Letteratura inglese 1

Letteratura inglese The Old English The early history of Britain and its people, like that of many other countries, is marked by a repeated pattern of invasion, conquest and settlement. The struggle for power, based largely upon wealth and military strength, was constant, resulting in conflicting loyalties, internal divisions, and widespread political instability. The term “Old English” was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. “Old English” implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the sixth century and the England of nineteenth century. The Germanic people known as the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes, who had successfully invaded the former Roman colony of Britain in the fifth and sixth centuries. The Celts first appeared in Britain around the year 700 BC. Originating from the north-west of Germany, they bought with them an already sophisticated culture. Celtic priests were Druids and were considered living archives of tribal law, history, science, medicine and religion. Druids filled the roles of judge, doctor, diviner, mystic and scholar. The Celts were originally a pagan culture who worshipped the elements: the sun and the moon, well, rivers, trees, stones, were believed to have “souls”. The most famous surviving circle is Stonehenge a group of enormous blue stones placed in concentric circle. The construction of Stonehenge took close to 2000 years. The Celts weren’t a united people. They had no real sense of themselves as a nation, and feuds both between and within different tribes were common. The Roman conquest of Britain began in the year 55 BC with the invasion of Julius Caesar. Britain wasn’t occupied by the Romans until much later under the reign of Emperor Claudius. The Romans introduced a literate culture into Britain for the first time in its history. The Latin language and civilisation became part of the structure of British society. They built roads, fortifications, baths, amphitheatres and towns where they settled and which they administrated the rural Celtic population. The Roman advance was halted just south of what is now the border between England and Scotland. The Caledonians, as the Romans called the fierce inhabitants of Scotland, refused to be colonised and eventually Emperor Hadrian decided to build a wall to keep the northen raiders out of roman Britain. Hadrian was one of the few Roman emperors to renounce the policy of unlimited imperial expansion. It’s possible to walk along the ruins of Hadrian’s Wall. The Roman of Britain had also driven the Chistianized Celtic inhabitants of Britain westwards to the confines of Wales and Cornwall and northwards into the Highlands of Scotland. The radical success of their colonization is evident in the new place-names that they imposed on their areas of settlement. The fate of the old Celtic inhabitants who were not able to remove themselves is announced in the English word Wealth, a word once applied both to a native Briton and to a slave (foreign). The old Roman order had utterly disintegrated under pressure from the new invaders, though stories of determined Celtic resistance to the Saxons in the sixth century. In Ad 410, barbarian raiders from northern Germany. After the departure of the Roman legions, the Romanised Britons were forced to employ Saxon mercenaries to defend their shores. These mercenaries refused to leave the country. The way was opened for another full-scale colonisation by the Anglo-Saxon invaders who soon took control of much of eastern Britain. The Britons continued to resist the Saxon invaders but suffered from internal divisions and had to defend from attacks by the Picts and the Irish as well as the Saxon. It was around the time of the Saxon invasions in the 5th century that the legend of King Arthur and the Knights. By the end of 6th century, the Anglo-Saxons had established seven recognisable kingdoms on Britain’s shores. Of these three: Kent, Sussex and Essex, are remembered in the names of the modern English countries. The fourth kingdom, that of the East Angles, lay in the extreme east of Britain. The other two Angle kingdoms were those of Northumbria and Mercia. The Wessex, was the kingdom of west. 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 Benedictines sent from Rome in AD 596 by Pope Gregory the Great. This mission led by Augustine, the first Archbishop of Canterbury, was important for the future of English culture. The Anglo-Saxon kings became literate and began to administer their kingdoms not through force but through rule ad law. The conversion of the kings, who used religious legitimacy to add to their power and prestige, was insufficient foundation for Christianity to establish itself more widely. In the 7th and 8th centuries and monasteries were built. Monasteries became centres of learning and depositaries of culture where the monks studied and copied out book by hand. One of the most important monk scholars of this period was the Venerable Bede, a native of the kingdom of Northumbria. According to Bede, Augustine’s mission to England was reinforced, four years after his arrival, by new clergy from Rome. The written word was of crucial importance to the Church, for its services depended upon the reading of the Holy Scriptures, on sermons, and on meditations. This emphasis on the written and read word must have been a considerable novelty to the generally unlettered new converts. The old runic alphabet of the Germanic tribes, which seems to have been used largely for inscriptions, was gradually replaced by Roman letters. Bede wrote his great Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum. For this reason he has been called “father of English history” and his work is the main source of information we have of the Anglo-Saxon period. Bede’s main theme s the spread of Christianity and the growth of the English church. Bede tells how Caedmon miraculously received the gift song, entered in monastery, and became the founder of a school of Christian poetry. Although Bede tells us that Caedmon had never learned the art of song, we may suspect that he concealed his skill from his fellow workmen and from the monks because he was ashamed of knowing “vain and idle” songs. After him others tied to compose religious poetry, but no one could equal him because he gift through heavenly grace. But the legend of Caedmon is very interesting. He dreamt this song, and when he woke up, he remembered everything that he had sung in his sleep, and to this he soon added, in the same poetic measure, more verses praising God. It was evident to all of them that he had been granted the heavenly grace of God. THE DREAM OF THE ROOD The dream of the Rood is considered the finest of a large number of religious poems in Anglo-Saxon. It is inscribed in runic letters in Ruthwell Cross. The experience of the Rood, often called “tree” in the poem has a suggestive relevance to the condition of the Dreamer. His isolation and melancholy is typical of exile figures in Anglo-Saxon poetry. The Dreamer’s description of Christ’s entry into heaven with his souls he has liberated from Hades reflects the Dreamer’s response to the hope that has been brought to him. Christ and the Rood both act in keeping with a code of heroic action: Christ is both heroic in mounting ad passive in suffering on the Rood. The first of the Germanic lands to have been brought into the sphere of the Western Church, Latin never seems to have precluded the survival and the development of a vigorous, vernacular literary tradition. Soon after their establishing their kingdom in England, the Anglo-Saxon had to defend themselves from a new invasion. The Vikings were excellent navigators. Under the Vikings occupation many of the monasteries built in the previous centuries were destroyed. This is one of the reasons why there are so few surviving historical documents form this period in English history.It was the result of the Vikings incursions that the Anglo-Saxon were forced to regroup their forces in Wessex, under the leadership of King Alfred the Great (849-99). Thanks to him the lands that the Vikings had occupied, were reconquered by Alfred the Great. He was the first king to unite England under one crown. Alfred, King of Wessex encouraged the culture. Under his reign, was wrote the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which today is considered one of the most important documents of the early medieval English. Edward the Confessor and Harold II, were the last two Anglo-Saxon kings. The language used in this period is now called Old English. This was a mixture of the languages spoken by the three Germanic tribes that invaded Britain in the 5th century, the Jutes, the Angles and Saxons. The literature of the Anglo-Saxons was first communicated orally. This meant that in its passage from generation to generation a poem or tale could change considerably, undergoing a number of variations, additions, omissions and embellishments. The poet or scop had a special role. Part historian, part priest he knew all the stories and legends of the clan, or eynn, stories passed down to him by a predecessors. He was the keeper of a rich poetic vocabulary of descriptive phases and formulae known as the word-hoard which he combined in different ways to compose lay, a public poetic composition, which he would accompany on stringed instrument. He had to improvise in a way which maintained the poem’s metrical rules. The scop is composed his/her verses or “rhymes” spontaneously while the same time keep within strict metrical rules. Old English poetry is characterised by a number of poetic devices which enable a writer to describe things indirectly, and which require a reader to use his or her imagination to construct their meaning. The most widespread of these figurative descriptions are called kennings. A kenning is a sort of riddle which often occurs in compound words. The word “to ken” means “to know”. Kennings are a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in a memorable ways. They are similar to what we call metaphors. We can say that kennings allow abstract concepts to be communicated by using more familiar words but also they allow poets to add variation to their verse both in terms of sound and imagery. The early 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 lost 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 well-known epic composition is Beowulf dating back to the 7th century. For the elegy the Exeter Book was one of the four remaining collections of Anglo-Saxon literature. Another form of poetry was religious. The first Anglo-Saxon Christian poet was Caedmon who composed poems based on the Biblical scriptures. Cynewulf wrote poems inspirited by the lives of the saints and the apostles. A typical characteristic of the language of early Anglo-Saxon poetry is the use of alliteration, the recurrence of the same initial sound In successive words, while a common is the caesura, the introduction of a pause in the middle of a line. BEOWULF Beowulf is the most famous of the early Anglo-saxon poems. Composed in Old English probably at the end of the 7th century it is anonymous and it is the longest at over 3000 lines. It is set in Scandinavia, and it is an example of an epic. It tells the story of an hero called Beowulf, a native Geatland, who rises to fame by coming to the human monster called Grandel (who is said to be descendant of Cain). Beowulf kills first the monster and then Grandel’s mother who has promised to take revenge for her son’s death. The poem ends with Beowulf’s funeral, lamenting both the hero’s death and the uncertain future of the people of Gaetland who, deprived of their great leader, are once again vulnerable to attack. In Beowulf we find an interesting mix of religious and cultural references and attitudes. 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 thank to God. References to the new Testament are absent, but Hrothgar and Beowulf often speak of God as though their religion is monotheistic. 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 practises 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. The poem begins with the magnificent scene of the ship burial of the mythical Danish hero king, Shefing. The poem moves on a few generations to the reign of Hrothgar, whose realm is menaced by the monster Grandel. From a contemporary perspective the monster can be seen as a physical manifestation of the internal conflicts and tensions underlying the apparently calm and prosperous surface of the royal household which threaten the peace and stability of society. The language of Beowulf is typical of Anglo-Saxon verse. It is full of kennings and alliteration while the rhythm is dominated by caesura. FROM THE EARLY BRITAIN TO THE MIDDLE AGES. Britain after the Norman conquest Harold’s reign was to be one of the shortest in English history. Harold’s reign was disputed by William Duke of Normandy, who claimed that Edward, his relative, had left the throne to him. In 1066 William led the Normans. The English were defeated. William “the Conqueror” was crowned in Westminster Abbey on Christmas Day in 1066. Under William England became part of a cross-channel kingdom that also included northern France. To keep the Anglo-Saxon population under control, the Normans built several castles in different parts of the country including the now famous Tower of London. People were forced to accept not only a new royal family and ruling class but also a new culture and language. Norman rule in Britain and the influence of French completely transformed both the structure and vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon English. French was used by the Norman nobles and the higher ranks of society and Anglo-Saxon remained the language of peasants. Latin was still used by the Church and as the language of learning. After the Norman conquest of 1066, the new rulers of Britain introduced French to the country. The Norman introduced the hierarchical feudal system. This was a pyramidal system by which the king allotted territories to his barons, who in turn gave land to the knights. The vassals, had to swear allegiance and pledge services to their overlords. The feudal system was structured around the principle of the concession of lands in return for services and was based on an essentially static agrarian economy. In this way he hoped to know how much money he could collect in terms of taxes. The results of this survey were written down in a register called Domesday Book. The principle service requested of nobles at this time was to help the king in is war campaigns. The cost of war meant that the king also had to ask merchant financiers to fund his campaigns. It gave the barons and merchants more power, and it led to the mobilisation in the service of war of large numbers of peasant labourers who became paid soldiers. The reign of Henry IIsaw the introduction of the first major reform which weakened the feudal structure of society. This was “common law” and it concerned the English legal system. It was created the trail by jury, a system which is still used today in England. Richard I engaged numerous wars, In particular crusades. They had began in 1095 on the orders of Pope Urban II, were intended as military expeditions to recover the “Holy Land” in particular the city of Jerusalem.John Lackland wanted to levy higher taxes to pay for disastrous war campaigns to protect his lands in French. On his return form one of these campaigns in 1215 his “financiers” decided they had enough and forced him to sign a document known as the Magna Charta. Henry III was he first Plantagenets. His Model Parliament as it was called, laid the foundations for the modern day House of Common and House of Lord. The increasing complexity of administration in England had led to the establishment of government offices in major towns such as London and York. One of the effects of the Norman conquests was to link England with Normandy in the north of France. The longest and most significant of these disputes between the kings of England and France began around 1337 when Edward III claimed the French crown with the justification that his mother, Isabella of France, was the daughter of the French King, Philip IV. The war lasted over a century and became known as the Hundred Years’ War. The cause were partly territorial and partly economic. When the Hundreds Years’ War ended, a blood feud started between the two rival houses of Lancaster and York. Because the emblem of both families was a rose, red of Lancaster and white for York, it became known as the War of the Roses. The immediate causes were dynastic. Richard III was killed in battle in 1485 by Henry Tudor, who then took the throne for himself, opening the way for the Tudor dynasty. All of this fighting and feuding was of course supported by an ideology in which war was exalted as a noble occupation. The idea of chivalry, form the French word chevalier, was introduced around 12th century. This was a set of values like loyalty, bravery, honesty and glory. It was an extremely important element of the courtly romances, centred around the figure of King Arthur. The war with France was interrupted in 1348 by the Black Death, an epidemic of bubonic plague which spread through the Europe. The Peasant’s Revolt The new-found prosperity and freedom of the peasants was cause of great alarm to the noble and the merchant landowners who controlled parliament, both because it represented a threat to their authority and also because it reduced their own income. But by this time the peasant workers had already begun to organise themselves into a prototypical union were preparing for an armed revolt. The government poll tax, as it was known, was simply the final insult which started the revolt. The peasants led by Wat Tyler marched on London and occupied the city. Many corrupt merchants and clergyman who had been pocketing the tax money were executed. The rebels weren’t strong enough to depose the government executed their leader and began taking reprisals. Hundreds were massacred by the army, often without trial. So there was the failure of the revolt. It was created an urban bourgeoisie.While in the countryside a new minor aristocracy, which became known as the gentry. Medieval Poetry The ballad Ballads began to appear throughout Europe around the time when the idea of courtly love was gaining popularity amongst the nobility. While they often dealt with similar themes of heroism and loyalty.Ballads generally used simple language and were composed of short stanzas of two or four lines which usually rhymed in some way. Ballads tend to be repetitive in structure as this makes them easier to remember. Repetition of this type is called refrain. It was identical fro each stanza and guaranteed a particular emotional effect which may be comic or elegiac. Ballads can be classified in many different categories, form border ballads celebrating the rivalry between the English and the Scottish people, to outlaw ballads, to ballads of magic, to town ballads. The appropriation of ballads by individual authors in a sense went against the spirit of the form as an expression of the “people”, that spoke of common experience and was available to all. Many English and Scottish ballads are difficult to date because they came mainly form ordinary country people and were transmitted orally long before they were written down and collected. SIR GAWIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT Sir Gawain belongs to be so-called Alliterative Revival.Sir Gawin and the Green Knight exists in only one original manuscript, as the last of four poems in the MS. Cotton Nero A x. dating no later than 1400. The three poems preceding it are Pearl, Purity, and Patience, and all four are generally 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. Sir Gawain is typical of Middle English alliterative poems in that 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. So belongs to be so-called Alliterative Revival. The story is based on Sir Gawain’s quest to confront the Green Knight, who has disrupted Arthur’s court. The Green Knight may represent fertility. Gawain’s chastity is tested by his host’s wife, who tries to seduce him. Gawain fails his test of trust by taking the girdle the woman offers him; it has protective power. The host turns out to be the shape-shifting Green Knight, who spares Gawain’s life in a beheading game. He Gives Gawain a green girdle as a token of G’s weakness and need for forgiveness. In the legend of the Green Knight, a fearsome green warrior rides into the king's court, and challenges anyone to cut off his head. Sir Gawain eventually rises to his challenge; then the Green Knight laughs, picks up his head, and rides away, vowing to return the favour. The poet has framed Gawain’s adventure with references in the first and last stanzas to what are called the “Brutus books,” the foundation stories that trace the origins of Rome and Britain back to the destruction of Troy. A cyclical sense of history as well as of the cycles of the season of the year, the generation of humankind, and of individual lives runs through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.The poem is written in stanzas that contains a group of alliterative lines which does not contain a fixed number or pattern of stresses like the typical of the Old English. 1)Nature vs. Human Society This is the central conflict which Gawain must deal with in 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 ultimately, his own fear of death. Throughout, Gawain counters this with his own faith in God and in chivalric values. But in the end his natural fear of death overcomes his sense of human morality, causing him to accept the green girdle. 2)The Futility of Human Constructions Gawain's sumptuous armor, no matter how well-forged or polished, will be of little use to him when he receives the exchange stroke from the Green Knight. 3)The Viability* of Chivalric Values Perhaps the most significant of these human constructions is chivalric code which forms such an essential part of medieval literature and of Gawain's belief system. Gawain is the very embodiment of chivalric values, yet his encounter with the seductive Lady Bertilak forces a crisis in the chivalric value system: should he honor the requests of the noble lady or remain faithful to his lord? l*attuabilità 4)Faith in God In contrast to the questionable nature of the chivalric code, the poet upholds Christian faith as the ultimate, saving grace for humanity. Ever pious, Gawain continuously finds guidance in God: from the image of the Virgin Mary on the inside of his shield to his prayers while journeying alone, to his narrow escape from the adulterous temptations of Lady Bertilak. It is, in a sense, faith in God which enables mankind to negotiate between the dangers of human society and the dangers of the natural world. 5)Celtic Pagan Sources and Christian overlay (sovrapposizione) Despite its 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 twelve 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. 6)The Fall of Man and Loss of Innocence Biblical parallels can be found in the appearance of Bertilak's castle (Paradise) and the role of his wife as temptress (Eve). WILLIAM LANGLAND Piers Plowman** is an allegorical moral and social satire, written as a "vision" of the common medieval type. The poet falls asleep in the Malvern Hills and dreams that in a wilderness* he comes upon the tower of Truth (God) set on a hill, with the dungeon* of Wrong (the Devil) in the deep valley below, and a "fair field full of folk" (the world of living men) between them. He describes satirically all the different classes of people he sees there; then a lady named Holy Church rebukes him for sleeping and explains the meaning of all he sees. Further characters (Conscience, Liar, Reason and so on) enter the action; Conscience finally persuades many of the people to turn away from the Seven Deadly Sins and go in search of St. Truth, but they need a guide. Piers (Peter), a simple Plowman, appears and says that because of his common sense and clean conscience he knows the way and will show them if they help him plow his half acre. Some of the company help, but some shirk; and Piers becomes identified with Christ, trying to get men to work toward their own material relief from the current abuses of worldly power. In the last section of the poem, much less coherent than the rest, the dreamer goes on a rambling but unsuccessful summer-long quest, aided by Thought, Wit, and Study. l** Plowman----aratore l* wildreness: distesa selvaggia/regione selvaggia l*dungeon: prigione Christ’s Humanity Christian culture has experienced moments of severe hostility to visual representation, but has permitted images of God. Humanity needed to repay God for the sin committed but was unable to do so. Faced with this impasse, God could either simply abolish the debt, or else become human, in order to repay Himself. In the Dream of The Rood, Christ is represented as a conquering, royal hero. Later medieval representations of Christ, by contrast, accentuate the suffering, sagging, lacerated body of a very human God. So Christ’s suffering humanity takes centre stage. These theological developments had forceful artistic and stylistic consequences. Because the theology was best expressed through visual or verbal images, if fed readily into both painting and a highly pictorial literature. Medieval Drama Miracle and mystery plays In the Middle Ages religious festivities and the services which accompanied them were not only acts of worship for the believers, but opportunities for entertainment as well. The stories from the Bible, were held in Latin and first given form in the church. In England, performances gradually moved outside into other parts of the town. Latin was replaced by the vernacular. In this way miracle and mystery plays came into being in the 13th century there is not a distinction between mystery and miracle plays, mystery plays usually dealt with events narrated in the Bible while miracle plays used stories from the lives of the saints. They were performed on movable stages called pageants. Each pageant represented an episode of the story, so people moved from one pageant to another. Although dealing with serious religious themes the mystery and miracle plays were popular form of drama and elements of humour and playful parody were often included in the story. The subjects of the Miracle Plays are: disobedience of Adam and Eve; Noah and the great flood; Abraham and Isaac; Events in the life of Christ. They were performed at the same time in different places with serious and religious in intention. The characters in the play has the tendency to become recognizably human. Morality Plays Morality plays, another form of religious allegorical drama, represented a popular medium by means of which the message of the Bible could be conveyed to a wide and mostly illiterate audience. The characters were not taken from the Bible but were usually static symbols of fixed values and ideas, such as the vices (greed, sloth…) or the virtues (patience, temperance…). These characters would dispute questions or morality, usually within the context of Church dogma. The most highly regarded of the morality plays is Everyman which dates form the late 15th century and deals with man’s fear of and reconciliation with death. 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 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. Everyman is an allegorical religious drama, translated form Dutch, which derives from oral tradition. In everyman the characters represent universal ideas and qualities. He is supposed to represent humanity in general, his situation is that of a particular class of people. 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. Medieval prose The legend of King Arthur dates from the 5th century. Indeed many of the magic and fantastic elements of the story relate to Celtic mythology. The stories refer to a timeless world where the gallant Knights of the Round Table battled for the love of virtuous maidens. They talk about the idea ofcourtly love which was connected to the Christian idea of passion as suffering rather than pleasure. Another key theme of the Arthurian romances was the mission to recover the Holy Grail. Arthurian romances were a European phenomenon , with writers form various countries concentrating on particular aspects of the legend and on the stories of the different Knights of the Round Table. The most famous English version is Thomas Malory’s Le Morte D’Arthur, published in 1485 which represent the climax of the Arthurian tradition and which leaves out the more fantastical aspects of the legend to concentrate on the idea of chivalry as a moral code of honour as well as a principle of good government. Theme: The search for the cup (the Holy Grail) used by Christ at the Last Supper, culminating with the dissolution of the Round Table. The first great prose work in the English language was written by Sir Thomas Malory who probably died in 1471. The true identity of this Malory is unknown. He seems to have been a violent person and probably wrote his masterpiece in prison. His Morte D’Arthur, as Malory himself wrote, was based on a “French book” which contained the many-branched story of Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. Malory eliminated much of the religious and magical side of the story but he still depicted these knights as models to follow. 