The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1590 or 1591. It is considered by some to be Shakespeare's first play,[1] and is often seen as his first tentative steps in laying out some of the themes and tropes with which he would later deal in more detail; for example, it is the first of his plays in which a heroine dresses as a boy. The play also deals with the themes of friendship and infidelity, the conflict between friendship and love, and the foolish behaviour of people in love. The highlight of the play is considered by some to be Launce, the clownish servant of Proteus, and his dog Crab, to whom "the most scene-stealing non-speaking role in the canon" has been attributed.[2]

Two Gentlemen has the smallest cast of any play by Shakespeare and is commonly seen as one of his weakest plays.[3]

Characters

Valentine – young man living in Verona Proteus – his closest friend Silvia – falls in love with Valentine in Milan Julia – in love with Proteus in Verona Duke of Milan – Silvia's father Lucetta – Julia's waiting woman Antonio – Proteus' father Thurio – foolish rival to Valentine for Silvia

Eglamour – suitor of Julia; later, agent for Silvia in her escape

Speed – a clownish servant to Valentine Launce[4] – the like to Proteus Panthino – Antonio's servant Host – of the inn where Julia lodges in Milan Outlaws Crab – Launce's dog Servants

Musicians

Synopsis

As the play begins, Valentine is preparing to leave Verona for Milan so as to broaden his horizons. He begs his best friend, Proteus, to come with him, but Proteus is in love with Julia, and refuses to leave. Disappointed, Valentine bids Proteus farewell and goes on alone. Meanwhile, Julia is discussing Proteus with her maid, Lucetta, who tells Julia that she thinks Proteus is fond of her. Julia, however, acts coyly, embarrassed to admit that she likes him. Lucetta then produces a letter; she will not say who gave it to her, but teases Julia that it was Valentine's servant, Speed, who brought it from Proteus. Julia, still unwilling to reveal her love in front of Lucetta, angrily tears up the letter. She sends Lucetta away, but then, realising her own rashness, she picks up the fragments of letter and kisses them, trying to piece them back together.

Meanwhile, Proteus' father has decided that Proteus should travel to Milan and join Valentine. He orders that Proteus must leave the next day, prompting a tearful farewell with Julia, to whom Proteus swears eternal love. The two exchange rings and vows and Proteus promises to return as soon as he can.

In Milan, Proteus finds Valentine in love with the Duke's daughter Silvia. Despite Julia's love, Proteus falls instantly in love with Silvia and vows to win her. Unaware of Proteus' feelings, Valentine tells him that the Duke wants Silvia to marry the foppish but wealthy Thurio, against her wishes. Because the Duke suspects that his daughter and Valentine are in love, he locks her nightly in a tower, to which he keeps the only key. However, Valentine tells Proteus that he plans to free her by means of a corded ladder, and together, they will elope. Proteus immediately informs the Duke, who subsequently captures and banishes Valentine. While wandering outside Milan, Valentine runs afoul of a band of outlaws, who claim they are also exiled gentlemen. Valentine lies, saying he was banished for killing a man in a fair fight, and the outlaws elect him their leader.

Meanwhile, in Verona, Julia decides to join her lover in Milan. She convinces Lucetta to dress her in boy's clothes and help her fix her hair so she will not be harmed on the journey. Once in Milan, Julia quickly discovers Proteus' love for Silvia, watching him attempt to serenade her. She contrives to become his page – a youth named Sebastian – until she can decide upon a course of action. Proteus sends Sebastian to Silvia with a gift of the same

ring that Julia gave to him before he left Verona, but Julia discovers that Silvia scorns Proteus' affections and is disgusted that he would forget about his love back home, i.e. Julia herself. Silvia deeply mourns the loss of Valentine, whom Proteus has told her is rumoured dead.

Not persuaded of Valentine's death, Silvia determines to flee the city with the help of Eglamour, a former suitor to Julia. They escape into the forest but when they are confronted by the outlaws, Eglamour flees and Silvia is taken captive. The outlaws head to their leader (Valentine), but on the way, they encounter Proteus and Julia (still disguised as Sebastian). Proteus rescues Silvia, and then pursues her deeper into the forest. Secretly observed by Valentine, Proteus attempts to persuade Silvia that he loves her, but she rejects his advances. Furious and mad with desire, Proteus insinuates that he will rape her ("I'll force thee yield to my desire").

At this point, Valentine intervenes and denounces Proteus. Horrified at what has happened, Proteus vows that the hate Valentine feels for him is nothing compared to the hate he feels for himself. Convinced that Proteus' repentance is genuine, Valentine forgives him and seems to offer Silvia to him. At this point, overwhelmed, Julia faints, revealing her true identity. Upon seeing her, Proteus suddenly remembers his love for her and vows fidelity to her once again. The Duke and Thurio arrive, and Thurio reminds Valentine that Silvia is his. Valentine warns Thurio that if he makes one move toward her, he will kill him. Terrified, Thurio denounces Silvia. The Duke, impressed by Valentine's actions, approves his and Silvia's love, and consents to their marriage. The two couples are happily united, and the Duke pardons the outlaws, telling them they may return to Milan.

Criticism and analysis

[edit] Language

Language is of primary importance in the play insofar as Valentine and Proteus speak in blank verse, but Launce and Speed speak (for the most part) in prose. More specifically, the actual content of many of the speeches serve to illustrate the pompousness of Valentine and Proteus' exalted outlook, and the more realistic and practical outlook of the servants. This is most apparent in Act 3, Scene 1. Valentine has just given a lengthy speech lamenting his banishment and musing on how he cannot possibly survive without Silvia; "Except I be by Silvia in the night/There is no music in the nightingale./Unless I look on Silvia in the day/There is no day for me to look upon" (ll.178–181). However, when Launce enters only a few lines later, he announces that he too is in love, and proceeds to outline, along with Speed, all of his betrothed's positives; "She brews good ale"; "She can knit"; "She can wash and scour", and negatives; "She hath a sweet mouth"; "She doth talk in her sleep"; "She is slow in words." After weighing his options, Launce decides that the woman's most important quality is that "she hath more hair than wit, and more faults than hairs, and more wealth than faults" (ll.343–344). He announces that her wealth "makes the faults gracious" (l.356), and chooses for that reason to wed her. This purely materialistic reasoning, as revealed in the form of language, is in stark contrast to the more spiritual and idealised love espoused by Valentine earlier in the scene.

[edit] Themes

One of the dominant theories as regards the value or importance of Two Gentlemen is that thematically, it represents a 'trial run' of sorts, in which Shakespeare deals briefly with themes which he would examine in more detail in later works. E.K. Chambers, for example, argued that the play represents something of a gestation of Shakespeare's great thematic concerns. In 1905, he wrote that Two Gentlemen "was Shakespeare's first essay at originality, at fashioning for himself the outlines of that romantic or tragicomic formula in which so many of his most characteristic dramas were afterwards to be cast. Something which is neither quite tragedy nor quite comedy, something which touches the heights and depths of sentiment and reveals the dark places of the human heart without lingering long enough there to crystallise the painful impression, a love story broken for a moment into passionate chords by absence and inconstancy and intrigue, and then reunited to the music of wedding bells."[18] As such, the play's primary interest for critics has tended to lie in relation to what it reveals about Shakespeare's conception of certain themes before he became an accomplished playwright. A.C. Swinburne, for example, wrote "here is the first dawn of that higher and more tender humour that was never given in such perfection to any man as ultimately to Shakespeare."[19] Similarly, Warwick R. Bond writes "Shakespeare first opens the vein he worked so richly afterwards – the vein of crossed love, of flight and exile under the escort of the generous sentiments; of disguised heroines, and sufferings endured and virtues exhibited under their disguise; and of the Providence, kinder than life, that annuls the errors and forgives the sin."[20]

Other critics have been less kind however, arguing that if the later plays show a skilled and confident writer exploring issues of the human heart, Two Gentlemen represents the initial, primarily unsuccessful attempt to do likewise. H.B. Charlton, for example, writing in 1938, argues that "clearly, Shakespeare's first attempt to make romantic comedy had only succeeded so far as it had unexpectedly and inadvertenly made romance comic."[21] Another such argument is provided by Norman Sanders; "because the play reveals a relatively unsure dramatist and many effects managed with a tiro's lack of expertise, it offers us an opportunity to see more clearly than anywhere else in the canon what were to become characteristic techniques. It stands as an 'anatomie' or show-through version, as it were, of Shakespeare's comic art."[22]

[edit] Love and friendship

Norman Sanders calls the play "almost a complete anthology of the practices of the doctrine of romantic love which inspired the poetic and prose Romances of the period."[23] At the very centre of this is the contest between love and friendship; "an essential part of the comicality of The Two Gentlemen of Verona is created by the necessary conflict between highly stylised concepts of love and friendship"[24] This is manifested in the question of whether the relationship between two male friends is more important than that between lovers, encapsulated by Proteus' rhetorical question at 5.4.54; "In love/Who respects friend?" This question "exposes the raw nerve at the heart of the central relationships, the dark reality lurking beneath the wit and lyricism with which the play has in general presented lovers' behaviour."[25] In the program notes for John Barton's 1981 RSC production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Anne Barton, his wife, wrote that the central theme of the play was "how to bring love and friendship into a constructive and mutually enhancing relationship." This is a common theme in Renaissance literature, since some aspects of the culture of the time celebrated friendship as the more important relationship (because it is pure and unconcerned with sexual attraction), and contended that they could not co-exist. As actor Alex Avery argues, "The love between two men is a greater love for some reason. There seems to be a sense that the function of a male/female relationship is purely for the family and to procreate, to have a family. But a love between two men is something that you choose. You have arranged marriages, [but] a friendship between two men is created by the desires and wills of those two men, whereas a relationship between a man and a girl is actually constructed completely peripheral to whatever the feelings of the said boy and girl are."[26]

William C. Carroll sees this societal belief as vital in interpreting the final scene of the play, arguing that Valentine does give Silvia to Proteus, and in so doing, he is merely acting in accordance with the practices of the day. However, if one accepts that Valentine does not give Silvia to Proteus, as critics such as Roger Warren argue, but instead offers to love Proteus as much as he loves Silvia, then the conclusion of the play can be read as a final triumphant reconciliation between friendship and love; Valentine intends to love his friend as much as he does his betrothed. Love and friendship are shown to be co-existent, not exclusive.

[edit] Foolishness of lovers

Another major theme is the foolishness of lovers, what Roger Warren refers to as "mockery of the absurdity of conventional lovers' behaviour."[27] Valentine for example, is introduced into the play mocking the excesses of love; "To be in love, where scorn is bought with groans/Coy looks with heart-sore sighs, one fading moment's mirth/With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights" (1.1.29–31). Later, however, he becomes as much a prisoner of love as Proteus, exclaiming, "For in revenge of my contempt for love/Love hath chased sleep from my enthrall'd eyes/And made them watchers of my own heart's sorrow" (2.4.131–133).

The majority of the cynicism as regards conventional lovers however comes from Launce and Speed, who serve as foils for Proteus and Valentine and "supply a mundane view of the idealistic flights of fancy indulged in by Proteus and Valentine."[28] Several times in the play, after either Valentine or Proteus has made a grandiose speech about love, Shakespeare introduces either Launce or Speed (or sometimes both), whose speeches undercut what has just been heard, exposing Proteus and Valentine to mockery. A good example is found in Act 2, Scene 1. As Valentine and Silvia engage in a game of flirtation, hinting at their love for one another, Speed provides constant asides which serve to directly mock the couple. For example,

VALENTINEPeace, here she comes.

Enter Silvia

SPEED (aside)O excellent motion! O exceeding puppet! Now he will interpret her.

VALENTINEMadame and mistress, a thousand good-morrows.

SPEED (aside)O, give ye good e'en. Here's a million of manners.

SILVIASir Valentine and servant, to you two thousand.

SPEED (aside)He should give her interest, and she gives it him

(2.1.85-94)

[edit] Inconstancy

A third major theme is inconstancy, particularly as manifested in Proteus, whose very name hints at his changeable mind (in Ovid's Metamorphoses, Proteus is a sea-god forever changing its shape). At the start of the play, Proteus has only eyes for Julia. However upon meeting Silvia, he immediately falls in love with her (although he has no idea why). He then finds himself drawn to the page Sebastian (Julia in disguise) whilst still trying to woo Silvia, and at the end of the play, he announces that Silvia is no better than Julia and vows he now loves Julia again. Indeed, Proteus himself seems to be aware of this mutability, pointing out towards the end of the play; "O heaven, were man/But constant, he were perfect. That one error/Fills him with faults, makes him run through all th'sins;/Inconstancy falls off ere it begins" (5.4.109–112).

References

[edit] Notes

All references to The Two Gentlemen of Verona, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Oxford Shakespeare (Warren), based on the First Folio text of 1623. Under its referencing system, 2.3.14 means act 2, scene 3, line 14.

1. ̂ It is placed first in both The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works (1986 and 2005) and The Norton Shakespeare: Based on the Oxford Shakespeare (1997 and 2008); see also Leech (1969: xxx), Wells et al. (1987: 3), Carroll (2004: 130) and Warren (2008: 26–27)

2. ̂ Wells et al. (1986: 4)3. ̂ Carroll (2004: 110)4. ̂ Most modern editors of the play tend to rename this character 'Lance', on the basis that 'Lance'

represents a modernisation of 'Launce'. See, for example, Kurt Schlueter (Cambridge Shakespeare – 1990), William C. Carroll (Arden Shakespeare – 2004) and Roger Warren (Oxford Shakespeare – 2008)

Editions of The Two Gentlemen of Verona

Bate, Jonathan and Rasmussen, Eric (eds.) The Two Gentlemen of Verona (The RSC Shakespeare; London: Macmillan, 2011)

Bond, R. Warwick (ed.) The Two Gentlemen of Verona (The Arden Shakespeare, 1st Series; London: Arden, 1906)

Carroll, William C. (ed.) The Two Gentlemen of Verona (The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd Series; London: Arden, 2004)

The Taming of the Shrew The Taming of the Shrew is a comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1590 and 1591.

The play begins with a framing device, often referred to as the Induction,[1] in which a mischievous nobleman tricks a drunken tinker named Sly into believing he is actually a nobleman himself. The nobleman then has the play performed for Sly's diversion.

The main plot depicts the courtship of Petruchio, a gentleman of Verona, and Katherina, the headstrong, obdurate shrew. Initially, Katherina is an unwilling participant in the relationship, but Petruchio tempers her with various psychological torments—the "taming"—until she becomes a compliant and obedient bride. The subplot features a competition between the suitors of Katherina's more desirable sister, Bianca.

The play's apparent misogynistic elements have become the subject of considerable controversy, particularly among modern audiences and readers. It has nevertheless been adapted numerous times for stage, screen, opera, and musical theatre; perhaps the most famous adaptations being Cole Porter's musical Kiss Me, Kate and the film 10 Things I Hate About You.

