind, who has put on the dress of a countryman. Orlando does
not recognise her: the two young people had met each other at court for a brief moment and had instantly fallen in love with
each other. Rosalind, who states that love is madness and observes that nobody has ever died for love, laughs at Orlando’s
attitudes.
Marriage will seal their love in a highly symbolic finale: the false ideas about love and life have been unmasked, the values of
real life have been affirmed; but at the same time the love of young people corresponds to an ideal reality, where “earthly
things” happily realised and earthly love happily united in marriage make heaven itself rejoice.

Twelfth Night: Viola, the protagonist, disguises herself as a young man, Cesario, after a shipwreck which has separated her
from her twin brother Sebastian. Viola takes service as a page with Orsino, Duke of Illyria, and falls in love with him; but
Orsino is in love with Olivia, who has rejected his affection and who falls in love with Viola/Cesario. The traditional comic
situation (each character loves the wrong person) is enriched by Shakespeare thanks to the complication generated by the
resemblance between Viola and Sebastian, who arrives in the street adjoining Olivia’s house and is immediately taken for
Cesario and taken in by Olivia, who promptly marries him. Surprisingly – but the happy ending is mandatory – Orsino decides
to marry Viola, who thus gets the man she loves (and who has decided that he will love her). Psychological verisimilitude is
not obligatory. This is often the case in Shakespeare’s happy comedies, which take place in fantasy locations (Verona is not
Verona, Athens is not Athens, Illyria is not Illyria) and which put forward events and situations not unlike those in classical
comedy aimed to entertain the public without claiming to instruct it and to make it feel merry thanks to their festive intentions

When Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, anti-Semitism was particularly rife in England and the Queen’s own doctor,
the Portuguese Jew Roderigo Lopez, has just been ferociously put to death, in front of an enthusiastic London crowd,
following a totally false accusation.

The Great Tragedies and “The Tempest”

Romeo and Juliet: written at the outset of his career, is one of Shakespeare’s major tragedies and certainly one of the most
popular. As all the world knows, it tells the story of the two “star-cross’d” lovers, Romeo and Juliet, victims of the hatred
between the two households that they belong to.
At the beginning the Chorus has informed us that we shall be witnesses to the “fearful passage of their death-marked love”.
The audience then follows the adventures of Romeo and Juliet, their first meeting, their moonlight dialogue, and their agonised
separation at the first light of dawn knowing that in a short while death will bring an end to their love and their short lives. It is
this which arouses the painful engagement of the audience with their unhappy fate, and it is in this that the tragic value of
Romeo and Juliet resides – in the fact that such a beautiful, encompassing and delicate love, so passionate and yet, as Friar
Laurence says, so “pure”, a love in which there is no fault, will be rewarded only with death.

Their love is ignited and shines with the speed and brilliance of a flash of lightning: the tragedy lies in the sudden extinction of
such beauty. The feud between the two households is the core of the play and what leads to the death of the lovers. From the
prologue to the final scene, Shakespeare insists on the fact that the private story is inseparable from the public context in which
it unfolds, as is shown by the amount of space in the finale devoted to a reconstruction of the events and the reconciliation
between the two families.

Hamlet: is a revenge tragedy. His father’s ghost tells Hamlet that he has been killed by his brother Claudius, who is now king
and has married his widow Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. The Ghost demands to be avenged, but Hamlet is not sure whether the
apparition really is his father’s ghost, a “spirit of health” who is telling the truth, or if it is a devil tempting him to kill an
innocent man – though not all that innocent since, in Hamlet’s eyes, Claudius is nevertheless guilty of sleeping “in the rank
sweat” of the bed he shares with his mother.
This is Hamlet’s quandary, resolved only half way through the third act, when Claudius gives himself away. But since Hamlet
does not carry out his vengeance at once and since Claudius quickly despatches him to England (with the intention of having
him killed), Hamlet’s revenge on his usurper-assassin uncle will not take place until his lucky return, at the end of Act V. The
power of the tragedy does not, however, derive from the plot but from the figure of Hamlet himself.

Stephen Greenblatt maintains that the key characteristic of the great tragedies, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth, lies in
their “strategic opacity”, i.e. in the fact that Shakespeare had decided to take out “a key explanatory element” of the
motivations of their protagonists in order to deepen their effect and to “release the enormous energy” that familiar, reassuring
explanations would partially block or contain. Just once, in his soliloquy in Act II, Iago gives some vague and unconvincing
reasons for his hatred, and he offers none at all when, at the end of the tragedy, Othello wants to know why that “demi devil”
has so disastrously deceived him: “Demand me nothing”, is Iago’s response. Othello is completely deaf to his wife’s
explanations, since his jealousy has robbed him of any ability to distinguish, to evaluate or to understand. And it is jealousy
that makes him believe that what he intends to do is not “a murder” but “a sacrifice”. When, after having killed the innocent
Desdemona, he discovers the truth, Othello
delivers a noble speech in which he in part absolves himself but in substance condemns himself; then he kills himself. One of
the main proofs of Shakespeare’s greatness as a writer lies precisely in the capacity of his texts to respond equally powerfully
to the personal and collective sensibilities of the most diverse epochs and
cultures. This strategic opacity can equally be invoked in the case of King Lear. Lear has decided to abdicate and bequeath his
kingdom to his three daughters. The very first words of the play establish that this is to be an equal division; but he then says
that he might “extend his bounty” to whichever of the daughters can demonstrate by her verbal homage to him that she loves
him most. No explanation is given for this decision, just as there is no convincing explanation of why his youngest daughter,
Cordelia, who indeed “doth love him most”, fails to pronounce a suitably rhetorical declaration of love for her father (her
explanation is that her love is “more ponderous than her tongue” and she can only speak words which are sincere). King Lear
has often been interpreted as a tragedy about power.
This theme is certainly there in the foreground, both in the behaviour of Lear and in that of Edmund, the bastard son of
Gloucester, and of Lear’s other two daughters, Regan and Goneril. These latter strip their father of every trace of his former
power and at the end of Act II emblematically give orders to close the gates of Gloucester’s castle, leaving Lear outside while
“the night comes on” and a storm is raging. His “noble anger” for the ingratitude of his daughters rapidly turns to madness; and
when, later, Cordelia comes to his aid, Lear sees her as a spirit, “a soul in bliss”. It is only with difficulty that he grasps that
next to him really is his daughter and that she loves him unreservedly; then almost immediately he has to come to terms with
her death in a scene so painful and agonising that Dr Johnson once said that he could not endure to read it. Alongside the story
of Lear is that of Gloucester, who is tricked by his bastard son Edmund into believing that his legitimate son and heir Edgar is
plotting to kill him.

King Lear is the tragedy of power; but it is also the tragedy of fathers unable to understand their own children. Lear and
Gloucester are blind. They are blind in the face of the adulation of children who are deceiving them and they are blind (and this
is their tragedy) in the face of the devotion of children who love them.

Macbeth, the “Scottish play”, is based on an episode recounted in Holinshed’s Chronicles, but substantially modified by
Shakespeare for his own purposes. It tells the story of the medieval Scottish king Macbeth and once again presents a character
who is a grandiose embodiment of evil. Unlike Richard III, however, Macbeth is shown at the outset of the play as a noble and
brave warrior.
He is tormented by doubt and hesitates in the face of the horror that the idea of regicide provokes in him; but in the end his
thirst for power gets the better of his doubts. He kills the “holy” king, putting the blame for the murder on his two officers, and
shortly afterwards has his friend Banquo, who suspects the truth, also done to death. Lady Macbeth is a woman driven by an
inflexible and evil determination.
As soon as she learns of the prophecy, she announces in a terrifying speech her wish to kill Duncan, the king; and no less
terrifying are the words she speaks to convince Macbeth.
In Act III likewise, after the murder of Banquo, she shows no pity. Then she disappears from the scene. She reappears in Act V,
sleep-walking through the palace and pronouncing a handful of phrases which mix traces of her earlier determination with an
obsession with blood. This scene is an invention of genius, counterposing her previous self-confidence with the profound
disturbance that has taken its place, but with no explanation and nothing in between. The scene is quite unexpected and casts a
new and indecipherable light on the character of Lady Macbeth, making her one of the most disturbing figures in
Shakespearean theatre. Macbeth, meanwhile,turns himself into an ever more bloodthirsty tyrant, guilty of even more
atrocities: but his words nevertheless succeed in giving the spectator a glint of the humanity that survives within him. Perhaps
this is the reason why, towards the end of the play, when he declares that life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
signifying nothing” (V, V, 26-28).

Antony and Cleopatra is the last of the great tragedies. Its source is Plutarch, which Shakespeare, as is his wont, reworks
brilliantly to suit his theatrical and thematic designs. The underlying theme is the conflict between reason and the passions. On
the one hand there is a conflict of two worlds: the world of Cleopatra, sensual queen of a warm country, capricious and
“irrational”, and the Roman world, cold, orderly, calculating, as represented in the figure of the triumvir and future emperor
Octavian. On the other hand there is the love between Antony and Cleopatra, so grand that, to know its confines, one would
have to “find out new heaven, new earth” (I, I, 17).
Antony, caught between the two worlds, chooses to take the side of Cleopatra and to challenge Rome and conquer the world,
his “dotage” for her leading him to deny his Roman-ness. His passion is the cause of his downfall, but it is also the force which
endows him with nobility and grandeur in defeat. Only in Romeo and Juliet has passion been represented with such intensity
and with speech of such poetic force. For his Egyptian queen and his Roman soldier, the no longer youthful Shakespeare
rediscovers the same accents that he had first found for his two “star-cross’d” lovers, and once again he raises them to the level
of myth.

The new theatrical form that Shakespeare developed was further enriched in The Tempest, where music and sound effects are
a decisive element in the unfolding of the plot and where, in Act IV, we find an actual Masque, the genre of spectacle
compounded of music, dance and fantastic costumes and stage-sets which was put on in the palaces of the aristocracy and at
court.
The Tempest tells the story of Prospero, Duke of Milan, who had handed over the government of the state to his brother
Antonio to devote himself to the study of magical art. But Antonio betrayed him and Prospero was forced to take refuge on a
far-off isle together with his little daughter Miranda. The play starts with Prospero raising a storm which causes the boat
carrying young Ferdinand, son of the King of Naples, to be shipwrecked off the shore of the island.
Prospero tells his daughter about his political fate and lets her understand more about his power as a magician which enables
him to control the mysterious forces present on the island, represented by Ariel, “an airy spirit” at his service, and the
monstrous Caliban, son of the former ruler of the island, the witch Sycorax.
Caliban is a savage, “deformed” and hostile, as the inhabitants of the New World were often portrayed. It is no surprise,
therefore, that since the end of the 19th century The Tempest has been interpreted in the light of the theme of colonialism and
that, particularly since Aimé Césaire’s version of the play.
The Tempest is one of the finest of all Shakespeare’s creations and one of the plays which gives most scope for the theatre to
exercise its magic. It concludes with the protagonist saying farewell to his magic, which is also the farewell of the actor
playing the role to the magic of the stage – and Shakespeare’s own farewell to the magic of the theatre.

Poems
Shakespeare was a great poet throughout, whether in his work for the theatre or in his writing of lyric and narrative poems.
Venus and Adonis, published in 1593, belongs to the tradition of erotico-mythological poetry, much appreciated in literary
circles at the time, and recounts in a sensual style the attempts by Venus to seduce the youth Adonis.
The second poem, The Rape ofLucrece (1594), narrates with a language full of verbal artifice one of the grimmest episodes in
Roman history, the rape of Lucretia by Tarquinius and her suicide. Shakespeare’s Sonnets were first printed in 1609.
It is likely that most of them were written before 1600, and the order in which they are published was probably not decided on
by Shakespeare but by the publisher. The in-quarto volume contains 154 sonnets, divided into two sections: sonnets 1 to 126
are concerned with a youth whom many identify with the Mr W.H. to whom the volume is dedicated, whereas sonnets 127 to
154 are mainly concerned with a Dark Lady.
There has been much speculation about the possible identities of the young man and the Dark Lady but none of the hypotheses
that have been advanced is particularly convincing. To tell the truth, the question is not really all that important, as the sonnets
are not to be considered autobiographical: they explore personal relations in friendship and love, offering up to the
reader a series of reflections on them which start from an individual case.
The first sonnets in the collection are a prime example of this. Their theme is the immortality of poetry – and the immortality
that poetry confers. Sonnets 1 to 7 urge the youth to marry as a means of immortality, for he and his beauty will continue to
live in a “fair child” of his. But then poetry too is enlisted to achieve this result; and finally, in the Sonnet 18, the poet proudly
declares that it will be poetry that offers immortality both to the young man and to the poet.

That same theme recurs in other sonnets in which the poet repeats his challenge to Time the destroyer. In others, however, the
theme is that of the discrepancy between the poet’s age and his friend’s youth, or that of the absence of the loved one, or that of
the injustice that seems to triumph in the world. Other sonnets again describe specific events: the estrangement and the
reconciliation between the poet and the youth (33-42); the rivalry with another poet (77-80 and 82-86); the seduction of the
youth by the woman the poet is in love with (40-42). The sonnets of the second part seem to recount the relationship between
the poet and the Dark Lady, or rather the suffering of his love for her.

THE EARLY 17TH CENTURY

James I and Charles I.