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. GEOFFREY CHAUCER - THE CANTERBURY TALES Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London in either 1343 or 1344. He was born into an emerging wealthy class and was educated well. He was sent to Italy were he probably met Petrarch in Florence, and became familiar with the work of Boccaccio and Dante. It was during the last ten years of his life that Chaucer worked on his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales. It was believed to be written as an inspiration form his pilgrimage to Canterbury and he was able to observe a diverse group of people. He deemed “The father of English poetry” as he was recognized as the greatest English poet of his time. The three periods into which Chaucer’s works are divided in: French period, Italian period and the English period. Chaucer seeks to expand his stylistic range following the examples of Boccaccio and Dante. In the last period of Chaucer’s life, he wrote Canterbury Tales which were written in Middle English and were probably begun in 1387. Chaucer originally planned to write an amazing 120 tales, giving four tales to each of his pilgrims, two to be told on the way to Canterbury and two on the way back. At his death the project was less than a quarter complete with only 24 tales. He died in 1400. The aim of the pilgrimage is to see the Thomas Becket’s Shrine in the Canterbury Cathedral, which is a symbol of holy, celestial city. The whole cycle is prefaced by a General Prologue in which the narrator gives us a brief description of each of the pilgrims and each tale is preceded by a prologue in which the pilgrim tells us something about him/ herself. It is the host, Harry Bailly, who proposes the tale-telling competition as a way of passing the time on the journey. There will be a prize for the best stories. The allusion is to Boccaccio’s Decameron in which a group of young aristocrats gather to tell stories. The route the pilgrimage takes is also highly significant. The pilgrims begin at The Tabard Inn. The Tabard was an inn established in 1307 by the head of a Benedictine Monastery. It was established to provide a hostile for him when he travelled to England and to accommodate all the pilgrims heading to England. It was located on the an area on the east-south of London. The pilgrims came from different social classes, such as the military, the clergy, the middle classes and the trades. A pilgrimage is a journey of a pilgrim, especially one to a shrine or a sacred places. During the Medieval times, people would make extensive journey to visit the resting place of saints or to visit sacred relics. Jerusalem and Rome were popular pilgrimage sites during the Medieval period. Many people decided to journey in groups as it was safer to travel in numbers. These journeys would take months, and numerous times, the pilgrims may not return because it was dangerous to travel to an unknown destination. There are lot of stops in which the pilgrims would eat, rest, drink, and tell stories of their journeys and of the sites they been to. Because faith was very important to the people of the Medieval times, many pilgrims believed that visiting the site would absolve them of their sins. The characters of the Canterbury Tales are presented in a way which renders them at the same time “types” drawn from popular and literary tradition. Chaucer’s characters have a human and individual quality which makes them extremely vital. They are different from characters in medieval ballads who can generally be considered static. Many of the pilgrims are portrayed physically, on the other hand they are described morally, including their qualities and their weaknesses. He suspends judgement of his characters, allowing them free voice so that the reader can decide for himself which are the more or less praiseworthy. Characters The knight: He is a distinguished man, who follows chivalry, truth, honour, generousness, and courtesy.The knight is famous for his successful fighters. He appertains to thearistocrats or military class serving with distinction in many campaigns. He is wise, modest and polite. He doesn’t wear gaily dressed. He wears a fustian tunic stained and dark with smudges where his armour left a mark. Hetakes the pilgrimage seriously enough to rush to join straight from battle and he posses fine horses. The Squire: He is strong and agile and he is 20 years old. He has curly hair and average height. He could bean aristocrat or a military. He is usually the son of the knight whose he is devoted. He is brave and a cavalryman. The Yeoman:The Yeoman was an archer and worked for a knight or squire. He wore a green hood and coat. His head was like a nut and his face was brown. He knew woodcraft. Yeoman wore a brace on their arm and bore a shield and sword. The yeoman also held a hunting horn. They were proper foresters. The yeoman was considered a noble, but was the lowest of the noble class. He could be a free man and own a small land. The prioress: She has a simple, shy smile with grey eyes. She is very clean and wears a nice cloak. She has a coral bracelet and a golden brooch. She appertains at the clergy as nun. She has very good table manners and she is very kindhearted, charitable, and respectable. Real name is Madam Eglantyne. The monk: He appears like themanly Man in a good shape. He has a shiny head and face. He wears very different robes of the usual monks which was a plain habit and hood but wore gray fur on his sleeves of his cope and a gold pin with a love knot at the end of the hood. The gold pin signified that he was not religious because instead of the gold pin it should be a rosary. He appertains at the clergy. Friar: he appertains at the clergy. He is jolly, festive and strong. He is a good singer with an happy and sturdy voice. His name was Hubert.His job didn’t make him wealthy but he knew how to make a profit. He is a limiter. He got many girls in trouble and he was able to hear confessions; made a decent living. Easily got money from people. He’s deceiving and immoral. The merchant: He is free and hasn’t an high status non-noble. He i san expert at currency exchange. The Oxford Cleric “The student”: he is a knowledgeable young student who would do anything to gain more knowledge, so he preferred books over money and nice things. He is quite and reserve and he never spoke more words than he needed to formal and respectful. Sergeant at the law:He is very wise; Talked little; Tricked people into thinking; he really was a very good lawyer; he could make a fool-proof contract or give a great defence; he was commissioned by the King of England. He is discreet and an able attorney. He makes people think he is bruiser and wiser that he really is and he is a very busy man. The Franklin: Franklin means “free man. He is a wealthy gentleman farmer but was not born noble. He appertains at middle Class. He is well-liked by other pilgrims. He is a medieval wealthy land owner. The Weaver: He is wise, fit to be noble. He had money; Demonstrate the pride associated with being a guild member; he is a successful people. Guilds are professional organizations for craftsmen. Demonstrate the pride associated with being a guild memberbelonged to a guild (associations of tradesmen, somewhat powerful in this time period). Haberdasher: is a person who sells small articles for sewing, such as buttons, ribbons and zippers. In English, haberdasher is another term for a men's outfitter. A haberdasher would sell small accessories, like linens and silks. Another meaning of "haberdasher" refers to a "dealer in, or maker of, hats and caps.” Medieval craftsmen, like haberdashers, belonged to guilds. Each guild had a hall or house to meet in. The members worked together to insure the quality of their work, train apprentices, set prices, care for the sick members of their guilds and the widows and children of deceased members. The men of the guild were wealthy, and their sons were automatically born into the guild. The doctor:He was part of the Middle Class. He made most of his money from when plagues struck his country and he tended to rip people off. Gold and money was very important to him. He was very intelligent in the field of medicine. He knew the cure for any malady that you had. He also was educated in astrology; he could read you your stars and tell you your luck. He knew his medical information by heart but did not know the Bible at all. He was not a very holy man.He is one of the best of his profession. The Wife of Bath:A deaf but intelligent woman; she is a very skilled tailor, a person who creates clothes; she had five husbands. She was alone during her childhood and she likes to laugh and talk to other. She knew how to flirt very well. She was the type that couldn’t keep her man down. She was too outgoing.Chaucer drew upon a centuries-old tradition of misogynist writing that was particularly nurtured by the medieval church. The irrational, material, earthly, and, therefore, lower side of human nature predominated in women. So the Wife of Bath seems ironically to confirm the accusations of the clerks, but at the same time she succeeds in satirizing the shallowness (superficialità), of the stereotypes of woman and marriage in antifeminist writings and in demonstrating how much the largeness and complexity of her own character rise above that stereotypes. The parson:he is poor in his social class, rich in holiness and work. He stands out as what the parish priest should be. He lived a perfect life taught others to follow and he is an ideal Christian Priest. A description of physical appearance is not given because a parson is a stereotype of the perfect priest. The Miller:The Miller was a broad, well-muscled man who could easily wrestle a ram.The Miller’s job was to grind wheat into flour using large rocks which constituted his large musculature. The Miller was so adept at his trade that he could tell the quality of grain simply by feeling it.The Miller’s social standing was with the lot of the Peasants. However, because of his wealth, not as much as a noble’s, he was held with higher regard among the peasants. Manciple: He is illiterate and wiser than thirty lawyers he feeds. Cheated well-educated lawyers. All carters follow his example in buying and he used to watch the market carefully. The Host: Harry Barley: he is a joyful man and he is generous in giving food and drink. He invented the idea of telling the stories of the pilgrimage and he offers dinner to the pilgrim who tells the best story. Plowman: The Plowman’s social class is considered to be among the virtuous poor or lower class. He was extremely poor but represented all the Christian values and virtues. He was a good worker who was religious. He lived in peace and charity and treated his neighbour with much respect. Plowman helped the poor and was always charitable. He was the Parson’s brother. He always paid his tithes and they were on time and in full. Pardoner: He appertains at clergy, freeman and contested status. A pardoner is one who dispenses papal pardons. He was gentle and patient because of working with the pope. The Pardoner boasts to his fellow pilgrims about his own depravity and the ingenuity with which he abuses his office and the extracts money from poor and ignorant people. The medieval pardoner’s job was to collect money for charitable enterprises, such as hospitals, supported by the church. He was licensed by the pope to award token remission of sins that the donor should have repented and confessed. 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 substitution of the Copernican for the Ptòlemaic system of astronomy, 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. In northern Europe, the Renaissance was delayed and filtered by the Reformation and in England it was more dilute and better integrated into the cultural life of relatively stable society in which the Church’s power and influence were already reduced, thanks to the reform continued under the reign of Elizabeth I whose court included some of the leading intellectual figures of the day. The Renaissance is often considered the beginning of the modern age, it is important to realise that the spirit of intellectual curiosity it promoted was essentially directed towards the past, in particular to the ideas and civilisations of ancient Rome and Greece.A key figure of Renaissance Humanism in Northern Europe was Erasmus of Rotterdam who published a new Latin version of the Greek Bible in 1516. During this period, the human figure and human thought and action began to take precedence over the divine sphere which had dominated the medieval period, giving rise to a cultural movement called Humanism. Man became the centre of artistic, cultural and moral enquiry and was exalted as the centre of the universe while various “others” including women and colonised “savages” were situated at its margins. Copernican Revolution In 1543 Nicolas Copernicus published his treatise De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (The Revolution of Celestial Spheres) where a new view of the world is presented: the heliocentric model. It is hard to underestimate the importance of this work: it challenged the age long views of the way the universe worked and the preponderance of the Earth and, by extension, of human beings. The realization that we, our planet, and indeed our solar system (and even our galaxy) are quite common in the heavens and reproduced by myriads of planetary systems provided a sobering (though unsettling) view of the universe. All the reassurances of the cosmology of the Middle Ages were gone, and a new view of the world, less secure and comfortable, came into being. Despite these ``problems'' and the many critics the model attracted, the system was soon accepted by the best minds of the time such as Galileo. With his victory at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485, Henry Tudor (King Henry VII) laid the foundations for on of the most fruitful periods in English history. His diplomatic skill in avoiding quarrels with his neighbours (Scotland and France), his careful handling of state finances and his building 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. During his reign, England saw a period of financial and governmental stability. When Henry VII died, his son Henry VIII came to the throne. His accession was considered by Humanist scholars as being the beginning of a new Golden Age.He was a brilliant scholar and ambitious in European politics, he was self-centred and extravagant, and quickly dissipated his father’s carefully accumulated savings. His efforts to make England politically important in Europe, as the balance of power between Spain and France, came to nothing. Henry VIII was always looking for quick ways to raise money. The Church was very rich and his power as an international organization was resented in England.These problems came to a head when Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII’s first wife, failed to supply him with a male heir (giving birth only to Mary Tudor). Henry sought a divòrce, but a papal dispensation was not forthcoming because Charles V of Spain, who was Catherine’s nephew, had great influence with the Pope. Henry became very angry and tried to persuade the English bishops to make him the head of the Church. The Reformation had the effect of diminishing the international power of the Roman Church. It was German in origin and led by Martin Luther, who gave birth to the Protestant Church. this problem with the Catholic Church ended with the Act of Supremacy.The name "Act of Supremacy" is given to two separate acts of the English Parliament, one passed in 1534 and the other in 1559. Both acts had the same purpose; to firmly establish the English monarch as the official head of the Church of England, supplanting the power of the Catholic pope in Rome.Henry had his eye on the wealth of the church, particularly the property of the monasteries. His lifestyle, and his desire for military glory had left Henry in a precarious financial position; he needed money, the church had lots of it, so the solution was obvious - take control of the church and its assets(risorse). This he did by asserting his legal right to act as head of the Church of England. Anne Boleyn For a woman who played such an important part in English history, we know remarkably little about her earliest years. 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. Anne returned (from France) to England around 1521 for details for her marriage were being worked out. Meanwhile she went to court to attend Queen Catherine. Her first recorded appearance at Court was March 1, 1522 at a masque. After her marriage to the heir of Ormonde fell through (fallire), she began lots of affairs. Exactly when and where Henry VIII first noticed Anne is not known. It is likely that Henry sought to make Anne his mistress, as he had her sister Mary years before. 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 and she feared that Henry might go back to Catherine if the marriage could not be annulled. Finally sometime near the end of 1532, she was 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. Only in May 1533 the Archbishop officially proclaimed that the marriage of Henry and Catherine was invalid. Queen Anne On the 1st of June, she left the Tower in procession to Westminster Abbey, where she became a crowned Queen in a ceremony led by Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury. By August, preparations were being made for the birth of Anne's child, which was sure to be a boy. But on September 7 1533, the Princess Elizabeth was born. Anne now knew that it was time she produced a son. By January of 1534, she was pregnant again, but the child was miscarried. In 1535, she became pregnant again but miscarried (abortire) 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 (dama di compagnia), Jane Seymour, began to grow (she was destined to be the his third wife). Anne's enemies at court began to plot against her using the King's attentions to Jane Seymour as the catalyst (catalizzatirore) for action. 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 through 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 (mettere sotto processo) 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. Even though the evidence against them was scant (insufficienti / scarse), they were both found guilty They were to be either burnt at the stake(rogo)(which was the punishment for incest) or beheaded (decapitati), at the discretion of the King. 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(sorvolare), 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(offrire/dare/fornire) the dignity of a private execution. In July 1543 Henry married his sixth wife, Catherine Parr. She was a good stepmother(matrigna) 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. 1530 Religious reform movements had already taken hold in England, but on a small scale: the Lollards* had been in existence since the mid-fourteenth century and the ideas of Luther and Zwingli circulated within intellectual groups, but continental Protestantism had yet to find favor with the English people. The break from Rome was accomplished through law. *The origins of Lollardy can be traced to the writings of John Wycliffe (alternately spelled Wiclif, Wicliff, or even Wickliff) Wycliffe was a churchman, writer, and theologian who was born sometime in the 1320s and died on the last day of 1384. He can in many respects be considered the father of the English Reformation. There are certain ideas that were commonly associated with Lollards. Among these are the beliefs that: The pope had no part to play in worldly affairs; The church was too worldly; Monasticism had drifted from its spiritual foundation; The Bible should be available to everyone in their own language; 'Dominion is of Grace', that is, true power is God's, and attempts to use power for individual gain is therefore wrong; As human beings we are all brothers. From these beliefs it was an easy jump to basic principles that today might be deemed(stimare/ considerare)socialism or even anarchism. Wycliffe began a translation of the Bible into English. For the time, this was an act of extreme courage, and one which brought him into direct conflict with the church in Rome. It is worth noting that there were already portions of the Bible available in English, but no complete translation. 'Wycliffe's Bible' as it was called, was widely distributed throughout England, and had a huge influence at the time. Predictably, it was denounced by the Church as an unauthorized and inaccurate translation. Later, in 1401 the Constitutions of Oxford made it heresy to translate the Bible into English. Prince Edward 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. BUT: In February 1553, Edward VI became ill and he died at the age of 15 on 6 July 1553. Bloody Mary Persecutions of Roman Catholics in Edward’s Reign led to a subsequent Catholic reaction against Protestantism when his sister Mary succeeded him. Mary I was known as “Bloody Mary” because of her persecution of Protestants 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. When she died in 1558 Mary’s half-sister Elizabeth came to the throne who restored a moderate and more tolerant from Protestantism. The Reign of Elizabeth I In 1558, Elizabeth became queen. It was during her reign that the English Renaissance reached its peak. The reign of Elizabeth was a time of great political significance for England, giving the country a considerable sense of stability and unity. In 1570 Pope Pius V issued a bull that declared Elizabeth excommunicated. This led to her suppressing several plots against her, the most famous of which was led by her cousin, the Catholic Mary Stuart, a pretender to the English throne who was eventually executed in 1587 after being imprisoned for twenty years. 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. With her charisma, Elizabeth captured the imagination of many poets. A famous example is Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Faerie Queen. It is considered a Courtesy Book, an original play for 12 books on 12 virtues of a gentleman, each represented by different knight (Book I about virtue of Holiness, or religious faith). They are Six books completed, 36,000 lines long who have a political allegory: couple represents England ( = Arthur) espoused to Queen Elizabeth ( = Gloriana). The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc."It is an allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably intended) on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues. The poem is deeply allegorical and allusive: many prominent Elizabethans could have found themselves—or one another—partially represented by one or more of Spenser's figures. Elizabeth herself is the most prominent example: she appears most prominently in her guise as Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself; but also in Books III and IV as the virgin Belphoebe, daughter of Chrysogonee and twin to Amoret, the embodiment of womanly married love; and perhaps also, more critically, in Book I as Lucifera, the "maiden queen" whose brightly lightly Court of Pride masks a dungeon full of prisoners. The poem also displays Spenser's thorough familiarity with literary history. …Elizabeth’s Reign Elizabeth was regarded as the centre around which everything revolved. This conception was still based on the medieval Ptolemaic theory of the earth being the centre of the cosmos around which the sun and the other planets turned. In fact, during the Renaissance the revolutionary discoveries of Copernicus had not yet been accepted and the Church considered them heretical. Elizabethan astronomy was dominated and limited by their notion of social and natural hierarchy in all things. The idea of cosmic harmony, the so-called “music of the spheres” derived from the philosophy of Plato and Neoplatonists.In the latter part of the 16th century, Spain was the major international power and either ruled, colonized, or exercised influence over much of the known world. English 'sea-dogs' had been causing a great deal of damage to Spain's trade in silver. Men such as Sir Francis Drake attacked Spanish shipping off (compagnia navale di spedizioni) of the West Indies and Spain lost a vast sum of money when the ships carrying silver sank* or had their cargo captured by Drake. To the English, Drake was a hero but to the Spanish he was nothing more than a pirate who, in their view, was allowed to do what he did with the full knowledge of Queen Elizabeth. This the Spanish could not accept. Spain controlled what was called the Spanish Netherlands. This consisted of modern day Holland and Belgium.  In particular, Holland wanted its independence. They did not like being made to be Catholic; in fact, Protestant ideas had taken root in Holland and many of those in Holland were secret Protestants. If they had publicly stated their Protestant beliefs, their lives would have been in danger. Spain used a religious secret police called the Inquisition to hunt out Protestants. However, during Elizabeth's reign, the English had been helping the Dutch Protestants in Holland. This greatly angered King Felipe II of Spain. To accomplish the conquest of England, Felipe planned a double attack. He would send his "Invincible Armada" of 125 ships into the English Channel where it would link up (associarsi) with the Duke of Parma in the Spanish Netherlands at Calais. The Armada would ferry(traghettare) the Duke's soldiers across the straight of Dover and these troops would march on London, seize(catturare/afferrare) the Queen, and proceed to conquer the entire country. By May 1588, however, the Armada was finally ready to sail. The fleet numbered over 130 ships, making it by far the greatest naval fleet of its age. Although the fame around the Armada, English ships were faster than the Spanish troop and a combination of bad weather and military skill inflicted a humiliating defeat on Philip. The defeat of the Spanish Armada marked a major turning point in world history and marked the beginning of England’s rise and Spanish decline. The role of Parliament during the Tudor period was quite limited: Elizabeth I called only 13 Parliaments in 44 years. In 1603 Elizabeth died and the English throne went to the son of Mary Stuart, James VI of Scotland who became James I of England.He was the first Stuart king and when James succeeded to Elizabeth’s throne he also tried to succeed to her symbolism. James I tried to rule without Parliament as much as possible and was a firm believer in the Divine Right of Kings. Unfortunately Elizabeth had left huge debts so the new King needed to raise money with a new tax. Parliament wanted new right on home and foreign policy in return but James refused. When the Thirty Years War broke out in Europe (1618- 1648), Parliament wanted to declare war against the Catholics, but James did not agree. These quarrels continued until his death in 1625. LITERATURE DURING THE RENAISSANCE During the Renaissance, literature became a search for meaning rather than the ideal expression of a meaning which already existed. Although Elizabethan society was still based on an idea of order and stability derived from a medieval cosmology. In English literature it is in the theatre that we fin the most vital and stimulating responses to these challenges. The poetry of the early Renaissance was highly influenced by the sonnets of Petrarch and was perhaps more inclined to a celebration of the perceived order of Elizabethan society and like that of the medieval period it tended towards idealisation. In England during this period, prose writing developed more in the form of a kind of literary philosophising or essay writing, connected to the idea of religious and moral reform. Plato’s idea of the nature of the world differed form that of Aristotle who had been the dominant figure in medieval philosophy. Plato’s philosophy was also more mystical and open the interpretation. Plato believed that our knowledge of the world came not through the senses but through a type of reminiscence or memory of what he called ideas. Everything that existed in nature corresponded to its idea of which it was an inferior but faithful copy. Plato described our sensory experience of the world as being similar to that people trapped in a cave who can only see the shadows of things and not the things themselves in their essence. Plato says that the philosopher is he who goes outside and sees things in direct sunlight. 