Characters

Katherina (Kate) Minola – the "shrew" of the title

Bianca – sister of Katherina; the ingénue Baptista Minola – father of Katherina and

Bianca Petruchio – suitor of Katherina Gremio – elderly suitor of Bianca Lucentio – suitor of Bianca (spends some of play

disguised as Cambio, a Latin tutor) Hortensio – suitor of Bianca and friend to

Petruchio (spends some of the play disguised as Litio, a music tutor)

Grumio – servant of Petruchio Tranio – servant of Lucentio (spends some of the

play disguised as Lucentio) Biondello – servant of Lucentio Vincentio – father of Lucentio A Widow – wooed by Hortensio A Pedant – pretends to be Vincentio A Haberdasher A Tailor

Curtis – servant of Petruchio

Nathaniel – servant of Petruchio Joseph – servant of Petruchio Peter – servant of Petruchio Nicholas – servant of Petruchio Philip – servant of Petruchio An Officer Servants

Characters appearing in the Induction:

Christopher Sly – a drunken tinker A Lord – plays a prank on Sly Bartholomew – a page Hostess of an alehouse Huntsman of the Lord Players Servingmen

Messenger

Synopsis

Prior to the first act, an induction frames the play as a "kind of history" played in front of a befuddled drunkard named Christopher Sly who is tricked into believing that he is a lord.

In the play performed for Sly, the "Shrew" is Katherina Minola, the eldest daughter of Baptista Minola, a Lord in Padua. Katherina's temper is notorious and it is thought no man would ever wish to marry her. On the other hand, two men – Hortensio and Gremio – are eager to marry her younger sister Bianca. However, Baptista has sworn not to allow his younger daughter to marry before Katherina is wed, much to the despair of her suitors, who agree that they will work together to marry off Katherina so that they will be free to compete for Bianca.

The plot becomes more complex when Lucentio, who has recently come to Padua to attend university, sees Bianca and instantly falls in love with her. Lucentio overhears Baptista announce that he is on the lookout for tutors for his daughters, so he has his servant Tranio pretend to be him while he disguises himself as a Latin tutor named Cambio, so that he can woo Bianca behind Baptista's back.

In the meantime, Petruchio arrives in Padua, accompanied by his witty servant, Grumio. Petruchio tells his old friend Hortensio that he has set out to seek his fortune "farther than at home/Where small experience grows" (1.2.50–51) and that his main business "happily to wive and thrive as best I may"(1.2.55). Hearing this, Hortensio seizes the opportunity to recruit Petruchio as a suitor for Katherina. He also has Petruchio present to Baptista a music tutor named Litio (Hortensio himself in disguise). Thus, Lucentio and Hortensio, pretending to be the teachers Cambio and Litio, attempt to woo Bianca unbeknownst to her father, and to one another.

Petruchio, to counter Katherina's shrewish nature, woos her with reverse psychology, pretending that every harsh thing she says or does is kind and gentle. Katherina allows herself to become engaged to Petruchio, and they are married in a farcical ceremony during which (amongst other things) he strikes the priest and drinks the communion wine, and then takes her home against her will. Once they are gone, Gremio and Tranio (disguised as Lucentio) formally bid for Bianca, with Tranio easily promising Baptista that he can make Bianca richer. However, in his zeal to win, he promises much more than the real Lucentio actually possesses, and Baptista determines that once Lucentio's father confirms the dowry Bianca is his. Tranio thus decides that they will need someone to pretend to be Vincentio, Lucentio's father, at some point in the near future. Elsewhere, as part of their scheme, Tranio persuades Hortensio that Bianca is not worthy of his attentions, thus removing any problems he may cause.

Meanwhile, in Petruchio's house, he begins the "taming" of his new wife, using more reverse psychology. She is refused food and clothing because nothing – according to Petruchio – is good enough for her; he claims perfectly cooked meat is overcooked, a beautiful dress doesn't fit right, and a stylish hat is not fashionable. Finally, Katherina comes to understand Petruchio's methods of taming, and when they are on the way back to Padua to attend Bianca's wedding, she willingly agrees with Petruchio that the sun is the moon, and proclaims that "if you please to call it a rush-candle,/Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me" (4.5.14–15). They also meet Vincentio who is also on his way to Padua, and Katherina eagerly agrees with Petruchio when he declares that Vincentio is a woman.

Meanwhile, back in Padua, Lucentio and Tranio convince a passing pedant to pretend to be Vincentio and confirm the dowry for Bianca. The man does so, and Baptista is happy for Bianca to wed Lucentio (actually Tranio in disguise). Bianca then secretly elopes with the real Lucentio. However, Vincentio then arrives in Padua, and encounters the Pedant, who claims to be Lucentio's father. Tranio (disguised as Lucentio) appears, and the Pedant acknowledges him to be his son Lucentio. There is much confusion about identities, and the real Vincentio is about to be arrested when the real Lucentio appears with his newly betrothed Bianca, and reveals all to a bewildered Baptista and Vincentio. Lucentio explains everything that has happened and all is forgiven by the two fathers.

Meanwhile, Hortensio has married a rich widow, and so in the final scene of the play there are three newly married couples at Baptista's banquet; Bianca and Lucentio, the widow and Hortensio, and Katherina and Petruchio. Because of the general opinion that Petruchio is married to a shrew, a quarrel breaks out about whose wife is the most obedient. Petruchio proposes a wager whereby each will send a servant to call for their wives, and whichever comes most obediently will have won the wager for her husband. Katherina is the only one of the three who comes, winning the wager for Petruchio. At the end of the play, after the other two wives have been hauled into the room by Katherina, she gives a speech on the subject of why wives should always obey their husbands, and tells them that their husbands ask only "love, fair looks and true obedience" (5.2.153). The play ends with Baptista, Hortensio and Lucentio marvelling at Petruchio's taming of the shrew.

Analysis and criticism

Critical history

The Taming of the Shrew has been the subject of much analytical and critical controversy, often relating to a feminist reading of the play in general, and Katherina's final speech in particular, as offensively misogynistic and

patriarchal. Others have defended the play by highlighting the (frequently unstaged) Induction as evidence that the play's sentiments are not meant to be taken at face value, that the entire play is, in fact, a farce. This issue however, represents only one of the many critical disagreements brought up by the play.

[edit] Authorship and The Taming of a Shrew

Title page of the second edition of A Shrew, which was issued in three editions (1594, 1596, and 1607) before the publication of The Shrew in the First Folio.

One of the most fundamental debates is the issue of authorship. The existence of A Shrew, which appeared in 1594, has led to an examination of authenticity regarding The Shrew. As Karl P. Wentersdorf points out, A Shrew and The Shrew have "similar plot lines and parallel though differently named characters."[19] As such, there are five main theories as to the relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew:

1. The two plays are unrelated other than the fact that they are both based on another play which is now lost. This is the so-called Ur-Shrew theory (in reference to Ur-Hamlet).[20]

2. A Shrew is a reconstructed version of The Shrew; i.e. a bad quarto of The Shrew, an attempt by actors to reconstruct the original play from memory and sell it.[21]

3. Shakespeare used the previously-existing A Shrew, which he did not write, as a source for The Shrew.[22]

4. Both versions were legitimately written by Shakespeare himself; i.e. A Shrew is an earlier draft of The Shrew.[23]

5. A Shrew is an adaptation of The Shrew by someone other than Shakespeare.[24]

Although the exact relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew remains uncertain, and without complete critical consensus, there is a tentative agreement amongst many critics that The Shrew is the original, and A Shrew is derived from it in some way. The main reason for assuming The Shrew came first is "those passages in A Shrew [...] that make sense only if one knows the The Shrew version from which they must have been derived;"[25] i.e. parts of A Shrew simply don't make sense without recourse to The Shrew.

The debate regarding the relationship between the two plays began in 1725, when Alexander Pope incorporated extracts from A Shrew into The Shrew in his edition of Shakespeare's works. Pope added the Sly framework to The Shrew, and this practice remained the norm amongst editors until Edmond Malone removed all extracts from A Shrew and returned to the strict 1623 text in his edition of the plays in 1792. At this time, it was primarily felt that A Shrew was a non-Shakespearean source play for The Shrew, and hence to include extracts from A Shrew in the body of The Shrew was to graft extraneous material onto the play which the playwright did not write.

This theory prevailed until 1850, when, in a series of articles for the magazine Notes and Queries, Samuel Hickson compared the texts of The Shrew and A Shrew, concluding that The Shrew was the original, and A Shrew was derived from it, not the other way around. Hickson chose seven passages that are similar in both plays and analysed them to conclude that A Shrew was dependent on The Shrew, although he was unsure exactly how The Shrew gave rise to A Shrew.[26] In 1926, building on Hickson's research, Peter Alexander suggested the bad quarto theory. He based his argument on three main pieces of evidence:

1. There is clear evidence that A Shrew was dependent for meaning upon The Shrew.2. The subplot in The Shrew is closer to the source I Suppositi than in A Shrew.3. New material in the subplot not found in I Suppositi is incoherent in A Shrew but coherent in The Shrew.

Alexander argued this evidence suggested that the direction of change was from The Shrew to A Shrew, i.e. A Shrew was derived from The Shrew and hence must be a bad quarto.[27] In their 1928 edition of the play for the New Shakespeare, Arthur Quiller-Couch and John Dover Wilson wholeheartedly supported Alexander's theory, which has remained popular ever since.

However, not everyone agreed with Alexander. For example, in 1930, E.K. Chambers rejected Alexander's theory and reasserted the source theory.[28] Similarly, in 1938, Leo Kirschbaum also rejected Alexander's claim. Although Kirschbaum agreed with the bad quarto theory in general, he didn't believe A Shrew qualified as a bad quarto. He argued that A Shrew was simply too different from The Shrew to come under the bad quarto banner, unlike Alexander's other examples of bad quartos The First part of the Contention betwixt the two famous Houses of

Yorke and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of Yorke.[29] Stephen Roy Miller supports Kirschbaum's opinion, pointing out that "the relation of the early quarto to the Folio text is unlike other early quartos because the texts vary much more in plotting and dialogue."[30] Character names are changed, plot points are altered (Kate has two sisters for example, not one), the play is set in Athens instead of Padua, Sly continues to comment on events throughout the play, and entire speeches are completely different (lines from other plays are also found in A Shrew, especially from Marlowe's Tamburlaine), all of which suggests that the author/reporter of A Shrew thought he (or she) was working on something different to Shakespeare's play, not simply transcribing it. As Miller points out, "underpinning the notion of a 'Shakespearean bad quarto' is the assumption that the motive of whoever compiled that text was to produce, differentially, a verbal replica of what appeared on stage,"[31] and both Kirschbaum and Miller argue that A Shrew does not fulfil this rubric.

Alexander's theory continued to be challenged as the years went on. In 1942, building on the work of Charles Knight, R.A. Houk developed what came to be dubbed the Ur-Shrew theory. In 1943, in a controversial argument, G.I. Duthie combined Alexander's bad quarto theory with Houk's Ur-Shrew theory. Duthie argued that A Shrew was a memorial reconstruction of Ur-Shrew, a now lost play upon which Shakespeare's The Shrew was based; "A Shrew is substantially a memorially constructed text and is dependent upon an early Shrew play, now lost. The Shrew is a reworking of this lost play."[32] Duthie argued that the time-scheme of A Shrew shows that it was a garbled version of something which probably made more sense in an original form, and that Shakespeare reorganised the plot when composing The Shrew so as to make more chronological sense. Although Duthie's argument wasn't fully accepted at the time, it has been gaining increased support in the late twentieth century.

In the light of Duthie's theory, in 1958, J.W. Shroeder attempted to revive the source theory by disproving both Hickson and Alexander's bad quarto theory and Houk and Duthie's Ur-Shrew theory. Shroeder's argument (which rests on the hypothesis that The Shrew was not written until at least 1597) was based on an analysis of parallel passages (some of which had been used by Hickson to argue the bad quarto theory) and chronological problems within both plays to show that there was no need for an Ur-Shrew theory or a bad quarto theory, when a source theory could address all the problems raised by comparing the two plays.[33] Shroeder's argument, however, was never fully accepted.

Subsequently, in 1964, Richard Hosley, in his edition of the play for the Pelican Shakespeare challenged the theories of Hickson, Alexander, Houk, Duthie and Shroeder, and suggested an early draft theory. Hosley's argument was based on the relative complexity of A Shrew when compared to contemporaneous plays. If A Shrew was not an early draft (i.e. not by Shakespeare), we would have "to assume around 1593 the existence of a dramatist other than Shakespeare who was capable of devising a three-part structure more impressive than the structure of any extant play by Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, or Kyd."[34] In this sense, Shakespeare must have written A Shrew, and as it is decidedly inferior to The Shrew, it follows that it is an early draft of the later play.

Alexander himself returned to the debate in 1969, once again re-presenting his bad quarto theory in light of the many objections raised in the preceding forty years. In particular, Alexander concentrated on the various complications and inconsistencies in the subplot of A Shrew, which had been used by Houk and Duthie as evidence for an Ur-Shrew, to argue that the reporter of A Shrew attempted to recreate the complex subplot from The Shrew but got muddled and imported ideas and lines for other plays, especially Marlow. For much of the remainder of the twentieth century, Alexander's views remained predominant.[35]

After little further discussion of the issue in the 1970s, the 1980s saw the publication of three scholarly editions of The Shrew, all of which re-addressed the question in light of the by now general acceptance of Alexander's theory; Brian Morris' 1981 edition for the Arden Shakespeare, H.J. Oliver's 1982 edition for the Oxford Shakespeare and Ann Thompson's 1984 edition for the New Cambridge Shakespeare. Morris summarised the issue at that time by pointing out, "Unless new, external evidence comes to light, the relationship between The Shrew and A Shrew can never be decided beyond a peradventure. It will always be a balance of probabilities, shifting as new arguments and opinions are added to the scales. Nevertheless, in the present century, the movement has unquestionably been towards an acceptance of the Bad Quarto theory, and this can now be accepted as at least the current orthodoxy."[36] Thompson wholeheartedly supported the bad quarto theory, but both Morris and Oliver were less sure, arguing instead for a combination of the bad quarto theory and the early draft theory.

