JONATHAN SWIFT

 JONATHAN SWIFT

Early Years and Education

Jonathan Swift was born into a poor family that included his mother Abigail and his sister Jane. His father, who was a well known clergyman in England, had died seven months before Jonathan's birth. Jonathan's mother, after the death of her husband, left the children to be raised by relatives (probably uncles), while she returned to her family in England (Leicester). And although it’s open to conjecture, It is also reported that Swift, as a baby, was taken by a nurse to England where he remained for three years before being returned to his family.
In 1682, Swift entered Trinity College where he received a B.A. by "special grace," a designation for students who did not perform very well while there. Upon leaving Trinity College, Swift went to England to work as a secretary (a patronage position) for Sir William Temple. In 1692, Swift received an M.A. from Oxford; in 1702, he received a D.D. (Doctor of Divinity) from Dublin University.
In 1694, he was ordained as a priest in the Church of Ireland (Anglican Church) and assigned as Vicar of Kilroot, a church near Belfast. While he went on with his religious career, until becoming Dean of St. Patrick’s in 1717, Swift continued writing satirically in various genres, including both prose and poetry, using various forms to address different causes, including personal, behavioral, philosophical, political, religious, civic, and others.

Swift's Major Literary Works

Swift is recognized as a defender of Ireland. In A Modest Proposal (1729), a reaction to English commercial practices that negatively impacted Ireland, Swift wrote one of the greatest works of sustained irony in English or any other language. Instead of maintaining that English laws prevent the Irish from manufacturing anything to sell, he argues that the only items of commerce that the English don't restrict are Irish babies and reasons that the Irish would be better off as cattle to be butchered than as a colony to be starved by the English. The Drapier's Letters (1724) is Swift's response to the continued subjugation of all aspects of the lives of those living in Ireland by England. The Letters aroused so much opposition that the English offered a reward of £300 for the name of the author. Although the Irish knew that he had written the letters, they did not betray him. They made him a national hero instead.

In his most recognized novel, Gulliver's Travels (1726), Swift presents a satire on all aspects of humanity by pointing out the weaknesses, vices, and follies inherent in all human beings; the satire reaches its apex in Swift's comparison of Houyhnhnms (horses) and Yahoos (human-like creatures) in Book IV.

In 1727, Swift visited England for the last time. He was declared mentally incompetent in 1742 and died in October 1745, leaving his estate to charity.

Plot Overview of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS*

Gulliver’s Travels recounts the story of Lemuel Gulliver, a practical-minded Englishman trained as a surgeon who takes to the seas when his business fails. In a deadpan first-person narrative that rarely shows any signs of self-reflection or deep emotional response, Gulliver narrates the adventures that befall him on these travels.
Gulliver’s adventure in Lilliput begins when he wakes after his shipwreck to find himself bound by innumerable tiny threads and addressed by tiny captors who are in awe of him but fiercely protective of their kingdom. They are not afraid to use violence against Gulliver, though their arrows are little more than pinpricks. But overall, they are hospitable, risking famine in their land by feeding Gulliver, who consumes more food than a thousand Lilliputians combined could. Gulliver is taken into the capital city by a vast wagon the Lilliputians have specially built. He is presented to the emperor, who is entertained by Gulliver, just as Gulliver is flattered by the attention of royalty. Eventually Gulliver becomes a national resource, used by the army in its war against the people of Blefuscu, whom the Lilliputians hate for doctrinal differences concerning the proper way to crack eggs. But things change when Gulliver is convicted of treason for putting out a fire in the royal palace with his urine and is condemned to be shot in the eyes and starved to death. Gulliver escapes to Blefuscu, where he is able to repair a boat he finds and set sail for England.
After staying in England with his wife and family for two months, Gulliver undertakes his next sea voyage, which takes him to a land of giants called Brobdingnag. Here, a field worker discovers him. The farmer initially treats him as little more than an animal, keeping him for amusement. The farmer eventually sells Gulliver to the queen, who makes him a courtly diversion and is entertained by his musical talents. Social life is easy for Gulliver after his discovery by the court, but not particularly enjoyable. Gulliver is often repulsed by the physicality of the Brobdingnagians, whose ordinary flaws are many times magnified by their huge size. Thus, when a couple of courtly ladies let him play on their naked bodies, he is not attracted to them but rather disgusted by their enormous skin pores and the sound of their torrential urination. He is generally startled by the ignorance of the people here—even the king knows nothing about politics. More unsettling findings in Brobdingnag come in the form of various animals of the realm that endanger his life. Even Brobdingnagian insects leave slimy trails on his food that make eating difficult. On a trip to the frontier, accompanying the royal couple, Gulliver leaves Brobdingnag when his cage is plucked up by an eagle and dropped into the sea.
Next, Gulliver sets sail again and, after an attack by pirates, ends up in Laputa, where a floating island inhabited by theoreticians and academics oppresses the land below, called Balnibarbi. The scientific research undertaken in Laputa and in Balnibarbi seems totally inane and impractical, and its residents too appear wholly out of touch with reality. Taking a short side trip to Glubbdubdrib, Gulliver is able to witness the conjuring up of figures from history, such as Julius Caesar and other military leaders, whom he finds much less impressive than in books. After visiting the Luggnaggians and the Struldbrugs, the latter of which are senile immortals who prove that age does not bring wisdom, he is able to sail to Japan and from there back to England.
Finally, on his fourth journey, Gulliver sets out as captain of a ship, but after the mutiny of his crew and a long confinement in his cabin, he arrives in an unknown land. This land is populated by Houyhnhnms, rational-thinking horses who rule, and by Yahoos, brutish humanlike creatures who serve the Houyhnhnms. Gulliver sets about learning their language, and when he can speak he narrates his voyages to them and explains the constitution of England. He is treated with great courtesy and kindness by the horses and is enlightened by his many conversations with them and by his exposure to their noble culture. He wants to stay with the Houyhnhnms, but his bared body reveals to the horses that he is very much like a Yahoo, and he is banished. Gulliver is grief-stricken but agrees to leave. He fashions a canoe and makes his way to a nearby island, where he is picked up by a Portuguese ship captain who treats him well, though Gulliver cannot help now seeing the captain—and all humans—as shamefully Yahoolike. Gulliver then concludes his narrative with a claim that the lands he has visited belong by rights to England, as her colonies, even though he questions the whole idea of colonialism.

*SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Gulliver’s Travels.” SparkNotes LLC. 2003. http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/gulliver/ (accessed May 27, 2017).

YEAR III and IV - JOHN MILTON AND PARADISE LOST

Milton’s Life

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608, in London. Milton’s father was a prosperous merchant, despite the fact that he had been disowned by his family when he converted from Catholicism to Protestantism. Milton excelled in school, and went on to study privately in his twenties and thirties. In 1638 he made a trip to Italy, studying in Florence, Siena, and Rome, but felt obliged to return home upon the outbreak of civil war in England, in 1639. Upon his return from Italy, he began planning an epic poem, the first ever written in English. These plans were delayed by his marriage to Mary Powell and her subsequent desertion of him. In reaction to these events, Milton wrote a series of pamphlets calling for more leniency in the church’s position on divorce. His argument brought him both greater publicity and angry criticism from the religious establishment in England. When the Second Civil War ended in 1648, with King Charles dethroned and executed, Milton welcomed the new parliament and wrote pamphlets in its support. After serving for a few years in a civil position, he retired briefly to his house in Westminster because his eyesight was failing. By 1652 he was completely blind.
Despite his disability, Milton reentered civil service under the protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, the military general who ruled the British Isles from 1653 to 1658. Two years after Cromwell’s death, Milton’s worst fears were realized—the Restoration brought Charles II back to the throne, and the poet had to go into hiding to escape execution. However, he had already begun work on the great English epic which he had planned so long before: Paradise Lost. Now he had the opportunity to work on it in earnest. It was published in 1667, a year after the Great Fire of London. The greatness of Milton’s epic was immediately recognized, and the admiring comments of the respected poets John Dryden and Andrew Marvell helped restore Milton to favor. He spent the ensuing years at his residence in Bunhill, still writing prolifically. Milton died at home on November 8, 1674. By all accounts, Milton led a studious and quiet life from his youth up until his death.

Education

Thanks to his father’s wealth, young Milton got the best education money could buy. He had a private tutor as a youngster. As a young teenager he attended the prestigious St. Paul’s Cathedral School. After he excelled at St. Paul’s he entered college at Christ’s College at Cambridge University. At the latter, he made quite a name for himself with his prodigious writing, publishing several essays and poems to high acclaim. After graduating with his master’s degree in 1632, Milton was once again accommodated by his father. He was allowed to take over the family’s estate near Windsor and pursue a quiet life of study. He spent 1632 to 1638—his mid to late twenties—reading the classics in Greek and Latin and learning new theories in mathematics and music.
Milton became fluent in many foreign and classical languages, including Italian, Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, French, Spanish, Anglo-Saxon, and spoke some Dutch as well. His knowledge of most of these languages was immense and precocious. He wrote sonnets in Italian as a teenager. While a student at Cambridge, he was invited in his second year to address the first year students in a speech written entirely in Latin.
After Cambridge, Milton continued a quiet life of study well through his twenties. By the age of thirty, Milton had made himself into one of the most brilliant minds of England, and one of the most ambitious poets it had ever produced.

