Thursday 12 September 2013

JOHN MILTON



His Life 
John Milton, who occupies the greatest place among such poets as an influence and model, was Londoner by birth, and was born in Bread Street on 9th December 1608; but his family belong Oxfordshire. Milton entered St.Paul's school in 1620, and went thence five years later to Christ college, Cambridge,becoming M.A in 163.
 During the twenty years  of civil commotion he wrote, except a few sonnets, no poetry, but was fertile in controversial prose, which will be dealt with in another chapter. he married in 1643; and she died in 1652, leaving him three daughters. Meanwhile his tract writing, now devoted to purely political matters, and especially the defense of the execution of the king, he also lost his eyesight in 1652,and married a second in 1656, she also died in 1658. At the restoration he hid himself married third time in 1663, this time more successfully in comfort and permanence.The publication of his great epics followed at no long intervals, and he died on November 1674, and was buried at St. Giles's, Cripplegate. 

His Works
His works fall under three unusually well marked periods; the first including all early poems up to Lycidas; the second fertile in prose, but yielding no poetry except most of the sonnets; the third giving two Paradises and Samson Agonistes. 
Before Lycidas ,he wrote such remarkable poems like The Ode on the Nativity;, as the hearald's cry of a new great poet, is a test of the  reader's power to appreciate poetry.For the famous pair L'Allegro and Il Penseroso, no one has ever had anything but praise. Even Dr. Johnson could feel their universal charm. Comus was written in 1634 John Milton is best known for Paradise Lost, widely regarded as the greatest epic poem in English. Together with Paradise Regained, it formed his reputation as one of the greatest English poets. In his prose works he advocated the abolition of the Church of England. His influence extended not only through the civil wars and interregnum but also to the American and French revolutions
Paradise Lost
By far his best-known poem is Paradise Lost, an epic in twelve books in the tradition of Virgil's Aeneid, recounting the story of Satan's rebellion against God, and of the disobedience and fall of Adam and Eve, led astray by Satan's lies. The story of Satan's rebellion is not found in the Bible, except in passing allusions capable of more than one interpretation. I will therefore pause to sketch the story as it was generally accepted in Milton's day..

Lycidas
Edward King was a fellow student of Milton's, a Puritan youth who had written some poetry and was intending to become a preacher. He was on a ship in the Irish Sea when it sank, and he was drowned. Several of his friends decided to write poems in his memory and publish the collection. Milton's contribution, Lycidas, belongs to a tradition going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans. It is a pastoral. That is, the poet and the persons he writes about are all treated as shepherds (or shepherdesses) living in the hillsides and pastures of ancient Greece. Edward King is renamed Lycidas, and Milton mourns his death. 

Sunday 5 May 2013

SHAKESPEARE'S COMEDIES PLAYS









stratford_bust_pic.jpg In Shakespearean comedy, forces of chaos seem to contribute to a larger harmony; the promiscuity of unregulated sexual desire leads to a prospect of constancy and marriage.  This is the reason why Shakespeare’s Comedy Plays always include marriage in the end.  Shakespeare was very familiar with classical Greek comedy.  The Grecian “Old Comedy” was generally satirical and frequently political in nature, containing within it an abundance of sexual innuendos.  He also includes the comedy styles of Commedia dell’arte.  He uses the stock characters akin to Commedia dell’arte such as the foolish old man, the devious bravado, or military officers full of false bravado.  Shakespeare took the best comedic traits of various styles of Comedy and applied them to his 18 comedies.

 John Garrett (London 1959)In an essay entitled "The Basis of Shakespearian Comedy," Professor Nevill Coghill…. pointed out that there were two conceptions of comedy current in the sixteenth century, both going back to grammarians of the fourth century, but radically opposed to each other. By the one definition, a comedy was a story beginning in sadness and ending in happiness. By the other it was, in Sidney’s words, "an imitation of common errors of out life" represented "in the most ridiculous and scornful sort that may be; so that it is impossible that any beholder can be content to be such a one." Shakespeare, he declared, accepted the first; Johnson, the second….