Other critics have also spoken on this issue. Championing the bad quarto theory, Ann Barton says, A Shrew is "now generally believed to be either a pirated and inaccurate version of Shakespeare's comedy or else a "bad

quarto" of a different play, now lost, which also served Shakespeare as a source."[11] Leah S. Marcus, whilst discussing the prevailing bad quarto theory, suggests that A Shrew is not a transcription of a performance of The Shrew, but is in fact an earlier version of The Shrew; that is to say, Shakespeare himself authored both works. However, she notes that many critics have rejected the idea of A Shrew being a work of Shakespeare's, subscribing instead to the bad quarto theory. She states that the reason for this, apart from the many differences in the text, and some extremely sloppy writing in A Shrew, is "because it identifies the acting company with an audience of lowlifes like Sly."[37] Marcus writes that this is seen by editors as out of character for Shakespeare and is therefore an indication that he did not write A Shrew. Wentersdorf also discusses the idea that Shakespeare penned both plays, and that A Shrew may have been either an early version of The Shrew written before it, or an abridged version written after it. Both theories would explain the differences between the two versions. Wentersdorf admits, though, that his theory is based primarily on speculation, and there is no real way of knowing for certain why Sly disappeared from The Shrew.[38] Others, such as Mikhail M. Morozov, have maintained that Shakespeare may not have been entirely original in his writing of the play (whether The Shrew or A Shrew), suggesting that the ideas found in the story were those of another author.[39] Kenneth Muir, for his part, believes that Shakespeare had a laissez-faire attitude to borrowing content from other authors in general, and he cites The Shrew as an instance of this.[40]

One of the most extensive examinations of the question came in 1998 in Stephen Roy Miller's edition of A Shrew for the Cambridge Shakespeare. Miller argues that A Shrew is indeed derived from The Shrew, but it is neither a bad quarto nor an early draft. Instead, it is an adaptation by someone other than Shakespeare. Miller argues that Alexander's suggestion in 1969 that the reporter became confused, and introduced elements from other plays is unlikely, and instead suggests an adapter at work (whom he refers to as the 'compiler'), writing in the romantic comedy tradition; "the most economic explanation of indebtedness is that whoever compiled A Shrew borrowed the lines from Shakespeare's The Shrew, or a version of it, and adapted them."[41] Part of Miller's evidence relates to Gremio, who has no counterpart in A Shrew. In The Shrew, after the wedding, Gremio expresses doubts as to whether or not Petruchio will be able to tame Katherina. In A Shrew, these lines are extended and split between Polidor and Phylema. As Gremio does have a counterpart in I Suppositi, Miller concludes that "to argue the priority of A Shrew in this case would mean arguing that Shakespeare took the negative hints from the speeches of Polidor and Phylema and gave them to a character he resurrected from Supposes. This is a less economical argument than to suggest that the compiler of A Shrew, dismissing Gremio, simply shared his doubts among the characters available."[42] Miller argues that there is even evidence in the play of what the compiler felt he was doing, working within a specific literary tradition; "as with his partial change of character names, the compiler seems to wish to produce dialogue much like his models, but not the same. For him, adaptation includes exact quotation, imitation and incorporation of his own additions. This seems to define his personal style, and his aim seems to be to produce his own version, presumably intended that it should be tuned more towards the popular era than The Shrew."[43]

As had Alexander, Houk, Duthie and Shroeder, Miller argues that the subplot in A Shrew and The Shrew holds the key to the debate, as it is here where the two plays differ most. Miller points out that the subplot in The Shrew is based on "the classical style of Latin comedy with an intricate plot involving deception, often kept in motion by a comic servant." The subplot in A Shrew however, which features an extra sister and addresses the issue of marrying above and below one's class, "has many elements more associated with the romantic style of comedy popular in London in the 1590s."[44] Miller cites plays such as Robert Greene's Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay and Fair Em as evidence of the popularity of such plays. He points to the fact that in The Shrew, there is only eleven lines of romance between Tranio and Bianca, but in A Shrew, there is an entire scene between Kate's two sisters and their lovers. This, he argues, is evidence of an adaptation rather than a faulty report;

while it is difficult to know the motivation of the adapter, we can reckon that from his point of view an early staging of The Shrew might have revealed an overly wrought play from a writer trying to establish himself but challenging too far the current ideas of popular comedy. The Shrew is long and complicated. It has three plots, the subplots being in the swift Latin or Italianate style with several disguises. Its language is at first stuffed with difficult Italian quotations, but its dialogue must often sound plain when compared to Marlow's thunder or Greene's romance, the mouth-filling lines and images that on other afternoons were drawing crowds. An adapter might well have seen his role as that of a 'play doctor' improving The Shrew – while cutting it – by stuffing it with the sort of material currently in demand in popular romantic comedies."[45]

Miller goes on to summarise his theory; "he appears to have wished to make the play shorter, more of a romantic comedy full of wooing and glamorous rhetoric, and to add more obvious, broad comedy."[46] As such, Miller rejects the bad quarto theory, the early draft theory, the Ur-Shrew theory and the source theory in favour of his own adaptation theory.

[edit] Induction

William Quiller Orchardson's illustration of Sly and the Lord in the Induction, engraved by Charles William Sharpe; from the Imperial Edition of The Works of Shakespere, edited by Charles Knight (1876)

A vital component of the misogynistic argument is the Induction, and its purpose within the larger framework of the play. Critics have argued about the meaning of the Induction for many years, and according to Oliver, "it has become orthodoxy to claim to find in the Induction the same 'theme' as is to be found in both the Bianca and the Katherine-Petruchio plots of the main play, and to take it for granted that identity of theme is a merit and 'justifies' the introduction of Sly."[50] For example, Geoffrey Bullough argues that the three plots "are all linked in idea because all contain discussion of the relations of the sexes in marriage."[60] Oliver disagrees with this assessment however, arguing that "the Sly Induction does not so much announce the theme of the enclosed stories as establish their tone."[61]

This point becomes important in terms of determining the seriousness of Katherina's final speech. Oliver argues that the Induction is used to remove the audience from the world of the enclosed plot – to place the ontological sphere of the Sly story on the same level of reality as the audience, and to place the ontological sphere of the Katherina/Petruchio story on a different level of reality, where it will seem less real, more distant from the reality of the viewing public. This, he argues, is done so as to ensure the audience does not take the play literally, that it sees it as a farce; "The drunken tinker may be believed in as one believes in any realistically presented character; but we cannot 'believe' in something that is not even mildly interesting to him. The play within the play has been presented only after all the preliminaries have encouraged us to take it as a farce [...] the main purpose of the Induction was to set the tone for the play within the play – in particular, to present the story of Kate and her sister as none-too-serious comedy put on to divert a drunken tinker."[62] If one accepts this theory, then the Induction becomes vital to interpretation, as it serves to undermine any questions of the seriousness of Katherina's closing sentiments. As such, if the Induction is left out of a production of the play (as it very often is), a fundamental part of the inherent structure of the whole has been removed. If one agrees with Oliver, not only does the Induction prove that Katherina's speech is not to be taken seriously, it removes even the need to ask the question of its seriousness in the first place. In this sense then, the Induction has a vital role to play in the controversy of the play, especially as it relates to misogyny, as, if Oliver's argument is accepted, it serves to undercut any charges of misogyny before they can even be formulated – the play is a farce, it is not to be taken seriously by the audience, so questions of seriousness regarding the play within the play simply aren't an issue.

[edit] References

All references to The Taming of the Shrew, unless otherwise specified, are taken from the Oxford Shakespeare (Oliver, 1982), which is based on the 1623 First Folio. Under this referencing system, 1.2.51 means Act 1, Scene 2, line 51.

1. ̂ The term was first used by in Alexander Pope in 1725, and has been commonly employed ever since. The First Folio text simply begins the play with the standard "Actus primus, Scœna prima" heading, and there is no differentiation between the Induction and what is commonly referred to today as Act 1, Scene 1 (Lucentio arriving in Padua).

2. ̂ Thompson (1984: 10)3. ̂ Juan Manuel, Libro de los ejemplos del conde Lucanor y de Patronio, Exemplo XXXVº – De lo

que contesçió a un mançebo que casó con una muger muy fuerte et muy brava.4. ̂ Shroeder (1959: 252)5. ̂ Hosley (1964: 289–308)

Love's Labour's Lost Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s, and first published in 1598.

Characters

Ferdinand: King of Navarre

Princess of France

Berowne (or Biron), Longaville, and Dumaine (or Dumian): Lords, attending on the King

Boyet and Marcade (or Mercade): Lords, attending on the Princess of France

Rosaline, Maria, and Katharine: Ladies, attending on the Princess

Don Adriano de Armado: a fantastical Spaniard

Sir Nathaniel: a Curate

Holofernes: a Schoolmaster

Dull: a Constable

Costard: a Clown

Moth: Page to Armado

A Forester

Jaquenetta: a country Wench

Officers and Others, Attendants on the King and Princess

[edit] Synopsis

The play opens with the King of Navarre and three noble companions, Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville, taking an oath to devote themselves to three years of study, promising not to give in to the company of women – Berowne somewhat more hesitantly than the others. Berowne reminds the king that the princess and her three ladies are coming to the kingdom and it would be suicidal for the King to agree to this law. The King denies what Berowne says, insisting that the ladies make their camp in the field outside of his court. The King and his men meet the princess and her ladies. Instantly, they all fall comically in love.

The main story is assisted by many other humorous sub-plots. A rather heavy-accented Spanish swordsman, Don Adriano de Armado, tries and fails to woo a country wench, Jaquenetta, helped by Moth, his page, and rivalled by Costard, a country idiot. We are also introduced to two scholars, Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel, and we see them converse with each other in schoolboy Latin. In the final act, the comic characters perform a play to entertain the nobles, an idea conceived by Holofernes, where they represent the Nine Worthies. The four Lords – as well as the Ladies' courtier Boyet – mock the play, and Armado and Costard almost come to blows.

At the end of this 'play' within the play, there is a bitter twist in the story. News arrives that the Princess's father has died and she must leave to take the throne. The king and his nobles swear to remain faithful to their ladies, but the ladies, unconvinced that their love is that strong, claim that the men must wait a whole year and a day to prove what they say is true. This is an unusual ending for Shakespeare and Elizabethan comedy. A play mentioned by Francis Meres, Love's Labour's Won, is believed by some to be a sequel to this play.[1]

[edit] Note

1. ̂ Knutson, Roslynn, The Repertory of Shakespeare's Company, 1594–1613 (Fayatteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1991): 75.

2. ̂ Woudhuysen, H. R., ed. Love's Labours Lost (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998): 61.3. ̂ Kerrigan, J. ed. "Love's Labours Lost", New Penguin Shakespeare, Harmondsworth 1982, ISBN

0-14-070738-74. ̂ Woudhuysen, H. R., ed. Love's Labour's Lost (London: Arden Shakespeare, 1998): 59.

5. See title page of facsimile of the original 1st edition (1598)

A Midsummer Night's Dream A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta. These include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of 9 amateur actors, who are manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. The play is one of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.

Characters

[edit] The Athenians Theseus , Duke of Athens Hippolyta , Queen of the

Amazons, betrothed of Theseus

Philostrate , Master of the Revels for Theseus

Egeus , father of Hermia, wants his daughter to marry Demetrius

Hermia , in love with Lysander Helena , in love with

Demetrius Lysander ,fixated on Hermia

until a potion shifts his affections to Helena

Demetrius ,in love with Helena while under the spell of the potion

[edit] The Fairies Oberon , King of the Fairies Titania , Queen of the Fairies Puck , a.k.a. Robin

Goodfellow, servant to Oberon

Titania's fairy servants o Peaseblossom, fairyo Cobweb, fairyo Moth, fairy

o Mustardseed, fairy

[edit] The Mechanicals

(An acting troupe in the forest)

Peter Quince , carpenter, who leads the troupe and is the Prologue

Nick Bottom , weaver; Bottom is turned into a donkey and is loved by Titania, he plays Pyramus in the troupe's production of "Pyramus and Thisbe".

Francis Flute , the bellows-mender who plays Thisbe.

Robin Starveling , the tailor who plays Moonshine.

Tom Snout , the tinker who plays Wall.

Snug , the joiner who plays a Lion.

[edit] Synopsis

The play features three interlocking plots, connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazon queen, Hippolyta, and set simultaneously in the woodland, and in the realm of Fairyland, under the light of the moon.[1]

In the opening scene, Hermia refuses to follow her father Egeus's instructions to marry Demetrius, whom he has chosen for her. In response, Egeus quotes before Theseus an ancient Athenian law whereby a daughter must marry the suitor chosen by her father, or else face death. Theseus offers her another choice: lifelong chastity worshiping the goddess Diana as a nun.

At that same time, Quince and his fellow players were engaged to produce an act which is "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe", for the Duke and the Duchess.[2] Peter Quince reads the names of characters and bestows them to the players. Nick Bottom who is playing the main role of Pyramus, is over-enthusiastic and wants to dominate others by suggesting himself for the characters of Thisbe, The Lion and Pyramus at the same time. Also he would rather be a tyrant and recites some lines of Ercles or Hercules. Quince ends the meeting with "at the Duke's oak we meet".

Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his queen, Titania, have come to the forest outside Athens. Titania tells Oberon that she plans to stay there until after she has attended Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding. Oberon and Titania are estranged because Titania refuses to give her Indian changeling to Oberon for use as his "knight" or "henchman," since the child's mother was one of Titania's worshipers. Oberon seeks to punish Titania's disobedience, so he calls for his mischievous court jester Puck or "Robin Goodfellow" to help him apply a magical juice from a flower called "love-in-idleness," which when applied to a person's eyelids while sleeping makes the victim fall in love with the first living thing seen upon awakening. He instructs Puck to retrieve the flower so that he can make Titania fall in love with the first thing she sees when waking from sleep, which he is sure will be an animal of the forest. Oberon's intent is to shame Titania into giving up the little Indian boy. He says, "And ere I take this charm from off her sight, / As I can take it with another herb, / I'll make her render up her page to me."[3]

Having seen Demetrius act cruelly toward Helena, Oberon orders Puck to spread some of the magical juice from the flower on the eyelids of the young Athenian man. Instead, Puck mistakes Lysander for Demetrius, not having actually seen either before, and administers the juice to the sleeping Lysander. Helena, coming across him, wakes him while attempting to determine whether he is dead or asleep. Upon this happening, Lysander immediately falls in love with Helena. Oberon sees Demetrius still following Hermia and is enraged. When Demetrius decides to go to sleep, Oberon sends Puck to get Helena while he charms Demetrius' eyes. Upon waking up, he sees Helena. Now, both men are in pursuit of Helena. However, she is convinced that her two suitors are mocking her, as neither loved her originally. Hermia is at a loss to see why her lover has abandoned her, and accuses Helena of stealing Lysander away from her. The four quarrel with each other until Lysander and Demetrius become so enraged that they seek a place to duel each other to prove whose love for Helena is the greatest. Oberon orders Puck to keep Lysander and Demetrius from catching up with one another and to remove the charm from Lysander, so that he goes back to being in love with Hermia.

Meanwhile, Quince and his band of six labourers ("rude mechanicals", as they are described by Puck) have arranged to perform their play about Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus' wedding and venture into the forest, near Titania's bower, for their rehearsal. Bottom is spotted by Puck, who (taking his name to be another word for a jackass) transforms his head into that of a donkey. When Bottom returns for his next lines, the other workmen run screaming in terror, much to Bottom's confusion, since he hasn't felt a thing during the transformation. Determined to wait for his friends, he begins to sing to himself. Titania is awakened by Bottom's singing and immediately falls in love with him. She lavishes him with attention, and presumably makes love to him. While she is in this state of devotion, Oberon takes the changeling. Having achieved his goals, Oberon releases Titania, orders Puck to remove the donkey's head from Bottom, and arrange everything so that Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, and Helena will believe that they have been dreaming when they awaken. Demetrius is left under the spell and in love with Helena.

