INTRODUCTION

WHAT S LITERATURE?
Term used to describe written or spoken material. Literature is used to describe anything from creative writing to more technical or scientific words. It is used to refer to works like poetry, drama, fiction and nonfiction.

WHY DO WE READ LITERATURE?

It represent a language of people. Its culture and tradition. Literature is a historical and cultural artifact. It introduces us to new worlds of experience. We learn from books and literature. We enjoy the comedies and tragedies of poems, stories, and plays and we may even grow and evolve trough literary journey with books. Literature adds to reality, it does not simply describe it. It enriches the necessary competencies that daily life requires and provides; and in this respect, it irrigates the desert that our lives have already become (C.S. Lewis 1898-1963)

BRITISH ISLES
The British isles is a geographical term for the group of islands lying off the north-west coast of continental Europe, including Britain, Ireland and a number of smaller island. The British Isles are divided in two separate and independent states. The smaller is the Republic of Ireland with its capital in Dublin. The larger is the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland with its capital London. The Island of Great Britain contains three nations: England, Scotland and Wales, which were separate at earlier stages of their history. So: by the United Kingdom we mean the political entity (ULSTER) Most people tend to say England when referring to Britain or the UK as a whole, probably because it is the biggest country. London is in the south of England

HOW TO TELL THE DATE IN ENGLISH

BRITISH ENGLISH: In British English the day is usually put before the month. You can add the ending of the ordinal number. The preposition of before the month is usually dropped. You can put a comma before the year (it is not common in British English). It is common if the date is a part of sentence. Ex. 5(th), (of) October (,) 2011. The conference takes place 10-12 December, 2003 AMERICAN ENGLISH: In American English, the month is usually put before the day. You can put the definite article before the day. It is common to write a comma before the year. Ex: October (the) 5(th), 2004 To sum up, for example, 5/10/2004 means 5 October 2004 in British English and May 10, 2004 in American English.

YEARS
Years in English are pronounced differently. The first two figures are a number and the last two figures are a number. They can be joined by hundred and, which is only necessary, however if the last two figures are 00 through 09. 1999 nineteen (hundred and) ninety-nine 1806 eighteen hundred and six / eighteen oh six 1066 ten sixty six 1000 ten hundred / the years one thousand 1002 - ten hundred and two 1900 nineteen hundred 1701 seventeen oh one 2000 two thousand / the year two thousand 2003 two thousand and three

THE ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
FROM PREHISTORY TO THE ROMAN OCCUPATION
IN 10000 BC the population of Britain consisted of small nomadic groups of hunters and fishermen. Then, there were several waves of invaders before the Roman occupation. The Celts first appeared around 700 BC presumably from Eastern Europe or southern Russia. They brought with them an already sophisticated culture. Their weapon-making skills were highly advanced and they produced elaborately shaped metal jewellery. They were originally a pagan culture who worshipped the elements-. The sun and moon, as well as rivers, trees and stones, all of which were believed to have souls . Water in particular was considered the most important life-generating element. The Celts believed in the immortality of the soul. The Romans conquest of Britain began roughly in 55 BC with the invasion of Julius Caesar. However, Britain was not actually occupied by the Romans until much later (from AD 43) under the reign of Emperor Claudius (Ad 41-54). With their Latin heritage, the Romans introduced a literate culture into Britain for the first time in its history. The Latin language and civilization became part of the structure of British society. Moreover, the Romans built roads, fortifications, baths, amphitheatres and town from which they administrated the rural Celtic population. Later the Romanized Britons themselves became the provincial administrators of Roman laws and taxes. Many modern town names such as Manchester or Winchester still carry traces of the Romans, being formed with the suffix chester ( walled town ) which derives from the Latin castra, meaning military camp. Indeed many Roman towns were initially army camps and later developed into permanent settlements. Though at the beginning there was considerable resistance, much of the Celtic population adapted to Roman ways quite happily, while educated Romans were fascinated by aspects of Celtic religion. Roman Britain , like the Roman empire itself, was in fact an extremely polytheistic society and Roman and Celtic gods were often fused into a single entity.

FROM THE ANGLO-SAXON INVASIONS TO THE BATTLE OF HASTING

According to the tradition, from the departure of Romans (AD 410) onwards, the Germanic tribes of the Jutes from Denmark and of the Angles and Saxons from Northern Germany started to invade Britain defeating the original Celtic people who escaped in the remote western areas of Cornwall, Wales and Scotland. By the end of the 6th century, the Anglo-Saxons had established seven recognizable kingdoms on Britain s shores: Kent, Sussex and Essex (which are remembered in the names of the modern English counties which correspond to their territories). East Angles (which lay in the extreme east of Britain) Wessex (the kingdom of West-Saxons, an area covering most of the south and south-west of England) Mercia (the present day Midlands) Northumbria ( the North of England)

SOCIAL CONTEXT
The Anglo-Saxons lived in small communities of huts, arranged around the lord s house. They were farmers or fishermen.

They brought with them their paganism, their distinctive warrior traditions and their language called AngloSaxon or Old English, which existed in a variety of dialects. The code of values of the Anglo-Saxon society was based on outstanding courage, loyalty of the people to their ruler and the generosity of the ruler to them. To die for one s lord in battle was a supreme virtue. They had also an acute sense of fate ( wyrd )

FOCUS ON:
WYRD
Wyrd literally means that which has turned or that which has become . It carries the idea of turning back to an original starting point. In a metaphysical term, wyrd embodies the concept that everything is turning into something else while both being drawn in toward and moving out from its own origins. Thus, we can think of wyrd as a process that continually works the patterns of the past into the patterns of the present.

THE SPREAD OF CHRISTIANITY

The process of re-Christianization began in the late sixth century. The missionary work was undertaken in the north and in Scotland by Celtics monks, but in the south the mission was entrusted to a group of Benedectines sent from Rome in AD 596 by Pope Gregory the Great. This mission, led by Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, was of incalculable importance to the future development of English culture. The chain of monasteries established by them served to link Britain both to the Latin civilization of the Roman Church and to the newly germinating Christian national cultures of Western Europe. By the end of the seventh century all the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England had accepted the discipline and order of Roman Christianity. The written word was of crucial importance to the Church, for its services depended upon the reading of the Holy Scriptures. This emphasis on the written and read word must, however, have been a considerable novelty to the generally unlettered new converts. The old runic alphabet of the Germanic tribes was gradually replaced by Roman letters. The conversion of England to Christianity, enriched Old English with a great wealth of Latin words. It also stimulated the language to give old words new meaning; for example, God, heaven and hell are Old-English words which became charged with a Christian significance. Literacy in early England may well have been limited to those in holy orders, but literature in a broader, oral form appears to have remained a more general possession. In this, Latin never seems to have precluded the survival and development of a vigorous, vernacular literary tradition. In the time of St. Augustine, around the 4th century it was intended that England would be divided into two provinces with two archbishops, one at London and one at York. It is the Archbishop of Canterbury who has the privilege of crowing the kings and queens of England and ranks immediately after the princes of royal blood.

A NEW WAVE OF INVASIONS

Around AD 800 a new wave of invasions began. The Vikings, from present-day Norway and Denmark, began by raiding and later occupying large areas in the north and East of England, as well as Ireland. Under the Viking occupation many of the monasteries and libraries built in the previous centuries were sacked and

destroyed, resulting in the loss of much of the culture and learning that had been accumulated. This is one of the reasons why there are so few surviving historical documents from this period in English history. It was only thanks to the skill and bravery of King Alfred the Great (840-900) that peace was achieved, becoming the first king to unite England under one crown.

LITERARY CONTEXT
Much of the literature of the Anglo-Saxons has been lost to us, either because it was never written down or because the manuscripts have not survived to this day. The earliest Anglo-Saxon literary works were poems. Some were pagan in their themes and tone. However, when they were written down by the monks of the monasteries, they last some of their pagan elements and fell under the influence of Christian morality. Early pagan poetry can be distinguished between the epic poem and the elegy. The most wellknown epic composition is Beowulf dating back to the 7th century. For the elegy, we think of six pagan elegies which are preserved in a volume from the 10th century known as The Exeter Book, one of the four remaining collection of Anglo-Saxon literature. Another form of poetry was religious. The first Anglo-Saxon Christian poet was Caedmon (?-c.680) who composed poems based on the Biblical scriptures. OLD ENGLISH POETRY (449-1066) Old English refers to the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons. Old English poetry was composed orally by bards or, as Anglo-Saxons called them, scops. The scops had a very important function within the community they belonged to. Besides entertaining the audience, they acted as historians of the group. They knew by heart many tales about the heroes of their people which they recited before an audience to the accompaniment of harp or lyre, varying the story to suit the listeners and the occasion. Their poems made use of a special poetic vocabulary or fixed phrases and ornate expressions which were a powerful aid to composition and memorization. THE VENERABLE BEDE One of the most important monk scholars of this period was the Venerable Bede (c. 673-735), a native of the kingdom of Northumbria. Bede wrote the first important English history in Latin, Historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum (Ecclesiastical History of the English People), which he completed in 731. Bede has been called the father of English history . His work is the main source of information we have of the Anglo-Saxon period.

CAEDMON S HYMN
Caedmon s Hymn (composed around AD 670) is the earliest dated poem, secular or religious, we possess in English. The story of this cowherd turned poet is told by Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastic History of the English People which remains an important witness to the events of the Anglo-Saxon period. In style, the Hymn conforms to the oral tradition of old English poetic composition, which requires that each half-line alliterates with the other. Apart from its literary character, Caedmon s Hymn is remarkable for the number of manuscript copies that survive no less than twenty-one. This number may not seem like a lot, but when you consider that most poems (including Beowulf) survive in only one manuscript, the

Umber is great, indeed. But why so many? Because the poem is recorded in Bede s Ecclesiastic History, which circulated widely throughout and after the Anglo-Saxon period. Each line is divided into two parts with a caesura (or pause) in the middle of the line. In Old English verse was generally written as continuous phase, with very little punctuation. It s possible to find some correspondent between Old English and Modern English.

ABOUT THE PLOT

Apparently, Caedmon was an illiterate monk who was rather shy and preferred not to participate when at a feast everybody took turns singing and entertaining the company. Instead, he would leave the hall in embarrassment. On one such occasion he left the house in which the entertainment was being held and went out to the stable, where it was his duty to look after the beasts that night. He lay down there and fell asleep, and in a dream he saw a man standing beside him who called him by name. Caedmon, he said, sing me a song . I don t know how to sing , he replied. it is because I cannot sing that I left the feast . The man who addressed him than said But you shall sing to me . What shall I sing about? he replied. Sing about the Creation of all things , the one answered. And Caedmon immediately began to sing verses in praise of God the creator that he had never heard before. This talent was believed to be a gift from God and Caedmon went on to compose more excellent verse without ever being able to read and write.

BEOWULF: THE LEGEND

The most famous work of the Anglo-Saxon literature is the epic poem (which is to say a long narrative poem which celebrates the action of a hero) Beowulf which survives in a single manuscript, written down around AD 1000 in the classical West Saxon of the kingdom of Wessex. The poem s composition, however, is considered by scholars to date back to about AD 700 and it represents the development of the oral tradition of the time.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE PLOT

The events occurring in the poem are set in southern Scandinavia in the fifth and sixth centuries. It is one of the most famous works of Anglo-Saxon poetry, and tells the breathtaking story of a struggle between the hero Beowulf, and a bloodthirsty monster called Grendel. From many winters, the court of the Danish king Hrothgar has been terrorized by the fearsome monster Grendel, who comes at nightfall to devour men in their sleep. Beowulf kills the monster and it is celebrated as a great hero, but joy turns to horror when Grendel s mother arrives to avenge the killing of her son. Beowulf kills Grendel s mother too in an underwater cave and eventually returns to his own country to become king. Later in, after having ruled his people wisely, he fights a dragon who is destroying his people. Both Beowulf and the dragon die and the poem ends with Beowulf s funeral. y A plot is a series of events arranged so as to reveal their dramatic, thematic, and emotional significance. A story is a series of events recorded in their chronological order. A plain story is like history. But a plot is someone s telling of the story. It may be biased or inaccurate, but sometimes more interesting

THE LANGUAGE OF BEOWUL

Beowulf is much admired for the richness of its poetry, for the beautiful sounds of the words and the imaginative quality of description. About a third of the words that are in themselves metaphorical description and were a typical feature of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Kennings combine 2 words to create an

evocative and imaginative alternative word. By linking words in this way the poets ere able to experiment with the rhythm, sounds and imagery of the poetry. Beowulf contains over a thousand kennings. Some well known Anglo-Saxon kennings include: Bone-house the human body Battle-light the sword Wave-floater the ship

CHRISTIAN INFLUENCES IN BEOWULF

In Beowulf we find an interesting mix of religious and cultural references and attitudes. Although the poem s themes are ostensibly secular, it contains both pagan and Christian elements. It mainly refers to old Germanic and Norse sagas, but there are signs of Christian influence in the way some of the themes are developed, for example when Beowulf dies he gives thanks to God. Certainly the Christian church authorities would not have approved of a poem celebrating the deeds of pagan warriors and kings, even if the Christianized Anglo-Saxons still felt a strong connection with the myths and legends of the past and with Scandinavian people. But in Beowulf the paganism of the Danes is muted. No mention is made of the pantheon of old Germanic gods, and Beowulf s religious practices seem completely compatible with the ideas of Christianity. Another important aspect of the poem is the way it mixes myth and legend with reported historical fact

THEMES
As a work of literature, Beowulf is remarkable in its complexity. The poem presents: y y y y A theological critique of the pagan world, but it is not a sermon The poem implies a vision of rightful kingship, but it is not a treatise The poem presents realistic descriptions of ships and weaponry, but it is not a story The story is not merely a good folktale

However, if Beowulf is none of these, that is because in a sense, the poem is all of these. It is bizarrely complex. The poem s interlace design continually reflects and consciously represents a deep awareness of the mysterious, multi-layered aspects of human experience. Beowulf functions on many levels, through many perspectives, in many worlds simultaneously. The poem creates: y y y y y y Plot through folkloric elements, which speak to the story world of Anglo-Saxon culture. It enhances meaning through symbolic elements, which open to the dream world of the unconscious It injects realism through historical elements, especially the world of power relations fixed in time It reveals character through psychological elements, which disclose the inner world of emotion It develops character through dramatic elements, the surface of action in temporal world It provokes engagement through somatic elements, which represent the life of the body, the carnal ground of human experience

FOCUS ON:
GRENDEL

Likely the poem s most memorable creation, Grendel is one of the three monsters that Beowulf battles. His nature is ambiguous. Though he has many animal attributes and a grotesque, monstrous appearance, he seems to be guided by vaguely human emotions and impulses, and he shows more of an interior life than one might expect. Exiled to the swamplands outside the boundaries of human society, Grendel is an outcast who seems to long to be reinstated. The poet hints that behind Grendel s aggression against the Danes lies loneliness and jealousy.

THE MONSTERS
In Christian medieval culture, monster was the word that referred to birth defects, which were always understood as an ominous sign from God a sign of transgression or of bad things to come. In keeping with this idea, the monsters that Beowulf must fight in this Old English poem shape the poem s plot and seem to represent an inhuman or alien presence in society that must be exorcised for the society s safety. They are all outsiders, existing beyond the boundaries of human realms. Grendel s and his mother s encroachment upon human society they wreak havoc in Heorot forces Beowulf to kill the two beasts for order to be restored. To many readers, the three monsters that Beowulf slays all seem to have a symbolic or allegorical meaning. For instance, since Grendel is descended from the biblical figure Cain, who slew his own brother, Grendel often has been understood to represent the evil in Scandinavian society of marauding and killing others. A traditional figure of medieval folklore and a common Christian symbol of sin, the dragon may represent an external malice that must be conquered to prove a hero s goodness. Because Beowulf s encounter with the dragon ends in mutual destruction, the dragon may also be interpreted as a symbolic representation of the inevitable encounter with death itself.

BEOWULF
In Hrothgar and Grendel, the poet presents a richly textured but static characterization. Not so with the towering man of Geats. In Beowulf s character, the poem reveals the personality in transition: from youth to age, from thane to king, from hero to anti-hero. Most of the transition occurs after the fight with Grendel.

Beowulf exemplifies the traits of the perfect hero. The poem explores his heroism in two separate phases: youth and age. These two phases of his life correspond to two different models of virtue, and much of the moral reflection in the story centers on differentiating these two models and on showing how Beowulf makes the transition from one to the other. In his youth, Beowulf is a great warrior, characterized predominantly by his feats of strength and courage. He also perfectly embodies the manners and values dictated by the Germanic heroic code, including loyalty, courtesy, and pride. After established himself as a hero defeating Grendel and Grendels mother, however, he seems to enter into a new phase of his life. In the final episodethe encounter with the dragonthe poet reflects on how the responsibilities of a king, who must act for the good of the people and not just for his own glory, differ from those of the heroic warrior. In light of these meditations, Beowulfs moral status becomes somewhat ambiguous at the poems end. Though he is deservedly celebrated as a great hero and leader, his last courageous fight is also somewhat hasty. The poem suggests that, by sacrificing himself, Beowulf unnecessarily leaves his people without a king, exposing them to danger from other tribes. This last portion of the poem emphasizes the overwhelming nature of fate. The conflict with the dragon has

an aura of inevitability about it. Rather than a conscious choice, the battle can also be interpreted as a matter in which Beowulf has very little choice or free will at all.

THE SWORD
With all the depictions of weaponry, the audience has reason to expect that Beowulf s swords will play a glorious role in some contest. But Beowulf is never to enjoy the use of his sword; not in the fight with Grendel, Grendel s mother, or the dragon. There are several different famous swords in Beowulf. First, there's the sword that Hrothgar gives Beowulf after he kills Grendel (1022). Second, there's Hrunting, the sword that Unferth lends to Beowulf to fight Grendel's mother (1458). Unfortunately, Hrunting fails to do any damage to the monster, so Beowulf grabs another sword from her horde of treasure (1557). This third sword decapitates her, but the blade melts when it touches her poisonous blood. Fourth, there's a gem-studded sword that King Hygelac gives Beowulf to celebrate his great deeds (2193). We can probably assume that this is the sword called Naegling, which breaks when Beowulf tries to use it to kill the dragon (2680). The really strange thing in Beowulf is that, frequently, swords don't do their job. Hrunting won't cut Grendel's mother; Naegling snaps when Beowulf swings it at the dragon; the sword with the engraved hilt melts in Grendel's mother's blood. We're getting an inkling that the poet wants to remind us of the futility of battle. It also seems that Beowulf does better when he uses his own body strength against the monsters around him, instead of weapons, which are almost like cheating because they give him an artificial advantage. Alternatively, at one point, the narrator suggests that Beowulf is so strong that his mighty strokes break blades in half, so perhaps Beowulf's heroism is greater than mere weapons could make it.

THE MEAD HALL

The poem contains two examples of mead-halls: Hrothgar s great hall of Heorot, in Denmark, and Hygelac s hall in Geatland. Both function as important cultural institutions that provide light and warmth, food and drink, and singing and revelry. Historically, the mead-hall represented a safe haven for warriors returning from battle, a small zone of refuge within a dangerous and precarious external world that continuously offered the threat of attack by neighboring peoples. The mead-hall was also a place of community, where traditions were preserved, loyalty was rewarded, and, perhaps most important, stories were told and reputations were spread.

FEATURES
The poem has the following features of epic: - it tells of the noble heroic actions of a mythical hero (Beowulf) and involves the fate of a whole people; - It begins in medias res after stating its theme; - the characters speak in long majestic speeches; - list of objects and detailed descriptions of people occur quite frequently. The verse is typical of traditional oral poetry in the use it makes of poetic devices to aid memory such as the repetition of fixed phrases and alliteration. The number of syllables in a line was irrelevant and rhyme was never used.

ANGLO-SAXON POEMS: ELEGIAC POEMS

The Anglo-Saxon era in early medieval England has left us with many examples of exquisite artistry. The greatest gift bequeathed to us by the Anglo-Saxons is their poetry, transmitted so precariously in only four surviving manuscripts. One of these manuscripts, the Exeter Book, contains, amongst other excellent poetry, a handful of short poems that have profoundly inspired readers and scholars since their rediscovery around two centuries ago. These poems, The Wanderer, The Seafarer, Deor, Wulf And Eadwacer, The Wife s Lament, The Husband s Message and The Ruin, form the core of a group that has been almost exclusively categorized in modern times as elegies. WHAT IS AN ELEGY? An elegy is a mournful poem in which a first-person expresses a feeling of loss, exile and solitude. Its three elements are grief, praise and consolation. The speaker tends to contrast the hard times of the present with evocations of a glorious but forgotten past. Here we see how memory for the poet becomes a source of consolation which can help him to live through the bitter times of the present and the prospect of a bleak future. Elegies are sometimes confused with eulogies and odes. An elegy is not the same as a eulogy, which is a statement written in prose that is read aloud at a funeral, although an elegy might suffice as a eulogy. An ode may also be composed for a deceased person or other subject, but its main purpose is praise and accolades.

