Letteratura inglese 3

The Riot Club of 2014 is a film adaption. She adapted the novel by Sarah Walters

called Tipping The Velvet. In 2018 her play Home I’m Darling won an important prize.

The last thing she works on is in 2022, Rivals, about a work by Jilly Cooper.

Posh and Home I’m Darling are the most important.

Sam West is Laura’s partner, son of actors, they often collaborate.

Posh

Inspired by an all-man prestigious dining club for Oxford students called Bullingdon

Club. It is known for the bad behavior of the guests: sexism, vandalism. David

Cameron, a former prime minister, was a client. Boris Johnson too, that studied at

Oxford. George Osborne, a former chancellor, too. It reminds us of the riot club. Her

characters are fictional.

Laura Wade likes to research and Posh is well researched, she interviewed people who

went there or that knew other people who were clients to find out more about this

clubs. In the play there’s the idea of poshness. We have 10 guys on stage, only two

female characters (an escort and the landlord’s daughter Rachel).

The language is part of the texture of the play. Laura Wade is known for the precision

of her texts. Most of the play’s action takes place in the private room of the club, that

will be trashed (vandalism). The play is more and more thorny and dark. Some

members feel that the club is leaving on its past glories. The president is one of them,

James. One of the guys is the womanizer of the group and he booked an escort for the

evening but she refuses the offer and goes away. They are clever and entertaining but

they’re messed up.

One month before the general election in 2010, the conservatives led by Cameron won

but they fell because the election resulted in Hung Parliament, the parliament had no

party which was able to command, no majority. The play was resonant and it was

adapted 2 years later because the political situation changed and they had to adapt

some references to specific politicians. The play touches cultural, social and political

issues.

She’s prolific but she doesn’t find writing easy, it is an agony, a pain.

Plot

Posh is divided into 2 acts, subdivided into 2 scenes. It explores how posh people have

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remained close the center of power in Britain for generations. This is the 1 time that a

play centers on posh, spoilt and privileged people that are at the top. They feel they

can do anything they want. They caused chaos and damage at the restaurant and paid

because they can afford it.

In a gentleman club in the center of London, Jeremy, a conservative politician, meets

his nephew, a guy who is in the riot club, where Jeremy was also inscribed. They share

stories about the club and they think that it is clear that the club has lost its riotous

part. Jeremy is disappointed by the fact that his nephew and his friends are much

quieter than before. He wants to do something at the next dinner to impress other

people.

Several months later they have dinner at the Oxfordshire country club. The 10

members arrive at the club, and James, the president, is late. They arrange the

delicious menu. They invite the escort and there is excitement but healthy tension

between people. When the president arrives, the dinner begins and there are several

toasts.

The guys are furious because they feel they have the right to do whatever they want

and don’t want to be challenged by the landlord, socially inferior. They mock Rachel

because she studies at another university.

The second half of the play begins with the complaint of the guys that feel without

power and privileges in favor of democracy (mediocrity). The posh of the original earl

riot club arrives and joins them. He encourages them to take the country back. They

start drinking, they involve Rachel because the prostitute walked away, one of them

tries to kiss Rachel with force and she leaves terrified. They boys start trashing the

room, the landlord argues with them, violence starts. The police arrives and they

decide to blame the entire fight on one of them, Allister. He is the scapegoat.

The play has a circular structure. At the end we are at the gentleman club again. This

time Jeremy doesn’t meet his nephew but Allister, that is facing a trial because of the

boys. Jeremy is impressed by Allister political ideas and at the end of the play he

suggests that he might have a future in politics. Jeremy wants to save him from prison.

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Important poet of the Victorian Age. He had a long life, almost the entire century

(1809 – 1892). He is very representative of the period. Tennyson wasn’t born lord, his

family was modest, in the countryside, he comes from a marginal background. His

beginning was marginal but growing up he became one of the most significant

Victorian English voices. He attended university, he received formal education, and

began to be interested in literature and poetry. In 1830 he published his first poetries:

transitional work between Romanticism and Victorianism in poetry. He was influenced

by Lord Byron, that at the time was a very adored poet. Byron died in 1824 in Greece.

Tennyson was shocked by his death, he ran out of his house and cried in the fields

because he was his literary hero. He wrote “Byron is dead” on a stone. For the

Victorian poets, Romanticism was a very formative experience. in memoriam”.

