Preparation for NET/JRF English - 12

Topics so far –

1.The Road Map for NET/JRF in English

2.Outline to NET/JRF English – Papers II & III - Syllabus January 2017

3.Geoffrey Chaucer: An Overview of the Poet and His Age

4.The Age of Chaucer: His Contemporaries

5.Chaucer’s Imitators and Disciples in England and Scotland

6.Beginnings of the English Drama – Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes

7.Background to the Renaissance in England

8.The Renaissance in England: Part – I

9.The Renaissance in England: Part – II

10.William Shakespeare - His Life & Works

11.Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Now – 

12. Shakespeare’s Successors

Next –

13. Restoration Period in Literature

12. Shakespeare’s Successors

[DRAMA, PROSE & POETRY under Charles I & The Commonwealth Period]

Drama under Charles I & The Commonwealth Period

The playwrights of whom we still have to speak belong to the reign of Charles I and should therefore have place in the next book of this history. But they are so entangled with their predecessors that they cannot easily be separated from them. To study them is to continue the earlier subject. It therefore seems bet to pursue the study of the dram uninterrupted until the theatres were closed.

Philip Massinger – The playwright who, after Fletcher, dominated the stage by the number and quality of his plays, had long worked with him as a subordinate. Massinger was a composite of Fletcher and Johnson.

Massinger began his career as a collaborator with older, better-known dramatists, and especially with Fletcher, whose influence over him was strong. Among his best-known plays are his comedies, A New Way to Pay Old Debts and The City Madam, and his tragedies, the Duke of Milaine and The Unnatural Combat. His finest qualities are the fluency and vitality of his blank verse, the clarity and strength of his plot construction, and his fine theatre sense. His characters (with one or two notable exceptions, like Sir Giles Overreach in A New Way to Pay Old Debts, and Luke Frugal in The City Madam) are usually types rather than individuals, and in situation, theatrical device, and characterization, he has a fondness for repetition which is a serious weakness. The shallow, boldly drawn characters often place too great a strain upon our credulity--his villains are villainous, and his women shameless, to an incredible degree. Predominantly serious in temper, Massinger often deals with the political issues of his day. He seems to lack real humour, and the comic garb can sit rather uneasily upon him. Philip Massinger’s A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1625–26) remained one of the most popular social comedies for more than two hundred years. The theme of class superiority (the upper class, and the rising mercantile middle class) begins to be popular here, and will assume greater and greater prominence in the literature of the eighteenth century.

With characters like Greedy and Frank Wellborn, Massinger’s play brings the city comedy (here set near Nottingham) to new heights; in Sir Giles Overreach – ‘a cruel extortioner’ – it created one of the great comic roles.

Workshop on Creativity and Writing @ BCM, Kottayam

Preparation for NET/JRF English - 11

Topics so far –

1. The Road Map for NET/JRF in English

2. Outline to NET/JRF English – Papers II & III - Syllabus January 2017

3. Geoffrey Chaucer: An Overview of the Poet and His Age

4. The Age of Chaucer: His Contemporaries

5. Chaucer’s Imitators and Disciples in England and Scotland

6. Beginnings of the English Drama – Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes

7. Background to the Renaissance in England

8. The Renaissance in England: Part – I

9. The Renaissance in England: Part – II

10. William Shakespeare - His Life & Works

Now –

11. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Next –

12. Shakespeare’s Successors

13. The Closing of the Theatres

14. Literature under Charles I and the Commonwealth

11. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Shakespeare’s contemporaries wrote plays mostly in collaboration with their peers. The prominent contemporaries of Shakespeare are –

George Chapman

Ben Jonson

John Marston

Thomas Dekker

Thomas Heywood

Thomas Middleton

Cyril Tourneur

John Webster

John Fletcher

George Chapman

Dramatist, poet, and distinguished translator, George Chapman embodied the Renaissance ideal of the sophisticated man of letters. Many critics consider his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey his most important achievement.

With Prince Henry as his patron, Chapman continued composing dramas, including his last major comedy, Eastward Ho, [written in collaboration with Ben Jonson and John Marston]. The play’s sarcastic political insults against policies favored by James I resulted in swift imprisonment for Chapman and Jonson, though both were soon released. Afterward, Chapman turned to writing tragedy. His best-known works from this period are Bussy D’Ambois and the two-part The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron.

His translation of the first twelve books of the Iliad appeared in 1609, prefaced by a dedication to Prince Henry, who had endorsed the work with a promise of three hundred pounds and a pension. However, when the young prince died suddenly in 1612, the prince’s father failed to fulfill Henry’s promise to Chapman.

Dr. Litvack's Date with Chennai

It was a memorable day by all means! Dr. Leon Litvack, kept his date with Chennai on 07 November for an impressive lecture on ‘Myth, Memory and Meaning’ at the University of Madras, - a thought-provoking and insightful lecture that was ‘spell-binding’ by all means.

The evening with Dr. Litvack was all the more wonderful, with the four of us having a lively and fruitful discussion that ranged from Folk Literature to Creative Writing, to the scope of the Humanities now and in the near future, and the Irish literary landscape vis-à-vis the Indian. 

Dr. Litvack did his Honours in Literature at The King’s College, London, [remember? King’s College, London, which has gone into the record books, for being the very first College that offered English Literature as a course of study, way back in 1828!] and well, Peter Barry was our source for that!

He talked about how the people from Northern Ireland were traditional and quite orthodox in their views, and how they differed from the South! Being the trustee on the Dickens’ Museum, he added that, they’re planning on having an exhibition in 2020 on Dickens and his oeuvre.

Ambai [C. S. Lakshmi] on her latest Book...