THE WANDERER
The Wanderer is one of the best known and most celebrated poems in Old English. It conveys the meditations of a solitary exile on his past glories as a warrior in his lord's band of retainers, his present hardships and the values of forbearance and faith in the heavenly Lord. The warrior is identified as eardstapa (line 6a), usually translated as "wanderer", who roams the cold seas and walks "paths of exile" (wrclastas) seeking shelter and aid. He remembers the days when he served his lord, feasted together with comrades, and received precious gifts from the lord. Yet fate (wyrd) turned against him when he lost his lord, kinsmen and comrades in battle and was driven into exile. The theme of isolation dominates The Wanderer completely and it is rendered by the skilful and emotive use of winter, sea and storm imagery

A plurality of scholarly opinion holds that the main body of the poem is spoken as monologue spoken in first person, bound between a prologue and epilogue in which the poet refers to the wanderer in third person.The Wanderer s monologue divides into two distinct parts, the first being a lament for his exile and the loss of kin, friends, home, and the generosity of his king. In the monologue s second portion, the Wanderer reflects more generally on man s fate, comforting himself with wisdom and urging resignation and control of emotion as ways of meeting adversity. This portion of the poem introduces the ubi sunt theme, as the Wanderer questions what has become of the things he has known and realizes that many have vanished and all else is fleeting. The poem, like much other Anglo-Saxon poetry, links pagan and Christian values in an uneasy combination. The authorial voice begins and concludes the poem, referring to God and stressing the importance of faith, themes absent from the Wanderer s speech. The Wanderer s lament upholds Anglo-Saxon tribal values, notably loyalty, generosity, courage, and physical strength. It has been argued by some scholars that this admonition is a later addition, as it lies at the end of a poem that some would say is otherwise entirely secular in its concerns; but inasmuch as many of the words in the poem have both secular and spiritual or religious meanings, the foundation of this argument is not on firm ground.

THE SEAFARER
The Seafarer deals with the experience of the outsiders. It begins with a lament of suffering of a life at sea compared with the comforts of land until the speaker understands that this exile is what he want, that he prefers to live a life of hardship on the waves rather than having the security of land. In this sense, his exile is self-imposed, he seems unable and unwilling to give up his ascetic lifestyle. His experiences seems to thrill him. In the second part of the poem he explains his reason for this choice, saying that all the things that civilization provides in order to avoid facing mortality, all its riches and comforts, are nothing more than pointless vanity. There is perhaps no more eloquent description in any literature of the tradition of peregrination pro amore Dei, venturing forth for the love of God. This was a tradition of great importance to all of the peoples of the British isles, both the Celtic, Irish and British and the Germanic Anglo-Saxons. To voluntarily give up the comforts of heart and home and venture forth on the sea, to seek out a foreign land in which to live a life of solitude and contemplation or to thereby spread the love of God was a path chosen by huge numbers of individuals during the early medieval period.

DEOR
Deor, also called Deor s Lament, Old English heroic poem of 42 lines, one of the two surviving Old English poems to have a refrain (the other is the fragmentary Wulf and Eadwacer ). It is the complaint of a scop, Deor, who was replaced at his court by another minstrel and deprived of his lands and his lord s favor. The poem consists of 6 stanzas of varying length. In the first 5 Deor recalls five examples of the sufferings of various figures from Germanic legend. Each stanza ends with the refrain That trouble passed; so can this. Only in the last stanza do we learn what "this" references: the poet's own sorrow at having lost his position of privilege. At the poem's conclusion, Deor reveals that he was once a great poet among the Heodenings, until he was displaced and sent wandering by Heorrenda, a more skillful poet.

THE WIFE S LAMENT

The poem "The Wife's Lament" takes the reader on a complex journey into the life of a woman living in the Old English world and struggling with both the frustration of being separated from her lover and the inability to rectify her situation. Throughout the poem the speaker reminisces on specific events from her past, and also periodically comments on her present situation with emotion, reflection and speculation. By doing this, she is able to illustrate to the reader the difficulties that women in the Old English time period were faced with and also how many women were victims of their own environment and defenseless in determining their fate.

THE RUIN
The Ruin has suffered more than any other of the 7 poems: significant portions of it have been lost due to the effects of burning. What remains is nevertheless a poem of power and beauty. The poet describes in great detail the scene of a ruined stone city, usually identified as Bath, the Roman Aquae Sulis, alternating between a view of it in its present decayed state and a description of its imagined glorious past. The first 15 or so lines describe the current scene. From line 37 onwards, the poet returns to the past and remains there for the rest of the poem, describing the now fallen splendor in tones of deep admiration.

THE MIDDLE AGES (1066-1485)

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES
In 1040, the Saxon King Edward (known as the Confessor because he was more interested in religious matter than in being king) came to the throne. He had strong family links with Normandy in Northern France and he had spent most of his life there. When he died in 1066 he left no obvious candidate to succeed him. The Royal Council chose Harold Godwinson, from a powerful Wessex family, but William, Duke of Normandy, also claimed the throne. William was furious, claiming that in 1051 Edward the King, a distant cousin, had promised him the throne and Harold had later sworn to support that claim. Harold was so squeezed between two fronts: the Vikings were attacking in the North and William was landing in England with a powerful army, establishing a camp near Hastings. Harold had travelled north to fight the another invader, Harold Hardrada, King of Norway and defeated him at Stamford Bridge near York. He marched south as quickly as he could and in 14 October, his army met William s. it was a close-fought battle lasting all day, but Harold was killed and his army collapsed. William was victorious and on Christmas Day 1066, he was crowned king in Westminster Abbey. A Norman aristocracy became the new governing class and many members of the native English elite, including bishops, were replaced with Normans.

THE EFFECTS OF THE CONQUEST

The Coronation of William the Conqueror in 1066 marked the invasion and occupation of the country by the Normans and the start of a new age for England. The Normans imposed the French language upon their English subjects. Until the 14th century three languages were spoken in England: French among the nobility and at court, Latin among the clergy and the members of the legal profession, and English among the ordinary people. Although William, at the age of 43, endeavored to learn the language of his new subjects he did not preserve. No English king would speak English as his native language for some three hundred years and although the Norman aristocracy and administration were gradually, and of necessity, obliged to become bilingual, it was only in the mid-fourteenth century that English was permitted to be used in petitions to Parliament, in legal procedure, and in legal documents. The Normans also introduced the feudal system, according to which all land was owned by the king but it was held by others in return for services and goods. Under William, England grew into a prosperous and peacefully country. The Church also grew in strength it controlled money, land and men. Conflict between Church and State became inevitable and led to the murder of the Archibishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket, in 1170. In the 13th century feudalism began to decline. The nobles forced King John to sign the Magna Carta in 1215. The following years saw the foundation of Parliament (from the French word parler ) which began as a council of nobles but before the end of the 13th century had come to include the gentry and merchants from the towns. It was Edward I (1272-1307) who brought together the first real Parliament.

FOCUS ON:
THE FEUDAL SYSTEM

The feudal system was a pyramidal system by which the king, who owned all the land, gave territories to his barons (nobles), who in turn gave land to those under them, the knights. In return for this land, the recipients, or vassals, had to swear allegiance and pledge service to their overlords and give them a part of the product of the land. The last link in the chain were the serfs, who worked on the land but were not free to have it and were little more than serves.

THOMAS BECKET
Thomas Becket, the son of a wealthy Norman merchant living in London, was born in 1118. After being educated in England, France and Italy, he joined the household of Theobald, the Archbishop of Canterbury. When Henry II became king in 1154, he asked Archbishop Theobald for advice on choosing his government ministers. On the suggestion of Theobald, Henry appointed Thomas Becket as his chancellor. The two soon became close friends. When Theobald died in 1162 Henry immediately saw the opportunity to increase his influence over the Church by naming his loyal advisor to the highest ecclesiastical post in the land. Henry petitioned the Pope who agreed. The decision angered many leading churchmen because they feared that as Becket was a close friend of Henry II, he would not be an independent leader of the church. They also pointed out that Becket had never been a priest, had a reputation as a cruel military commander and was very materialistic (Becket loved expensive food, wine and clothes). However, after being appointed, Thomas Becket began to show a concern for the poor. Every morning thirteen poor people were brought to his home. After washing their feet Becket served them a meal. He also gave each one of them four silver pennies. Instead of wearing expensive clothes, Becket now wore a simple monastic habit. As a penance (punishment for previous sins) he slept on a cold stone floor, wore a tight-fitting hair shirt that was infested with fleas and was scourged (whipped) daily by his monks. If King Henry believed that by having "his man" in the top post of the Church, he could easily impose his will upon this powerful religious institution, he was sadly mistaken. In those days, the Church reserved the right to try felonious clerics in their own religious courts of justice and not those of the crown. Furthermore, those that had sought the privilege of a trial in a Church court were not exclusively clergymen. Any man who had been trained by the church could choose to be tried by a church court. Even clerks who had been taught to read and write by the Church but had not gone on to become priests had a right to a Church court trial. This was to an offender's advantage, as church courts could not impose punishments that involved violence such as execution or mutilation. There were several examples of clergy found guilty of murder or robbery who only received "spiritual" punishments, such as suspension from office or banishment from the altar. Henry was determined to increase control of his realm by eliminating this custom so he decided that clergymen found guilty of serious crimes should be handed over to his courts. Becket vacillated in his support of the king but finally refused to agree to changes in the law. The king believed that Becket had betrayed him and was determined to obtain revenge. He claimed that Becket had stolen 300 from government funds when he had been Chancellor. Becket denied the charge but he offered to repay the money. Henry refused to accept Becket's offer and insisted that the Archbishop should stand trial. When Henry mentioned other charges, including treason, Becket decided to run away to France where he remained in exile for six years. There Becket organized a propaganda campaign against Henry. As Becket was supported by the pope, Henry feared that he would be excommunicated (expelled from the Christian Church).

The two former friends appeared to resolve their dispute in 1170 when King Henry and Becket met in Normandy and the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed to return to England. However, as soon as he arrived on English soil, he excommunicated the Archbishop of York and other leading churchmen who had supported Henry while he was away. Henry, who was in Normandy at the time, was furious when he heard the news and supposedly shouted out: "Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?" The king's exact words have been lost to history but his outrage inspired four knights, who had understood from this angry speech that he desired the death of Becket, to sail to England to rid the realm of this annoying prelate. They arrived at Canterbury during the afternoon of December 29 and immediately assassinated the Archbishop as he prepared to say mass at an altar in his cathedral. The knights found him at the altar, drew their swords and began hacking at their victim finally splitting his skull. Henry was horrified when he heard the news as he believed that it was his words that had been the cause of Becket s death. The knights who did the deed to curry the king's favor, fell into disgrace. Several miracles were said to occur at the tomb of the martyr and he was soon canonized. Hordes of pilgrims transformed Canterbury Cathedral into a shrine. Eighteen months years later, in an act of penance, the king donned a sack-cloth walking barefoot through the streets of Canterbury while eighty monks flogged him with branches, and starved himself for three days.

MAGNA CARTA
Magna Carta was signed between the barons and John at the Rummymed near Winsdor Castle. The document was a series of written promises between the king and his subjects, that he, the king, would govern England and deal with its people according to the customs of feudal law. Magna Carta was an attempt by the barons to stop a king in this case John - abusing his power with people of England suffering. But why would a king agree to the demands of the barons who were meant to be below his authority? England had for some years owned land in France. The barons had provided the king with both money and men to defend this territory. Traditionally, the king had always consulted the barons before raising taxes and demanding more men for military service. This was all part of the feudal system. While kings were militarily successful abroad, relations between the kings and the barons were good. John was not successful in his military campaigns abroad. His constant demands for more money and men angered the barons. By 1204, John had lost his land in northern France. In response to this, John introduced high taxes without asking the barons. This was against feudal law and the accepted custom. John made mistakes in other areas as well. He angered the Roman Catholic Church. The Pope Innocence III, angered by John s behavior, banned all church services in England in 1207. Religion was very important to the people including the barons. The Catholic Church taught the people that they could only get to heaven if the Catholic Church believed that they were good enough to got there. How could they show their goodness and love of God if the churches were shut? Even worse for John was the fact that the pope excommunicated him in 1209. This meant that John could never get to heaven until the pope withdrew the excommunication. Faced with this, John climbed down and accepted the power of the Catholic Church giving them many privileges in 1214. This year was disastrous for John for another reason. Once again, he suffered military defeat in an attempt to get back his territory in northern France. He returned to London demanding more money from taxes. This time the barons were not willing to listen. They rebelled against his power. The barons captured London. However they did not defeat John entirely and by the Spring of 1245, both sides were willing to discuss matters. The result was the Magna Carta, 63 clauses about the position of the Catholic Church in England, about the relationship with barons, and about the England s legal system. The document marked the beginning of an epochal shift in power away from the king to a small elite of nobles, merchants and senior churchmen. Moreover, it created the conditions for the rise of the middle classes or free men.

THE LATE MIDDLE AGES (1300 1485)

Several events both at home and abroad marked the fourteenth century. Discontent began to grow among the poor because of the heavy taxation imposed by the king and led to the Peasant s revolt (1381). The leaders of the Revolt were executed but slowly the peasants began to win freedom and get better wages. Abroad a long war broke out with France, known as the Hundred Years War (1337-1453). Its end result was that England lost all its possessions in France. The ensuring peace was soon broken at home by a bloody civil war for the possession of the crown between the supporters of the House of Lancaster and the House of York. The struggle is popularly known as the Wars of the Roses because the two Houses had respectively a white rose and a red rose as their emblems. The major cause of the conflict was the mental illness that affected the King Henry VI who became incapacitated to rule. The nobles were divided between those who supported the claim to the throne of Richard III, the Duke of York, and those who supported the Lancaster claimant Henry Tudor. The wars were formally battles between rival groups of nobles. In fact, the economic life of the time went on in spite of the wars, due to indifference of the majority of the population to the results of the conflict. The wars ended in 1485 when Henry Tudor defeated Richard III in the battle of Bosworth and became Henry VII. Henry`s marriage to Elizabeth of York united the two sides and ended the fighting.

SOCIAL CONTEXT
Society was firmly based upon rank and each person was classified according to his or her place on the social scale which depended on birth, profession and others factors such as marital status. At the top of the social scale was the nobility and below them ware the knights who were merely gentlemen farmers. Next, traders and craftsmen and the ordinary freemen of the town. At the bottom were the villeins , unfree peasants with no rights against their feudal lord. The middle class was still in his infancy then but it was beginning to emerge. Chaucer himself was a member of what we would now call the upper middle class. Women s place was well-established in society and inferior to men s. their duty was to cook food for the family and keep the house in good order. They were supposed to obey their husbands in all things and disobedient wives were often beaten. Church hierarchy was also firmly established. Yet within Church ranks there was considerable in-fighting between the regular clergy living in convents and monasteries, like the Monk, the Prioress and the Friar of The Canterbury Tales, and the secular clergy, living among ordinary people like the Parson and the Pardoner in the Tales.

CHIVALRY
Chivalry is the generic term for the knightly system of the Middle Ages and for virtues and qualities it inspired in its followers. Conventions of chivalry directed that men should honour, serve and do nothing to displease maidens. A medieval knight was in origin a soldier rich enough to possess a horse and to be able to equip himself with the armour and weapons appropriate to a mounted warrior. According to the chivalric code observed throughout Western Europe, a squire, who had served his term of apprenticeship to a knight, was himself able to rise by degrees to the formal dignity of knighthood. The new knight, after a ritual bath, a night s vigil, and sacramental confession, was ceremonially dubbed by his liege-lord (most often his king). The knight swore a binding oath of loyalty to his lord and pledged himself to protect the weak (a group deemed to include all women), to right wrongs (a category usually defined by his liege), and to defend the Christian faith (especially against the advances of Muslim infidels). This system of aristocratic male bonding inspired the creation of the three great European crusading military Orders, the Hospitallers, the Templars, and the Teutonic Knights of St Mary s Hospital at Jerusalem. These tightly knit bodies of

celibate gentlemen soldiers were originally formed to protect the pilgrim routes to Jerusalem following the brutal European capture of the Holy City from the Saracens in 1099. Despite the zealous suppression of the Templars by the kings of France and England in the early fourteenth century, the idea of knighthood continued to flourish under new royal patronage. Looking back nostalgically to the reign of the largely mythical Arthur, King Edward III of England founded the Order of the Garter in c.1334. this new military confraternity was restricted to twenty-five members including the monarch himself. Edward presided as a pseudo-Arthur at a mock Round Table, genially participating in ceremonials and festivities and watching over tournaments designed to show off the valor of his knights. Aided by the cosmopolitan influence of Eleanor of Aquitaine the culture of the troubadours of Provence had spread north to two relatively sober French-speaking courts. Eleanor, the granddaughter of the first troubadour poet and the dedicatee of Wace s Brut, exercised her patronage in favor of a new kind of poetry which linked the elevated view of sexual love first cultivated by the troubadours with stories associated with the exploits of Arthurian knights. This new concern with fin amors (sometimes described as courtly love ) recognized a parallel between the feudal service of a knight to his liege-lord and the service of a lover to an adored and honored lady. Whether or not this cultivated literary pattern was based on a courtly reality is much disputed; what is certain is that the culture of the twelfth century began to place a new emphasis on the dignity and distinctiveness of women in what remained a male-dominated, clerical, and military civilization.

LITERARY CONTEXT
Much has been made recently a Richardian resurgence in English writing. Though King Richard ii cannot be personally credited with encouraging this resurgence, his twenty-year reign (1377-99) was to prove remarkable for the quality, quantity, variety, and energy of its literary enterprise in English. The literary resurgence of Richard II s reign is almost certainly related to the emphatic shift towards the use of English as the pre-eminent medium of communication, government, and entertainment amongst the ruling lite.

THE METRICAL ROMANCE

One of the emerging genre was the Metrical romance, exemplified in Layamon s Brut, which deals with the legendary story of King Arthur, believed to be the descended from Brutus (who was also supposed to have found Britain). The text survives in two British library manuscripts. The dating to an exact year is not possible but it is generally agreed that it was composed in the first quarter of the thirteenth. The author was probably a priest from Midlands. The poem Brut is based on the Roman de Brut (1155) by the Norman Robert Wace who relied heavenly on Geoffry of Monmouth s Historia Regum Britanniae. The general content of all three works is the same: a detailed account of the history of the Britons. The history begins with the fall of Aeneas who journeys with other Trojans through the Mediterranean sea until they finally reach the Isle of Avalon, inhabited by Giants. These foes are killed and the isle renamed Britain after the founding father (???). The Arthurian passage is the major part of the poem. The major topic of Arthur s reign are his campaigns in which he succeeded in conquering the greater part of North-Western Europe.

THE CAROLE, THE FABILAU AND THE ALLEGORICAL POEM

The appearance of a code of chivalry meant that there was less emphasis in mere bravery in battle. Writers and philosophers began to explore the nature of love (both religious and profane). Poetics form from France made their appearance: - the carole (carol) that was a kind of dance-song;

the fabliau, a short metrical tale made popular in medieval France by the jongleurs, or professional storytellers. Fabliaux was characterized by vivid detail and realistic observation and were usually comic, coarse and often cynical, especially in their treatment of women; the allegorical poem such as the Romance of the Rose, translated by Chaucer.

The shift in thirteen-century French poetry away from exclusively military or heroic subjects is especially evident in the compendious Roman de la rose. The very title of the poem, The Romance of the Rose , suggests the degree to which fashionable romance has swung away from a concentration on knightly prowess to an allegorical and philosophical treatment of fin amors centred ( sent on a richly symbolic flower. In a dream or vision the courtly poet-narrator discover a delicately planted, walled garden on a bright May morning- in the midst of the garden a man reflects (on) the image of a rose, a rose which at first can neither be plucked nor embraced but which serves to represent the perfection of his love. The body of the poem is concerned with the dreamer s quest to achieve the rose, a quest which is variously assisted or opposed by allegorical figures who embody aspects of his beloved. It proved a vastly popular poem.

THE ALLITERATIVE REVIVAL

With alliterative revival we mean the increase or surge in alliterative poetry composed in the second half of the 14th century in England. Alliteration had been the formalistic focus in Old English poetry, but after 1066 it began to be replaced by the new convention of rhyme which southern courtly poets were using due to the influence of continental traditions in the romance languages like Latin and French. Between 1066 and 1300, hardly any poetic manuscript using the alliterative form survive. There are two theories to explain this absence. The first supports the idea that individuals were still writing alliterative verses, but by coincidence none of these manuscripts survive to the modern period, or that the tradition survived in oral form only and was never written down. The second theory suggests that, after alliterative verse had been mostly abandoned, a surge of regionalism and nationalism encouraged northern poets to return to it during the mid and late 1300s. during this time, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and other medieval poems were written using alliterative.