At the death of Elizabeth in 1603, James Stuart, son of the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots executed in 1587 and her successor
king of Scotland under the title of James VI, became the first Stuart king of England, designating himself “King of Great
Britain”. He was a stubborn advocate of royal absolutism and never really understood the rights of the English Parliament. He
promoted a policy of international peace-making, starting with a peace which he planned to sign with Spain immediately on his
accession.
This action, combined with his conflict with Parliament, particularly in the later years of his reign, made him decidedly
unpopular. James was a cultivated person, who in his youth had written poetry and who liked to be seen as a patron of the arts.
In the cultural field, however, he is most famous for a work to which he offered support rather than active participation, and
that was a new translation of the Bible, known as the Authorised Version and also as the King James Bible.
On James’s death in 1625, his second surviving son Charles became king and soon afterward married Henrietta Maria, sister of
Louis XIII of France. Like his father, Charles was a patron of the arts; and, like his father, he believed in the absolute power of
the monarch and was incapable of coming to terms with the House of Commons. In his case, however, the contrast was deeper:
in 1642 the Civil War broke out, ending some years later with the humiliating defeat of the King.

Jacobean and Caroline Drama.

In the first years of the 17th century the theatre began to lose its unitary character. New theatrical forms developed for publics
which were also tending to diversify. In particular, James and his court favoured an intrinsically elitist genre, the masque.
Based as far as its staging was concerned on Italian models, the masque had already begun to establish itself during Elizabeth’s
reign. Even in cases where the text was provided by poets or dramatists of distinction such as Ben Jonson, the words as such
were not the main attraction of the spectacle. The extravagant costumes, the music, the dancing, the sumptuous sets, the special
effects provided by purpose-built machines were what constituted the decisive attraction of the genre, one which by its nature,
and because of the huge cost involved, could only be performed at court or in the palaces of the aristocracy.

Jonson
Ben Jonson (1572-1637) studied the classics at Westminster School under the tutelage of the historian and antiquary William
Camden. Classical culture was his guiding light throughout his literary career, both as a poet and as a dramatist. It was also the
device that he exploited in order to lay claim to literary authority and the status of great Author with a capital A.
He edited and published his own works in a volume entitled The Works of Ben Jonson (1616), which also contained his plays –
in contrast to the normal practice and approach taken by the playwrights of his time. Jonson wrote comedies and tragedies
which scrupulously respected the units of time and place as he had encountered them in his study of the classics. He set his
comedies in the real world of his time, often in London, as in Bartholomew Fair (1604) and The Alchemist (1610).

According to the theory of humours, the four cardinal humours were blood, phlegm, choler and melancholy. A man was
supposed to be governed by a proportioned mixture of these four; if any single one of them formed the prevalent humour, the
ideal equilibrium was lost and the man became sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric or melancholic as the case might be. A humour,
according to Jonson, was a bias of disposition, and “some peculiar quality” could “so possessa man” as to make him act in one
way. In his comedies the characters were therefore the embodiment of a dominant ruling passion, and the comic effect was
produced as much by the excesses of a single character as by the interaction of the conflicting passions (and humours) of
different characters. The Alchemist (1610) is set in a house in London, which has been abandoned by its owner,Lovewit,
during an epidemic of the plague.

Fletcher, Heywood, Middleton, Webster.

John Fletcher (1579-1625) is now remembered mainly for the two plays on which he collaborated with Shakespeare, Henry
VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen. But he was a very successful playwright in his own right, both in his lifetime and for much
of the 17th century. The genre of which he was a master was the tragicomedy. One of his first works was The Faithful
Shepherdess (1603) whose title itself implies the debt it owes to the Pastor fido by the creator and theoretician of the genre,
Battista Guarini. It was not a success, possibly because the unreal world of shepherds and shepherdesses was not found
convincing by the public.nFletcher therefore turned to the writing of a number of tragicomedies in collaboration with Francis
Beaumont which were set in an environment less remote from the real world and used a less artificial language closer to
ordinary speech.
The leading author of city comedies was Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), son of a master bricklayer. He wrote a number of
works in collaboration with other dramatists and, on his own, some ferocious comedies which, as T. S. Eliot was to write, offer
a “photographic” representation of the less attractive side of life at the time. A Trick to Catch the Old One (1605) is a farcical
comedy in which a spendthrift nephew plays tricks on his avaricious uncle. Dissipation and avarice are shown as “normal”
human characteristics and it is fair enough if, as in classical comedy, the voice of youth comes out victorious. In A Mad World
My Master (1606) the young Follywit tries to rob his grandfather. But this time youth loses out and Follywit marries the
prostitute Gullman, who had been the lover of his grandfather, believing her to be a virgin. In the sub-plot a country gentleman,
Master Penitent Brothel, seeks to seduce the wife of the jealous citizen Hairbrain.
A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603) by Thomas Heywood (1573?-1641) is the most successful example of the genre. The
plot concerns the marriage between a country gentleman, John Frankford, and Anne, his faultless wife who nevertheless yields
to the charms of their guest Wendoll. When he finds out, Frankford devises a subtle and cruel punishment: he locks her up in a
remote house, barred from the sight of her children and himself. Consumed by remorse, Anne wastes away and dies and her
husband pardons her on her deathbed. Frankford can be seen as a man of civilised values who does not give way to anger but is
guided on the one hand by reason and on the other by moral rigour of a kind which Puritans too would appreciate, and which
has been appreciated by the public even in modern times. There remains, however, a reasonable doubt as to whether his
behaviour might not be more inhuman than civilised.
Many of the plays referred to above were written and performed in the first part of the reign of James I and are an extension of
the theatrical production that flourished in the Elizabethan period. This applies equally to the tragedies of John Webster
(1578?-1632?). The White Devil is based on an event which really took place in Italy some years earlier, even though names
and events are changed and confused to create a stereotypical “Italian” atmosphere – dark, violent, blasphemous and corrupt.
The white devil is Vittoria Corombona, wife of the old Camillo, who falls in love, reciprocated, with Brachiano, who is tired of
his wife Isabella, sister of the Duke of Florence. Camillo and Isabella are killed (in dumb show), Vittoria is tried by a tribunal
presided over by the Duke of Florence and his brother, Cardinal Monticello, and defends herself with boldness, unmasking the
hypocrisy of her accusers. She is sentenced to confinement in a “house of penitent whores”, from which she is freed by
Brachiano. But Gasparo and Lodovico, the Duke’s men, poison and strangle Brachiano and then stab Vittoria and her brother
Flamineo who is the accomplice of the two lovers and killer of his virtuous brother Marcello.
The final part of the tragedy, which up to that point has “delighted” the public with the intrigues and crimes of its corrupt
characters, shifts its focus to the dimension of death which has accompanied the events. But, as In the case of Middleton
referred to above, this in no way implies a moral concern on Webster’s part.
The assassins are punished with death, but what really interests the dramatist is how, through the presentation of their crimes,
to create a series of brilliantly effective and spectacular moments of theatre.
Similar considerations also apply, in part, to Webster’s masterpiece, The Duchess of Malfi (1613?), which, however, in
addition to its vertiginous succession of deceits and crimes, can also rely on the psychological richness of its two protagonists
and the sense of pity aroused by the sufferings of the innocent.

Ford.
Among the dramatists of the Caroline period, James Shirley (1596-1666), prolific author of tragedies, comedies, tragicomedies
and masques,was the most obviously successful particularly in court circles, but none of his work has survived in the theatrical
repertory of today; nor for that matter has the work of any other dramatists of the period. The only exception is ’Tis Pity She’s
a Whore (printed 1633) by John Ford (c. 1586 - c. 1640), a tragedy whose central theme is the incest taboo. Giovanni loves his
sister Annabella, who asks him to swear eternal love: “love me or kill me, brother”. Giovanni will do both these things.
When Annabella discovers she is pregnant, she marries Soranzo, one of her suitors, in order to shield her brother. But the truth
is soon found out and Soranzo organises a banquet at which he intends to expose Annabella and Giovanni and execute his
vengeance. Aware of his intentions, Giovanni kills Annabella and arrives at the banquet carrying her heart on his dagger. He
kills Soranzo and is then killed by Soranzo’s servant. Giovanni lets himself be killed after having proclaimed his love, this time
defiantly, whereas at the beginning of the play he had proclaimed it discreetly, praising the beauty and guiltlessness of the
incestuous love which united them.
Ford had allowed him to present their love as a spiritual union, rather than a physical one, as a sanctuary in which to hide away
far from a false and corrupt world, and as the only value in a world lacking in values; it was an absolute love, but one which
could only survive so long as it remained unknown to the world. In this tragedy, as also in The Broken Heart (also printed in
1633), which is set in Spain,Ford does not establish a parallel between the court of Charles I and the imaginary courts of his
plays; nor does he seem to refer to the specific characteristics of his time. Ford is the poet of feelings which are absolute, of
absolute convictions which shape and dominate the actions and destiny of the characters who are possessed by them,
over and above the system of values of a given epoch.

Poetry
John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral from 1621, died on 31 March 1631. A month before, he had delivered his last
sublime and powerful sermon, “Death’s Duel”, before King Charles I at Whitehall. In the last years of his life he had published
numerous sermons, religious writings and hymns, which corresponded to his choice of an ascetic life and his official role in the
Church of England. This had not always been the case.
Donne had been born, in 1572, into a Catholic family and had been brought up as a Roman Catholic.
He had been educated at Hart Hall, Oxford, and later had gone to Cambridge, where his extraordinary intellectual gifts had
soon manifested themselves; but, as a Catholic, he had not been awarded a degree.
Most of his love poems, his Elegies and his five Satires belong to the 1590s. But his Songs and Sonnets are very difficult to
date and some may have been written after his marriage, celebrated in 1601. As the years went on the religious problem
assumed a greater importance for him and his move away from Catholicism, which had perhaps already begun during his time
at Lincoln’s Inn, became apparent. In 1615 he took Holy Orders and King James appointed him a royal chaplain and forced
Cambridge to grant him a degree. Two years later his wife died, after giving birth to their twelfth child. It was a terrible grief,
which left an indelible mark on his soul. Izaak Walton, his friend and first biographer, wrote that from that moment Donne was
“crucified to the world”. It is certain that from that moment the religious dimension became central to his life and his writings.
It is possible to detect fundamental common features across the wide range of Donne’s writings. Their central theme is always
love, and sometimes even the love of God assumes a strongly physical, even erotic character. In the Holy Sonnets the poet
addresses himself to God, who has “made” him, invoking his mercy in tones not far removed from those in which he addresses
himself to the woman he loves to obtain her love.

But it is difficult not to feel that Donne’s poetry reaches its greatest heights of beauty and
originality in the love poems and that in any case it is here that he finds his voice, his style, his manner of
entrusting to his verses the images and concepts he wishes to communicate to the reader. As has been
established, English love poetry found its original identity with Spenser and Sidney. The form used was
basically that of the sonnet, but Donne’s choice was fundamentally different. The title of the volume where his love poems,
published after his death (1633 and 1635), are Songs and Sonnets. But none of the poems uses the sonnet form: they are lyrics
of varying length and varying metrical properties, whose form is dictated by the “message” that he has to communicate. Their
principal characteristic lies in the fact that the beloved is not the centre of the poem. The lover is not the centre either; rather it
is the relationship that the lover wishes to establish with her and the way his amorous sentiment manifests itself and to which
she is called upon to respond. In some cases the discourse is platonic in nature, an invitation to a spiritual
union which goes beyond the physical and sentimental.

The Metaphysical Poets.

The Metaphysical poets were “rediscovered” at the beginning of the 20th century. Francis Palgrave, Professor of Poetry at
Oxford, in his hugely popular anthology The Golden Treasury, first published in 1861 and reissued in 1896 with a
“supplementary book”, included not a single poem of Donne’s and only a couple of items by Metaphysical poets.
The “rediscovery” was due in particular to the publication in 1921 of the volume Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the 17th
Century edited by Herbert Grierson, and even more to the essay published in that same year by T.S. Eliot, The Metaphysical
Poets, in which he indicated a number of traits common to those poets. It is nevertheless the case that some are more
metaphysical than others and that many of them have little if anything to say to our modern sensibility. George Herbert
(1593-1633), a friend of Donne’s, is less metaphysical. He was ordained deacon probably in 1624 and became a priest in
1630. During those years Herbert worked on the poems which, when he realised he was dying, he sent to a friend, asking him
to assess whether they were worthy of publication.
Almost all his English poems were then collected together and he published them in a volume under the title The Temple
(1633). The title gives a precise idea of an architectonic religious unity, in which every poem forms a part of the poetic edifice
constructed by Herbert. His poems, he himself said, represent “a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed
betwixt God” and his soul; but his conflicts do not have the same violent quality as Donne’s, nor, in spite of the ingenuity of
their images, are they expressed by means of the daring rhetorical solutions of the type to which Donne was attached.

That was Robert Herrick, the most gifted of all of them, endowed with a faultless ear and an extraordinary facility of
expression (he wrote more than 2500 compositions). He took his degree at Cambridge and then lived for some years in
London, mixing in literary circles.