The fairies then disappear, and Theseus and Hippolyta arrive on the scene, during an early morning hunt. They wake the lovers and, since Demetrius does not love Hermia any more, Theseus overrules Egeus's demands and arranges a group wedding. The lovers decide that the night's events must have been a dream. After they all exit, Bottom awakes, and he too decides that he must have experienced a dream "past the wit of man". In Athens, Theseus, Hippolyta and the lovers watch the six workmen perform Pyramus and Thisbe. Given a lack of preparaton, the performers are so terrible playing their roles to the point where the guests laugh as if it were meant to be a comedy, and afterward everyone retires to bed. Afterward, Oberon, Titania, Puck, and other fairies enter, and bless the house and its occupants with good fortune. After all other characters leave, Puck "restores amends" and reminds the audience that this might be nothing but a dream (hence the name of the play).

Analysis and criticism

[edit] Themes in the story

[edit] Love

David Bevington argues that the play represents the dark side of love. He writes that the fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titania's eyes, forcing her to fall in love with an ass.[8] In the forest, both couples are beset by problems. Hermia and Lysander are both met by Puck, who provides some comic relief in the play by confounding the four lovers in the forest. However, the play also alludes to serious themes. At the end of the play, Hermia and Lysander, happily married, watch the play about the unfortunate

lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy and laugh at it.[9] Helena and Demetrius are both oblivious to the dark side of their love, totally unaware of what may have come of the events in the forest.

[edit] Problem with time

There is a dispute over the scenario of the play as it is cited at first by Theseus that "four happy days bring in another moon",[2] the wood episode then takes place at a night of no moon, but Lysander asserts that there will be so much light in the very night they will escape that dew on the grass will be shining[10] like liquid pearls. Also, in the next scene Quince states that they will rehearse in moonlight[11] which creates a real confusion. It is possible that the Moon set during the night allowing Lysander to escape in the moonlight and for the actors to rehearse, then for the wood episode to occur without moonlight. Theseus's statement can mean four days until the next month.

[edit] Loss of individual identity

Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, writes of the blurring of the identities of fantasy and reality in the play that make possible "that pleasing, narcotic dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play".[12] By emphasising this theme even in the setting of the play, Shakespeare prepares the reader's mind to accept the fantastic reality of the fairy world and its magical happenings. This also seems to be the axis around which the plot conflicts in the play occur. Hunt suggests that it is the breaking down of individual identities that leads to the central conflict in the story.[12] It is the brawl between Oberon and Titania, based on a lack of recognition for the other in the relationship, that drives the rest of the drama in the story and makes it dangerous for any of the other lovers to come together due to the disturbance of Nature caused by a fairy dispute.[12] Similarly, this failure to identify and make distinction is what leads Puck to mistake one set of lovers for another in the forest and place the juice of the flower on Lysander's eyes instead of Demetrius'.

Victor Kiernan, a Marxist scholar and historian, writes that it is for the greater sake of love that this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters are made to suffer accordingly: "It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to have dubious effects on its acolytes".[13] He believes that identities in the play are not so much lost as they are blended together to create a type of haze through which distinction becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and more practical ties between characters as a means of coping with the strange world within the forest, even in relationships as diverse and seemingly unrealistic as the brief love between Titania and Bottom the Ass: "It was the tidal force of this social need that lent energy to relationships".[14]

David Marshall, an aesthetics scholar and English Professor at the University of California – Santa Barbara, takes this theme to an even further conclusion,[citation needed] pointing out that the loss of identity is especially played out in the description of the mechanicals their assumption of other identities. In describing the occupations of the acting troupe, he writes "Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered". In Marshall's opinion, this loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities found in community, which Marshall points out may lead to some understanding of Shakespeare's opinions on love and marriage. Further, the mechanicals understand this theme as they take on their individual parts for a corporate performance of Pyramus and Thisbe. Marshall remarks that "To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part". He claims that the mechanicals understand this and that each character, particularly among the lovers, has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater benefit of the group or pairing. It seems that a desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what quietly moves the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is the primary sense of motivation and is even reflected in the scenery and mood of the story.

[edit] Ambiguous sexuality

In his essay "Preposterous Pleasures, Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream", Douglas E. Green explores possible interpretations of alternative sexuality that he finds within the text of the play, in juxtaposition to the proscribed social mores of the culture at the time the play was written. He writes that his essay "does not (seek to) rewrite A Midsummer Night's Dream as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ... moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy".[15] Green states that he does not

consider Shakspeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the "discontents of civilisation", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not resolve so neatly in real life.[16] Green writes that the "sodomitical elements", "homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality" in the story must be considered in the context of the "culture of early modern England" as a commentary on the "aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order". Aspects of ambiguous sexuality and gender conflict in the story are also addressed in essays by Shirley Garner[17] and William W.E. Slights[18] albeit all the characters are played by males.

[edit] Feminism

Male dominance is one thematic element found in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander and Hermia escape into the woods for a night where they do not fall under the laws of Theseus or Egeus. Upon their arrival in Athens, the couples are married. Marriage is seen as the ultimate social achievement for women while men can go on to do many other great things and gain societal recognition.[19] In his article, "The Imperial Votaress", Louis Montrose draws attention to male and female gender roles and norms present in the comedy in connection with Elizabethan culture. In reference to the triple wedding, he says, "The festive conclusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream depends upon the success of a process by which the feminine pride and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive mothers, unruly wives, and wilful daughters are brought under the control of lords and husbands."[20] He says that the consummation of marriage is how power over a woman changes hands from father to husband. A connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn. The juice employed by Oberon can be seen as symbolising menstrual blood as well as the sexual blood shed by virgins. While blood as a result of menstruation is representative of a woman's power, blood as a result of a first sexual encounter represents man's power over women.[21]

There are points in the play, however, when there is an absence of patriarchal control. In his book, Power on Display, Leonard Tennenhouse says the problem in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the problem of "authority gone archaic".[22] The Athenian law requiring a daughter to die if she does not do her father's will is outdated. Tennenhouse contrasts the patriarchal rule of Theseus in Athens with that of Oberon in the carnivalistic Faerie world. The disorder in the land of the faeries completely opposes the world of Athens. He states that during times of carnival and festival, male power is broken down. For example, what happens to the four lovers in the woods as well as Bottom's dream represents chaos that contrasts with Theseus' political order. However, Theseus does not punish the lovers for their disobedience. According to Tennenhouse, by forgiving of the lovers, he has made a distinction between the law of the patriarch (Egeus) and that of the monarch (Theseus), creating two different voices of authority. This distinction can be compared to the time of Elizabeth I in which monarchs were seen as having two bodies: the body natural and the body mystical. Elizabeth's succession itself represented both the voice of a patriarch as well as the voice of a monarch: (1) her father's will which stated that the crown should pass to her and (2) the fact that she was the daughter of a king.[23] The challenge to patriarchal rule in A Midsummer Night's Dream mirrors exactly what was occurring in the age of Elizabeth I.

References

1. ̂ Shakespeare, William (1979). Harold F. Brooks. ed. The Arden Shakespeare "A Midsummer Nights Dream". Methuen & Co. Ltd. cxxv. ISBN 0-415-02699-7.

2. ^ a b |a midsummer night's dream| editor=R. A. Foakes | Cambridge University Press3. ̂ A Midsummer Night's Dream , Act 2, Scene 1, Lines 183–185. 4. ̂ A Midsummer Night's Dream by Rev. John Hunter ; London; Longmans, Green and CO.;18705. ̂ S4Ulanguages.Com See title page of facsimile of this edition, claiming James Roberts as a

publisher and 1600 as the publishing date)

John Dryden John Dryden (9 August 1631 – 1 May 1700) was an influential English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who dominated the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Walter Scott called him "Glorious John."[1] He was made Poet Laureate in 1667.

Early life

Dryden was born in the village rectory of Aldwincle near Thrapston in Northamptonshire, where his maternal grandfather was Rector of All Saints. He was the eldest of fourteen children born to Erasmus Dryden and wife Mary Pickering, paternal grandson of Sir Erasmus Dryden, 1st Baronet (1553–1632) and wife Frances Wilkes, Puritan landowning gentry who supported the Puritan cause and Parliament. He was also a second cousin once removed of Jonathan Swift. As a boy Dryden lived in the nearby village of Titchmarsh, Northamptonshire where it is also likely that he received his first education. In 1644 he was sent to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar where his headmaster was Dr Richard Busby, a charismatic teacher and severe disciplinarian.[2] Having recently been re-founded by Elizabeth I, Westminster during this period embraced a very different religious and political spirit encouraging royalism and high Anglicanism. Whatever Dryden’s response to this was, he clearly respected the Headmaster and would later send two of his own sons to school at Westminster. In the late twentieth century a house at Westminster was founded in his name.

As a humanist public school, Westminster maintained a curriculum which trained pupils in the art of rhetoric and the presentation of arguments for both sides of a given issue. This is a skill which would remain with Dryden and influence his later writing and thinking, as much of it displays these dialectical patterns. The Westminster curriculum also included weekly translation assignments which developed Dryden’s capacity for assimilation. This was also to be exhibited in his later works. His years at Westminster were not uneventful, and his first published poem, an elegy with a strong royalist feel on the death of his schoolmate Henry, Lord Hastings from smallpox, alludes to the execution of King Charles I, which took place on 30 January 1649, very near the school where Dr Busby had first prayed for the King and then locked in his schoolboys to prevent their attending the spectacle.

In 1650 Dryden went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.[3] Here he would have experienced a return to the religious and political ethos of his childhood: the Master of Trinity was a Puritan preacher by the name of Thomas Hill who had been a rector in Dryden’s home village.[4] Though there is little specific information on Dryden’s undergraduate years, he would most certainly have followed the standard curriculum of classics, rhetoric, and mathematics. In 1654 he obtained his BA, graduating top of the list for Trinity that year. In June of the same year Dryden’s father died, leaving him some land which generated a little income, but not enough to live on.[5]

Returning to London during The Protectorate, Dryden obtained work with Cromwell’s Secretary of State, John Thurloe. This appointment may have been the result of influence exercised on his behalf by his cousin the Lord Chamberlain, Sir Gilbert Pickering. At Cromwell’s funeral on 23 November 1658 Dryden processed with the Puritan poets John Milton and Andrew Marvell. Shortly thereafter he published his first important poem, Heroique Stanzas (1658), a eulogy on Cromwell’s death which is cautious and prudent in its emotional display. In 1660 Dryden celebrated the Restoration of the monarchy and the return of Charles II with Astraea Redux, an authentic royalist panegyric. In this work the interregnum is illustrated as a time of anarchy, and Charles is seen as the restorer of peace and order.

[edit] Later life and career

After the Restoration, Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day and he transferred his allegiances to the new government. Along with Astraea Redux, Dryden welcomed the new regime with two more panegyrics; To His Sacred Majesty: A Panegyric on his Coronation (1662), and To My Lord Chancellor (1662). These poems suggest that Dryden was looking to court a possible patron, but he was to instead make a living in writing for publishers, not for the aristocracy, and thus ultimately for the reading public. These,

and his other nondramatic poems, are occasional—that is, they celebrate public events. Thus they are written for the nation rather than the self, and the Poet Laureate (as he would later become) is obliged to write a certain number of these per annum.[6] In November 1662 Dryden was proposed for membership in the Royal Society, and he was elected an early fellow. However, Dryden was inactive in Society affairs and in 1666 was expelled for non-payment of his dues.

On 1 December 1663 Dryden married the royalist sister of Sir Robert Howard—Lady Elizabeth. Dryden’s works occasionally contain outbursts against the married state but also celebrations of the same. Thus, little is known of the intimate side of his marriage. Lady Elizabeth however, was to bear him three sons and outlive him.

With the reopening of the theatres after the Puritan ban, Dryden busied himself with the composition of plays. His first play, The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663 and was not successful, but he was to have more success, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he was also to become a shareholder. During the 1660s and 70s theatrical writing was to be his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best known work being Marriage à la Mode (1672), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem which described the events of 1666; the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation, and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670).

When the Great Plague of London closed the theatres in 1665 Dryden retreated to Wiltshire where he wrote Of Dramatick Poesie (1668), arguably the best of his unsystematic prefaces and essays. Dryden constantly defended his own literary practice, and Of Dramatick Poesie, the longest of his critical works, takes the form of a dialogue in which four characters–each based on a prominent contemporary, with Dryden himself as ‘Neander’—debate the merits of classical, French and English drama. The greater part of his critical works introduce problems which he is eager to discuss, and show the work of a writer of independent mind who feels strongly about his own ideas, ideas which demonstrate the incredible breadth of his reading. He felt strongly about the relation of the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675) has a prologue which denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama. His play All for Love (1678) was written in blank verse, and was to immediately follow Aureng-Zebe. In 1679 he was attacked in an alley near his home in Covent Garden by thugs hired by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester,[7] with whom he had a long-standing conflict.[8]

Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic MacFlecknoe, a more personal product of his Laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden's main goal in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offenses against literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of him on the stage and in print."[9] It is not a belittling form of satire, but rather one which makes his object great in ways which are unexpected, transferring the ridiculous into poetry.[10] This line of satire continued with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). His other major works from this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word biography to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

When in 1688 James was deposed, Dryden’s refusal to take the oaths of allegiance to the new government left him out of favour at court. Thomas Shadwell succeeded him as Poet Laureate, and he was forced to give up his public offices and live by the proceeds of his pen. Dryden translated works by Horace, Juvenal, Ovid, Lucretius, and Theocritus, a task which he found far more satisfying than writing for the stage. In 1694 he began work on what would be his most ambitious and defining work as translator, The Works of Virgil (1697), which was published by subscription. The publication of the translation of Virgil was a national event and brought Dryden the sum of ₤1,400.[11] His final translations appeared in the volume Fables Ancient and Modern (1700), a series of episodes from Homer, Ovid, and Boccaccio, as well as modernized adaptations from Geoffrey Chaucer interspersed with Dryden’s own poems. The Preface to Fables is considered to be both a major work of criticism and one of the finest essays in English.[citation needed] As a critic and translator he was essential in making accessible to the reading English public literary works in the classical languages.

Dryden died on May 1, 1700, and was initially buried in St. Anne's cemetery in Soho, before being exhumed and reburied in Westminster Abbey ten days later.[12] He was the subject of various poetic eulogies, such as Luctus Brittannici: or the Tears of the British Muses; for the Death of John Dryden, Esq. (London, 1700), and The Nine Muses.

Poetic style

What Dryden achieved in his poetry was not the emotional excitement we find in the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century, nor the intellectual complexities of the metaphysical poets. His subject-matter was often factual, and he aimed at expressing his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated way possible. Although he uses formal poetic structures such as heroic stanzas and heroic couplets, he tried to achieve the rhythms of speech. However, he knew that different subjects need different kinds of verse, and in his preface to Religio Laici he wrote: “...the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic...The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion....A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth.”