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. 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. SIR THOMAS MORE Thomas More was born in London. He started writing his most famous book, Utopia. In 1529 he became Lord Chancellorof England. In 1534 More opposed Henry VIII’s decision to divorce his wife Catherine. He was therefore imprisoned in the Tower of London. Utopia Thomas More’s main work Utopia was written in Latin, which was the international language of intellectual debate at the time. Utopiabecame popular at once and was soon translated into English. The title comes form Greek ou topos and mean “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. The narrator is Hythlodaeus, a Portuguese seaman who, during his travels, has discovered the island of Utopia, a place which, he says, is completely in the world in being a perfect society. The work displays the strong influence of Plato’s Republic, with its radically communalistic reimaging of the society, but it also shaped by more contemporary influences: monastic communities, emerging market societies, the peasant rebels. So in the first book Hythloddaeus talks of his adventures and travels and describes England as a land where poverty produces crime, greed and social problem. But it is not a call for revolutionary social reform, rather, a meditation, in the form of a dialogue, on the question of whether intellectuals should involve themselves in politics. In the second book he describes Utopia as the ideal state. Utopia is ruled according to principles of harmony and justice: private property has been replaced by communal ownership, there is a complete freedom of thought and every religion is tolerated, while war was considered a terrible practice to be used only as a last resort. Yet the society is not completely equal: it is male dominated and a distinction is made between the free citizens of Utopia and a slave class of “bondsmen” who do the heavy manual labour. The book is a pure product of Renaissance Humanism, and like other texts of the period was partly inspired by Plato’s notion of the perfect state developed in the Republic, Timeaeus and Critias. More 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”. RENAISSANCE POETRY The sonnet The most typical expression of Renaissance poetry was the sonnet. The sonnet derived from the Italian poets Dante and Petrarch. They gave the poets of Elizabethan England a new set of poetic conventions with which they could construct countless themes and variations. Amongst the central concerns of the sonneteers were love, friendship, beauty, the destructive effect of time and the desire for women who were unattainable or who could not return the poet’s love. Often the lady the poet loves is very beautiful but also very cruel. For the poet, love is inspired by the beauty of the beloved which he tries to capture in poetic form, but this beauty, thought it may contain something immortal, is itself mortal and fades with the passage of time. Therefore he 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 an idealised figure, and this raises several questions which can be reconducted to Platonic ideas which are extremely important in Renaissance aesthetic. Regarding form, the original Petrarchan sonnet was a poem of fourteen lines of hendecasyllables divided into two parts, the first contains two quatrains (or one 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 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, Philip Sidney, Edmund Spencer and William Shakespeare. The sonnet became more of a vehicle for religious feeling and a way of dramatising the poet’s relationship with God. SIR THOMAS WYATT Wyatt introduced into English the sonnet, a fourteen-line poem in iambic pentameter with a complex , intertwining rhyme scheme. For the most part, he took his subject matter from Petrarch’s sonnets. Petrarch’s sonnets consist of an “octave”, rhyming abba abba, followed, after a turn in the sense, by a “sestet” with various rhyme schemes that have in common their avoidance of a rhyming couplet at the end. Wyatt employs the Petrarchan octave, but his most common sestet scheme is cddc ee. For the lover in Petrarch’s poems, love is a transcendent experience, extending beyond the boundaries of life itself; for the lover in Wyatt’s poems, it is all too transient, and embittering. Some of Wyatt’s songs, to be sure, strike a note of jaunty independence, often tinged with misogyny; but melancholy complaint is rarely very distant.Though Wyatt’s representations of women are often cynical, it is clear that aristocratic women played a key role in the reception and preservation of his poetry. Women were not excluded from the courtly game of lyric-making. EDMUND SPENSER Spenser was born in London in 1552. He was a series of twelve pastoral poems written in the tradition of Virgil’s “eclogues”. 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 Queen, an unfinished allegorical romance centred around the character of Queen Gloriana. The chivalrous theme of the poem reflects the mythology of Elizabeth as a supposed descendant of King Arthur. It begins with the Red Cross Knight, who stands for true religion and the Anglican Church. The basis for Spencer’s choice of virtues is Aristotle’s philosophy reshaped to Renaissance and Protestant requirements. The Spenserian stanza consists of 8 lines of 10 syllables plus a ninth line of 12 syllables. Spenser’s verse form was later adopted by other poets, in particular by the Romantics Byron, Shelley and Keats. With her charisma, Elizabeth captured the imagination of many poets. A famous example is Edmund Spenser, who wrote the Faerie Queen. It is considered a Courtesy Book, an original play for 12 books on 12 virtues of a gentleman, each represented by different knight (Book I about virtue of Holiness, or religious faith). They are Six books completed, 36,000 lines long who have a political allegory: couple represents England ( = Arthur) espoused to Queen Elizabeth ( = Gloriana). The Spenserian stanza is a fixed verse form. Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic pentameter followed by a single 'Alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of these lines is "ababbcbcc." It is an allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably intended) on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues. The poem is deeply allegorical and allusive: many prominent Elizabethans could have found themselves—or one another—partially represented by one or more of Spenser's figures. Elizabeth herself is the most prominent example: she appears most prominently in her guise as Gloriana, the Faerie Queene herself; but also in Books III and IV as the virgin Belphoebe, daughter of Chrysogonee and twin to Amoret, the embodiment of womanly married love; and perhaps also, more critically, in Book I as Lucifera, the "maiden queen" whose brightly lightly Court of Pride masks a dungeon full of prisoners. Book 1 Synopsis: -Redcrosse Knight: representative of Holiness, commissioned by Gloriana, Queen of Fairy Land, to accompany Una to kingdom of her parents &deliver them from dragon scourging their land.Redcrosse e Una go on adventures & encounter series of enemies.Redcrosse defeats Error with Una's help.Cannot tell appearance from Reality, through Archimago's deception, Redcrosse leaves Una and becomes involved with Duessa. —With help from Arthur and Una, defeats a series of enemies: brothers Sansfoy, Sansloy and Sansjoy (French for Faithlessness, Lawlessness & Joylessness); Orgoglio (Italian for pride); Despair; anddragon (fight lasting 3 days).At end of Book I, Redcrosse claimed by Duessam betrothed to Una and returns to court of Fairie Queene. The poem also displays Spenser's thorough familiarity with literary history. Book I (The Legende of the Knight of the Red Crosse, or Of Holinesse): Redcrosse Knight: representative of Holiness, commissioned by Gloriana, Queen of Fairy Land, to accompany Una to kingdom of her parents anddeliver them from dragon scourging their land.Redcrosse e Una go on adventures and encounter series of enemies.Redcrosse defeats Error with Una's help.Cannot tell appearance from Reality, through Archimago's deception, Redcrosse leaves Una e becomes involved with Duessa.With help from Arthur and Una, defeats a series of enemies: brothers Sansfoy, Sansloy e Sansjoy (French for Faithlessness, Lawlessness e Joylessness); Orgoglio (Italian for pride); Despair; anddragon (fight lasting 3 days).At end of Book I, Redcrosse claimed by Duessam betrothed to Una and returns to court of Fairie Queene. Religious and allegory: On a historical e religious level, separation of Redcrosse and Una through e machinations of Archimago and seductions of Duessa (= Catholicism, or "False" Faith) stands for outlawing of Protestantism andrestablishment of Catholicism under Queen Mary. - Redcrosse = England. - Una = the one true faith, Protestantism. - Duessa = Catholicism. - Archimago = the Pope. Redcrosse Knight: Knight of Holiness, one of virtues Spenser represents allegorically in poem. St. George, patron saint of England. Book One of Faerie Queene is story of his efforts to exemplify holiness. Una:Una is "his" lady, going with Redcrosse to rescue her parents e people from dragon.Una = Truth, or one true religion (Anglican Protestantism, for Spenser).White dress = purity black cloak = mourning for sins of mankind; veil = concealment, i.e., truth is not always plain to see. Canto 1: The main hero introduced: Redcrosse's armor. Fight with Error - defeated by faith e RC's disgust. Archimago deceives RC & Una. Sends false dream and uses magic to create a false Una. PHILIP SYDNEY He was born into a wealthy family and then educated at school and after in Oxford. His output included the Defence of Poetry, Arcadia, a prose romance. The Defense of Poesy It is an eloquent argument for the dignity, social efficacy, and moral value of imaginative literature in verse or prose. Sydney gives this argument the underlying form of a classical oration, as if he were a lawyer in ancient Rome defending his client against defamatory accusations. The great master, Cicero and Quintilian, prescribed a set structure for such orations and he adapts his defence to this structure. Sydney points out the antiquity of poetry, its prestige in the biblical and classical words, and its universality; also, he cities the names given to poets - Vates, or “prophet”. But he bases his defence essentially on the special status of the poetic imagination. This freedom enables the poet to present virtues and vices in a livelier and more affecting way than nature does, teaching, delighting, and moving the reader at the same time. The Defence also refutes Plato’s charge that poets are liars. ENGLISH RENAISSANCE AND RENAISSANCE DRAMA The Metaphysical poets The term "metaphysical," as applied to English and continental European poets of the seventeenth century, was used by Augustan poets John Dryden (1631-1700) and Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) to reprove (rimproverare) those poets for their "unnaturalness." As Goethe wrote, however, "the unnatural, that too is natural," and the metaphysical poets continue to be studied and revered for their intricacy and originality.The term Metaphysical poets describes a number of poets who actually have relatively little in common. Although they cannot be considered as a real poetic movement, in their works we can fin some common features. Their works are characterised by the use of philosophical metaphors which are called “Metaphysical conceits”. The term “conceit” refers to an elaborate metaphor comparing two apparently dissimilar objects, often with an effect of shock or surprise. 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.Their work is a blend of emotion and intellectual ingenuity, characterized by conceit or “wit”- that is, by the sometimes violent yoking (aggiogare) together of apparently unconnected ideas and things so that the reader is startled out (sorprendersi) and forced to think through the argument of the poem. Metaphysical poetry is less concerned with expressing feeling than with analyzing it, with the poet exploring the recesses of his consciousness. The boldness (audacia) of the literary devices used - especially obliquity, irony, and paradox - are often reinforced by a dramatic directness of language and by rhythms derived from that of living speech. John Donne John Donne (1572 – 1631) was the most influential metaphysical poet. His personal relationship with spirituality is at the centre of most of his work, and the psychological analysis and sexual realism of his work marked a dramatic departure from traditional, genteel verse. In 1593, Donne abandoned his Roman Catholic faith and joined the Anglican Church. It was around this time that he wrote some of his important satires and love poems. After his involvement in a naval expedition against Spain in 1596vhis prospect for advancement in politics seemed good. Donne was persuaded by King James I to become a minister and went on the greatest preachers of the age, attracting hundreds of people to his sermons. His early work, collected in Satires (1593) and in Songs and Sonnets (1601), was released in an era of religious oppression. His Holy Sonnets, which contains many of Donne’s most enduring (stabile/duraturo) poems, was released shortly after his wife died in childbirth. The intensity with which Donne grapples with (lottare) concepts of divinity and mortality in the Holy Sonnets is exemplified in "Sonnet X [Death, be not proud]," "Sonnet XIV [Batter my heart, three person’s God]," and "Sonnet XVII [Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt].” Donne is considered one of the most important Metaphysical poets. Although in terms of age he was roughly their contemporary, Donne’s poetry that was self-confident, witty and sophisticated. Many Donne’s love poems are like philosophical seductions, in which clever mental argument alludes to a kind of veiled eroticism.Donne’s language is deeply influenced by the world of science, both medieval and modern. His poems often include references philosophy, theology, chemistry, geography and astronomy. Renaissance Drama Renaissance drama may safely be regarded as the high point of English literature during this period. The social, political and religious ferment which went on in the later sixteenth century had a particularly fruitful effect on the young playwrights of the 1580s and 90s. during the Renaissance the concept of drama was to change completely. The dramatists of the age led by Christopher Marlowe, and slightly later William Shakespeare, began to explore the many sides of human nature.Christopher Marlowe is the first great playwright in English. His most significant play is probably Doctor Faustus which is almost an allegory of the humanist revolution. Faust’s pact with the devil, to whom he promises his soul in return for unlimited power and knowledge, can be seen as a metaphor both for the humanist idea of man breaking free of God’s control, and for England’s political break with the Roman Church. The age of Shakespeare was an exciting one in which to be a dramatist. The sixteenth century witnessed an explosion in the dramatic arts, with new styles of theatre emerging. Theatre in the middle ages was quite unlike the theatre of Shakespeare’s day. Folk (gente / tradizionale) plays about heroes like St George, battles and dragons, treated secular themes, but much other medieval drama had a strong religious ethos. While medieval mystery plays, for example, dramatised Biblical events, morality plays allegorised the human struggle to choose between vice and virtue. Drama could be associated with Christian feast days, and was not performed in permanent theatres, but in public or private buildings, in open spaces like churchyards, on temporary structures like ‘scaffolds’(impalcatura/patibolo) or in the street. Plays were often of anonymous authorship, and some plays, like the mystery plays and morality plays were performed not by professional actors but by ordinary townsfolk.Shakespeare’s literally achievement is unprecedented and has arguably never been equalled in its originally or range of concerns. Shakespeare is paradoxically both the greatest dramatist of the Renaissance and also the greatest dramatist of the modern period. Another element of Shakespeare’s greatness is that he is first writer to consider the great problems of existence independently of pre-existing models of thought. He does this by creating characters who, in the words of the philosopher Hegel “free artists of themselves”, which is to say that they are able to contemplate themselves objectively in images that they have created through their intelligence: they can see themselves as dramatic characters acting out their lives, or as actors playing role. During and after the Reformation, the drama began to change. Genres like tragedy, comedy and satire replaced the mystery and morality plays of the middle ages. Playwrights experimented with forms borrowed from classical authors, studying the tragedies of Seneca and the comedies of Terence and Plautus. Plots and characters were taken from a range of sources. Shakespeare, for example, read medieval chronicles, classical drama and poetry, narratives of travel and the colonisation of the New World, and the romances and legends of earlier centuries, mining* them for material he could recycle into dramatic form. In this period, the identity of the individual playwright became important, and dramatists like Kyd, Shakespeare and Marlowe were developing their own distinctive writing styles. New themes appeared as well. Love between men and women were a theme adaptable either to comedy, or to tragedies such as Othello or Anthony and Cleopatra. History and politics were also of great interest in an age of strong rulers, Elizabeth I and James I. Ideas about the power of monarchs and the burdens and dangers of kingship were explored in history plays, or in tragedies like King Lear. Jacobèan revenge drama examined not only the ethics but also the psychology of revenge and aggression. The shift in focus from religious to humanist values led to the creation of the flawed(imperfetto) hero, embodied in characters like Hamlet, Lear and Othello, and the Machiavellian villain, as for example Iago. Elizabethan theatre It is important to consider that before the theatre there existed troupes of professional actors or travelling players who toured around giving public performances. Their performances were staged on movable platforms often in town squares. The first permanent theatre was erected in 1576 by Burbage. This was called simply the “Theatre”. Permanent theatres were usually circular or polygonal. Around the theatre walls there were three rows of galleries. The most famous theatre of the time was the Globe Theatre which was built in London in 1599, on the South bang of the Thames. The Globe The first Globe Theatre has interesting origins. Apparently Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’sMen, originally performed at “The Theatre”. After it was called the Globe. Like the other theatres of this period, the Globe was an open air theatre without lights, which meant that performances had to take place in daytime. The action moved from scene to scene without a beak. When the theatres was full, the players were surrounded by the audience on three sides. This meant that the relationship between actor and audience was more intimate than modern theatres. In 1631, the original Globe Theatre burned to the ground. Apparently a cannon shot during a performance of Henry VIII had ignited the thatched roof of the gallery. Construction was begun on the original foundations, and a new Globe was completed before Shakespeare’s death. The new Globe continued operating as a theatre until 1642, when it was closed down by the Puritans. Elizabethan did not use scenery but gave great importance to costume. Often costumes were not realistic or historically accurate but they were highly elaborate and were designed to express the traits of a particular character. It is important to remember that women very rarely acted in plays and female roles were generally taken by boys. Female characters in Shakespeare’s comedies for example often dress up as men to permit them access to spaces form which women are excluded. Both in speech and gesture, acting in the Renaissance was more formal than modern acting. It was also closely related to a branch of contemporary education known as rhetoric. Elizabethan students were taught rhetoric as a form of creativecomposition and persuasive argument, and appropriate gestures were part of the subject. The long monologues and soliloquies of the plays of Shakespeare and Marlowe which often deal with philosophical ore theological questions, contain elements of rhetoric. One important influence on Elizabethan drama was Senecan tragedy, a rather brutal and violent five-act form written in imitation of the Roman playwright. An early example of this type was Gorboduc* (1562) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, but it gradually evolved into the so-called “revenge tragedy” dealing with the theme of revenge. * takes as its subject Gorboduc, a mythical king of ancient Britain. First performed in 1561, it is the earliest English tragic play in blank verse.* *blank verse: poetry written in unrhymed iambic pentameter. Blank Verse is any verse comprised of unrhymed lines all in the same meter, usually iambic pentàmeter. It was developed in Italy and became widely used during the Renaissance because it resembled classical, unrhymed poetry. Some features: This is one reason why the solìloquy, which can seem faintly (vagamente) ridiculous in a modern theatre, was an important device in the Elizabethan playwright’s repert ire. The proximity of the audience also had an influence on acting technique, since there was no necessity for raising the voice, indeed, subtle distinctions in gesture and expression were more possible. Another factor was that the Elizabethan audience were actually trained listeners: in a time before newspapers and when printed works were available only for a very few, even the common people had a very acute listening skills. Scenery was very scarce. There was an occasional tree or chair, but much was left to the imagination or simply explicitly made clear in the text of the play. There was little time for changes of scenery and there was no covenient curtain to hide the mechanics of the show, so the action was practically continuous. Surely, the medium of verse would not have seemed artificial or incongruous as it might in a modern play, but a natural expression of dramatic moments, in an age which lacked the tradition of realistic prose or drama. Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe was born in Canterbury in 1564. In 1580 he went to Cambridge University where he established a reputation for free thinking and atheism. Violence and disreputable behaviour seem to have characterized his student years. In 1587 he moved to London and after the spectacular success of Tamburlaine the Great (1587) he rapidly established himself as the most imprtant playwright of the period. His death in a London tavern is still shrouded (avvolgere) in mystery. Some critics have suggested that as a result of his political activities he may simply have known too much and had thus become “undesirable”. During his brief life Marlowe succeeded in writing five dramatic masterpieces: -Tamburlaine the Great (an heroic epic in dramatic form divided into two parts of five acts each) 1587 -Doctor Faustus 1588 (morality plays) -The Jew of Malta (dating perhaps from 1589, acted in 1592, printed in 1633); -Edward the Second (1594) -Dido, Queen of Carthage (completed by Thomas Nash, produced and printed 1594); His plays are often thought to be among the first to embody the true spirit of the Renaissance, concentrating in their humanist fashion on man as opposed to God. They take as their main themes the lust (desiderio / lussuria) for power, the desire to surpass the old restrictions of the Church and the limitation of knowledge. However, this was a new age: this new found sense of freedom went hand in hand with the greater opportunities for gathering wealth afforded by the opening up of new markets abroad and the descovery of new lands.Marlowe’s works also represented a departure from the didactic spirit of the miracle and mystery plays of the 1500s, developing and enhancing the more realistic elements of the sixteenth-century interludes. Characters were no longer simple personifications of virtues and vices but were enriched by human passions and human limitations. Perhaps, Marlowe’s main contribution to English drama was the elaboration on blanke verse (non-rhymyng lines of iambic pentameter). Marlowe’s verse became later a more flexible and poetic means of expression. Doctor Faustus Doctor Faustus, a well-respected German scholar, grows dissatisfied with the limits of traditional forms of knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and religion—and decides that he wants to learn to practice magic. His friends Valdes and Cornelius instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastopheles, a devil. Despite Mephastopheles’s warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells the devil to return to his master, Lucifer, with an offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service from Mephistopheles. Meanwhile, Wagner, Faustus’s servant, has picked up some magical ability and uses it to press a clown named Robin into his service. Mephastopheles returns to Faustus with word that Lucifer has accepted Faustus’s offer. Faustus experiences some misgivings (sospetto) and wonders if he should repent and save his soul; in the end, though, he agrees to the deal, signing it with his blood. As soon as he does so, the words “Homo fuge,” Latin for “O man, fly,” appear branded on his arm. Faustus again has second thoughts, but Mephastopheles bestows (elargire) rich gifts on him and gives him a book of spells to learn. Later, Mephistopheles answers all of his questions about the nature of the world, refusing to answer only when Faustus asks him who made the universe. This refusal prompts other misgivings in Faustus, but Mephastopheles and Lucifer bring in personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins to prance about (vantarsi) in front of Faustus, and he is impressed enough to quiet his doubts. Armed with his new powers and attended by Mephistopheles, Faustus begins to travel. He goes to the pope’s court in Rome, makes himself invisible, and plays a series of tricks. He disrupts the pope’s banquet by stealing food. Meanwhile, Robin has picked up some magic on his own, and with his fellowRafe, he undergoes a number of comic misadventures. At one point, he manages to summon Mephistopheles, who threatens to turn Robin and Rafe into animals (or perhaps even does transform them; the text isn’t clear) to punish them for their foolishness. Faustus goes on with his travels but as the twenty-four years of his deal with Lucifer come to a close, he begins to dread his impending death. He has Mephistopheles call up Helen of Troy, the famous beauty from the ancient world, and uses her presence to impress a group of scholars. An old man urges Faustus to repent, but Faustus drives him away. Faustus summons Helen again and exclaims rapturously (entusiastcamente) about her beauty. But time is growing short. Faustus tells the scholars about his pact, and they are horror-stricken (afflitti dal dolore) and resolve to pray for him. On the final night before the expiration of the twenty-four years, Faustus is overcome by fear and remòrse. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. At midnight, a host (ospite, oste) of devils appears and carries his soul off (portare via) to hell. In the morning, the scholars find Faustus’s limbs (arti) and decide to hold a funeral for him. Doctor Faustus: the power of knowledge 1) Man's Limitations and Potential The possible range of human accomplishment (realizzazione) is at the heart of Doctor Faustus, and many of the other themes are auxiliary to this one. The axis of this theme is the conflict between Greek or Renaissance worldviews, and the Christian worldview that has held sway (dominare) throughout the medieval period. As Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, contact with previously lost Greek learning had a revelatory effect on man's conception of himself. While the Christian worldview places man below God, and requires obedience to him, the Greek worldview places man at the center of the universe. For the Greeks, man defies the gods at his own peril, but man has nobility that no deity can match. Doctor Faustus is a scholar and a lover of beauty. He seeks to achieve godhood himself, and so he leaves behind the Christian conceptions of human limitation. Though he fancies himself to be a seeker of Greek greatness, we see quickly that he is not up to the task. 2) Pride and Sin Pride is one of the Seven Deadly Sins, arguably (senza dubbio) the one that leads to all the others. Within the Christian framework, pride is a lethal motivation because it makes the sinner forget his fallen state. For Christians, men are fallen since birth, because they carry with them the taint of original sin. A men made haughty (altero) with pride forgets that he shares Eve's sin, and must therefore be saved by the gift of grace. Only God, through Christ, can dispense this grace, and the man who forgets that fact deprives himself of the path to salvation. Faustus' first great sin is pride. He does not stop there. Reflecting the Christian view, pride gives rise to all of the other sins, and ends ironically with the proud man's abasement (degradazione / umiliazione). Faustus goes quickly from pride to all of the other sins, becoming increasingly petty (meschino) and low. 3) Flesh and Spirit In Christianity, flesh and spirit are divided to value the later and devalue the former. Faustus' problem is that he values his flesh, and the pleasure it can provide him, while failing to look after the state of his soul. 4) Damnation Damnation is eternal. Eternal hell is another concept that Westerners take for granted as part of religion, but again this belief of uniqueness needs to be appreciated. While the Jewish view of the afterlife was somewhat vague, Christians developed the idea of judgment after death. If Faustus dies without repenting and accepting God, he will be damned forever. As we learn from Mephistopheles, hell is not merely a place, but separation from God's love. 5)Valuing Knowledge over Wisdom Faustus has a thirst for knowledge, but he seems unable to acquire wisdom. Faustus' thirst for knowledge is impressive, but it is overshadowed (eclissare/ fare passare in secondo piano) by his complete inability to understand certain truths. Because of this weakness, Faustus cannot use his knowledge to better himself or his world. He ends life with a head full of facts, and vital understanding gained too late to save him. 6) Talk and Action Faustus is, with no exceptions, beautiful when he speaks and contemptible when he acts. His opening speeches about the uses to which he'll put his power are exhilarating, but once he gains near-omnipotence he squanders (sprecare) twenty-four years in debauchery and petty tricks. This gap between high talk and low action seems related to the fault of valuing knowledge over wisdom. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Although Shakespeare is probably the most famous writer in the world, relatively little is known his life. His father was a glove-maker and his mother came from a prosperous family. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, eight year his senior. By 1592 he was already a well-known playwright. Shakespeare became a leading member of the theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (In these years he also became a founder member of The Chamberlain’s Company, a kind of cooperative of actors for whom he was the resident playwright. They soon became the leading company in London and were often invited to perform in private before Elizabeth I and her court. His acting career continued, and we know that in 1598 he acted in Ben Jonson’s play, Every Man in his Humour), with whom he worked for the rest of his career as actor, playwriting and administrator. He 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 playwriting he wrote 37 plays. Humours Every Man in His Humourpopularized 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 (flemma), 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 effect - the 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)chòleric (yellow bile) c)sanguine (blood) d)phlegmatic (phlegm) He wrote 37 plays, none of which were published in authorized editions during his lifetime. They were collected in an edition known as the First Folio in 1623. Comedies Shakespeare’s romantic comedies mostly date from the early period of his life. Light-hearted (spensierato/allegro) plays, mostly on themes relating to love, they feature stock theatrical devices as the mistaken identity (as in The Comedy of Errors) and cross-dressing (travestimento)(as in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), where the comedy was accentuated by the fact that the parts of women were still acted by men or boys (and it would be until after the Restoration in 1660). These plays used generally extremely complicated plots, wordplay and wit. Shakespeare’s later comedies, written probably after 1598 (e.g. Much Ado (rumore) about Nothing, As You Like It, Twelfth Night) display a shift in tone to a greater seriousness.The rollicking (allegro/chiassoso) heroes still remain (for example Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor) but, in keeping with the spirit of the times, there is a growing presence of meditation and melancholy, as well as romance. The treatment of themes such as the unreliability (inaffidabilità) of love, of illusion and self-deception (autoinganno) paved the way for the great tragedies to come. In particular, the use of the clown or fool (buffone) (Touchstone in As You Like It) and their bitter-sweet attitude to life (as in King Lear, or in Anthony and Cleopatra) became a turning point in drama where their seemingly childish words usually conceal a macabre wisdom which the saner characters in the plays fail to recognize. The Histories Shakespeare began his career with a history play, Henry VI, and the last play attributed to him is also a history, Henry VIII, but most of this category of plays belong to the middle part of his career, between 1595-1600. He often transformed historical events creatively to suit (andare bene/adattarsi) the political climate and tastes of the Elizabethan age and to produce plays dealing with themes of rebellion and kingship at a time where there was a real fear that the existing order might be undermined (mettere a repentaglio/indebolire) by insurrection.They combine a vision of kingship as being divinely instituted, with a strong sense of the need for a moral guide to guarantee order in a state. These works played on the strong patriotic and nationalistic feelings of the day, highlighting the danger of divisions within the realm, which led to rebellion and usurpation. The Tragedies Shakespeare’s great tragedies (Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Timon of Athens, Romeo and Juliet, Titus Andronicus) were written between 1601-1608.Here the world-view has shifted to a rather bitter and disillusioned outlook and the emphasis is on tragic heroes, defined by the celebrated critic Bradley as, “conspicuous persons of high degree” whose fall leads to death and suffering.The tragic flaw (difetto / pecca) which these great heroes display take the form of a powerful passion (jealousy in Othello, ambition in Macbeth or revenge in Hamlet), which in the course of the play is revealed to be an exceptional disturbance of normal moral laws.The balance must be righted again and restored through the destruction of the hero. Darker forces often seem to be at work, and the whole world seems to be involved in the implacable progress of destiny.Supernatural phenomena as well as the frequent madness are indicators of the feverish (delirante) pitch to which the struggle between one man and his destiny is carried. The late romances embraces the later plays written after Shak. retired to Stratford, around 1608.It includes: Pericles;Cymbeline*; The Winter’s Tale*; The Tempest. *Cymbeline is based on legends concerning the early Celtic British King Cunobelinus. Although listed as a tragedy in the First Folio, modern critics often classify Cymbeline as a romance. The plot of Cymbeline is loosely based on a tale by Geoffrey of Monmouth about the real-life British monarch Cunobelinus. *The main plot of The Winter's Tale is taken from Robert Greene's pastoral romance Pandosto (King of Bohemia), published in 1588. These works are more lyrical in comparison with the earlier plays and seem to represent a newly found peace of mind in Shakespeare’s art.All these plays somehow deal with the reconciliation and justice, moving from a starting point of loss or wrong, through a series of conflicts to a happy and forgiving conclusion, exposing (smascherare) the corruption of civilization and reasserting the value of mercy and love. They also have a strong supernatural presence and have something of the qualities of a fairy tale and in their tranquillity constitute a fitting conclusion to Shak’s career: the aging playwright, after the great conflict which resulted in the production of the tragedies, finds peace and reconciliation in his own heart at last. The Merchant of Venice Antonio, a Venetian merchant, complains to his friends of a melancholy that he cannot explain. His friend Bassanio is desperately in need of money to court Portia, a wealthy heiress who lives in the city of Belmont. Bassanio asks Antonio for a loan in order to travel in style to Portia’s estate. Antonio agrees, but is unable to make the loan himself because his own money is all invested in a number of trade ships that are still at sea. Antonio suggests that Bassanio secure the loan from one of the city’s moneylenders and name Antonio as the loan’s guarantor. Themes Self-interest vs love On the surface the main difference between the Christian characters and Shylock appears to be that Christians value human relationships over business ones, whereas Shylock is only interested in money. However, upon closer inspection that supposed difference 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 ring’s monetary value. Some human relationships do indeed matter to Shylock. Finally Shylock eloquently argues that Jews are human beings just as Christians are, but Christian such as Antonio hate Jews simply because they are jews. Thus while the Christians characters may talk more about mercy, love, charity they are not always consistent in how they display these qualities. Laws The Merchant of V. depends heavily upon laws and rules (the laws of the state of Venice and the rules stipulated in contracts and wills). Laws can be manipulated for cruel purpose but they are also capable of producing good when executed by the right people. When Portia arrives and manipulates the law skilfully, the outcome is the happy ending (Antonio is rescued, and Shylock refuses his revenge). However, despite the happy ending, the manipulation of laws and contracts raises the fearful spector of how the law can be misused. Characters Antonio: Antonio is the title character of the play. Although Shylock is often thought of as the main character, Antonio is actually the “merchant” of Venice. Antonio’s love for his friend Bassanio causes him to sign Shylock’s contract and set up the most interesting conflict in the play. Antonio’s famous opening line is mysterious: In sooth, I know not why I am so sad. (I, 1) No reason is given in the play for his melancholy. Is Shakespeare suggesting that the quest for material wealth is doomed to sadness and frustration. Is this also true of Shylock? Antonio also possesses an incorrigible dislike of Jews, having kicked and spit on Shylock in the past. Is this a “normal” view of Christian anti-Semitism for the time period, or is Shakespeare suggesting a darker meaning that makes the audience uneasy about Antonio’s intolerance? Antonio is beloved of his friends and ultimately proves merciful to Shylock, although he requires him to convert to Christianity. In the end, Antonio learns to achieve happiness by risking all his material wealth for the sake of friendship. Bassanio A gentleman of Venice, and a kinsman and friend of Antonio. Bassanio is a key figure in both main plots: Bassanio, a suitor of Portia, must select the correct casket to win her hand. Bassanio’s need for cash in order to compete with Portia’s other suitors sets up the loan from Shylock to Antonio. An unsuccessful businessman, Bassanio proves himself a successful suitor, correctly identifying the casket that contains Portia’s portrait. After the trial scene, Bassanio is encouraged to give up Portia’s ring, setting up the final subplot in Act V. Portia: One of the most resourceful heroines in Shakespeare’s mature romantic comedies. She is bound by the lottery set forth in her father’s will, but is determined to marry Bassanio, while being tactful to her other suitors. In the court scene, Portia saves Antonio’s life by finding a technicality in the bond. Portia also sets in motion the “ring plot” at the end of the play to embarrass Bassanio and Gratiano, but is careful not to take the prank too far. Although Portia delivers one of the most famous speeches in the play on the quality of mercy, she displays cruelty to Shylock when she awards half of his estate to the state and the other half to Antonio, as the Venetian whose life he threatened. Critics who are sympathetic to Shylock sometimes see Portia as an example of Christian prejudice and cruelty. Shylock: As the play’s antagonist, Shylock can be interpreted a number of different ways: A greedy and bloodthirsty moneylender A clownish Jewish stereotype A tragic figure who is persecuted by a backwards society Shylock is despised as a moneylender, or usurer, but this was the only occupation a Jew could have in medieval Venetian society. Because Shylock is both reviled as a moneylender and pitied as a persecuted Jew, he is the most compelling and complex character in the play. While Elizabethan audiences probably viewed him as a comic character, most modern audiences are sympathetic to him because of the cruelty he has endured at the hands of Christians. His character alone adds tragic overtones to a play that would otherwise be classified as a comedy. Jessica: Daughter of Shylock, in love with Lorenzo Although Jessica is Jewish, her behavior towards her father reinforces the anti- Semitic attitudes of Shakespeare’s England. Jessica describes life in her father’s house as “hell.” (II, 3) She betrays her father by rejecting her faith and eloping with a Christian, Lorenzo. In the trial, she is awarded all of Shylock’s possessions after his death, half of which will be held in trust by Antonio. Anti-semitism One interpretation of the play is that Shakespeare intended to contrast the mercy of the Christian characters with the vengefulness of Shylock. The conflict between Portia and Shylock in the trial scene can also be seen as the conflict between the vengeful, exacting God of the Old Testament, whose priority is Justice (Shylock) and the merciful God of the New Testament (Portia). From a Christian point of view, Shylock’s conversion to Christianity at the end of the play is a “happy ending”—his soul is saved and he can now enter heaven. Modern audiences, however, often see the play as a plea for tolerance, with Shylock as the sympathetic character. This interpretation faults Portia as a “false judge” who has no right to sentence Shylock at all. Shylock’s anger does not come from some inherent “Jewishness,” but from years of abuse. Although Shylock is condemned for greed and dishonesty, the Christian characters can also be seen as hypocritical. Bassanio initially seeks Portia’s hand in marriage so he can pay his debts. Although Portia delivers a moving speech on the subject of mercy, her judgment against Shylock can be seen as cruel and barbaric. Regardless of Shakespeare’s intentions, the play has been used by anti-Semites throughout its history. The Nazis used Shylock’s character for their own propaganda. Shortly after Kristallnacht in 1938, The Merchant of Venice was broadcast for propagandistic purposes over the German airwaves. Productions of the play followed in Lübeck (1938), Berlin (1940), and elsewhere within the Nazi Territory. Love: The central romantic relationship in the play is between Bassanioand Portia.Their marriage is paralleled by two other pairs of loversShylock’s daughter, Jessica, elopes with the Christian, Lorenzo. Portia’s servant, Nerissa, marries Bassanio’s companion, Gratiano. Love is seen as related to economic and legal concerns: Bassanio borrows money from Antonio to woo the wealthy Portia, so he can get out of debt. Portia is bound by the terms of her father’s riddle and must marry the man who picks the correct casket. As is often the case in Shakespearean comedies, the play ends with multiple marriages (Portia and Bassanio, Nerissa and Gratiano, and Jessica and Lorenzo). Antonio's mysterious depression in the opening line and complete devotion to Bassanio has led some critics to theorize that he is in love with Bassanio. In this interpretation, Antonio is depressed because Bassanio is coming to an age where he will soon marry a woman. In the end, Bassanio (the Christian) wins both love and wealth when he marries Portia. Shylock (the Jew) loses his daughter’s love, his religion, and all his possessions. Ultimately, Antonio is rewarded with wealth (his ships finally come in), but he is alone at the end of the play. If the critics who believe he is in love with Bassanio at the beginning of the play are right, he achieves wealth, but loses love. HAMLET On a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts (bastioni) of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Discovered first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar Horatio, the ghost resembles the recently deceased King Hamlet, whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne and married the king’s widow, Queen Gertrude. When Horatio and the watchmen bring Prince Hamlet, the son of Gertrude to see the ghost, it speaks to him, declaring ominously that it is indeed his father’s spirit, and that he was murdered by none other than Claudius. Ordering Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his throne and married his wife, the ghost disappears with the dawn. lPrince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness. Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behavior and attempt to discover its cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him. When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in conversation with the girl. But though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia: he orders her to enter a nunnery (convento) and declares that he wishes to ban marriages. lA group of traveling actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s guilt. He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet imagines his uncle to have murdered his father, so that if Claudius is guilty, he will surely react. When the moment of the murder arrives in the theatre, Claudius leaps up (balzare) and leaves the room. Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer would send Claudius’s soul to heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate revenge and decides to wait. Claudius, now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent to England at once. Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He draws his sword and stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime, he is immediately dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders (ordini precisi) for the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death. Hamlet is much more than a tragedy of a revenge. Among the other themes explored in the play are the meaning of action, power, honour, justice, doubt, death, the restoration of order, the nature of human beings and the nature of the good rulers. A recurrent motif in Hamlet is the idea that interior evil and disease are concealed under the false appearance of a healthy exterior. The rapport between appearance and reality, which as we have seen is typical of much Renaissance literary production, is probably best exemplified in the “play within the play”. One of the most relevant ideas to a modern reading of the play is the complex figure of Hamlet himself, who is one of the first truly modern characters in literature. Hamlet is a figure who is radically isolated, cut off both from society and from any kind of religious or moral certainly. Hamlet is the first character in literature who possesses full self-consciousness. In his soliloquies Hamlet melancholically teaches us how to speak to ourselves. With Hamlet, Shakespeare invents a character who is free to decide for himself, but his actions provoke a chain of tragic consequences which are beyond his control, leading to the deaths of nearly everyone in the play. But finally both Hamlet snd the audience are forced to ask themselves if what he did was right, destroying a human community in the name of filial loyalty and a higher, abstract idea of justice. The mystery of Death In the aftermath of his father’s murder, Hamlet is obsessed with the idea of death and over the coureses of the events he considers death from many perspectives. Throughout, the idea of death is closely tied to themes of spirituality, truth, uncertainty in that death may bring the answers to Hamlet’s deepest questions.The question of his own death plagues H. as he repeatedly contemplates whether or not suicide is a morally legitimate action in an unbearably painful world. However he fears that if he commits suicide he will be consigned to eternal suffering because of Christian religion’s proibition of suicide. Hamlet frequently makes comments referring to every human body’s eventual decay noting that even kings are eaten by worms. Misogyny Shattered by his mother’s decision to marry Claudius so soon after her husband’s death , H. becomes cynical about women in general, showing a particular obsession with what he perceives to be a connection between female sexuality and moral corruption. This motif is an important inhibiting factor in Hamlet’s relationships with Ofelia. He urgers Ophelia to go to a nunnery rather than experience the corruptions of sexuality. Hamlet “madness” If Hamlet is mad, most of his actions can be easily accounted for. However, if one comes to the conclusion that Hamlet is sane, at least for part of the play, this allows an element of disorder into proceedings, as it is difficult for the audience to ascertain the exact nature of his motivation for his actions.Although Hamlet, after meeting the Ghost, seems fairly clear in his mind about his course of action, he procrastinates for a long time about whether and how and when he should kill Claudius, even passing up a perfect opportunity to do so. It is worth considering why, if Hamlet is so sure of himself, he hesitates to convert his intentions into actions. He is not sure of himself…only at the end does he seem to show some ‘This is I, Hamlet the Dane’ yet he still reverts to being unsure when Ophelia dies. Therefore we can read it as hesitation, until he starts to believe it fate in Act5. •It could be that the course that fate has set out for Hamlet conflicts with his personality. We can see from Hamlet’s early exchanges that he is a philosophical and contemplative character, enjoying verbal and conceptual duels with his friends. The action that he has sworn to take requires quick and brutal resolution, and this polarisation of action and nature could be the reason for Hamlet’s hesitation. Through the madness, or the hurt he felt from Ophelia when she didn’t respond to him. It seems that he always loved her to conjure such a reaction from him, especially at the funeral. Hamlet is disgusted by Danish culture, which at the time included massive amounts of drinking, feasting and vulgarity at times of celebration. This is shown when he says of these customs “More honoured in the breach than in the observance. It seems though that this was going on when King Hamlet was alive ‘the pith and marrow of our attributes’ so Demark has not suddenly gone into disorder through his death. It is obvious to any audience of Hamlet that much of Hamlet’s struggles and conflicts are internal. He is by nature a philosopher and a thinker. In such a trying situation, it is only natural that such a person would look within himself for answers. This is why we perhaps view him as self absorbed, he can only see his pain and therefore gets a different view on the world…this could be the madness we see. The famous soliloquy beginning “To be or not to be, that is the question,” is generally viewed as a debate on suicide, something of a recurring theme. Hamlet rather impersonally considers the merits of death, which he compares to sleep, but finally concludes that the risk of pain in the afterlife makes suicide an option not worth taking. His view on death changes however in act 5 in the graveyard scene as he seems more rational and sees the physical death not the spiritual one. ‘Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returned to dust’. He is thought the tragic hero, he has his tragic flaw which is not to act, so the audience expect this. It also builds up and shows contrast when at the end he finally believes in fate and acts. Claudius One can argue that his act of fratricide was as motivated by his love of Gertrude as it was by his love of power, and so label the murder an act of passion. It could be that he wanted to win Gertrude's love and take Hamlet under his wing as his own son. He is never crystal clear, however the way he lets Gertrude drink and die at the end perhaps bring more order in the audiences mind to the fact that he was after just the political power. Gertrude Some directors, such as Kenneth Branagh, believe that there is evidence of an incestuous relationship between Gertrude and Hamlet, following Jones’ works on the Oedipus Complex in Hamlet. Polonius Most 20th century productions of Hamlet, up until around 1980, cast Polonius as a senile and pompous old man, and played him for laughs. However, recently directors have tended to make him younger and have emphasised his shiftiness rather than his senility. This all means that it is hard to view Polonius as one character: when analysing the role one must consider both sides of the man. Could he not be both…a man who is sometimes pompous and perhaps occasionally foolish, but still has a view for politics. In conclusion In conclusion, much of the disorder in Hamlet stems from the fact that there is not one major character who can be easily judged and categorised. Every character is multi-faceted and complex, and none more so than Hamlet himself. Because Hamlet is so changeable and difficult to read, because he rarely, if ever, shows the audience or the other characters his true feelings, he is impossible to analyse with certainty. This means that the audience has not only to deal with the plot - complicated in itself - and with the very complex characters with even more complex relationships, but must entertain many possibilities regarding each character’s actions, motivations, thoughts and especially their pasts. This creates a play littered full of interweaving plots and sub-plots, with each major character always involved in one of them. This makes for much disorder in the play. MACBETH The play begins with the brief appearance of a trio of witches and then moves to a military camp, where the Scottish King Duncan hears the news that his generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated two separate invading armies—one from Ireland and one from Norway. Macbeth and Banquo encounter the witches. The witches prophesy that Macbeth will be made thane (terre concesse dal sovrano) (a rank of Scottish nobility) of Cawdor and eventually King of Scotland. They also prophesy that Macbeth’s companion Banquo will father a line of kings thou he himself will not be king himself. The witches vanish, and Macbeth and Banquo treat their prophecies skeptically until some of King Duncan’s men come to thank the two generals for their victories in battle and to tell Macbeth that he has indeed been named thane of Cawdor. Macbeth is intrigued by the possibility that the remainder of the witches’ prophecy—that he will be crowned king—might be true, but he is uncertain what to expect. lHe visits with King Duncan, and they plan to dine together at Inverness, Macbeth’s castle, that night. Macbeth writes to his wife, Lady