UEPR – Universidade Estadual do Paraná – Campus FAFIPAR English Literature I

Letras Português – Inglês Professor Alessandra Quadros Zamboni

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Universidade Estadual do Paraná – Campus Litoral ENGLISH LITERATURE I SYLLABUS

3rd GRADE – LIBERAL ARTS Professor: Alessandra Quadros Zamboni

2011

1. Ementa: Aspectos históricos da Literatura Inglesa e estudo de obras narrativas, poéticas e dramáticas de seu início até o século XIX, focalizando os principais movimentos, tendências e autores representativos. 2. Metodologia:

Aulas teóricas, exposições orais, seminários e discussões. 3. Avaliação:

- Seminários, assiduidade e participação nas discussões (2,0) - Artigo acadêmico (2,0) - Prova bimestral (6,0)

4. Syllabus:

1. Old, Middle and Modern English Literature 2. Renaissance – Elizabethan Ages

- William Shakespeare: sonnets and drama (Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othelo)

- John Milton (Paradise Lost) 3. Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travells 4. Romanticism: Poetry: 4.1 1st Generation: The Lyrical Ballads (1798)

- William Wordsworth - Samuel Coleridge - William Blake

4.2 2nd Generation: - Lord Byron - Percy Bysshe Shelley - John Keats

5. Nineteenth-Century Novelists: - Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice; Sense and Sensibility. - Mary Shelley: Frankenstein - Charles Dickens: Hard Times, Oliver Twist - The “Brontë Sisters”: Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre; Emily Brontë: Wuthering

Heights; Anne Brontë 6. Reference: BARNARD, Robert. A short history of English Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1984. BLAMIRES, Harry. A short history of English Literature. London: Routledge, 1984. BORGES, Jorge Luis. Curso de literatura inglesa. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2002. BURGESS, Anthony. A literatura inglesa. São Paulo: Ática, 2004. CARTER, R. & McRae J. History of literature in English: Britain & Ireland .

London: Routledge, 1998. FORD, Boris. The Pelican guide to English literature: the modern age.

Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974. FOWLER, Alastair. A history of English Literature. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. HARVEY, Paul. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford, The

clarendon Press, 1967. KETTLE, Arnold. An Introduction to the English Novel. London, Hutchinson Univ.

Library, 1972. MITIDIERI, Aldo. Essential English Literature and Anthology. São Paulo: Campinas,

GEAC, s/d. PRIESTLEY, J. B et al. Adventures in English Literature. Vol 3. New York, Harcourt

Brace & World, Inc., 1963. ROGERS, Pat. An outline of English literature. Oxford: OUP, 1998. SANDERS, Andrew. The short Oxford history of English Literature . New York:

OUP, 2004. THORNLEY, G. C. & GWYNETH, Roberts. An Outline of English Literature .

London: Longman,1984. Demais bibliografia que se fizer pertinente ao longo do curso.

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ENGLISH LITERATURE I

THE BEGINNING OF ENGLISH: OLD ENGLISH

(600 – 1100)

CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS

Literature is as old as human language, and as new as tomorrow’s sunrise. And literature is everywhere, not only in books, but in videos, television, radio, CDs, computers, newspapers, in all the media of communication where a story is told or an image created.

It starts with words, and with speech. The first literature in any culture is oral. The classical Greek epics of Homer, the Asian narratives of Gildamesh and the Bhagavad Gita, the earliest versions of the Bible and the Koran were all communicated orally, and passed on from generation to generation – with variations, additions, omissions and embellishments until they were set down in written form, in versions which have come down to us. In English, the first signs of oral literature tend to have three kinds of subject matter – religian, war, and the trials of daily life – all of which continues as themes of a great deal of writing.

The Old English Language, also called Anglo-Saxon, was the earliest form of English. It is difficult to give exact dates for the rise and development of a language, because it does not change suddenly; but perhaps it is true to say that Old English was spoken from about A.D. 600 to about 1100.

PERSONAL AND RELIGIOUS VOICES The first fragment of literature is known as Caedmon´s Hymn. It

dates from the late seventh century (around 670). The story goes that Caedmon was a lay worker on the state of the monastery of Whitby, in Northumbria, and the voice of God came to him. His hymn is therefore the first song of praise in English culture, and the first Christian religious poem in English, although many Latin hymns were known at the time. It was preserved by the monks of Whitby, and it is not certain whether the few lines which have survived through the ages are the complete hymn or not.

Christian monks and nuns were, in effect, the guardians of culture, as they were virtually the only people who could read and write before the fourteenth century. It is interesting therefore that the most of the native English culture they preserved is not in Latin, the language of the church, but in Old English, the language of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes.

It is the voice of everyday people, rather than of a self-consciuous “artist”, that we hear in Caedmon´s Hymn, and in such texts as Deor´s Lament (also known simply as Deor) or The Seafarer. These reflect ordinary human experience and are told in the first person. They make the reader or hearer relate directly with the narratorial “I”, and frequently contain intertextual references to religious texts. Although they express a faith in God, only Caedmon´s Hymn is an overtly religious piece. Already we can notice one or two conventions creeping in; ways of writing which will be found again and again in later works. One of these is the use of the first-person speaker who narrates his experience, inviting the reader or listener to identify with him and sympathise with his feelings. The frame of reference of these texts is to the Latin exegical commentaries and liturgical texts.

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LANGUAGE NOTE: The Earliest Figurative Language

Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic tropes which enable a writer to describe things indirectly and which require a reader imaginatively to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are what are known as kennings. Kennings often occur in compounds: for example, hronrad (whale-road) or swanrad (swan-road) meaning “the sea”; banhus (bone-house) meaning the “human body”. Some kennings involve borrowing or inventing words; others appear to be chosen to meet the alliterative requiriment of a poetic line, and as a result some kennings are difficult to decode, leading to disputes in critical interpretation. But kennings do allow more abstract concepts to be communicated by using more familiar words: for example, God is often described as moncynnes weard (“guardian of mankind”).

Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for keywords like battle, warrior, horse, ship, the sea, prince, and so on. Some are decorative periphrases: a king can be a “giver of rings” or a “giver of treasure” (literally, a king was expected to provide his warriors with gifts after they had fought for him).

The greatest Old English poem is Beowulf, which belongs to the seventh century. It is a story of about 3,000 lines, and it is the first English epic. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it. The name of its author is unknown.

Beowulf is not about England, but about Hrothgar, King of the Danes, and about a brave young man, Beowulf, from southern Sweden, who goes to help him. Hrothgar is in trouble. His great hall, called Heorot, is visited at night by a terrible creature, Grendel, which lives in a lake and comes to kill and eat Hrothgar´s men. One night Beowulf waits secretly for this thing,

attacks it, and in a fierce fight pulls its arm off. It manages to reach the lake again, but dies there. Then its mother comes to the hall in search of revenge, and the attacks begin again. Beowulf follows her to the bottom of the lake and kills her there.

In later days, Beowulf, now king of his people, has to defend his country against a fire-breathing creature. He kills the animal but is badly wounded in the fight, and dies. The poem ends with a sorrowful description of Beowulf´s funeral fire.

Beowulf (about 1000) stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word “to ken” is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning “to know”. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce.

The old language of Beowulf cannot be read now except by those who have made a special study of it. The language of Beowulf is extremely rich and inventive, full of imposing tones and rhythms: there are a great many near synonyms for “warrior”; many compound adjectives denoting hardness; many images of light, colour, and blood; many superlatives and exaggerations to underline the heroic, legendary aspects of the tale.