A further sub genre of the comedy is the tragicomedy - a serious play with a happy ending. For example, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale could be considered a tragicomedy because it reaches a tragic climax but ends with a happy conclusion. Here is a list of Shakespearean comedies:
A further subgenre of the comedy is the tragicomedy - a serious play with a happy ending. For example, Shakespeare's A Winter's Tale could be considered a tragicomedy because it reaches a tragic climax but e
The plot is very important in Shakespeare's comedies. They are often very convoluted, twisted and confusing, and extremely hard to follow. Another characteristic of Shakespearean comedy is the themes of love and friendship, played within a courtly society. Songs often sung by a jester or a fool parallel the events of the plot. Also, foil and stock characters are often inserted into the plot.
Love provides the main ingredient for the plot. If the lovers are unmarried when the play opens, they either have not met or there is some obstacle in the way of their love. Examples of the obstacles these lovers go through are familiar to every reader of Shakespeare: the slanderous tongues which nearly wreck love in Much Ado About Nothing; the father insistent upon his daughter marrying his choice, as in A Midsummer Nights Dream; or the expulsion of the rightful Duke's daughter in As You Like It.
Shakespeare uses many predictable patterns in his plays. The hero rarely appears in the opening lines; however, we hear about him from other characters. The hero does not normally make an entrance for a few lines, at least, if not a whole scene. The hero is also virtuous and strong, but he always possesses a character flaw.
In the comedy itself, Shakespeare assumes that we know the basic plot, and he jumps right into it with little or no explanation. Foreshadowing and foreboding are put in the play early and can be heard throughout the drama. Many Shakespearean comedies have five acts. The climax of the play is always during the third act.
nds with a happy conclusion. Here is a list of Shakespearean comedies: 

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



Thursday 2 May 2013

THE LIFE OF SHAKESHPEARE



THe results of the almost ferocious industry spent upon unearthing and analysing every date and detail of Shakespeare's life are on whole very merge, and for literary purposes almost entirely unimportant, while with guesswork we have nothing to do. The certainties may be summarised very briefly, William Shakespeare was traditionally born on 23rd of April, and certainly baptised on the 26th of April 1564, at Stafford-on-Avon . His grandfather's name was Richard, that of his father, a dealer in hides, gloves, corn, wood, etc., and the poet's mother was Mary Arden. He had two sisters and three brothers. The family, which through Mary Arden had some small landed property, was at one time prosperous, at others not.

Shakespeare himself married early; the date of the actual ceremony is not known, but bond of marriage passed between him and his wife, Anne Hathaway on November 1582, when he was little more than eighteen, and his wife,  a yeoman's daughter, eight years older. They had three children , Susanna, Hamnet, and Judith. 

Tradition there is- through of no great age, and of exceedingly slight authority- as to his leaving Stafford for London, perhaps in 1585, 1586, or 1587, and perhaps in consequence of deer stealing prank in the neighbouring park of sir Thomas Lucy of Charlotte. He perhaps began his connection with the theatre as a horse-holder; and was pretty certainly as an actor before long.

In 1593 appeared his first work, the remarkable Venus and Adonis, and next year the rather less remarkable Lucrece. He was connected soon after the middle of the last decade of the century with divers theatres, become a shareholder in them and by 1597 could buy a good house, New place, at Stratford, where he afterwards enlarged his property. It is to be noted that his constant residence at London during ten years, his wife desertion of his wife, etc., are all matters of guesswork founded on barely negative evidence. London was his headquarters during this decade from 1586 to 1596, and occasionally visited  by him during third- at close of which, in 1616 on 23rd April, he died. His reputation, through it has steadily grown, has always been great;  there has never from the day of his death to this day been wanting testimony to his position from the greatest living names of the time in English Literature.