[edit] Selected works

Astraea Redux , 1660 The Wild Gallant (comedy), 1663 The Indian Emperour (tragedy), 1665 Annus Mirabilis (poem), 1667 The Enchanted Island (comedy), 1667, an adaptation with William D'Avenant of Shakespeare's The

Tempest Secret Love, or The Maiden Queen , 1667 An Essay of Dramatick Poesie , 1668 An Evening's Love (comedy), 1668 Tyrannick Love (tragedy), 1669 The Conquest of Granada , 1670 The Assignation, or Love in a Nunnery , 1672 Marriage à la mode , 1672 Amboyna , or the Cruelties of the Dutch to the English Merchants, 1673 The Mistaken Husband (comedy), 1674 Aureng-zebe , 1675 All for Love , 1678 Oedipus (heroic drama), 1679, an adaptation with Nathaniel Lee of Sophocles' Oedipus Absalom and Achitophel , 1681 The Spanish Fryar , 1681 MacFlecknoe , 1682 The Medal , 1682 Religio Laici , 1682 Threnodia Augustalis , 1685 The Hind and the Panther , 1687 A Song for St. Cecilia's Day , 1687 Amphitryon , 1690 Don Sebastian , 1690 Creator Spirit, by whose aid, 1690. Translation of Rabanus Maurus' Veni Creator Spiritus [22]

King Arthur , 1691 Cleomenes , 1692 Love Triumphant , 1694 The Works of Virgil, 1697 Alexander's Feast , 1697 Fables, Ancient and Modern , 1700 The Art of Satire To the Memory of Mr. Oldham , 1684

Romantic poetry The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard Fournier (1889); pictured in the centre are, from left, Trelawny, Hunt and Byron

Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era[1] which began in the mid/late-18th century[2] as a reaction against the prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the day (Romantics favoured more natural, emotional and personal artistic themes),[3][4] also influenced poetry. Inevitably, the characterization of a broad range of contemporaneous poets and poetry under the single unifying name can be viewed more as an exercise in historical compartmentalization than an attempt to capture the essence of the actual ‘movement’.[citation needed]

Poets such as William Wordsworth were actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban, often eschewing consciously poetic language in an effort to use more colloquial language. Wordsworth himself in the Preface to his and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads defined good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” though in the same sentence he goes on to clarify this statement by asserting that nonetheless any poem of value must still be composed by a man “possessed of more than usual organic sensibility [who has] also thought long and deeply;” he also emphasises the importance of the use of meter in poetry (which he views as one of the key features that differentiates poetry from prose).[5] Although many people stress the notion of spontaneity in Romantic poetry, the movement was still greatly concerned with the pain of composition, of translating these emotive responses into poetic form. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent Romantic poet and critic in his On Poesy or Art sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”.[6] Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of Romantic poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create art, coupled with an awareness of the duality created by such a process.

For some critics, the term establishes an artificial context for disparate work and removing that work from its real historical context" at the expense of equally valid themes (particularly those related to politics.)[7]

The six most well-known English authors are, in order of birth and with an example of their work:

The six most well-known English authors are, in order of birth and with an example of their work:

William Blake - The Marriage of Heaven and Hell William Wordsworth - The Prelude Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Rime of the Ancient Mariner George Gordon, Lord Byron - Don Juan "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" Percy Bysshe Shelley - Prometheus Unbound "Adonais" "Ode to the West Wind" "Ozymandias" John Keats - Great Odes "Hyperion" "Endymion"

Although chronologically earliest among these writers, William Blake was a relatively late addition to the list; prior to the 1970s, romanticism was known for its "Big Five."[8]

William Wordsworth William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge". Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

[edit] Early life

The second of five children born to John Wordsworth and Ann Cookson, William Wordsworth was born on 7 April 1770 in Wordsworth House in Cockermouth, Cumberland[1]—part of the scenic region in northwest England, the Lake District. His sister, the poet and diarist Dorothy Wordsworth, to whom he was close all his life, was born the following year, and the two were baptised together. They had three other siblings: Richard, the eldest, who became a lawyer; John, born after Dorothy, who went to sea and died in 1805 when the ship of which he was Master, the Earl of Abergavenny, was wrecked off the south coast of England; and Christopher, the youngest, who entered the Church and rose to be Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.[2] Their father was a legal representative of James Lowther, 1st Earl of Lonsdale and, through his connections, lived in a large mansion in the small town. Wordsworth, as with his siblings, had little involvement with their father, and they would be distant from him until his death in 1783.[3]

Wordsworth's father, although rarely present, did teach him poetry, including that of Milton, Shakespeare and Spenser, in addition to allowing his son to rely on his own father's library. Along with spending time reading in Cockermouth, Wordsworth would also stay at his mother's parents house in Penrith, Cumberland. At Penrith, Wordsworth was exposed to the moors. Wordsworth could not get along with his grandparents and his uncle, and his hostile interactions with them distressed him to the point of contemplating suicide.[4]

After the death of their mother, in 1778, John Wordsworth sent William to Hawkshead Grammar School in Lancashire and Dorothy to live with relatives in Yorkshire; she and William would not meet again for another nine years. Although Hawkshead was Wordsworth's first serious experience with education, he had been taught to read by his mother and had attended a tiny school of low quality in Cockermouth. After the Cockermouth school, he was sent to a school in Penrith for the children of upper-class families and taught by Ann Birkett, a woman who insisted on instilling in her students traditions that included pursuing both scholarly and local activities, especially the festivals around Easter, May Day, and Shrove Tuesday. Wordsworth was taught both the Bible and the Spectator, but little else. It was at the school that Wordsworth was to meet the Hutchinsons, including Mary, who would be his future wife.[5]

Wordsworth made his debut as a writer in 1787 when he published a sonnet in The European Magazine. That same year he began attending St John's College, Cambridge, and received his B.A. degree in 1791.[6] He returned to Hawkshead for his first two summer holidays, and often spent later holidays on walking tours, visiting places famous for the beauty of their landscape. In 1790, he took a walking tour of Europe, during which he toured the Alps extensively, and visited nearby areas of France, Switzerland, and Italy.

[edit] First publication and Lyrical Ballads

In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems "experimental." The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was augmented significantly in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much 18th-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotions recollected in tranquility: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.

[edit] The Prospectus

In 1814 he published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part The Recluse. He had not completed the first and third parts, and never would. He did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he

lays out the structure and intent of the poem. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature:

My voice proclaimsHow exquisitely the individual Mind(And the progressive powers perhaps no lessOf the whole species) to the external WorldIs fitted:--and how exquisitely, too,Theme this but little heard of among Men,The external World is fitted to the Mind.

Some modern critics[who?] recognise a decline in his works beginning around the mid-1810s. But this decline was perhaps more a change in his lifestyle and beliefs, since most of the issues that characterise his early poetry (loss, death, endurance, separation and abandonment) were resolved in his writings. But, by 1820, he enjoyed the success accompanying a reversal in the contemporary critical opinion of his earlier works. Following the death of his friend the painter William Green in 1823, Wordsworth mended relations with Coleridge.[13] The two were fully reconciled by 1828, when they toured the Rhineland together.[7] Dorothy suffered from a severe illness in 1829 that rendered her an invalid for the remainder of her life. In 1835, Wordsworth gave Annette and Caroline the money they needed for support.

[edit] The Poet Laureate and other honours

Wordsworth received an honorary Doctor of Civil Law degree in 1838 from Durham University, and the same honour from Oxford University the next year.[7] In 1842 the government awarded him a civil list pension amounting to £300 a year. With the death in 1843 of Robert Southey, Wordsworth became the Poet Laureate. He initially refused the honour, saying he was too old, but accepted when Prime Minister Robert Peel assured him "you shall have nothing required of you" (he became the only laureate to write no official poetry). When his daughter, Dora, died in 1847, his production of poetry came to a standstill.

[edit] Major works

Lyrical Ballads , with a Few Other Poems (1798) o "Simon Lee"o "We are Seven"o "Lines Written in Early Spring"o "Expostulation and Reply"o "The Tables Turned"o "The Thorn"o "Lines Composed A Few Miles above Tintern Abbey"

Lyrical Ballads , with Other Poems (1800) o Preface to the Lyrical Ballads o "Strange fits of passion have I known"[14]

o "She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways"[14]

o "Three years she grew"[14]

o "A Slumber Did my Spirit Seal"[14]

o "I travelled among unknown men"[14]

o "Lucy Gray"o "The Two April Mornings"o "Nutting"o "The Ruined Cottage"o "Michael"o "The Kitten At Play"

Poems, in Two Volumes (1807) o "Resolution and Independence"o "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"o "My Heart Leaps Up"

o "Ode: Intimations of Immortality"o "Ode to Duty"o "The Solitary Reaper"o "Elegiac Stanzas"o "Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802"o "London, 1802"o "The World Is Too Much with Us"

Guide to the Lakes (1810)

The Excursion (1814)

Laodamia (1815, 1845)

The Prelude (1850)

[edit] References

^ Venn, J.; Venn, J. A., eds. (1922–1958). "Wordsworth, William". Alumni Cantabrigienses (10 vols) (online ed.). Cambridge University Press. ^ a b c d e f g h [1] Everett, Glenn, "William Wordsworth: Biography" Web page at The Victorian Web Web site, accessed 7 January 2007 ^ "The Cornell Wordsworth Collection". Cornell University. Retrieved on 13 February 2009. ^ Stephen Gill, William Wordsworth: A Life, Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 132-3. ^ See: Recollections of the Lake Poets. ^ Moorman 1968 p. 8 ^ Kelly Grovier, "Dream Walker: A Wordsworth Mystery Solved", Times Literary Supplement, 16 February 2007

Samuel Taylor Coleridge Samuel Taylor Coleridge (  / ̍ k o ʊ l r ɪ d ʒ / ; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as for his major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. He coined many familiar words and phrases, including the celebrated suspension of disbelief. He was a major influence, via Emerson, on American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life, Coleridge suffered from crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated by some that he suffered from bipolar disorder, a condition as yet unidentified during his lifetime.[1] Coleridge suffered from poor health that may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these concerns with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction, causing constipation which required humiliating enemas [2].

Early life

Coleridge was born on 21 October 1772 in the country town of Ottery St Mary, Devon, England.[3] Samuel's father, the Reverend John Coleridge (1718–1781), was a well-respected vicar of the parish and headmaster of Henry VIII's Free Grammar School at Ottery. He had three children by his first wife. Samuel was the youngest of ten by Reverend Coleridge's second wife, Anne Bowden (1726–1809).[4] Coleridge suggests that he "took no pleasure in boyish sports" but instead read "incessantly" and played by himself.[5] After John Coleridge died in 1781, 8-year-old Samuel was sent to Christ's Hospital, a charity school founded in the 16th century in Greyfriars, London, where he remained throughout his childhood, studying and writing poetry. At that school Coleridge became friends with Charles Lamb, a schoolmate, and studied the works of Virgil and William Lisle Bowles.[6] In one of a series of autobiographical letters written to Thomas Poole, Coleridge wrote: "At six years old I remember

to have read Belisarius, Robinson Crusoe, and Philip Quarll – and then I found the Arabian Nights' Entertainments – one tale of which (the tale of a man who was compelled to seek for a pure virgin) made so deep an impression on me (I had read it in the evening while my mother was mending stockings) that I was haunted by spectres whenever I was in the dark – and I distinctly remember the anxious and fearful eagerness with which I used to watch the window in which the books lay – and whenever the sun lay upon them, I would seize it, carry it by the wall, and bask, and read."

However, Coleridge seems to have appreciated his teacher, as he wrote in recollections of his schooldays in Biographia Literaria:

I enjoyed the inestimable advantage of a very sensible, though at the same time, a very severe master [...] At the same time that we were studying the Greek Tragic Poets, he made us read Shakespeare and Milton as lessons: and they were the lessons too, which required most time and trouble to bring up, so as to escape his censure. I learnt from him, that Poetry, even that of the loftiest, and, seemingly, that of the wildest odes, had a logic of its own, as severe as that of science; and more difficult, because more subtle, more complex, and dependent on more, and more fugitive causes. [...] In our own English compositions (at least for the last three years of our school education) he showed no mercy to phrase, metaphor, or image, unsupported by a sound sense, or where the same sense might have been conveyed with equal force and dignity in plainer words... In fancy I can almost hear him now, exclaiming Harp? Harp? Lyre? Pen and ink, boy, you mean! Muse, boy, Muse? your Nurse's daughter, you mean! Pierian spring? Oh aye! the cloister-pump, I suppose! [...] Be this as it may, there was one custom of our master's, which I cannot pass over in silence, because I think it ... worthy of imitation. He would often permit our theme exercises, ... to accumulate, till each lad had four or five to be looked over. Then placing the whole number abreast on his desk, he would ask the writer, why this or that sentence might not have found as appropriate a place under this or that other thesis: and if no satisfying answer could be returned, and two faults of the same kind were found in one exercise, the irrevocable verdict followed, the exercise was torn up, and another on the same subject to be produced, in addition to the tasks of the day.[7]

Throughout his life, Coleridge idealized his father as pious and innocent, while his relationship with his mother was more problematic.[citation needed] His childhood was characterized by attention seeking, which has been linked to his dependent personality as an adult.[citation needed] He was rarely allowed to return home during the school term, and this distance from his family at such a turbulent time proved emotionally damaging.[citation needed] He later wrote of his loneliness at school in the poem Frost at Midnight: "With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt/Of my sweet birthplace."

From 1791 until 1794, Coleridge attended Jesus College, Cambridge.[8] In 1792, he won the Browne Gold Medal for an ode that he wrote on the slave trade.[9] In December 1793, he left the college and enlisted in the Royal Dragoons using the false name "Silas Tomkyn Comberbache",[10] perhaps because of debt or because the girl that he loved, Mary Evans, had rejected him. Afterwards, he was rumoured to have had a bout of severe depression.[citation needed] His brothers arranged for his discharge a few months later under the reason of "insanity" and he was readmitted to Jesus College, though he would never receive a degree from Cambridge.