Beowulf gives us an interesting picture of life in those old days. It tells us of fierce fights and brave deeds, of the speeches of the leader and the sufferings of his men. It describes their life in the hall, the terrible creatures that they had to fight, and their ships and travels. They had a hard life on land and sea. They did not enjoy it much, but they bore it well.

In the lines of Beowulf, each half-line has two main beats. There is no rhyme. Instead, each half-line is joined to the other by alliteration (middes/maerne; haeleth/hiofend/hlaford; beorge/bael; wigend/weccan/wudu; sweart/swiothle/swogende). Things are described indirectly and in combinations of words. A ship is not a ship:

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it is a sea-goer, a sea-boat, a sea-wood, or a wave-floater. A sailor is a sea-traveller, a seaman, a sea-soldier. Even the sea itself (sae) may be called the waves, or the sea-streams, or the ocean-way. Often several of these words are used at the same time. Therefore, if the poet wants to say that the ship sailed away, he may say that “the ship, the sea-goer, the wave-floater, set out, started its journey and set forth over the sea, over the ocean-streams, over the waves”. This changes a plain statement into something more colourful, but such descriptions take a lot of time, and the action moves slowly. In Old English poetry, descriptions of sad events or cruel situations are commoner and in better writing than those of happiness.

In general it is fairly safe to say that Old English prose came later than Old English verse; but there was some early prose. The oldest Laws were written at the beginning of the seventh century. Some of there are interesting: if you split a man´s ear, you had to pay 30 shillings. These Laws were no literature, and better sentences were written towards the end of the seventh century.

The most interesting piece of prose is the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the main literary source of Anglo-Saxon history, an early history of the country. There are, in fact, several chronicles, belonging to different cities. No doubt King Alfred (849 – 901) had a great influence on his work. He probably brought the different writings into some kind of order. He also translated a number of Latin books into Old English, so that his people could read them. He brought back learning to England and improved the education of his people.

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MIDDLE ENGLISH LITERATURE (1100 – 1485)

The English which was used from about 1100 to about 1500 is called Middle English, and the gratest poet of the time was Geoffrey Chaucer. He is often called the father of English poetry, although, as we know, there were many English poets before him. As we should expect, the language had changed a great deal in the seven hundred years since the time of Beowulf and it is much easier to read Chaucer than to read anything written in Old English. Here are the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales (about 1387), his greatest work:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures swote The droghte of Marche hath perced to the rote When April with his sweet showers has struck to the roots the dryness of March...

There are five main beats in each line, and the reader will notice that rhyme has taken the place of Old English alliteration. Chaucer was a well-educated man who read Latin, and studied French and Italian poetry; but he was not interested only in books. He travelled and made good use of his eyes; and the people whom he describes are just like living people.

The Canterbury Tales total altogether about 17,000 lines – about half of Chaucer´s literary production. A party of pilgrims agrees to pass the time on their journey from London to Canterbury with its great church and the grave of Thomas à Becket. There are more than twenty of these stories, mostly in verse, and in the stories we get to know the pilgrims themselves. Most of them, like the merchant, the lawyer, the cook, the sailor, the ploughman, and

the miller, are ordinary people, but each of them can be recognized as a real person with his or her own character. One of the most enjoyable characters, for example, is the Wife of Bath. By the time she tells her story we know her as a woman of very strong opinions who believes firmly in marriage (she has had five husbands, one after the other) and equally firmly in the need to manage husbands strictly. In her story one of King Arthur´s knights must give within a year the correct answer to the question “What do women love most?” in order to save his life. An ugly old witch knows the answer (“To rule”) and agrees to tell him if he marries her. At last he agrees, and at the marriage she becomes young again and beautiful.

Of Chaucer´s other poems, the most important are probably Troylus and Cyseyde (1372-7?), and The Legend of Good Women (1385). The former of these is about the love of the two young people.

The old alliterative line was still in use in Chaucer´s time, though not by him.

An important Middle English prose work, Le Mort D´Arthur (1470), was written by Sir Thomas Malory. Even for the violent years just before and during the Wars of the Roses, Malory was a violent character. He was several times in prison, and it has been suggested that he wrote at least part of Le Morte D´Arthur there to pass the time.

The stories of Arthur and his knights have attracted many British and other writers. Arthur is a shadowy figure of the past, but probably really lived. Many tales gathered round him and his knights. One of the main subjects was the search for the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. (This cup is known as The Holy Grail.) Another subject was Arthur´s battles against his enemies, including the Romans. Malory´s fine prose can tell a direct story well, but can also express deep feelings in musical sentences.

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Le Mort D´Arthur is, in a way, the climax of a tradition of writing, bringing together myth and history, with an emphasis on chivalry as a kind of moral code of honour. The supernatural and fantastic aspects of the story, as in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, are played down, and the more political aspects, of firm government and virtue, emphasised. It was a book for the times. The Wars of the Roses ended in the same years as Le Mort D´Arthur was published. It values were to influence a wide readership for many years to come. There is sadness, rather than heroism, in Arthur´s final battle.

The first English plays told religious stories and were performed in or near the churches. Many events of religious history were suitable subjects for drama. These early plays, called Miracle or Mystery Plays, are in four main groups, according to the city where they were acted: Chester, Coventry, York and Wakefield.

The subjects of the Miracle plays are various: the disobedience of Adam and Eve; Noah and the great flood; Abraham and Isaac; events in the life of Christ; and so on. They were acted by people of the town on a kind of stage on wheels called a pageant. This was moved to different parts of the towns, so that a play shown in one place could then be shown in another. Often several Miracle Plays were being performed at the same time in different places.

Although the Miracles were serious and religious in intention, English comedy was born in them. There was a natural tendency for the characters in the play to become recognizably human in their behaviour.

Other plays, in some respects not very different from the Miracles, were the Morality Plays. The characters in these were not people (such as Adam and Eve or Noah); they were virtues (such as Truth) or bad qualities (such as Greed or Revenge) which walked and talked. For this reason we find these places duller today, but this does not mean that the original audiences found them dull. The plays presented moral truths in a new and effective way.

Another kind of play, the Interlude, was common in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The origin of this name is uncertain; perhaps the Interludes were played between the acts of long Moralities; perhaps in the middle of meals; or perhaps the name means a play by two or three performers. They are often funny, and were performed away from churches, in colleges or rich men’s houses or gardens.

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THE RENAISSANCE (1485 – 1660)

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND: − Reformation − The conquest of the America by Columbus − Copernicus / Galileo − Humanism − Discoverings (science, mathematics and astronomy) − Shakespeare

CONTEXTS AND CONDITIONS At the end of the 1400, the world changed. Two key dates

can mark the beginning of modern times. In 1485, the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and, following the invention of printing, William Caxton issued the first imaginative book to be published in England – Sir Thomas Malory´s retelling the Arthurian legends as Le Morte D´Arthur. In 1492, Christopher Columbus’ voyage to the Americas opened European eyes to the existence of the New World. New worlds, both geographical and spiritual, are the key to the Renaissance, the “rebirth” of learning and culture, which reached its peak in Italy in the early sixteenth century and in Britain during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, from 1558 to 1603.

After the Reformation, the relationship between man and God, and consequently the place of man in the world, had to be re-examined. This was a world which was expanding. Over the next century or so, Copernicus and Galileo would establish scientifically that the Earth was not the centre of the universe. This expansion was reflected in the mental explorations of the time. The figure of the Dutch philosopher Erasmus also takes on considerable importance here. His humanist thinking had a great influence on generations of writers whose work placed man at the centre of the universe.