Monday 29 April 2013

THE UNIVERSITY WITS



TOwards the close of the twilight period, however, we come to a group of dramatic work produced by known or least named person , distinguished from the doggerel of the interludes and the starched sterility of the early blank verse play by the presence in almost all cases of considerable, and in one or two of all but the nights, gifts, equipment, and even define literary aim. All these men were probably, and all but one or two certainly of University training,an advantage less  uniformly possessed by their immediate successors. For once the centre and source of a great literary movement in England was what it ought to have been- the two Universities. The literary developments of the time were actually firmed at Oxford or at Cambridge. but the vast majority of the distinguished writers of the time were  University men; their friendships, which in eager discussion of literary novelties always ply so great part, were in many cases University friendships; the mighty group of playwrights who founded the English drama were called, " University Wits"

In this honourable function Cambridge had a little priority and the predominance. Of great early dramatic group Marlowe, Greene, and Nash were Cambridge men, but Lily, Peele, and Lodge were Oxonian.
University Wits is a term invented by literary historians to identify a handful of writers, some well known, others less so, who first appeared in the early 1580s and had almost completely vanished from the record by the mid-90s. Some were students together at the Merchant Taylor’s School during the period when the boys performed plays for the Court. Some were together at Trinity College Oxford and then at the Inns of Court in the Holborne district of London. Some wrote poetry, some tales, some plays, some all three. For some we have almost nothing but their reputations. All wrote in “pre-Shakespearean” styles that separated them from the writers of the previous “drab era.” As David Horne, author of the only biography of George Peele, puts it: “All were learnt and classical in their tastes and interested in courtly literature” (70). Several are the accepted authors of works that Shakespeare “rewrote” in the ’90s, and most of them have been assigned an assortment of the many anonymous works of that period.
Most interesting perhaps is how several of them are the favourites for authors of those Shakespeare plays that the so-called “disintegrators” like to assign to someone other than Shakespeare: George Peele and Robert Greene lead the field in this, but almost all of them have been assigned to all or part authorship of at least one of his plays by some Shakespeare scholar. In other words their styles in some places are so close to early Shakespeare that scholars can’t tell the difference.
The leading name is that of Robert Greene (“died” 1592), poet, pamphleteer, proto-novelist and playwright. Though not the first to appear in print––his first pamphlet, Mamillia, was registered with the Stationers in 1580, the year after John Lyly’s Euphues––but he was the most prolific: 20 works published over the next 12 years (with a number of anonymous works attributed to him later). He was also the first to disappear (I use the term advisedly) in 1592. Described by his fellow pamphleteers and even by himself as a profane and profligate ne’er do weel––something utterly belied by his works––Greene’s biography is too weak to take seriously. For these and other reasons, we (myself and one other authorship scholar) believe that the real Robert Greene was a front for a Court writer.


The second most prominent member of the group in terms of published material and talent is Thomas Nashe (1567-1601). He and Greene should be credited with launching the English periodical press as a viable industry. Their volley of pamphlets throughout the latter half of the 1580s and the early years of the ’90s showed the world that there was a market in England for serial publications of quality. Like his senior, Nashe’s works proclaim him as one of the most highly educated, erudite writers of his time, qualities his official biography doesn’t support. I stand with the Baconian Edward George Harman in claiming that Nashe was a front for Francis Bacon.

Most famous of all, Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) is not on every list (he attended Cambridge, not Oxford, and was never a student at the Inns), but he was obviously involved with some of the others. The popularity of his play Tamburlaine in the late 1580s was what turned the London Stage into an industry strong enough and popular enough to withstand its enemies’ continuous efforts to take it down. His assassination in 1593 by government agents was the opening bell for the disappearance of the entire group, who were all dead or fled shortly after (that is, all but Nashe, who continued to get published until 1599). It also proves that he was who he said he was, for no one would bother murdering a proxy, leaving the real writer to strike again under another name. In fact, for the most part his biography is a model for what we should expect to find for any gifted and popular writer of the period.

