Riassunto esame Letteratura Inglese, Prof. Cavone, libro consigliato English literature, a short history, Bertinetti

The beginnings: Beowulf

For centuries, England was a land of conquest; in fact, it was invaded by the Romans, who called the island Britannia, then by some Germanic tribes, including the Saxons and the Angles. English was the Germanic language divided into Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. The Old English was used to write the first poems which were of a warrior type, among which the most important was Beowulf, which is a long narrative poetical composition dealing with the recollection of a glorious past in the national history of a country and the brave actions of heroes. The main protagonist is a young warrior who fights two gigantic monsters, Grendel and Grendel’s mother, in order to bring happiness to the kingdom in Denmark. The old hero succeeds in killing a monster but he is mortally wounded. The society described is aristocratic and military and marked by Christian ideals. The main characters are supernatural with superhuman powers.

Geoffrey Chaucer: Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer is considered second only to Shakespeare as England’s greatest poet, but in particular, he is considered the father of English literature because his language, the dialect of his native London, gradually became standard English, becoming the basis of Modern English. He went also to Italy where he became interested in Dante and Boccaccio. He was born around 1343. His career started with the re-elaboration of French models. He is remembered for his masterpiece “Canterbury Tales” where thirty people, all belonging to different social classes and including Chaucer himself, are going on a pilgrimage to Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury. Every pilgrim is expected to tell two stories while going to Canterbury and two coming back. All the pilgrims are introduced in the General Prologue and they represent a portrait of English society, in particular the middle class. Realism is the most distinctive feature of the work and the pilgrimage is the key metaphor for life from the religious sphere, in the sense that we are all pilgrims on the way to the heavenly city, and every journey reflects the basic pattern of existence.

Historical background

In 1558, Elizabeth, Henry VII and Anne Boleyn’s daughter, became Queen of England, a divided nation, the majority of which was anti-Catholic and anti-Spanish. She had a strong personality and a lively intelligence. She brought unity and defeated England’s enemies at home and abroad. At the death of Elizabeth in 1603, James Stuart under the title of James VI became the first Stuart King of England promoting a policy of international peace-making. On James’ death in 1625, his second surviving son Charles became king of England who believed in the absolute power of the monarch and was incapable of coming to terms with the House of Commons. In this case, however, the contrast was deeper: in 1642 the Civil War broke out ending with the defeat of the King who was crushed by Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Parliamentary forces. Charles I was sentenced to death and Britain became a republic. After his death, his son was dismissed by the Parliament and the eldest surviving son of Charles I was proclaimed King with whom a bloodless revolution started.

William Shakespeare (16th-17th century)

The 16th century saw the rise of the sonnet in Great Britain, composed of fourteen lines. It was composed of an octave plus a sestet: the octave presents and develops a subject, then there is a turning point introduced by words like “but, and, if”, while the sestet contains the solution of the problem or personal reflections. The general subjects were love, faith, great passions for eternal beauty. When we speak about a sonnet, it is very essential to refer to the most important and remembered playwright, poet, dramatist, and so on of the English literature that is William Shakespeare.

He was born in 1564 in Stratford-upon-Avon and at the age of 18 he married Anne Hathaway and had three children, Susannah and two twins, a girl and a boy who died at the age of 11. Shakespeare decided to leave his wife and his children and started a very successful career: in 1593 the theaters of London were closed because of bubonic plague, during this period he wrote private plays. When the theaters reopened, he became the main playwright of the most popular acting company in London, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men: during the years 1594-1599 he wrote “Midsummer Night’s Dream” (1595), “Romeo and Juliet” and “Richard II” (1595) and “The Merchant of Venice” (1596). When he was 52 years old, he decided to come back to Stratford where he died.

Shakespeare the poet

Shakespeare decided not to use the Italian form for the sonnet but he employed three quatrains and a final couplet. The sonnets by S. can be divided into two sections. The first one is addressed to a “fair youth” where the poet urges the young man, who is probably S.’ young patron, to marry, to preserve his virtues through his children and he speaks about the destructive power of time and moral weakness. The second section is addressed to a dark lady or black woman who is irresistibly desirable. The style of the sonnets is characterized by a rich and vivid descriptive language.

Shakespeare the dramatist

As regards the characters, S. doesn’t take his characters from one social class only, but there is a range of social classes, and the most important feature regarding them is the family ties: father and mother, mother and children, and so on. Before speaking about the features of the most important plays by S., it is important to remember that S. was a man of considerable culture, had a brilliant memory, an extraordinary ability to connect the situations, circumstances, and sensations of the characters he created for the stage. The fascination of S.’s work lies first in the way his stories are told: he is an excellent storyteller and the language he uses in his works plays a very important role. It is a language so exuberant as to seem out of control, a language that does not pre-exist the writer but it comes into being through the creative process itself.