It was not by accident that neo-Platonic philosophy, from the great age of classical Greece, became dominant in the Renaissance. Its ideals of the harmony of the universe and the perfectibility of mankind, formulated before the birth of Christianity, opened up the humanist ways of thinking that pervaded much European and English Renaissance writing.

Literature before the Renaissance had frequently offered ideal patterns for living which were dominated by the ethos of the church, but after the Reformation the search for individual expression and meaning took over. Institutions were questioned and re-evaluated, often while being praised at the same time. But where there had been conventional modes of expression, reflecting ideal modes of behaviour – religious, heroic, or social – Renaissance writing explored the geography of the human soul, redefining its relationship with authority, history, science, and the future. This involved experimentation with form and genre, and an enormous variety of linguistic and literary innovations in a short period of time.

The Reformation gave cultural, philosophical, and ideological impetus to English Renaissance writing. The writers in the century following the reformation had to explore and redefine all the concerns of humanity. In a world where old assumptions were no longer valid, where scientific discoveries questioned age-old hypotheses, and where man rather than God was the central interest, it was the writers who reflected and attempted to respond to the disintegration of former certainties. For it is when the universe is out of control that it is as its most frightening – and its most stimulating. There would never again be such an atmosphere of creative tension in the country. What was created was a language, a literature, and a national and international identity.

At the same time there occurred the growth, some historians would say the birth, of modern science, mathematics and astronomy. In the fourth decade of the sixteenth century Copernicus replaced Aristotle’s system with the sun, rather than the Earth, at the centre of the universe. In anatomy, Harvey discovered (1628) the circulation of the blood, building on sixteen-century work in Italy. There was a similar explosion from the start of the seventeenth century in the discovery, development and use of clocks, telescopes, thermometers,

9 compasses, microscopes – all instruments designed to measure and investigate more closely the visible and invisible world.

The writing of the era was the most extensive exploration of human freedom since the classical period. This led English literature to a new religious, social and moral identity which it maintained until the mid-nineteenth century. English became one of the richest and most varied of world literatures, and is still the object of interest and study in places and times distant from its origin. The Reformation and the century of cultural adjustment and conflict which followed are crucial keys in understanding English literature’s many identities.

The literature of the English Renaissance contains some of the greatest names in all world literature: Shakespeare, Marlowe, Webster, and Johnson, among the dramatists; Sidney, Spenser, Donne, and Milton among the poets; Bacon, Nashe, Raleigh, Browne, and Hooker in prose; and, at the centre of them all, the Authorised Version of the Bible, published in 1611.

So many great names and texts are involved because so many questions were under debate: “what is man, what is life for, why is life so short, what is good and bad (and who is to judge), what is a king, what is love...?” These are questions which have been the stuff of literature and of philosophy since the beginning of time, but they were never so actively and thoroughly made a part of everyday discussion as in Elizabethan and Jacobean ages.

RENAISSANCE POETRY Many imitators of Chaucer appeared after his death in 1400,

but few are of great interest. More than a century had to pass before any further important English poetry was written. Queen Elizabeth ruled from 1558 to 1603, but the great Elizabethan literary age is not considered as beginning until 1579.

The direct literary influence on the English Renaissance love sonnet was the Italian Francesco Petrarca – known in English as Petrarch – who wrote sonnets to his ideal woman, Laura. This

idealisation is very much a feature of early Renaissance verse. Classical allusions, Italian Renaissance references, and contemporary concerns make the poetry of the sixteenth century noticeably different in tone and content from the poetry of the early seventeenth century, when Elizabeth was no longer the monarch. There is a universalisation of personal feeling and a concern with praise in the earlier verse. This becomes more directly personal and more anguished as the sixteenth century comes to a close.

Poetry became the pastime of educated high society. It is poetry of love and loss, of solitude and change. The theme is transience, which was to feature strongly in all Shakespeare’s work, began to appear with greater frequency through the 1570s and 1580s.

A number of contrasts, or binaries, begin to emerge; these, from the Renaissance onwards, will be found again and again to express the contrasts, the extremes, and the ambiguities of the modern world:

I find no peace and all my war is done I fear and hope, I burn and freeze like ice; I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise, And naugh I have and all the world I seize on...

(Sir Thomas Wyatt, I find no peace)

Time past and time present will be a constant source of contrast in literature: change, mutability, infidelity, and transience will be found in many texts.

The poet who introduced the Elizabethan age proper was Edmund Spenser. In 1579 he produced The Shepherd’s Calendar, a poem in twelve books, one for each month of the year. Spenser was no doubt making experiments in metre and form, examining his own abilities. The poems take the form of discussions between shepherds, and are therefore pastorals – the best pastorals writen in English up to that time. There are various subjects: praise of Queen Elizabeth, discussions about religion, the sad death of a girl, and so on. The nation welcomed the book; it was expecting a great literary age, and accepted this work as its beginning.

10 In The Faerie Queene (15590 – 1596), Spenser brings

together English myth and topical adulation of the monarch to make a poem praise and critique – the most ambitious single contribution to Elizabethan poetry and the single most important work in the history of English poetry since The Canterbury Tales. Indeed, Chaucer was Spenser´s favourite English poet and, in constructing his “allegory, or darke conceit”, Spenser was acutely alive to the traditions on which he was building. Following Malory, he choose the “hystorye of King Arthure, as most fitte for the excellency of his person”, and it was the imaginative freedom of King Arthur’s adventure’s which provided Spenser with the narrative licence of the poem.

Yet beyond these two Englishmen, Chaucer and Malory, Spencer was looking back to the “antique Poets historicall”, by which he chiefly meant Homer, Virgil and Ariosto. In particular, he modelled much of his poetic career on Virgil´s pastoral. This enabled Spenser in The Faerie Queene to look back to a golden age of pastoral harmony but also to celebrate the court of Elizabeth I, through drawing a parallel with King Arthur´s legendary court. The poem absorbs and reflects a vast range of myth, legend, superstition and magic, and explores both history and contemporary politics.

The Faerie Queene is Elizabeth, seen abstractly as Glory, and appearing in various guises. In a deliberate echo of the Arthurian legends, twelve of the knights undertake a series of adventures. The work is highly symbolic, and allusive, and is inevitably episodic in its effects. “A Gentle Knight”, with a red cross on his breast, is on a quest. He is Saint George, the symbolic saint of England. He had seen Gloriana (The Faerie Queene) in a vision, and would go in search of her.

His adventures in trying to find her would form the poem´s story. The Faerie Queene has an annual twelve-day feast, on each day of which one of her courtiers leaves the court to set right a wrong. Each journey would involve a different virtue and the hero would be involved in each, while still seeking Gloriana. The greatness of the work is not in its thought or in its story. It is

in the magic feeling in the air, the wonderful music of the verse, the beauty of the sound.

Spenser invented a special metre for The Faerie Queene. The verse has nine lines; of these the last has six feet, the others five. The rhyme plan is ababbcbcc. This verse, the “Spenserian Stanza” is justly famous and has often been used since:

Long thus she travelèd through deserts wide, By which she thought her wand´ring knight should pass, Yet never show of living wight espied; Till that attn lenght she found the trodden grass In which the track of people´s footing was, Under the steep foot of the mountain hoar; The same she follows, till attn last she has The damsel spied slow-footing her before, That on her shoulders sad the pot of water bore.

Spenser only completed just over half of the planned twelve books of The Faerie Queene. He married Elizabeth Boyle in 1594 when he was over forty. The joy that he felted I expressed in the marriage hymn Epithalamion (1595–96). It adds of his writings–notably the early The Shepheardes Calender and Epithalamion plows particularly interesting it goes they relation of poetry to team: twelve eclogues representing the twelve months of the year in the former, and the twenty-four stanzas representing the hours of Midsummer’s Day in the latter.