John Lyly (1553-1606) is the earliest of the Wits, both in age and in public awareness. The first thing to bear his name, the proto-novel Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit, made him famous, both in his own time and ever after, carrying to a peak its ornate style, known ever since as euphuism. Licensed in December 1578, published the following spring, it foretold the kind of literature that would be coming from the University Wits for the next decade. His name is also attached to a series of Court plays performed by the children’s companies throughout the ’80s. Lyly had attended Oxford (Magdalen), though earlier than the other Wits (BA 1573, MA 1575). However, like Greene and Nashe, his biography fails to support his claims to authorship, chiefly because although Euphues was one of the most popular books of the time, and although he continued to live in London and was apparently in desperate need of work and money, it seems he produced nothing from the disbanding of Paul’s Boys in 1590 until his death in 1607––17 years of inexplicable silence.

Thomas Watson (1555-1592?), one of the first to arrive was also one of the first to vanish. Primarily a Latinist, his best known work in English is the Passionate Century of Love, over a hundred poems, some translations, many in the style of 15th-century Italian poets, published in 1582 (and dedicated to the Earl of Oxford). A variety of things were published under Watson’s name including lyrics to madrigals set to music by William Byrd. However, despite the obvious popularity of the works published in his name, what we have in the way of a biography simply can’t support them. That both he and Robert Greene, another biographically-challenged writer, supposedly died within days of each other at the outset of the literary holocaust of the ’90s suggests that both were fronts for the same Court writer. (The only evidence for Watson’s death at that time is a single line in the parish register of St. Batholomew the Less. For Greene there’s nothing.)

George Peele (1556-1596) appears in the literary record at about the same time as Watson, both shortly after Greene. A graduate of Christ Church College Oxford (mat 1571, BA 1577, MA 1579), having returned to London, his home town, in 1581, he wrote for the Stage until 1590, at which point he broke with his earlier career as a Wit, providing official encomia and writing and directing pageants for the City and his alma mater. He’s credited with writing the only play to be identified with the first Blackfriars Theater (The Arraignment of Paris) in 1581, while suggestions that he was the author of the various other plays claimed for him are too uncertain to take on faith
.
Thomas Lodge (1558-1625) connects with this group through all three factors: time, location, and works. Educated at the Merchant Taylor’s School during the period when the students occasionally performed at Court, then at Oxford during the period that John Lyly and George Peele were attending (he got his BA in 1577 and his MA in 1581). Once out of college he became a member of Lincoln’s Inn, located in the neighborhood of High Holborn where Peele and others were also located. His first appearance in print in 1579 was in response to the Church-promoted attack by Stephen Gosson on the playwriting Wits. Although his biographer has a poor opinion of his talent (Sisson 184-9), he did produce one work that was later turned into a masterpiece by Shakespeare: As You Like It. But that he was more than a front is clear from the many mediocre tales published under his name and several serious translations and medical works he published later. As a contributor to the literary legacy of the University Wits he fades from the scene following the publication of his last pastoral tale in 1596, having turned to the study and practice of medicine that will dominate the rest of his life.

 Thomas Kyd
(1558-1594) was a Londoner like Peele, and a student at the Merchant Taylor’s School during the same play-giving period as Thomas Lodge and Edmund Spenser. The son of a scrivener, what today we would call a professional secretary, there is little solid evidence that Kyd was ever much more than that for clients like Lord Strange. His authorship of the groundbreaking play The Spanish Tragedy is based on nothing more than three words by Meres and a passing mention by Thomas Heywood 30 years later, which, if nothing else, has made him a favorite with scholars as the purported author of dozens of anonymous works including the mythical Ur-Hamlet. Arrested by Cecil’s agents in May 1593, Kyd was imprisoned and racked into turning state’s evidence against Marlowe. Though released following Marlowe’s assassination, he died the following year, shortly after the murder of their patron, Lord Strange.

