A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note -66


A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
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  Elizabethan Age  / Renaissance  (Reworking of learning)         
  1. Elizabethan ascended the throne of England in 1558 and ruled over the country till her death in 1603. Read More about Elizabethan Literature 
  2. During this period, the English national life took big strides. Recognizing the Elizabethan period as one of the most signified periods, in the literary and social history of England, Hudson has observed, “By Virtue of its wonderful fertility and car city, and splendor of its production, this period ranks as one of the greatest in the annals of word’s literature, and its greatness was the result of many operative forces.” Read More about A to Z (Objective Questions)
  3. The renaissance reached its full flowering during this period. Under the impact of renaissance Elizabethan people freed themselves from the church. They adopted a flexible secular code in their life and thought.Read More about Elizabethan Literature 
  4. A new cutler of humanism was born people began to take interest in this life and made efforts to make it better and happiness.

PRE-ELIZABETHAN PERIOD: Noted for the Extensive Manuring for the Fruitful Soil of the Elizabethan Literature


(Sir Thomas More, William Tyndale, Sir Thomas Wyatt, Nicholas Udall, Thomas Sackville, Thomas Norton)

Extending from 1500 to 1558, this period is noted for the extensive manuring for the fruitful soil of the Elizabethan Literature.  The fifteenth century produced but one book that is read nowadays, the Morte d’Arthur; up to the birth of Shakespeare in 1564, the sixteenth century produced but one, the Utopia. Sir Thomas More was one of the young men who were fortunate enough to study under the greatest of that remarkable group of scholars who, in the closing years of the fifteenth century, made Oxford famous by their teaching of Latin and Greek. Read More about History of English Literature (Essay)  He too became a great scholar, early gained prominence as a lawyer, and was eventually made Lord Chancellor; finally, because he adhered courageously to high moral principles, he gave up his life at the executioner's block, a very common ending to a life-story in those days. The Utopia, a small volume compared to the bulky Morte d’Arthur, is a great statesman-philosopher's dream of what he thought England should be. It tells of an ideal commonwealth on an imaginary island vaguely located somewhere between the coasts of South America and Africa. The account is supposed to come from a traveler who has been there and who tells in detail how the country is governed and what are the customs of the inhabitants. Some of More's ideas are so impracticable that Utopian has come to mean visionary; yet not a few of his reforms have long. Since been carried out, and others of them begin to look less strange. 

The Utopia, we may believe, would not have been written had the New Learning never reached England. Wyatt and Surrey appear in our table not because they are great poets whose works we read today but because they too came under the spell of Italy. The poems of these two courtiers were not printed till after both were dead; we find them in a little collection of poems (such collections were becoming common) published by a Mr. Tottel. Read More about History of English Literature (Essay) They deserve attention for two reasons. First, they show that the study of Italian poetry and the writing of verses in imitation of Italian models is becoming popular with the court aristocracy. Wyatt has been called the first patrician to make his mark in English poetry. Second, in this little Miscellany of Tottel's we find for the first time specimens of blank verse and of the sonnet, both of Italian origin,— forms which from this time on play an important part in English poetry. 

Tyndale's New Testament was but one of many versions of the Bible in part or in whole that appeared during this period. It is the best of them all, though the most popular was the Great Bible, so called because of its size and sumptuous appearance. Copies of it were placed in every church; and at times, we are told, men neglected the service to read it, so great was   the interest it aroused. But the version of the Bible with which we are familiar, and which made such a lasting impression on English literature, belongs not to this period but to the next. These earlier versions are important, however, in that they prepared the way for a better translation later on. Perhaps the most significant of all the works mentioned in the table are Ralph Roister Doister and Gorboduc, the first regular comedy and the first regular First regular tragedy. Read More about The Revival of Learning (1450-1550)  They are crude affairs, partly- comedy and particularly the latter, yet entitled to consider- tragedy action because they are the forerunners of the comedies and tragedies of Shakespeare's day—the feeble beginning of regular English drama.