His Prothalamion (1596), written in honour of the double marriage of the daughters of the Earl of Worcester, contains the repeated line, “Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.” Spenser also wrote 88 sonnets which were published in 1595–with the Epithalamion–under the title Amoretti.

The Elizabethan age produced a surprising flow of lyrics. Lyric poetry gives expression to the poet´s own thoughts and feelings, and for this reason we tend to picture the lyric poet as a rather dreamy unpractical person with his thoughts turned inwards. As a description of the Elizabethan lyric poets, nothing could be further from the truth.

11 THE SONNET FORM

Italian Sonnet Form - Petrarch

The original form of the sonnet was the Italian sonnet, developed by the fourteenth-century poet Petrarch. It consisted of an eight line octet (also known as the "Italian octave") and a six line sestet (also known as the "Sicilian sestet"). Each section of an Italian sestet has a specific rhyme scheme and a specific purpose.

The rhyme scheme for the octet is ABBA ABBA, and the purpose of the octet is to present a situation or a problem. The rhyme scheme for the sestet can be either CDECDE or CDCDCD, and the purpose of the sestet is to comment on or resolve the situation or problem posed in the octet. When this (or any sonnet form) is used in English, it is traditionally in iambic pentameter, and, "the tradition is a strong one."

Spenserian Sonnet Form

It is a sonnet variation developed in the sixteenth century by English poet Edmund Spenser. While few poets have used this form, it serves as a bridge between the Italian sonnet and the form used by Shakespeare.

In a Spenserian sonnet, the rhyme scheme used is ABAB BCBC CDCD EE, and there does not appear to be a requirement that the initial octet sets up a problem which the closing sestet answers. Instead, the form is treated as three quatrains (linked by the connected rhyme scheme described above) followed by a couplet. Again, iambic pentameter is used.

English Sonnet Form - Shakespeare

The English Sonnet is a form, which Williams says was "developed by Shakespeare himself to accommodate the Italian sonnet to relatively-rhyme poor English, avoiding the

requirement for triple rhymes in the sestet." The rhetorical pattern of the poem changes slightly… as the… situation or problem presented in the octave is now dealt with tentatively in the next four lines and summarily in the terminal couplet. Some English sonnets… develop through a series of three examples in three quatrains with a conclusion in the couplet. So the content of an English Sonnet is not coupled as closely to the form as it is in the Italian Sonnet.

The rhyme scheme of the English sonnet is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. As noted, Shakespeare has eliminated the close linking, via rhymes, of the individual quatrains, presumably to allow more flexibility in English, which does not provide as many rhyming possibilities as Italian.

One of the interesting elements of Shakespeare's sonnets is the "enjambment" of "phrases" with "sonnet lines." This is done frequently in Shakespeare's plays (which use a great deal of non-rhymed iambic pentameter, a form known as "blank verse"); less frequently in the sonnets. In an "enjambed" line, the textual phrases extend beyond the end of the sonnet lines, and a textual phrase begins or ends in the middle of a line of iambic pentameter.

RENAISSANCE PROSE In prose, the classical influences found in poetry and drama are

reflected in different ways.

Sir Fancis Bacon, who perfected the essay form in English on the French model of Montaigne, used his writing to ask questions and initiate discussion with witty provocation as in The Advancement of Learning. “If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties.”

The range of the interests was vast. No single English intellectual symbolises the idea of Renaissance man more than Bacon. He wrote on aspects of law, science, history, government, politics, ethics, religion and colonialism, as well as gardens, parents, children and health. The key work for appreciating the width of his interests is his Essays, originally published in 1597, and enlarged twice before his death. These meditations, often only a page long, give a remarkable insight into the thought of the period. On occasion this coincides with

12 late twentieth-century sensibilities, as when he advises that negotiation is generally better conducted face to face than by letter; at other times one might not agree with the assumptions on which his judgements are made but within the constrains of the period they are sensibly tolerant – when stablishing a ‘plantation’ or colony, for instance, he suggests treating the ‘savages’ with justice.

THE ELIZABETHAN THEATRE – from the street to a building

By the time Marlowe was writing, a new type of audience had been created for a different kind of theatrical performance. Earlier in the century, the mystery and morality plays had been performed almost anywhere, outside, often moved from location to location by wagon. In contrast, ‘interludes’ – little more than dramatic verse – were performed for the elite at court or in manor houses. In the latter part of Elizabeth’s reign, these two groups came together to form an audience mixed across the classes, professions and trades.

Fixed theatres were established in London and while most, like the Globe, were open to the sky, a small number, such as the later Blackfriars, were completely enclosed. This entailed daytime performances without lights or a stage curtain and very few, if any, props, though the actors were dressed in rich costumes. There were no scene changes in the modern sense and the action moved fluidly from one scene to the next without an apparent break. The platform stage – known as a thrust stage – was pushed out into the audience who stood around it on three sides with a few privileged persons seated on the edge of the stage. This entailed a much closer intimacy between the actors and their audience and made more sense, for instance, of the soliloquy as an aside to the dramatic action. It also required a greater imaginative effort by the audience compared with the modern theatre, but this was perhaps not so difficult for spectators who had previously watched performances on wagons.

Alongside the development of theatres came the growth of an acting culture; in essence it was the birth of the acting

profession. Plays had generally been performed by amateurs – often men from craft guilds. Towards the end of the sixteenth century there developed companies of actors usually under the patronage of a powerful or wealthy individual. These companies offered some protection against the threat of Puritan intervention, censorship, or closure on account of the plague. They encouraged playwrights to write drama which relied on ensemble playing rather than the more static set pieces associated with the classical tradition. They employed boys to play the parts of women and contributed to the development of individual performers. Audiences began to attend the theatre to see favorite actors, such as Richard Burbage or Will Kempe, as much as to see a particular play.

Although the companies brought some stability and professionalism to business of acting – for instance, Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s, subsequently the King’s, Men, continued until the theatres closed (1642) – they offered little security for the playwright. Shakespeare was in this respect, as in others, the exception to the rule that even the best-known and most successful dramatists of the period often remained financially insecure.

In the humanist world following Erasmus, man is at the centre of the universe. Man becomes largely responsible for his own destiny, behaviour and future. This is the new current of thought which finds its manifestation in the writing of the 1590s and the decades which follow. The euphoria of Elizabeth’s global affirmation of authority was undermined in these years by intimations of morality: in 1590 she was 57 years old. No one could tell how much longer her golden age would last; hence, in part, Spenser’s attempts to analyse and encapsulate that glory in an epic of the age. This concern about the death of a monarch who – as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen – was both symbol and totem, underscores the deeper realisation that morality is central to life. After the Reformation, the certainties of heaven and hell were less clear, more debatable, more uncertain.

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WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE (1564 – 1616)

William Shakespeare, byname Bard of Avon, or Swan

of Avon, English playwright and poet, recognized in much of the world as the greatest of all dramatists. Shakespeare's plays communicate a profound knowledge of the wellsprings of human behavior, revealed through portrayals of a wide variety of characters. His use of poetic and dramatic means to create a unified aesthetic effect out of a multiplicity of vocal expressions and actions is recognized as a singular achievement, and his use of poetry within his plays to express the deepest levels of human motivation in individual, social, and universal situations is considered one of the greatest accomplishments in literary history.