Macbeth, telling her all that has happened. Lady Macbeth suffers none of her husband’s uncertainty. She desires the kingship for him and wants him to murder Duncan in order to obtain it… Themes The corrupting power of unchecked ambition Macbeth is a courageous general who is not naturally inclined to commit evil deeds, yet he deeply desires power. Lady Machbeth pursues her goals with greater determination but in each case, ambition is what drives the couple to more terrible atrocities. The problem the play suggest is that one decides to use violence to further one’s quest for power, it is difficult to stop. The relationship between Cruelty and Masculinity Characters in Macbeth frequently dwell on issues of gender. Lady M. manipulates her husband by questioning his manhood and both (M. and Lady M) equate masculinity with naked aggression. At the same time, the audience notices that women are the sources of violence and evil and finding the roots of evil in women promoted misogynistic views of the play. The difference between kingship and tyranny In the play Duncan is always referred to as a “king” while M. soon becomes known as the “tyrant”. The model king offers the kingdom an embodiment of order and justice, comfort and affection. M. by contrast, brings only chaos to Scotland symbolized in the bad weather and bizarre supernatural events. He offers no real justice. He must be overcome so that Scotland can have a true king once more. The theme of ambitions: This theme is directly apparent in two main characters in the play: Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Macbeth: not naturally inclined to commit crime, yet deeply desires power and advancement. Kills Duncan against his better judgment and suffers guilt and paranoia. Deteriorates as play progresses. Lady Macbeth: more determined but less able to deal with the consequences of her actions. ´In each case ambition, (helped of course by the witches prophesies) is what drives this couple to commit these terrible atrocities. Once one decides to pursue ambition with violence, the more out of control it becomes. The temptation to use violence to achieve the throne presents itself over and over again through the potential threats to the throne (Fleance, Malcom, Banquo). “Fair is Foul and Foul is fair” Macbeth is a “fair host” as him and lady Macbeth plot King Duncan’s murder. Both a woman and a host, Lady Macbeth should be the model of grace and femininity, however, her thoughts are cold and evil. Tragic hero A tragic hero is a character that the audience sympathizes with despite his/her actions that would indicate the contrary. Macbeth, in spite of his horrible murders, is a pitiable man. Macbeth internally suffers. Plagued by fear, paranoia, sleeplessness and exhaustion. Macbeth: is a pitiable man, despite his terrible crimes. His saving grace is that he did not want to commit the crime in the first place but was coerced by Lady Macbeth. Macbeth suffers internally and is thus never able to enjoy his royal status. Macbeth background There was no Tudor successor to the throne of England. Therefore, Elizabeth I chose James VI of Scotland to succeed her. After her death in 1603, James VI of Scotland became James I of England. Elizabeth I had been instrumental in the death of her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who was beheaded. Macbeth: a tribute to King James I: ´Shakespeare wrote Macbeth in 1606, during King James’ reign: King James was a devout advocate of the “Divine Right of Kings; The setting is Scotland, King James’ homeland; Banquo was an ancestor of James and is shown in the play to be a virtuous person; James believed himself to be an expert on witchcraft; James had an interest in faith healing. Shakespeare demonstrated the Elizabethan belief that the country is stable only if the King is good and virtuous. Elizabethans believed that evil occurs in darkness, which is a recurring theme in Macbeth. Shakespeare included a lot of blood and murder, which the Elizabethans expected to see in a play. The play was considered a thriller – a threat to an anointed King and the perceived evil behind the threat – and alluded to the Gunpowder plot of 1605. CHARACTERS and other themes Lady Macbeth: Began as courageous and daring (still evil); Courage deteriorated, broke down ; Lady Macbeth: courage and daring nature deteriorates into delusional, hapless somnambulist; Breaks down mentally and physically because of the strain of the crime. Macbeth and his wife are pitiable characters because the reader is able to follow their every thought and action.  Thus, the reader sees not only their gruesome effects on the Scottish people but also on themselves. Theme of light and darkness Most of Macbeth takes place in the dark, and both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seem to believe that the dark can hide their crimes, perhaps even from themselves. THE TEMPEST (confronto con Defoe) Generally it regarded as Shakespeare’s last play in 1611 and ti was performed for King James I and at the marriage festivities of his daughter Elizabeth. THE PLOT: Prospero, Duke of Milan, deposed from his throne by his broche Antonio, has been shipwrecked on an Island with his daughter Miranda. Thanks to his knowledge of magic, Prospero frees the spirit Ariel, who was imprisoned by a witch called Sycorax and who then becomes Prospero’s servant. He also has another servant, Caliban,Sycora’s son. Caliban is described as a monstrous creature and was the sole inhabitant of the Island until Prospero’s arrival. The play begin with a storm raised by Prospero’s magic which causes the ship carrying Antonio, Alonso King of Naples, his broche Sebastian and Alonso’s son Ferdinand to be shipwrecked off the Island. Ferdinand meets Miranda and the couple fall in love but Prospero puts a spell on Ferdinand to protect his daughter’s virtue before finally permitting the couple to marry at the end of the play. Meanwhile, on the other part of the island, Antonio and Sebastian, are planning to kill Alonso, and Caliban tries to murder Prospero and take control of the island. At the end of the play, with the help of the spirit Ariel, all the characters are finally reunited. Prospero forgives Antonio on the condition that he returns his dukedom to him, and before they all embark for Italy, he sets Caliban and Ariel free, renouncing both his political and magic powers. Source: William Strachey’s account of the shipwreck of the Sea Venture in 1609. Themes: Right relationship; Responsibilities; Master/Servant; Revenge or mercy; Commentary on European exploration of new lands; Utopianism; Colonialism; Imperialism; “The Other”; Nature of indigenous peoples; The role of the artist ; Autobiographical? ACT I AND II:In The Tempest, Shakespeare seems to have anticipated the race, class and gender politics of Colonialism: Prospero is the Colonial Master, deposed from his European seat, andnow imposing his rule on Caliban’s Island; Ariel is the “good native,” who happily does the bidding of the master; Caliban is the “bad native” who must be controlled and enclave; Miranda is the “prize” the ideal of feminine purity that must be protected from the savane; Ferdinand is the “heir” to Europe’s wealth and power, though he hasn’t done anything to deserve his good fortune; Stephan and Trinculo represent the lower-class Europeans who emulate the upper class in seeking to take advantage of the natives; Antonio, Adrian and Sebastian are European courtiers who will take advantage of any opportunity to advance their positions; Antonio (brother of Prospero and usurping Duke of Milan) plots with Sebastian to overthrow his brother, Alonso (King of Naples). But, in The Tempest, there are occasional reminders of the pre-modern, pre-colonial attitudes, in which class is all-important, and race has not yet been identified as a category of inferiority: The court of Naples is shipwrecked on this island because they are returning to Europe after a marriage in Tunis: the King of Naples has married his daughter, Clarabelle, to the King of Tunis, an African.The most seriously “criminal” characters in the play are European aristocrats like Sebastian and Antonio, not Caliban. Features of the play The text probably derives from more than one source. Some passages echo the English translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or the accounts of the shipwreck of the Sea-Adventure off the coast of the Bermudas in 1609. The tempest is a complex play where magic and reality intermingle. Indeed, one of its main themes is magic in the play there are two types of magic represented by the witch Sycorax (black magic) and by Prospero (white magic). In Marlowe’s Faustus the magus was represented as a fascinating but diabolical figure in league with the devil. Shakespeare’s Prospero is the good magician of Christian Cabala. Though, like that of Faustus, his magic is influenced by the ideas of Agrippa. Prospero claim to use it for “good” ends. In fact in the tempest, the idea of “black” magic is connected exclusively to the world of the slave Caliban and his mother, the witch Sycorax. Prospero’s magic is a “reforming” magic, connected with the idea of a good empire. In his concern for his daughter Miranda’s chastity, for example, Prospero evokes the themes of Elizabethan imperial ambitions, when Elizabeth’s chastity was the emblem of her ideal role as an Empress. Another crucial theme in the Tempest is power in all its form: the power of European culture over non- European cultures, the power of language and the power of its artist to create illusion. The relationship between Prospero and Caliban reflects the power of the colonisers over colonise peoples. Prospero calls Caliban “a devil, a born devil” and the question of language becomes a political ne. Prospero’s daughter teaches Caliban to speak their language, but only so that he can become a more efficient servant. Caliban rebels against this role, preferring to use the language he has been taught to curse Prospero. This section of the play refers In part to the ongoing colonisation of the Americans and to the idea of imposing European values and culture on the natives in the belief that they are savages who have no values and culture of their own. The figure Ariel stands as a metaphor for the powers of the art and language that the artist may borrow to create his works but can never master completely. Art and language have a life of their own, beyond the author. On a different level, Prospero’s release of Caliban at the end of the play is accompanied by an acknowledgment that he, too, contains something of Caliban’s savage uncontrollable nature. This has been much commented on, particularly in post-colonial readings of the play. Sonnets The cycle of 154 Sonnets (thought to be written in the 1590s although unpublished until 1609) is the most the enigmatic of all his works and continue to excite speculation to this day. Apparently addressed partly to a fair young man and partly to a mysterious dark lady, they deal with themes of love and the passage of time and friendship. 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. These range from fascination with the man’s girl-like beauty to his sufferings at the man’s indifference to him, to his sadness at growing old and he fact that the young man’s youth will also fade. Shakespeare frequently returns to the conflict between the beauty of what his eyes see and the truth of what his heart knows, concluding that appearances are often deceptive. Shakespeare wishes to preserve the eternal part of the young man’s beauty against the effects of time. Love is judged to be stronger than time, but poetry as in the sonnet Spenser we have just read, is considered immortal. The indestructible container of an eternal memory, it will triumph over time. 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 this idea of poetry’s capacity to immortalise. Language Shake’s English was very different from modern English. Some words do not exist any more and others had the same form but a different meaning. One of the most important grammatical features that is possible to notice is the use of the second singular form “thou/thy/thine” (you, your/yours). The verb form for this generally ended in –est or –st. So “Thou didst” ---you did; “Thou seest” –you see. Some verbs had irregular form: “Thou hast”—you have; “Thou art” – you are, also said “Thou beest”; hath– has; doth– does; land there were other alternative third person singular forms in – th. Some structure may seem strange to modern ears, as for example the comparative, where Shak. often uses “more” together with the form –er, such as in “more better”; Negatives were also often formed by putting “not” after normal verbs rather than using auxiliaries. Some common contractions were ’tis- it is; ‘twas-it was; ‘t: it. Sonnet 130 Sonnet 130 is clearly a parody of the conventional love sonnet, made popular by Petrarch and, in particular, made popular in England by Sidney's use of the Petrarchian form in his epic poem Astrophel and Stella. The elements of the conventional love sonnet are light-heartedly mocking (prendere in giro). In Sonnet 130, there is no use of grandiose metaphor or allusion; he does not compare his love to Venus, etc. The ordinary beauty and humanity of his lover are important to Shakespeare in this sonnet, and he deliberately uses typical love poetry metaphors against themselves. In Sidney's work, for example, the features of the poet's lover are as beautiful and, at times, more beautiful than the finest pearls, diamonds, rubies, and silk. In Sonnet 130, the references to such objects of perfection are indeed present, but they are there to illustrate that his lover is not as beautiful -- a total rejection of Petrarch form and content. Shakespeare uses a new structure, through which the straightforward (diretto) theme of his lover’s simplicity can be developed in the three quatrains and neatly concluded in the final couplet. But Shakespeare ends the sonnet by proclaiming his love for his mistress despite her lack of adornment, so he does finally embrace the fundamental theme in Petrarch's sonnets: total and consuming love. Sonnet 18 “Sonnet 18” uses a typical convention of Renaissance poems about the transience of youth and beauty: comparison with aspects of nature. In this sonnet the poet begins by considering what metaphorical comparison would best reflect and the same time preserve the image of the young man. His first idea is to compare him “to a summer’s day”, because the man’s youth is similar to nature in full bloom. But summer, he knows, especially in England, is often short and the weather is changeable: one minute it’s too hot, the next the sun has disappeared and it’s turned cold again. This unpredictable alteration between good and bad weather, typical of English summers, does not convey the sense of balance and harmony the poet sees in the young man’s beauty. It is also true that, like a real summer, the young man’s youth will not last long. In fact, it is not in nature, but only in art that the poet will be able to preserve the idea of youth, the imagined perfect day of the young man’s “eternal summer”. This marks the turning point of the sonnet. In the world of the poem, the young man’s beauty will never fade or die, but will go on growing in the minds of a readers for centuries to come. Sonnet 60 The power of these sonnets lies in their attempt to address the human condition in general and to become a universal expression of it. The atmosphere is much darker than the Sonnet 18. The poet is in a melancholy mood but his melancholy inspires him to reflect on how the progress of human life resembles the futile movement of the waves. Just as each wave dies as soon as it reaches the shore, only to be replaced by the next, the minutes of our lives pass quickly away. Minutes, like the waves, are small units and they help to convey the inexorable forward movement of time. But, again like the waves breaking on the shore, they also suggest how much time is simply wasted. In the second stanza the poet evokes the “ages of man”, a familiar subject in art of the period, tracing the short path from birth to adulthood and then old age. In the beginning time is seen as benevolent, the giver of life, but as we grow older, it becomes a trap. The positive value of the gift of life is cancelled by the fact that it is also the gift of death. After a middle period, in which the appearance of youth appears to be fixed or paralysed comes old age and physical decay. Time is portrayed as the conqueror of all. Everything to which he has given life must also die. Finally comes the turning point of the sonnet, in which Shakespeare speaks again of the immortality of poetry and the fact that it is the only thing which can survive the effects of time. It appears only at the very end, in the final couplet, and seems much weaker and less confident in its expression. Poetry may survive the effects of time but here it seems to offer limited consolation. THE EARLY SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (metaphysical poetry) John Donne Ben Jonson In 1616 Ben Jonson published his Works to the derision of those astounded to see mere plays and poems collected under the same title the king gave to his political treatises. Jonson knew and admired both Donne and Shakespeare and more than any Jacobean belonged to both of their very different worlds, but in publishing his Works he laid claim to higher literary status. He had risen from humble beginnings to become England’s unofficial poet laureate. His first successful play, Every Man in His Humour, had inaugurated to so-called comedy of humours. He capitalized on this success with the comedies Volpone (1606), Epicene (1609), The Alchemist (1610). Jonson preserved the detached, satiric perspective of an outsider, but he was rising in society and making accommodations where necessary. Ben Jonson modelled himself on classical authors and his characters were types like those of Theophrastus, or were intended to illustrate the theory of Humours. In early Western physiological theory, a Humour is one of the four fluids of the body that were thought to determine a person's temperament and features. In the ancient physiological theory still current in the European Middle Ages and later, the four cardinal humours were blood, phlegm, choler (yellow bile), and melancholy (black bile); the variant mixtures of these humours in different persons determined their “complexions,” or “temperaments,” their physical and mental qualities, and their dispositions. The ideal person had the ideally proportioned mixture of the four; a predominance of one produced a person who was sanguine (Latin sanguis, “blood”), phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholic. Volpone Ben Jonson -had a passion for the varied and colourful London life of his time; had a boisterous and even cruel sense of humor; showed impressive originality even when working within classical models Volpone is characterised with: - savagery (crudeltà) and humour -moral feeling and grim (severa) characterisation of the monstrous absurdities of human nature It could be read as: -a moral exemplum -a beast fable (a beast fable is a short tale in which the principle actors are animals. Jonson’s characters are people, but they have the characteristics of animals, as their names reveal) -a satire (on English life in General) -a humour play -a tragedy. The play Volpone is very pessimistic. A principle theme is the way that greed can make people gullible. In playing their trick, which focuses on exposing the greed of others, Volpone and Mosca also expose their own selfishness and greed (which is greater than that of the victims). The setting is Renaissance Italy, accepted by the English imagination of the time as the proper home of vice.The characters are deliberately restricted in scope in the interests of the satiric purpose. They are pretty shallow and rearely show genuine emotions. They could be described as two-dimentional. There is no real catharsis in the play, no true triumph of good over evil. Bonario and Celia are not saved by their gods but because the evil people tell on each other. Plot Inspired by classical stories of the of the captatores, the legacy hunters of Rome, described by Petronius and others, Jonson created with Volpone the story of a cunning rich man who feigns a mortal illness so that his wealthy neighbours would court his favour in hopes of becoming his heir. But Volpone ( Big Fox) cannot act alone. His servant Mosca (Fly) plays on the legacy hunters’ hopes and fears acting as Volpone’s agent but also capable of double-cross. He promises each of the legacy hunters that Volpone will name him as his heir, and he urge each of the ‘birds of pray’ to speed the process by showing Volpone examples of their good will and respect through what else but gifts. Thus each is induced to bring gifts to the supposedly dying Volpone, with the idea that they will not only receive gifts back when he dies but all his other treasures as well. The eager legacy hunters willingly hasten to prove the devotion to Volpone, but their eagerness has a malevolent side: they become willing to betray and destroy closest to them in hopes of getting the big reward. However, unlike in the conventional comedy, good does not necessarily triumph at the end, for even the state itself is shown to be easily corrupted. Volpone’s avarice seems to be epidemic, and good characters like Celia and Bonario stand at the mercy of evil. Every man in his humour Every Man in His Humour, not Jonson's greatest but probably his most influential play, first acted by the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1598, was entered in the Stationers' Register August 4, 1600, and was printed the following year. This version, with its scene laid in Florence and its chief characters bearing Italian names, was later carefully revised by Jonson for publication in the 1616 folio. The scene was shifted to London, the characters were given English names and were more individualized, and the expression in general was much altered, the most notable change being the excision of Lorenzo's (Knowell's) defence of poetry at the end of the play, a passage which delayed the action and to Jonson's mind probably violated the principle of decorum because it was unsuited to such a gathering. The plot is of Jonson's own invention, but from Chapman's An Humorous Day's Mirth (1599) he drew hints for the gull, and from Plautine comedy he derived the suggestion of a pair of elderly persons deceived and outwitted by a pair of clever, young men, is well as the shrewd serving-man and the braggart soldier. In its preservation of unity of tone, its observance of the unities of time, place, and action, and its truth to what is typical or normal in action and character, the play shows a definite adherence to the requirements of classical comedy as formulated by Renaissance criticism, notably by Sidney in his Defense of Poesy, published in 1595. The prologue to the later version of the play presents Jonson's essential dramatic theory for all his comedies. He here expresses condemnation of the wildly romantic tendencies in the drama and declares his purpose to "show the image of the times" by employing "deeds and language such as men do use," and to make follies, not crimes, his chief consideration. The Alchemist Jonson's most popular play is The Alchemist which was written during the plague season of 1610 for performance before Londoners who, like Lovewit, would return to their homes after all danger of infection had passed. The practice of alchemy was as common to the life of the time as it had been in the Middle Ages, and exposures of impostures such as Jonson portrays were so frequent in life as well as in literature that it has been impossible to discover any source for this aspect of the play. From Plautus' Mostellaria he may have derived the quarrel scene at the opening of the play and the idea of the unexpected return of the owner of a house in which rogues are carrying on their practices; and he may have taken certain minor suggestions from Plautus' Pœnulus and Erasmus' colloquy on the alchemist. The construction of the play reveals the hand of the master. All the unities are rigidly observed. The action takes place in a single day at a house in the Blackfriars district of London, and, while the three intrigues remain distinct, each being a unit in itself, they are actuated by similar motives, are pervaded by one comic tone, and are related to the general plan. Suspense as to the outcome of the action constantly increases to the very end of the play. 1600 HISTORICAL BACKGROUND Under the early Stuart monarchs, (James I and Charles I) there was a definite shift in moral view. Elizabethan confidence began to waver (vacillare) and a rather more cynical (and realistic) view of human nature and corruption began to hold sway (avere influenza). Gradually the audience was also changing: Shakesperare’s move to the inside and more exclusive Blackfriars Theatre in 1609 was sign that the theatre was losing its appeal to the masses, despite the popular successes by Thomas Dekker, John Ford, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher (they wrote very popular comedies in the period 1608-1613). By the time the Puritans closed the Theatres in 1642 drama was in serious decline.