It is not right, however, to think that English drama began at this time, for plays of a sort, highly satisfactory to those who witnessed them, were given at least five hundred years earlier. We have noted several times how much English literature owes to the church of the middle Ages. It should not surprise us therefore to learn that the earliest English plays were religious, were composed and acted by priests, and were given in the churches. The church service, it should be remembered, was conducted in Latin, the Bible was a Latin Bible, and few of those who attended service understood any language save their own. How natural, therefore, that in a desire to acquaint their congregations with the Scriptures, the priests should resort to acting out Bible narratives in simple fashion, and that sooner or later all the Bible stories should be presented in dramatic form, at first in Latin and finally in English. Although the Miracle plays, as they are called, were given at first in the churches, as they increased in popularity and larger crowds were attracted to them they were   given in churchyards, and finally on village greens and at street corners.
Read More about The Revival of Learning (1450-1550) By this time, however, the Miracle plays had passed out of the hands of priests and into the hands of the labor guilds or unions. Thus not only the church but the rapidly rising merchant classes have a share in the development of the drama. Each guild made a specialty of one play, and great was the rivalry among guilds. Out of the Miracle play grew what is called the Morality.

 The Morality does not tell a Bible story; yet, as the name suggests, its purpose is to teach a moral lesson. Vice, Gluttony, Mercy, Justice, Death, Mankind are among the characters found, each play being a little allegory picturing the struggle of the soul in the great conflict between right and wrong. A third early variety, the Interlude, takes us not to the great churches, nor to the guilds of the prospering middle classes, but to the homes of the nobles, the feudal aristocracy. The Interlude was hardly more than a dialogue, sometimes accompanied by music, coming between the courses at a banquet. Its purpose was simply to make folks merry. Read More about The Revival of Learning (1450-1550)  Thus early English drama is principally of native origin; it owes not a little, however, to the New Learning. When, Drama and in the fifteenth century, the classics were New being studied with such enthusiasm, what Learning more natural than that schoolmasters should have their boys learn and present, in the schoolroom, Latin comedies, first in the original, and later in English. Latin tragedies were given too. And from presenting Latin plays how natural the step to the writing of plays patterned after Latin models. Gorboduc, the first regular tragedy, though its plot is based upon a British legend, is patterned after a Latin model; so too is Ralph Roister Doister. Although this brief period produced so little that is of permanent value, we can see how it was preparatory in many ways to the brilliant Elizabethan period. Drama is passing through its experimental stages. Blank verse, the vehicle of Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies, and the sonnet, a form in which much of the best Elizabethan poetry is cast, are being acclimatized. The many translations of the Scripture are preparing the way for the noble King James Version. We note, moreover, that scholars from the universities are entering the arena of letters, and that courtiers are winning laurels by writing verses. Literature is now becoming popular at court.

A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 65


History of English Literature: A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers :

The Pre-Raphaelite movement

  • he   little group with Dante Rossetti, William Morris, and Algernon Swinburne, known as the Pre-Raphaelites,   found their inspiration, as did earlier poets who shared in the Romantic Movement, in the Middle Ages.
    • The Pre-Raphaelite movement, which was initiated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the mid nineteenth century, was originally not a literary but an artistic movement. Rossetti , himself a painter  and a poet as well felt that contemporary painting had become a too formal academic and unrealistic . Also read the other set of A to Z (Objective Questions)
  •  He desired to see it taken back to the realism, sensuousness and devotion to detail which characterize the art of the Italian painters before Raphael. 
  • They reacted against Victorian materialism and the neoclassical conventions of academic art by producing earnest, quasi-religious works.

A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 64


A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK

(ALL THE ANSWERS ARE COLOURED. I HAVE TRIED TO GIVE LOGIC BEHIND ANSWERING THESE QUESTIONS. WITHOUT SYLLOGISTIC FORMAT YOU NEED AN ELFIN TOWER TALL HEAD.)  