Life A complete, authoritative account of Shakespeare's life is

lacking, and thus much supposition surrounds relatively few facts. It is commonly accepted that he was born in 1564, and it is known that he was baptized in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. The third of eight children, he was probably educated at the local grammar school. As the eldest son, Shakespeare ordinarily would have been apprenticed to his father's shop so that he could learn and eventually take over the business, but according to one account he was apprenticed to a butcher because of declines in his father's financial situation. According to another account, he became a schoolmaster. In 1582 Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, the daughter of a farmer. He is supposed to have left Stratford after he was caught poaching in the deer park of Sir Thomas Lucy, a local justice of the peace. Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway had a daughter in 1583 and twins-a boy and a girl-in 1585. The boy did not survive.

Shakespeare apparently arrived in London about 1588 and by 1592 had attained success as an actor and a playwright. Shortly thereafter he secured the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of

Southampton. The publication of Shakespeare's two fashionably erotic narrative poems Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594) and of his Sonnets (published 1609, but circulated previously in manuscript form) established his reputation as a gifted and popular poet of the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century). The Sonnets describe the devotion of a character, often identified as the poet himself, to a young man whose beauty and virtue he praises and to a mysterious and faithless dark lady with whom the poet is infatuated. The ensuing triangular situation, resulting from the attraction of the poet's friend to the dark lady, is treated with passionate intensity and psychological insight. Shakespeare's modern reputation, however, is based primarily on the 38 plays that he apparently wrote, modified, or collaborated on. Although generally popular in his time, these plays were frequently little esteemed by his educated contemporaries, who considered English plays of their own day to be only vulgar entertainment.

Shakespeare's professional life in London was marked by a number of financially advantageous arrangements that permitted him to share in the profits of his acting company, the Chamberlain's Men, later called the King's Men, and its two theaters, the Globe Theater and the Blackfriars. His plays were given special presentation at the courts of Queen Elizabeth I and King James I more frequently than those of any other contemporary dramatist. It is known that he risked losing royal favor only once, in 1599, when his company performed "the play of the deposing and killing of King Richard II" at the request of a group of conspirators against Elizabeth. In the subsequent inquiry, Shakespeare's company was absolved of complicity in the conspiracy.

After about 1608, Shakespeare's dramatic production lessened and it seems that he spent more time in Stratford, where he had established his family in an imposing house called New Place and had become a leading local citizen. He died in 1616, and was buried in the Stratford church.

14 Works

Although the precise date of many of Shakespeare's plays is in doubt, his dramatic career is generally divided into four periods: (1) the period up to 1594, (2) the years from 1594 to 1600, (3) the years from 1600 to 1608, and (4) the period after 1608. Because of the difficulty of dating Shakespeare's plays and the lack of conclusive facts about his writings, these dates are approximate and can be used only as a convenient framework in which to discuss his development. In all periods, the plots of his plays were frequently drawn from chronicles, histories, or earlier fiction, as were the plays of other contemporary dramatists.

First Period Shakespeare's first period was one of experimentation. His

early plays, unlike his more mature work, are characterized to a degree by formal and rather obvious construction and by stylized verse.

Chronicle history plays were a popular genre of the time, and four plays dramatizing the English civil strife of the 15th century are possibly Shakespeare's earliest dramatic works (see England: The Lancastrian and Yorkist Kings). These plays, Henry VI, Parts I, II, and III (1590?-1592?) and Richard III (1593?), deal with evil resulting from weak leadership and from national disunity fostered for selfish ends. The four-play cycle closes with the death of Richard III and the ascent to the throne of Henry VII, the founder of the Tudor dynasty, to which Elizabeth belonged. In style and structure, these plays are related partly to medieval drama and partly to the works of earlier Elizabethan dramatists, especially Christopher Marlowe. Either indirectly (through such dramatists) or directly, the influence of the classical Roman dramatist Seneca is also reflected in the organization of these four plays, especially in the bloodiness of many of their scenes and in their highly colored, bombastic language. The influence of Seneca, exerted by way of the earlier English dramatist Thomas Kyd, is particularly obvious in Titus Andronicus (1594?), a tragedy of righteous revenge for heinous and bloody acts, which are staged in sensational detail.

Shakespeare's comedies of the first period represent a wide range. The Comedy of Errors (1592?), a farce in imitation of classical Roman comedy, depends for its appeal on mistaken identities in two sets of twins involved in romance and war. Farce is not as strongly emphasized in The Taming of the Shrew (1593?), a comedy of character. The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594?) concerns romantic love. Love's Labour's Lost (1594?) satirizes the loves of its main male

characters as well as the fashionable devotion to studious pursuits by which these noblemen had first sought to avoid romantic and worldly ensnarement. The dialogue in which many of the characters voice their pretensions ridicules the artificially ornate, courtly style typified by the works of English novelist and dramatist John Lyly, the court conventions of the time, and perhaps the scientific discussions of Sir Walter Raleigh and his colleagues.

Second Period Shakespeare's second period includes his most important plays concerned

with English history, his so-called joyous comedies, and two of his major tragedies. In this period, his style and approach became highly individualized. The second-period historical plays include Richard II (1595?), Henry IV, Parts I and II (1597?), and Henry V (1598?). They encompass the years immediately before those portrayed in the Henry VI plays. Richard II is a study of a weak, sensitive, self-dramatizing but sympathetic monarch who loses his kingdom to his forceful successor, Henry IV. In the two parts of Henry IV, Henry recognizes his own guilt. His fears for his own son, later Henry V, prove unfounded, as the young prince displays a responsible attitude toward the duties of kingship. In an alternation of masterful comic and serious scenes, the fat knight Falstaff and the rebel Hotspur reveal contrasting excesses between which the prince finds his proper position. The mingling of the tragic and the comic to suggest a broad range of humanity subsequently became one of Shakespeare's favorite devices.

Outstanding among the comedies of the second period is A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), which interweaves several plots involving two pairs of noble lovers, a group of bumbling and unconsciously comic townspeople, and members of the fairy realm, notably Puck, King Oberon, and Queen Titania. Subtle evocation of atmosphere, of the sort that characterizes this play, is also found in the tragicomedy The Merchant of Venice (1596?). In this play, the Renaissance motifs of masculine friendship and romantic love are portrayed in opposition to the bitter inhumanity of a usurer named Shylock, whose own misfortunes are presented so as to arouse understanding and sympathy. The character of the quick-witted, warm, and responsive young woman, exemplified in this play by Portia, reappears in the joyous comedies of the second period.

The witty comedy Much Ado About Nothing (1599?) is marred, in the opinion of some critics, by an insensitive treatment of its female characters. However, Shakespeare's most mature comedies, As You Like It (1599?) and Twelfth Night (1600?), are characterized by lyricism, ambiguity, and beautiful, charming, and strong-minded heroines like Beatrice. In As You Like It, the contrast between the manners of the Elizabethan court and those current in the English countryside is drawn in a rich and varied vein. Shakespeare constructed a complex orchestration between different characters and between appearance and reality and used this

15 pattern to comment on a variety of human foibles. In that respect, As You Like It is similar to Twelfth Night, in which the comical side of love is illustrated by the misadventures of two pairs of romantic lovers and of a number of realistically conceived and clowning characters in the subplot. Another comedy of the second period is The Merry Wives of Windsor (1599?), a farce about middle-class life in which Falstaff reappears as the comic victim.

Two major tragedies, differing considerably in nature, mark the beginning and the end of the second period. Romeo and Juliet (1595?), famous for its poetic treatment of the ecstasy of youthful love, dramatizes the fate of two lovers victimized by the feuds and misunderstandings of their elders and by their own hasty temperaments. Julius Caesar (1599?), on the other hand, is a serious tragedy of political rivalries, but is less intense in style than the tragic dramas that followed it.