Francis Bacon
The most successful prose writings in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods were little books of tales about rogues and thieves.
The authors were often ingenious men of letters, who purported to be warning honest folk, especially visitors from the
provinces, of the dangers of life in the metropolis, but who were perfectly aware that they were writing works of entertainment,
arousing readers’ curiosity about the exciting world of low life.
The finest prose writing of the period, however, was produced by someone who was not in the first instance a man of letters
but a politician and author of texts of a philosophical and scientific character, Francis Bacon (1561-1626). His Essays,
published in various editions from 1597 to 1625, have remained celebrated for their direct and essential style; but perhaps his
most original work is The New Atlantis, published posthumously in 1627, a year after his death. It tells the story of the
discovery of a remote island called Bensalem, an island which, as in other utopian tales which appeared in Europe around that
time, is the home of a kind of ideal state.
Bacon, however, turns his attention away from politics to science. In Bensalem, great importance is attached to a college of
sciences, publicly financed, whose end is “the knowledge of causes and secret motions of things, and the enlarging of the
bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible”. The studies and experiments of the members of the college
concern physics, chemistry, astronomy, medicine, agriculture and mechanics.
His style, polished and simple, has been praised for its beauty over the centuries. So fine is it that some scholars, basing
themselves on linguistic similarities between his writing and that of Shakespeare, have put forward the bizarre and implausible
theory that Shakespeare’s works were in reality written by Bacon.

REVOLUTION AND RESTORATION

A Century of Revolutions.
In 1640 Charles I summoned Parliament, after having governed England without it since 1628, to finance his war against
Scotland and its Presbyterian Church. But after two years during which the conflict between King and Parliament steadily
intensified, Charles fled to the North, leaving London to be the centre of his Protestant enemies’ power. Both sides prepared for
war, but Parliament’s economic resources (it was able to levy taxes and controlled London, the South and East of England and
the navy) were much greater than the King’s. The first phase of the Civil War lasted from 1642 to 1646, with the final defeat of
the Royalist troops and of the towns that still held out for the King. The contrasts among the victors and, above all, between the
House of Commons and the army induced Charles, who negotiated a secret Engagement with the Scots, to prompt the second
phase of the Civil War. The King and his allies were crushed by Oliver Cromwell, the great general and leader of the
Parliamentary forces. Charles I, charged with high treason by a specially constituted high court of justice, was sentenced to
death and executed on 30 January 1649. Britain became a republic. Oliver Cromwell became first Chairman of the Council of
State of the new republic. In 1653, having dissolved Parliament, he became Lord Protector. The Puritan revolution, which had
overthrown the old order and unleashed the liberating force of radical new ideas and behaviours, had, as often happens with
revolutions, fossilised into a regime which kept in place many of the new ideas and formally affirmed them while denying their
substance. On Oliver Cromwell’s death in 1658, his son Richard was immediately declared Lord Protector in his place. But not
for long. Parliament dismissed Richard in 1659 and in May 1660 Charles, the eldest surviving son of Charles I, was proclaimed
King Charles II. At the outset he enjoyed a nationwide surge of loyalty, which, however, soon subsided. His alliance with
France was understandably viewed with suspicion; his relations with Parliament were often conflictual and in 1681 he
dissolved it. On his death he was succeeded by his brother, James II, openly Catholic, autocratic, and fiercely hostile to
Parliament. In the ensuing confrontation James, who could no longer count on the support of any section of society, was
deposed by Parliament in 1688. His throne was given to his daughter Mary and her husband, the Protestant William of Orange.
It was not exactly a “bloodless revolution” as has sometimes been claimed. But it was certainly a “Glorious Revolution”
which, with the Bill of Rights in 1689, gave rise to the world’s first constitutional monarchy. The king could no longer be an
absolute ruler (he had no power to suspend or dispense with law) and Parliament became the centre of national political life:
government, according to the theory of the philosopher John Locke, was the result of a social contract between the king and his
people represented in Parliament. In practice the people represented in the Parliament of the time were mainly those sections of
society which had been the protagonists of English social and economic life since the beginning of the century, those which
tend to be referred to, somewhat inappropriately, under the French term bourgeoisie. Herein, too, lay a very significant and
even revolutionary fact, that of a cultural revolution which affected every aspect of the social, artistic and literary life of the
country. The English bourgeoisie, whose economic pre-eminence had long been recognised and which had risen with the
Glorious Revolution to an equally dominant role in political affairs, now prepared to conquer for itself, and in its own eyes, a
decisive role in social and cultural life.

Marvell.
Andrew Marvell (1621-78) was an earnest student of the classics, particularly Horace and Juvenal, and author in 1650 of a
Horatian Ode dedicated to Cromwell. After the Restoration he wrote a number of satires both in prose and in verse (for
example against the Lord Chancellor, against the Archdeacon of Canterbury, or against corruption at court), and was for a long
time after his death mainly remembered as a satirist. His lyric poetry, related to that of the Metaphysical poets and therefore
totally out of fashion at the time of the publication of his Miscellaneous Poems in 1681, entered the canon of English poetry
only after the rediscovery of the Metaphysical By Grierson and Eliot. Marvell’s poetry possesses a rhetorical virtuosity and a
wit surpassed only by Donne. Sometimes his theme is in the first instance the simple beauty of nature, of flowers and gardens
but the contemplation of nature produces a complex web of reflections on the emotions, the passions and the anxieties intrinsic
to the human condition. Elsewhere, however, he addresses, in Eliot’s phrase, “the great commonplaces of English literature”;
but the way he treats them –ironically, enigmatically and leaving open the possibility of a multiplicity of interpretations seize
the day. Marvell plays ironically with the concept of time, with the seemingly endless wait which the loved one, by her
coyness, imposes on his desire; but time passes inexorably, leading towards death when “her beauty shall no more be found”
and she will be in her grave.
There is an echo here of the Greek Anthology that he had studied at Cambridge, but the irony and wit with which the argument
is put forward is pure Marvell. Pure Marvell, too, is the tone of the verses that follow, the explicitly erotic invitation issued to
the loved one (“ sport us while we may”) so that together they may “devour” time rather than “languish” in its power. The
poetic talent of the satirist Marvell finds its moment of triumph in his lyrical writing.

Milton.
John Milton (1608-74) is one of the central protagonists of English culture and literature, second only to Shakespeare in the
almost unanimous judgement of modern criticism. Conscious of his exceptional expressive gifts, Milton devoted his life to
becoming not only a great poet but also the interpreter of his times and the voice that spoke to the British nation to illustrate to
it the divine message. This message could not but be forged by Protestant doctrine, to whose spread Milton had been actively
committed in the years of the Civil War. The parallel study of the classics and of the sacred texts was for him the necessary
basis for the formation of the intellectual, whose responsibility was to be an active presence in the community of citizens,
pointing out the path that they should follow. Milton thus put forward, in the first instance for himself but also for the world of
culture at large, the ideal of assuming a role which today would be called that of the committed intellectual.
Even in Milton’s masque we find the celebration of a noble household but, contrary to traditional models of the genre,
Comus does not put forward the image of a perfect world threatened by evil forces which are then defeated so as to exalt the
previous state of perfection. Here there is no pre-existing perfect world; perfection is an ideal to pursue, a target to reach only
after a victory over a long series of temptations and dangers encountered in the wood of error. Comus Milton’s religious
convictions were central both to his personal life and to his poetry. He spent the years 1638 and 1639 in Italy, which for him
was the land of artistic creation.
Paradise Lost is a grandiose and massively ambitious work. Epic poetry celebrates deeds of heroes who are the mythical
ancestors of the nation. Paradise Lost has as its protagonists Adam and Eve, ancestors of the whole human race. And just as
Homer and Virgil represent in their epics the legendary world of heroes, a Golden Age now departed and lost forever, so
Milton in his poem represents the magnificence of the Paradise that humanity has lost.
The comparison with the epic is constant, to the point that, at the outset of Book IX, Milton insists that the argument of the
poem “is not less but more heroic” than those embarked on in the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Aeneid. The poem also preserves
the fundamental principle of the epic poem: the story told constitutes –this time not just for a single nation but for the whole of
humanity to imagine its own collective identity, based on shared values and common notions and beliefs.
The poem starts with a literal fall –that of Satan, “hurled headlong flaming from the ethereal sky down to bottomless perdition”
in hell, prefiguring the Fall of Man.

Milton’s crucial choice, however, was that in favour of blank verse, the metre of Elizabethan tragedy, in preference either to the
metre used by Spenser or that chosen by Surrey for his Aeneid translation, or to the heroic couplet that was all the rage at the
time. With this choice Milton on the one hand rejects the metrical form used by “aristocratic culture”, preferring to affirm the
principle of formal rigour promoted by the Puritans; on the other hand, however, he aligns himself with the classical tradition
while at the same time adopting the type of verse used in the English theatre for communicating experience. Through his use of
this traditional metre Milton sought to communicate to the men of his time the ultimate meaning of the experience that he saw
as the basis for all of human experience.

Bunyan
John Bunyan (1622-88), son of a tinker, was enrolled in 1644 into the Parliamentary army to serve in the Civil War. After his
discharge in 1647 he went to work as a tinker himself and some years later became a Nonconformist preacher. After the
Restoration, in a climate decidedly unfavourable to Protestant confessions of faith, he was arrested (in 1661) and spent the next
12 years in jail.
While in prison he began writing his masterpiece, the religious allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, which he finished during a
second term of imprisonment, in 1677. The book, published in 1678, was an immediate and enormous success, a success
constantly renewed over time to the point that it became staple reading for generations on both sides of the Atlantic. Its
importance in the formation of American culture in particular cannot be overestimated. The appearance of spurious
“continuations” immediately after its publication led Bunyan to publish a Second Part of the Pilgrim (1684), in which the same
pilgrimage is undertaken, but this time by the wife and children of the original protagonist, Christian, who meanwhile has
happily entered the Celestial City. The whole story is presented as a dream.
The narrator resembles the dreamer figures of medieval allegory (there are strong echoes of Piers Plowman), while the
characteristics of the narrative recall those of Everyman and the morality plays. He is so terrorised by the obscure presences
that surround him that he can no longer tell his own voice from those of the fiends who are tormenting him and suggesting
“many grievous blasphemies to him which he verily thought had proceeded from his own mind”. At the end, however, with the
aid of his fellow pilgrim Hopeful, he reaches the Celestial City.
What Bunyan is doing here is analogous to what Milton did when he attributed the behaviour and false values of the
aristocracy to the world of Hell. Furthermore, both Milton and Bunyan put particular emphasis on individual salvation and on
the concept of life as a test of one’s virtue. The principal difference between these two great writers lies in the fact that Bunyan,
thanks to the simplicity of his prose, to the “realism” of his dialogues, and to the fact that the Pilgrim is an ordinary human
being, wrote a book that appealed to an enormously wider readership. This was not just for religious reasons. Fundamentally,
Bunyan offers his readers a story in which “ordinary” people like themselves face absolutely extraordinary adventures

Restoration Drama
The Puritans had closed the theatres in 1642. With the accession of Charles II in 1660, the theatre immediately returned to life.
Only two theatre companies were given royal licence to perform in the capital. But they were more than enough, because an
entire generation had grown up ignorant of the very existence of the theatre, and Puritan attitudes towards it had spread to
include the majority of the population. After a few years the new companies also acquired new theatres to perform in. These
were built on the Italian or French model. There was a U-shaped stalls area with a dozen or so rows of benches, surrounded by
boxes, and with two tiers of galleries rising above. On the stage itself two revolutionary novelties were introduced. The first
consisted of the new scenery: moveable painted scene flats could be slid on stage from each side along three or four grooves in
the stage floor. Here they could form a backscene, or could be removed and changed, or opened to reveal a sensational
backcloth at the rear. The dramatist no longer needed to entrust representation of the space of the action to the words of the
characters and the spectators’ imaginations, but could count on the art of painting which on occasion, in the case of tragedies,
could be called upon to create spectacular landscapes (though this, obviously, limited the total freedom to change places
allowed by the Elizabethan stage). The second revolutionary innovation, borrowed from continental models, was that female
roles were now entrusted to actresses rather than to young male actors, allowing the dramatist to devise more and more varied
female parts.
The King himself was a great promoter of this second change, spurred on by his fondness for actresses. He was equally keen
on Spanish comedies of intrigue, and by his presence at the theatre encouraged his courtiers to take part in theatrical
performances. The public was significantly different from that of the Elizabethan period, consisting of aristocrats, gentlemen,
merchants and the like, an elite public whose composition gradually became broader.
At the outset the repertory was provided by plays by earlier dramatists such as Shakespeare, Jonson, Fletcher and Shirley, but
within a decade the public began to be treated to new types of both tragedy and comedy. Restoration tragedy was
approximately modelled on that of Corneille and was obliged to avoid the excesses of language and action typical of previous
English tragedy: Shakespeare himself was revised and “improved”. The widespread rediscovery of the criteria of classical
aesthetics brought with it a pursuit of moderation, clarity and order, even in tragedy, while the metre corresponding to these
principles was the heroic couplet, a pair of rhyming verses of ten syllables.