1. Which of Dickens’ novels opens with the words “It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times ....”. Read More about A to Z (Objective Questions)
(A) A Tale of Two Cities (B) Oliver Twist
(C) Pickwick Papers (D) Hard Times
** “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way.”- A Tale of Two Cities**
2. The term “The Fleshly School of Poetry” is associated with the :
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(A) Chartists (B) Pre-Raphaelites
(C) Symbolists (D) Imagists

A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 63


A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK

 (ALL THE ANSWERS ARE COLOURED. I HAVE TRIED TO GIVE LOGIC BEHIND ANSWERING THESE QUESTIONS. WITHOUT SYLLOGISTIC FORMAT YOU NEED AN ELFIN TOWER TALL HEAD.)
1. The title The Sound and the Fury is taken from:
(A) Hamlet (B) Macbeth
(C) The Tempest (D) King Lear Read More about A to Z (Objective Questions)
** MACBETH :She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word.
To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. Act V, Sc V
**
2. Pecola is a character in:
(A) The Bluest Eye (B) Oliver Twist
(C) Don Quixote (D) Beloved
3. Which of the following was associated with the “Bloomsbury Group”.
(A) T. S. Eliot (B) W. B. Yeats
(C) T. E. Hulme (D) Virginia Woolf

A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 60


A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers
UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK

1. The epithet “a comic epic in prose” is best applied to

(A) Richardson’s Pamela

(B) Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

(C) Fielding’s Tom Jones

(D) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

**Several novels   fall into the category of mock epic, including Joseph Andrews (1742), described by its author, the English novelist Henry Fielding, as “a comic epic ... in prose.” However, his The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) or Tom Jones, is regarded by critics as one of the great English novels. It is in the picaresque tradition, involving the adventures and misadventures of a roguish hero. It tells in rich, realistic detail the many adventures that befall Tom, an engaging young libertine, in his efforts to gain his rightful inheritance. So the best choice is (c)** Read More about A to Z (Objective Questions)
 

2. Muriel Spark has written a dystopian novel called

(A) Memento Mori

(B) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

(C) Robinson

(D) The Ballad of Peckham Rye

** Memento Mori (1959)-a group of aged intellectuals carry on their bickering and rivalries even as they are successively dying, each one warned by a mysterious phone call, “Remember you must die.”

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)-the story of an eccentric Edinburgh schoolteacher seen through the eyes of an admiring (but later disenchanted) pupil.  **

Philip Henslowe’s Diary and the Rose Theatre: Invaluable Material Evidence for the Study of the English Theatre in the age of Playwright William Shakespeare


Reading through the diary pages we learn, Philip Henslowe, son of Edmund Henslowe of Sussex was an enterprising man who was permanently settled on the bank side by 1577 and who married his master’s rich widow who had a fair daughter by her first marriage named Joan. In the eighties of the sixteenth century Henslowe is known as a dyer, in the nineties as a pawn-broker and always as a purchaser of southward property. As a businessman of enterprise, Henslowe of quick to mark the prospects of the theatre business; in 1585 he built the Rose Theater. Read More about William Shakespeare By 1594 he possessed another theatre at Newington butts. His step –daughter Joan was married to the famous actor, Edward Alleyn and this marked the beginning of a successful and profitable partnership with the great actor. By the time Henslowe the English theater manager owned the Fortune  and Hope  theaters in London. Read More about Drama  
  
To record first and most interestingly, Philip Henslowe took a lease of property called ‘the little rose with two gardens’ in 1585. It was situated on the backsides between the river and Maid Lane. The lease was to run for twenty years on a rental of £ 7. Later in 1587, the said Henslowe formed a partnership with one John Cholmley for building a playhouse on a portion of this property. It was built by 1588 and appears in Norden’s map of 1593 as a round building. Cholmley died in 1592. 