PIERS PLOWMAN
Piers Plowman is an allegorical, moral and social satire which has the form of a dream vision, a common medieval type in which the author presents the story under the guise of having dreamed it. The dream vision generally involves allegory, not only because one expects from a dream the unrealistic, the fanciful, but also because people have always suspected that dreams relate the truth in disguised form that they are natural allegories. Through a series of such visions it traces the Dreamer-narrator s persistent, passionate search for answers to his many questions, especially the question he puts early in the poem to Lady Holy Church: how I may save my soul. Langland s narrator falls asleep and witness a compact vision of the whole of late fourteenth-century English society. Some ideal practitioners of earthly occupations are surrounded and undermined by a much larger set of very energetic social types who exploit their occupations for entirely selfish ends. The poem s narrator and dreamer Will is guided in his search of the truth by Holy Church who explains the meaning of all he sees. Earlier in the poem an ideal earthly representative of justice, Piers Plowman, offers to lead a pilgrimage to the shrine of St. Truth. According to him the truest form of pilgrimage is no pilgrimage at all; instead all classes of society should stay at home and work harmoniously for the production of material food by agricultural workers, with knights helping plowmen and protecting the Church, while priest pray for both workers and knights. There is, however, a problem with this model: it collapses. The ideal society put into action by Piers fails entirely, workers simply refuse to work, abuse the authority of knights, and respond only to the terrible pressure of Hunger, a figure who evokes the ravages of famine in the fourteenth century. Eventually Piers realize that his search is vain and that he cannot achieve the whole truth. Langland s sympathy with the sufferings of the poor and his indignant satire of corruption in Church and state undoubtedly made his poem popular with the rebels. Although he may not have sympathized with

the violence of the rebels and their leaders, he recognized that for the church to be preserved, it needed profound reform. The passionate sympathy for the commoner, idealized in Piers Plowman, also appealed to reformers who felt that true religion was best represented not by the ecclesiastic hierarchy but by the humblest orders of society.

SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

Despite the verve and the variety of subject, setting, and treatment of many earlier English romances, none seriously challenges the sustained energy, the effective patterning, and the superb detailing of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Although the poem s author is anonymous like many other medieval writers, painters, and architects his language indicates that he was born in the northwest Midlands of England and that he was writing in the second half of the fourteenth century. The poem exists in only one original manuscript, as the last of four poems in the Ms. Cotton Nero Ax. The three poems preceding it are known as Pearl, Cleanness (or Purity), and Patience and all four are considered to have been written by the same anonymous poet, judging from similarities in style, dialect and theme. The poems are also illustrated with crude drawings. Gawain is a typical of the Middle English alliterative poems, in fact it is written in alliterative long lines, following the basic metrical principles of Old English verse. Each long line consists of two half-lines, each half with two stressed syllables and a varying number of unstressed syllables. THE PLOT Part 1 - During a New Year s Eve feast at King Arthur s court, a strange figure, referred to only as the Green Knight, pays the court an unexpected visit. He challenges the group s leader or any other brave representative to a game. The Green Knight says that he will allow whomever accepts the challenge to strike him with his own axe, on the condition that the challenger find him in exactly one year to receive a blow in return. As the game seems to imply a certain death there was no volunteers and the stronger ridicules them all. Even Arthur hesitates to respond, but when the Green Knight mocks Arthur s silence, the king steps forward to take the challenge. As the king is about to wield the great battle-axe, Gawain speaks. In polite language, Gawain begins to take the king s place, so the life of the king can be spared in place of a knight as weak and lowly as he. The court agrees to let Gawain play and after restating the terms of the agreement to each other he takes hold of the axe and, in one deadly blow, cuts off the knight s head. To the amazement of the court, the now-headless Green Knight picks up his severed head. Before riding away, the head reiterates the terms of the pact, reminding the young Gawain to seek him in a year and a day at the Green Chapel so that he may receive his exchange blow. After the Green Knight leaves, the company goes back to its festival, but Gawain is uneasy. Part 2 - Time passes, and autumn arrives. On the Day of All Saints, Gawain prepares to leave Camelot and find the Green Knight. He puts on his best armor, mounts his horse, Gringolet, and starts off toward North Wales, traveling through the wilderness of northwest Britain. Gawain encounters all sorts of beasts, suffers from hunger and cold, and grows more desperate as the days pass. On Christmas Day he prays to find a place to hear Mass and stumble upon a beautiful castle with strong defenses. The lord of the castle welcomes Gawain warmly, introducing him to his lady and to the old woman who sits beside her. After the third day, Gawain thanks the lord and declares himself his servant, but regrets that he must leave the next morning to continue his quest. The lord reveals that the Green chapel is just two miles away, so Gawain must stay for the remaining three days and relax in bed. For sport, the host (whose name is later revealed to be Bertilak) strikes a deal with Gawain: the host will go out hunting with his men every day, and when he returns in the evening, he will exchange his winnings for anything Gawain has managed to acquire by staying behind at the castle. Gawain happily agrees to the pact, and goes to bed. Part 3 - The first day, the lord hunts a herd of does, while Gawain sleeps late in his bedchambers. On the morning of the first day, the lord s wife sneaks into Gawain s chambers and attempts to seduce him.

Gawain puts her off, but before she leaves she steals one kiss from him. That evening, when the host gives Gawain the game, Gawain in exchange kisses him, since he has won one kiss from the lady. The second day, the lord hunts a wild boar. The lady again enters Gawain s chambers, and this time she kisses Gawain twice. That evening Gawain gives the host the two kisses in exchange for the boar s head. The third day, the lord hunts a fox, and the lady kisses Gawain three times. She also asks him for a love token, such as a ring or a glove. Gawain refuses to give her anything and refuses to take anything from her, until the lady mentions her girdle. The green silk girdle she wears around her waist is no ordinary piece of cloth, the lady claims, but possesses the magical ability to protect the person who wears it from death. Intrigued, Gawain accepts the cloth, but when it comes time to exchange his winnings with the host, Gawain gives the three kisses but does not mention the lady s green girdle. The host gives Gawain the fox skin he won that day, and they all go to bed happy, but weighed down with the fact that Gawain must leave for the Green Chapel the following morning to find the Green Knight. New Year s Day arrives, and Gawain, accompanied by a servant, finally leaves the castle for the Green Chapel. The servant begs Gawain to reconsider his mission and run from the Green Knight, who is a horrible, cruel monster: huge, merciless, someone who kills for pure joy. But Gawain refuses to run, as that would prove himself a cowardly knight. Intent on fulfilling the terms of the contract, Gawain presents his neck to the Green Knight, who proceeds to simulate two blows. On the third feint, the Green Knight lightly cuts his neck causing him a small scar on his neck. Angered, Gawain shouts that their contract has been met, but the Green Knight merely laughs. The Green Knight reveals his name, Bertilak, and explains that he is the lord of the castle where Gawain recently stayed. Because Gawain did not honestly exchange all of his winnings on the third day, Bertilak drew blood on his third blow. Nevertheless, Gawain has proven himself a worthy knight, without equal in all the land. When Gawain questions Bertilak further, Bertilak explains that the old woman at the castle is really Morgan le Faye, Gawain s aunt and King Arthur s half sister. She sent the Green Knight on his original errand and used her magic to change Bertilak s appearance. Relieved to be alive but extremely guilty about his sinful failure to tell the whole truth, Gawain wears the girdle on his arm as a reminder of his own failure. He returns to Arthur s court, where all the knights join Gawain, wearing girdles on their arms to show their support.

FOCUS ON:
GAWAIN
Gawain is not a static character. In Parts 1 and 2 of the poem he is a paragon of virtue. In Part 3 he conceals from his host the magical green girdle that the host s wife gives him, revealing that, despite his bravery, Gawain values his own life more than his honesty. His acceptance of the lady s offering of the green girdle teach him that though he may be the most chivalrous knight in the land, he is nevertheless human and capable of error. Ultimately, however, Gawain confesses his sin to the knight and begs to be pardoned; thereafter, he voluntarily wears the girdle as a symbol of his sin.

GREEN KNIGHT
He is an ambiguous figure: he says that he comes in friendship, not wanting to fight, but on the other hand the friendly game he proposes is quite deadly. The knight s real ambivalence is, however signified by his bearing both of a holly branch and an axe huge and monstrous . Whereas the green branch betokens life, the axe threatens death. To sum up, the knight both symbolizes the wildness, fertility, and death that characterize a primeval world,

and the values of the law and justice, suggesting that part of his function is to establish a relationship between wilderness and civilization, past and present.

MORGAN LA FAYE
The Arthurian tradition typically portrays Morgan as a powerful sorceress, trained by Merlin, as well as the half sister of King Arthur. Not until the last one hundred lines do we discover that the old woman at the castle is Morgan le Faye and that she has controlled the poem s entire action from beginning to end. As she often does in Arthurian literature, Morgan appears as an enemy of Camelot, one who aims to cause as much trouble for her half brother and his followers as she can.

THEMES
NATURE VS HUMAN SOCIETY
This is the central conflict which Gawain must deal with his quest. He is forced to confront the forces of Nature, both external and internal, in the form of the Green Knight, the winter landscape, his own sexual desire and his own fear of death. In the end , his natural fear of death overcomes his sense of human morality, causing him to accept the green girdle.

THE FRAILTY OF CHIVALRIC VALUES

Gawain is the very embodiment of chivalric values. The ideals of Christian morality and knightly chivalry are brought together in his symbolic shield. The pentangle represents the five virtues of knights: friendship, generosity, chastity, courtesy, and piety. Yet his encounter with the seductive Lady Bertilak forces a crisis of the chivalric values system.

CELTIC PAGAN SOURCES AND CHRISTIAN OVERLAY

Despite the Christian message, the poem has strong roots in Celtic Pagan myth. There are many elements common to pre-Christian Celtic mythology, such as the waiting period of 12 months and a day, the Beheading game, and the temptation Game. The Green Knight himself is a strongly pagan character, similar to the Green Man or Wild Man of the woods who symbolizes fertility in folklore. Gawain s journey can even be seen as the hero s archetypical encounter with the Otherworld, an essential theme in pagan belief.

THE COLOR GRENN

In the 15th-century Saint Wolfgang and the Devil by Michael Pacher, the Devil is green. Poetic contemporaries such as Chaucer also drew connections between the color green and the devil, leading scholars to draw similar connections in readings of the Green Knight. Given the varied and even contradictory interpretations of the color green, its precise meaning in the poem remains ambiguous. In English folklore and literature, green was traditionally used to symbolize nature and its associated attributes: fertility and rebirth. In Celtic mythology, green was associated with misfortune and death, and therefore avoided in clothing. The green girdle, originally worn for protection, became a symbol of shame and cowardice; it is finally adopted as a symbol of honor by the knights of Camelot, signifying a transformation from good to evil and back again; this displays both the spoiling and regenerative connotations of the color green.

GEOGGREY CHAUCER

Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in either 1343 or 1344. His father was a successful wine merchant with connections to the court of Edward III. Geoffrey was thus born into an emerging wealthy class and was educated well, though it remains unknown whether he attended university. From about the age of 26, Chaucer was frequently employed on important diplomatic missions both at home and abroad. His most important journeys were those to Italy in 1372 and 1378 during which he probably met Petrarch in Florence, and became familiar with the work of Boccaccio and Dante. In 1374 he was made Controller of Customs for hides, skins and wool of the Port of London, a job which he didn t like much and later complained about in the satirical poem, The House of Fame . From 1386 he represented the county of Kent in parliament and was appointed Clerk of the King s Works (person who oversees building work in progress) first at Westminster, then at Windsor and the Tower. It was during the last ten years of his life that Chaucer worked on his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales. After his death in 1400 he was honored by burial in Westminster Abbey. While leading a busy life, Chaucer was also a writing poetry. At a time when French or Latin were still languages of culture, of the Court and Parliament, he decided to write in English which he definitely promoted as the literary language of the British nation in his works. His decision was as revolutionary as Dante s decision to abandon Latin for the Italian vernacular. Moreover, in his works Chaucer introduced metrical innovations which were very important for the development of English poetry. He invented the use of rhyme and of two rhyming pentameters, called heroic couplet, which became the principal meter in The Canterbury Tales. These innovations are enough to earn him the title of father of English poetry . Chaucers works are commonly dived into three period: the French period, the Italian period and the English period. Although it is true to say Chaucer wrote almost exclusively in English, his early works, such as his translation of The Romaunt of the Rose (after the French Roman de la Rose of the 12th century) and The Book of the Duchess (an elegy on the death of a noble woman killed by the plague) are, in terms of narrative style, highly influenced by their French models. In his middle period, Chaucer seeks to expand his stylistic range following the examples of Boccaccio and Dante. From this period date such works as The Parlement of Foules, a fable with birds and other animals as characters, and The House of Fame, where the influence of Dantes Divine Comedy is at its most evident. In this comic fable it is Ovid rather than Virgil who is to be the poets guide through the vicissitudes of love. Other works of this period include Troilus and Criseyde and The Legende of Good Women. If in the first, Chaucer present us with an essentially male-centered view of love based around the idea of female inconstancy, in the latter he tries to look at the subject from a female point of view, recounting the stories of famous women such as Cleopatra who died for love. In the last period of Chaucers life, he was mainly occupied with the writing of The Canterbury Tales which were written in Middle English and were probably begun in 1389. TRISTAN AND CRISEYDE
RHYME ROYAL IN TROILUS AND CRISEYDE

The rhyme royal was first used in English by the 14th century British wordsmith Geoffrey Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. Its stanza construction has a skeleton of 7 lines in iambic pentameter typically consisting of 9 to 11 syllables for each line. The end of the 1st and 3rd lines rhyme, as do the end of the 2nd and the 4th.

Then, the last word of the 5th line rhymes with the end of the 4th. The last two lines of the rhyme royal also end with words that rhyme each other but not any of the other lines. An iambic foot is an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. These small groups of syllables are called feet . The word iambic describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word pentameter indicates that a line has 5 of these feet THE CANTERBURY TALES Chaucer probably began to write The Canterbury Tales around 1387. It is his most famous and important work. It is a collection of stories mainly written in verse, although there are parts in prose. It is introduced by a General Prologue which sets out the circumstances which bring the poet and the 29 pilgrims together at The Tabard Inn in Southwark (a suburb south of London) before they set off for Canterbury to pray at the tomb of the martyred St Thomas Becket. The General Prologue also presents them to us providing a detailed description of each pilgrim. It is the Host of the Tabard, Harry Bailly, who proposes the tale-telling competition as a way of passing the time on the journey. Every pilgrim will have to tell four stories, two on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back, and the winner for the best story will have a free dinner at the Tabard on their return. The Host himself will travel with the company as judge of this taletelling competition. Chaucer originally planned to write an amazing 120 tales but at his death the project was less than a quarter complete with only 24 tales. The allusion is to Boccaccio s Decameron in which a group of young aristocrats gather to tell stories. But here the situation is somewhat different. The pilgrims have all met by chance and come from all levels of society: for instance, the military are represented by the Knight, the clergy by several people (the Prioress, the Nun, the Monk, the friar, The Parson etc.), the middle class is represented by such people as the doctor and the Merchant, while the trades have their representatives in the Miller, the Carpenter and others. Chaucer even casts himself in the list of the pilgrims in the rather ironic role of an incompetent story-teller. The two extreme of society, the richest and the poorest, were excluded because in actual fact aristocrats would travel on their own and not mix with common people, while servants and poor peasants had no means to travel at all. Also women were not free to travel by themselves, unless they enjoyed their independence like the Prioress and the Wife of bath. Chaucer s story-tellers are human types well-known to popular as well as to literary tradition. However, they are not depicted as stereotypes; they are human beings with an irresistible vitality. In this they are different from characters in medieval ballads who can generally be considered static. Many of the pilgrims are portrayed physically, through detailed description of their clothes and tools which show their character and social standing. Moreover, the pilgrims are often described morally, including their qualities and their weakness. But Chaucer is highly modern in the way he suspends judgment of his characters, allowing them free voice so that the reader can decide for himself which are the more or less praiseworthy. THEMES The tales cover a wide range of themes. Chaucer draw inspiration for them from various sources: the English popular and literary tradition, Latin classics (especially Ovid) and the Italian contemporaries Petrarch and Boccaccio. Among these are love, corruption, hypocrisy and chivalry.

LOVE AND MARRIAGE The themes of marriage and love, which occurs in several tales, are explored with originality from contrasting point of view: for instance, virtuous love versus sensual love, woman s submission to man versus woman s sovereignty in marriage, etc. MEDIEVAL DRAMA
MYSTERY OR MIRACLE PLAYS The origins of British drama date back to the Middle ages. Before that time, street performers with various skill singers, dancers, mimes, acrobats, clowns and so on went around the country and performed their shows in market squares or, occasionally, in the halls of aristocrats. In the medieval period, a more formal theatre began to emerge from the rituals of the church. In the Middle Ages, the church had to deal mostly with peasants who could neither read nor write and only spoke their local dialect. Drama was used to give them a religious education in the mysteries of faith and the bible. At first liturgical drama was used, in the form of a sung dialogue between the celebrants, to involve the congregation in choral celebration of religious mysteries and to commemorate the great Christian events of the Nativity and the Resurrection during the festivals of Christmas and Easter. Religious performances moved out of the church when, in the early 14th century, a new religious festival was introduced in the month of June to celebrate Corpus Christi . On that day, the consecrated Host was carried out of the church in procession and around the village or town. In time, the processions consisted of a number of plays dealing with stories of the Old and New Testament. These were called Mystery or Miracle plays. Although there is not a clear distinction between mystery and miracle plays, the firsts usually dealt with events narrated in the Bible while the latter used stories from the lives of the saints. Although dealing with serious religious themes the mystery and miracle plays were a popular form of drama and elements of humor and playful parody were often included in the story. The single episodes strung together in a Mystery Cycle. Each play was financed and performed by the trade or craft guild of the town, that is, associations of merchants and skilled workers such as saddlers, carpenters and smiths. Guilds took responsibility for the properties or props, that is, all the objects that had to be used on stage during the play, the scenery, the costumes and the actors. The Mystery Cycle was staged outdoors; each play was performed on a movable stage wagon called a pageant . They resembled a small house open on all sides, were drawn by horses and stopped at appointed places in the town in the central square or next to the town hall or the bishop s residence. Performances went on from early morning until late evening. All business and activities were suspended so that everybody could take part in the festivities. People filled the streets. They would stop in front of a pageant and watched an episode they wanted to see or moved on to another one. Each pageant had its own audience. The manuscripts of various versions of the complete Mystery Cycle have been preserved; they are called the York, Chester, Wakefield, Coventry and Lincoln cycles from the name of the town where they were probably presented. Their authors are anonymous. With the Reformation (XVI) and the rise of the Puritans, the cycles died out or were deliberately suppressed by the Church. MORALITY PLAYS Mysteries were not the only plays to hold the stage in the Middle Ages. There were others , also anonymous, which were called Morality Plays. They reached the height of their popularity in the second half of the 14th century but they were still performed in the 15th century. At first morality plays were performed by travelling professional companies on a platform built in an open space. Later they moved indoors into the banquet halls of noblemen or into the common room of universities.

Like the mystery plays, they too have a primarily religious purpose, that is improving common people s religious education, but their method of attaining it is different. The mysteries dramatized significant events in biblical and sacred history from the creation of the world to Judgment Day in order to bring out the meaning of God s scheme of salvation. The moralities, ?however, instead of rehearsing scriptural stories, usually told an allegorical tale, not a biblical one. Morality were composed individually and not in cycles. Their characters were allegorical personifications of abstractions from theology or of various human features, virtues and vice, as their name revealed: the Seven Deadly Sins (Pride, Envy, Lust and so on), the Seven Graces, Mankind, etc. Afterwards, the morality plays developed into interludes, short plays or incidental entertainments usually performed in the middle of a feast. The character were still frequently allegorical but with more elements and an easier language.

EVERYMAN
The finest morality play which has come down to us is Everyman. The story offers a lesson for the salvation of man s soul. It represents allegorically the forces that can help to save Everyman and those that cannot or that obstruct his salvation. Its hero, who also gives his name to the title of the play, is a character representing mankind. He is called by Death to appear before God and asks for the support of his friends . All have allegorical names and are personifications of various virtues and aspects of human life, including Fellowship, Beauty, Goods and good Deeds. Yet although everyman is supposed to represent humanity in general, his situation is that of a particular class of people. He is a city dweller whose life seems to revolve around worldly pursuits such as making money and having a good time. As a morality tale, the play revolves around the Biblical notion that all is vanity , that we cannot take any of life s comforts with us when we die. Within the Christian framework of the play, only our Good Deeds can save us from perdition. However, it is probable that the audience identified with the world view of Everyman and felt his god to be unjust in his judgment. THE PLOT The play begins with god looking down from his heavens on Everyman. He sends Death with a message for everyman asking him to prepare an account of how his life on earth has been spent. Everyman, understandably, does not wish to leave life on earth. He says that he is not ready and first offers Death money to spare him. When refused, Everyman instead looks for someone to accompany him. Good Deeds and Knowledge advise him to take also Discretion, Strength, and Beauty, and, as counselors, his Five Senses accompany him to the grave. Everyman receives the Last Sacrament and set out on his journey with these companions. But when he actually reaches the grave, Beauty leaves him, followed by Strength and the others. And again, only Knowledge and Good Deeds accompanies him to the heavenly realm to plead his cause before his Maker, and Knowledge, remaining behind, hears a joyful songs of the angels.