Blogger's Note: Well, students from MCC, especially those of you who did your Part II English in the Day Stream would be familiar with the very first poem that you had to do as part of your III Semester Programme - She by Lakshmi Kannan aka Ambai, a Tamil feminist writer. The poem depicts the emotional and psychological sterility of the woman at home, and her lack of self-expression in a patriarchal society. Ambai has now come out with her latest book titled A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge, with her crime-solving protagonist Sudha Gupta.

Ambai talks to Jerry Pinto - 

On Mysteries and Detective stories in Tamil Fiction –

On Her foray into Detective Fiction –

On Literature - Literature as a means for social change –

On Writers - A Writer and her righteous anger –

On Women - ‘A woman who knows what she wants will know how to extract the space for that’ –

Ambai (C. S. Lakshmi) has a new book out. A Meeting on the Andheri Overbridge (Juggernaut) is a collection of three longish short stories, translated by Meenakshi Subramaniam. What marks the difference is that these are detective stories, all starring Sudha Gupta, Mumbai resident, mother of one, employer of one (Stella), wife of one (Naren). This marks quite a change from what one expects from Ambai. Excerpts from an interview:

The literary origins of the detective story go back right up to Oedipus Rex, we are told, where the king must find the sinner/ criminal who has transgressed the moral order. Is there a similar lineage in Tamil fiction?

I think all epics and classical texts contain mysteries, for life abounds with mysteries. Kovalan of Silappadhikaram is beheaded for a crime he did not commit. Kannagi comes to the court of the Pandyan king to prove that the queen’s anklet with pearls was not stolen by her husband. She dramatically breaks the anklet and rubies spill out. Then there is the mystery of whose son Karna really was in Mahabharata . There is the abduction of Sita in Ramayana and the search for her. And there is the mystery of who Lava and Kusa really are. The interesting thing is that no one is really a sinner or a criminal but everyone is caught up in the eddies and spates of life.

The formal demands of the short stories you generally write are quite different from the demands of form in the detective story. Did you find reconciling the two difficult?

‘To Music, to becalm his Fever’ - Critical Summary

‘To Music, to becalm his Fever’ by Robert Herrick

Critical Summary

Introduction

Robert Herrick, a charming poet, was a disciple of Ben Jonson, and the Sons of Ben were not metaphysicals. Herrick never married, but a number of his poems are addressed to imaginary mistresses.

Of the seventeenth century English poets, Herrick’s work has the closest inherent relationship to music. It is melodious, and most of his poems have the character of song about them. Among his contemporaries, in fact, Herrick is called ‘the songwriter’.

On the Poem

Herrick’s poem ‘To Music, to becalm his Fever’ was included in Bissell’s In Praise of Music. This text would also be set to music by Paul Hindemith, and in 1952 by Ned Rorem from Flight For Heaven, No. 1.  It was written about 1660, when the poet was 70 years of age, and reflects Herrick's marriage of music and poetry.

At its most basic level, this is a poem of “passage” with music as the embracing catalyst. Memory research says that the last thing a person recognizes is touch and music. Music can distract, quiet the mind, make us laugh, remind us of past experience or relationships, soothe our soul, or transport us to another place. Poems extolling the soothing balm brought by sleep to those in need are numerous. ‘To Music: To Becalm His Fever’ stands out as the best in its class.

Song to Music for Slumber

To ‘charm’ something involves chanting a verse that supposedly has magic powers. Another meaning of charm is to ‘put to sleep’. Yet another meaning of charm is, to “put to sleep”.

The poet Herrick, in this poem pens an ode to Music, to charm him to sleep, as he knows that Music has the great power of putting him to deep slumber. Music is also personified as the balm or the panacea that can remove the sickness from the poet, by ‘killing’ his fever.

Preparation for NET/JRF English - 10

Topics so far – 

1. The Road Map for NET/JRF in English

2. Outline to NET/JRF English – Papers II & III - Syllabus January 2017

3. Geoffrey Chaucer: An Overview of the Poet and His Age

4. The Age of Chaucer: His Contemporaries

5. Chaucer’s Imitators and Disciples in England and Scotland

6. Beginnings of the English Drama – Miracle Plays, Moralities and Interludes

7. Background to the Renaissance in England

8. The Renaissance in England: Part – I

9. The Renaissance in England: Part – II

Now -

10. William Shakespeare - His Life & Works

Next –

11. Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

12. Shakespeare’s Successors

13. Literature under Charles I and the Commonwealth

William Shakespeare - His Life & Works

There is no one kind of Shakespearean hero, although in many ways Hamlet is the epitome of the Renaissance tragic hero, who reaches his perfection only to die. In Shakespeare’s early plays, his heroes are mainly historical figures, kings of England, as he traces some of the historical background to the nation’s glory. But character and motive are more vital to his work than praise for the dynasty, and Shakespeare’s range expands considerably during the 1590s, as he and his company became the stars of London theatre. Although he never went to university, as Marlowe and Kyd had done, Shakespeare had a wider range of reference and allusion, theme and content than any of his contemporaries. His plays, written for performance rather than publication, were not only highly successful as entertainment, they were also at the cutting edge of the debate on a great many of the moral and philosophical issues of the time.

Click to enlarge

Shakespeare’s earliest concern was with kingship and history, with how ‘this sceptr’d isle’ came to its present glory. As his career progressed, the horizons of the world widened, and his explorations encompassed the geography of the human soul, just as the voyages of such travellers as Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Sir Francis Drake expanded the horizons of the real world.

Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays over a period of some twenty-four years, as well as the most famous sonnet collection in English and a number of longer poems: he wrote all these while working with his theatre company and frequently performing with them. His was a working life in the theatre, and his subsequent fame as the greatest writer in English should not blind us to this fact. He was a constant experimenter with dramatic form and content, and with the possibilities that the open thrust stage gave him to relate to his audience.