Third Period Shakespeare's third period includes his greatest tragedies and

his so-called dark or bitter comedies. The tragedies of this period are considered the most profound of his works. In them he used his poetic idiom as an extremely supple dramatic instrument, capable of recording human thought and the many dimensions of given dramatic situations. Hamlet (1601?), perhaps his most famous play, exceeds by far most other tragedies of revenge in picturing the mingled sordidness and glory of the human condition. Hamlet feels that he is living in a world of horror. Confirmed in this feeling by the murder of his father and the sensuality of his mother, he exhibits tendencies toward both crippling indecision and precipitous action. Interpretation of his motivation and ambivalence continues to be a subject of considerable controversy.

Othello (1604?) portrays the growth of unjustified jealousy in the protagonist, Othello, a Moor serving as a general in the Venetian army. The innocent object of his jealousy is his wife, Desdemona. In this tragedy, Othello's evil lieutenant Iago draws him into mistaken jealousy in order to ruin him. King Lear (1605?), conceived on a more epic scale, deals with the consequences of the irresponsibility and misjudgment of Lear, a ruler of early Britain, and of his councilor, the Duke of Gloucester. The tragic outcome is a result of their giving power to their evil children, rather than to their good children. Lear's daughter Cordelia displays a redeeming love that makes the tragic conclusion a vindication of goodness. This conclusion is reinforced by the portrayal of evil as self-defeating, as exemplified by the fates of Cordelia's sisters

and of Gloucester's opportunistic son. Antony and Cleopatra (1606?) is concerned with a different type of love, namely the middle-aged passion of Roman general Mark Antony for Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Their love is glorified by some of Shakespeare's most sensuous poetry. In Macbeth (1606?), Shakespeare depicts the tragedy of a man who, led on by others and because of a defect in his own nature, succumbs to ambition. In securing the Scottish throne, Macbeth dulls his humanity to the point where he becomes capable of any amoral act.

Unlike these tragedies, three other plays of this period suggest a bitterness stemming from the protagonists' apparent lack of greatness or tragic stature. In Troilus and Cressida (1602?), the most intellectually contrived of Shakespeare's plays, the gulf between the ideal and the real, both individual and political, is skillfully evoked. In Coriolanus (1608?), another tragedy set in antiquity, the legendary Roman hero Gnaeus Marcius Coriolanus is portrayed as unable to bring himself either to woo the Roman masses or to crush them by force. Timon of Athens (1608?) is a similarly bitter play about a character reduced to misanthropy by the ingratitude of his sycophants. Because of the uneven quality of the writing, this tragedy is considered a collaboration, quite possibly with English dramatist Thomas Middleton.

The two comedies of this period are also dark in mood and are sometimes called problem plays because they do not fit into clear categories or present easy resolution. All's Well That Ends Well (1602?) and Measure for Measure (1604?) both question accepted patterns of morality without offering solutions.

Fourth Period

The fourth period of Shakespeare's work includes his principal romantic tragicomedies. Toward the end of his career, Shakespeare created several plays that, through the intervention of magic, art, compassion, or grace, often suggest redemptive hope for the human condition. These plays are written with a grave quality differing considerably from Shakespeare's earlier comedies, but they end happily with reunions or final reconciliations. The tragicomedies depend for part of their appeal upon the lure of a distant time or place, and all seem more obviously symbolic than most of Shakespeare's earlier works. To many critics, the tragicomedies signify a final ripeness in Shakespeare's own outlook, but other authorities believe that the change reflects only a change in fashion in the drama of the period.

The romantic tragicomedy Pericles, Prince of Tyre (1608?) concerns the painful loss of the title character's wife and the persecution of his daughter. After many exotic adventures, Pericles is reunited with his loved ones.In Cymbeline (1610?) and The Winter's Tale (1610?), characters suffer great loss and pain but are reunited. Perhaps the most successful product of this particular vein of creativity, however, is what may be Shakespeare's last complete play, The Tempest (1611?), in which the resolution suggests the beneficial effects of the union of wisdom and

16 power. In this play a duke, deprived of his dukedom and banished to an island, confounds his usurping brother by employing magical powers and furthering a love match between his daughter and the usurper's son. Shakespeare's poetic power reached great heights in this beautiful, lyrical play.

Two final plays, sometimes ascribed to Shakespeare, presumably are the products of collaboration. A historical drama, Henry VIII (1613?) was probably written with English dramatist John Fletcher (see Beaumont and Fletcher), as was The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613?; published 1634), a story of the love of two friends for one woman.

Shakespeare's reading With a few exceptions, Shakespeare did not invent the plots of

his plays. Sometimes he used old stories (Hamlet, Pericles). Sometimes he worked from the stories of comparatively recent Italian writers, such as Boccaccio--using both well-known stories (Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing) and little-known ones (Othello). He used the popular prose fictions of his contemporaries in As You Like It and The Winter's Tale. In writing his historical plays, he drew largely from Plutarch's Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans for the Roman plays and the chronicles of Edward Hall and Ralph Holinshed for the plays based upon English history. Some plays deal with rather remote and legendary history (King Lear, Cymbeline, Macbeth)--though it seemed more genuinely historical to Shakespeare's contemporaries than it does today. Earlier dramatists had occasionally used the same material (there were, for example, earlier plays called The Famous Victories of Henry the fifth and King Leir). But, because many plays of Shakespeare's time have been lost, it is impossible to be sure of the relation between an earlier, lost play and Shakespeare's surviving one: in the case of Hamlet it has been plausibly argued that an "old play," known to have existed, was merely an early version of Shakespeare's own.

Shakespeare was probably too busy for prolonged study. He had to read what books he could, when he needed them. His enormous vocabulary could only be derived from a mind of great celerity, responding to the literary as well as the spoken language. It is not known what libraries were available to him. The Huguenot family of Mountjoys, with whom he lodged in London, presumably possessed French books. There was, moreover, a very interesting connection between Shakespeare and the book trade. For there survives the record of apprenticeship of one Richard Field, who published Shakespeare's two poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, describing

him as the "son of Henry Field of Stratford-upon-Avon in the County of Warwick, tanner." When Henry Field the tanner died in 1592, John Shakespeare the glover was one of the three appointed to value his goods and chattels. Field's son, bound apprentice in 1579, was probably about the same age as Shakespeare. From 1587 he steadily established himself as a printer of serious literature--notably of Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch (1595, reprinted in 1603 and 1610). There is no direct evidence of any close friendship between Field and Shakespeare. But it cannot escape notice that one of the important printer-publishers in London at the time was an exact contemporary of Shakespeare at Stratford, that he can hardly have been other than a schoolfellow, that he was the son of a close associate of John Shakespeare, and that he published Shakespeare's first poems. Clearly, a considerable number of literary contacts were available to Shakespeare, and many books were accessible.

That Shakespeare's plays had "sources" was already apparent in his own time. An interesting contemporary description of a performance is to be found in the diary of a young lawyer of the Middle Temple, John Manningham, who kept a record of his experiences in 1602 and 1603. On February 2, 1602, he wrote:

At our feast we had a play called Twelfth Night, or What You Will, much like The Comedy of Errors, or Menaechmi in Plautus, but most like and near to that in Italian called Inganni. . . .

The first collection of information about sources of Elizabethan plays was published in the 17th century--Gerard Langbaine's Account of the English Dramatick Poets (1691) briefly indicated where Shakespeare found materials for some plays. But, during the course of the 17th century, it came to be felt that Shakespeare was an outstandingly "natural" writer, whose intellectual background was of comparatively little significance: "he was naturally learn'd; he needed not the spectacles of books to read nature," said John Dryden in 1668. It was nevertheless obvious that the intellectual quality of Shakespeare's writings was high and revealed a remarkably perceptive mind. The Roman plays, in particular, gave evidence of careful reconstruction of the ancient world.