MEDIEVAL PROSE The legend of King Arthur dates from the 5th century around the time of the first Anglo-Saxon invasions when it became symbolic of the Celtic Britons resistance. Indeed many of the magic and fantastic elements of the story, which probably first emerged in Wales, relate to Celtic mythology. The stories, as they were retold in the courtly romances of the late medieval period, refer to a timeless world where the gallant Knights of the round Table battled for the love of virtuous maidens. These romances showed the influence of the ideal of courtly love which emerged during the 12th century, probably originating in the songs of Provencal troubadours. This was a chaste,

quasi-religious idea of love in which women were exalted as ideal but untouchable love objects, comparable with the Virgin Mary, the cult of whom was developing around this time. Courtly love was connected to the Christian idea of passion as suffering rather than pleasure, an idea which continued to dominate lyric poetry for centuries. Another key theme of the Arthurian romances was the mission to recover the Holy Grail, the cup supposedly used by Jesus Christ in celebrating the Last Supper before the Crucifixion. Arthurian romances were a European phenomenon, with writers from various countries concentrating on particular aspects of the legend and on the stories of different Knights of the Round Table, and adapting them to suit their own culture and traditions. Among these are the French poet Chrtien de Troyes (? c.1183), famous for his romances Lancelot and the incomplete Perceval, ou le conte du Graal and the Germans Gottfried von Strassburg and Wolfram von Eschenbach whose respective versions of Tristan und Isolde and Parzifal were to be the inspiration for two Wagner s greatest operas. The most famous English version is Thomas Malory s Morte Darthur, published in 1485 which represents the climax of the Arthurian tradition. TOMAS MALORY Morte Darthur is the title that William Caxton, the first English printer, gave to Malory s volume, which is the first great prose work in English language. The true identity of the author is unknown. He seems to have been a violent person and probably wrote his masterpiece in prison. His Morte Dartur was based on a variety of English and French sources in both verse and prose which contained stories about Arthur and his knights. Malory translated them all into English prose and eliminated much of the religious, magical and fantastical side of the story to concentrate on the idea of chivalry as a moral code of honor as well as a principle of good government. Malory traces the Arthurian story from the king s begetting, birth, education, and assumption of power to his and his court s tragic decay. Between these determining poles he gives over long sections to the adventures of the knights of the Round Table. In a certain sense Malory was the last authentic voice of English feudalism just before the rise of the powerful central state under the Tudors.

THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

The term Renaissance literally means rebirth and is the period in European civilization immediately following the Middle Ages, conventionally held to have been characterized by a surge of interest in classical learning and values. The Renaissance also witnessed the discovery and exploration of new continents, the discoveries in the sciences, the decline of the feudal system and the growth of commerce, and the invention or application of such potentially powerful innovations as paper, printing and gunpowder. To the scholars and thinkers of the day, however, it was primarily a time of the revival of classical learning and wisdom after a long period of cultural decline and stagnation.

FOCUS ON: NICOLAS COPERNICUS

In 1543 Nicolas Copernicus (1473 1543) published his treatise where a new view of the world is presented: the heliocentric model. This model was based on the idea that the earth and the other planets orbited around the sun, and that the earth spun on its own axis. This overturned the medieval religious view of the cosmos based on the theory of Ptolemy that the earth, being the centerpiece of God s creation, was the fixed centre of the universe around which planets and stars revolved in concentric circles.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
HENRY VII
With his victory at the Battle of Bosworth field in 1485, Henry Tudor (King Henry VII) laid the foundations for one of the most fruitful periods in English history. During his reign of Henry VII, England saw a period of financial and governmental stability. His diplomatic skill in avoiding quarrels with his neighbors (Scotland and France), his careful handling of state finances and his buildings of a powerful merchant fleet, which enabled England to dominate international trade, were all important steps in the establishment of England as a world power.

HENRY VIII
Henry VII s son, Henry VIII was a completely different character: though a brilliant scholar and ambitious in European politics, he was self-centered and extravagant, and quickly dissipated much of the wealth he had inherited. In his attempts to produce a son and heir, Henry married six times.

Henry III wanted to divorce the first of his unfortunate six wives, Catherine of Aragon, the daughter of the King of Spain, failed to supply her with a male heir (giving birth only to Mary Tudor). This brought Henry into direct conflict with the Catholic Church and pope Clement VII. When he failed to obtain a divorce or annulment of his marriage from him, Henry took a step which was to influence every aspect of British life and culture. He ended the rule of the Catholic church in England passing the Act of Supremacy (1534), and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church of England. A religious, social and political revolution took place at the same time. Anglicanism became the national religion in place of Catholicism. It was based on some principles of the Protestant belief, born out of the Reformation, a religious movement against the catholic Church started by Luther in Germany in 1521. Roman Catholic monasteries and convents were abolished (1539), and the clergy s properties were confiscated by the Crown, bringing a considerable revenue to the king s treasury.

After his divorce, Henry VIII married Anne Boleyn who gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, the future queen of England. Ten days after Anne was beheaded, Henry married Jane Seymour. The following year, Jane died giving birth to Edward. Henry now at last had a male heir. After the death of Jane Seymour, Henry began to look for another wife. In July 1543 Henry married his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. She was a good stepmother to Henry's two daughters Mary and Elizabeth. Catherine also helped to moderate Henry's religious persecutions. Henry VIII died in 1547 after six marriages and three heirs: Edward, Mary, and Elizabeth Tudor.

FOCUS ON ANNE BOLEYN

For a woman who played such an important part in English history, we know remarkably little about her earliest years. Her birthdate is unknown; even the year is widely debated. General opinion now favors 1501 or 1502, though some historians persuasively argue for 1507. She was probably born at Blickling Hall in Norfolk. The daughter of an ambitious knight and niece of the duke of Norfolk, Anne spent her adolescence in France. When she returned to England, her wit and style were her greatest charms. She had a circle of admirers and became secretly engaged to Henry Percy. She also entered the service of Katharine of Aragon. She became quite popular among the younger men though she was not considered a great beauty; Anne was the opposite of the pale, blonde-haired, blue-eyed image of beauty. She had dark, olive-colored skin, thick dark brown hair and dark brown eyes which often appeared black. She was of average height, had small breasts and a long, elegant neck. Hostile chroniclers relate a sixth finger and a large mole or goiter on her neck. Exactly when and where Henry VIII first noticed Anne is not known. He was originally attracted to her sister, Mary who came to court before Anne and was the king's mistress in the early 1520s. Nevertheless soon Anne caught the eye of Henry VIII. At first, the court probably thought that Anne would just end up as another one of Henry's mistresses. But, in 1527 we see that Henry began to seek an annulment of his marriage to Catherine, making him free to marry again. King Henry's passion for Anne can be attested to in the love letters he wrote to her when she was away from court. Henry hated writing letters, and very few documents in his own hand survive. However, 17 love letters to Anne remain and are preserved in the Vatican library. The legal debates on the marriage of Henry and Catherine of Aragon continued on. Anne was no doubt frustrated by the lack of progress. Her famous temper and tongue showed themselves at times in famous arguments between her and Henry for all the court to see. Anne feared that Henry might go back to Catherine if the marriage could not be annulled and Anne would have wasted time that she could have used to make an advantageous marriage. Sometime near the end of 1532, Anne finally gave got pregnant. To avoid any questions of the legitimacy of the child, Henry was forced into action. Sometime near St. Paul's Day (January 25) 1533, Anne and Henry were secretly married. Although the King's marriage to Catherine was not dissolved, in the King's mind it had never existed in the first place, so he was free to marry whomever he wanted. On May 23, the Archbishop officially proclaimed that the marriage of Henry and Catherine was invalid. Finally, on the 1st of June, she was crowned Queen. By August, preparations were being made for the birth of Anne's child, which was sure to be a boy. Names were being chosen, with Edward and Henry the top choices. The proclamation of the child's birth had already been written with 'prince' used to refer to the child. Anne took to her chamber, according to custom, on August 26, 1533 and on September 7, at about 3:00 in the afternoon, the Princess Elizabeth was born.

Anne now knew that it was imperative that she produce a son. By January of 1534, she was pregnant again, but the child was either miscarried or stillborn. In 1535, she became pregnant again but miscarried by the end of January. The child was reported to have been a boy. The Queen was quite upset, and blamed the miscarriage on her state of mind after hearing that Henry had taken a fall in jousting. She had to have known at this point that her failure to produce a living male heir was a threat to her own life, especially since the King's fancy for one of her ladies-in-waiting, Jane Seymour, began to grow. Anne's enemies at court began to plot against her using the King's attentions to Jane Seymour as the catalyst for action. Cromwell began to move in action to bring down the Queen. He persuaded the King to sign a document calling for an investigation that would possibly result in charges of treason. On April 30, 1536, Anne's musician and friend for several years, Mark Smeaton, was arrested and probably tortured into making 'revelations' about the Queen. Then the Queen's own brother, George Boleyn, Lord Rochford was arrested. On May 2, the Queen herself was arrested at Greenwich and was informed of the charges against her: adultery, incest and plotting to murder the King. She was then taken to the Tower by barge along the same path she had traveled to prepare for her coronation just three years earlier. On Monday the 15th, the Queen and her brother were put on trial at the Great Hall of the Tower of London. It is estimated that some 2000 people attended. Anne conducted herself in a calm and dignified manner, denying all the charges against her. Her brother was tried next, with his own wife testifying against him (she got her due later in the scandal of Kathryn Howard). Even though the evidence against them was scant, they were both found guilty, with the sentence being read by their uncle, Thomas Howard , the Duke of Norfolk. They were to be either burnt at the stake (which was the punishment for incest) or beheaded, at the discretion of the King. Anne knew that her time would soon come and started to become hysterical, her behavior swinging from great levity to body- wracking sobs. She received news that an expert swordsman from Calais had been summoned, who would no doubt deliver a cleaner blow with a sharp sword than the traditional axe. She was assured that there would be little pain; she replied, with typical spirit, 'I have heard that the executioner is very good. And I have a little neck.' Interestingly, shortly before her execution on charges of adultery, the Queen's marriage to the King was dissolved and declared invalid. One would wonder then how she could have committed adultery if she had in fact never been married to the King, but this was overlooked, as were so many other lapses of logic in the charges against Anne. They came for Anne on the morning of May 19 to take her to the Tower Green, where she was to be afforded the dignity of a private execution. She made a short speech before kneeling on the scaffold. She removed her headdress (which was an English gable hood and not her usual French hood, according to contemporary reports) and her ladies tied a blindfold over her eyes. The sword itself had been hidden under the straw. The swordsman cut off her head with one swift stroke. Anne's body and head were put into an arrow chest and buried in an unmarked grave in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula which adjoined the Tower Green. Her body was one that was identified in renovations of the chapel under the reign of Queen Victoria, so Anne's final resting place is now marked in the marble floor.

EDWARD VI
Ten days after Anne was beheaded, Henry married Jane Seymour. The following year, Jane died giving birth to Edward. Henry now at last had a male heir. After the death of Jane Seymour, Henry began to look for another wife. Under the Act of Succession 1543, Henry's only surviving legitimate son, Edward, inherited the Crown, becoming Edward VI. Since Edward was only nine years old at the time, he could not exercise actual power. Henry's will designated 16 executors to serve on a council of regency until Edward reached

the age of 18. The executors chose Edward Seymour, Jane Seymour's elder brother, to be Lord Protector of the Realm. During the six years of Edward VI's reign, Protestantism advanced rapidly in England. In February 1553, Edward VI became ill and he died at the age of 15 on 6 July 1553. His sister Mary succeed him.

MARY I
Mary I was known as Bloody Mary because of her persecution of Protestant as she tried to restore the Catholic religion of her mother, Catherine of Aragon to that of the 1526 model and total obedience to Rome. In 1554 she married the most fanatically Catholic sovereign in Europe, Philip II of Spain. This involved her in wars with France and the loss of the last English possession in the country, the town of Calais, and with it the last piece of the Plantagenet empire. Under her reign around 300 English Protestant were burnt, including Cranmer. May was childless and when she died in 1588 Mary s half sister Elizabeth came to the throne who restored a moderate and more tolerant form of Protestantism.

QUEEN ELIZABETH (?????????????) In 1558, Elizabeth became queen. It was during her reign (1558-1603) that the English Renaissance reached its peak. Elizabeth was also ambitious and her reign coincided with the beginning of the British Empire Despite enormous pressure Elizabeth never married and was known as the Virgin Queen . She used her chastity as a political weapon to maintain the stability of the country. Throughout the 16th century Britain was engaged in an empire building race with its most powerful rival, Spain.

SOCIAL CONTEXT
During the sixteenth century the population more than doubled and the changing in agricultural habits led to social and economic problems. Inflation was also a problem: prices rose and even if some classes thrived, as for example the larger landowners or yeomen, times were very hard for the poor. THE LAND ENCLOSURE Changes in agriculture during the Elizabethan period led to people leaving the countryside and their village life to search for employment in the towns. The wool trade became increasingly popular during the Elizabethan age, which meant that land which had been farmed by peasants was now dedicated to rearing sheep and a process known as land enclosure meant that the traditional open field system ended in favour of creating larger and more profitable farming units which required fewer people to work on them. The number of jobs decreased and people were forced to leave their homes in search of employment in the towns. THE POOR LAW During Queen Elizabeth's reign in the 1590s a series of poor harvests occurred. The price of food increased and people were suffering from starvation. This, combined with a population increase of 25% during the Elizabethan era created an extremely serious situation in the land. Starving and homeless people were driven to desperate acts endangering society in general. The 1601 Poor Law act made provision to: To levy a compulsory poor rate on every parish

To provide working materials Provide work or apprenticeships for children who were orphaned or whose parents were unable to support them Offer relief to the 'Deserving Poor and collecting a poor relief rate from property owners Parents and children were responsible for each other, so poor elderly parents were expected to live with their children

THE STANDARDIZATION OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE The invention of printing at the beginning of the period led to a growing standardization of the English language (based largely on London English) and the decline of dialect, at least among the upper classes. There was a boom in literacy. Indeed, by the end of the period, it is estimated that half the population could read and write. EDUCATION: THE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS Education in medieval times had been almost exclusively the province of the Church, but the change in the intellectual climate brought about by Humanism and the new scientific and geographical discoveries generated new interest in the question of the best education for children. This was the time of the Grammar Schools which were either attached to religious institutions or founded by groups of merchants, especially after the dissolution of monasteries. The curriculum consisted of: Latin, Greek, Ancient history, Religion, English The students were the sons of the local middle class: merchants, farmers, lawyers and shopkeepers. Girls were not normally sent to school, since the only education considered appropriate for them was to learn how to run the home, to sew, to embroider and perhaps to play a musical instrument.

LITERARY CONTEXT
THE RENAISSANCE PROSE
Prose in England during the Renaissance was mainly a vehicle for philosophical and scientific discourse and moral and religious sermons. One of the major themes of its prose was speculation about an ideal society. Thomas More s Utopia is one of the most representative examples of the humanist culture of the time. Another later example of the Utopian essay was The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon (1561 1626) an uncompleted study of an imaginary culture dominated by natural philosophers. Bacon, perhaps the greatest English philosopher of his time, was extremely learned and interested in many subjects. Indeed during the Renaissance there was no clear separation between different fields of knowledge as there is now. Religion, philosophy, science and mathematics were all seen as being interlinked. Indeed Bacon s essays also promoted the advancement of scientific research and learning in general. His work included texts in both English and Latin. Like More, Bacon wrote partly in Latin thinking that it would remain the language of international learning. Humanist thought was also an important influence in the construction of the new Church of England. In 1611, the first authorized English version of the Bible was printed. It was based mainly on the version translated by the theologian William Tyndale (c. 1494 1536) and became known as the King James Bible. Its influence was enormous both on the development of religion in England, and on its literature. Biblical idiom entered extensively into the English language and its influence can be felt to this day both in prose and in poetry. Sermons were another popular form of religious discourse. The poet John Donne is perhaps the greatest exponent of the form, and his sermons have given language many powerful metaphors. One of the most famous he has left to us is that of the death bell that tolls for every man.

THOMAS MORE
Thomas More was born in London and was educated at Canterbury College, Oxford. He entered parliament in 1504. During time spent on official business in Flanders, he started writing his most famous book, Utopia, which he completed and published in 1516. In 1529 he became Lord Chancellor of England and was treated with great respect during his residency at court. However, in 1534 More opposed Henry VII s decision to divorce his first wife Catherine and refused to swear acceptance of the king s supremacy over the Church of England. He was therefore imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was found guilty of high treason and beheaded in 1535. His body was buried in the Tower and, according to some sources, his head was exhibited on London Bridge. He was canonized as St Thomas More four hundred years later.

UTOPIA
Thomas More s main work Utopia was written in Latin, which was the international language of intellectual debate at the time, and published in 1516, with More s close friend Erasmus of Rotterdam (the greatest humanist scholar of the Northern Reanissance) supervising the printing. Utopia became popular at once and was soon translated into English (1551), French, German, Italian and Spanish. The title comes from Greek ou topos and means nowhere . It is a speculative political essay about the search for the best possible form of government. This was a subject that was of great concern to intellectuals of the whole Renaissance period producing a number of works from different political perspectives. The form of Utopia was probably suggested by the narrative of the voyages of Amerigo Vespucci printed in 1507 which helped More imagine an alternative to the world he inhabited . The narrator is Raphael Hythlodaeus, a Portuguese seaman who, during his travels, has discovered the island of Utopia, a place which, he says, is completely unique in the world in being a perfect society. Utopia is divided into two books. In the first book Hythlodaeus talks of his adventures and travels and describes England as a land where poverty produces crime, greed and social problems. In the second book (the part of the work More composed first) he describes Utopia as the ideal state. Utopia, he says, is ruled according to principles of harmony and justice: money and private property have been replaced by communal ownership, people work only six hours per day, a national system of education is available for women and men alike, there is complete freedom of thought and every religion is tolerated, while war is considered a terrible practice to be used only as a last resort. It is a proto-Welfare State in which the old are honoured and the young are taught to be conformist and respectful. Since everyone works, no one is overburdened and there is ample time for all citizens to pursue the arts of peace and the pleasure of the mind and the body. Yet the society is not completely equal: Utopia is in fact founded on the rule of the oldest male in each household and on the due submission of wives to their husbands. In other words it s a male dominated society. Utopia was written at a time when there was widespread social and economic inequality in Britain and stealing was commonly punished by hanging. Freedom of speech, too, was almost non-existent and was possible only in private. As a plan for a perfect society, Utopia thus appears in marked contrast to the society in which More actually lived. His device enabled him to say what he liked without putting himself in danger in an age when a rash expression of opinion could send one to the Tower. The book was partly inspired by Plato s notion of the perfect state developed in the Republic. More, however, gives us a much more physical, tangible and realistic account of his society than Plato does, describing the daily lives and relations of its inhabitants in considerable detail. Yet one thing Utopia shares with Plato s ideal state is the assumption that man is fundamentally good .

THE RENAISSANCE POETRY THE SONNET

The most typical expression of Renaissance poetry was the sonnet. The sonnet derived from the Italian poets Dante (1265 1321) and Petrarch (1304 -74). They gave the poets of Elizabethan England a new set of poetic conventions with which they could construct countless themes and variations. The standard theme of the Renaissance sonnets, inspired by Petrarch, was that of courtly love: poets expressed their passion for an unattainable Lady, and explored various aspects of their own emotions. Often the lady the poet loves is very beautiful but also very cruel. We are given no real insight into her feelings but only learn about the poet s interior world. The poet may have conflicting feelings, from great happiness to absolute desperation, from delight to pain and jealousy. Other recurrent themes were friendship, beauty and virtues, the destructive effect of time and transcience of life. For the poet, love is inspired by the beauty of the beloved which he tries to capture in poetic form, but this beauty, though it may contain something immortal, is itself mortal and fades with passage of time. Therefore the nature of the poet s desire contains a paradox: the poet often desires a lady but at the same time he hopes she will not surrender. The lady is portrayed as an idealized figure. Regarding form, the original Petrarchan sonnet was a poem of fourteen lines of hendecasyllables divided into two parts, the first containing two quatrains (or an octave), the second, two tercets (or a sestet). The rhyme scheme is usually ABBA ABBA CDE CDE. The first octave often presents the situation while the sestet includes personal reflections and sometimes the solution to the dilemma expressed in the first part of the sonnet. This form was later modified by English poets into the Elizabethan sonnet, again composed of fourteen lines of iambic pentameters, but this time divided into three quatrains and one rhyming couplet. The rhyme scheme is usually ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The English substitution made possible more dramatic progression in the presentation of feelings, and invited a summing up in conclusion. Indeed, the final couplet often forms a conclusion to what is presented in the first twelve lines.