Sunday 24 February 2013

THE MIRACLE PLAY



THe outburst of English Drama is so pre-eminently the glory of the Elizabethan period of literature proper, that it has seemed on the whole better to take no detailed notice in the preceding Books of the early experiments- not very early, not very numerous, and not of the first importance in literature- which we possess in that literary kind.



The modern drama did arise out of the Miracles. The Miracles did pass into the Moralities. The Moralities did pass into modern dramas. and though the imitation of the ancient classical drama, and its performance in school and universities, coloured, shaped, generally influenced , the modern drama most momentously, this drama no more arose out of them than Spenser arose out of Virgil, or Hooker out of Cicero.

Miracle play or Mystery play, form of medieval drama that came from dramatisation of the liturgy of the Roman Catholic Church. It developed from the 10th to the 16th cent., reaching its height in the 15th cent. The simple lyric character of the early texts, as shown in the Quem QuĊ“ritis, was enlarged by the addition of dialogue and dramatic action. Eventually the performance was moved to the churchyard and the marketplace. Rendered in Latin, the play was preceded by a prologue or by a herald who gave a synopsis and was closed by a herald's salute.

It is sufficient to say that we have from France Latin mystery or miracles plays which may be of eleventh century, Latin mixed with a little French nearly as early, and plays wholly in French which are as old as twelfth.The four great collections known by the names of their place of performance, are the York, Wakefield, Coventry, Chester plays. we have one of a Newcastle cycle, one of a Dublin,an East-Anglian version of Abraham and Isaac, one norfolk"Digby Mysteries" and the oldest of all , the Harrowing of the Hell.


Towney Plays ms., opening of The Second Shepherd's Play. HM 1 ff37v-38; courtesy of the Huntington Library.

 A very little examination of these plays will show the astonishing fallacy of the proposition that the modern drama. Instances of indirect connection are to be found especially in the story of The Ark and the Tower of Babel,both of which were fixed on almost from the first as opportunities for comic play and digression. The great instance of the sheer addition is the famous 'Second Shepherds'play , not merely comic , but of absolutely romantic treatment .

Wednesday 6 February 2013

THE FOUR GREAT SCOTTISH POETS

IT has constantly been remarked as most curious and partially unaccountable phenomenon, that while Chaucerian poetry, as soon as Chaucer's own hands failed, gave nothing but third rate work or worse in England it produced in Scotland work in some cases of very high quality indeed. Such account as is possible of the reasons for the general lateness of purely Scottish literature has been given in  this  chapter . In this I;ll give an account of the four chiefs of Scottish poetry when it did come-James the first, Robert Henryson, William Dunbar, and Gawain or Gavin Douglas.

1-James Stewart 

 Criticism of the strenuously inert kind has played its usual games with the literary work of James Stewart,first king of  the name on England. After by turns attributing to him and taking away from him Christ's Kirk on the Green, Pebbles to the Play, etc., it has recently attacked his claims, which for nearly four centuries had been undisturbed, on the King's quair itself. this James would naturally have been, seeing that he was born in 1394, captured at sea by the English in 1405, kept in honourable captivity in England till 1424. The King's quair may be ranked as the two most graceful, scholarly and elegant poems of the french-Chaucerian tradition to be found in English. The Ballad of good Council, which is also ascribed by good authority to James, and is the only other piece bearing such attribution.









  2- Robert Henryson


Few poets whose personality is certain, and whose work is both eminent in merit and not inconsiderable in bulk, have a more shadowy record than master Robert Henryson, schoolmaster in Dunfermline, as he is entitled in editions of his work printed some sixty or seventy years after his death.About his work, however, there is no reasonable doubt. They consist of two poems of some length, the Testament of Creseide and Orpheus and Eurydice; of a collection, with prologue, of Aesopic fables in Scots;and of rather more than dozen minor poems. There is,however, no doubt that Robene and Makyne Malkin, the best known of Henryson'soem. The remaining members of this small but admirable collection of verse are less interesting, though much above the standard of their time.