Comedies

The most popular one is “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” that can be defined as a play within a play. This is one of the most frequently performed in schools and is particularly enjoyable for children because it is full of fairies, songs, and magic spells. The first Acts take place in Athens where the Duke is about to celebrate the marriage to Hippolyta. The other Acts take place in the wood where two young Athenians and the girls who are in love with them engage in pursuit of each other: it is in the wood that the magic is performed. In the wood, there are also craftsmen, one of them is transformed by a spell so that he has the head of an ass, while Titania, victim of another spell, falls in love with the first person she sees. It is important to underline that very often the real protagonists of Shakespeare’s comedies are the women who are beautiful, intelligent, enterprising and decisive and are able to dominate the stage with their initiative and their witty speech. Another comedy is “As You Like It” as the site of a serene and simple life, where love and innocence triumph. The two main characters are Rosalind and Orland who doesn’t recognize her: the two young people had met each other for a moment and had instantly fallen in love with each other. Rosalind who states that love is madness and observes that nobody has ever died for love, laughs at Orlando’s attitudes. The main important message is that the false ideas about love and life have been unmasked, the values of real life have been affirmed but at the same time the love of young people corresponds to an ideal reality. Viola is the other female character of “Twelfth Night” who disguises herself as a young man, while Portia is the heroine of “The Merchant of Venice”, who chooses a husband by subjecting her suitors to a test specified in her father’s will, disguises herself as a man, an advocate, to defend the merchant in court. One of the most important themes is the contrast between Jews and Christians: the main difference between the Christian characters and Shylock is that the Christian characters regard human relationships more valuable than business ones, whereas Shylock is interested only in money. (The Taming of the Shrew)

Tragedies

“Romeo and Juliet” is one of Shakespeare’s major tragedies and certainly one the most popular. It tells the story of the two lovers, Romeo, the son of Lord Montague who is the head of a Veronese family that is gripped in a bloody feud with the Capulets and Juliet Lord Capulet’s daughter, victims of the hatred between the two households that they belong to. It takes place in Verona street. Romeo is banished from Verona for killing Tybalt, Juliet’s cousin. It is in the last act that there is the explanation of the story: Romeo finds Juliet’s sleeping body in her family tomb after she has drunk the potion, and he believes her to be dead. He decides to kill himself, then Juliet wakes up from her sleep. Out of fear and love, she inserts her dagger into her heart with the famous line “Oh happy dagger”. The death of the young couple ends the feud between their families. It is a tragedy because of the tragic role of chance: the heroes of the play must fight against external forces that make their relationship difficult. The most important theme is the lack of communication deriving from bad communication.

Another important tragedy is “Hamlet” which is a revenge tragedy: his father’s ghost tells Hamlet that he has been killed by his brother Claudius, who is now king and has married his widow Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. The Ghost demands to be avenged, but Hamlet is not sure whether the apparition really is his father’s ghost. This is Hamlet’s quandary, resolved only halfway through the third act and he wonders about killing his uncle. Hamlet’s revenge on his uncle will not take place until his lucky return. The power of the tragedy does not derive from the plot but from the figure of Hamlet himself. He addresses the audience when he speaks directly to it with soliloquies of great poetic intensity, the famous is “to be or not to be”, in which he reflects on the meaning of human life, its disappointments, troubles, longings, and torments, and at the point evokes the possibility of suicide. The play makes us reflect on our shared human condition on our limits, our uncertainties, and the value and meaning of our lives.

Other tragedies are “Macbeth” telling the story of the medieval Scottish king Macbeth who is tormented by doubt and hesitates in the face of the horror that the idea of regicide provokes in him, but in the end his thirst for power gets the better of his doubts. He kills the holy king. “Antony and Cleopatra” is the last of the great tragedies, the underlying theme is the conflict between reason and the passions, in particular on the one hand there is the world of Cleopatra, sensual queen and irrational and the Roman world embodied by the future emperor Octavian. On the other hand, there is the world of the love between them and Antony decides to be on the side of his beloved by challenging Rome and the entire world. Finally there is “Tempest” that is one of the finest of all Shakespeare’s creations and one of the plays which gives most scope for the theatre to exercise its magic. (King Lear).

The theatre

Ben Jonson

Ben Jonson studied the classics, in fact, classical culture was his guide throughout his literary career. He wrote comedies and tragedies which respected the unities of time and place and set his comedies in the real world of his time, often in London. There is an expression used to define his form of comedy that is “Comedy of Humors”: according to this theory the four cardinals humors were blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy. One of his plays is “The Alchemist” (1610) is set in a house in London, which has been abandoned by its owner during an epidemic of the plague. “Volpone” is another masterpiece by Jonson that takes place in Venice but it is easy to see in it a representation of contemporary London. The rich man Volpone pretends to be seriously ill to get gifts from his would-be heirs. Jonson’s attitude towards the upper classes was different because he was not critical towards these social classes, but he saw them as embodying Renaissance values as presented in Castiglione’s “Cortegiano”. Finally, Jonson’s texts present complex allegories which are elaborations of a basic contrast between good and evil, vice and virtue.