The greatest sonnet writers of the age were Thomas Wyatt (who introduced the sonnet in England), Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare. After 1600, enthusiasm for the sonnet form suddenly declined. Though it was revived periodically, in the 17th century and again in 19th, it never recovered the essential quality that distinguished it from other short poems. This quality depended on the ability of the poet to feel contradictions of emotions, amorous feeling and spiritual questions which reflected the world view of the Renaissance period. PHILIP SIDNEY
Courtier, soldier, poet and critic, he was educated at Oxford. He travelled in France, Germany and Italy on diplomatic and military missions and died from a wound in war. He became a friend of Spenser, who dedicated his Shepherd s Calendar to him and commemorated his death in his Astrophel. Sidney s personal qualities of nobility and generosity made him a model of English chivalry and courtliness. His writing consist of his famous pastoral romance Arcadia (1580), his collection of sonnets Astrophel and Stella (1591), and his Defence of Poetry (1595, also known as the Defence of Poesy or An Apology for Poetry). ARCADIA The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, also known simply as the Arcadia or the Old Arcadia, is a long prose work written towards the end of the sixteenth century, and later published in several versions. It is Sidney's most ambitious literary work and as significant in its own way as his sonnets. The work is a romance that combines pastoral elements with a mood derived from the Hellenistic model. In the work, that is, a highly idealized version of the shepherd's life with stories of jousts, political treachery, kidnappings, battles, and rapes. His own comments indicate that his purpose was humble; he asserts that he intended only to entertain his sister, Mary Herbert, the Countess of Pembroke. The version of the Arcadia known to the Renaissance and later periods (New Arcadia) is substantially longer than the Old Arcadia. In the 1580s, Sidney took the frame of the original story, reorganized it, and added episodes, most significantly the story

of the just rebel Amphialus. The additions more than double the original story; however, Sidney had not finished the revision at the time of his death in 1586. ASTROPHEL AND STELLA Astrophel and Stella (1591) is a sequence of 108 sonnets and 11 songs about the unrequited love of Astrophel (= lover of a star) for Stella (= star). Naturally, like Petrarch with Laura, he never gets anywhere in his pursuit of Stella. She is and must remain unattainable. Overall Astrophel and Stella is a brilliant portrait of obsessive love, which explore the lover s state of mind and soul running through the whole range of emotions, from self-pity to joy and tenderness then back to despair. Sidney was in many ways similar to his Astrophel (they were both courtiers, politicians and accomplished soldiers) but it would be a mistake to identify the two completely. In fact, Sidney often views Astrophel with comic detachment, gently mocking his hero for his vanity. It is important to remember that there is humour as well as pathos in Sidney s sonnets. Astrophel and Stella was highly popular in its time and started a fashion of sonnet sequences, inspiring a vast number of imitators. THE DEFENCE OF POETRY Defence of Poetry is undoubtedly the most important critical treatise on poetry written by an Englishman during the Elizabethan period. It has achieved the status of a classical text. Although it reflects Sidney's Protestantism, it is nevertheless a worldly work. Drawing on an extraordinary range of classical and Continental texts, Sidney sets out* to defend "poor poetry" against its attackers and to argue positively that poetry, whose "final end is to lead and draw us to as high a perfection as our degenerate souls, made worse by their clayey lodgings, can be capable of," is the best vehicle for the "purifying of wit." He disposes his argument according to a traditional seven-part classical structure, beginning with an introduction or exordium and moving through the stages of proposition, division, examination and refutation to a final peroration, and including, as custom permitted, a digressio on a related issue. Sidney opens his argument by claiming that poetry gave rise to every other kind and division of learning. For this reason the Romans called the poet vates, "which is as much as a diviner, foreseer, or prophet," such as David revealed himself to be in his Psalms. With equal reverence the Greeks called the poet a "maker," as do the English (from the Greek verb poiein, "to make"). In all cases true poetry makes things "either better than nature brings forth, or, quite a new forms such as never were in nature." Nature's "world is brazen," Sidney argues; only the poets bring forth a golden one. Sidney next explains that the poet is able to create this heightened fictive world by coupling an idea with an image. It is the replicability of the poetic image among those who understand why and how it was created that distinguishes poetry from nature. The ongoing replication of poetic images is what enables our "erected wit" to mitigate against the effects of our "infected will." Sidney concludes this narration by presenting his central proposition, the crucial definition of the process of encoding conceits in images to create energetic poetic constructs: "Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis--that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring --to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture--with this end, to teach and delight." This definition--a tightly composed amalgam of ideas taken from Aristotle (mimesis), Plutarch ("speaking picture"), and Horace ("teach and delight")--with its emphasis upon activity, informs all the theoretical matter of The Defence of Poesy. Sidney considers the various subgenres in which poetry is arrayed (from the lowest to the highest, discussing pastoral, elegy, comedy, lyric, and epic or heroic), with a cautionary* comment about over rigid distinctions. Anticipating the design of his Arcadias , he recommends Jacob Sannazaro and Boethius, who "mingled prose and verse," and others who "mingled matters heroical and pastoral. Characteristically, he reserves his highest praise for the epic that is, in short, "the best and most accomplished kind of poetry. Sidney refused that: - Poets divert men from the pursuit of "other more fruitful knowledges"; - that poetry "is the mother of lies";

- that poetry "is the nurse of abuse, infecting us with many pestilent desires"; - that Plato banished poets from his ideal commonwealth in The Republic. Moreover Sidney considers, in a relevant digression, the lmentable condition of poetry in England, directing his criticism, characteristically, at poets rather than poetry, claiming in a reaffirmation of the poet as vates. As for those who refuse to value poetry, in the name of all poets Sidney offers the malediction that when you die, (may) your memory die from the earth for want of an epitaph .

EDMUND SPENSER Edmund Spenser was born in London of a poor family in 1552. He was educated at Cambridge where he read Homer, Virgil, Tasso and Ariosto who were to influence his major work. He was introduced into court life and made friends with the poet Sidney to whom he dedicated his Shepherd s Calendar (published anonymously in 1579), a series of twelve pastoral poems (reflecting the twelve months of the year) written in the tradition of Virgil s eclogues (i.e. verse dialogues in rural settings, with shepherds and shepherdesses with classical, French or English peasant names). Also in 1579 Spenser began to work in the service of the Earl of Leicester, Queen Elizabeth s chief court favourite, and began what is considered his masterpiece, The Faerie Queene, an unfinished allegorical romance centred around the character of Queen Gloriana (representing Glory in general and Queen Elizabeth I in particular who granted Spenser a pension of 50 pounds a year in reward). If The Faerie Queene is thus an epic celebration of Queen Elizabeth, the Protestant faith, and the English nation, it is also a chivalric romance. In the poem the queen sends twelve of her knights (each a symbol of twelve different virtues) on separate adventures full of damsels in distress, dragons, witches, enchanted trees, wicked magicians, giants, dark caves and shining castles. As a romace, Spenser s poem is designed to produce wonder, to enthrall its readers with sprawling plots, marvelous adventures, heroic characters, ravishing descriptions, and esoteric mysteries. The chivalrous theme also reflects the mythology of Elizabeth as a supposed descendant of King Arthur. Spenser was an admirer of Chaucer and made it his purpose in poetry to get rid of foreign influences in the English language. For The Faerie Queene he invented a new stanza, called the Spenserian stanza (later used by the Romantics Shelley, Keats and Byron) which consists of a nine-line stanza of closely interlocking rhymes (ababbcbcc), consisting of eight iambic pentameter* lines followed by an iambic line of six feet (an alexandrine). The longer length of the stanza allows Spenser more space to develop the description of a scene, while the couplet in the middle of the stanza creates a sweeter musical effect by slowing down the pace. The Spenserian stanza has origins in the Old French ballade (eight-line stanzas, rhyming ababbcbc), the Italian ottava rima (eight iambic pentameter lines with a rhyme scheme of abababcc), and the stanza form used by Chaucer in his Monk s Tale (eight lines rhyming ababbcbc).

FOCUS ON IAMBIC PENTAMETER

The term describes the particular rhythm that the words establish in that line. That rhythm is measured in small groups of syllables; these small groups of syllables are called "feet". The word "iambic" describes the type of foot that is used (in English, an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable). The word "pentameter" indicates that a line has five of these "feet."

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Shakespeare probably wrote his 154 sonnets in the 1590s, although they were published some years later, in 1609. They all use the Elizabethan form: three quatrains and a final couplet rhyming ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

Most of Shakespeare s sonnets speak about the themes of love and time, suggesting that love outlasts time and, of course, poetry outlasts both. Other themes include beauty, death, friendship, the power of the beloved and the suffering of the lover. These are typical themes of the sonnets of the time, but Shakespeare s images have a unique complexity and energy. Shakespeare s 154 Sonnets have generally been recognized as falling into three distinct groups. The first 126 are addressed to a fair youth (probably a young aristocrat who was also Shakespeare s patron); the next 26 refer to a new association with the Dark Lady ; the last two give a new twist to the erotic theme by playing fancifully with stories of Cupid and the loss of his (phallic) brand . These unmarked divisions contain within them subgroups (sonnets 1-17, for example, encourage the youth to marry, while sonnets 76-86 are disturbed by the threat posed by a rival poet). In the later poems thee ambiguous relationship between the narrator, the young man, and the Dark Lady takes on the nature of an emotional triangle in which, as sonnet 144 suggests, the narrator is torn between the love for the young man and the love for the woman who appears to have seduced him. The sonnets to the young man, which compose the larger group, form one of the most impressive and complex explorations of the themes of platonic love in English poetry. In his sonnets, Shakespeare wishes to preserve the eternal part of the young man s beauty against the effect of time. Love is judged to be stronger than time, but poetry is considered immortal. It is through these poems that this young man s beauty will be preserved forever. Many of Shakespeare s sonnets to the young man repeat the idea of poetry s capacity to immortalize. The second, much smaller group of sonnets that Shakespeare wrote are addressed to a dark lady whose real identity remains a mystery. These poems reject many of the traditional conventions of Elizabethan love poetry, such as that of exalting the ideal perfection and beauty of the beloved. In some ways, in fact, they represent a critique of such conventions. In describing a dark lady, Shakespeare is careful to emphasize how little she corresponds to the conventional ideas of beauty, grace or womanly perfection of his time. For him, however, the fact that she is not conventionally beautiful is an indication of her natural beauty. But this is not the same thing as the natural beauty of flowers or of the sun, moon or stars to which other poets falsely compare their ladies. It is rather, the beauty of her own particular nature in all its uniqueness and difference. Unlike many other women, who use the artifices of make-up to hide their defects and try to reach some ideal perfection, the dark lady is content to stay as nature intended her . Her naturalness also makes her extremely rare in a world in which desire of other women to correspond to an ideal notion of beauty makes them all banally similar inferior copies of an unattainable ideal. What fascinates the poet in his lady are the things that make her unique I his eyes. Often, in fact, it is her apparent imperfections that distinguish her from the norm. these range from physical defects to moral ones: her lack of virtue, her infidelity, her cruelty. The dark lady sonnets represents a much more honest, real account of love affair than any other poems from the period. Hare we have love in all its colours, from lust to tenderness, shame to disgust, adoration to hatred, irony to despair and jealousy to indifference. For the poet, the dark lady is at the same time an angel promising infinite happiness and a demon sent to drive him mad.

THE METAPHYSICAL POETS

It is misleading to talk about the Metaphysical poets as a homogenous group since the label was invented in the 18th century by critic, poet and lexicographer Samuel Johnson to describe a number of poets who actually have relatively little in common. In Lives of the Poets Johnson sarcastically writes the Metaphysical poets were men of learning, and to show their learning was their endeavour . The most famous poets in the so-called group are John Donne and later on George Herbert and Andrew Marvell. Although they cannot be considered as a real poetic movement, in their works we can find some common features. Their works are characterized by the use of philosophical metaphors which are called Metaphysical conceits . The term conceit refers to an elaborate metaphor comparing objects which at first glance seem to have nothing in common, often with an effect of shock or surprise. Again in the words

of Johnson, a Metaphysical conceit consists in the combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike . A famous example of Metaphysical conceit is Donne s comparison of two lovers to a pair of compasses. Discussing the unity of the lovers souls, Donne says If they be two, they are two so As stiff twin compasses are two, Like the two arms of the compass, the lovers can be distanced but they cannot be completely pulled apart and together they will always draw a circle, the symbol of unity. Metaphysical poems often contained difficult arguments which relied on paradox and intricate logic. Another common feature was the display of knowledge in several fields which flourished during the Renaissance, from religion to astrology, from alchemy to philosophy. From a formal point of view, their poems did not adhere to a particular verse-form but generally demonstrated a rhythmical complexity which distances them from the sonneteers. The reputation of the Metaphysical poets declined in the 18th century and interest in their work was not revived until the 20th-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot praised them for the way they work fused thought with emotion.

JOHN DONNE
John Donne was born in London into an old Roman Catholic family at a time when anti-Catholic feeling in England was high. After attending both Oxford and Cambridge without taking a degree, Donne decided to study law. In 1593, his younger brother Henry was arrested for giving protection to a priest and died in prison shortly afterwards, at which point Donne abandoned his Roman Catholic faith and joined the Anglican church. It was around this time that he wrote some of his most important satires and love poems, which though unpublished were nevertheless well known. After his involvement in a naval expedition against Spain in 1596 his prospects for advancement in politics seemed good. Ha sat in Queen Elizabeth s last parliament and had friends in powerful positions. But in 1601, everything changed when he secretly married Lady Egerton s niece, seventeen-year-old Anne Moore, against the wishes of her father who had Donne imprisoned and dismissed from his post. The next years were times of great hardship for the couple as Donne struggled to make a living as a lawyer. They had 12 children of which only 78 survived. But he also found time to write. Among his works of this time were Songs and Sonnets, Elegies, Satires, Letters, Sermons or Meditations and the Divine Poems that include the Holy Sonnets. Eventually Donne was persuaded by King James I to become a minister and went on to become one of the greatest preachers of the age, attracting hundreds of people with his sermons. But as religious writing took over, his poetic output reduced to almost nothing. Donne died in 1631 shortly after having preached what he called his own funeral sermon, Death s Duel . The outstanding characteristics of Donne s poetry, especially of his love poetry, are also those of the socalled metaphysical school. The first is the argumentative quality of his love poems. Donne often argues with the woman addressed and tries to persuade her to share this or that point of view. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning the speaker attempts to persuade his beloved not to mourn though they have to part. Then there is the dramatic quality of his poems. They originate in actual or imaginary experienced or situations: two lovers have just woken up in bed or have to part. They also open in an abrupt way, almost in media res, and involve a speaker and someone who is being addressed. The impression is that of a living voice speaking from the page or of an actor performing in a distinctive tone. The rhythms are those of the speaking voice or the speculating mind and the lines are of unequal length. The language is colloquial and closer to that of the great dramatist of the period than to that of lyrical poems. Donne s poems are constantly witty and abound in similes, metaphors, conceits, puns and paradoxes which are used to prove a point in a logical manner, to reason and draw a conclusion. In A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning he compares the relationship of two parting lovers to the interdependent movements of the legs of a pair of compasses. The point of comparison in which they are shown to be alike is not obvious and has

to be proved through a series of logical stages. The image does not have a decorative value bur reveals more about the experience of love. Donne draws his imagery from a wider range of subjects than the stock images of courtly love poets (gardens, flowers, birds, etc.). His images are those of a learned mind and derive from geographical discovery, law, theology, medicine or other scientific areas: for example, the movements of the spheres and the opening and closing of a pair of compasses in the poem A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. His love poetry departs from the idealized views of love and woman typified by the Elizabethan courtly poetry of Sidney and Spenser. His Songs and Sonets do not form an Elizabethan sequence centered on a single lady whom the lover worships from afar and who represents everything good in life. Donne s poems arise out of unique experiences his love is intensely physical and his women are real. Courtly lyric was dignified, ornate, musical and respectful of the lady. Donne s originality lies in his rejection of standard poetic forms and language and the attitudes of the courtly world. His tone is not tender or reverential, but often self-confident and skeptical, even cynical.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF DRAMA During the reign of Henry VII drama was still chiefly medieval in content and form; Mystery and Miracle plays were performed as well as Morality plays. Henry VIIIs schism from Rome in 1534 and the Reformation, the religious movement which divided Protestants from Catholics, hastened the end of Medieval religious drama because of the Kings hostility to Roman Catholicism. The festival of Corpus Christi was suppressed in 1548 and, although Mysteries continued to be performed on other religious festivals almost until the end of the 16th century, they were then banned altogether in order to avoid occasions for conflict between Catholic and Protestant. Drama, renewed in form and content, flourished again especially in the reign of Elizabeth I, who ascended the throne in 1558, and continued to enjoy great popularity under the Stuart King James I. During those years, drama became a major genre for English writers to express themselves in. the quality of the plays was indeed so exceptional that this period is labeled in history of literature the English renaissance. Much human talent was employed in the writing and production of plays which appealed people from all social levels, from the sovereign to the lowest class. The most vital British drama in this period broke away from the religious root of the Middle Ages to reflect the spirit of the new age which reached its maximum splendor during the years of Elizabeth Is reign. The new age exalted human nature in all its aspects, good and bad, strong and weak, and emphasized mans life and destiny on earth and his position in the universe. Similarly, Elizabethan drama presented heroes and heroines larger than life as well as human types taken from contemporary English society. Elizabethan drama also dealt with themes taken from English history in order to express pride in the nations achievements and tradition. The popularity of drama spread thanks to travelling companies of actors, they were resident professional actors in Lords houses who took to travelling in the summer, going around the country and giving public performances. They kept the status of servants of their Lord and called their companies after his name: the Earl of Leicesters men, the Lord Chamberlains men, the Lord Admirals men, etc. They had to carry a letter to avoid being punished and imprisoned as vagabonds. Their performances took place on movable platforms in inn yards or in town squares or, if they were lucky, in the manor houses of nobles. There were no women in these companies because the acting profession was considered immoral and, therefore, inappropriate for a woman. So young boys played womens roles in the plays. When James I came to the throne in 1603 he became the patron of the main company of actors in London, the Lord Chamberlains men, who were called Kings men from then on. The first time permanent playhouses were built was towards the end of the 16th century. They were built in London at the expenses of companies of players who had realized that the capital was the

ideal centre for all entertainment. But playhouses had to be located on the south bank of the Thames, outside the city walls because the Puritan authorities considered them to be centers of corruption and did not allow them to built under their jurisdiction. These were the first playhouses built in London: The Theatre in 1576, The Rose in 1587. The Swan in 1595, The Globe in 1599. The Elizabethan playhouses was circular or polygonal ij shape. The stage consisted of a rectangular platform stage, which projected into the theatres central pit. The pit roughly corresponded to the inn yards where travelling companies used to act. This area had no roof and no seats and was occupied by spectators who could only pay the basic admission fee of one penny to watch a play and stood throughout the performance. Around the theatre walls, three tiers of galleries provided better and more expensive seats and boxes for higher social classes. The stage was surrounded by the audience on three sides. On the fourth side, at the back of the stage, there was a wall which hid a tiring house, where the players changed. Two doors on either side of the wall, a central opening and un upper balcony provided access from the tiring house to the stage. The performance took place in daylight. If a flag flew from the top of the playhouse, it meant that a show was in progress. Elizabethan plays used no painted scenery and only a few properties (props), as articles and objects to be used in a performance are called. These could be moved by the players themselves without interrupting the flow of the action: for example, a throne, a tree, a table, a sign. The setting was usually indicated in the characters speeches and it was up to the audience to recreate it through their imagination. The Elizabethan audience accepted the convention of a quick change of place and time in the action even if nothing on the stage suggested it except for the position, movements, gestures and tone of voice of the actors. Every company of actors dreamed of working permanently in London where biggest audiences were. The public included people from all walks of life, from the lower classes to the nobility. If the sovereign wanted to see a play, the players would be called to the Court. Whatever their literary ambitions may have been, Elizabethan playwrights wrote plays to provide entertainment and make money. Once written, plays were sold to a company of players and became the property of that company. If a printed copy was made, the name of the company and not of the playwright was usually written on the frontispiece of the text. ELIZABETHAN PLAYWRIGHTS The group of playwright who founded the English drama of the Renaissance, from the 1570s to the 1590s, were called the Universities Wits because they were all men of university education, either from Cambridge (like Marlowe, Greene, Nashe) or from Offord (like Lyly, Peele, Lodge). The two universities were beginning to play their proper part in the national literary life. The bestknown of the University Wits are Lyly and Marlowe. JOHN LYLY
Chiefly remembered for his Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580), the latter of which is often considered the first English novel, Lyly was an Elizabethan dramatist who composed witty and highly polished plays aimed at a sophisticated audience. His earliest works, the two parts of Euphues, gave the name to the highly elaborate and elegant prose style known as Euphuism and inaugurated a short-lived but influential vogue for writings in this mode, to be supplanted in the late 1580s by the popularity of Philip Sidney's style in his Arcadia. Lyly's dramas, like his prose works, are characterized by rich rhetorical ornamentation and complex structures of balanced antitheses, images, proverbs, and allusions. With plots borrowed from the classics but with personalities recognizable in their day, Lyly's plays are considered to have set new standards for light comedy and to have raised English drama from a crude to a sophisticated level.

CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE Christopher Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker. His baptism was registered in 1564 at Canterbury where he was also educated. He then graduated from Cambridge University. Almost nothing is known of his short life except that, to some extent, it was a wild and violent one and that he was accused of atheism and blasphemy. He is said to have worked as a secret agent for the Government. He was killed in 1593 in suspicious circumstances. By the time of his early death, Marlowe had proved his talent as a dramatist in four tragedies, Tamburlaine, Edward II, Doctor Faustus and The Jew of Malta, which held the stage until the closing of theatres in 1642 and had a great influence on Shakespeare s work. Marlowe developed the old Morality play in a high original way. Each of his plays centers around a protagonist who is dominated by a ruling passion: Tamburlaine is driven by his desire to conquer the world, Edward is blinded by his homosexual love for his favorite, Doctor Faustus is possessed by his desire for knowledge and the Jew for his love for gold. But, unlike the old Morality play, in which symbolic characters went unchanged through the play, Marlowe allowed his characters to develop. Marlowe s characters are titanic, larger than life figures and prepared the way for Shakespeare s tragic heroes, like Macbeth and King Lear. Another of Marlow s great achievements is to have introduced blank verse ( unrhymed iambic pentameters) to British drama, showing what a flexible tool it could be for the English language. DOCTOR FAUSTUS PLOT The play begins with Doctor Faustus of Wittenberg, sitting in his study. Dissatisfied with the study of philosophy, law and divinity, Faustus turns his attention to the challenge of magic and the dark arts, which he believes will open to him the secrets of matter and the universe. With his incantations Faustus manages to make the devil s advocate, Mephistophilis, appear. Mephistophilis offers Faustus limitless power and knowledge in exchange for his immortal soul. Everything can be his if he signs the fatal contract, which grants him 24 years of life and liberty. Faustus is advised by both good and evil angels, while his fellow philosopher fear for his soul. However, Faustus, who dreams of becoming the great emperor of the world . Decides to sign, even though he knows he will be damned. After signing the pact, Mephistophilis gives him a series of magic books which will enable Faustus to have and do anything he wants. He meets Lucifer, the devil himself, and is introduced to the seven deadly sins, who are personified as in morality play. A number of scenes follow in which Faustus disrupts a papal conference, calls up the Spirit of Helen of Troy and performs other amazing feasts. As the end approaches, however, Faustus begins to regret his decision. His final speech is extremely powerful for the way it reveals the anguish of his tortured and divided soul. INTERPRETATION OF THE PLAY Considering what is known about Marlowe s life and beliefs, Doctor Faustus is in many ways a highly ambiguous play and it has provoked a number of conflicting interpretations. However, we can imagine that an average Elizabethan audience would probably have seen it as a condemnation of Faustus., both in his defiance of the Church and his desire for knowledge. It is in fact possible that Marlowe was commissioned to write it as a piece of anti-Renaissance propaganda. It appeared in 1594, at a time when Elizabeth and her court, afraid to offend the powerful forces of

the Catholic Counter-Reformation, had distanced themselves from the ideas of a radical reformist figures like John Dee and Edmund Spenser. Some critics have argued that Faustus is in part a satirical portrait of John Dee himself. Like Dee, Faustus is interested in science, magic and alchemy and is deeply influenced by the work of Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535), who had been condemned by the Roman Church for sorcery. In Doctor Faustus, Agrippa is an inspirational figure for Faustus. It is partly under the influence of Agrippa s De occulta philosophia (The Occult Philosophy) that Faustus calls up Mephistophilis. And I [ ] will be as cunning as Agrippa was, whose shadows made all Europe honour him Another similarity is Faustus enthusiasm for empire. His desire to become emperor of the world possibly alludes to Dee s plans for a reformed British Empire with Elizabeth as its nominal head. Marlowe s Faustus, however, is in many ways a complex and ambiguous character. On the negative side, he is portrayed as arrogant, greedy and self-interested. But he is at the same time brilliant and charismatic. Figures such as the Pope and his cardinals, on the other hand, are ridiculed and shown to be just as concerned with increasing their power as Faustus is. Marlowe himself was reputed to be an atheist, so he probably had some sympathy for Faustus. But in the end how we look at Faustus depends very much on our own attitudes to questions and themes the play addresses. These include the limits to scientific enquiry, the dangers of megalomania and the desirability of empires. One thing is certain. Marlowe s hero emerges as a representative of the new spirit of freedom and human potential that began with the Renaissance, the sense that man could decide his own destiny. His desire for knowledge, power and the ultimate secrets of the universe announces the birth of the modern age.

FOCUS ON THE THEMES: SIN, REDEMPTION, AND DAMNATION

Insofar as Doctor Faustus is a Christian play, it deals with the themes at the heart of Christianitys understanding of the world. First, there is the idea of sin, which Christianity defines as acts contrary to the will of God. In making a pact with Lucifer, Faustus commits what is in a sense the ultimate sin: not only does he disobey God, but he consciously and even eagerly renounces obedience to him, choosing instead to swear allegiance to the devil. In a Christian framework, however, even the worst deed can be forgiven through the redemptive power of Jesus Christ, Gods son, who, according to Christian belief, died on the cross for humankinds sins. Thus, however terrible Faustuss pact with Lucifer may be, the possibility of redemption is always open to him. All that he needs to do, theoretically, is ask God for forgiveness. The play offers countless moments in which Faustus considers doing just that, urged on by the good angel on his shoulder or by the old man in scene 12both of whom can be seen either as emissaries of God, personifications of Faustuss conscience, or both. Each time, Faustus decides to remain loyal to hell rather than seek heaven. In the Christian framework, this turning away from God condemns him to spend an eternity in hell. Only at the end of his life does Faustus desire to repent, and, in the final scene, he cries out to Christ to redeem him. But it is too late for him to repent. In creating this moment in which Faustus is still alive but incapable of being redeemed, Marlowe steps outside the Christian worldview in order to maximize the dramatic power of the final scene. Having inhabited a Christian world for the entire play, Faustus spends his final moments in a slightly different universe, where redemption is no longer possible and where certain sins cannot be forgiven.

POWER AS A CORRUPTING INFLUENCE

Early in the play, before he agrees to the pact with Lucifer, Faustus is full of ideas for how to use the power that he seeks. He imagines piling up great wealth, but he also aspires to plumb the mysteries of the universe and to remake the map of Europe. Though they may not be entirely admirable, these plans are ambitious and inspire awe, if not sympathy. They lend a grandeur to Faustuss schemes and make his quest for personal power seem almost heroic, a sense that is reinforced by the eloquence of his early soliloquies. Once Faustus actually gains the practically limitless power that he so desires, however, his horizons seem to narrow. Everything is possible to him, but his ambition is somehow sapped. Instead of the grand designs that he contemplates early on, he contents himself with performing conjuring tricks for kings and noblemen and takes a strange delight in using his magic to play practical jokes on simple folks. It is not that power has corrupted Faustus by making him evil: indeed, Faustuss behavior after he sells his soul hardly rises to the level of true wickedness. Rather, gaining absolute power corrupts Faustus by making him mediocre and by transforming his boundless ambition into a meaningless delight in petty celebrity. In the Christian framework of the play, one can argue that true greatness can be achieved only with Gods blessing. By cutting himself off from the creator of the universe, Faustus is condemned to mediocrity. He has gained the whole world, but he does not know what to do with it.
THE DIVIDED NATURE OF MEN

Faustus is constantly undecided about whether he should repent and return to God or continue to follow his pact with Lucifer. His internal struggle goes on throughout the play, as part of him of wants to do good and serve God, but part of him (the dominant part, it seems) lusts after the power that Mephastophilis promises. The good angel and the evil angel, both of whom appear at Faustuss shoulder in order to urge him in different directions, symbolize this struggle. While these angels may be intended as an actual pair of supernatural beings, they clearly represent Faustuss divided will, which compels Faustus to commit to Mephastophilis but also to question this commitment continually. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Although Shakespeare is probably the most famous writer in the world, relatively little is known about his life. Shakespeare s birth is traditionally celebrated on 23 April. He was born in Stratfordupon-Avon. His father was a glove-maker and his mother came from a prosperous family. He was probably educated at the local grammar school, where he could have acquired a reasonably impressive education, including a respectable knowledge of Latin, but he did not proceed to Oxford or Cambridge. Records indicate that in 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior. Nothing is known for certain about how he began his career as a writer and a man of the theatre. While London soon became the centre of Shakespeare s professional life, his family continued to live in Stratford. By 1592 he was already a well-known playwright. It was probably when the plague closed London theatres from 1592 to 1594, that Shakespeare started to write his famous sonnets. His patron and friend was the Earl of Southampton. After the plague, Shakespeare became a leading member of the theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain s Men, (later renamed the King s Men when James I came to the throne in 1603), with whom he worked for the rest of his career as actor, playwright and administrator. He later became a member of the syndicate which built the Globe Theatre. As a poet he wrote a collection of 154 sonnets and two

long poems. As a playwright he wrote 37 plays, which were popular with both educated and common audiences alike. Shakespeare apparently had no interest in preserving for posterity the sum of his writings, let alone in clarifying the chronology of his works or in specifying which plays he wrote alone and which with collaborations. He wrote plays for performance by his company, and his scripts existed in his own handwritten manuscripts or in scribal copies, in playhouse prompt books, and probably in pirated texts based on shorthand reports of a performance or on reconstructions from memory by an actor or published during his lifetime in the small-format, inexpensive books called quartos; to these were added eighteen other plays, never before printed, in the large, expensive folio volume of Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies (1623), published seven years after his death. In this First Folio , edited by two of his friends and fellow actors, John Heminges and Henry Condell, however, the plays were simply grouped as Comedies, Histories and Tragedies and not by date or chronological order. For this reason the dates and order of composition are generally difficult to establish. In order to give at least an approximate date to each play, editors and critics used a method based 0on three types of evidence: - external evidence: references to Shakespeare s plays in other writers works; - internal evidence: references to contemporary events quoted in the plays; - stylistic evidence: the particular style, plot, characters, language and metrics presented in the plays. On the basis of these types of evidence Shakespeare s plays may be dived into three chronological periods, each one with clear features of its own. The first period includes comedies (e.g. The Comedy of Errors, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, Love s Labour s Lost, A Midsummer Night s Dream, The Merchant of Venice), history plays (e.g. the trilogy of Henry VI, Richard III, King John, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V), and tragedies (Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar). In this period Shakespeare showed great sympathy for human nature and a positive attitude to life. Even when the play has a tragic outcome, life is still presented positively as worth living. Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is a celebration of love in spite of its tragic ending. Then Shakespeare entered a period in which his works reflected a gloomier vision of life. Traditional human values, such as love, friendship and honour, fall apart; family and society are broken and destroyed by betrayal, violence and war; man seems to live in godless chaotic universe, easy prey to malignant fate. This is what can be inferred from the great tragedies written after 160: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The other plays of this period Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, All s Well that Ends Well although they are not tragedies, also contain a dark, bitter streak which reveals the pessimistic outlook of the playwright. In the final period of Shakespeare s productive life the most representative work in his last play, The Tempest (1612). In this the playwright seems to have reached a new serene and detached vision of the world after a period of sad experience. Prospero is the play s main character and Shakespeare s spokesman, according to most critics. He is a learned man who uses his magic powers to take a terrible revenge on the enemies who usurped his throne and threatened the lives of his daughter and himself. But in the end all is revealed as an illusion; no one is actually hurt, enemies are forgiven and divided lovers are happily united. Prospero says he will destroy the books that contain the secret of his magic and retire to a quit life of meditation. Like his character, Shakespeare gave up the magic of his art and retired from the theatre in the same year, 1612, and returned to Stratford. Shakespeare was an extraordinary playwright; in his works, literature and popular culture combine. He was not of an age, but for all time , as Ben Jonson, a contemporary dramatist, said. He was able to write comedy and tragedy, history and farce, with a personal vision which could

speak to all kinds of people throughout the conceivable situation, social and political. He created an unequalled range of characters, portraying the complexities of emotion and reason, and exploring the depths of human nature.

Shakespeare's writings greatly influenced the entire English language. Prior to and during Shakespeare's time, the grammar and rules of English were not fixed. But once Shakespeare's plays became popular in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, they helped contribute to the standardization of the English language, with many Shakespearean words and phrases becoming embedded in the English language, particularly through projects such as Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language which quoted Shakespeare more than any other writer. He expanded the scope of English literature by introducing new words and phrases, experimenting with blank verse, and also introducing new poetic and grammatical structures.

ROMEO AND JULIET

PLOT The Montagues and Capulets, the two most important families of Verona, are bitter enemies. Romeo, the son of Lord Montague, goes to a masked ball given by the Capulet family and he falls in love with their daughter Juliet. After the ball, Romeo overhears Juliet confessing that she, too, has fallen in love with him and they decide to marry secretly. With the help of Friar Lawrence, they are married the next day. Unfortunately the same day some of the Montagues and Capulets meet and a conflict follows in which Romeo s friend Mercutio is killed. Romeo is involved in the fight and to vindicate Mercutio he kills Tybalt, Juliet s cousin, and is then banished to Mantua. Meanwhile, Lord Capulet wants Juliet to marry Count Paris. Juliet asks the Friar for advice and he suggests she should drink a potion which will give her the appearance of being dead for 42 hours. The friar will tell Romeo about it and Romeo will take her to Mantua with him. But the Friar s message fails to reach Romeo in time, and Romeo, believing Juliet to be dead, decides to kill himself. He buys some poison and goes to see Juliet s body for the last time. At the tomb Romeo gives Juliet a final kiss, drinks the poison and dies. Juliet awakes and finding Romeo dead, takes his knife and kill herself. FEATURES OF THE PLAY LOVE
Love in Romeo and Juliet is not some pretty, idealized emotion. Yes, the love Romeo and Juliet share is beautiful and passionate. It is pure, exhilarating, and transformative, and they are willing to give everything to it. But it is also chaotic and destructive, bringing death to friends, family, and to themselves. Over and over in the play, Romeo and Juliet s love is mentioned in connection with death and violence, and finds it s greatest expression in their suicide

The play explores the matter of love in its many forms. Shakespeare places the pure and absolute love of Romeo and Juliet in contrast with other notions of Love that are embodied by other characters. For Juliet s father, love is a profitable contract between two families. For Juliet s nurse, love is something physical that belongs to the realm of the senses. For Paris, the man Juliet s family want her to marry, love is linked to the idea of decorum and correct behavior.

FATE From the opening prologue when the Chorus summarizes Romeo and Juliet and says that the starcrossed lovers will die, Romeo and Juliet are trapped by fate. No matter what the lovers do, what plans they make, or how much they love each other, their struggles against fate only help fulfill it. But defeating or escaping fate is not the point. No one escapes fate. It is Romeo and Juliets determination to struggle against fate in order to be together, whether in life or death, that shows the fiery passion of their love, and which makes that love eternal. INDIVIDUALS VS. SOCIETY Because of their forbidden love, Romeo and Juliet are forced into conflict with the social world around them: family, friends, political authority, and even religion. The lovers try to avoid this conflict by hiding, by escaping from it. They prefer the privacy of nighttime to the public world of day. They volunteer to give up their names, their social identities, in order to be together. They begin to keep secrets and speak in puns so that they can publicly say one thing while meaning another. On the morning after their marriage, they even go so far as to pretend that day is night so they wont have to part. But no one can stop day from dawning, and in the end Romeo and Juliet cant escape the responsibilities of the public world. Romeo tries to stop being a Montague and avoid fighting Tybalt, but fails. Juliet tries to stop being a Capulet and to stand up to her father when he tries to marry her off to Paris, but is abandoned by her mother and the Nurse. Romeo is banished from Verona by Prince Escalus, who embodies political law. Finally, to preserve their love, Romeo and Juliet are forced to the ultimate act of independence and privacy: suicide. THE MERCHANT OF VENICE Bassanio, a noble but poor Venetian, asks his friend Antonio, a rich merchant, for 3000 ducats to be able to court the rich heiress Portia. Antonio is also short of money, however, because all his money is tied up in his merchant ships, which are still at sea. But because he wants to help his friend, he borrows the necessary amount from Shylock, a Jewish moneylender or usurer, who demands that if the sum is not returned, he may extract one pound of flesh to be cut from Antonio s body. Meanwhile Lorenzo, a close friend of Antonio and Bassanio, escapes with Shylock s daughter, Jessica, taking some of her father s money. Shylock is infuriated by his daughter s betrayal and wants revenge. Antonio learns that his ships have been lost at sea. Since Antonio can no longer pay his debt, Shylock claims his penalty. They go to the court of justice, where Portia is disguised as a lawyer. Portia admits the validity of Shylock s claim, but tells him that he must cut off exactly one pound of flesh, without spilling one drop of blood, and if he does not follow these rules he will be killed. Since this is clearly impossible, now it is Shylock who is forced to ask for mercy. Shylock is permitted to live but only on condition that he becomes a Christian. The play ends with Portia giving Antonio a letter which informs him that his ships have arrived safely in port. MANIPULATION OF LAW
Justice and law can be manipulated by people in power. In Merchant of Venice, Portia manipulated the law to trap Shylock with his own words. Laws can be manipulated for cruel purpose but they are also capable of producing good when executed by the right people

SELF INTEREST VS. LOVE On the surface, the main difference between the Christian characters and Shylock appears to be that the Christian characters value human relationships over business ones, whereas Shylock is only interested in money. The Christian characters certainly view the matter this way. Merchants like Antonio lend money free of interest and put themselves at risk for those they love, whereas Shylock agonizes over the loss of his money and is reported to run through the streets crying, O, my ducats! O, my daughter! (II.viii.15). With these words, he apparently values his money at least as much as his daughter, suggesting that his greed outweighs his love. However, upon closer inspection, this supposed difference between Christian and Jew breaks down. When we see Shylock in Act III, scene i, he seems more hurt by the fact that his daughter sold a ring that was given to him by his dead wife before they were married than he is by the loss of the rings monetary value. Some human relationships do indeed matter to Shylock more than money. Moreover, his insistence that he have a pound of flesh rather than any amount of money shows that his resentment is much stronger than his greed. Just as Shylocks character seems hard to pin down, the Christian characters also present an inconsistent picture. Though Portia and Bassanio come to love one another, Bassanio seeks her hand in the first place because he is monstrously in debt and needs her money. Bassanio even asks Antonio to look at the money he lends Bassanio as an investment, though Antonio insists that he lends him the money solely out of love. In other words, Bassanio is anxious to view his relationship with Antonio as a matter of business rather than of love. Finally, Shylock eloquently argues that Jews are human beings just as Christians are, but Christians such as Antonio hate Jews simply because they are Jews. Thus, while the Christian characters may talk more about mercy, love, and charity, they are not always consistent in how they display these qualities.

HAMLET When Hamlets father the King of Denmark dies suddenly, Hamlets mother, Gertrude, marries the dead kings brother, Claudius, who takes the throne. Hamlet meets his fathers ghost who tells him that he was murdered by Claudius and Hamlet resolves to take revenge for his death. Hamlet pretends he is mad and rejects the love of Ophelia, the daughter of the kings counselor Polonius. In order to prove that his father was murdered, he asks a group of actors to perform a play about a similar fratricide, called The Murder of Gonzago, in front of Claudius to see his reaction. (This has been defined as a play within the play). During the murder scene, Claudius goes out of the room in apparent guilty fury. Hamlet the accuses his mother of having betrayed his fathers memory by marrying Claudius. During this scene he hears a noise behind a curtain and kills the intruder, thinking it is Claudius, when it is in fact Polonius. Hamlet is then sent to England by the king who wants to have him executed there. But Hamlet manages to escape and to return to Denmark. During Hamlets absence Ophelia, destroyed by Hamlets rejection of her and by her fathers death, drowns herself. Returning from France, her brother Laertes decides to avenge his fathers and sisters deaths. Claudius arranges a duel between the two but Hamlet does not know that the king poisoned a glass of wine and Laertes poisoned his sword, one of which would surely kill the Prince. However, things go amiss when the Queen drinks the poisoned wine and falls dead. Laertes slices Hamlet's arm with his poisoned sword, leaving Hamlet with just enough time left of his life to fulfill his goal. He slays king Claudius, and also Laertes when he discovers the sword had poisoned him. They all die in the end. REVENGE

It is interesting that Hamlet is a revenge tragedy driven by a protagonist unable to commit to the act of revenge. In the story, it is Hamlets inability to avenge the murder of his father that drives the plot forwards and the deaths of Polonius, Laertes, Ophelia, Gertrude, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern all result from Hamlets delay. ACTION VS. INACTION To highlight Hamlets inability to take action, Shakespeare includes a number of other characters capable of taking resolute and headstrong revenge as required. Fortinbras travels many miles to take his revenge and ultimately succeeds in conquering Denmark; Laertes plots to kill Hamlet to revenge the death of his father, Polonius. Compared to these characters, Hamlets revenge is ineffectual. Once he decides to take action, he delays any action until the end of the play. It should be noted that this is not uncommon in Elizabethan revenge tragedies. What makes Hamlet a unique piece of writing is the remarkable way in which Shakespeare uses the delay to build Hamlets emotional and psychological complexity. Hamlets revenge is delayed in three significant ways:
1. Hamlet must first establish Claudius guilt, which he does in Act 3, Scene 2 by presenting the murder of his father in a play. When Claudius storms out during the performance, Hamlet becomes convinced of his guilt. 2. Hamlet then intellectualizes his revenge, contrasting with the rash actions of Fortinbras and Laertes. For example, Hamlet has the opportunity to kill Claudius in Act 3, Scene 3. He draws his sword, but is concerned that Claudius will go to heaven if killed while praying. 3. After killing Polonius, Hamlet is sent to England making it impossible for him to gain access to Claudius and carry out his revenge. During his trip, he decides to become more headstrong in his desire for revenge.