Dryden
John Dryden (1631-1700) was a figure of immense importance in English cultural life in the second half of the 17th century. A
poet first and foremost, but also a playwright and essayist, he wrote his first major work,Heroique Stanzas, in 1659 on the
death of Cromwell, following it in 1660 with the poem Astraea Redux to celebrate the return of the King. The subject matter of
Dryden’s poetry was often great political events and questions of politics and religion and it was easy to present him as an
opportunist, singing the praises of whoever was in power. Rather, however, he should be seen as a moderate who, at a time of
radical and even violent political confrontation, spoke up for whoever seemed most likely to guarantee peace and stability. In
his poem Annus Mirabilis (1667) Dryden recalled the “wonders of 1666”, the Fire of London and the victory against the
Dutch: and the following year he was given the title of Poet Laureate. But in 1687, two years after his conversion to
Catholicism, he published The Hind and the Panther, a poem in which through a series of complex allegories he criticised the
Anglican Church and illustrated his theological conviction that truth is achievable only through absolute faith. The following
year the Glorious Revolution deprived him of his laureateship and excluded him from any important public position. But this
did not shake his faith and he remained a Catholic to the end of his life.
In his last 12 years Dryden went back to writing for the theatre, which in the 1660s and 70s had occupied a large part of his
poetic activity. He also produced excellent translations of Latin poets (Virgil, Persius, Juvenal) and compiled a volume of
translations of Ovid, Boccaccio and Chaucer under the title Fables Ancient and Modern which was published in 1700 (and in
whose “Preface”, written in his elegant and already modern prose style, he proclaims Chaucer “the father of English poetry”).
Dryden’s first plays, written immediately after the Restoration, were verse and prose comedies.
This type of tragedy, called Heroic Tragedy, was much appreciated by the elite public of the time in that it coincided with the
self-image which it wished to project to the world. And the heroic couplet, Dryden thought, was the metre whose formal
elegance made it the most suitable for transmitting these values and this self-image.

Dryden himself regarded comedy as an inferior genre, of only modest literary value. And yet, as for other playwrights of the
period, comedy was the genre which provided him with the opportunity for some of the most felicitous moments of his artistic
production.

Restoration Comedy
The first Restoration comedies were quite varied in type. There were plays on political themes; there were also imitations of
Molière. Before long, however, a new type of comedy came to the fore. This was the so-called London comedy, whose subject
matter was the world of the metropolitan high society and which featured as its “heroes” young gentlemen and ladies of that
social group. Ordinary citizens of the City were by contrast treated with scorn in so far as they were representatives of the
social stratum that had eagerly supported the Puritan revolution and the regime of Oliver Cromwell.
The type of London comedy to which the most interesting Restoration plays belong, those which are still performed today, is
the comedy of manners, characterised by satire on the customs and manners of the day and mockery of the attitudes, behaviour
and values of the London beau monde. The fop is the particular object of ridicule. His values are not all that different from
those of the other characters, even those of the hero and heroine. His fault is his lack of proportion, his excess, which is seen as
something negative in itself but which above all can be used to reveal the limits and, in some cases, the total inconsistency of
the values shared by all and sundry. In general his defect is affectation, but individual plays concentrate on a particular type of
affectation by which the fop is characterised and defined –a fanatical attention to dress, a studied indifference to the amorous
addresses made to his lady friend, his exalted opinion of himself, and his boasting about his success with women which he
accompanies with a pride in his own discretion.
The fop’s other outstanding defect is his belief that he is a wit, and thus possesses the virtue par excellence of the heroes and
heroines of the comedy of manners. Wit, the rhetorical instrument so dear to the Metaphysical poets, becomes here above all a
linguistic ability, “a quickness and variety”, as John Locke put it, in linking together concepts and ideas “for entertainment and
pleasantry”.

Etherege
The career of George Etherege (1635-93) opened with The Comical Revenge (1664), a comedy whose story develops through
four interlinked plots, taking place in four different social strata, to each of which there corresponds a different language. The
play with language in this comedy was Etherege’s most original contribution to a genre which in general worked mainly on a
level of intrigue interspersed with episodes of farce. His next play, She Would If She Could (1668), on the other hand, is
already a fully-fledged London comedy, sparkling and amoral, which was a great success and seems to have been instrumental
in earning Etherege an appointment as secretary to the Ambassador to Constantinople for the next three years. His third and
last play, The Man of Mode (1676), is an exemplary comedy of manners, as its title already implies. Its sub-title is “or, Sir
Fopling Flutter”; this being the character who is the “man of mode”, a fop full of affectation and presumption who, in his
eagerness to impersonate the codes and values of high society, unmasks its vain and superficial essence. The protagonist,
however, is not him but Dorimant, a character inspired by the poet and libertine, the Earl of Rochester. The rake is a figure who
often features in Elizabethan and Jacobean comedies. But in the comedy of manners this figure is transformed into a character
whose behaviour is motivated almost exclusively by eroticism. The rake, who is usually accompanied by a love-lorn young
man of exemplary purity, repents at the end and this enables his past misdeeds to be absolved and him to be seen as a positive
figure. Recent critical writing has suggested that the rake’s desire for absolute freedom corresponds to a dream of a life
dominated by the arena of play, one in which there are no prohibitions and responsibilities; others have suggested that his
libertinism is based on a need for total autonomy which is none other than a lust for power. Both these aspects may indeed be
present, but the desire which moves him is nevertheless in the first instance always erotic. Dorimant, elegant, witty, cynical,
says farewell at the beginning of the play to his lover Mrs Loveit and pays court, with complete success, to her friend Belinda.
Immediately afterwards, however, he meets Harriet, who is the ideal heroine of the comedy of manners, and initiates a
courtship with her as well. But there is a difference: this time the rake falls in love and at the end asks her to marry him. The
courtship, as is almost always the case in this type of comedy, is in reality a duel.

Wycherley
Horner, the protagonist of Wycherley’s masterpiece, The Country Wife (1675), is in this respect an exception: the rake-hero
does not become a reformed rake but remains a libertine until the curtain falls. William Wycherley (1640-1716), who had been
sent to France when he was 15, returned to England only in 1660, with the Restoration. In his five French years he had
absorbed the great French literary culture and had learnt to appreciate the profound significance of the theatre of Molière. He
also used various episodes from Molière’s comedies in his own plays, one of which, The Plain Dealer (1676), derives quite
openly from Le Misanthrope.
Wycherley had debuted with a comedy of intrigue, Love in a Wood (1671), based on a play by Calderón, and even his next
play, The Gentleman Dancing-Master (1672), entirely based on the expedient of having the girl who is its heroine manage to
meet her beloved by dressing him up as her dancing master, belongs in essence to the same genre. But his greatest play, The
Country Wife (1675), the Restoration comedy most often performed today, is of a different nature entirely. The motor of the
plot is the rake Horner, who pretends to be a eunuch in order more easily to seduce the ladies of respectable society. He also
seduces Margery, the ingenuous country wife of the odious Pinchwife. Meanwhile his friend Harcourt is in love with Alithea,
Pinchwife’s sister and engaged to the fop Sparkish.
In The Country Wife Wycherley mounts a frontal attack on the forms which regulate social relations and elevate appearance to
the level of truth. The cult of appearances leads Sparkish, who for this reason is made the object of a cruel and mocking satire,
to display an almost total lack of jealousy, which he regards as a duty for a man of mode: he thus does not “see” that Harcourt
is courting his fiancée, but then believes in her betrayal when she is unjustly accused and appears guilty. The satire on the
hypocrisy of which the “women of quality” who share Horner’s “favours” are the bearers is ferocious, but Wycherley’s
sharpest darts are directed not at them in particular but at the ensemble of social conventions which replace honour with
“reputation”.
He thus presents husbands as even more guilty than their wives –as is shown by the hypocritical consensus with which in the
finale they endorse Horner’s deceit. The charm of the play lies in its clever construction, its lively dialogue, full of witticisms
and puns, and in the candour of the country wife, an ingénue of irresistible comic charm; but even more it lies in the character
of Horner, in his exuberance and in the triumph of his vitality. Horner does not reform, but the play does not condemn him at
all. Not just because he ​uncovers and mocks social imposture, but above all because he is the bearer of a joyous sexuality
which recognises the rights of desire. The Country Wife is a comedy of manners. But it would not be wrong to describe it also
as a sex comedy, a kind of play particularly prevalent in the 1670s, in which the sexual aspect is at the centre of the comic
invention. To this type belongs, for example, The Soldier’s Fortune by Thomas Otway (1652-85), the author also of Venice
Preserved, the only Restoration tragedy apart from All for Love to have stood the test of time. Another author of sex comedies
was Aphra Behn (1640-89), singled out by Virginia Woolf as the first professional woman writer. Behn tried her hand at almost
all the theatrical genres and succeeded throughout in imposing a woman’s point of view on her plays. She found a particularly
convincing voice when denouncing the frequent “forced marriages” of the period, as in the comedy Sir Patient Fancy (1678)
where she even devised a finale in which, in total contravention of the laws and social reality of the time, the young heroine is
able to leave her old husband whom she has married against her will, without having to abandon her dowry.

Farquhar
The splendid age of Restoration comedy would have ended here had it not been for the emergence on the London stage of
George Farquhar.
Farquhar, a young Irish actor who had left Dublin for London as a result of an incident in which he accidentally stabbed a
fellow actor, enjoyed instant success with a pair of comedies which combined situations familiar to the Restoration public with
flashes of distinctly Irish originality. But his main contribution to English drama was to come later. After a period when, in
order to pay off his debts, he served as an officer in the Grenadiers, he returned to the stage with a lively and carefree comedy,
The Recruiting Officer (1706), based on his experience in the army.

THE 18TH CENTURY

A Century of Contradictions
Upon William’s death in 1702, Anne, second daughter of James II, became queen. She was the last English queen to wear the
English crown. She had no children and, as decreed by the Act of Settlement of 1701, when she died in 1714 she was
succeeded by Georg Ludwig, Elector of the German state of Hanover, and a great-grandson of James I.
On his accession, he took the name and title of George I and he and his successors, George II, George III, George IV, William
IV and Queen Victoria are called the Hanoverian dynasty. In truth the first two Georges did not count for much. The kingdom
was firmly in the hands of the prime minister and of the two parliamentary parties, the Whigs and the Tories.
The American Revolution and the loss of the American colonies (1783) was a serious blow, not only economically. Yet by
1793, when the war against revolutionary France began, Britain had already recovered all its economic and military power. In
literature, the first part of the 18th century is often referred to as the Augustan Age, after the reign of the Roman emperor
Augustus and the splendour of Latin culture in the period. Many of the writers who came to the fore during the reign of Queen
Anne were in fact inspired by the example of the great Latin writers.
This is why the watchword for the second half of the 18th century is Sensibility: that is to say, a capacity for moral feeling,
which issued forth in literature in the form of a veritable cult of the feelings. The two aspects, Enlightenment and Sensibility,
are co-present, not necessarily as opposed values, but rather as values between which to seek a dialectical co-existence, if not
altogether a form of harmony.

Pope
Alexander Pope (1688-1744) was the first English poet to make a living from his literary output. He claimed, ironically, to be
“above a patron”. Pope had absolute faith in the value of poetry. He had the same faith in it as the humanists had done, and like
the humanists he loved the clarity and elegance of classic poetry. All this emerges clearly from his Essay on Criticism, which
takes up the concept of imitation of Nature, but even more clearly from his poetry itself.
The type of verse that best fitted his convictions was the heroic couplet, the metre beloved of Dryden and one whose rigorous
structure seemed to Pope to offer a guarantee of classical purity.
The book which drew him to public attention was Pastorals, a work inspired by Virgil which put forward the pastoral genre as
the representation of an ideal state of life.
His masterpiece is The Rape of the Lock (1712), a mock-heroic poem which tells of the quarrel between two families caused
by the snipping of a love-lock from the head of the beautiful Belinda. The tragi-comic consequences of this ill-considered
gesture, the descriptions of the salons of the aristocracy and the life of society, the exaltation of Belinda’s beauty, are all
presented to the reader in the noble tones of the epic.
The comic effect arises from the immense gap between the reality and the rhetorical means by which it is described; but
a further, and more subtle, comic effect is given by the allusions and references to some of the greatest works of the
literary tradition, from the Aeneid to Paradise Lost.
Pope’s mature verse was chiefly ironic, characterised by a satirical tone somewhat harsher than in The Rape of the Lock. Pope
had not been able to enter university because he was a Catholic and had been the butt of insults from men of letters because of
his physical deformity.
But once he had acquired a secure position on the English cultural scene, he was free to launch into a corrosive satire of the
literary world, presented as the Empire of Dullness, where “Dunce the second rules like Dunce the first”. This satire is
contained in the three volumes of The Dunciad (1728), a mock-epic poem whose “heroes” are dunces, or fools, and its target is
the mediocrity of artists who enjoyed an undeserved reputation in important circles.
Swift
By contrast, the satire of Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) is heavily marked by bitterness and disgust. Born in Ireland to
English parents, he took his degree at Trinity College Dublin, was ordained in 1694 and then spent some time moving
to and fro between England and Ireland (towards which he felt no particular attachment), finally being appointed Dean
of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin in 1713.
By far the most famous of Swift’s works, however, is Gulliver’s Travels, a formidable satire which owes much of its fame to
having been abbreviated, edulcorated, censored and reduced to its first two parts only to serve as a very popular adventure
story for children. The source of the book is The True History by the 2nd-century AD Greek writer Lucian, a tale of fantastic
journeys undertaken by a group of lost mariners. Swift was also acquainted with many books of travellers’ tales, of varying
reliability, which were very popular at the time, and he could not fail to have known Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Among other
things, Gulliver’s Travels can be read as a subtle parody of existing works in the genre. The story, divided into four books, is
told by Lemuel Gulliver, a ship’s surgeon and an honest fellow, sincere, but not particularly perspicacious.
These character traits enable Swift to create ironic or satirical effects deriving from the fact that there is no irony or satire in
Gulliver’s own statements. Gulliver is shipwrecked on the island of Lilliput, where he is a giant among beings only six inches
tall.