3- William Dunbar



It is usual to rank William Dunbar as the chief of all this group, and in fact the greatest scottish poet except Burnes.He was certainly a Lothian man, probably allied not mearly in name to the great family of the Earls of Dunbar and March. The year 1460,with the usual circa, is accepted as his birthdate.The two most considerable are The Twa Maryit Wemen and the wedo and the Friars of Berwick. Both are very strongly Chaucerian. Next to these two may be ranked the Golden Targe, The flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy, the famous Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins,and The Thistle and The Rose.

4-Gawain douglas  




The last of the four poets to be mentioned here is also the least, though he has an interest of his own. Gawin or Gawain douglas was the third son of Archibald douglas. it is not known at which of the numerous seats of the Douglasses he was born but the date must have been 1474-75.In 1501 he finished the Palice of Honour.Between this and the year of Flodden, 1513, in the summer of which he finished Virgil, we hear little of him. In order to come to a just estimate of this, though the Virgil itself will give us sufficiant data, it is before all things neceassary to considerhis originals poems, the palice and Honour,and King Hart.

Sunday 6 January 2013

JOHN WYCLIFFE

                    



                                                    John Wycliffe (1320-1384) was a theologian and early proponent of reform in the Roman Catholic Church during the 14th century. He initiated the first translation of the Bible into the English language and is considered the main precursor of the Protestant Reformation. Wycliffe was born at Ipreswell (modern Hipswell), Yorkshire, England, between 1320 and 1330; and he died at Lutterworth (near Leicester) December.

                                                    John Wycliffe, "was an English preacher, writer and Bible translator who has been called "the morning star of the Reformation." He preached and wrote against various doctrines and practices of the Church of Rome, translated the Bible into English, and sent itinerant preachers (later called Lollards) throughout England to bring to the common people the the Word of God and the message of salvation through Jesus Christ,who was lived almost 200 years before the Reformation, but his beliefs and teachings closely match those of Luther, Calvin and other reformers. As a man ahead of his time, historians have called Wycliffe the "Morning star of the Reformation."

                         The work of wycliffe, a prose writer only, and a 'scared' and philosophical prose writer , is less novel, less attractive, but not less important. Little, despite his fame and the violent partisanship for and against him, is really known of the auther. we do not know when John Wycliffe was born or where, though the probabilities connect his birth with the place of Wycliffe-on-rees and the time of 1320-1325. He was certainly master od Balliol(a northern college) at Oxford, in 1360;and by the confession of his opponents,was a recognized expert in theology and scholastic philosophy.

                     The english work of Wycliffe and the Wyclifites (for a large part of the university of Oxford was saturated with his doctorine, and the complete body of Wyclifian literature is  rather an earlier 'Tracts for the Times'than the work of any one man) consists on the one hand of a new and complete  translation of the Bible, on the other of a considerable mass of tracts and sermons inteded for popular consumption.
                      
                      Wyclif is chiefly remembered and honored for his role in Bible translating. In the early 1380's he led the movement for a translation of the Bible into English, and two complete translations (one much more idiomatic than the other) were made at his instigation. (How much of the translating he did himself, if any, remains uncertain.) He proposed the creation of a new religious order of Poor Preachers who would preach to the people from the English Bible. Today, the Wyclif Foundation, named in his honor, is committed to translating the Bible into all the languages spoken anywhere in the world.Sources: (1) Every Man's Book of Saints (Mowbray's, London and Oxford, 1981); (2) Encyclopedia Britannica; (3) The New Catholic Encyclopedia; (4) H B Workman, John Wyclif: a Study of the English Medieval Church, 2 vol, 1926. (5)  George Saintsbury,A Short History of English Literature