* *the stock assumption of literary historians was that in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries there was an intense mutual hostility between Puritanism and the stage. Puritans regarded theatres as abominable haunts (tana) of vice and corruption which a well-regulated state would completely suppress. Dramatists regarded Puritans as hypocrites, who pretended to be holier than other people but were in fact motivated by various kinds of greed, for food, sex, and money. Classical settings such as Venice or Rome gave way to portraits of the corruption and hypocrisy of contemporary London society. This desperate world-views culminates in the tragedies of John Webster (1580-1634) which are unequalled in their gloomy(oscuro) vision of human nature. The Renaissance prose Alongside with the scientific and mathematical developments of the Renaissance went a parallel blossoming in the art of prose. The Renaissance prose displays a clear progress from the rather elaborate and ornamental style based on Cicero, which seemed too dense with subordinate clauses and artificial to modern readers* *Lyly's popular prose romance, Euphues, or The Anatomy of Wit (1578), set the fashion for the decade before Shakespeare started writing. Euphues is a rather moral romance distinguished by its elaborate style. Lyly was one of those who wanted to raise English prose to the height of sophistication of the great Latin stylists. The result is at times almost comic to us now--and soon became the subject of parody in his own time--but it was an important development in the awareness of English writers of the power of the language they spoke. another interesting example of Lyly's elegant and elaborate style is Endymion(1591). EUPHUISM It became an elegant Elizabethan literary style marked by excessive use of balance, antithesis, and alliteration and by frequent use of similes drawn from mythology and nature. The word is also used to denote artificial elegance. It was derived from the name of a character in the prose romances Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and his England (1580) by the English author Lyly. Although the style soon fell out of fashion, it played an important role in the development of English prose. It appeared at a time of experimentation with prose styles, and it offered prose that was lighter and more fanciful than previous writing. The influence of euphuism can be seen in the works of William Shakespeare who imitated the style in some works and parodied it in others. Both Lyly's prose works and his plays give many examples of the Renaissance creed that male friendship is to be considered superior to the love of a man for a woman (the woman's point of view is not considered). Euphues and Philautus vie (COMPETERE) for the love of Lucilla, realising finally that their friendship is more important; in the play Endymion Eumenides puts his love for his friend Endymion above his love for Semele. Translations were very important: Wyatt and Surrey had already rendered the petrarchian sonnet in English, but in the field of prose, translations of important works created the basic background for English prose style for the future generations. Of particular importance were North’s translations of Plutarch’s Lives, Chapman’s translations of Homer in the seventeenth century. Another key book was Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Baldassarre Castiglione’s treatise, The Courtierb (1508-1516), which brought its analysis of the perfect renaissance courtier in Italy over England. CIVIL WAR AND RESTORATION The Stuart monarchs were certainly less successful than the Tudors. They were obstinate in their beliefs, almost foolish.James I committed numerous errors which irritated Parliament and on the accession of Charles I in 1625 the main politcal issue of the period remained the struggle between the monarchy and Parliament. In 1628 a low known as the Petition of Right was forced on Charles which limited his power in several ways, including that of preventing him from raising taxes without parliamentary authorisation. This was the first major clash between the parliament and the king. When parliament refused to give money, Charles responded by dissolving parliament and from 1629-40 ruled as an absolute king.In 1640 unfortunately for him, he was forced to recall it for financial reasons and he had to agree to the Petition of Right in 1628, which gave Parliament, power over state finances and law. After a few years, Charles dissolved the parliament again and he made a success of it until 1637.He tried to make the Scottish Church accept the same organization as the Anglican Church, introduced the new prayer book, but predictably the Scots arose against him, and in 1638 he had to face the rebel Scottish army.Charles who was now without Parliament’s support had an inexperienced army and was forced to grant the Scots money. Thus he was obliged to convene (convocare) Parliament, which lost no time in imposing a new law saying that parliament had to meet at least once every three years. In 1642, a civil war was declared between these two factions – the Royalists or Cavaliers, who supported the king, and the Roundheads, the parliamentary faction led by Cromwell. In fact, the parliamentary faction were Puritan in outlook and were supported by the new gentry along with small landowners and artisans. In 1647, the defeated Ling Charles was imprisoned by the parliament and he was executed in 1649.The Parliament was in control, but the real power lay with Cromwell and the army. Eventually the conflict between Cromwell and Parliament came to a head with Cromwell establishing the Protectorate called Commonwealth (1653-58). This was essentially a monarchy by another name, with Cromwell at its head. His rule was a time of rigid social and religious laws on radical Protestant lines. Cromwell had a bodyguard of 160 men during the Protectorate. In the end he was just as dictatorial and autocratic as Charles and James had been. He called Parliament when he needed money and dismissed it when it argued. In the 17th century the definition of "commonwealth" expanded from its original sense of "public welfare" to a republic or democratic state. Unfortunately Cromwell’s government was too severe. They abolished the House of Lords and the Anglican Church and they enforced the strict observance of Puritan beliefs. He used the army to maintain law and order. There was to be no celebration of Christmas or Easter and no games on Sunday. The results of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate confirmed in the English a hatred of military rule and the severe Puritanism associated with it. From this point on Parliament opposed Puritanism vigourously. PURITANISM It was a religious reform movement which in the late 16th and 17th centuries sought to “purify” the Church of England of remnants of the Roman Catholic “popery”.Puritans became noted in the 17th century for a spirit of moral and religious earnestness that informed their whole way of life, and they sought through church reform to make their lifestyle the pattern for the whole nation. Their efforts to transform the nation contributed both to civil war in England and to the founding of colonies in America as working models of the Puritan way of life. This naturally led to the rejection of much that was characteristic of Anglican ritual at the time, these being viewed as “popish idolatry.” In its place the Puritans emphasized preaching that drew on(attingere/ ricorrere) images from scripture and from everyday experience. The moral and religious earnestness that was characteristic of Puritans was combined with the doctrine of predestination inherited from Calvinism, a sense of themselves as elect spirits chosen by God to live godly(devoto) lives both as individuals and as a community. Puritanism covered a wide variety of beliefs. They rejected any spiritual authority except that of the Bible. They questioned the power of official Church authorities and believed that the voice of God spoke in each man’s individual conscience and that no intermediary should interfere. Puritanism was very influential in the first half of the 17th century and from the Civil War until the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660a Puritan government ruled England. After the Restoration Puritans were at first denied participation in the Church of England and refused rights of free religious worship. Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, in his austere life and work ethic, could be described as a “Puritan hero”. The term Puritanism is also used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristic of the Puritans. GEORGE HERBERT (1593-1633) His style in his volume of religious poetry, the Temple, is simple and graceful, especially compared with his friend John Donne. These poems reflect Herbert’s struggle to define his relationship to God through biblical metaphors: king and subject, lord and courtier, master and servant, father and child. Unlike Donne, Herbert does not voice fears about his salvation or about his desperate sins; his anxieties center rather on his relationship with Christ, most often represented as that of friend with friend. His recourse is to develop a biblical poetics that renounces conventional poetic styles to depend instead on God’s “art” wrought in his own soul and displayed in the language and symbolism of the Bible. Herbert was influenced by the genre of the emblem, which typically associated mysterious but meaningful pictures and mottoes with explanatory text. Shaped poems like “the altar” or “Ester Wings” present image and picture at once. Other poems allude to typological symbolism, which reads persons and events in the Old Testament as types of Christ. The Temple: a collection of religious poems; Contest between secular wit and religious devotion; Spiritual struggle rather than auto-biographical sincerity, as in Donne; Emblematic objects: the human body is a church building; Remarkable variety of stanza forms, including pattern poems: ‘Easter Wings’. Easter Wings analysis So the most obvious thing about the form of "Easter Wings" is that it actually has a physical form. No same-old left-aligned vanilla-flavored poems in Herbert's Easter basket. These stanzas give new meaning to the phrase, A picture's worth a thousand words—or, in the case of "Easter Wings,". Officially known as carmen figuration or pattern/shaped/figural poetry, this type of poem-picture takes the relationship between form and content to a visual level. Take a look at these stanzas. Not only does their elegant unfurled wing-shape mimic the title of the poem; the changing line length also reflects the line-by-line meaning of each stanza. But just because "Easter Wings" looks like a bird doesn't mean it's flighty. With its symmetrical stanzas, ABABACDCDC rhymes, and impeccable iambic rhythm, this poem keeps its wings elegantly folded. Just check out how perfectly the stanzas match up. Adam ends up "most poor" at line 5? The speaker ends up "most thin" at line 15. The speaker's singing victories with the larks between lines 8 and 9? He's feeling the same with the hawks in lines 18 and 19. And lines 6 and 16 are actually identical. And just how do we get that sleek wing-curve without messing up the rhythm? First off, this baby's made of iambs, or sets of two syllables with the first one short and unstressed and the second one long and stressed. This non-stress/stress pattern gives iambic poetry its characteristic dadum dadum sound. Check out the stress pattern in the first line to get a feel for how this iambic rhythm plays out here (stressed syllables are bolded and italicized): Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store (1) If you count the number of non-stress/stress pairs here, you'll notice that this first line contains five iambs or 10 syllables. But wander down to line 2, and you'll count something different. This line has only 4 iambs or 8 syllables: Though foolishly he lost the same (2) Get out your magnifying glasses, sleuths, it's the case of the disappearing iamb. Keep counting and you'll discover the pattern: Herbert chops off an iamb every line until he hits line 5, which contains only two words, one iamb, and two syllables: Most poor (5) Line 6 is the same and then the pattern reverses, with each line gaining an iamb until at line 10 we're back up to a full 5. Tallying all the syllables gives us this overall pattern: 10, 8, 6, 4, 2, 2, 4, 6, 8, 10. On the page, those iambs look like wings. Simple but nifty. And even niftier when you realize that the content of the lines mirrors their size. HENRY VAUGHAN ( 1621- 1695 ) Some feature of Vaughan’s poetry derive from the rich Welsh-language poetic tradition: the frequency of assonance, consonance and alliteration; the multiplication of comparisons and similes; and the sensitivity to nature, especially the countryside around the Usk River. Some Vaughan’s poetry is secular. In 1650 Vaughan published his major collection of religious verse, Silex Scintillians; it was republished in 1655 with a second book added. A conversion experience may have prompted Vaughan’s turn to religious themes: the title of the book is explicated by the emblem of a flint-like heart struck by a bolt of lightning from the hand of God. While his secular poetry recalls Ben Jonson’s, the religious poetry overtly models itself on Herbert’s. Some twenty-six poems appropriate their titles from The Temple. Vaughan’s religious sensibility too differs markedly from Herbert’s. Unable to locate himself in a national Church of England, now dismantled by the war, he wanders unaccompanied through a landscape at once biblical, emblematic, and contemporary, mourning lost innocence. Vaughan seems unable to experience Christ as a friend or supporter in present trials (problemi), as Herbert so often does; instead, he longs for a full relationship with the divine yet to come, at the Last Day. Vaughan’s twin brother, Thomas, introduced him to Hermetic philosophy, an esoteric brand of Neoplatonism that found occult correspondences between the visible world of matter and the invisible world of spirits. RICHARD CRASHAW (1613-1649) Steps to the Temple, the name of Richard Crashaw’s collection of sacred poetry, clearly acknowledge George Herbert’s primacy among devotional poets. Crashaw was deeply influenced by the Counter-Reformation, which reacted against Protestant austerity. He is the only major English poet in the tradition of the Continental Baroque. Baroque style is exuberant, sensuous, and elaborately ornamented, and it deliberately decorum, challenging formal restrains and generic limitations. Crashaw’s favourite subject are typical of baroque art: the infant Jesus surrounded by angels and cherubs; the crucified Savior streaming blood; the sorrowful Virgin; the tearfully penitent Mary Magdalen. In 1646 Crashaw published , with the first version of Steps to the Temple, a book of secular poems, The delights of the Muses, some of them in the restrained style of Ben Jonson. Steps to the Temple (1646): a homage to Herbert; Sensuous images describe religious passion; Catholicism: Baroque mannerism; Secentismo, Gongorism. ROBERT HERRICK He was the most devoted of the Sons of Ben, though his epigrams and lyric also show the direct influence of calssical poets. Herrick’s single volume of poems; Hesperides, with its appended book of religiuos poems, Noble Numebers, contains over four hundred short poems. Many are love poems on the carpe diem theme. Also, he derives mythic energy and power form certain recurring motifs. One is metamorphis, the transience of aall natural things. Another is celebration- festivals and feasts- evoking the social, ritualistic, and even anthropological significances and energies contained in rural harvest festivals. For Herrick this involves love devoid of high passion and the creation of poetry against the revanges of time. Poems celebrating rural feasts and festivals, cerimonial social occasions, and the rituals of good fellowship reinforce the coservative values of social stability, tradition, and order threatened by the Puritans. Several poems that draw upon the Celtic mythology of fairy folk make their feasts, temples, worship and cerimonies stand in for the forbidden ceremmonies of the Laudian church and a life governed by ritual. THOMAS CAREW Thomas Carew is perhaps the Cavalier poet with the greatest range and complexity. His Poems published posthumorously, are witty(spiritoso) and often outrageous, but their emphasis on natural sensuality and the need for union between king and subject ecodes a serious critique of the Neoplatonic artifice of the Caroline court. It combines a dramatization of serious social and political problems in the antimasque with widly hyperbolic praise of the monarchs in the main masque. ANDREW MARVELL His style is characterised by art, elegant, well-crafted, limpid style, and the cool balance and reserve of some poems align him with Jonson. Yet his paradoxes and complexities of tone, his use of dramatic monologue, and his witty, dialectical arguments associate him with Donne. He is supremely original poet, so complex and elusive that it is often hard to know what he really thought about the subject he treated. Marvell recognizes divine providence in the political changes. Marvell accepted the Restoration but maintained his own indipendent vision and his abiding belief in religious toleration, a mixed state, and a costitutional government. Many of Marvell’s poems explore the hman condition in terms of fundamental dichotomies that resist resolution. Marvell experimented with style and genre to striking effect. Many of his dramatic monologues are voiced by named, naive personas who stand at some remove from the author. Metaphysical wit and Classical proportion. Milton’s influence: Christian Humanism, Puritanism; Wit is bound up with strong moral sense; Love of nature put to moral purpose. THE RESTORATION In 1660 Parliament offered to restore the monarchy if Charles would agree to concessions for religious toleration and a general amnesty. Charles was not as hard-headed as his father, and he agreed to the proposals. He returned to London on a wave of popular support to be crowned Charles II (1660-85). The Restoration was notable for a relaxation of the strict Puritan morality of the previous decades. Theatre, sports, and dancing were revived. Charles' court was notable for its revelry (baldoria) and licentiousness. While Charles was enjoying his new court, he was less than successful internationally. Supporters of the Parliament in the Civil War were allowed to hold positions of responsibility under the “restored” monarchy, although Parliament did not maintain its strength. Charles II allowed also both Catholic and Puritans minorities to exercise their faith freely. Unfortunately the parliament, strongly Anglican, did not agree, and in fact passed a law in 1673 which prevented Catholics from occupying public offices. This was intended to prevent Charles II from embracing the Catholic faith, to which he was generally attracted. 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 the Church and the 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. In 1662 an Act of Uniformity penalised all kinds of Puritan opinion which refused to conform to the Anglican doctrine. The Test Acts obliged candidates for public positions to be practising members of the Church of England. Another important event was when the Royal Society of London “for the improving of Natural Knowledge” received the king’s patronage in 1662. The Society reflected another fundamental attitude of the period: rationalism. During Charles II’s reign London was struck by two great calamities: first of all an outbreak of the plague, in 1665, which caused the death of about 100000 people, and then in 1666 the so-called “Great Fire”. Charles II died in 1685 leaving no heirs and his brother James II, a Catholic, succeeded to the throne trying to restore the Catholic Church and removing the laws preventing Catholics from holding power. Parliament resisted strongly because he had become more powerful than the King. The situation came to a head when the king produced a catholic male heir in 1688. Over the years the king menaced the interests of both Tories and Whigs with his intention to supplant Anglicanism and undermine parliament’s authority. So the Tories allied with the Wings to invite back from Holland William of Orange and his wife Mary, James’ Protestant daughter. In 1688 the king was forced to abdicate leading to the event which came to be known as the Glorious Revolution because it was relatively non-violent. William of Orange and his wife Mary were offered the throne by the parliament., an act which for the first time created a contract between a monarch and parliament, the Bill of Rights of 1689. From this point on the king could no longer raise taxes, form an army or suspend laws without parliament’s consent. In 1689 the Toleration Act granted freedom of worship to Protestant dissenters. In 1701 with the Act of Settlement parliament excluded James’ Catholic son from the succession. When William the Orange died childless in 1702, Mary’s younger sister Anne became the queen. During her reign England was involved in the War of Spanish Succession against France. INTELLECTUAL LIFE: SOME FATURES The publication in 1611 of the Authorized Version of the Bible(The revised version of the Bible, now in general use wherever the English tongue is spoken, was executed by order of King James I, and was completed and published in the year 1611. it is also known as KJV (King James Version), which was read and interpreted by many different people, led to the formation of a large number of new religious sects, such as the Baptists and the Quakers, who were later to be very important for their reforming work. The Pilgrim Fathers, a group of Puritan settlers (colonie), sailed to America in 1620 in order to achieve religious freedom and live according to their beliefs. They paved the way for the British domination of North America. The new empiricism in science (the idea that scientific assertions must be tested by experiment) displaced medieval theology. The Royal Society, an institution encouraging scientific research and progress, was founded by Charles II in 1660 (Isaac Newton was one of the members). The first newspapers began to appear. With the Act of Union in 1707, Scotland lost its own parliament in return for representation in the English parliament. In terms of its administrative and legal system, Scotland remained distinct from England as it does to this day. The Union had several positive consequences for Scotland which went from being a poor and under-developed country to having a share in England’s prosperity. The relation between the Ireland and England, on the other hand, had always been tempestuous and would remain so. English rulers began to attempt to suppress Irish dissent and to colonise the north of the with an Anglo-Scottish ruling class. In the 17th century Ireland was completely subdued by the armies of the Puritan Oliver Cromwell. During the Restoration a series of punitive laws and economic restrictions excluded Catholics from many professions and completely destroyed the Irish economy, creating widespread poverty and country. POETRY It cannot be denied that poetry was in decline after the Restoration but the genius of John Milton dominated the age. Satire too became a popular mode; the aim of satire was “to make men laugh themselves out their follies and vices” and this anticipated the explosion of satire in eighteenth century (Samuel Butler (1612-1680) produced Hudibras, a satirical treatment of figures and attitudes from the time of the Civil War). John Dryden, apart from his contribution to drama and critics, also wrote extremely elegant verse and a satirical poem, Absalom and Achitophel. JOHN MILTON John Milton’s father was a scrivener and made sure than his son got the best education available. John’s father had been disinherited by his own father when he became a Protestant. These two elements, the love for learning and strong religious beliefs, would mark the life of the younger John. John Milton was born in London. While considering himself destined for the ministry, he began to write poetry in Latin, Italian, and English. Milton did not adjust to (adattarsi) university life. He was called, in scorn, "The Lady” (because of his fair complexion, long hair, graceful elegance and high morals), and after starting a strong fight with his tutor, he was expelled for a term. On leaving Cambridge Milton had given up his original plan to become a priest. He travelled in France and Italy in the late 1630s, meeting in Paris the jurist and theologian Hugo Grotius and the astronomer Galileo Galilei in Florence - there are references to Galileo's telescope in Paradise Lost. Concerned with the Puritan cause, Milton published a series of pamphlets against episcopacy (1642), on divorce (1643), in defence of the liberty of the press (1644), and in support of the regicides (1649). He also served as the secretary for foreign languages in Cromwell's government. After the death of Charles I, Milton expressed in THE TENURE(occupazione/diritto) OF KINGS AND MAGISTRATES (1649) the view that the people have the right to depose and punish tyrants. In 1651 Milton became blind but blindness helped him to stimulate his verbal richness. After the Restoration of Charles II in 1660, Milton was arrested as a noted defender of the Commonwealth, but was soon released. Meanwhile he became a relatively poor man. Milton was married three times. Milton died in 1674. Milton's achievement in the field of poetry was recognized after the appearance of Paradise Lost. Before it the writer himself had showed some doubt of the worth of his work. The theme of Fall and expulsion from Eden had been in Milton's mind from the 1640s. His ambition was to compose an epic poem to rival the ancient poets, such as Homer and Virgil, whose grand vision in Aèneid left traces in his work. PARADISE LOST Paradise Lost is not easy to be read with its odd syntax, difficult vocabulary, and complex, but noble style. It was originally published in 1667 (though written nearly ten years earlier) in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, changed into twelve books (in the manner of the division of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification; most of the poem was written while Milton was blind. This work is heavily indebted (pesantemente indebitato con) to the classical epics and it is written in blank verse (versi sciolti) with a rich range of vocabulary. This is an epic like no other because, besides telling the story of Adam and Eve and the Fall of man, it tells of the connection between human time (time from the creation of Adam) and the infinite universe that existed before us. SATAN’S SPEECH These lines are taken from Book I.  Satan is  surveying   his new home trying to become aware of the new situation after his downfall.  Satan and the Rebel Angels had fallen down  through space   “Nine times the Space that measures Day and Night”  before landing in hell.    Satan compares the new world to Paradise and feels lost  because everything is different here: “the region, the soil, the clime“; there is only “a mournful gloom” all over the place instead of the “celestial light” of the Paradise. He is not glad at first to be there, but he soon rejects despair and accepts the new situation: “Be it so…. Farewell happy fields where joy for ever dwells: hail horrors, hail infernal word”.  In the following lines   Satan shows all his ambition, all his self-confidence and determination. He realizes that now he is the “new possessor” of a place where “ farthest from him( God)…. at least we shall be free….and….may reign secure”. His ambition is to have a reign somewhere, no matter if that place is gloomy and horrible. He is great in the self-assurance of his strength:  he has got “a mind not to be changed by place or time”, a mind that “ can make a Heaven of Hell, and a Hell of Heaven”.  Then hell and heaven are only states of  mind.  Milton’s hell is not a real place! Hell is in the mind because the mind can change the external world:  if we live in a Paradise but our mind perceives it as a hell, that place  will be hell and viceversa. Satan is the real hero of Paradise Lost; he shows all the characteristics that Milton admired: courage, pride, oratorical power, self-confidence, ambition and so on.He is great in the self-assurance of his strength and in his contempt of the pain that has been inflicted on him. He also embodies Milton’s Puritan ideals of independence and libertysince he is seen as a rebel fighting against the absolute power of a tyrannical God, just as Milton, defender of liberties, struggles   his battle against a despotic king. As Blake said, “Milton is on the Devil’s party without knowing”.  He feels equal to God in reason and inferior only in power. When God banishes him from Heaven, he feels himself injured and wants to take a revenge against him, corrupting His new creation: man.  He succeeds in his task and in the form of a snake, he persuades Eve to eat an apple from the forbidden tree of knowledge. Satan is ambitious.  He is very proud and his boundless pride makes him believe that it “is better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”.   He has got the traits of the great military leaders and tries and succeeds in giving courage to his depressed soldiers after a defeat. The rebellious element in Milton’s Satan was later to influence the Romantic poets in the conception of the “satanic hero”, a lonely outsider who struggles against everything and everybody, isolated from the rest of mankind. In the Byronic Hero we can find many traits of Milton’s Satan. Even if Satan is the central figure in the passage, the presence of God is always felt. Satan never directly names him, but God is always in his thoughts. He feels to be equal to God in reason; he is inferior to him only in the power because God possesses  the strenght:” what reason has equalled, thunder hath made greater”. He considers himself to be only “less than he”. Satan despises the pain inflicted on him, but he seems frustrated because he is aware of God’s superiority: he refers to God calling him “ the Almighty”, he admits that “he who now is Sovran can dispose and bid what shall be right”. The language of the passage, direct and forceful, has the characteristics of the best oratory full of memorable phrases. The character who connects the prehuman universe with our own one is Satan. He is often considerd the real hero of Paradise Lost. Satan was one of the most important inhabitants of the prehuman universe. In fact, according to the poem the universe could have been represented like this: Heaven _________ Chaos The upper of these two hemispheres of primeval infintity was the heaven, a limitless region of light and glory. God is surrounded by a vast population of beings called Angels, of whom Satan is was the greatest. Below Heaven there was Chaos – a huge limitless ocean, an abyss of universal darkness and lifelessness. This was the universe before God decided to make his Divine son, Jesus, as the Head and Lord of the Angels. Satan and his followers rebel against this decree of God and fight a great battle, but Jesus himself defeats Satan and his army. They are hurled (lanciare) from Heaven and fall to a place that has been specially made to hold them: the hell. Heaven _______ Chaos _______ Hell Satan and the fallen angels spend nine days stupefied and stunned(intontito). Once recovered from his fall Satan begins plotting his revenge against God. Having heard that God had decided to create a new being (man) Satan decides to destroy this new creation. He therefore flies from hell up through Chaos to ne newly created universe of Man. Here he plans the corruption of Man and his venture is a success, or at least ill will be a success until the Second Coming. Themes and Symbols 1)The Importance of Obedience to God: The first words of Paradise Lost state that the poem’s main theme will be “Man’s first Disobedience.” (BooK I, Line I); In essence, Paradise Lost presents two moral paths that one can take after disobedience: the downward spiral of increasing sin and degradation, represented by Satan, and the road to redemption, represented by Adam and Eve. 2)to disobey/to repent: While Adam and Eve are the first humans to disobey God, Satan is the first of all God’s creation to disobey. His decision to rebel comes only from himself—he was not persuaded or provoked by others. Also, his decision to continue to disobey God after his fall into Hell ensures that God will not forgive him. Adam and Eve, on the other hand, decide to repent for their sins and seek forgiveness. Unlike Satan, Adam and Eve understand that their disobedience to God will be corrected through generations of toil(fatica/duro lavoro) on Earth. This path is obviously the correct one to take: the visions in Books XI and XII demonstrate that obedience to God, even after repeated falls, can lead to humankind’s salvation. 