Gay and Fielding

Satire and parody are also at the root of the most interesting theatrical production that appeared on the English stage in
the first half of the 18th century after the absolute jewel of The Beaux’ Stratagem. But the most appreciated genre of the
period was the “exemplary” comedy (also traditionally referred to as sentimental comedy), whose main exponent was Richard
Steele.
His positive characters were an incarnation of the values appreciated by the bourgeoisie: they were honest, serious and good,
and the “exemplary” story ended with the triumph of goodness. Naturally, there was not much in them to raise a laugh –they
were comedies “almost solemn enough for a sermon”, says Parson Adams in Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews. But the
bourgeois public of the day flocked to see Steele’s plays and other exemplary comedies seemingly without succumbing to
boredom, as the public of today undoubtedly would.
The public of today, on the other hand, still appreciates the masterpiece of John Gay (1685-1732), The Beggar’sBeggar’s
Opera (1728), described as a “ballad opera” because it contained 69 songs, or “ballads”, and was divided, like an opera, into
three acts. Satire and parody, realised through the technique of inversion, are what animate it.
Parody is also the central feature of the work of Henry Fielding. Fielding is best known as one of the fathers of the English
novel, but at the outset of his career he also wrote some 25 plays, many of which are ballad operas, farces and parodies of
heroic tragedy. Fielding’s theatrical success was largely due to his skill with parodic effects, but it also derived from the
irreverence of his satire, which dared to take as targets the King, the Queen, the Prince of Wales and Walpole.
Fortunately for himself and for us, Fielding found a new outlet for this satirical and parodic vein and transferred his formidable
critical spirit to the novel, the literary genre of the modern age. The English novel is the literary genre of the rising bourgeoisie.
We may or may not agree with Hegel’s assertion that the novel is the epic of a prosaic modern middle-class world, but it
remains the case that the values expressed by the 18th-century English novelists are the values shared by the middle class, and
the realism of their works was congenial to a middle-class reading public deeply interested in the individual self, in the
material world, in that which is concrete and specific, and utterly alien to the abstract and mythological world of the romance.
The revolutionary feature of the novel, in contrast to the romance, is clearly set out in the “Preface” written by the playwright
Congreve to his novel Incognita (1691).

Defoe
In his classic essay The Rise of the Novel (1957), Ian Watt connected the affirmation of the new genre with a corresponding
ideology of economic and psychological individualism. Close reading of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe shows that his thesis
(maybe with some slight corrections on the strictly literary side) is one with which one must remain substantially in agreement.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731), born in London, son of a butcher, was for a while a hosiery merchant and later a wine and tobacco
merchant; he travelled extensively in Europe (possibly also in Italy), and between 1703 and 1714 travelled around Britain to
gather political information for the powerful statesman Robert Harley, who also employed him as a secret agent. In the midst
of all this he nevertheless found time to write hundreds of pamphlets, political and ideological essays (in prose and in verse),
historical treatises and essays, innumerable articles for the periodicals to which he was a contributor, and finally, from 1719
onwards, the novels to which he owes his reputation.
All this we find not only in his political writings but also in his fiction, beginning with Robinson Crusoe (1719). Robinson,
shipwrecked on an island, is the quintessential homo economicus, defined entirely by his properties. Before the ship sinks, he
removes all that he can. He lists with great precision all the objects he carries with him, just as later he will come up with
detailed inventories of his possessions and wealth: he does this because he is what he owns. Robinson’s “strange and surprising
adventures” are naturally written by his own hand. Defoe wants the reader to know from the outset that everything recounted is
absolutely true, a “just history of fact”.

The character (and this is Defoe’s limitation) may weep and fall into despair, but we never see what the deep feelings are in his
mind and in his heart. “Character psychology” is not yet there in Defoe. But there is no doubt that his Robinson, his Moll, his
Roxana are among the most alive, the most true to life and the most securely rooted in our collective imagination of all the
creations of the English novel.

Richardson
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740) is the first novel of a Puritan printer, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), who, when
he was thirteen, had been employed writing letters for young lovers and who, in 1733, had written a book of advice for
young men apprenticed to a trade, The Apprentice’s Vade Mecum, on morals and conduct. Pamela is made up of letters and
journals, most of them written by Pamela (there are six correspondents in all), a 15-year-old maidservant who is laid siege to
by her young master, Mr B. The young girl resists and even after having been imprisoned in Mr B.’ s remote house she refuses
his “generous” offer to make her his mistress.
The language in which Pamela expresses her “impudence” and her troubles is the language of the ordinary people. It is true
that there are occasions where the phrases she uses and sometimes entire chunks of her letters cannot be the direct
self-expression of a maidservant. Richardson intervenes authority to “correct” some of the irregularity of common speech and
replace it with a more formal if not literary language.
The characters springing from Richardson’s imagination thus present themselves to us as real people, who communicate the
truth of their experiences with the immediacy of the instrument at their disposal. It is up to us as readers to reflect on them and,
as Richardson would have wished, draw from them the necessary lessons.

Fielding
Henry Fielding (1707-54), son of a lieutenant, was sent to the exclusive public school of Eton when he was twelve, and
remained there for five years. In 1728 he enrolled as a student of letters at the University of Leyden, remaining there for
18 months, during which he pursued further study of classical literature. This cultural formation helps to explain his
attitude to the work of writing. Pamela was published and Fielding immediately found in the moralism of that book a new
object for his contempt and parodic skills. Shamela (1741) is Fielding’s mocking response to Richardson. The parodic intent is
already there in the title, a combination of Pamela with sham (or fake) and shame (perhaps also with “shambles”), and
extends to the entire epistolary form –or, more precisely, to the pretension of Richardson’s kind of writing to be able to
be “to the moment”. Above all, however, Shamela is a satire on what Fielding felt to be the moralistic hypocrisy of Pamela
(and Pamela). His next novel, Joseph Andrews, was published the following year. Its initial impulse and its opening sections
are parodic in style. Joseph, Pamela’s brother, is the footman of Lady Booby, the aunt of Mr B. (who is
now called Squire Booby)
The difference in the kind of character is not considered positive in itself, as it was in Congreve’s Preface: rather, Fielding
appeals to the classical genres to legitimate the presence of his lower-class characters and at the same time to legitimate the
form of the new genre itself. His characters are like people we find in real life, and life “furnishes an accurate observer with the
ridiculous”.
Fielding maintained that this capacity “to feel the misfortunes and enjoy the happiness of others” was a gift of nature possessed
by too few.

Smollett
The adventures experienced by Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews in the course of their travels (from London to Somerset in
Joseph’s case; from Somerset to London in Tom’s) have echoes of the “picaresque novel”, the sub-genre that first appeared in
Spain in the 16th century and which tells the venturesome story of a young man of lowly social extraction.
In 1751 Smollett published The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle, a novel told by an omniscient narrator in which the
protagonist’s Grand Tour offers Smollett the opportunity to mount a series of mocking (and chauvinistic) critiques of
continental habits and manners.
The journey of the five correspondents becomes five journeys, as was appropriate in an age of
“sentimental journeys” (Sterne’s book had appeared just three years earlier). All of Smollett’s work is dictated by his caustic
anti-conformism: even Humphry Clinker is a novel that goes against the grain, but it is one in which satire has given way to
humour.

Sterne
Hardly had the English novel found its place as a literary genre and established its basic conventions than along came a
work that overthrew all its fundamental assumptions. The author of this work was a country parson, the Rev. Laurence
Sterne (1713-68) and its title was The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1760-67). Already in the title a significant break
with convention can be observed: it purports to be not about adventures, but “opinions”. The novel itself then
proceeds in such a manner as to openly declare its fictional character and to present the author as the creator of the
world of the novel.
He explores and takes apart every figure of rhetoric, every form of professional language or jargon, every worn-out artifice of
grammar or syntax; he explores the very limits of the ability of words to convey a shared meaning. It is for this reason that he
has recourse to a variety of nonverbal devices

The Age of Sensibility

Sensibility is the key term used to pinpoint a decisive aspect of English culture in the second half of the 18th century. Precise
dates for phenomena of this kind can be useful for authors of manuals such as the one you have in front of you; but in reality
things do not work in distinct blocks: transformations, revolutions even, have roots and can manifest themselves to the alert
eye well before their full flowering. Old and new aspects can co-exist for a long time and sometimes, particularly in the case of
the 18th century, the new aspects can be in contrast with each other.

Poetry
In the years when Pope was writing his Dunciad neoclassical poetic diction was dominant. The Scottish poet James Thomson
(1700-48), in his poem The Seasons (1726-1730), celebrates “the pure pleasures of rural life”, placing the “natural” landscape
of the countryside and the activity of peasant labour at the heart of his poetic invention. From the rhetorical point of view, the
distance from Pope is not all that great, but the subject of his poems and their ideological content are already signs of the
emergence of a new sensibility.
The words of a surviving bard (who at the end of the poem commits suicide) provide Gray with the opportunity to align his
poetry in the direction of the Sublime. This is another central idea of pre-Romantic poetry, one which assigns aesthetic value to
the grandeur and violence of nature and to its savage aspects, seen as able to arouse the deepest emotions, from religious awe
to aghast terror.

The Gothic Novel

Gray was a friend and former school fellow (at Eton) of Horace Walpole (1717-97), son of the dictatorial Prime Minister. It
was the younger Walpole who in 1757 founded the printing press that was to publish Gray’s Odes. Walpole appreciated Gray
as poet of the Sublime, an aesthetic category which he found particularly congenial. In 1764, Walpole published the novel The
Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story, presenting it as the translation of an old Italian text.
With this novel Walpole created a new genre, that of the “Gothic novel”, which brings together the taste for the picturesque and
the sublime with a predilection for mystery and irrationality. The protagonist of the Gothic novel is most often a young woman
who is pursued by villains of terrifying wickedness from whom she flees, and who in her flight faces every sort of real or
imaginary danger, including ghosts and apparently supernatural phenomena which threaten her at every turn. Almost always
the novel concludes with the canonical happy ending, which tends to appear blatantly improbable. This ending is offered as a
“reward” for the reader who along with the heroine has been subjected throughout the plot to the “sublime” emotion par
excellence –terror.
The most famous, admired and imitated of all Gothic authors was Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823), a withdrawn, sickly woman,
who invented the most extravagant and horrifying stories of the age. Her first novel, inspired by Ossian, was set in Scotland;
her later novels, for which she was to become famous, were set in Italy, in picturesque landscapes (in harmony with Burke’s
idea of the Sublime), and in mysterious convents or in the cellars of sinister castles which give scope for infinite variations on
the theme of terror. The victim is the pursued and persecuted girl and her pursuer/ persecutor is a false-hearted and lecherous
villain. The story ends with the inevitable wedding, the reward earned by the girl who has had to face horrible dangers and
supernatural terrors.
The Monk (1796), the masterpiece of Matthew Gregory Lewis (1775-1818), makes a significant change to the basic rules of
the Gothic genre. At the outset of the novel Ambrosio, the future villain, is a young monk famous for his devotion, but he is
tricked and led into the path of sin by a diabolical woman. At this point, in accordance with the rules of the genre, the monk
pursues a young girl living with her mother; but then, instead of the expected happy ending, what ensues is that Ambrosio
rapes the girl (who turns out to be his sister) and kills her.

Dr Johnson
At the time that the first grave poems were being published, directly expressive of the new sensibility, and at the time when
Walpole was selling thousands of copies of his Castle of Otranto, Samuel Johnson (1709-84), artistically and philosophically as
far removed from that sort of literature as could be imagined, was emerging as the most authoritative figure in the whole
English literary world. So important was he that the period called the Age of Sensibility could with equal justice be referred to
as the Age of Johnson. Johnson was born in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller. He attended the University of Oxford for just
over a year before lack of money forced him to abandon his studies. Suffering acute mental distress following his father’s
death in 1731, he attempted by various means to make a living from intellectual work. Finally, in 1737, he decided to move to
London, where he entered the service of the founder of The Gentleman’s Magazine, to which he became a regular contributor,
and set out on a career of intense literary activity, writing poems, essays and biographies (the genre, he said, “most easily
applied to the purposes of life”).
In 1747 he issued the “Plan” of his Dictionary of the English Language, the work for which he is most famous and on which he
had started working the previous year. His aim was to create “a dictionary by which the pronunciation” of English could “be
fixed and its attainment facilitated; by which its purity” could be “preserved and its use ascertained”. He gave a definition for
some 40,000 words, illustrating them with quotations drawn from Sidney, Milton, Dryden, Swift and Pope as well as from
many other fields of learning.
While working on the Dictionary, Johnson in 1750 started a periodical, The Rambler, expressly conceived “to consider the
moral discipline of the mind”. His numerous articles (the periodical was almost entirely written by him) established him as the
foremost moralist of the period. Both the poem The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749), written in imitation of Juvenal’s Satires,
and Rasselas (1759), a philosophical tale on “the choice of life”, express a moral vision of severity and rigour, in which
humility and faith are the only antidote against illusions which are bound to be disappointed, and against the “insufficiency of
human enjoyments”.
Much of what we know of Johnson and his importance as unrivalled authority in the world of letters of his day we owe to his
biographer, James Boswell (1740-95), whose Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) is a work of scholarship, well documented by
Johnson’s letters and writings and by records of their conversations (Boswell used to take notes immediately afterwards), but is
also a work of great affection and esteem for a man with a complex personality, both difficult and fascinating. Johnson, as
mentioned above, was a great admirer of the art of biography. His biography is the monument to the charm of that art –and a
monument to the man and his work.