The first collection of source materials, arranged so that they could be read and closely compared with Shakespeare's plays, was made by Mrs. Charlotte Lennox in the 18th century. More complete collections appeared later, notably those of John Payne Collier (Shakespeare's Library, 1843; revised by W. Carew Hazlitt, 1875). These earlier collections have been superseded by one edited by Geoffrey Bullough as Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (7 vol., 1957-72).

It has become steadily more possible to see what was original in Shakespeare's dramatic art. He achieved compression and economy by the exclusion of undramatic material. He developed characters from brief suggestions in his source (Mercutio, Touchstone, Falstaff, Pandarus), and he developed entirely new characters (the Dromio brothers, Beatrice and Benedick, Sir Toby Belch, Malvolio,

17 Paulina, Roderigo, Lear's fool). He rearranged the plot with a view to more effective contrasts of character, climaxes, and conclusions (Macbeth, Othello, The Winter's Tale, As You Like It). A wider philosophical outlook was introduced (Hamlet, Coriolanus, All's Well That Ends Well, Troilus and Cressida). And everywhere an intensification of the dialogue and an altogether higher level of imaginative writing together transformed the older work.

But, quite apart from evidence of the sources of his plays, it is not difficult to get a fair impression of Shakespeare as a reader, feeding his own imagination by a moderate acquaintance with the literary achievements of other men and of other ages. He quotes his contemporary Christopher Marlowe in As You Like It. He casually refers to the Aethiopica ("Ethiopian History") of Heliodorus (which had been translated by Thomas Underdown in 1569) in Twelfth Night. He read the translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses by Arthur Golding, which went through seven editions between 1567 and 1612. Chapman's vigorous translation of Homer's Iliad impressed him, though he used some of the material rather sardonically in Troilus and Cressida. He derived the ironical account of an ideal republic in The Tempest from one of Montaigne's essays. He read (in part, at least) Samuel Harsnett's Declaration of egregious popish impostors and remembered lively passages from it when he was writing King Lear. The beginning lines of one sonnet (106) indicate that he had read Edmund Spenser's poem The Faerie Queene or comparable romantic literature.

He was acutely aware of the varieties of poetic style that characterized the work of other authors. A brilliant little poem he composed for Prince Hamlet (Act II, scene 2, line 115) shows how ironically he perceived the qualities of poetry in the last years of the 16th century, when poets such as John Donne were writing love poems uniting astronomical and cosmogenic imagery with skepticism and moral paradoxes. The eight-syllable lines in an archaic mode written for the 14th-century poet John Gower in Pericles show his reading of that poet's Confessio amantis. The influence of the great figure of Sir Philip Sidney, whose Arcadia was first printed in 1590 and was widely read for generations, is frequently felt in Shakespeare's writings. Finally, the importance of the Bible for Shakespeare's style and range of allusion is not to be underestimated. His works show a pervasive familiarity with the passages appointed to be read in church on each Sunday throughout the year, and a large number of allusions to passages in Ecclesiasticus (Wisdom of Jesus the Son of Sirach) indicates a personal interest in one of the uncanonical books.

Understanding Shakespeare Sympathetic exploration of the texts

On opening the works of Shakespeare, a reader can be held by a few lines of verse or a sentence or one complex, glittering, or telling word. Indeed, Shakespeare's supreme mastery of words and images, of sound, rhythm, metre, and texture, as well as the point, neatness, and lyricism of his lines, has enslaved countless people.

The next step in understanding, for most readers, is an appreciation of individual characters. Many of the early books on Shakespeare were about his "characters," and controversy about them still continues. Appreciation of the argument of the plays usually comes on insensibly, for Shakespeare is not a didactic playwright. But most persistent readers gain an increasing sense of a unity of inspiration, of an alert moral judgment and idealistic vision, both in the individual plays and in the works as a whole.

When the plays are seen in performance, they are further revealed in a new, three-dimensional, flesh and blood reality, which can grow in the minds of individual playgoers and readers as they become more experienced in response to the plays' many suggestions.

But, while various skills and learned guidance are needed for a developed understanding of Shakespeare, the directness of his appeal remains--the editors of the First Folio commended the plays to everyone "how odd soever your brains be, or your wisdoms." Perhaps most essentially, the plays will continually yield their secrets only to imaginative exploration.

William Shakespeare's World Most of Shakespeare's career unfolded during the monarchy of Elizabeth I,

the Great Virgin Queen from whom the historical period of the Bard's life takes its name as the Elizabethan Age. Elizabeth came to the throne under turbulent circumstances in 1558 (before Shakespeare was born) and ruled until 1603. Under her reign, not only did England prosper as a rising commercial power at the expense of Catholic Spain, Shakespeare's homeland undertook an enormous expansion into the New World and laid the foundations of what would become the British Empire. This ascendance came in the wake of the Renaissance and the Reformation, the former regaining Greek and Roman classics and stimulating an outburst of creative endeavor throughout Europe, the latter transforming England into a Protestant/Anglican state, and generating continuing religious strife, especially during the civil wars of Elizabeth's Catholic sister, Queen Margaret or "Bloody Mary."

The Elizabethan Age, then, was an Age of Discovery, of the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and the exploration of human nature itself. The basic

18 assumptions underpinning feudalism/Scholasticism were openly challenged with the support of Elizabeth and, equally so, by her successor on the throne, James I. There was in all this an optimism about humanity and its future and an even greater optimism about the destiny of England in the world at large. Nevertheless, the Elizabethans also recognized that the course of history is problematic, that Fortune can undo even the greatest and most promising, as Shakespeare reveals in such plays as Antony & Cleopatra. More specifically, Shakespeare and his audiences were keenly aware of the prior century's prolonged bloodshed during the War of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York. Many Elizabethans, particularly the prosperous, feared the prospect of civil insurrection and the destruction of the commonwealth, whether as a result of an uprising from below or of usurpation at the top. Thus, whether or not we consider Shakespeare to have been a political conservative, his histories, tragedies and even his romances and comedies are slanted toward the restoration or maintenance of civil harmony and the status quo of legitimate rule.

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Shakespeare’s Works

Comedy (18) History (10) Tragedy (10) Poetry

• All's Well That Ends Well • As You Like It • The Comedy of Errors • Cymbeline • Love's Labours Lost • Measure for Measure • The Merry Wives of Windsor • The Merchant of Venice • A Midsummer Night's Dream • Much Ado About Nothing • Pericles, Prince of Tyre • Taming of the Shrew • The Tempest • The Two Noble Kinsmen • Troilus and Cressida • Twelfth Night • Two Gentlemen of Verona • Winter's Tale

• Henry IV, part 1 • Henry IV, part 2 • Henry V • Henry VI, part 1 • Henry VI, part 2 • Henry VI, part 3 • Henry VIII • King John • Richard II • Richard III

• Antony and Cleopatra • Coriolanus • Hamlet • Julius Caesar • King Lear • Macbeth • Othello • Romeo and Juliet • Timon of Athens • Titus Andronicus

• The Sonnets (154) • A Lover's Complaint • The Rape of Lucrece • Venus and Adonis • Funeral Elegy by W.S.

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The Sonnets

XVIII.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimm'd; And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd; But thy eternal summer shall not fade Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest; Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou growest: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this and this gives life to thee.

CXVI. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star t of every wandering bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

XXIX.