3)The Hierarchical Nature of the Universe Paradise Lost is about hierarchy as much as it is about obedience. The layout of the universe—with Heaven above, Hell below, and Earth in the middle—presents the universe as a hierarchy based on proximity to God and his grace. This spatial hierarchy leads to a social hierarchy of angels, humans, animals, and devils. To obey God is to respect this hierarchy. 4)The Fall as Partly Fortunate After he sees the vision of Christ’s redemption of humankind in Book XII, Adam refers to his own sin as a felix culpa or “happy fault,” suggesting that the fall of humankind, while originally seeming an unmitigated catastrophe, does in fact bring good with it. Adam and Eve’s disobedience allows God to show his mercy and temperance in their punishments and his eternal providence towards humankind. This display of love and compassion, given through the Sin, is a gift to humankind. Humankind must now experience pain and death, but humans can also experience mercy, salvation, and grace in ways they would not have been able to had they not disobeyed. 5) The Geography of the Universe: Milton divides the universe into four major regions: glorious Heaven, dreadful Hell, confusing Chaos, and a young and vulnerable Earth in between. Milton believes that any other information concerning the geography of the universe is unimportant. Milton acknowledges both the possibility that the sun revolves around the Earth and that the Earth revolves around the sun but it does not matter which revolves around which, demonstrating that Milton’s cosmology is based on the religious message he wants to convey, rather than on the findings of contemporaneous science or astronomy. 6) Conversation and Contemplation One common objection raised by readers of Paradise Lost is that the poem contains relatively little action. Milton sought to divert the reader’s attention from heroic battles and place it on the conversations and contemplations of his characters because conversation and contemplation were the two pursuits that he believed were of fundamental importance for a moral person. The sharing of ideas allows two people to share and spread God’s message. Likewise, pondering God and his grace allows a person to become closer to God and more obedient. (Verses 1-16) In the fist verses he invokes his muse, whom he identifies as the Holy Spirit. He asserts his hopes that his epic poem will surpass the other great epic poems written before, as he claims that his story is the most original and the most virtuous. He also asks his muse to fill his mind with divine knowledge so that he can share this knowledge with his readers. PARADISE REGARDED Paradise Regained (four books) is his poem published in 1671. It is connected by name to his earlier and more famous epic poem Paradise Lost, with which it shares similar theological themes. It deals with the subject of the Temptation of Christ. According to the poet's conception, whereas Paradise was lost by the yielding (accomodante)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 of Paradise Lost, but as a cunning (astuto), smooth (liscio/raffinato), and dissembling creature, a ‘Spirit unfortunate’, as he describes himself. SONNETS: Milton wrote twenty-four sonnets between 1630 and 1658. five in Italian constitute a mini- Petrarchan sequence on a perhaps imaginary Italian lady. The rest are individual poems on a wide variety of topics and occasions. Milton writes sometimes about personal crises, sometimes about political issues or personages, sometimes about friends and friendship, sometimes about historical events. His tone ranges from Jonsonian urbanity to prophetic denunciation. The form of the sonnets in Petrarchan, but in the later sonnets especially, the sense runs on from line to line, overriding expected end-stopped lines and the octave/ sestet shift. WHEN I CONSIDER HOW MY LIGHT IS SPENT When I consider how my light is spent, Ere half my days, in this dark world and wide, And that one Talent which is death to hide Lodged with me useless, though my Soul more bent To serve therewith my Maker, and present My true account, lest he returning chide; “Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?” I fondly ask. But patience, to prevent That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state Is Kingly. Thousands at his bidding speed And post o’er Land and Ocean without rest: They also serve who only stand and wait.” This sonnet was written when Milton had become blind. It consists of an octave and a sestet like a Petrarchan sonnet , but differs from it in the rhyme scheme of the sestet which is CDE CDE instead of CDC DCD. Further, he made no separation between the octave and the sestet. The Volta is stressed by a run-on-line: “ But Patience, to prevent/that murmur…”  (ll. 8-9). The sonnet illustrates the importance of religion in the Puritan Age .The main theme of the poem is of course blindness. Milton’s attitude to blindness in the octave is different from the one in the sestet: in the former there is complaint and despair about it while in the latter there is acceptance and   resignation. In the octave Miltoncomplaints about blindness, even if it has been given by God, because he can’t serve Him well. He feels frustrated because he is aware that he has got talent  lying  inside him,but he is also aware that he can’t use it because of blindness “one Talent …. lodg’d with me useless”  . He complaints about that because his “ soul is more bent to serve therewith My Maker”. He wants to “present a true account of myself” for fear that God “returning” on Doomsday may reproach him. The question he asks is whether God requires day-labour even of those who are blind.  The answer is given in the sestet. Man is not saved by works or good actions as for Catholics but by his faith alone:”God doth not need either man’s work or his own gifts” they also serve who only stand and wait”. According to the Puritans, men’s purpose in life is to serve God. The   best way to serve God is to accept “His mild joke” , that is to do   His will.   Following His directions, their joke becomes mild  and they can be directed in the right way and “serve Him best”.  The term “Talent” in the third line alludes to the Biblical Parable of the Talents in Saint Mathew’s Gospel: three servants were given some coins by their master. The first two doubled them, while the third buried them in the earth and was punished for not using them. Milton identifies himself with the third because his “Talent …..lodged with me useless”. The sonnet contains some figure of speech. There is a personification of Patience in line 5 and an alliteration in /d/ (days-dark) and in /w/ ( world-wide) in line 2.  There are also some metaphors:  light which stands for sight in line 1, Talent which stands for genius in line 3 and day-labour which stands for work in line 7. The octave has got a particular syntactic structure: the main clause,  “I fondly ask”, which is in line 8, is preceded by  subordinate clauses. POEMS: In the first phase (1625-1640) was mainly spent writing poems such as the ode “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity”; the sonnet “On Sakespeare”; “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensoso”; and the elegy Lycidas. THE AUGUSTAN AGE: HISTORICAL CONTEXT The eighteenth century is often referred to by critics and historians as the Augustan Age: this is due to its similarities with the era of Roman emperor August (63 BC – AD 14). The so called Bloodless or Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England heralded a period of relative domestic peace and prosperity which was to last for the entire first half of the century. In this sense it may justly be compared with the extended period of civil calm and economic wellbeing in the Greco-Roman world following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC. Post 1688 England gloried in a form of government which had effectively undermined the absolute constitutional rights of kings. English parliamentarians were elected by wealthy landowning families and they were in opposition to challenge and influence the decisions of their powerful monarchs. However the vast majority of the population did not possess the right of vote. During the reign of Queen Anne (1702-1714) and Act of Union was passed in 1707, partly in the attempt to curb (tenere a freno) the threat of a future Catholic monarch. So Scotland and England were united as “Great Britain” and were governed under one parliament. With the advent of the Hanoverian king George I (1714-1727) the prospect of a future Catholic monarch for England became increasingly unlikely. George I spoke little English and was more concerned with what was happening in his native Hanover (in what is now Germany) and his frequent absences furthered the cause of parliamentary politics. Many decisions were taken directly by his Whig ministers. The most eminent politician of the time was Robert Walpole whose name became the hallmark (marchio) of an age characterized by low taxes and a peaceful foreign policy. Under George II (1727-1760) Walpole remained prime minister and Britain’s prosperity went on. British hegemony in India and North America was firmly established. George III (1760-1820) was the third Hanoverian king to rule in Britain. In contrast to his predecessors, he was born in England and felt a greater affinity with his subjects. Moreover George fiercely asserted to choose his ministers. INTERNATIONAL SCENE The loss of the American colonies became official with the end of the American War of Independence in 1783. Britain’s political leaders supported by George III had insisted on parliamentary sovereignity with regard to American affairs, whereas political activists in America were convenced that “taxation without Representation” was unacceptable. On the outbreak of the war the American colonies were, from North to South; Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut (making up New England), New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. To the North of the colonies lay the British province of Canada. THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION (1775-1783) For about 150 years - until 1764 - American colonists tolerated British rule. But when Parliament enforced trade laws, and imposed taxes on sugar, Americans grew angry. When the colonies approved their Declaration of Independence in 1776, it was not at all clear they could actually win the fight with Britain but Americans finally won their revolutionary war with significant help from France. During the Augustan age, British society attained a high level of political and social stability. But it was not to last or long. The American Declaration of Independence from British rule of 1776 saw George Washington become the first president of the United States of America. The Declaration of Independence, written by Thomas Jefferson, stated that America was an independent nation and its inhabitants had the right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. The loss of the American colonies as a consequence of the American War of Independence began at a time when Britain’s conservative rulers feared the general forces of revolutionary ferment. This is why this period is often referred to as the Age of Revolutions (the Industrial Revolution, too). The aim of revolution was no longer that of restoring society to an earlier “uncorrupted” state but of getting rid of old forms of government and finding new and more just ways by which to organise and govern society. THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Any inclination towards reform dissipated in the wake of the horrors of the French Revolution. France declared war on Britain in 1793 and the new bloodshed (spargimento di sangue) across the Channel put an end to any possibility of reform in England during the late eighteenth century. The French revolution had developed into a bloody power struggle between different groups. The Jacobins, who seized power from the moderate middle-class Girondins in 1793, used extreme measures to realise their revolutionary aims. Led by Maximilien Robespierre they mobilised a huge army and radicalised the French Constitution, introducing the idea of liberty, equality and fraternity for all. IRELAND The French Revolution led to more ambitious ideas also in Ireland. Since 1791 there had existed a secret society called United Irishmen . The society sought political independence from England under the banner of “Irishmen”, regardless of religious denominations (Protestants or Catholics). In 1798 an armour rising occurred with the military aid of the French, but was successfully put down by the English. Realizing the possible danger of a French-sustained insurrection, parliament decided it was time to bring the Irish under direct control. In 1801, the Act of Union was passed and the Dublin parliament surrender itself to Westminster. The “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland” was born. SOCIAL CONTEXT Rationalism: Although it may seem a clichè, for much of the XVIII century there was a prevailing spirit of optimism. There was a tendency to put faith in the rational capacities of man and this affected also the intellectual climate of the Enlightenment in Europe. The powers of reason and common sense held sway those of imagination and the emotions (even if there were important exceptions such as the rise of sentimentalism in the mid-eighteenth century novel and the appearance of the Gothic narrative). From Classic to Romantic: Within the confines of XVIII century society we witness not only the culmination of a neo-classical literature, which had its roots in post-Restoration England, but also the challenges of a new Romanticism. The reading public was changing quite rapidly and the taste for reading was spreading. Female readers became numerous and in addition to the fine ladies who had much leisure time on their hands, another market was made up of the huge number of household servants who had access to their masters’books. It should be noted tht novels were far too expensive for the average lower-class worker. The price of a book would be more than the weekly wage (salario) of a labourer. Although the establishment of circulating libraries* helped to relieve the situation. Circulating libraries in the 18th and 19th century were associated with leisure, and were found  in cities and towns with a population of 2,000 and upward. They were as much of an attraction in wealthy resorts (luogo di vacanza), where people came to relax and look after their health, as in cities and small towns. Circulating libraries made books accessible to many more people at an affordable price. During the 18th century a new active culture evolved. Coffee Houses sprang up all over London and attracted a variety of patrons. The crowd at coffee houses included doctors, merchants, writers, and politicians. Besides (in aggiunta a) taverns, coffee houses were the first place for people to meet and talk about different issues. Runners were sent from coffee house to coffee house in order to relay information on major events of the day. Poem and poetry: In contrast to prose, both poetry and drama take a secondary role in XVIII century literature. The Augustan poet was a social being whose private feelings were considered inappropriate material for public confession and the conflict between the intellect and the emotions was drawing to a climax. As for drama, this was a particularly barren period: not a single tragedy of any worth was written during this time. As regards comedy, the tone was frequently moralizing and there were often strong elements of didactics. PROSE: Essays, journalism and above all the novel were the most important aspects of literary production in an age dominated by prose. The abolition of the Licensing Act* in 1694 marked the end of censorship and heralded a new period of freedom for the modern press. *The Licensing Act (1643) introduced: pre-publication licensing; registration of all printing materials with the names of author, printer and publisher in the Register at Stationers’ Hall; search, seizure (cattura) and destruction of any books offensive to the government; arrest and imprisonment of any offensive writers, printers and publishers. Newspapers and periodicals: Many accomplished writers of the age (Defoe, Swift and Johnson for example) were encouraged to write articles or essays for the growing number of newspapers and periodicals. Journalism became a new trade and depending on the periodical concerned, the subject dealt with current affairs, politics, literature, fashion, gossip, entertainment and contemporary manners, fads (tendenza) and morals. It was a prose frequently characterized by refind simplicity and conversational tone, so as to reach the largest number of readers as possible. The eighteenth century novel can be defined as a prose narrative of considerable lenght dealinh more or less imaginatively and in varying degrees of complexity with a world of actual human experience. The novel took individual experience as its most important criterion and the plots that had formed the backbone of English literature for many centuries (history, legend, mythology, etc…) were largely abandoned by the new novelists. TIME AND REALISM The rejection of classical literary conventions meant that instead of the general human types, characters usually differ greatly one form one other. The fact that characters were often given contemporary names and surnames was something new and served to reinforce the impression of realism. In contrast to earlier fictional works where notions of specific time were usually considered irrelevant, the XVIII century novel reveals a much greater concern with the exactness of time. The is a sense of temporal sequencing which encourages us to believe there is some kind of causal relation between events. Where the action occurred became a question of great importance and was the logical complement to the question of time. In previous fiction (for example in Sidney or Bunyan) the idea of place had usually been vague and fragmentary. In the new novel specific references to names of streets or towns, together with detailed descriptions of objects helped the creation of a solid idea of setting. There was a general movement away from rhetorical and figurative language towards a more descriptive and denotative form of language. In its desire to present things with an air of complete authenticity prose gained in realism even if it lacked much of the elegance that had characterised it in former times. DANIEL DEFOE Defoe was born in London in 1660. His father was a prosperous but dissenting and non-conformist tradesman and this meant that he could not send his son to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead, Daniel had a sound education at the highly reputable Presbyterian Academy of Newington Green, where the Bible and Bunyan featured prominently. He left the Academy with a practical-minded temperament and was fluent in five languages (which did not include Latin and Greek). In 1719 Defoe turned from journalism (he had edited the periodical “The Review” from 1704-1713), to a new form of extended prose fiction and he produced his most famous work, Robinson Crusoe (1719). He died alone and in misery in 1731. WORKS Defoe’s claim to literary fame rests largely on his novels and by many critics he is considered to be the father of the English novel. Although the novel was thought as lying and something untrue, he insisted that what he wrote was “a history of fact” and that in each of his works there was a moral or didactic purpose which may serve as an example to others. His most important novels are: Robinson Crusoe (1719) Captain Singleton (1720) Moll Flanders (1722) Colonel Jack (1722) Lady Roxana (1724) Many of his pamphlets have become legendary, including The Shortest Way With the Dissenters (1702) Himself a Dissenter he mimicked the bloodthirsty rhetoric of High Anglican Tories and pretended to argue for the extermination of all Dissenters. Nobody was amused, Defoe was arrested in May 1703. He also wrote some highly successful satirical verse, including The True Born Englishman (1701), an attack on xenophobia and intolerance of immigrants. ROBINSON CRUSOE Robinson Crusoe is an Englishman from the town of York in the seventeenth century, the youngest son of a merchant of German origin. Encouraged by his father to study law, Crusoe expresses his wish to go to sea instead. His family is against Crusoe going out to sea, and his father explains that it is better to seek a modest, secure life for oneself. Initially, Robinson is committed to obeying his father, but he eventually succumbs to temptation and embarks on a ship bound for London with a friend. When a storm causes the near deaths of Crusoe and his friend, the friend is dissuaded from sea travel, but Crusoe still goes on to set himself up as merchant on a ship leaving London. The following trips are not so successful. In Brazil, Crusoe establishes himself as a plantation owner and soon becomes successful. Eager for slave labour and its economic advantages, he embarks on a slave-gathering expedition to West Africa but ends up shipwrecked off of the coast of Trinidad. Crusoe soon learns he is the sole survivor of the expedition and seeks shelter and food for himself. He returns to the wreck’s remains twelve times to salvage guns, powder, food, and other items. He erects a cross that he inscribes with the date of his arrival, September 1, 1659, and makes a notch every day in order never to lose track of time. In June 1660, he falls ill and hallucinates that an angel visits, warning him to repent. After recovering, Crusoe makes a survey of the area and discovers he is on an island and he begins to feel more optimistic about being on the island, describing himself as its “king.” One day Crusoe is shocked to discover a man’s footprint on the beach. He first assumes the footprint is the devil’s, then decides it must belong to one of the cannibals said to live in the region. Later Crusoe catches sight of thirty cannibals heading for shore with their victims. One of the victims is killed. Another one, waiting to be slaughtered, suddenly breaks free and runs toward Crusoe’s dwelling. Crusoe protects him, killing one of the pursuers and injuring the other. Crusoe defeats most of the cannibals onshore. The victim vows total submission to Crusoe in gratitude for his liberation. Crusoe names him Friday, to commemorate the day on which his life was saved, and takes him as his servant. The two men share lots of adventures against cannibals and On December 19, 1686, Crusoe boards the ship to return to England. Themes 1)The Ambivalence of Mastery Crusoe’s success in mastering his situation, overcoming his obstacles, and controlling his environment shows the condition of mastery in a positive light, at least at the beginning of the novel. Moreover, Crusoe’s mastery over nature makes him a master of his fate and of himself. But this theme of mastery becomes more complex and less positive after Friday’s arrival, when the idea of mastery comes to apply more to unfair relationships between humans. In Chapter XXIII, Crusoe teaches Friday the word “[m]aster” even before teaching him “yes” and “no,” and indeed he lets him “know that was to be [Crusoe’s] name.” Crusoe never entertains the idea of considering Friday a friend or equal. In this way Defoe explores the link between the two in his depiction of the colonial mind. 2) The Necessity of Repentance Crusoe’s experiences constitute not simply an adventure story in which thrilling things happen, but also a moral tale illustrating the right and wrong ways to live one’s life. Crusoe believes that his major sin is his rebellious behaviour toward his father, which he refers to as his “original sin,” akin to Adam and Eve’s first disobedience of God. This biblical reference also suggests that Crusoe’s exile from civilization represents Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. For Crusoe, repentance consists of acknowledging his wretchedness and his absolute dependence on the Lord. After repentance, he complains much less about his sad fate and views the island more positively. 3) The Importance of Self-Awareness The idea that the individual must keep a careful reckoning (computo) of the state of his own soul is a key point in the Presbyterian doctrine that Defoe took seriously all his life. Crusoe’s arrival on the island does not make him revert to a brute existence controlled by animal instincts, and, unlike animals, he remains conscious of himself at all times. STYLISTC FEATURES Like Defoe’s 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 matter of fact, following the principles promoted by the Royal Society that prose writing should be plain. Another interesting feature is the organization of the story: there is no real novelistic plot; rather Crusoe’s journal merely recounts the things that happen to him in a diary-like sequence. Robinson Crusoe’s enduring popularity in 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. the religious allegory: the book has been interpreted as a religious allegory, a Puritan tract about man’s redemption from sin. The Puritans had a very uncomplicated view of religion. Their view was the man must save himself from original sin on Earth, regarding the paradise he as lost through his labour and self-reliance. 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 master. As a Puritan, Crusoe’s 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. the economic allergy the book also functions as an allergy of merchant capitalism: the mini-civilization, which Crusoe established on the island, is similar to the society from which he comes. 