Goldsmith and Sheridan.

Sentimental comedy, as we have already said, fitted well with the philosophy and values which the bourgeois public believed
in with profound conviction. Unfortunately there was no room in this sort of comedy for laughter, an essential element of
comedy of any kind. It was this anomaly which Oliver Goldsmith (1730-74) addressed, both polemically and in his theatrical
practice. Born in Ireland and the son of a Protestant clergyman, in 1756 Goldsmith settled in London, where he began writing
for various periodicals and became a friend of Dr Johnson.
Goldsmith’s first play, The Good-Natured Man (1768), as its title implies, makes reference to the same optimistic hope
in benevolence professed by the sentimental comedy. But Goldsmith’s language has a verve, a lightness of touch, a wit
and a sense of humour of a kind that was entirely lacking in the theatre of the day.
The Rivals (1775) is a play of youthful gaiety and ebullience and a light-hearted comic tone. But its characters and their
predicaments reveal a richness of nuance that place it alongside the great classic comedy. The protagonists are Lydia, a girl
who despises riches and dreams of a pure, romantic, disinterested love (love and poverty would appear to be her motto) and
Captain Absolute who, knowing these things about her, presents himself before her as the modest Ensign Beverley.
DALLE ORIGINI AL RINASCIMENTO

Per secoli l'Inghilterra è stata terra di conquiste. La poesia più importante scritta nel cosiddetto inglese antico è Beowulf. Composto
durante l'VIII secolo e lungo 3182 versi, Beowulf canta l'eroico mondo del nord da cui gli inglesi erano venuti in Gran Bretagna. Era
il Signore dei Geati e affronta un terribile drago che aveva attaccato il suo popolo. Ha ucciso il drago ma nella battaglia è stato ferito a
morte. La poesia si conclude con il funerale solenne di Beowulf.
Il tono del poema è leggendario e tipico dell'epopea, come si addice a una storia di eroi in “sovrumana opposizione” a mostri
fantastici che incarnano il male.
Beowulf descrive un mondo pagano che non conosce la Bibbia. Il poeta lo sa, ma sa anche che il cristianesimo è un'acquisizione
recente e quindi si limita a inserire tra le gesta eroiche dei suoi antenati una manciata di riferimenti cristiani.
Il mondo degli antenati, quando è il mondo degli eroi, appartiene a quello che Hegel chiama il passato assoluto, senza alcun
legame con il passato storico e quindi con il presente, anche attraverso, come l'Iliade e l'Eneide, la storia è scritto per il presente,
con il punto di vista e i valori del presente. L'opera in prosa più importante sopravvissuta è dovuta al re Alfredo, che salì al trono
nell'871, quando i danesi avevano preso il controllo di tutti i regni inglesi tranne il suo. Alfred tradusse i Soliloqui di
Sant'Agostino, le Regole per i pastori di San Gregorio e le Storie ecclesiastiche di Beda dal latino in inglese, stabilendo
quest'ultimo come lingua letteraria.
Nel 1066 l'Inghilterra fu invasa per l'ultima volta. Guglielmo il Conquistatore, duca di Normandia, sbarcò ad Hastings il 28
settembre. Il giorno di Natale fu incoronato re nell'abbazia di Westminster.
Con i Normanni, migliaia di parole francesi invasero l'Inghilterra e l'inglese, dando origine a una lingua semiflessa che rimase però
fondamentalmente inglese, tranne che nelle aree del diritto e della cucina.
Per comodità l'inglese scritto e parlato in uso tra il 1100 e il 1400 è indicato come inglese medio, ma in realtà non esisteva affatto
una lingua letteraria standard.
Possiamo iniziare con Sir Gawain perché è l'esempio più illustre dell'altro decisivo cambiamento culturale portato dalla Conquista.
Chanson de gestes → canti dei fatti.
“Canzone” perché questa era la forma in cui venivano presentate le storie raccontate, celebrando gli atti, o “fatti”, di un
personaggio o di una stirpe nelle guerre feudali e soprattutto nelle guerre contro l'Islam, in particolare la riconquista della Spagna.
Particolarmente apprezzata fu la Chanson de Roland → l'eroica lotta di Ronald contro i Saraceni a Roncisvalle e la sua morte e la
vendetta di Carlo Magno contro il nemico e il traditore Grenelon.
La Chanson de Roland e le altre chansons cantate dei paladini e le loro gesta compiute dai feudatari della Francia meridionale
contro i Saraceni costituiscono “la questione di Francia”.
Una qualità simile pervade il Roman de Brut, scritto dal poeta normanno Robert Wace e dedicato nel 1155 alla regina Eleonora
d'Aquitania. Basandosi sulla cronaca latina di Geoffrey di Monmouth, la Historia Regum Britanniae, racconta in 15.000 righe le
avventure di Bruto. La storia è situata nel passato, ha sfumature epiche, il racconto del
Questo aspetto romantico è accentuato nella versione medio inglese del poema di Wace, Layamon Brut.

Il nome romance deriva dal francese antico romanz, che significa volgare. La corte di Artù è un centro di cortesie, le storie d'amore
si intrecciano con la cavalleria e l'avventura, e coraggiosi cavalieri combattono per difendere le damigelle in difficoltà. Il cavaliere
è un esempio di coraggio, onore e cortesia, e il suo dovere è servire Dio e il suo Re anche a costo della propria vita. Decisamente
importante nella sua diffusione fu La Morte Darthur, la versione in prosa della leggenda arturiana scritta da Sir Thomas Malory e
completata nel 1469 o 1470, attingendo sia alla versione francese che a quella inglese per produrre una sorta di versione definitiva
del romanzo arturiano.

Seguendo le sorti della leggenda arturiana ci ha portato alla fine del XV secolo. Sir Gawain e il Cavaliere Verde sono poesie scritte
in versi allitterativi, che ricordano la poesia dell'antico inglese ma più sofisticate nella forma e nel compendio della visione
cavalleresca propria del romance.
L'integrità e l'onore di Gawain sono simboleggiati dal blasone araldico sul suo scudo, una stella a cinque punte che rappresenta la
più alta delle sue virtù, trawthe, cioè lealtà e fedeltà, ma qui associata alle cinque ferite di Gesù e designando così Gawain come
latore di un codice cavalleresco profondamente religioso e dedicato a Cristo.

La differenza tra realtà e principi cavallereschi in cui i cavalieri cercavano di trovare il proprio riflesso era senza dubbio notevole.
Negli anni in cui fu scritto Gawain, Riccardo II dovette affrontare la spietata opposizione di conti e duchi. E quando, dopo un
periodo di tregua, pensò di potersene liberare, Henry Bolingbroke, duca di Lancaster, radunò la nobiltà intorno a sé e costrinse il re
ad abdicare.
L'anno in cui Enrico VII salì al trono fu anche l'anno in cui andò in stampa Le Morte Darthur. I principi della cavalleria, insieme ad
Artù, Merlino, la spada nella roccia e il nobile Ancelot, erano consegnati alla fantasia e alla fantasia di adulti e bambini.
Pearl è un poema di 1212 versi conservato nello stesso manoscritto di Sir Gawain. È una poesia onirica con una struttura metrica
estremamente complessa e una sofisticata costruzione retorica. Gli appare in sogno una bella donna, la perla che ha smarrito, e
anche la figlia da lei perduta, morta a due anni.
Piers Plowman, anch'esso un poema onirico in stile allitterativo, è scritto nell'inglese del Worcestershire, un dialetto più facilmente
comprensibile ai lettori di Londra, dove il suo autore, William Langland, un religioso sposato degli ordini minori, ha vissuto a
lungo.

Nell'Inghilterra della seconda metà del XIV secolo fiorì il genio di Geoffrey Chaucer, considerato da molti studiosi secondo solo a
Shakespeare come il più grande poeta inglese. Servì con l'esercito inglese in Francia nel 1359-60 e ancora nel 1369, ricevette varie
missioni diplomatiche per Edoardo III e continuò a svolgere importanti funzioni pubbliche nei successivi regni di Riccardo ed
Enrico.
Il suo contributo più originale alla letteratura inglese deriva dall'incontro con la cultura italiana. Fu Dante che fornì il modello del
poema come visione utilizzata in House of Fame e ispirò in lui la convinzione che la grande poesia potesse essere scritta in
volgare, mentre Petrarca, che proclamò la nobiltà e la dignità della poesia e quindi del poeta.
Troilus e Criseyde è una storia d'amore anomala. Costruito in rhyme-royal racconta la storia di due amanti del titolo, seguendo lo
schema che nel Medioevo passò alla tragedia, ma ha un finale pensato per essere tragico.
Il capolavoro di Chaucer, a cui ha dedicato la sua opera poetica negli ultimi quindici anni della sua vita, è The Canterbury Tales.
Come in numerosi testi medievali, Chaucer ha inquadrato una serie di storie affidandole a diversi narratori.
Prima della sua morte Chaucer ne aveva completati solo 22, che sono tradizionalmente raggruppati in dieci “Frammenti”.
Il gruppo più numeroso è costituito dai cosiddetti Fabliaux, racconti comici, di ambientazione popolare, spesso incentrati sulla
moglie triangolo, il marito anziano o geloso, e l'amante.
Il migliore di tutti è The Nun's Priest's Tale, che appartiene al genere della bestia favola, la cui morale è affidata a due
personaggi animali, il gallo Chauntecleer e la gallina Pertelote.

Per il lettore moderno, però, forse ancora più affascinanti dei racconti sono i Prologhi, prima il Prologo generale con le sue
descrizioni di tutti i pellegrini e poi i prologhi individuali in cui ogni pellegrino si presenta.
Il narratore descrive i personaggi, compresi i loro difetti, con un accattivante buonumore che maschera segretamente una
formidabile ironia. Le due figure che mostrano l'arte di Chaucer nel suo massimo splendore e che sono entrate più pienamente
nell'immaginario inglese sono la Moglie di Bath e il Pardoner. Il suo atteggiamento nei confronti dell'esistenza è l'opposto di
quello dei moralisti. Chaucer dipinge il suo ritratto con acutezza psicologica e con evidente simpatia, mettendo in primo piano la
sua esuberante sessualità con immagini pirotecniche e commenti caustici.

Nel suo prologo, il Pardoner si vanta della sua abilità nel vendere indulgenze e, dopo un paio di bicchieri, ammette di usare false
reliquie e ogni sorta di espediente per spremere denaro anche dai poveri. È un vero e proprio truffatore e non si vergogna di definirsi
“un uomo pieno di vizio”. The Pardoner's Tale è una storia esemplare. Tre giovani chiassosi si mettono in cerca della Morte per
ucciderlo, e lo trovano o, come dice lo stesso Perdonatore in latino, radix malorum est cupiditas.

Il poema si conclude con The Parson's Tale, che non è un racconto ma un lungo sermone sulla penitenza. L'ultima “Ritrattazione”
in cui Chaucer ripudia tutte le sue opere che non hanno un'intenzione morale, e le enumera una per una, compresi gli stessi
“racconti di Canterbury”, è il logico risultato del suo sermone.
Dopo la morte di Chaucer, la letteratura inglese conobbe un lungo periodo di mediocrità. Chaucer era un modello da imitare. Fu un
secolo che iniziò con le brevi visite di Enrico, seguite da un susseguirsi di sconfitte nella guerra contro la Francia e dai trent'anni
delle Guerre delle Rose.

Una concezione letteraria opposta era quella sposata da Thomas Wyatt, le cui opere poetiche furono pubblicate solo alcuni anni
dopo la sua morte. Wyatt era un cortigiano e un diplomatico, al servizio di Enrico VIII in diverse missioni.
In realtà il suo poema più famoso, che imita “Una candida cerva” di Petrarca, potrebbe contenere un velato riferimento alla
sfortunata regina, come il cervo sul cui collare di diamanti è scritto “Noli me tangere, per Cesare io sono”.
Wyatt ha sviluppato in modo originale la lezione di Petrarca. Sul piano formale assunse la disciplina del sonetto, tanto che invece
di due parti di otto e sei versi rispettivamente lo divise in tre quartine e un distico finale, in rima abba-abba cddc ee.

Come il teatro greco ha la sua origine nel rito, così il teatro del mondo cristiano ha la sua origine nella Messa.
Si può ritenere che la Chiesa abbia interesse a far sì che gli insegnamenti della religione siano comunicati in forma semplice e
attraente a tutti i fedeli, anche ai meno istruiti. Ogni episodio era affidato ad una delle corporazioni presenti nel paese e la
rappresentazione degli episodi veniva spesso eseguita su carri e piattaforme mobili che si muovevano per le vie del paese con punti di
sosta concordati. L'insegnamento religioso e morale attraverso il teatro si svolge anche attraverso le commedie morali, che mettevano
in scena un conflitto allegorico tra le figure del Bene e del Male mentre lottavano per catturare l'anima dei personaggi che
rappresentavano simbolicamente l'intera umanità.