[edit] Poetry

Despite not enjoying the name recognition or popular acclaim that Wordsworth or Shelley have had, Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilizing common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality. As important as Coleridge was to poetry as a poet, he was equally important to poetry as a critic. Coleridge's philosophy of poetry, which he developed over many years, has been deeply influential in the field of literary criticism. This influence can be seen in such critics as A.O. Lovejoy and I.A. Richards.[citation needed]

[edit] Literary criticism

[edit] Biographia Literaria

In addition to his poetry, Coleridge also wrote influential pieces of literary criticism including Biographia Literaria, a collection of his thoughts and opinions on literature which he published in 1817. The work delivered both biographical explanations of the author's life as well as his impressions on literature. The collection also contained an analysis of a broad range of philosophical principles of literature ranging from Aristotle to Immanuel Kant and Schelling and applied them to the poetry of peers such as William Wordsworth.[29][30] Coleridge's explanation of metaphysical principles were popular topics of discourse in academic communities throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, and T.S. Eliot stated that he believed that Coleridge was "perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the last." Eliot suggests that Coleridge displayed "natural abilities" far greater than his contemporaries, dissecting literature and applying philosophical principles of metaphysics in a way that brought the subject of his criticisms away from the text and into a world of logical analysis that mixed logical analysis and emotion. However, Eliot also criticizes Coleridge for allowing his emotion to play a role in the metaphysical process, believing that critics should not have emotions that are not provoked by the work being studied.[31] Hugh Kenner in Historical Fictions, discusses Norman Furman's Coleridge, the Damaged Archangel and suggests that the term "criticism" is too often applied to Biographia Literaria, which both he and Furman describe as having failed to explain or help the reader understand works of art. To Kenner, Coleridge's attempt to discuss complex philosophical concepts without describing the rational process behind them displays a lack of critical thinking that makes the volume more of a biography than a work of criticism.[32]

In Biographia Literaria and his poetry, symbols are not merely "objective correlatives" to Coleridge, but instruments for making the universe and personal experience intelligible and spiritually covalent. To Coleridge, the "cinque spotted spider," making its way upstream "by fits and starts," [Biographia Literaria] is not merely a comment on the intermittent nature of creativity, imagination, or spiritual progress, but the journey and destination of his life. The spider's five legs represent the central problem that Coleridge lived to resolve, the conflict between Aristotelian logic and Christian philosophy. Two legs of the spider represent the "me-not me" of thesis and antithesis, the idea that a thing cannot be itself and its opposite simultaneously, the basis of the clockwork Newtonian world view that Coleridge rejected. The remaining three legs—exothesis, mesothesis and synthesis or the Holy trinity—represent the idea that things can diverge without being contradictory. Taken together, the five legs—with synthesis in the center, form the Holy Cross of Ramist logic. The cinque-spotted spider is Coleridge's emblem of holism, the quest and substance of Coleridge's thought and spiritual life.

[edit] Coleridge and the influence of the Gothic

Coleridge wrote reviews of Ann Radcliffe’s books and The Mad Monk, among others. He comments in his reviews: "Situations of torment, and images of naked horror, are easily conceived; and a writer in whose works they abound, deserves our gratitude almost equally with him who should drag us by way of sport through a military hospital, or force us to sit at the dissecting-table of a natural philosopher. To trace the nice boundaries, beyond which terror and sympathy are deserted by the pleasurable emotions, – to reach those limits, yet never to pass them, hic labor, hic opus est." and "The horrible and the preternatural have usually seized on the popular taste, at the rise and decline of literature. Most powerful stimulants, they can never be required except by the torpor of an unawakened, or the languor of an exhausted, appetite... We trust, however, that satiety will banish what good sense should have prevented; and that, wearied with fiends, incomprehensible characters, with shrieks, murders, and subterraneous dungeons, the public will learn, by the multitude of the manufacturers, with how little expense of thought or imagination this species of composition is manufactured."

However, Coleridge used these elements in poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), Christabel and Kubla Khan (published in 1816, but known in manuscript form before then) and certainly influenced other poets and writers of the time. Poems like these both drew inspiration from and helped to inflame the craze for Gothic romance. Mary Shelley, who knew Coleridge well, mentions The Rime of the Ancient Mariner twice directly in Frankenstein, and some of the descriptions in the novel echo it indirectly. Although William Godwin, her father, disagreed with Coleridge on some important issues, he respected his opinions and Coleridge often visited the Godwins. Mary Shelley later recalled hiding behind the sofa and hearing his voice chanting The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

[edit] References

1. ̂ Jamison, Kay Redfield. Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. Free Press (1994.), 219–224.

2. ̂ Holmes, Richard (2011). Coleridge: Darker Reflections. London: HarperCollins. pp. 12-14, quoting Coleridge "Notebooks" 2805. ISBN 9780007378821.

3. ̂ Radley, 134. ̂ James Gillman (2008) The Life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Bastion Books5. ̂ Coleridge,Samuel Taylor, Joseph Noel Paton, Katharine Lee Bates.Coleridge's Ancient Mariner

Ed Katharine Lee Bates. Shewell, & Sanborn (1889) p.26. ̂ Morley, Henry. Table Talk of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,

Christobel, &c. New York: Routledge (1884) pp.i-iv

Coleridge as a Romantic Poet

“Lyrical Ballads” published in 1798 is a joint venture of Wordsworth and Coleridge which is a key to understand all the poetry of the Romantic Age including that of Coleridge.

This joint adventure was taken by Wordsworth and Coleridge to find out a balance between the two extremes; the tendency to realism and the tendency to romance in their extreme forms. These two poets felt that English poetry needed first that romance should be saved and ennobled by the presence and the power of truth-truth moral and psychological, and secondly that naturalism (realism) without losing any of its fidelity to fact, should be saved and ennobled by the presence and power of imagination _ the light that never was, on sea or land.

In this respect both the poets agreed to present two different kinds of poems. Coleridge chose such series of poems in which the incidents and agents were to be, in part at supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interest of affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturall accompany such situations, supposing them real. For the second kinds of poems that were mainly to be presented by Wordsworth were such poems in which the subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life. The characters and the incidents were to be such as will be found in every village and vicinity where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballada’. In this plan it was agreed that Coleridge’s endeavors should be directed to persons and charaters supernatural or at least romantic. However, such supernatural element should not be void of human interest and inward nature of man. It must contain the semblance of truth sufficient to procure of these shadows imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitute poetic faith. Wordswoth, on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give charm of novelty to things of everyday, and to excite a feeling similar to the supernatural by awakening the mind’s jattention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us. of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us.

In the light of the above plan of both the poets, and in the light of Coleridge’s poetry itself, we find the following chief characteristics in Coleridge’s poetry. These characteristics are; supernaturalism, element of mystery, fertile imagination, dream quality, medievalism, love of Nature, meditative note, humanitarianism, music and narrative skill which distinguish Coleridge’s poetry as the most complete representative of the English Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century.

Let us take these characteristics of Coleridge poetry one by one:

Supernaturalism: Supernaturalism is something that is above and beyond what is natural; events which cannot be directly explained by known laws and observations. Exploration of the occult (supposedly supernatural or magic) and of infinity, mysticism, and numerology (study of the supposed influence of number) are some other manifestation of the intense desire of man to know what exists or lies beyond the finite mind. Imaginative and inventive fiction and poetry have been created upon this appeal. This element of supernaturalism is found in the three major works of Coleridge, ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Christabel”. The outstanding quality of Coleridge’s supernaturalism, however, is that his writings do not excite one’s senses to a feverish pitch and do not remain remote from human reality. He is capable of creating the still, sad music of humanity. In his supernaturalism we do not find any kind of crudeness as is found in other poets Horace and Monk Lewis. He

replaced the crudeness with suggestiveness. He did not portray horror, he suggested it. Both in the cases of the Night-mare Life-in-Death and the serpent woman Geraldine, he resists the temptation of depicting their hideous monstrosity. He conveys the gruesomeness (horrification) of Life-in-Death in a few suggestive lines.

Her lips were red, her looks were freeHer locks were yellow as goldHer skin was white as leprosyThe Night-mare Life-in-Death was sheWho thicks Man’s blood with cold.

Or through the Mariner’s response to herFear at my heart, as at a cupMy life-blood seemed to sip. In the same manner the repulsiveness (unpleasantness) of Geraldine’s ugly bosom is conveyed through a clever suggestion, A sight to dream of, not to tell!O shield her! Shield sweet Christabel!Coleridge has successfully kept the reality of supernatural phenomena by avoiding the descriptions of details. He deepens his effect by mystery surrounding it. Along with this Coleridge’s supernaturalism has essentially psychological truth in it. The supernatural touches in ‘Kubla Khan’ or ‘The Ancient Mariner’ are so managed that they are in perfect harmony with the mental and emotional moulds of the characters as well as the readers. The ancestral voices heard by Kubla Khan prophesy war. The poet in his poetic frenzy is capable of building supernatural awe in the minds of the readers when the people coming see his castle see his flashing eyes and waving hair and draw a circle around him thrice to keep them safe from this man who has been fed on honey and dew and drank the milk of paradise. The supernatural drama of the ‘The Ancient Mariner’ catches hold of the readers’ sub-conscious mind. This is, however, noteworthy that Coleridge like Homer and Shakespeare makes the element of supernaturalism the part of a wider scheme which is intimately related to living human experience. The central idea of the need of human love and compassion with man, bird and beast and the entire creation of God and the painful experience caused by their absence is so intensely human that even the supernatural character of the events cannot becloud its truthfulness.

Element of Mystery or Mysteriousness; Mysteriousness is that condition in which some character, event or situation remains hidden and is not revealed to the usual vision or common understanding. It is not completely known but makes its presence feel to the people. Coleridge possesses an unusual gift of evoking the mystery of things. The Ancient Mariner is made a mysterious character just by the mention of the glittering eyes long grey beard and skinny hands. Geraldine’s sudden appearance in an unexpected circumstance makes her mysterious. Her being beautiful exceedingly also makes her mysterious. But Coleridge uses this faculty most effectively by keeping alive the ordinary natural phenomena in tact. The blowing of the winds and the twinkling of stars assume a mysterious character. Mast-high ice sending a dismal sheen and making cracking and growling sound is bound to appear mysterious. Similarly mysterious is found in the death fires dancing in red and rout and water burning green, blue and white like a witch’s oils. The romantic chasm in ‘Kubla Khan’ is given a touch of mystery by the mention of the ‘woman wailing for her demon love.’

Fertile and Rich imaginationImagination is a mental faculty of framing images of external objects which are not present to the five senses. It is a process of using all the faculties so as to realize with intensity what is not perceived, and to do this in a way that integrates and orders every thing present to the mind so that reality is enhanced thereby. Coleridge in his ‘Biographia Literaria’ writes of imagination thus; ‘The power reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite and discordant qualities of sameness, with the differences of the general; with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with the representative; the sense of novelty and freshness with old familiar objects; a more than usual state of emotion with more than usual order. We see that Coleridge’s imagination has all these qualities to a superb order.

Coleridge is gifted with the most fertile and vigorous imagination among all the Romantic Poets. It is by this rich and fertile imagination that he is able to create his perplexing mystery. In this respect he goes ahead of Wordsworth who was too conscientious to describe or present those things that were not seen personally by him. Coleridge, on the other hand, was able to describe and present those things which he came across during his vast

study through his faculty of imagination. He had the faculty of presenting such unseen and inexperienced things so vividly as if those had been literally present before his eyes. He presents the place of Kubla Khan’s palace as he was practically present there,‘here Kubla Khan commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden there unto. And thus ten miles of fertile ground was enclosed with a wall,’ set imagination on fire and we can have vivid picture of Kubla Khan’s stately pleasure dome. According to the great Greek critic Longinus, a great writer is that one who has the capability of transporting the reader to his own imaginative world. Coleridge, no doubt, was bestowed with this quality. Not only this, he had the rare skill to create an imaginary world, changed it into imaginative and then transformed it to a make-belief condition. The world created by Coleridge in his whole poem of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the best example of this faculty of Coleridge. J.L. Lowes’ book ‘The Road to Xanadu’ amply illustrates how Coleridge’s imagination could transform simple facts collected during his reading into something mysterious and wonderful.

Dream Quality: Dream quality is a quality of imagining while asleep. It is a process of or a sequence of images that appear involuntarily to the mind of a sleeping person, often a mixture of real and imaginary characters, places and events. The major poems of Coleridge have a strange dream like atmosphere about them. Dreams with him are no shadows. They are the very substance of his life. He fed on his dreams and vitalized him in his poems. ‘Kubla Khan’ is essentially a dream poem recounting in a poetic form what he saw in a vision. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ displays a dream- like movement. C.M Bowra in the ‘Romantic Imagination’ illustrates the affinity of ‘The ancient Mariner’ with a dream. ‘On the surface it shows many qualities of a dream,’ he says. ‘It moves in abrupt stages each of which has its own single dominating character. Its visual impressions are remarkably brilliant and absorbing. Its emotional impacts change rapidly but always come with unusual force as if the poet were hunted and obsessed by them. When it is all over, to cling to the memory with a peculiar tenacity (tending to stick firmly)just as on waking it is difficult at first to disentangle (get freed) ordinary experience from influences which still survive from sleep.’ The dramatic texture (structure) of Coleridge’s poems gives them a kind of twilight vagueness intensifying their mystery. Medievalism: Medievalism means devotion to the Middle Ages, a devotion to the spirit of beliefs of the Middle Ages. Coleridge’s love for supernatural led him to the exploration of Middle Ages. He was fascinated by the romance and legends associated with them. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ ‘Christable’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ are all wrought with the glamours of Middle Ages. But it should be kept in mind that Medievalism does not form the substance of his poems. It gives them the much needed sense of remoteness and offers a fit setting for the marvelous which is Coleridge’s purpose to hint at or openly display.

Love of Nature: Nature means a physical world including all natural phenomena and living things. It also means a force that is represented before man in the form of beautiful scenes. Wordsworth is stated to be communicating new order of experience for which Nature serves us a point of departure and there was not such an experience in English poetry before his time. Coleridge shows for Nature the same loving devotion as we find in Wordsworth. But Bowra rightly points out that his eye for Nature is for its more charms and less obvious appeals and he takes richer and more luxurious pleasure in those aspects of Nature that can present a dramatic and mysterious look. Whether his descriptions are based on his personal experiences or on what he has read, he never fails to give them a semblance of truth. The bergs around the skiff or the single sudden stride of a tropical night are scenes that he could not have seen, but they look a lively and realistic as the fire wild torrents actually seen by him rushing down the sides of the hoary, majestic sky. He can evoke the richness of colour as well as the magical associations of sound much better than any other poet. And he is equally successful both in giving graphic descriptions and in achieving broad generalized effects. In his earlier attitude towards Nature, he had a pantheistic view and also accepts it as a moral teacher, but later he comes to believe that it is we who invest Nature with life and it simply reflects our own moods. This later stage of his attitude towards Nature is the stage when he says in ‘Dejection: An Ode.’

O Lady! We receive but what we give,And in our life alone doth Nature liveOurs is her wedding garment, ours her shroud!

Meditative Note: Meditative thinking is the result of reflective and speculative temper. It is a philosophic bent of mind. Coleridge was amply gifted with this quality. This tendency of mind was present even in his early age which made him to do serious reading. He was specially impressed by the German philosophers Kant and Schiller. ‘Dejection: An Ode’ is also written in a meditative mood in which he deplores the loss of imaginative power because of the metaphysical strain in his thinking. The verses in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (which also

hint at the theme of the poem) clearly reflects his meditative mind when he says;‘He prayth well, who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast.’