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. the imperialist allegory More recently Robinson Crusoe has been considered as an allegory of British imperialism because it attempts to demonstrate the white, Christian Crusoe’s inherent superiority over the savage Friday, who must be civilised 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. The indigenous inhabitants of these countries were generally regarded as savage who had to be civilised. In Robinson Crusoe the savage Friday does not really have a voice. He only learns to speak when Crusoe teaches him English. The master-slave relationship is reminiscent of that between Prospero and Caliban, does not learn to curse his master. LADY ROXANA Roxana or The Fortunate Mistress was published in 1724. It is supposed to be a biography of one Madamoselle Beleau, the lovely daughter of French Protestant refugees, brought up in England and married to a good-for-nothing son of an English brewer (birraio). Roxana's husband squanders his property and abandons his wife and five children. She enters upon a career of a mistress, first to the landlord in whose house she and her husband were renting, and then to a series of wealthy aristocrats and businessmen in three countries, England, France and Holland. She acquires her name of "Roxana," traditionally given to stage actresses, after she had returned to London from Europe, and become a famous courtesan. She is accompanied in her adventures by a faithful maid, Amy, a very lively, attractive and intelligent woman. After many adventures with many men and women, most of whom amazingly, are good decent people who do not take advantage of a beautiful abandoned woman in distress (hence the title of the story—"The Fortunate Mistress"), she finally marries a Dutch merchant who has been her long time lover and friend and even the father to one of her sons. However, in a rather a hurried end to the story, the husband discovers the immoral life his wife has led and dies shortly after leaving a her a small sum of money. Theme: the novel examines the possibility of eighteenth century women owning their own state despite a patriarchal society. The novel further draws attention to the incompatibility between sexual freedom and freedom from motherhood. Roxana becomes pregnant many times due to her sexual exploits, and it is one of her children who come back to expose her, years later, by the closing scenes in the novel. The character of Roxana can be described as a proto-feminist because she carries out her actions of prostitution for her own ends of freedom, but before a feminist ideology was fully formed. HENRY FIELDING Henry Fielding’s career as an inventor and a master of the English novel in the eighteenth century was one of many he undertook in response to his frustrated social expectations. He then studied for the legal profession and also tried his hand at prose fiction. He then studied for the legal profession and also tried his hand at prose fiction. In 1741 he published Shamela, a parody of Samuel Richardson’s wildly successful novel Pamela, which narrates a housemaid’s trouble with and eventual marriage to her sexually harassing master. In 1742, he wrote The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews appeared. It also fully develops a new kind of comic fiction, which he preface defines as “a comic Epic-Poem in Prose”. He found an idealized model for the heroines of those novels in his first wife, Charlotte. His literary output reflects his range of vision. The selection here from Joseph Andrews exemplifies the subtle scepticism with which Fielding views distinction s of rank. When Parson Adams, a hero of the novel, brings the servant girl Fanny Goodwill to one of the many inns in the story, they encounter Joseph Andrews, Fanny’s betrothed, and Slipslop. Fielding goes on to articulate ideas that run through all his treatments of social hierarchy: individuals occupy different ranks due to arbitrary circumstances; a given status or occupation can tell us little about the virtue or vice of the person associated with it; and people make fools of themselves when they take social distinctions too seriously. Moral attitude In terms of attitudes to morality, Fielding’s works represented abreak with the more Puritan concerns of his immediate predecessors. His aristocratic origins perhaps explain his more tolerant and liberal-minded attitude towards sexual promiscuousness in his protagonists. He accepts that there are no wholly good or wholly bad characters in the world even if virtues such as bravery, loyalty and benevolence are of great importance. His frank generosity moved from the belief that men are naturally inclined towards goodness and that vice can be defeated by virtue. He was also convinced that men can defeat the unpleasant aspects of immorality through laughter. He writes in his opening dedication of Tom Jone to Geroge Lyttleton: “I have employed all the wit and humour of which I am master in the following history; wherein in I have endeavoured to laugh (ridere fragorosamente) mankind out of their favourite follies and vices” Apart from his engagement in journalism (The True Patriot) and in drama (he wrote over 20 plays including comedies, farces and satires), he was a great novelist. - Shamela (1741) - The History and Adventures of Joseph Andrews (1742), which can be considered his forst real novel, attempting to parodied again the hypocritical moral values of the middle classes depicted by Richardson. - The Life of Jonathan Wild, the Great (1743), a mock-heroic satire of political opportunism and ruthless* morality. The novel deals with the life of the infamous highwayman*, Jonathan Wild, who was hanged in 1725. - Tom Jones (1749), his masterpiece; - Amelia (17519, a novel concerned wit social problems; LAURENCE STERNE Sterne (1713-1768) stands apart among the great eighteenth-century novelists, but none more than he influenced experiments in the art of fiction in the centuries to come. In the first two volumes of his masterpiece, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, he published them at his own expense in York; soon he was famous in London literary circles and, soon after that, throughout Europe. Sterne thought of his second and last novel, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, as a morally delicate alternative to Tristram Shandy that would placate his critics. In the short volumes, A Sentimental Journey presents a series of episodes about travel in France narrated by the protagonist, Sterne’s alter ego, named after the jester in Yorick and the unnamed grassed in a Paris shop is here presented complete and well exemplifies the complexity of Sterne’s renderings of sentimental exchanges. It is on Tristam Shandy that his reputation largely rests. This work of eccentric genius brought Sterne fame and fortune both in England and France but, interestingly enough, it was not until the twentieth century that Sterne was reinstated among the “greats” of XVIII century fiction. Indeed, Tristam Shandy remains the most “modern” of eighteenth-century novels. This novel, or anti-novel as some critics prefer to call it, is divided up into nine volumes, which where written over a seven year period beginning in 1760. It is narrated in the first person singular by Tristam Shandy himself. JONATAN SWIFT Born of English parents in Dublin, Swift was educated in Ireland before moving to England in 1689. here he was to enjoy the patronage of Sir William Temple, a Whig politician and enlightened patron of the arts, for ten years. In 1710 he turned to the Tories, he collaborated with the Tory periodical The Examiner, and fiercely criticized many Whigh ministers. However, after the death of Queen Anne in 1714 the Tory ministry fell and left many of its leaders in disgrace. He spent much of the remaining time in Ireland writing works of a satirical nature. The often caustic strain to be found in these works has earned Swift an unfortunate and undeserved reputation as a misanthrope. In 1730s his health deteriorated considerably and he died in 1745 declared insane and succumbing to complete madness. WORKS He was a great pamphleteer and one of the most astute commentators of the XVIII century. His prose is characterized by precision and clarity and by, as the critic Robert Adams wrote, “the nervous energy of his sentences”. Apart from some attempts with verse he became very famous for his prose satire: The Battle of the Books A Tale of the Tub(vasca), a satire against the numerous corruptions in religion and learning. The Drapier (fabbricatore di tende) Letters, a well disguised and successful attack on some of the English government’s negative policies toward Ireland and these letters earned Swift the love of the Irish nation Gulliver’s Travels (1726) A Modest Proposal (1729), one of the most enjoyable satires of all time in which Swift pretends to be a cool and political economist who shows with scientific precision how to solve the problem of poverty in Ireland: Irish babies should be raised as food to placed in the tables of the rich in England. Gulliver’s Travels In part one the hero, ship’s surgeon 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 an culture, and about the country’s political system. He agrees to help the people in their was against another island 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 whose inhabitants are all giants. The situation of Part two is reserved, 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 discussions 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 islands. Part four finds Gulliver in a land ruled by intelligent horses who call themselves the Houyhnhnms, which is also the name of the island. Again Gulliver spends his time trying to learn the language and ways of these animals, and assimilates them so well that when he returns home to his wife and children he finds himself disgusted by their humanness. Gulliver’s Travels has for a long time been considered a children’s 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 “the style is very plain and simple”. Gulliver is a matter-of-fact man who records the marvels he sees with careful detail, in the language of the traveller who speaks with great seriousness about what he has seen and wants to be believed. The novel’s 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 in the centuries after its publication as to what Swift’s intentions in writing it actually were. The book’s defenders say that the book is a satire of man’s hypocrisy, vanity and cruelty. Although Gulliver’s Travels is a book which works on many levels, critics have suggested that it as specific political allegorical dimension. In this light, he four voyages may be read as follows: First Journey: The diminutive Lilliputians, although a well-organised society, can be seen to represent cruelty, pettiness and provincialism. Critics have suggested that the politicians of the government were modelled on leading political figures of Swift’s time. Though they are initially kind to him, the Lilliputians see Gulliver as a giant baby, a huge body controlled by the physical needs. Their only use for him is as a weapon to destroy their enemies. Second Journey: The giants of Brobdingnag represent human vanity and self-love. Gulliver’s descriptions on their bodies 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 Lilliputians saw him. Third Journey: The Laputans can be seen as a parody of the pretensions of abstract intellectual thinking, which has no connection to reality, and also as a satire on Britain’s military and colonial ambitions. This was probably a satirical attack against the members of the Royal Society, including Newton. However, seen from a distance the world of the Laputans is also a world of lightness, where ideas are liberated from the constraints of reality. Swift’s satirical intentions have been inverted by modern and contemporary artists and poets who have taken inspiration from some of his absurd inventions. 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 he 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 the Yahoos, but from the horses’ point of view, he picture he portrays of the violent and vicious society he comes from merely confirms that, underneath the masquerade of civilisation, humans are indeed just like the Yahoos. A MODEST PROPOSAL A modest proposal seems to sum up the best of Swift’s irony. Irony is the most powerful instrument of satire and one of the most difficult to use. It requires very great skill, as it is mainly based on the discrepancy between what the sentences “seem” to be saying and what they are “really” saying. Swift is a real master of irony and satire, as he is able to say the most atrocious and shocking things in the most natural possible way. A modest proposal was inspired by the dreadful conditions Swift found in Ireland, when he made his last journey there is 1727. Famine and starvation were widespread because of a series of ruinous harvests, which were also due to mismanagement by the Irish themselves. To help them, he then suggested the “Modest Proposal”. SAMUEL RICHARDSON (1689-1761) Samuel Richardson was born into relative poverty as one of nine children in the midland country of Derbyshire (a county in the East Midlands) in England. The Richardson family moved to East London in 1700, and around this time, Samuel received a brief grammar-school education. Richardson’s personal life was not without considerable emotional hardship. He married his master’s daughter, Martha Wilde but she died ten years later having given birth to six children, none of whom was to reach adulthood. Richardson’ second wife, Elizabeth Leake, also gave birth to six children – of these only four daughters managed to survive their father who died in 1761. By the age of 13, Richardson already displayed a gift fo story telling and letter writing. His printing career was more uniformly successful than were his efforts of begetting (generare) offspring. The model of the industrious Puritan bourgeois businessman (rising at five in the morning and turning in at eleven at night), he rose to become official printer for the House of Commons and printer of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (essentially England’s Academy of Sciences). As a printer, Richardson naturally had extensive contact with the book-selling world. His demonstrated familiarity with the literary marketplace caused many booksellers to consult him on the literary quality of their works. He was also a prolific writer of letters, and his reputation as such led two booksellers to approach him in 1739, asking him to produce a volume of model letters. Called a “letter-writer,” the genre comprised exemplary letters that, in their form, provided the semiliterate with adaptable epistolary templates(modelli) and, in their content, offered practical, social, or moral advice about common predicaments. In Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions (1741), Richardson addressed a number of fictional situations, including that of attractive servant-girls subject to plots against their virtue. Basing himself upon the real case of a serving maid whose virtue had been unsuccessfully attacked by an unscrupulous man, he started writing Pamela, his first “epistolary novel”, at the age of 50. It was a great success. WORKS Together wit that of Defoe, Richardson’s name i most commonly mentioned when referring to the paterfamilias of the eighteenth-century novel. Both authors played an important role in the creation and the development of the novel. Richardson wrote three important novels which won considerable success and were later imitated all over Europe.: Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1740-41) Clarissa Harlowe (1747-48) Sir Charles Grandison (1753-54) Set in a domestic middle-class environment, all three novels proved immensely popular with the reading public and especially among women. There is a heavy moralizing tendency within the novels, reflecting the author’s concern about religion and virtue. Indeed, in his preface to Clarissa, Richardson remarks as follows: “What will be found to be more particularly aimed at in the following work is: - to caution parents against undue exercise of their natural authority over their children in the great article of marriage - to warn children against preferring a man of pleasure to a man of probity, - to investigate the highest and most important doctrines not only of morality but of Christianity, by showing them thrown into action in the conduct of the worthy characters, while the unworthy, who set those doctrines at defiance(sfida) are consequentially, punished.” If in his didactic concerns of plot and psychological characterization he represents a step forward. Indeed, in Richardson there is a strong element of psychological analysis which had been lacking in most other prose fiction. We are taken inside the minds of Richardson’s characters and we are invited to share their innermost thoughts and feelings. There is a great sense of individual development within the confines of the story: characters are far from static and the reader is almost a privileged witness of their sharply (fortemente/ nettamente) detailed evolution. The three novel were written in the form of letetrs exchanged between the main characters. This “epistolary technique” was largely a reflection of the fashion for letter writing of the period. Just as Defoe had avoided the dilemma of fiction as something immoral by insisting on its authenticity, so Richardson’s technique allows a mainly middle-class Puritan public “to believe” that a series of letters had been chanced upon (imbattersi in), collected and edited by a scrupulous author. The epistolary form allows differing inddividual viewpoints of the same events to be fully explored within the text without any loss of authenticity (and in this sense Rich. Anticipated the workings(ingranaggi) of the moderd psychological novel with its multiple viewpoints). Another aspect of this form is its immediacy, as Richardson remarks in his preface to Clarissa: “all the letters are written while the hearts of the writers must be supposed to be wholly engaged in their subjects…so they aboubd not only with critical situations, nut with what may be called instantaneous descriptions and reflections…” The less positive aspect of this technique is that the reader feels bound (costretto) to ask himself if it was possible for someone to write so many letters often of such gret lenght and detail, and under psychologically demanding circumstances. PAMELA: Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (ricompensate) is an epistolary novel centering on the relationship between a beautiful servant girl and her aristocratic master. An epistolary novel is one in which a character (or characters) tells the story through letters (epistles) sent to a friend, relative, etc., and/or through journal entries. PLOT: Fifteen-year-old Pamela Andrews is a servant at an estate (tenuta) in the county of Bedfordshire, England. She keeps a journal and frequently writes home to her impoverished parents, John and Elizabeth Andrews. In her latest letter, she reports news of the death of her elderly employer, Lady B., but says her son, Squire (signorotto) B., plans to retain her and the rest of the staff. She encloses in the letter four guineas the young man gave her as a gesture of good faith. All he asks is that she remain a good and diligent employee.  Before she has a chance to seal and send the letter, which she wrote in the deceased woman’s dressing room, the squire enters and reads it. Pamela is embarrassed. However, he compliments her on her generosity toward her parents. Sometime later, she receives a letter from her parents thanking her for the money but warning her never to compromise her virtue for material gain. When the squire’s sister, Lady Davers, comes to Bedforshire to visit her brother, she tells him it is improper for so pretty a girl as Pamela to be living under the roof of a bachelor. Instead, Lady Davers says, Pamela should live with her. The squire agrees to the arrangement. However, the squire delays relocating Pamela. Pamela tells her in another letter that the squire has given her more garments and exquisite shoes. After Mrs. Andrews writes back to remind her daughter to keep on her guard, Pamela replies that the squire has decided to keep her at Bedfordshire, for he fears that the nephew of Lady Davers might make advances toward her. One day in the summer house of his estate, he puts his arm around her without warning and kisses her. When she protests strongly, he becomes very angry but then offers her gold to keep the incident a secret. She refuses the money and later writes to her parents about the incident. The housekeeper sympathizes with her but says the squire probably won’t bother her again. Sometime later, the squire angrily scolds Pamela after he learns that she has informed her parents and Mrs. Jervis of his behavior. Now, he says, his reputation is compromised. When Pamela breaks away and runs to another room, he rips off a piece of her dress. However, she closes and locks the door before he can continue his pursuit. Then she faints. Later, in front of Pamela and Mrs. Jervis, the squire attempts to downplay the incident, claiming that Pamela exaggerated the details. When he asks Mrs. Jervis for her opinion, she sympathizes with Pamela but is afraid to accuse her master of wrongdoing. At this point, Pamela has made up her mind to leave Bedfordshire and return home. However, she decides to remain at Bedfordshire to complete a waistcoat (panciotto) she has been fashioning for the squire. One day the squire proposes to give Pamela’s parents fifty guineas a year if she pledges to marry the Rev. Arthur Williams, the squire’s chaplain at Lincolnshire. (The proposal is, of course, a ploy to keep her within reach.) When Pamela refuses the offer, he decrees that she may return home the next morning and will order a carriage to await her. However, after the carriage driver takes her five miles on the road toward her home, he turns off and takes her to the squire’s Lincolnshire estate instead. At this point in the story, the reader learns that John, the footman charged with delivering Pamela's letters, has first diverted all of them to the attention of the squire. The latter has read each of them and has held back recent ones. At Lincolnshire, Pamela is a virtual prisoner under the watchful eye of the housekeeper, Mrs. Jewkes. Not long after Pamela’s arrival, she meets the Rev. Williams. He is sensible and sober, and he sympathizes with the deeply distressed Pamela. However, there is little he can do to liberate her, for he depends on the squire for his livelihood. .......Mrs. Jewkes follows Pamela everywhere, even when she goes for walks on the grounds alone or with Williams. However, Pamela and the minister communicate in secret via messages left between rocks in the flower garden. Moreover, because Squire B. seems to have eyes and ears everywhere he learns of Pamela's desire to escape with the assistance of Williams. Oddly, though, in spite of the squire’s treatment of her, she cannot bring herself to hate him. When she learns that he almost drowned while crossing a creek during a hunting expedition, she writes in a letter to her parents, "When I heard his danger, which was very great, I could not in my heart forbear rejoicing for his safety; though his death would have ended my afflictions . . . O what an angel would he be in my eyes yet, if he would cease his attempts, and reform!" .......Finally, the squire gives up and grants her wish to her return to her parents. On her way home the travelers stop at an inn. There, Pamela sits down to eat just as a messenger from the squire delivers a letter to her. In it, the squire says he has read part of a journal she left behind and was touched to learn that she was concerned for his safety when he almost drowned. Furthermore, he says, he now knows how poorly Mrs. Jewkes treated her. He also admits that he himself treated her badly. Then he declares that he truly loves her and begs her to return to Lincolnshire. However, he says, he will understand if she wishes to continue on to her home. Pamela also learns that the squire is ill. Sometime later, Pamela and the squire marry in a private ceremony in a chapel at the Lincolnshire estate… THEMES LOVE The novel is of course a love story, and Pamela is the fulcrum on which the story turns. One day, the story centres on familial love, which Pamela exchanges with her parents; the next day, on false love, or lust, which the squire attempts to inflict on Pamela; another day, on brotherly love, which Pamela exchanges with Mrs. Jervis. Preservation of virtue In the face of the squire's attempts to seduce her, Pamela never once gives in to him, Although she discovers after a time that she loves him, she refuses to bed with him outside of marriage. Class and Gender Distinctions In protecting herself from the clutches of her male employer, Pamela is at a considerable disadvantage. The European culture of the 1700s gave every advantage to males, especially upper-class males. Pamela, of course, is a lower-class female servant. A pretty servant girl was easy prey for a wealthy master who took a fancy to her, for he could use his money and power to entice her or sexually harass her. After the squire begins treating Pamela as a young woman instead of a sexual object, he declares his love for her. JOSEPH ADDISON (1672-1719) He was an English essayist poet playwright and politician. His name is usually remembered along side that of his long-standing friend, Richard Steele, with whom he founded the Spectator Magazine. In 1693 he addressed a poem to John Dryden and his first major work, a book of the lives of English poets, was published in 1694. In 1709 he with Steele started the Spectator, the first number of which appeared in 1711. One of the principal conceives of the spectator is its fictional narrator, Mister Mr. Spectator. The first number is dedicated to his life-story. He speaks very little communicating mainly through facial gestures. He comments on the habits, foibles and social faux passé of his fellow citizens. The second one introduces the members of the “Spectator Club”, Mister Spectator’s close friends. The club members have drawn from many different walks of life. The best known of this characters is Sir Roger The Coverley, an English Squire of Queen Anne’s Reign. In the Spectator he appears as a judos critic of manners and morals of the society. The main aim of the Spectator was to reform the society, and it was Addison’s task. Addison noticed that the manners of the society have been corrupted by the stage actors. He exposed the principle of the modern comedy by statling its clarity. He also exposed the trifles in which the woman of the time participate. He laugth at the follies and foibles of the modern women. He was against the feminine violence in the Parties. Addison was a great satirist of his age who wanted to correct his society through his mild satire. He refers himself as Mister Spectator. As Mister Spectator he looks at the world with eyes of a mature person who is always hopeful of betterment (miglioramento). ALEXANDER POPE (1688-1744) Pope was born into a Catholic family . He suffered prejudice all his life: he could not attend university or hold public office and the sense of being an outsider (in theory Catholics could not live within ten miles of London) was enhanced by his physical defects: he was practically a dwarf and a tubercular disease during adolescence left him deformed. He showed precocious talent in his early poetry: - Pastorals (1709) - An Essay on Criticism (1711) - The Rape of the Lock (1714) He was one of the member of “The Scribleurs Club” ( a club which included Swift) made up of Tory wits. Together they produced a series of papers supposedly written by Martin Scibleurs, but which were in reality a harsh satire on false learning and pedantry. His translation of Homer’s Iliad made him a rich man. The literary milieu at the time was extremely competitive: vitriolic attacks on one’s rivals were the order of the day. Pope in fact devoted a whole work, The Dunciad (1728) to settle his scores with critics and other figures who had ill-treated him. Anyway he found still room for more contemplative work such as the Essay on man (1733-1734). In later years Pope became increasingly dissatisfied with the political climate and his biting satire made him a feared man in government circles. Anyway, Pope’s elegance and wit shine through The Rape of the Lock (in 5 cantos) is one of the most famous English-language examples of the mock-epic. Published in its first version in 1712, when Pope was only 23 years old, the poem served to forge his reputation as a poet and remains his most frequently studied work. The inspiration for the poem was an actual incident among Pope’s acquaintances (conoscenti) in which Robert, Lord Petre, cut off a lock of Arabella Fermor’s hair, and the young people’s families fell into strife (conflitto) as a result. John Caryll, another member of this same circle of prominent Roman Catholics, asked Pope to write a light poem that would put the episode into a humorous perspective and reconcile the two families. The poem was originally published in a shorter version, which Pope later revised. In this later version he added the “machinery,” the retinue (seguito/scorta) of supernaturals who influence the action as well as the moral of the tale. THOMAS KYD The evolution of theatre buildings and companies in the last years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign was to some degree paralleled by the rapid development of a newly expressive blank-verse tragedy. The key figures in this evolution were Thomas Kyd and his close associate Chrisopher Marlowe. Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy: or, Hieronimo is Mad Again, presented at the Rose theatre in the early months of 1592 and published anonymously later in the same year, proved amongst the most popular and influential of all the plays of the period. It introduced a new kind of central character, on obsessive, brooding, mistrustful and alienated plotter, and it set a pattern from which a line of dramatic explorations of the theme of revenge developed. The Spanish tragedy ultimately proved to be play as parodied and ridiculed by other dramatists as it had once been flattered by imitation. What particularly established its reputation was its intermixture of dense plotting, intense action, swiftly making dialogue, and long, strategically placed, rhetorically shaped speeches. The soliloquies of Hieronimo, a father determined to revenge the murder of his son, both gave prominence to an onward drama of private disillusion and created on impression of the agonized soul writing as it debated with itself. 45