Although he does ultimately kill Claudius in the final scene of the play, we cannot credit Hamlet with plotting the revenge rather, it is Claudius plan to kill Hamlet that backfires. Perhaps if Hamlet had acted earlier, lives could have been saved? THE MYSTERY OF DEATH In the aftermath of his fathers murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death, and over the course of the play he considers death from a great many perspectives. He ponders both the spiritual aftermath of death, embodied in the ghost, and the physical remainders of the dead, such as by Yoricks skull and the decaying corpses in the cemetery. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to the themes of spirituality, truth, and uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlets deepest questions, ending once and for all the problem of trying to determine truth in an ambiguous world. And, since death is both the cause and the consequence of revenge, it is intimately tied to the theme of revenge and justiceClaudiuss murder of King Hamlet initiates Hamlets quest for revenge, and Claudiuss death is the end of that quest. The question of his own death plagues Hamlet as well, as he repeatedly contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world. Hamlets grief and misery is such that he frequently longs for death to end his suffering, but he fears that if he commits suicide, he will be consigned to eternal suffering in hell because of the Christian religions prohibition of suicide. In his famous To be or not to be soliloquy (III.i), Hamlet philosophically concludes that no one would choose to endure the pain of life if he or she were not afraid of what

will come after death, and that it is this fear which causes complex moral considerations to interfere with the capacity for action.
MYSOGYNY Shattered by his mothers decision to marry Claudius so soon after her husbands death, Hamlet becomes cynical about women in general, showing a particular obsession with what he perceives to be a connection between female sexuality and moral corruption

KING LEAR
King Lear tells the story of an old English king called Lear who, in the absence of a male heir, decides to divide up his kingdom among his three daughters according to how much they profess love to him. The first two daughters Regan, wife of the Duke of Cornwall, and Goneril, wife of the Duke of Albany, exaggerate their affection for their father to increase their inheritance. The youngest daughter Cordelia, however, is disgusted by her sisters hypocrisy: when Lear asks her how much she loves him she says as much as is natural for a daughter to love her father. Lear confuses her honesty with insolence and disinherits Cordelia, who is exiled and marries the King of France. Lear divides his inheritance between Goneril and Regan on the condition that they promise to maintain the old king, together with a company of a hundred of his knights. But the two sisters soon reveal their evil intentions. They do not keep their promise and in the end they throw Lear out of the court in the middle of a storm, saying that he has lost his mind. A parallel plot concerns the Duke of Gloucester who has problems with his two sons. His illegitimate son Edmund has convinced him that his other son Edgar plans to take his lands. But Edmund, like Regan and Goneril, is simply trying to manipulate things to his own advantage. Indeed, thanks to Edmund s insinuations, Gloucester is suspected of complicity with the enemy and he is blinded by the Duke of Cornwall. Edgar, disguised as a mad beggar, leads the blind Gloucester to join Lear in the wilderness, where they begin to realize their terrible mistakes in favouring the wrong children. Returning to Englands, Cordelia, now the Queen of France, is briefly reunited with her old father. But then they are imprisoned by Edmund who has gained power in the kingdom after winning the affections of both Regan and Goneril. The ending of the play is one of the most tragic in Shakespeare canon. Cordelia is hanged on Edmund s orders, and Lear, already mad, dies of grief. Goneril, meanwhile, poisons Regans out of jealousy over Edmund and then kills herself. Gloucester dies after being reunited with his good son Edgar. Edmund is killed, unrepentant, by Edgar, who the becomes king. FEATURES OF THE PLAY The themes of the play cover greed, betrayal, lust for power, and cruelty. The tragedy of King Lear is initially provoked by Lear s excess of paternal love which is also an excessive demand for love. It is perhaps difficult for a modern audience to understand how Lear is able to so violently reject his most beloved daughter. Cordelia insists that her love for her father is limited by the natural bond which exists between father and child, and that when she marries, half her love will go to her husband. Indeed Lear s rejection of her seems almost monstrous, pointing to dark, unexpressed passions. Goneril and Regan, on the other hand, with their exaggerated declarations of absolute devotion are able to placate their father, though they actually hate him. They tell him what he wants to hear bur the betray him by throwing him out into the wilderness. In King Lear, love is ultimately not a redemptive force but one which destroys <and leads to catastrophe. Excessive love is shown as an obstacle to wisdom and good judgment.

JACOBEAN DRAMA

The chronological division between Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is rather artificial, as several dramatists, Shakespeare included, wrote their plays during the reigns of both Elizabeth and James I. however, the label Jacobean drama describes a theatrical production with features of its own, different from those of the Elizabethan period; it is also loosely used to include plays written under King Charles I. several playwrights were active in this period Beaumont, Fletcher, Massinger, Middleton, Chapman Jonson, Ford, Webster, and others. It was quite common for dramatists to write plays in collaboration, like Beaumont and Fletcher who produced fifteen plays together. Ben Jonson enjoyed an unrivalled literary prestige and influence among his contemporaries. His masterpieces are Volpone (1605), Epicene, or The Silent Woman (1609), and The Alchemist (1610). They are typical Jacobean comedies in that they are not romantic, as Shakespeares had been, but satirical. Jonsons satire expressed criticism and distaste for the world and exposed the vices and follies of man. Jonson was also a striking contrast to Shakespeare and Elizabethan dramatists in strictly observing the three classical unities of time, place and action; this meant that the story was a single plot, which occurred in one place only and covered a period of twenty-four hours. Although his plays follow classic models, they provide a wonderful portrait-gallery of human types from contemporary society. He had a great influence on the tradition of English comic writing in drama and fiction (Congreeve, Fielding, Dickens, James Joyce among others acknowledge his influence). His output also includes a large number of masques. A masque was a form of theatrical entertainment for the court and the aristocracy, in which the spectacular and musical elements predominated over plot and character. Jacobean tragedies are full of shocking details, images of blood, torture and violent deaths. In the final scene of John Fords Tis Pity Shes a Whore (1633) a character appears on the stage holding his lovers bleeding heart in his hands, while in a scene in John Websters The Duchess of Malfi (1613) the main character is tortured by a group of madmen. Some of the Sheakespere later plays, written in this period, have scenes of violence: for example, in Macbeth the protagonist emerges from Duncans room with blood dripping from his hands and in King Lear the Duke of Gloucester has his eyes put out. It is interesting to note that Italy was often chosen in English plays of the Jacobean period as a background for violent crimes or cunning behavior. Tis Pity Shes a Whore, The Duchess of Malfi and Volpone all have Italian setting. One reason for this negative view of Italy was the hostility between the Protestant church, established in England after the Reformation, and the Catholic church of Rome which was seen by protestants as a nest of corruption. BEN JONSON Ben Jonson was born at Westminster probably in 1572. He had no university education. He was apprenticed as a bricklayer, did not like the trade, joined the army and went abroad. On his return to London, he took to the stage and became an unsuccessful actor and playwright. He knew Shakespeare, whose works he greatly appreciated. He married in the early 1590s. in 1598 he killed a fellow-actor in a duel nut escaped the gallows. About the same time he joined the Roman Catholic Church. His reputation as a playwright was steadily growing and he was at the height of his fame when he went on walking tour of Scotland in 1618; there he paid a visit to the Scottish poet William Drummond. In his last years he lost his money and his health. He died in 1637 and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Jonsons reputation as a dramatist rests on his satirical comedies of the Jacobean period. His first success was Every Man in His Humour (1598), followed by Every Man out of His Humour (1599), Cynthias Revels (1600) and The Poetaster (1601). These plays are satires against the citizens, the courtiers and the poets. Jonsons three greatest plays are Volpone ( 1610), where the full strength of his invention is shown in the kaleidoscopic variety of characters and the perfection of the plots.

Jonson excelled in writing Court masques, forms of dramatic entertainment which involved music and dances. He also left two collections of poems. Although he was opposed to the moralistic and narrow-minded attacks of the Puritans against the theatre, Jonson thought that drama should have a moral function in the same way as Horace, the Latin poet, used to satire against human and social evils. In this sense each one of Jonsons plays is an act of judgment on his own society, of which he exposes the vices and weaknesses. Jonsons two masterpieces, Volpone and The Alchemist, are about the same theme, the greed for gold that motivates human actions; the third one, Epicene, revolves around the figure of a woman who turns out to be a man, and is a taunt against the Puritans moralistic obsession with the theatre. The play does not follow the traditional conventions of comedy. First the villains and not the hero and heroine are the main characters; secondly, at the beginning of the play, they appear to be in harmony, although it is only an appearance based on mutual deceit. The final denouement does not bring happiness but retribution. In spite of the fact that justice is done, the play leaves a horrifying impression of moral chaos. The setting is Venice which was well-known for its mercantile prosperity. Therefore it supplies a good theatrical model to reflect the English society of the time, devoted to the sanctity of gold. Jonson was the founder of the so-called comedy of humours, in which each character is an exaggerated representative of a single human behavior. The characters in Volpone are flat ones: the eponymous character is the embodiment of cunning as Celia is of Christian virtue; Corvino is a compound of greed, stupidity and calculation; Mosca, the parasite, is the personification of evil. Jonsons theory of humours revealed skepticism that human nature could change as a result of experience. EVERY MAN IN HIS HUMOUR Every Man in His Humour is one of Jonson's best-known and most influential plays. Initially staged in 1598 by the Lord Chamberlain's Men (which included William Shakespeare in the cast), the play was first printed in 1601. PLOT The central plot of Every Man in His Humour concerns the adventures of a young, upper-class man, Edward Knowell, who visits the city both to visit his friend, Wellbred, and to seek the hand of Bridget, who is from a lower economic and social class. Edward's father regards the match as illadvised and resolves to follow him to the city to prevent the marriage. Realizing that his father is following him wanting to sabotate his attempts to wed Bridget, Edward solicits the help of his father's clever servant, Brainworm, who assumes several disguises to trick the elder Knowell and foil his pursuit. The characters encounter various eccentrics, such as the soldier Bobadill, the jealous husband Kitely, the country fool Stephen, and the city fool Matthew, all of whom are exemplars for particular personality traits based on the theory of humours. The play closes in the courtroom of the eccentric Justice Clement, where the young couple is wed. Edward's father accepts his son's marriage and the play ends with the classic ritual of the wedding feast. FOCUS ON HUMOURS Every Man in His Humour popularized the comedy of humours. Originally a medical term, humours were the fluids believed to regulate the body and by extension the human temperament. The theory, which can be traced to ancient times, is that there are four distinct bodily fluids: blood, phlegm*, black bile, and yellow bile. An imbalance of these fluids, or humours, causes a personality

disturbance. In Every Man in His Humour Jonson worked these theories into his drama to great effectthe characters in the work show clear evidence of their individual imbalances of humours. Each humours corresponded to one of the traditional four temperaments. a) melancholic (black bile) b) chleric (yellow bile) c) sanguine (blood) d) phlegmatic (phlegm)

THE CIVIL WAR AND THE RESTORATION

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
James I died in 1625 and the throne passed to his son Charles I who shared his fathers conviction that he was king by divine right and that he owed no one explanation for his conduct. During his reign, he ruled the country as an absolute monarch causing great hostility in Parliament. This conflict between King and Parliament resulted in Civil War in 1642. During the conflict, the Catholics, the gentry and the aristocracy in general became Royalists or Cavaliers while the professional and mercantile classes in urban areas sided with Parliament. The Parliamentary army, also called Roundheads (from the fact that they had their hair short because they considered long hair sinful), under the leadership of the Puritan general Oliver Cromwell, broke the Royalists resistance at Naseby in 1645. Cromwell was also the man responsible for the execution of Charles I in 1649. Monarchy was abolished and the English royal family went into exile to the court of Louis XIV in Paris. Cromwell established a sort of republic known as the Commonwealth. However, this was actually little more than a dictatorship, and in 1653 Cromwell made himself Lord Protector; a position he held until his death in 1658. After Cromwells death, his son Richard was unfit to govern the protectorate and in 1660 the monarchy was restored. Charles Is son, came back from exile in France and became King Charles II of England. The new king had a fine mind and successfully manipulated domestic and foreign policies to his advantage. During his reign, English colonization and commerce expanded in India and in the New World where the colonies of New York, New Jersey and Carolina were founded. However, the power of the monarch was in fact replaced by the power of a parliamentary system with most of the power in the hands of the executive prime minister. Two political parties, the Tories and the Whigs, were founded and the English two party system began. The Tories continued the Cavalier sentiment for Church and king and were mainly supported by the landed gentry, while the Whigs continued the Roundhead support for parliament and were mainly supported by the urban middle classes. FOCUS ON: PETITION OF RIGHTS Following disputes between Parliament and King Charles I over the execution of the Thirty Years' War, Parliament refused to grant subsidies to support the war effort, leading to Charles gathering "forced loans" without Parliamentary approval and arbitrarily imprisoning those who refused to pay. In 1628, Parliament presented the famous Petition of Rights, in which the two most important points were: - No taxes should be levied without Parliaments approval; - No one should be imprisoned except on a formal and justifiable charge Initially, Charles refused to give his consent to the Petition, but he was in desperate need of money. Eventually Charles consented to the Petition on 7 June 1628 and in return for his acceptance, he was granted subsidies. Although the petition was of importance as a safeguard of civil liberties, its spirit was soon violated by Charles, who continued to collect duties without Parliament's authorization and to prosecute citizens in an arbitrary manner.

SOCIAL CONTEXT

During the Commonwealth, Cromwell, who was a Puritan squire, enforced a strict moral code. All kinds of innocent recreations as well as drunkenness and licentiousness were suppressed. The London playhouses were closed by Act of Parliament in 1642. When the new king, Charles II, returned, he opened the way to French influences on English culture and way of life. He had spent his long exile at the court of Louis on English culture and way of life. He had spent his long exile at the court of Louis XIV whose luxurious way of life he had become accustomed to. He preferred entertainment to business; he loved hunting, dancing and the theatre. In reaction to the Puritan strictness of the preceding decade under the Commonwealth, English people, and in particular the upper classes, followed the king in a life devoted mainly to amusement and increasingly to moral license. During the reign of Charles II, London was a large town of about 300,000 inhabitants. In 1665 and 166 two catastrophes, the plague and the so-called Great Fire, hit the city. The plague killed about a third of its inhabitants. It affected mainly the poor who lived in the slums and could not afford to leave the city. After the pestilence a terrible fire destroyed most of the oldest section of London which, at this time, was mainly constructed of wood.. This destruction proved to be a blessing in disguise. It razed to the ground the worst slums of the ancient city which was rebuilt in brick and stone. Throughout the century emigrants went to the new world. Some groups of settlers were looking for religious freedom, like the Pilgrim Fathers in 1620. FOCUS ON: THE PURITANS Puritanism was a movement that arose within the church of England in the latter part of the 16th century. The Puritans wanted to carry the reformation of the Church beyond the point represented by the Elizabethan settlement (1559), which had been an attempt to find a compromise between the Roman Catholicism and the ideas of the Protestant reformers. Puritanism covered a wide variety of beliefs. First of all, Puritans rejected any spiritual authority except that of the bible the pure Word of God. Secondly, they questioned the power of official Church authorities and believed that the voice of God spoke in each mans individual conscience and that no intermediary should interfere. Thirdly, they insisted on extreme austerity convinced that images, altars and the ornate vestments worn by priest were just medieval superstitions and should be eliminated. Lastly, in their insistence on the pure truth of religion they began to regard any sort of entertainment, dancing or theater as a vanity which diverted people from spiritual devotion. This last aspect led to the closing of theatres in 1642. The hardworking attitude typical of Puritan mentality was connected to the Calvinist theory of predestination, according to which men and women are born sinners and it is only through hard work and discipline that they can be saved by Gods grace.

CULTURAL CONTEXT
The so-called Authorized Version of the Bible in English appeared in 1611 and was produced with the approval of James I. it is by far the most important translation of the Bible for its literary and social influence. It was familiar to everybody as it was widely used in church and education. Its language soon became part of the cultural heritage of the people. The study of the classics was almost as widespread as Christian learning. Latin was still the language of knowledge.

Many of the thirty thousand pamphlets and books published in this period discussed issues cuch as pacifism, social equality, womens suffrage, land reform, divorce, religion and so on. These writings not only laid the basis for the future implementation of such ideas, but they also created a popular press and a taste for reading. News was conveyed by newsletters printed in London and sent down to subscribers in the country who circulated them among the neighbours. This continued to be the main way of spreading news until after the end of the 17thb century when the first newspapers were published. During the Restoration, scientific enquiry was encouraged and led to a scientific revolution which reached its highest point in Isaac Newtons theory of gravity. Newton (1642-1727) was the most prestigious president of the Royal Society founded in 1662, primarily as a forum of scientific discussion. The English language of the 17th century was under the influence of several strong forces. Religious controversies made the language develop in two directions. On the one hand, preachers who wanted to capture a large audience used a simple, colloquial language with a predominance of Anglo-Saxon vocabulary. On the other hand, the church hierarchy used an elevated style, with Latinate words and elaborate sentences on the model of Latin orators like Cicero. Moreover, the scientific and political revolutions of the century fed a large new vocabulary into the language. The English who emigrated to the colonies of North America borrowed new words both from the Indian natives language and from Spanish, French, Dutch and German settlers; the language developed ascents which were different to the mother tongue. The English of the New World was starting a life of its own. However, there was no conception of a Standard English even in Britain, where several competing dialects existed. Scots was one; it was spoken in the Lowlands of Scotland while Gaelic, a Celtic language, still predominated in the Highlands. In Ireland, Gaelic Irish was the language of the majority of the common people, but Irish English was spreading on the eastern coast of the island. After the Restoration, it was generally felt that the English language had grown too unruly and that it should be given some form of order. JOHN MILTON John Milton was born in London in 1608 of an honest family. In his pamphlet The Second Defence of the People of England, which is largely a defence of himself in answer to a detractor, he tells us about his early schooling. My father destined me from a child to the pursuit of literature; and my appetite for knowledge was so voracious, that, from twelve years of age, I hardly ever left my studies, or went to bad before midnight. This primarily led to my loss of sight. My eyes were naturally weak, and I was subject to frequent Headaches; which, however, could not chill the ardour of my curiosity. After studying at Cambridge he left for a two-year tour of Europe he met Galileo in Florence, visited Rome, Naples and many others Italian towns. The clash in England between King Charles I and Parliament made him cut short his tour. On his return to England, he settles in London and began writing a series of social, religious, and political tracts on which he expressed support for the parliamentary cause in the civil War. Nevertheless he married Mary Powell, the daughter of a Royalist house. The marriage proved a failure, mainly because his wife resented his puritan austerity and his learning. It was probably as a result of this that he wrote four pamphlets in favour of divorce. He became totally blind in about 1652 and thereafter carried on his literary work helped by an assistant. With the Restoration, Milton was punished for his support of parliament by a fine , and lived in seclusion until his death in 1674. His literary career traditionally divides into three periods.

During the first phase (1625-1640) he wrote poetry in Latin and in English: the two companion poems LAllegro and Il Penseroso (1632) about the active life and the contemplative life, and the elegy Lycidas (1637). The second phase (1640-1660) was the period of political pamphlets and of prose treatise. In the third phase (1660-74) Milton produced his major works the epic Paradise Lost was probably composed between 1658 and 1663/65 (dates are uncertain) and published in 1667, first in 10 volumes, then in 1674 in 12 volumes. Its sequel Paradise Regained was published together with the tragedy Samson Agonistes in 1671. PARADISE LOST

Paradise Lost, considered by mainly to be Miltons masterpiece, is one of the most ambitious poems ever written and certainly one of the most difficult. Paradise Lost is an epic poem written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter). Milton had long intended to write an epic to equal the ancient Roman Aeneid by Virgil and the Greek Iliad and Odyssey by Homer. Milton follows Virgils epic construction closely but in the opening exordium he states clearly that he is engaged on a much more difficult enterprise since he is concerned with ultimate truth, and with the ambition of justify[ing] the ways of God to men. Paradise Lost attempts to tell the story of the Fall of Adam and Eve in 12 cantos (or books). In his poem Milton observes epic conventions. - Paradise Lost opens with a statement of the theme and an invocation to the muse for inspiration. - The story begins in medias res - The setting is cosmic, that is, as vast as the universe (it encompasses Heaven, Hell, primordial Chaos, and the planet earth) - Main characters like Satan deliver epic speeches in elevated language and boastful tone. - The style is elevated and dignified The style in which the poem is written has been described as grand, that is, magnificent and elevated: it is highly-coloured, pictorial, figurative and sonorous. Its language is, for example, rich in adjectives, in sensuous images, in allusions to the classical world and references to the bible. The prevailing stylistic influence is Latin both in vocabulary and grammatical construction. Milton Latinized much of his diction, distorted the normal English word order in favour of Latin syntax, and uses complicated sentence structure to achieve the magnificence and the remoteness from everyday language that the subject and the genre required. PLOT God appoints His Son to the seat of honour on His right hand. The archangel Lucifer (meaning light bearer), who desired that position for himself, rallies one tenth of the other angels and starts a tremendous war against God and His followers. God proves superior and defeats him in a terrible war in heaven. Lucifer, whose name is now Satan (meaning enemy), and his supporters are hurled down to Hell, the place of fiery torment that God had prepared for them. Satan vows eternal vengeance and decides to tempt man, Gods latest creature. He flies to the Garden of Eden where, disguised as a snake, he persuades Eve to taste the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Adam joins her in sin to demonstrate his love and solidarity with his human companion. Because of their disobedience they are driven from the Garden into the world where they prepare to affront a mortal life.