As Henslowe’s account of repairs shows, the theatre was erected on a brick foundation with timber and plaster and it had a thatched roof. The first company to perform at this theatre as per records of Henslowe’s diary is Stranger’s. Read More about Elizabethan Literature  
Assuming that all the entries in the said diary refer to the Rose, six different companies performed plays here form 1592 to 1603- namely, Stanger’s,  Sussex’s , Queen’s admiral’s,  Pembroke’s and Worcester’s. The curious thing is that by 1592 Philip Henslowe starts keeping a diary, which has become one of the most important records of the period and an indispensable look into the world of the theatre of the Elizabethan era. In the diary, Henslowe keeps record of costumes purchased, and monies paid to the various people with whom he did business, etc.

After 1603 there are no further records about the Rose. Henslowe’s lease of the property expired in 1605. He did not renew the lease as the rent of   £ 20   seemed heavy for him, Malone states that the Swan and the Rose were closed in 1613 as theatres but that after 1620 they were sometimes used for the exhibition of prize-fighters. Read More about William Shakespeare

On the other hand, On the death of Alleyn who was heir to most of Henslowe’s property, the latter’s diary and other papers passed to the library of Duldtwitch College where they remained forgotten and mislaid till Edmond Malone unearthed them. These documents, later edited by W.W. Gregg throw a flood –lighton Henslowe’s relations with the theatre and on the Elizabethan stage in general. The diary which is in the nature of an account or men random book covers the years 1592-1603, and forms tow parts. In the first part Henslowe records the performances by the companies at his theater, the names of the plays and the amounts received by him as owner of the theatre. He seems to have started with a performance by the stranger’s company on 23 June, 1592.  Read More about William Shakespeare

Rose Theatre
This information apart, the diary furnishes us with a fair knowledge of the contemporary playwrights and players and a chronology of the play. In fact,  Philip Henslowe’s diary provides invaluable material evidence for the study of the English theater in the age of playwright William Shakespeare. Read More about William ShakespeareIn his diary he kept his accounts of transactions for his theaters, as well as records of loans and payments to actors and dramatists. Henslowe acted as a banker to the players and made payments on their behalf to playwrights. Those plays acted at his theatres were put together by syndicates of two to five writers. Read More about Elizabethan Literature  
Playwriting thus became a practical business and not so much high art. For example in 1599, Dekker himself wrote only two plays but collaborated in fourteen. Of the 280 plays referred by Henslowe about one-seventh survives and they are mostly by single authored. This only reveals the natural instinct of an author to be interested more in his own singular work for the purpose of getting artistic value. Read More about Elizabethan Literature  

This diary also shows that popular plays were often revised. Thus Marlowe’s tragedy of Dr Faustus, written in 1592 and having twenty-five performances between September, 1594 and October, 1597 was entered for publication on 7th January, 1601. Bird and Rowley, Henslowe’s hack, were paid for making additions to this play on 22ndNovember, 1602. Revision and collaboration of Shakespeare’s plays Read More about William Shakespeare shows signs of such alterations and revisions. Collaboration, however, in Shakespeare’s plays is more an exception than a rule, there being fairly general agreement that portion of unevenness in King John.

Henslowe’s diary is by far the most important document illuminating the Elizabethan stage and theatre. It also aids immeasurably the chronological study of the Shakespearean plays and furnishes evidence for the authenticity and authorship of the plays. 
Now try to answer....
  •  The group of five: Philip Henslowe,   Edward Alleyn, John Heminges, Henry Condell, Richard Burbage .
  •  1584: The   property called The Little Rose contained a rose garden, but also a brothel.  There was built The Rose theatre, the third real theatre in London, and the very first on that side of the Thames.  (First real theatre - The Theatre in Shoreditch, built in 1576 by James Burbage)
  •  In the diary there is no mention of Shakespeare. Why? Professional rivalry?

Ardhendu De

 Ref: Wikipedia, Rose theatre

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