John Fletcher

He is remembered for the two plays on which he collaborated with S., “Henry VIII” and “The two Noble Kinsmen”. He has become very important because he wrote a number of tragicomedies in collaboration with Francis Beaumont. The complexity of their plots and the moral difficulties encountered by the hero in the face of major choices made their works not appreciated by the modern public but they were appreciated by the court of Charles I. Another important English dramatist was Marlowe with its “Doctor Faustus” (1592-1593) and other tragedies which were written in order to show his personal rebellion against the dark Middle Ages, the concepts of sin and salvation which are the first to embody the true spirit of the Renaissance.

Poetry

The metaphysical poem

The metaphysical poet of the 17th century was expected to be a man of wit, expressing not only his sensitivity but also his knowledge and cleverness and metaphysical poetry contains references belonging to unusual fields for poetry, such as religious debate, astrology, and so on, contains metaphors and images surprising the reader and it is full of paradox. Another type of poetry of this period was that of the cavalier poets whose poems about love and loyalty to the King Charles I were distinguished by a lightness of tone, a graceful wit, and marked by a controlled form. The Cavalier Poets often imagined pastoral worlds into which to escape and they often sang of love as free and happy sensual satisfaction.

John Donne is considered a great literary innovator of his age and the most remarkable representative of the Metaphysical school. He created a way of writing marked by an intense dramatic quality, dramatic monologues, and the use of wit. Religion was a very important element in his life and his masterpiece is “Songs and Sonnets” written after his marriage where the most important theme is love, and sometimes even the love of God, in fact in the “Holy Sonnets” he addresses himself to God invoking his mercy as he addresses himself to the woman he loves to obtain her love. Poems of “Songs and Sonnets” are not marked by the sonnet form but they are lyrics of varying length whose form is dictated by the message that the poet wants the reader to communicate. The most important feature of Donne’s poems is that the beloved is not at the center of the poem but the main theme is the message the writer wants to convey. Finally, he is a metaphysical poet because he addresses himself to the beloved by using dissimilar images and finding resemblances in things apparently unlike: a brilliant example is to compare the union of two lovers with the relation between the two legs of a compass.

Andrew Marvell was a metaphysical poet because on the one hand he speaks about simply the beauty nature and so he is defined “the green poet” but on the other side this contemplation of nature produces a complex web of reflections on the emotions, passions, and anxieties to the human condition. An important poem is “To his Coy Mistress” where the most important theme is that of “Carpe diem”.

John Milton devoted his life to becoming not only a great poet but also the interpreter of his times and the voice that spoke to the British nation to illustrate to it the divine message. His formation is strictly based on the classics and on the works by Shakespeare. During the period 1632-1637 he published the poems “L’Allegro” and “Il Pensieroso” and the “Comus”, where there is the typical carpe diem theme of Cavalier poetry, all celebrating chastity as the only source of human joy and freedom and the pastoral elegy “Lycidas” where it is told the vindication of God’s ways to men which allows the poet to conclude the poem with the message of consolation that elegy must offer.

Paradise Lost: it deals with the biblical story of Adam and Eve with God and Lucifer who is thrown out of Heaven to corrupt humankind. Satan, the most beautiful of the angels, is hurled into Hell with his followers, as a consequence of his defeat in the war in Heaven. In the work, Satan has many of the features of the epic hero: leadership, initiative, courage which refuses to accept defeat: Milton puts a great deal of his own soul into his character: as he was aggressive against the political authority of the king and the religious authority of the Church of England, his sympathy was for Satan, the rebel.

Restoration drama

When Charles II came to the throne, he decided to reopen the theatres with two great revolutions: the first one consisted of the new scenery with a backscene while the second one was that female roles were entrusted to actresses rather than to young male actors: the king himself was a great promoter of this second change. John Dryden was a figure of immense importance in English cultural life in the 17th century. The subject matter of Dryden’s poetry was great political events and questions of politics and religion. His first plays were comedies in which he faced the same theme treated by Ariosto in “Orlando Furioso”.

Restoration comedy

The first Restoration comedies were varied in type: about political themes, some of Spanish inspiration, some were also imitations of Molière. To this kind of comedy the London comedy belongs, whose subject matter was the world of the metropolitan high society and the main characters were ordinary citizens of the City: artisans, merchants all representatives of the social stratum that had supported the Puritan revolution and the regime of Cromwell.

The eighteenth century