FEATURES The question of the hero of Miltons epic has long been a subject of controversy. Critics are still debating whether it is Adam, Christ or Satan. Some critics have reflected on how Miltons treatment of the subject also functions as a political allegory of the English history of the period. The rebellion 0f the angel Lucifer, who is cast out of heaven, partly seems to refer to the rebellion of the Puritans against King Charles I which led to the English Civil War and the establishment of the Commonwealth. FOCUS ON SATAN This is a poem in which Satan leads a revolution against an absolute monarch and in which questions of tyranny, servitude, and liberty are debated in a parliament in Hell. Milton attributes to him the traits of the epic hero great energy and vitality, courage, determination to continue his fight and undertake what the others dare not, leadership and concern for his followers. In Books I and II the reader sympathises with the former Archangel and forgets that he is working towards an evil end. Yet the view of Satan as the hero of Paradise Lost does not seem compatible with the whole structure of the poem which presents his physical and moral degeneration in the form of the serpent and the loss of all his initial dignity and grandeur. Nor is it compatible with the purpose Milton proclaimed in writing the poem to justify the ways of God to men or with the very nature of classical epic. The hero of an epic is meant to represent the virtues of the civilization concerned. FOCUS ADAM AND EVE Miltons Adam and eve are not conventional epic heroes, but neither are they the conventional Adam and Eve. Their state of innocence is not childlike, tranquil, and free of sexual desire. Instead, the first couple enjoy sex, experience tension and passion, make mistakes of judgment, and grow in knowledge. PARADISE REGAINED
Paradise Regained , "is a sequel to 'Paradise Lost', and deals exclusively with the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. According to the poet's conception, whereas Paradise was lost by the yielding of Adam and Eve to Satan's temptation, so it was regained by the resistance of the Son of God to the temptation of the same spirit. Satan is here represented not in the majestic lineaments that we find in 'Paradise Lost', but as a cunning, smooth, and dissembling creature, a 'Spirit unfortunate', as he describes himself.

THE AUGUSTAN AGE

HISTORICAL CONTEXT
The Historical period covered in this section (1688-1775), in particular the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century, was a period of relative stability and prosperity in which Great Britain developed both at a political and an economic level. At a political level it saw a decrease in the power of the monarchy in favour of Parliament. This is the process that led to it. When James II converted and supported Catholicism, he was strongly opposed by Anglicans both in Parliament and among the public at large. However, everybody expected the throne to pass to one of the kings Protestant daughters from his first marriage. The situation changed in 1688, when the kings second wife gave him a son who could certainly perpetuate the Catholic dynasty. The end result was the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688, which removed the king from the throne of English in a bloodless revolution to put an end to the absolute power of the monarch. William of Orange, who has married one of Jamess daughters, Mary, was invited back from Holland, by the Parliament to succeed to the throne, but the new royal couple, before they accepted the crown, had to sign The Bill of Rights which limited the power of the monarchy. These are the main points of the Bill of Rights: -The Crown cannot change the laws nor keep an army without Parliaments consent; - Parliament has the right to levy taxes and control over government finance; - Parliament is freely elected and it enjoys freedom of speech. An addition to the Bill of Rights, in 1701, set the rule that only Protestant heirs could ascend the throne; Catholic heirs were excluded. The powers of Parliament were extended in 1707 when the Scottish Parliament was united to the English one with the Act of Union. When William of Orange died childless in 1702, Marys younger sister Anne became queen. During her reign England was involved in the War of Spanish Succession against France. When she died in 1714, the German Protestant George of Hanover became king, marking the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty. George I was made king in order to prevent a return from Scotland of the exiled Catholic successor of James II. George I was an unpopular king partly because of his attachment to Germany. He spoke no English and left important decisions to his council of ministers. It is in this period that the figure of the Prime Minister came to the fore and the party system began to develop. The two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories, consolidated their position and alternated in government. The first great Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, held office for over 20 years. He based his policy on mercantile expansion and helped to lay the foundations of the British Empire. In this period Britain expanded its possessions in India, North America and the Caribbean, while the sea voyages of Captain Cook prepared the way for the colonization of Australia, New Zealand and islands in the Pacific Ocean. There were, of course, interruptions of the prevailing calm. Britain took part in the European wars of succession at the beginning of the century and again in the 1740s and 1750s. at home it had to face a series of uprisings by the Jacobites. They were the Scottish and Catholic supporters of the male descendants of James II and were so called from the Jacobus, the Latin name for James. These revolts culminated in their final defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. These external and internal struggles, however, did not interfere with the main political development of the country, which saw Britain emerge as a constitutional monarchy with an established Anglican church and an embryonic democratically elected parliament.

THE CULTURAL CONTEXT

From a cultural point of view the period has been defined in various ways - Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Augustan Age, the Neo-Classical Age which all emphasise the predominant trend of the period, that is, the prevalence of reason over feelings. Self-love and selfishness were seen as the driving force in man by the dominant philosophical thinking; only reason could temper this selfish nature and turn man into a social being who could conform to the rules of civilized life. The terms Age of Reason and Age of Enlightenment stress the rational trend of the period which saw remarkable progress in natural science and in the application of scientific method to other areas of life. The discoveries of Newton (1642-1727) explained the universe in logical terms and the religious fervor which had brought about great political upheavals in the previous century diminished. This did not necessarily bring about a rejection of religious faith but a more rational approach to religious matter. Philosophy remained firmly under the control of the empiricism of John Locke (1632-1704). Its greatest 18th century champion, and one of the greatest of all British philosophers, was the Scotsman David Hume. Besides losing its political power in this period, the Court also lost its primacy as a cultural centre. It was replaced by independent literary centers which developed around coffee houses. These became meeting-places for political, cultural and philosophical debates, from which journalism developed. Coffee houses and journals acted as social levelers which encouraged the circulation of ideas and provided models of language and moral values. The Royal Society, which had been founded in 1622 to foster the development of art and science, was another important cultural centre. There scientists met for discussion: their writing was in direct and plain prose and influenced the development of the English language. The growth of the reading public, as a result of the increase in literacy, and the rise of a wealthy class with money to buy books and leisure to read, made publishing a profitable business. Writing became a profession for the first time and patrons slowly began to disappear. Samuel Johnson (1709-84),one of the most influential literary figures of the time, denounced patronage as a form of servitude limiting human freedom. Culture became increasingly identified with the middle class whose tastes and needs the writer tried to meet. The spirit of the age inevitably affected its literature. The predominance of reason and common sense made satire the most popular form both in poetry and prose. It also meant that literature was seen not only as a mean to amuse but also to instruct. The rise of the realistic novel in this period can be seen as an indication of the triumph of rationalism. The earlier part of the 18th century has been called Augustan Age. Several writers of the time used the expression themselves to indicate that they looked upon Virgil, Horace and Ovid, poets who lived in the Rome of Emperor Augustus (27BC AD 14), as models. That is also the reason why the period is sometimes called n eo-classical, to indicate that writers and artists attempted to reproduce the formal perfection of the classics. This meant observing strict rules of meter and rhyme and only using proper poetic diction, that is, a language removed from everyday language and only appropriate for poetry. Poetry was intellectual rather than emotional and aimed at classic perfection of form rather than the expression of feeling. Poets like Pope saw themselves as exponents of human reason, not of human emotion, as later poets did. Although the period favoured classical rules, understanding over fancy, and form over content, subjective, meditative and emotional trends were also present in the art of the period. Towards the end of the century these culminated in what is often labeled as pre-romanticism. Love of nature, interest in folklore, and a tendency to mystery and melancholy, characterize both the poetry of the last part of the this period is notable for the birth and development of a new genre, the novel, which was soon to become one of the most popular forms of literature.

Eighteen-century English was very close to its present form. The literary men of the time Defoe and Swift among them felt that the language needed rules. A dictionary was badly needed. Dr Samuel Johnsons Dictionary is a landmark in the English language. He worked at it or nine years, from 1746 to 1755. He wrote the definitions of more than 40,000 words. DANIEL DEFOE Daniel Defoe was born in London in 1660. English novelist, pamphleteer, and journalist, along with Samuel Richardson, Defoe is considered the founder of the English novel. Defoe wrote for the middle class - merchants, traders, artisans, bankers and professional men the class that was growing in power, prestige and culture and had more and more time to read and whose tastes, interests and values he, a merchant himself and a journalist, knew well. Although his Nonconformist father (Nonconformist were those people who refused to conform to the doctrine of the Church of England) wanted him to become a minister, Defoe worked in trade and politics. In fact in 1683 he started working as a merchant and travelled around Europe and in the meantime also became interested in politics. His most remarkable achievement in journalism was the periodical The Review, which he founded in 1704 and wrote for until 1713. This paper, mainly political in character, was initially published weekly and later three times a week and was a precursor to the modern newspaper. Defoe did not start writing prose fiction until 1719 when, at the age of sixty, he published The Life and Strange Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner, which was based partly on the memoirs of voyages and castaways and which brought him fame. In his remaining years, Defoe concentrated on books rather than pamphlets and in 1722 he published Moll Flanders, the fictional autobiography of a prostitute, as well as A Journal of the Plague Year, an account of the plague which struck London in 1665. His last great work of fiction, Roxana, appeared in 1724. Daniel Defoe died in 1731. PLOT Robinson Crusoe is probably the most famous adventure story in English literature. It tells the story of a man who is shipwrecked off a desert island where he spends the next 28 years before being rescued. The story is divided into three parts. In the first part we are told briefly about Crusoes early life and about how he runs away from home to indulge his desire for sea voyages. A first shipwreck and a period of slavery in Morocco do not put him off. Rescued by a Portuguese ship, he goes to Brazil where he becomes a rich planter. But during a voyage to Guinea (Africa) to buy black slaves for his friends plantations he is shipwrecked on a desert island off the mouth of the Orinoco River where he remains for about 28 years. The second part of the book is in the form of a journal in which Crusoe writes about life on the island; how he uses strength and intelligence to overcome the difficulties of his situation and eventually become master of the island. In this period, with the help of a few things saved from the shipwreck, he succeeds in making a tolerable life for himself. He domesticates some animals and meet one of the cannibals who occasionally land on the island whom he calls Friday and whom resolves to convert to Christianity, teaching him the rudiments of his language and culture, including how to use a gun to hunt animals for food and later to defend themselves from attack. The third and final part of the book tells of their rescue and of Crusoes return to England with Friday as his servant and then of his eventual journey to Brazil. FEATURES

Like Defoes other novels Robinson Crusoe is written in the first-person in the form of an autobiography. As he does with Moll Flanders, Defoe adds a preface which states The editor believes this thing to be a just History of fact; neither is there any appearance of fiction in it. So we are led to believe that this is the story of a real man, and that Defoe is merely the editor. The style of the narrative is very realistic. Crusoes island , actions and adventures are presented with such convincing details that none of his readers regarded the novel as a work of fiction and Defoe never admitted it was. This concern for complete realism, that is, for the accurate and detailed description of reality, was unprecedented in English prose literature. It derived both from Defoes long practice as a journalist and from his Puritanism. As a Puritan he considered all fiction deeply immoral. With realism, which gave his fictional stories the illusion of authenticity, he had fewer problems of conscience. We are given little or no access to Crusoes inner thoughts or feelings, he generally tells us only about his actions and about what physically happens to him. Occasionally he reflects on religious questions. Robinson Crusoes enduring popularity is undoubtedly due to the fact that, like all classics, in the words of Italo Calvino it has never finished saying what it has to say. Here are three of the most common interpretations that have been given to the text. 1 The religious allegory The book has been interpreted as a religious allegory, a Puritan tract about mans redemption from sin. The Puritans had a very uncomplicated view of religion. Their view was that man must save himself from original sin on Earth, regaining the paradise he has lost through his labour and selfreliance. The island on which Crusoe is shipwrecked is at first an island of despair. But gradually, through his virtues of intelligence and hard work he gradually transforms it into a paradise of which he is a master. As a Puritan, Crusoes religious beliefs are very different from those of the Roman Catholic religion. He does not ask God for salvation but relies only upon his own labours. 2 The economic allegory The book also functions as an allegory of merchant capitalism: the mini-civilisation, which Crusoe establishes on the island, is similar to the society from which he comes. After he has arrived on the island he begins to regard it as his property. He builds himself an improvised house with a fence round it. He gathers wealth in the form of stocks of food and supplies. He even gives himself an arduous work routine, although he has no boss. When he meets the savage, Friday, he employs him as a servant. In this sense Crusoe embodies the values of the self-made man. He is like a businessman who, starting from nothing, slowly builds himself an empire. 3 The imperialist allegory More recently Robinson Crusoe has been considered as an allegory of British imperialism because it attempts to demonstrate the white, Christian Crusoes inherent superiority over the savage Friday, who must be civilized and converted to Christianity. Robinson sees it as his right to be lord and master of the island despite the fact that Friday was there before him. His logic follows that of the British government who saw it as their right to conquer and control parts of Africa and later India. The indigenous inhabitants of these countries were generally regarded as savages who had to be civilized. In Robinson Crusoe the savage Friday does not rally have a voice. He only learns to speak when Crusoe teaches him English. JONATHAN SWIFT Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland in 1667 and educated at Trinity College in Dublin. In 1689 he left Ireland to go to England and for the next ten years he served as secretary to Sir William

Temple, a prominent English statesman. In 1694 Swift became an ordained Anglican priest. After being disappointed in love, he decided not to get married. After Sir Williams death in 1699 he moved back to Ireland and in 1704 published (anonymously) his first major satirical work, A Tale of a Tub. Even though born in Ireland and resident there for a large part of his life, Swift always considered himself an Englishman. After a period in which he supported the Whigs, in 1710 he returned to England and became editor of The Examiner, the journal of the ruling Tory party. But with the fall of the Tories in 1714, he accepted a post as Dean of St Patricks Cathedral, Dublin. Around 1713, Swift, along with Alexander Pope, William Congreve and John Gay, formed a group of satirists known as the Scribleurs Club. In 1726he published his masterpiece, Gullivers Travels and in 1729 a Modest Proposal, a grotesque satire on the Irish problems of overpopulation and food shortage and the indifference of the English towards them. In this savagely funny text, Swift suggests that babies make a succulent dish, especially when boiled, and so comes up with a solution both to overpopulation and to starvation. In the last years of his life his health deteriorated severely and he was declared insane. He died in 1745. GULLIVER S TRAVELS Gullivers Travels is divided into four parts: In Part One the hero, ships surgeon Lemuel Gulliver, tells of his shipwreck off the island of Lilliput. The Lilliputians, he discovers, are a tiny people, only six inches high. During his stay on Lilliput he learns about the local customs and culture, and about the countrys political system. He agrees to help the people in their war against another island, Blefuscu, after which he returns to England. In Part Two Gulliver sets off for India but after a series of misadventures finds himself abandoned on the island of Brobdingnag whose inhabitants are all giants. The situation of Part One is reversed, as Gulliver finds himself regarded as something like a living doll for children to play with. He is sold to the queen and has some interesting discussion with the king about the political situation in Europe, before returning once again to England. Part Three sees Gulliver land on the amazing flying island of Laputa with its capital Lagado which is populated by philosophers and scientists, all involved in bizarre and ultimately futile scientific research and speculations. From here he journeys to another two island, Glubbdubdrib and Luggnagg, each with their own absurdities. Part Four finds Gulliver in a land ruled by intelligent horses who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, which is also the name of the island, and who re served by a filthy, bestial, subhuman race called the Yahoos. Again Gulliver spends his time trying to learn the language and ways of the Houyhnhnms, and assimilates them so well that when returns home to his wife and children he finds himself disgusted by their humanness. FEATURES OF THE NOVEL Gullivers Travels has for a long time been considered a childrens classic because of the wonderfully absurd imagination of its images and the simplicity of its prose. Swift declares at the beginning of the novel that style is very plain and simple. We know that he set up the habit of reading large passages aloud to his servants, to make sure that every sentence followed his rigorous standard of simplicity. Gulliver, like Crusoe, is a matter-of-fact man who records the marvels he sees with careful detail. This minute realism contrasts sharply with the improbable situations Gulliver meets on his travels. However, the novels dense mixture of fantasy, political satire, moral fable and playfulness render it a highly complex work and there has been much debate among literary critics ion the centuries after its publication as to what Swifts intentions in writing it actually were. Many have regarded it as a

misanthropic book, a vicious attack on the human race as a whole. The books defenders, on the other hand, say that the book is a satire of mans hypocrisy, vanity and cruelty, his smallmindedness and absurd pretensions. When Gullivers Travels was published anonymously in 1726 it was instantly successful. One report said that ten thousand copies were sold in three weeks, which was remarkable for the time. Immediate translations were made into French and Dutch and weekly journals started printing pirate extracts. INTERPRETATION Although Gullivers Travels is a book which works on many levels, critics have suggested that it has a specific political allegorical dimension. In this light, the four voyages may be read as follows: First Journey The Lilliputians are brave and organized little men, but they are also narrow-minded. Their physical smallness is intended to represent the moral smallness of humanity. In this first book the satire is presented from Gullivers point of view. He looks down on the Lilliputians and sees their pettiness. Second Journey The giants of Brobdingnag represent human vanity and self-love. Gullivers descriptions of their bodies (which to him are enormous) reveal a mixture of fascination for, and disgust and repulsion towards the human body, which may be seen as an obstacle to spiritual growth. But here the diminished Gulliver is identified with the Lilliputians, so in a way Gulliver is able to see how the Lilliputians saw him. This parallel is further emphasized by the Kings response to Gullivers account of England, when he says that the majority of the English appear to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. Third Journey The third book satirizes the emptiness of intellectual thinking which has no connection to reality (the island flies above the ground). This was probably a satirical attack against the members of the Royal Society, including Newton. Fourth Journey The land of the Houyhnhnms where horses rule over a bestial sub-human race is one of the best examples of Swiftian reversal. We are made to see Gulliver from the perspective of the horses whose only experience of the human race is with the savage Yahoos. Gulliver tries to convince them that his own race is not at all like Yahoos, but from the horses point of view, the picture he portrays of the violent and vicious society he comes from merely confirms that, underneath the masquerade of civilization, humans are indeed just like Yahoos only more sophisticated in their barbarism.

A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland From Being a Burden on Their Parents or Country, and for Making Them Beneficial to the Publick, commonly referred to as A Modest Proposal, is a Juvenalian satirical essay written and published anonymously by Jonathan Swift in 1729. Swift suggests that impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. This satirical hyperbole mocks heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as Irish policy in general. Across the country poor children, predominantly Catholics, are living in squalor because their families are too poor to keep them fed and clothed. The author argues, by hard-edged economic reasoning as well as from a self-righteous moral stance, for a way to turn this problem into its own solution. His proposal, in effect, is to fatten up these undernourished children and feed them to Ireland's rich land-owners. Children

of the poor could be sold into a meat market at the age of one, he argues, thus combating overpopulation and unemployment, sparing families the expense of child-bearing while providing them with a little extra income, improving the culinary experience of the wealthy, and contributing to the overall economic wellbeing of the nation. The author offers statistical support for his assertions and gives specific data about the number of children to be sold, their weight and price, and the projected consumption patterns. He suggests some recipes for preparing this delicious new meat, and he feels sure that innovative cooks will be quick to generate more. He also anticipates that the practice of selling and eating children will have positive effects on family morality: husbands will treat their wives with more respect, and parents will value their children in ways hitherto unknown. His conclusion is that the implementation of this project will do more to solve Ireland's complex social, political, and economic problems than any other measure that has been proposed.

I am assured by our merchants that a boy or a girl, before twelve years old, is no saleable commodity, and even when they come to this age, they will not yield above three pounds, or three pounds and half a crown at most on the Exchange, which cannot turn to account either to the parents or to the kingdom, the charge of nutriment and rags having been at least four times that value. I shall now therefore humbly propose my own thoughts, which I hope will not be liable to the least objection. I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled, and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee, or a ragout. I do therefore humbly offer it to public consideration, that of the hundred and twenty thousand children, already computed, twenty thousand may be reserved for breed, whereof only one fourth part to be males, which is more than we allow to sheep, black-cattle, or swine, and my reason is that these children are seldom the fruits of marriage, a circumstance not much regarded by our savages, therefore one male will be sufficient to serve four females. That the remaining hundred thousand may at a year old be offered in sale to the persons of quality and fortune throughout the kingdom, always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump, and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends, and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter. I have reckoned upon a medium, that a child just born will weigh 12 pounds, and in a solar year if tolerably nursed increaseth to 28 pounds. I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children. (extract) Glossary remedy botemiddel burden byrde beneficial av det gode commodity vare

yield innbringe / kaste av seg nutriment mat liable to utsatt for / utsett for computed ansltt savage villmann render gjre/gjere reckon regne/rekne devour fortre