LA LETTERATURA ELISABETTIANA
Henry Tudor salì al trono nel 1509.
Nel 1521 fu proclamato dal Papa Difensore della Fede e poi sposò Cristina d'Aragona.
Nel 1534 l'Atto di Supremazia lo aveva proclamato capo della Chiesa d'Inghilterra.
Nel 1536 Anna Bolena fu giustiziata per presunto adulterio ed Enrico sposò Jane che morì di parto dando alla luce il figlio di Enrico,
Edoardo, che gli successe alla sua morte nel 1547.
Edoardo morì nel 1553 e la successione passò a Mary Tudor, figlia di Enrico da Caterina d'Aragona. Era una fervente cattolica, Maria
ha condotto una feroce politica di persecuzione contro i protestanti, che ha portato al suo soprannome di Bloody Mary.
Di fronte a una situazione sociale, religiosa e politica estremamente complessa e instabile, la giovane regina si dimostrò capace di
agire sia con prudenza che con decisione. Col passare del tempo Elizabeth riuscì a concentrarsi sulla sua figura, l'immagine di una
nazione finalmente unita sotto la sua corona, nel pieno dell'espansione economica e in procinto di diventare la maggiore potenza del
Vecchio Mondo.
Per meglio comprendere la dimensione culturale sottesa al mondo dell'aristocrazia elisabettiana, vale la pena richiamare l'attenzione
sul ruolo svolto dai più celebri trattati contemporanei sui costumi del vero gentiluomo.

Philip Sidney
Philip Sidney è il poeta in cui questa corrispondenza sembrava trovare la sua massima espressione, anche se solo dopo la sua tragica
morte prematura. Come poeta aristocratico, Sidney non pubblicò mai le sue opere letterarie. A Defense of Poetry è una rivendicazione
della superiorità della letteratura contro la storia e la filosofia, caratterizzata dalla purezza dello stile.
Astrophil e Stella è una sequenza, alla maniera petrarchesca, di 108 sonetti e undici canzoni che descrive l'amore di Astrophil (amante
delle stelle in greco) per Stella (stella in latino). Arcadia è un romanzo in prosa, contenente alcuni versi basati sul prototipo
dell'Arcadia di Sannazaro. Questa è la storia d'amore pastorale di Sidney. La storia centrale è quella di due principi innamorati di due
principesse, in cui si mescolano vari momenti comici, episodi drammatici e, Il Calendario di Shepherd dedicato a Sidney, che si
compone di 12 egloghe, una per ogni mese dell'anno, era fortemente allegorico: i dialoghi tra i pastori mascherano personaggi reali,
vescovi e conti, per sviluppare temi di carattere generale come l'amore, la morale, religione o poesia.
The Faerie Queene: 6 libri, anche se ne aveva previsti 12. È un poema epico/anglicano, in cui il nemico è il cattolicesimo. La Chiesa
d'Inghilterra ha restituito alla Chiesa la purezza primitiva; La regina Elisabetta, che è il suo governatore supremo, è la regina vergine.
Spenser si rifà al fantastico mondo di Re Artù e dei suoi Cavalieri, ma visto da una posizione morale rigorosa e rispondendo a un
gusto rinato alla corte elisabettiana per l'atteggiamento e i simboli (anche i tornei) tipici della Cavalleria. Sei Cavalieri sono gli eroi
delle sei “avventure” narrate in ogni libro, ognuna esemplificativa di una virtù: Verità, Temperanza, Castità, Amicizia, Giustizia e
Cortesia. Spenser fonde la poesia eroica con il romanticismo, usando come modelli, in particolare l'Orlando Furioso del primo: il suo
metro è basato sull'ottava rima dei suoi modelli italiani, ma vi aggiunge un nono verso in modo che la sua stanza rima abab bcbc.
L'allegoria era la sua strada.

Amoretti, un sonetto dedicato alla sua seconda moglie Elisabetta e pubblicato con Epithalamion, un inno matrimoniale in 24 strofe, in
cui, come Orfeo, risuona alla sposa le sue “lodi del proprio amore”. Spenser non è affatto l'unico poeta che ha cercato la fama
attraverso poesie pubblicate su larga scala e invece è ricordato soprattutto oggi per la delicatezza della sua poesia "privata".

Teatro
La forma in cui la cultura elisabettiana si esprimeva in tutta la sua originalità e grandezza era il teatro. Il teatro si è diffuso dall'essere
un intrattenimento occasionale per una piccola minoranza per diventare la più diffusa socialmente delle arti. La Regina amava il
teatro: se ne dilettava molto e lo raccomandava al godimento della corte. I protestanti lo odiavano, vedendo in esso la forma più
diabolica di imitazione della realtà.
A Londra, all'inizio del XVI secolo, c'era un enorme potenziale pubblico. a distanza
contro di essa, al fianco della borghesia protestante della Città contraria al teatro per motivi religiosi. Il problema fu “risolto” nel 1572
con il Vagrancy Act che stabiliva pene molto severe, inclusa l'impiccagione, per i colpevoli. Compagnie: Lord Admiral's Men,
Queen's Men, Chamberlain's Men.

Le compagnie teatrali erano piccole ma riuscivano a mettere in scena commedie con un gran numero di personaggi mediante la pratica
del raddoppio. I ruoli delle ragazze erano interpretati da giovani attori, poiché l'idea stessa delle donne che si esibivano sul palco era
considerata totalmente scioccante. Anche questa convenzione ebbe importanti conseguenze per il drammaturgo, che fu obbligato a
limitare il numero e la portata delle parti femminili.

La "fossa" al piano terra era riservata ai soli posti in piedi e gli spettatori pagavano un centesimo per l'ingresso. Lo spettacolo è stato
rappresentato alla luce del giorno, davanti a uno sfondo permanente, senza cambi di scena e senza possibilità di ricreare lo spazio e il
tempo dell'azione se non attraverso le parole del testo. Una pedana con alle spalle una zona nascosta da sipari che fungeva da
retroscena, posta su un lato del cortile di una locanda o eretta all'aperto in una fiera, con il pubblico su tre lati. Era per sua natura uno
spazio che favoriva un rapporto diretto tra il pubblico e l'attore, che ad esso indirizzava i suoi “diversi” e lo prendeva in confidenza
per le parole dei soliloqui.
A Londra, alla fine del Cinquecento, il cosiddetto teatro privato, modellato sui grandi saloni delle case nobiliari dove si
rappresentavano le commedie. Il pubblico dei teatri privati ​tendeva a provenire da una classe sociale più ristretta, che poteva
permettersi il prezzo d'ingresso più alto. Il drammaturgo e la compagnia teatrale sapevano di dover progettare uno spettacolo che
potesse essere messo in scena sia al chiuso che all'aperto e per un pubblico che, sia nei teatri “pubblici” che “privati”, fosse in sintonia
con lo stesso tipo di drammaturgia convenzioni e, almeno in parte, alla stessa idea di teatro.

Il pubblico elisabettiano rimase sostanzialmente unitario. Ma durante il regno di Giacomo I (1603-25) questo pubblico unitario
cominciò a dividersi, con le fasce più colte del pubblico che sceglievano sempre più i teatri privati; e sotto il regno di Carlo I
(1625-1642) di fatto scomparve, poiché il teatro si rivolgeva sempre più a un pubblico d'élite.

Giocare a
Per tutto il periodo in cui Shakespeare era attivo, tuttavia, le compagnie teatrali sapevano che la domanda che avrebbero dovuto
soddisfare era sostanzialmente uniforme. C'era anche una richiesta di novità e diversità, con i teatri pubblici che mettevano in scena
uno spettacolo diverso ogni giorno, il che significava almeno trenta nuovi spettacoli all'anno. Le fonti di ispirazione per i nuovi
drammi furono: romanzi e novelle italiane, l'eredità mitica e leggendaria del mondo classico e della storia romana e, dal 1580 in poi,
la stessa storia inglese. Era spesso il caso che gli scrittori lavorassero insieme sullo stesso testo.

I generi teatrali erano:

1. Commedia
2. Tragedia
3. Gioco di storia
4. Tragicommedia

Commedia: era generalmente una commedia romantica. I suoi ingredienti erano incomprensioni e identità sbagliate, con una trama
spesso motivata dall'amore inizialmente mal indirizzata ma alla fine focalizzata sull'oggetto giusto. Fu allora Ben Jonson che per
primo rifiutò la commedia romantica e attirò i suoi personaggi dal mondo contemporaneo che lo circondava e spostò l'accento
dall'amore al denaro, dai sorrisi gentili alla dura satira. La prima commedia inglese è stata Ralph Roister Doister.

Tragedia: era nel complesso un genere meno diffuso (meno diffusi) della commedia. Il suo modello era Seneca ma interpretato in
modo parziale e piuttosto sanguinario. Sempre da Seneca derivò la forma più caratteristica dell'epoca: la “tragedia della vendetta”. La
prima tragedia inglese, Gorboduc (1562).

Dramma storico: Shakespeare, Marlowe e altri autori di commedie storiche hanno seguito la tradizionale concezione del tempo nel
presentare gli eventi passati nelle vesti di uno “specchio per magistrati”, uno specchio che conteneva una lezione che offriva una
narrazione esemplare della caduta del potente. Era una concezione della storia che leggeva gli eventi passati come una sanzione della
piena legittimità dei governanti di oggi e come fonte di orgoglio nazionale e che consentiva ai drammaturghi di contribuire a
rafforzare il ruolo di Elisabetta come garante dell'unità e della prosperità della nazione. Il primo esempio conosciuto di una commedia
storica fu King John di John Bale (1538).

Tragicommedia: genere che venne alla ribalta più tardi, in epoca giacobina.

Marlowe
Spirito universitario e spia al servizio di Sua Maestà. Ad un certo punto, però, i servizi segreti decisero che non era più affidabile e
probabilmente furono loro a farlo uccidere organizzando una rissa in una taverna nel sobborgo londinese di Deptford in cui fu ferito a
morte. Marlowe è stato un grande scrittore per il teatro e un grande poeta: il suo più grande merito è stato quello di aver affidato il suo
talento poetico ai versi sciolti nella creazione dei suoi testi teatrali e di aver dimostrato ai drammaturghi del suo tempo quale forma di
linguaggio suonasse meglio sul loro palcoscenico . Senza di lui il teatro elisabettiano sarebbe stato una cosa molto minore.
I suoi personaggi sono monolitici (questo è anche il loro limite) e grandiosi nella loro malvagità.
Queste qualità stupivano e affascinano il pubblico dell'epoca, che vi trovava un perfetto connubio per il gusto del sensazionalismo e
dell'eccesso.

Tamburlano il Grande (1587): storia eroica e crudele di un “pastore scita” che assurge a imperatore distruggendo chiunque si frappone
alla sua marcia verso il potere, ed entusiasmò gli spettatori proprio per l'eccessiva qualità del protagonista e le sue gesta. Tamburlaine
è il dramma che ha il maggior numero di passaggi in cui il potere poetico di Marlowe manifesta la sua forza più eloquentemente.
L'ebreo di Malta (1592): Barabas, il personaggio centrale è malvagio ed è stato brutale nei crimini che commette per ottenere
vendetta. La dimensione grottesca nella rappresentazione di Barabas lo fa assomigliare a un cattivo in un cartone animato dell'orrore.
Ma la sua denuncia dell'ipocrisia e dell'avidità dei cristiani e del loro “fruttuoso” pregiudizio contro gli ebrei è degna di un vero
personaggio tragico (e di un grande drammaturgo tragico).
Storia tragica del Doctor Faustus (1590): Come Tamburlaine, Faustus sfida Dio: ma la sua sfida è ancora più peccaminosa, perché fa
un patto con il Diavolo per ottenere potere, onore e conoscenza sconfinata in cambio della sua anima. Questo è un gioco di moralità. È
regolarmente combattuto tra il peccato e il pentimento.

Edoardo II (1592): l'opera teatrale meglio costruita di Marlowe che trasformò la commedia storica in una tragedia storica, come
Shakespeare doveva fare anche con il suo Riccardo III prodotto in quegli anni. La tragedia ruota attorno a quattro personaggi di
notevole forza drammatica: Edward, il suo amante Gaveston, sua moglie la regina Isabella e il suo amante Mortimer. Lo scontro tra i
loro sentimenti privati ​e la loro ricerca di potere porta la nazione sull'orlo della catastrofe. La rivolta dei baroni porta all'omicidio di
Gaveston e alla riuscita ribellione di Isabella e Mortimer al confinamento di Edward nel castello di Berkeley e al suo omicidio. Con
L'eroe è un re dalle limitate capacità politiche e militari che durante il suo regno ha cercato di affermare la sua autorità su baroni
insubordinati e potenti, e lo ha immaginato come una figura tragica intrigante e inquietante il cui desiderio di potere e desiderio
sessuale si combinano per guidarlo alla sua rovina. Pone il problema della legittimità del potere reale: Shakespeare avrebbe
probabilmente avuto in mente l'esempio di Marlowe nel concepire il suo Riccardo II.