He prayth best, who loveth bestAll things both great and smallFor the dear God who loveth usHe made and loveth all.;

Humanitarianism: Humanitarianism means the love of humanity and a commitment to improving the lives of others. We find humanitarianism in Coleridge’s poetry. Both he and Wordsworth strongly supported the French Revolution in the hope that it would free the masses from the tyranny of the dictators. But they were miserably disappointed in their hope. When Coleridge discovered that the revolutionists were perverting or violating the very principles they had stood for, he did not hesitate to denounce them in his, ;Franch:An Ode’. His love of humanity is expressed in different poems and also in the moral of ‘The Ancient Mariner’ when he says‘He prayth well who loveth wellBoth man and bird and beast’

Music: Music is the art of arranging sounds, the art of arranging or making sound, usually those of musical instruments or voices, in groups and patterns that create a pleasing or stimulating effect. It can be presented in the written form indicating pitch, duration, rhythm, and tone of notes to be played. ‘Coleridge is always a singer’, says H.D. Traill. Court Hope also agrees that there is a tendency to approximate the art of poetry to the art of music. Coleridge’s musical genius can best be seen in such poems as ‘The Ancient Mariner’, ‘Christable’, ‘Kubla Khan’ and ‘Youth and Age’. ‘The Ancient Mariner’ has woven cunning sound patterns with the help of internal rhyme or of clever use of alliteration

The ice was here, the ice was thereThe ice was all aroundIt cracked and growled, and roared and howledLike noises in the swound!

The internal rhyme and the alliterative effect in the following lines is note worthy

‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flewThe furrow followed freeWe were the first that ever burstInto that silent sea.’

The musical quality in ‘Christable’ and ‘Kubla Khan’ puts the reader into a hypnotic spell.

Narrative skill

Narrative skill is the art of telling a story or giving an account of a sequence of events in the order in which they happened. Coleridge is superb in the art of story telling. He knows how to create suspense or to evoke interest in the narrative. In ‘The Ancient Mariner’ he invests the Mariner with a hypnotic power in order to raise our curiosity in his story. And he introduces his events very dramatically. By bringing the specter –ship gradually closer to view, a hush of expectancy is created before death and Life-in-Death are dramatically brought on the scene to determine the fate of the Mariner. The dropping down of his two hundred sailor companions one by one after the killing of Albatross and their souls going out making a whiz sound of the cross bow produces a very dramatic effect. The wedding guest’s interruptions are used to high light the climatic moments. All these devices give the poem an incomparable narrative beauty.

The above are the characteristics that distinguish Coleridge from other romantic poets and make him the most complete representative of the English Romantic poetry of the early nineteenth century.

Wordsworth and Coleridge:Emotion, Imagination and Complexity

The 19th century was heralded by a major shift in the conception and emphasis of literary art and, specifically, poetry. During the 18th century the catchphrase of literature and art was reason. Logic and rationality took precedence in any form of written expression. Ideas of validity and aesthetic beauty were centered around concepts such as the collective "we" and the eradication of passion in human behavior. In 1798 all of those ideas about literature were challenged by the publication of Lyrical Ballads, which featured the poetry of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth and Coleridge both had strong, and sometimes conflicting, opinions about what constituted well-written poetry. Their ideas were centered around the origins of poetry in the poet and the role of poetry in the world, and these theoretical concepts led to the creation of poetry that is sufficiently complex to support a wide variety of critical readings in a modern context.

Wordsworth wrote a preface to Lyrical Ballads in which he puts forth his ideas about poetry. His conception of poetry hinges on three major premises. Wordsworth asserts that poetry is the language of the common man:

To this knowledge which all men carry about with them, and to these sympathies in which without any other discipline than that of our daily life we are fitted to take delight, the poet principally directs his attention. (149)

Poetry should be understandable to anybody living in the world. Wordsworth eschews the use of lofty, poetic diction, which in his mind is not related to the language of real life. He sees poetry as acting like Nature, which touches all living things and inspires and delights them. Wordsworth calls for poetry to be written in the language of the "common man," and the subjects of the poems should also be accessible to all individuals regardless of class or position. Wordsworth also makes the points that "poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" (151). These two points form the basis for Wordsworth's explanation of the process of writing poetry. First, some experience triggers a transcendent moment, an instance of the sublime. The senses are overwhelmed by this experience; the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" leaves an individual incapable of articulating the true nature and beauty of the event. It is only when this emotion is "recollected in tranquility" that the poet can assemble words to do the instance justice. It is necessary for the poet to have a certain personal distance from the event or experience being described that he can compose a poem that conveys to the reader the same experience of sublimity. With this distance the poet can reconstruct the "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" the experience caused within himself.

Wordsworth's critical ideas are manifested in his writing. He uses the language and subjects of the common man to convey his ideas. As he writes in "The Tables Turned," "One impulse from a vernal wood / May teach you more of man, / Of moral evil and of good, / than all the sages can" (136). These lines show that Wordsworth places little stock in the benefit of education or institutionalized wisdom. He implies that any person with exposure to Nature can learn the secrets of the world, regardless of social or economic considerations. In "I wandered lonely as a cloud," Wordsworth uses the sonnet form to express his ideas about poetry being the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility:

For oft when on my couch I lie In vacant or in pensive mood, They flash upon that inward eye Which is the bliss of solitude; And then my heart with pleasure fills, And dances with the daffodils. (187)

This stanza comes after Wordsworth has described experiencing in the natural world the wonderment that the night creates. In the poem he meditates on the stars and the light bouncing off waves on the water. He is unable to truly comprehend the beauty and importance of the experience until he is resting

afterward, and he is able to reconstruct the event in his mind. This remembrance brings him a wave of emotion, and it is out of this second flood of feeling that the poem is born. In Wordsworth's poetry, these ebbs of emotion are spurred on by his interaction with Nature. In "Tintern Abbey" he writes that "Nature never did betray / the heart that loved her" (139). Indeed, Wordsworth is continually inspired and led into transcendent moments by his experiences in Nature. These experiences bring to his mind a wide variety of contemplations and considerations that can only be expressed, as he writes in "Expostulation and Reply," in "a wise passiveness" (135).

While Wordsworth's critical ideas obviously worked for his poetry, Coleridge differed in his take on the art. Coleridge did not agree that poetry is the language of the common man. He thought that lowering diction and content simply made it so that the poet had a smaller vocabulary of both words and concepts to draw from. Coleridge focused mainly on imagination as the key to poetry. He divided imagination into two main components: primary and secondary imagination. In Biographia Literaria, one of his significant theoretical works, he writes:

The primary imagination I hold to be the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite of the eternal act of creation of the infinite I AM. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, coexisting with the conscious will, yet still identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. (387)

It is the imagination involved in the poetry that produces a higher quality verse. The primary imagination is a spontaneous creation of new ideas, and they are expressed perfectly. The secondary imagination is mitigated by the conscious act of imagination; therefore, it is hindered by not only imperfect creation, but also by imperfect expression. To further subdivide the act of imagination, Coleridge introduces his concept of fancy. Fancy is the lowest form of imagination because it "has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites" (387). With fancy there is no creation involved; it is simply a reconfiguration of existing ideas. Rather than composing a completely original concept or description, the fanciful poet simply reorders concepts, putting them in a new and, possibly, fresh relationship to each other. Coleridge also writes that poetry "reveals itself in the balance or reconciliation of opposite or discordant qualities" (391). Through juxtaposition ideas, concepts, and descriptions are made clear. The more imaginative the juxtaposition is, the more exciting the poem becomes.

As with Wordsworth, Coleridge also combines his theoretical ideas in his poetry. He abandons Wordsworth's notion of poetry for the common man, and uses lofty language, poetic diction, and subject matter that is specialized. While he still holds a reverence for Nature inherent to romantic literature, his poems are not exclusively based around the natural. He makes use of primary imagination in his work, because it is the kind of imagination he values most, and avoids secondary imagination or fancy as much as possible. "Kubla Kahn" illustrates his use of primary imagination:

In Xanadu did Kubla KahnA stately pleasure dome decree:Where Alph, the sacred river, ranThrough caverns measureless to manDown to a sunless sea. (347)

The poem is the manifestation of a drug-induced vision. The lines have come to Coleridge unbidden, and represents the creation of a previously nonexistent setting. He creates these instances throughout the poem. Especially notable is the vision he describes in the last stanza, "A damsel with a dulcimer / In a vision I once saw: / It was an Abyssinian maid, / And on her dulcimer she played" (348). Both of these segments create entirely new scenes in the reader's mind. Coleridge also uses highly imaginative images to create juxtaposition in the poem. He writes, "A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!" (348), and uses this image twice in the poem. The "reconciliation of opposites" manifests itself in lines such as these. The adjective "sunny" implies warmth, while "ice" is cold. Together they hint at a darker side to the surfacially idyllic pleasure dome. The simple fact that it is Kubla Kahn's pleasure dome is a juxtaposition as well. The leader of the Mongols is not colloquially thought of as a kind or benevolent man. This discordance, too, hints at the underlying darkness of the poem, thereby exposing a truth that all is not perfect in neither the pleasure dome nor Coleridge's hallucination.

Coleridge and Wordsworth valued artful poetry. Although they had some different theoretical opinions, both of them succeeded at making poetry that is complex and dense enough to withstand two centuries of analysis, and modern critical practice has not yet fully distilled the potential meaning to be found in their work. It is easy to see how their work places them firmly in the realm of the Romantics, but it is quite difficult to come up with a single form of modern criticism that can fully deal with these two poets. Mimetic forms of criticism, including contemporary Platonists and Aristotelians, could offer observations about how the poetry of Wordsworth seeks to imitate Nature and the effects of Nature on the individual. He works to reconstruct an experience for the reader. Likewise, these same critics could say that Coleridge's imitation of human beings in poems like "Christabel" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" teaches us something about human nature and behavior. Unfortunately, purely mimetic criticism would miss much of the rhetorical devices and aesthetic qualities embedded in the work. Pragmatic forms of criticism, which focus on the rhetorical purpose of the author, could offer insight as to how the poetry of Coleridge and Wordsworth seek to instruct the reader, and could also elucidate the rhetorical structure of their works. Both of the poets seek to reinforce the individual, the glory and value of Nature, and induce revelations in their readers. Also, as with all of the Romantics, Coleridge and Wordsworth are constantly seeking the sublime. This period follows the rediscovery of Longinus' ideas about the sublime, which describe how rhetorical structure is used to gain the same feeling of transcendence as Nature promotes. The work of Coleridge and Wordsworth is also rhetorically constructed to express their critical theories, which a pragmatic reading of the text would pick up. The expressive forms of criticism could offer valuable insights into the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth by focusing on the texts as products of the poets. Certainly forms of psychoanalytical criticism would have much to say about Wordsworth's constant overflow of emotion and Coleridge's chemically altered imagination. Objective critics like the New Critics and formalists could shed light on the synergy created by the interaction of the various parts of Coleridge and Wordsworth's poems. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge wrote that a poem must be a cohesive unit, with every part working together to build into a whole (390). Both poets pay close attention to form and diction in their work, and create poems that are independent units of thought. Especially the work of Wordsworth seems to precipitate Marxist criticism, which could provide insight about the elements of class in his poems, and could also discuss the connection between form and content in the poetry. Postmodern critics would especially enjoy looking at the fierce individuality of Coleridge and Wordsworth, who each create their own micronarrative of the world while rejecting the metanarratives of their time.

The complexity of Wordsworth and Coleridge's theoretical ideas leads to the complexity of their poetry. It is impossible to name one form of criticism that could sum them up entirely, because ultimately they are working with a large number of weighty concepts. This is why their poetry is still read and analyzed. Since Aristotle claimed in his Poetics that the complexity of a work is directly proportional to the greatness of the work, we have sought out literature that withstands multiple intense readings. Because we can look at the poems of Coleridge and Wordsworth in a large variety of ways, we are constantly finding new meaning, which gives the poetry a re-readability not found in lesser work. Re-readability is the hallmark of good literature and of the sublime. Coleridge and Wordsworth knew this, and they wrote toward that goal.

T. S. Eliot Thomas Stearns Eliot OM (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was a playwright, literary critic, and an important English-language poet of the 20th century.[3] Although he was born an American, he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 (at age 25) and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.

The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock—started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is seen as a masterpiece of the modernist movement, and was followed by some of the best-known poems in the English language, including Gerontion (1920), The Waste Land (1922), The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945).[4] He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.[5]

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, and educated at Harvard, Eliot studied philosophy at the Sorbonne for a year, then in 1914 won a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford, becoming a British citizen in 1927 when he was 39. He said

of his poetry and the effect on it of his nationality: "It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good ... if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."[6]

Life

[edit] Early life and education

Eliot was born into the Eliot family, a middle class family originally from New England, who had moved to St. Louis, Missouri.[7][4] His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919), was a successful businessman, president and treasurer of the Hydraulic-Press Brick Company in St. Louis. His mother, Charlotte Champe Stearns (1843–1929), wrote poetry and was a social worker, a new profession in the early twentieth century. Eliot was the last of six surviving children; his parents were both 44 years old when he was born. His four sisters were between eleven and nineteen years older; his brother was eight years older. Known to family and friends as Tom, he was the namesake of his maternal grandfather Thomas Stearns.

Several factors are responsible for Eliot's infatuation with literature during his childhood. First, Eliot had to overcome physical limitations as a child. Struggling from a congenital double hernia, a condition in which one’s intestines jut through the bowel wall and causes an abdominal rupture, Eliot was unable to participate in many physical activities and thus was prevented from interacting socially with his peers. Because Eliot was often isolated his love of literature developed. For, once he learned to read, the young boy immediately became obsessed with books and was completely absorbed in tales depicting savages, the Wild West, or Mark Twain’s thrill-seeking Tom Sawyer.[8] In his memoir of T.S. Eliot, Eliot’s close friend Robert Sencourt comments that young Eliot “would often curl up in the window-seat behind an enormous book, setting the drug of dreams against the pain of living.”[9] Secondly, Eliot also credited his hometown with seeding his literary vision: "It is self-evident that St. Louis affected me more deeply than any other environment has ever done. I feel that there is something in having passed one's childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those people who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London."[10] Thus, from the onset, literature was an essential part of Eliot's childhood and both his disability and location influenced him.

From 1898 to 1905, Eliot attended Smith Academy, where his studies included Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and German. He began to write poetry when he was fourteen under the influence of Edward Fitzgerald's Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, a translation of the poetry of Omar Khayyam. He said the results were gloomy and despairing, and he destroyed them.[11] His first poem published, "A Fable For Feasters," was written as a school exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February 1905.[12] Also published there in April 1905 was his oldest surviving poem in manuscript, an untitled lyric, later revised and reprinted as "Song" in The Harvard Advocate, Harvard University's student magazine.[13] He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey," "A Tale of a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King." The last mentioned story significantly reflects his exploration of Igorot Village while visiting the 1904 World's Fair of St. Louis. [14][15]Such a link with primitive people importantly antedates his anthropological studies at Harvard.[16]

After graduation, Eliot attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts for a preparatory year, where he met Scofield Thayer, who would later publish The Waste Land. He studied philosophy at Harvard from 1906 to 1909, earning his bachelor's degree after three years, instead of the usual four.[4] Frank Kermode writes that the most important moment of Eliot's undergraduate career was in 1908, when he discovered Arthur Symons's The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899). This introduced him to Jules Laforgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. Without Verlaine, Eliot wrote, he might never have heard of Tristan Corbière and his book Les amours jaunes, a work that affected the course of Eliot's life.[17] The Harvard Advocate published some of his poems, and he became lifelong friends with Conrad Aiken, the American novelist.