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries And look upon myself and curse my fate, Wishing me like to one more rich in hope, Featured like him, like him with friends possess'd, Desiring this man's art and that man's scope, With what I most enjoy contented least; Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising, Haply I think on thee, and then my state, Like to the lark at break of day arising From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate; For thy sweet love remember'd such wealth brings That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

CXXX.

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red; If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damask'd, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound; I grant I never saw a goddess go; My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare As any she belied with false compare.

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Hamlet, Prince of Denmark

Keneth Branagh in Hamlet, 1996.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, has multiple woes. The ghost of his father haunts Elsinore; his uncle, Claudius, has married Queen Gertrude, his mother, and assumed the throne; and Fortinbras of Norway threatens Denmark with an invading army. When Hamlet meets the ghost, his dead father reveals that Claudius poisoned him—and the ghost demands that Hamlet exact revenge. In order to carry this out, Hamlet feigns madness; as part of his insanity, he scorns the affections of Ophelia, daughter of Polonius, to whom he had made romantic overtures. Polonius grows concerned over the apparent insanity that has beset Hamlet and reveals it to the King and Queen. Meanwhile, Hamlet struggles to convince himself that Claudius is the murderer of his father, and in an attempt to "catch the king's conscience," Hamlet convinces a traveling troupe of actors to perform a play in which the

action closely resembles the events related to him by the ghost.

While Hamlet, judging the reaction of Claudius, is convinced of the new king's guilt, he can't bring himself to slay him outright. Instead, Hamlet rebukes Gertrude with the news that she is sleeping with the killer of her husband. Unfortunately, Polonius—who is hidden behind a tapestry in the Queen's chamber, eavesdropping—panics and cries for help; Hamlet stabs him, thinking it is Claudius. Of course, when this news is given to Claudius, the King sends Hamlet to England with the ostensible purpose of securing Hamlet's safety and the recovery of his senses. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, two childhood friends of Hamlet's who are now little more than spies for Claudius, are to accompany him. The trick is that Hamlet will bear a letter to the King of England in which Claudius asks England to sentence Hamlet to death.

In the midst of these events, Ophelia loses her own sanity; she is driven to madness by Hamlet's condition and the death of Polonius. Laertes, her brother, returns to Elsinore from his studies and vows his vengeance upon Hamlet for what the prince has done to his family. News is brought that Hamlet has returned to Denmark, much to the surprise of Claudius, and that Ophelia has drowned herself in a river. Claudius now plots with Laertes to kill Hamlet upon his return to Elsinore. Meanwhile, Hamlet meets Horatio, his best friend, and tells how he altered the letter so that the execution order was for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern instead of him. At the end of Hamlet's tale, Ophelia's funeral procession enters, and Laertes and Hamlet confront one another. Laertes challenges Hamlet to a duel.

This is all part of Claudius's plot; instead of dull blades, Laertes will select a sharp one. In addition, Laertes is to poison the tip of his blade so that a wound will kill the prince. And, just in case the previous measures are not enough, Claudius will keep a poisoned chalice from which Hamlet will drink. The plan goes awry from the beginning; Laertes is unable to wound Hamlet during the first pass. Between rounds, Gertrude raises a toast to Hamlet with the poisoned chalice. Then, in the

22 heat of the duel, Laertes manages to wound Hamlet but loses the poisoned rapier to him, and Laertes himself is poisoned as well. Gertrude swoons to her death; Laertes falls and reveals the plot against Hamlet, telling him he has "not a half-hour's life" in him. Enraged, Hamlet stabs Claudius with the poisoned foil, then makes him drink from the chalice that slew Gertrude. This done, Hamlet collapses and dies in Horatio's arms as Fortinbras enters the castle. Fortinbras is left to rule Denmark, as the entire royal family is dead, and he bids his men give Hamlet and the rest a proper funeral.

23

Hamlet’s Famous Soliloquies

ACT I SCENE II. A room of state in the castle.

HAMLET

O, that this too too solid flesh would melt Thaw and resolve itself into a dew! Or that the Everlasting had not fix'd His canon 'gainst self-slaughter! O God! God! How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable, Seem to me all the uses of this world! Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely. That it should come to this! But two months dead: nay, not so much, not two: So excellent a king; that was, to this, Hyperion to a satyr; so loving to my mother That he might not beteem the winds of heaven Visit her face too roughly. Heaven and earth! Must I remember? why, she would hang on him, As if increase of appetite had grown By what it fed on: and yet, within a month-- Let me not think on't--Frailty, thy name is woman!-- A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow'd my poor father's body, Like Niobe, all tears:--why she, even she-- O, God! a beast, that wants discourse of reason, Would have mourn'd longer--married with my uncle, My father's brother, but no more like my father Than I to Hercules: within a month: Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married. O, most wicked speed, to post With such dexterity to incestuous sheets! It is not nor it cannot come to good: But break, my heart; for I must hold my tongue.

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ACT II SCENE II. A room in the castle.

HAMLET

Now I am alone. O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I! Is it not monstrous that this player here, But in a fiction, in a dream of passion, Could force his soul so to his own conceit That from her working all his visage wann'd, Tears in his eyes, distraction in's aspect, A broken voice, and his whole function suiting With forms to his conceit? and all for nothing! For Hecuba! What's Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, That he should weep for her? What would he do, Had he the motive and the cue for passion That I have? He would drown the stage with tears And cleave the general ear with horrid speech, Make mad the guilty and appal the free, Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed The very faculties of eyes and ears. Yet I, A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak, Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause, And can say nothing; no, not for a king, Upon whose property and most dear life A damn'd defeat was made. Am I a coward? Who calls me villain? breaks my pate across? Plucks off my beard, and blows it in my face? Tweaks me by the nose? gives me the lie i' the throat, As deep as to the lungs? who does me this? Ha! 'Swounds, I should take it: for it cannot be But I am pigeon-liver'd and lack gall To make oppression bitter, or ere this I should have fatted all the region kites With this slave's offal: bloody, bawdy villain!

24 Remorseless, treacherous, lecherous, kindless villain! O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a whore, unpack my heart with words, And fall a-cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Fie upon't! foh! About, my brain! I have heard That guilty creatures sitting at a play Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, will speak With most miraculous organ. I'll have these players Play something like the murder of my father Before mine uncle: I'll observe his looks; I'll tent him to the quick: if he but blench, I know my course. The spirit that I have seen May be the devil: and the devil hath power To assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses me to damn me: I'll have grounds More relative than this: the play 's the thing Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king. Exit

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ACT III

SCENE I. A room in the castle. HAMLET

To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there's the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law's delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover'd country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought, And enterprises of great pith and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.--Soft you now! The fair Ophelia! Nymph, in thy orisons Be all my sins remember'd.

25 ACT IV

SCENE IV. A room in the castle.

HAMLET How all occasions do inform against me, And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, If his chief good and market of his time Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, Looking before and after, gave us not That capability and god-like reason To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple Of thinking too precisely on the event, A thought which, quarter'd, hath but one part wisdom And ever three parts coward, I do not know Why yet I live to say 'This thing's to do;' Sith I have cause and will and strength and means To do't. Examples gross as earth exhort me: Witness this army of such mass and charge Led by a delicate and tender prince, Whose spirit with divine ambition puff'd Makes mouths at the invisible event, Exposing what is mortal and unsure To all that fortune, death and danger dare, Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great Is not to stir without great argument, But greatly to find quarrel in a straw When honour's at the stake. How stand I then, That have a father kill'd, a mother stain'd, Excitements of my reason and my blood, And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see The imminent death of twenty thousand men, That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, Which is not tomb enough and continent To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!