National success came in 1850 when he published the poem “ It’s an

elegy about death. Tennyson is a melancholy poet. Arthur Henry Hallam was his friend

from university that died very young during a trip in France. He was supposed to marry

Tennyson’s sister, he was almost a member of the family. However, there was a very

close link between them, maybe even an erotic link that at the time couldn’t be

expressed. He dedicated the poem to him and this explains the intensity. Poems were

usually about a dear departed person. This poem touched people’s imaginary, even

Queen Victoria that was a widow (she lost her very loved husband). She bought a copy

of the poem. This becomes the poem of the nation. Queen Victoria nominated him

“Poet Laureate” official poet of the English crown and the nation. Every sovran

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nominates one, usually those celebrating important historical events. Wordsworth was

the Poet Laureate before Tennyson. Recently the Poet Laureate was a woman.

The Idylls of the Kings is a cycle of twelve narrative poems by the English poet Alfred

Lord Tennyson which retells the legend of King Arthur.

He is known also for his shorter poems. Ulysses is a dramatic monologue, written in

blank verse without rhymes. The old Ulysses that is back to Itaca after his journey

regains his kingdom, his wife and his son. He is a man of exploration and in the poem

he explains how he cannot live anymore in this little island of fishermen. He needs to

travel, to discover, to find new challenges, so he leaves Itaca again for his last journey.

He goes beyond the limits of the world, at the pillars of Hercules.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield ” are Ulysses words, very representative.

It’s the incarnation of Victorian masculinity, to produce, to act.

When Tellyson writes about the past, the past is a mirror for the present. He writes

about the hopes, the inspirations of his age. However, he is very pessimistic and

melancholic too. The elegiac tone is always very present. He talks about anxieties,

doubts, crisis, doom (destruction, apocalypse).

Tellyson is a spokesperson for an entire age, that of Victorian England, the largest

empire in history. He was read not only by English people, but also from India, Canada,

etc.

In the Victorian age there are many variations, many genres.

Tennyson is the poet of chivalry, knighthood, honor, virtue, purity, morality, heroism,

self-sacrifice.

He analyzes the nation, its strengths and its weaknesses. We can use the word “sage”

because Tennyson represented his period and his nation. The epic genre is an obvious

choice.

The position of England in epics is peculiar: it doesn’t have a medieval poetic history,

even if we can mention Beowulf (IX century). The hero Beowulf it’s a geat, goth, he

comes from Scandinavia and everything takes place not in England but in the

Germanic world. The manuscript was discovered by a Danish, Torkelin, and not a

British. Beowulf was not considered a national monument, because it was felt as very

distant from the culture.

Tennyson decided that he wanted to write an epic poem for his nation about king

Arthur and medieval legends collected around him. Tennyson knew that John Milton

himself had the aspiration to write about king Arthur. Tennyson decided that king

Arthur would be the proper theme for the national epic poem.

He could write about the past and the present. It’s a medieval story and he took

advantage of the fascination for medieval stories. He started developing poems about

different episodes from the Arthurian stories with a double aim: to write about human

universals, eternal human questions (honor, self-sacrifice, loyalty, love and hate,

destiny, trust) and a community, collectivity, kingdom, nation. There’s another aim:

Tennyson wanted to write a problematic poem, an epic about contrasts and opposites.

It’s about the rise of Arthur and Camelot and their fall. It’s also a story of crisis, of

decay, as we can see in the episode of Merlin’s vision (he can preview a negative

event). He has a premonition about king Arthur’s final battle.

Tennyson relates the rise and the fall of community with individuals. There’s an

explanation for the fall of nations and kingdoms: when people who represent the

counterparts prevail. When the meanest in a collectivity have more power than the

virtuous people, the community implodes. People in a community should want to leave

together, in harmony, with the same goals.

The main themes of The Idylls of the Kings:

- Development, implosion, fall;

- Struggle between order and disorder, stability and chaos of anarchy (absence of

a unified power);

- Individual and collective heroism;

- Collapse and extinction of an entire civilization; st

- Civilization against barbarism (Arthur creates an entire civilization the 1

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poem is called “the coming of Arthur”. When he arrives, he finds a desert land

that he renders a civilization with the help of Merlin). For Tennyson the

destruction of Arthur and the knights is also the destruction of civilization.

The poems can be read symbolically as the passing of seasons: the coming of Arthur is

the beginning of spring, the birth of the country. Then we have summer, the moment

of the full maturation of the civilization. Then, autumn when the darkness begins to

win over the light, then winter at the end with the last poem entitled “the

passing of Arthur”. He is defeated by his enemy and he dies. The last battle is a civil

war, so it’s an internal enemy: his nephew Sir Modred. This final implosion is not an

ext