After working as a philosophy assistant at Harvard from 1909 to 1910, Eliot moved to Paris, where from 1910 to 1911, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. He attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier.[4][17] From 1911 to 1914, he was back at Harvard studying Indian philosophy and Sanskrit.[4][18] Eliot was awarded a scholarship to Merton College, Oxford in 1914. He first visited Marburg, Germany, where he planned to take a summer program, but when the First World War broke out, he went to Oxford instead. At the time, so many American students attended Merton that the Junior Common Room proposed a motion "that this society

abhors the Americanization of Oxford." It was defeated by two votes, after Eliot reminded the students how much they owed American culture.[19]

Eliot wrote to Conrad Aiken on New Year's Eve 1914: "I hate university towns and university people, who are the same everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead."[19] Escaping Oxford, Eliot actually spent much of his time in London. This city had a monumental and life-altering impact on Eliot for multiple reasons, the most significant of which was his introduction to the acclaimed literary figure Ezra Pound. A connection through Aiken resulted in an arranged meeting and on September 22, 1914, Eliot paid a visit to Pound’s flat. Pound instantly deemed Eliot “worth watching” and was imperative to Eliot’s beginning career as a poet as he is credited with promoting Eliot through social events and literary gatherings. Thus, according to biographer John Worthen, during his time in England Eliot “was seeing as little of Oxford as possible. He was instead spending long periods of time in London, in the company of Ezra Pound and "some of the modern artists whom the war has so far spared . . . . It was Pound who helped most, introducing him everywhere.”[20] In the end, Eliot did not settle at Merton, and left after a year.

By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, but he failed to return for the viva voce exam.[21][4]

[edit] Poetry

For a poet of his stature, Eliot produced a relatively small amount of poetry and he was aware of this early in his career. He wrote to J.H. Woods, one of his former Harvard professors, "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."[37]

Typically, Eliot first published his poems individually in periodicals or in small books or pamphlets, and then collected them in books. His first collection was Prufrock and Other Observations (1917). In 1920, he published more poems in Ara Vos Prec (London) and Poems: 1920 (New York). These had the same poems (in a different order) except that "Ode" in the British edition was replaced with "Hysteria" in the American edition. In 1925, he collected The Waste Land and the poems in Prufrock and Poems into one volume and added The Hollow Men to form Poems: 1909–1925. From then on, he updated this work as Collected Poems. Exceptions are Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939), a collection of light verse; Poems Written in Early Youth, posthumously published in 1967 and consisting mainly of poems published between 1907 and 1910 in The Harvard Advocate, and Inventions of the March Hare: Poems 1909–1917, material Eliot never intended to have published, which appeared posthumously in 1997.[38]

Eliot said of his nationality and its role in his work: "[M]y poetry has obviously more in common with my distinguished contemporaries in America than with anything written in my generation in England ... It wouldn't be what it is, and I imagine it wouldn't be so good ... if I'd been born in England, and it wouldn't be what it is if I'd stayed in America. It's a combination of things. But in its sources, in its emotional springs, it comes from America."[6]

[edit] The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Main article: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

In 1915, Ezra Pound, overseas editor of Poetry magazine , recommended to Harriet Monroe, the magazine's founder, that she publish "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Although the character Prufrock seems to be middle-aged, Eliot wrote most of the poem when he was only twenty-two. Its now-famous opening lines, comparing the evening sky to "a patient etherised upon a table," were considered shocking and offensive, especially at a time when Georgian Poetry was hailed for its derivations of the nineteenth century Romantic Poets.

The poem follows the conscious experience of a man, Prufrock (relayed in the "stream of consciousness" form characteristic of the Modernists), lamenting his physical and intellectual inertia, the lost opportunities in his life and lack of spiritual progress, with the recurrent theme of carnal love unattained. Critical opinion is divided as to whether the narrator leaves his residence during the course of the narration. The locations described can be

interpreted either as actual physical experiences, mental recollections, or as symbolic images from the unconscious mind, as, for example, in the refrain "In the room the women come and go."

The poem's structure was heavily influenced by Eliot's extensive reading of Dante Alighieri and refers to a number of literary works, including Hamlet and those of the French Symbolists.

Its reception in London can be gauged from an unsigned review in The Times Literary Supplement on June 21, 1917. "The fact that these things occurred to the mind of Mr. Eliot is surely of the very smallest importance to anyone, even to himself. They certainly have no relation to poetry."[39]

The Waste Land

In October, 1922, Eliot published The Waste Land in The Criterion. Eliot's dedication to il miglior fabbro ("the better craftsman") refers to Ezra Pound's significant hand in editing and reshaping the poem from a longer Eliot manuscript to the shortened version that appears in publication.[40]

It was composed during a period of personal difficulty for Eliot—his marriage was failing, and both he and Vivienne were suffering from nervous disorders. The poem is often read as a representation of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. Before the poem's publication as a book in December, 1922, Eliot distanced himself from its vision of despair. On November 15, 1922, he wrote to Richard Aldington, saying, "As for The Waste Land, that is a thing of the past so far as I am concerned and I am now feeling toward a new form and style."

The poem is known for its obscure nature—its slippage between satire and prophecy; its abrupt changes of speaker, location, and time. Despite this, it has become a touchstone of modern literature, a poetic counterpart to a novel published in the same year, James Joyce's Ulysses.[citation needed]

Among its best-known phrases are "April is the cruellest month," "I will show you fear in a handful of dust" and "Shantih shantih shantih." The Sanskrit mantra ends the poem.

[edit] The Hollow Men

The Hollow Men appeared in 1925. For the critic Edmund Wilson, it marked "The nadir of the phase of despair and desolation given such effective expression in The Waste Land."[41] It is Eliot's major poem of the late 1920s. Similar to other work, its themes are overlapping and fragmentary. Post-war Europe under the Treaty of Versailles (which Eliot despised), the difficulty of hope and religious conversion, Eliot's failed marriage.[42]

Allen Tate perceived a shift in Eliot's method, writing that, "The mythologies disappear altogether in The Hollow Men." This is a striking claim for a poem as indebted to Dante as anything else in Eliot’s early work, to say little of the modern English mythology—the "Old Guy Fawkes" of the Gunpowder Plot—or the colonial and agrarian mythos of Joseph Conrad and James George Frazer, which, at least for reasons of textual history, echo in The Waste Land.[43] The "continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity" that is so characteristic of his mythical method remained in fine form.[44] The Hollow Men contains some of Eliot's most famous lines, notably its conclusion:

This is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.

[edit] Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is the first long poem written by Eliot after his 1927 conversion to Anglicanism. Published in 1930, it deals with the struggle that ensues when one who has lacked faith acquires it. Sometimes referred to as Eliot's "conversion poem," it is richly but ambiguously allusive, and deals with the aspiration to move from spiritual barrenness to hope for human salvation. The style is different from the poetry that predates his conversion. Ash Wednesday and the poems that followed had a more casual, melodic, and contemplative method.[citation needed]

Many critics were particularly enthusiastic about it. Edwin Muir maintained that it is one of the most moving poems Eliot wrote, and perhaps the "most perfect," though it was not well received by everyone. The poem's groundwork of orthodox Christianity discomfited many of the more secular literati.[45][4]

[edit] Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats

In 1930, Eliot published a book of light verse, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats ("Old Possum" was Ezra Pound's nickname for him). This first edition had an illustration of the author on the cover. In 1954, the composer Alan Rawsthorne set six of the poems for speaker and orchestra, in a work entitled Practical Cats. After Eliot's death, the book was adapted as the basis of the musical, Cats, by Andrew Lloyd Webber, first produced in London's West End in 1981 and opening on Broadway the following year.

[edit] Four Quartets

Eliot regarded Four Quartets as his masterpiece, and it is the work that led to his being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.[4] It consists of four long poems, each first published separately: Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940), The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942). Each has five sections. Although they resist easy characterization, each begins with a rumination on the geographical location of its title, and each meditates on the nature of time in some important respect—theological, historical, physical—and its relation to the human condition. Each poem is associated with one of the four classical elements: air, earth, water, and fire.

Burnt Norton asks what it means to consider things that might have been. We see the shell of an abandoned house, and Eliot toys with the idea that all these merely possible realities are present together, invisible to us. All the possible ways people might walk across a courtyard add up to a vast dance we can't see; children who aren't there are hiding in the bushes.

East Coker continues the examination of time and meaning, focusing in a famous passage on the nature of language and poetry. Out of darkness, Eliot offers a solution: "I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope."

The Dry Salvages treats the element of water, via images of river and sea. It strives to contain opposites: "The past and future/Are conquered, and reconciled."

Little Gidding (the element of fire) is the most anthologized of the Quartets. Eliot's experiences as an air raid warden in The Blitz power the poem, and he imagines meeting Dante during the German bombing. The beginning of the Quartets ("Houses / Are removed, destroyed") had become a violent everyday experience; this creates an animation, where for the first time he talks of Love as the driving force behind all experience. From this background, the Quartets end with an affirmation of Julian of Norwich: "All shall be well and/All manner of thing shall be well."

The Four Quartets cannot be understood without reference to Christian thought, traditions, and history. Eliot draws upon the theology, art, symbolism and language of such figures as Dante, and mystics St. John of the Cross and Julian of Norwich. The "deeper communion" sought in East Coker, the "hints and whispers of children, the sickness that must grow worse in order to find healing," and the exploration which inevitably leads us home all point to the pilgrim's path along the road of sanctification.

Critical reception

[edit] Responses to his poetry

The initial critical response to Eliot's poetry, particularly "The Waste Land," was mixed. Some critics, like Edmund Wilson, Conrad Aiken, and Gilbert Seldes thought it was the best poetry being written in the English language while others thought it was esoteric and wilfully difficult. Edmund Wilson, being one of the critics who praised Eliot, called him "one of our only authentic poets."[57] Nevertheless, it should be noted that Wilson also pointed out some of Eliot's weaknesses as a poet. In regard to "The Waste Land," Wilson admits its flaws ("its lack of structural unity"), but concluded, "I doubt whether there is a single other poem of equal length by a contemporary American which displays so high and so varied a mastery of English verse."[57]

Other critics, like Charles Powell, were decidedly negative in their criticism of Eliot, calling his poems incomprehensible.[58] And the writers of Time magazine were similarly baffled by a challenging poem like "The Waste Land."[59] Of course, there were some critics, like John Crowe Ransom, who wrote mostly negative criticisms of Eliot's work but who also had some positive things to say. For instance, though Ransom negatively criticised "The Waste Land" for its "extreme disconnection," Ransom was not completely condemnatory of Eliot's work (like Powell) and admitted that Eliot was a talented poet.[60]

Addressing some of the common criticisms directed against "The Waste Land" at the time, Gilbert Seldes stated, "It seems at first sight remarkably disconnected and confused . . . [however] a closer view of the poem does more than illuminate the difficulties; it reveals the hidden form of the work, [and] indicates how each thing falls into place."[61]

[edit] Allegations of anti-Semitism

The depiction of Jews in some of Eliot's poems has led several critics to accuse him of anti-Semitism. This case has been presented most forcefully in a study by Anthony Julius: T. S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism, and Literary Form (1996).[62][63] In "Gerontion," Eliot writes, in the voice of the poem's elderly narrator, "And the Jew squats on the window sill, the owner [of my building] / Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp."[64] Another well-known example appears in the poem, "Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar." In this poem, Eliot wrote, "The rats are underneath the piles. / The Jew is underneath the lot. / Money in furs."[65] Interpreting the line as an indirect comparison of Jews to rats, Julius writes, "The anti-Semitism is unmistakable. It reaches out like a clear signal to the reader." Julius's viewpoint has been supported by literary critics such as Christopher Ricks, George Steiner, and James Fenton.[66]

In a series of lectures delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, published under the title After Strange Gods: A Primer of Modern Heresy (1934), Eliot wrote of societal tradition and coherence, "What is still more important [than cultural homogeneity] is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable."[67] Eliot never re-published this book nor the lecture.[66]

Craig Raine, in his books In Defence of T.S. Eliot (2001) and T. S. Eliot (2006), has sought to defend Eliot from the charge of anti-Semitism. Reviewing Raine's 2006 book, Paul Dean stated that he was not convinced by Raine's argument though he concluded, "Ultimately, as both Raine and, to do him justice, Julius insist, however much Eliot may have been compromised as a person, as we all are in our several ways, his greatness as a poet remains."[66]

[edit] Works

[edit] Poetry

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) o The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock o Portrait of a Lady (poem) o Aunt Helen

Poems (1920) o Gerontion o Sweeney Among the Nightingaleso "The Hippopotamus" o "Whispers of Immortality"o "Mr. Eliot's Sunday Morning Service"o "A Cooking Egg"

The Waste Land (1922) The Hollow Men (1925) Ariel Poems (1927–1954)

o The Journey of the Magi (1927) Ash Wednesday (1930) Coriolan (1931)

Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939) The Marching Song of the Pollicle Dogs and Billy M'Caw: The Remarkable Parrot (1939) in The Queen's

Book of the Red Cross Four Quartets (1945)

[edit] Further reading

Ackroyd, Peter . T. S. Eliot: A Life. (1984) Ali, Ahmed. Mr. Eliot's Penny World of Dreams: An Essay in the Interpretation of T.S. Eliot's Poetry,

Published for the Lucknow University by New Book Co., Bombay, P.S. King & Staples Ltd., Westminster, London, 1942, pages 138.

Alldritt, Keith. Eliot's Four Quartets: Poetry as Chamber Music. Woburn Press, 1978. Asher, Kenneth T. S. Eliot and Ideology (1995) Brand, Clinton A. "The Voice of This Calling: The Enduring Legacy of T. S. Eliot," Modern Age Volume

45, Number 4; Fall 2003 online edition, conservative perspective Brown, Alec. The Lyrical Impulse in Eliot's Poetry, Scrutinies vol. 2. Bush, Ronald . T. S. Eliot: A Study in Character and Style. (1984) Bush, Ronald, 'The Presence of the Past: Ethnographic Thinking/ Literary Politics'. In Prehistories of the

Future, ed. Elzar Barkan and Ronald Bush, Stanford University Press. (1995). Crawford, Robert. The Savage and the City in the Work of T. S. Eliot. (1987).* Christensen, Karen. "Dear

Mrs. Eliot," The Guardian Review. (29 January 2005). Dawson, J.L., P.D. Holland & D.J. McKitterick, A Concordance to 'The Complete Poems and Plays of T.S.

Eliot'. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Forster, E. M. Essay on T. S. Eliot, in Life and Letters, June 1929. Gardner, Helen . The Composition of Four Quartets. (1978). ---The Art of T. S. Eliot. (1949) Gordon, Lyndall . T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life. (1998) Harding, W. D. T. S. Eliot, 1925-1935, Scrutiny, September 1936: A Review. Hargrove, Nancy Duvall. Landscape as Symbol in the Poetry of T. S. Eliot. University Press of