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

Vita
William Shakespeare nacque nel 1564 a Stratford-upon-Avon. All'età di 18 anni sposò Anne Hathaway ed ebbero una figlia e due
gemelli, una femmina e un maschio. La prima infanzia di William è avvolta nel mistero. Ad un certo punto ha lasciato Stratford, sua
moglie e i suoi figli, ma non sappiamo quando o cosa abbia fatto dopo. Dopo una lunga e fortunata carriera, nel 1611 Shakespeare
lasciò Londra e i suoi teatri per tornare a Stratford, dove morì nel 1616, all'età di 52 anni.

Nel 1594, passata la peste, i teatri riapriranno. In quell'anno si formò la compagnia degli uomini del Lord Chamberlain, a cui si unì
Shakespeare. Oltre che attore e azionista della compagnia, Shakespeare è stato il prolifico autore di testi da eseguire per gli uomini di
Lord Chamberlain. Nel 1608 una nuova epidemia di peste portò ancora una volta alla chiusura dei teatri pubblici e gli Uomini del Re
si trasferirono nel teatro privato dei Blackfriars.
Il pubblico non era più quello misto a cui erano abituati al Globe. Era più raffinato, con un gusto particolare per il nuovo genere della
tragicommedia. Shakespeare sviluppò questo genere in modo nuovo, con i romanzi che scrisse tra il 1608 e il 1611: Pericle, Il principe
di Tiro, Cimbelino, Il racconto d'inverno e La tempesta.

Che Shakespeare fosse un uomo di notevole cultura è certo. Aveva una memoria brillante, come si addice a un uomo che di
professione faceva l'attore, aveva una straordinaria capacità di collegare le situazioni, le circostanze e le sensazioni dei personaggi che
creava per la scena con le molteplici ispirazioni provenienti da ogni angolo della cultura di il suo tempo.
Nelle opere di Shakespeare, anche quelle situate in una dimensione fortemente improntata alla fantasia, si ha sempre la sensazione di
trovarsi di fronte alla solidità della vita, alla sua realtà concreta e immediatamente riconoscibile. Shakespeare è un narratore
straordinario. Questa forma di “raccontare” non si realizza sotto forma di narrativa ma piuttosto sotto forma di dramma, che richiede
un’ambientazione fisica, con persone in carne ed ossa che comunicano la storia raccontata: i clienti di questo spettacolo, il pubblico,
lo riconoscerà come vero solo sulla base di convenzioni teatrali che gli sono familiari e assicurerà loro che è credibile. Le convenzioni
teatrali in atto nel teatro elisabettiano furono una condizione necessaria per l'esplosione del genio drammatico di Shakespeare.

I suoi personaggi parlano con le parole del discorso quotidiano, ma all'improvviso usciranno con locuzioni inaspettate, strane
sottolineature o figure retoriche nascoste che danno un tono insolito al contenuto, o parole insolite che appartengono più naturalmente
al filo filosofico nascosto nel dialogo ed emergono con apparente naturalezza. Le convenzioni teatrali richiedevano che tutto ciò che
veniva detto sulla scena fosse ritenuto vero, o perché, nel caso di Shakespeare, qualsiasi cosa fosse detta poteva contare anche sul
dono più potente posseduto dal linguaggio.

Come ogni scrittore classico le sue opere saltano nel tempo e nello spazio e possono dire cose diverse a persone diverse, come del
resto già accadeva in epoca elisabettiana. Naturalmente, era un uomo del suo tempo, e alcune delle sue convinzioni e convinzioni
appartengono ai suoi
tempo e non al nostro – e come tale va inteso.
Solo Shakespeare, però, ci ha regalato Amleto, Otello, Romeo e Giulietta, Macbeth, Falstaff. Ci ha donato personaggi che
costituiscono l'archetipo di un atteggiamento e di una forma di esperienza che può essere comune a ciascuno di noi o quantomeno
contenere in sé il suo significato: la gelosia, l'angoscia del dubbio, l'amore sconfinato, la sete di potere, la vitalità sconsiderata . Non è
un caso che i nomi di quei personaggi siano diventati sinonimo di un particolare modo di essere.

Storie
Shakespeare ha scritto tre drammi storici interconnessi sul regno di Enrico VI e un sequel su Riccardo III. Shakespeare era interessato
ad affrontare una serie di problemi politici cruciali. Ci sono diversi temi in comune a tutte le sue opere, come le responsabilità del re, i
disastri causati dalle forze opposte all'interno della nazione, la necessità dell'unità nazionale e la legittimità della regalità.
I drammi storici di Shakespeare avevano un importante valore educativo per la grande maggioranza degli spettatori meno colti e
contenevano un chiaro messaggio politico per tutti quanti.

Riccardo III: rimane uno dei drammi di Shakespeare più popolari. Il suo protagonista possiede una straordinaria abilità retorica ed è
una figura del male su larga scala. L'obiettivo principale di Richard è la conquista del potere ed è la sua malvagità che gli consente di
acquisirlo. È un attore sublime che eleva l'imposizione a un'arte della politica. Oggi Riccardo III può essere paragonato ai tiranni dei
nostri giorni.

Riccardo II: Shakespeare scrisse del suo regno per affrontare il tema della regalità e della legittimità. La storia di un re costretto a
rinunciare al trono è stata dunque al tempo stesso un tema politico di attualità e una riflessione sulla natura e le prerogative della
sovranità e il fondamento stesso della legittimità.
L'assassinio di Riccardo fu ordinato da Bolingbroke, che aveva già preso il potere e preso il nome di Enrico IV, e
che, in tipico stile politico, lamenta la morte del suo predecessore e condanna i suoi assassini. Il soliloquio di Richard appena prima
del suo omicidio è uno dei momenti più esaltanti della poesia drammatica di Shakespeare e un tocco finale al ritratto che l'opera ha
dipinto dello sfortunato re. È la figura del re sfortunato e debole che si guadagna la simpatia del pubblico.

Enrico IV: parte prima e parte seconda raccontano i travagli del nuovo re, l'usurpatore Bolingbroke e suo figlio, il coraggioso ma
dissoluto principe Enrico. Ma la grande creazione di questi due drammi storici è la figura di Falstaff, capo della “ciurma dissoluta”
frequentata dal giovane principe. Falstaff è una figura comica, un grande bugiardo e un meraviglioso pretendente, ed eloquente
portavoce dei piaceri del mangiare, del bere e della fornicazione. “Falstaff, che è libero, ci istruisce alla libertà – non una libertà nella
società, ma una libertà dalla società”. Quando Enrico IV muore, Falstaff si precipita a Londra per salutare il suo ex compagno di
grazia, ora Enrico V. Ma il re risponde: "Non ti conosco, vecchio... non presumere che io sia ciò che ero". Questa è la fine delle allegre
avventure di Falstaff.

Enrico V: era un popolare eroe nazionale. Eppure, in una breve scena alla vigilia della battaglia, Henry, ovviamente travestito, parla
con tre soldati che espongono le loro paure e i loro dubbi sulla giustizia di quella guerra, e la consapevolezza che la loro morte in
battaglia avrà come ricompensa la miseria delle loro mogli e dei loro figli. Henry, retoricamente ma anche onestamente, espone le
ragioni della sua "giusta causa" e li esorta a combattere. Shakespeare fa il punto per lui, ma le parole che mette in bocca ai soldati
rimangono una testimonianza della crudele realtà della guerra

Commedie
Sogno di una notte di mezza estate: uno spettacolo nello spettacolo. Questa è la commedia di Shakespeare più popolare in tutto il
mondo di lingua inglese, perché è piena di fate, canzoni, stregoneria e incantesimi. Atto I e Atto V si svolgono ad Atene, dove il Duca
sta per celebrare il suo matrimonio con Ippolita. Gli atti II, III e IV si svolgono nel bosco dove due giovani ateniesi e le ragazze
innamorate di loro si inseguono l'un l'altro. Ed è qui, nel bosco, che si compie la magia che risolverà il conflitto tra Oberon e Titania,
re e regina delle fate, e che, dopo molti colpi di scena della trama, risolverà le questioni amorose di i giovani. Anche nel bosco ci sono
un gruppo di artigiani che stanno provando lo spettacolo che reciteranno al matrimonio del Duca. Uno di loro, Bottom, viene
trasformato da un incantesimo in modo che...
ha la testa d'asino, mentre Titania, vittima di un altro incantesimo, si innamora della prima persona che vede.
Quando gli incantesimi svaniscono, tutto torna alla normalità e Bottom torna in città appena in tempo per recitare nello spettacolo
rappresentato al palazzo del Duca per onorare le sue nozze. I quattro giovani decidono che le cose che sono accadute loro sotto
l'effetto della magia erano solo un sogno. Ma noi tra il pubblico abbiamo visto queste stesse cose accadere sul palco davanti ai nostri
occhi e sappiamo che erano vere, anche se non crediamo nella magia. Perché non è in gioco la magia delle fate, ma la magia del
teatro.

Molto spesso le vere protagoniste delle commedie shakespeariane sono le donne. Belli, intelligenti, intraprendenti e decisi, dominano
la scena con la loro iniziativa e il loro arguto discorso.

Come vi piace: si svolge principalmente nella Foresta di Arden, dove Orlando e Rosalind si sono rifugiati separatamente per sfuggire
ai pericoli di corte. Il bosco è un luogo che la letteratura pastorale presentava come il luogo di una vita serena e semplice, dove
trionfano l'amore e l'innocenza. Shakespeare smaschera con delicatezza le convenzioni del genere pastorale in quanto i personaggi,
anche se aderiscono a queste convenzioni, in certi momenti decisivi si rivelano falsi.
Per quanto riguarda l'amore, lo smascheramento è opera di Rosalind, che ha indossato l'abito di una contadina. Orlando non la
riconosce: i due giovani si erano conosciuti a corte per un breve momento e si erano subito innamorati. Rosalind, che afferma che
l'amore è follia e osserva che nessuno è mai morto per amore, ride del pensiero di Orlando.
atteggiamenti. Il matrimonio suggella il loro amore in un finale altamente simbolico: sono state smascherate le false idee sull'amore e
sulla vita, sono stati affermati i valori della vita reale; ma nello stesso tempo l'amore dei giovani corrisponde ad una realtà ideale, dove
le “cose terrene” felicemente realizzate e l'amore terreno felicemente uniti nel matrimonio fanno gioire il cielo stesso.

La dodicesima notte: Viola, la protagonista, si traveste da giovane, Cesario, dopo un naufragio che l'ha separata dal fratello gemello
Sebastian. Viola prende servizio come paggio con Orsino, duca d'Illiria, e se ne innamora; ma Orsino è innamorato di Olivia, che ha
rifiutato il suo affetto e si innamora di Viola/Cesario. La tradizionale situazione comica (ogni personaggio ama la persona sbagliata) è
arricchita da Shakespeare grazie alla complicazione generata dalla somiglianza tra Viola e Sebastian, che arriva nella strada attigua
alla casa di Olivia e viene subito preso per Cesario e accolto da Olivia, che lo sposa prontamente. Sorprendentemente – ma il lieto fine
è d'obbligo – Orsino decide di sposare Viola, che ottiene così l'uomo che ama (e che ha deciso che l'amerà). La verosimiglianza
psicologica non è obbligatoria. È spesso il caso delle allegre commedie shakespeariane, ambientate in luoghi di fantasia (Verona non è
Verona, Atene non è Atene, Illiria non è Illiria) e che propongono eventi e situazioni non dissimili da quelli della commedia classica
volti ad intrattenere il pubblico senza pretendere di istruirlo e di farlo stare allegro grazie ai loro propositi festosi.

Quando Shakespeare scrisse Il mercante di Venezia, l'antisemitismo era particolarmente diffuso in Inghilterra e il medico della regina,
l'ebreo portoghese Roderigo Lopez, è stato appena messo a morte ferocemente, di fronte a una folla entusiasta di Londra, a seguito di
un'accusa totalmente falsa.

Le grandi tragedie e "La tempesta"

Romeo e Giulietta: scritto all'inizio della sua carriera, è una delle maggiori tragedie shakespeariane e sicuramente una delle più
popolari. Come tutto il mondo sa, racconta la storia dei due amanti "sfortunati", Romeo e Giulietta, vittime dell'odio
tra i due nuclei familiari di appartenenza.
All'inizio il Coro ci ha informato che saremo testimoni del “pauroso passaggio del loro amore segnato dalla morte”. Il pubblico segue
quindi le avventure di Romeo e Giulietta, il loro primo incontro, i loro dialoghi al chiaro di luna e la loro dolorosa separazione alle
prime luci dell'alba sapendo che in breve tempo la morte porrà fine al loro amore e alla loro breve vita. È questo che suscita il
doloroso coinvolgimento del pubblico con il loro infelice destino, ed è in questo che risiede il valore tragico di Romeo e Giulietta –
nel fatto che un amore così bello, avvolgente e delicato, così appassionato eppure, come Dice frate Lorenzo, così “puro”, un amore in
cui non c'è colpa, sarà ricompensato solo con la morte.

Il loro amore si accende e brilla con la velocità e la brillantezza di un lampo: la tragedia sta nell'estinzione improvvisa di tanta
bellezza. La faida tra le due famiglie è il fulcro della commedia e ciò porta alla morte degli amanti. Dal prologo alla scena finale,
Shakespeare insiste sul fatto che la storia privata è inseparabile dal contesto pubblico in cui si svolge, come dimostra lo spazio nel
finale dedicato alla ricostruzione degli eventi e alla riconciliazione tra le due famiglie.