Early Works

In his twenties, Milton wrote five masterful long poems, each of them influential and important in its own separate way: “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity,” “Comus,” “Lycidas,” “Il Penseroso,” and “L’Allegro.” Through these poems, Milton honed his skills at writing narrative, dramatic, elegiac, philosophical, and lyrical poetry. He had built a firm poetic foundation through his intense study of languages, philosophy, and politics, and fused it with his uncanny sense of tone and diction. Even in these early poems, Milton’s literary output was guided by his faith in God. Milton believed that all poetry served a social, philosophical, and religious purpose. He thought that poetry should glorify God, promote religious values, enlighten readers, and help people to become better Christians.
Aside from his poetic successes, Milton was also a prolific writer of essays and pamphlets. These prose writings did not bring Milton public acclaim. In fact, since his essays and pamphlets argued against the established views of most of England, Milton was even the object of threats. Nevertheless, he continued to form the basis for his political and theological beliefs in the form of essays and pamphlets.

Politics

Milton’s political ideals are expressed in the many pamphlets he wrote during his lifetime. He championed the absolute freedom of the individual—perhaps because he had been so often betrayed by the institutions in which he put his trust. His distrust of institutions was accompanied by his belief that power corrupts human beings. He distrusted anyone who could claim power over anyone else, and believed that rulers should have to prove their right to lead other people.
Milton was an activist in his middle years, fighting for human rights and against the rule of England’s leaders, whom he believed were inept. Knowing he was not a fighter, he demonstrated his activism by writing lengthy, rhetorical pamphlets that thoroughly and rigorously argue for his point of view. Although he championed liberty and fought against authority throughout his career, in theory he believed in a strict social and political hierarchy in which people would obey their leaders and leaders serve their people. He believed that leaders should be leaders because they are better and more fit to rule than their subjects. But despite these rigid views of authority, Milton believed that the social hierarchy that actually existed in his day was extremely corrupt, and he directly challenged the rule of Charles I, the king of England during much of Milton’s lifetime. Milton argued that Charles was not, in fact, fit to lead his subjects because he did not possess superior faculties or virtues.

Religion

Milton took public stances on a great number of issues, but most important to the reading of Paradise Lost are his positions on religion. In Milton’s time, the Anglican Church, or Church of England, had split into the high Anglican, moderate Anglican, and Puritan or Presbyterian sects. Milton was a Presbyterian. This denomination called for the abolishment of bishops, an office that exists as part of the Catholic and Anglican churches. Milton, however, gradually took his views further, ultimately calling for the removal of all priests, whom he referred to as “hirelings.” Milton despised the corruption he saw in the Catholic Church, repeatedly attacking it both in his poetry and prose. In “Lycidas,” he likens Catholics to hungry wolves leaping into a sheep’s pen, an image similar to his depiction of Satan leaping over the wall of Paradise in Paradise Lost, Book IV. He saw few problems with the division of Protestants into more and smaller denominations. Instead, he thought that the fragmentation of churches was a sign of healthy self-examination, and believed that each individual Christian should be his own church, without any establishment to encumber him. These beliefs, expressed in a great number of pamphlets, prompted his break with the Presbyterians before 1650. From that point on, Milton advocated the complete abolishment of all church establishments, and kept his own private religion, close to the Calvinism practiced by Presbyterians but differing in some ways. Milton’s highly individual view of Christianity makes Paradise Lost simultaneously personal and universal.
In his later years, Milton came to view all organized Christian churches, whether Anglican, Catholic or Presbyterian, as an obstacle to true faith. He felt that the individual and his conscience (or “right reason”) was a much more powerful tool in interpreting the Word of God than the example set by a church. Throughout Paradise Lost, Milton expresses the idea that Adam and Eve’s fall from grace was actually fortunate, because it gives individual human beings the opportunity to redeem themselves by true repentance and faith. The importance of remaining strong in one’s personal religious convictions, particularly in the face of widespread condemnation, is a major theme in the later Books of Paradise Lost, as Michael shows Adam the vision of Enoch and Noah, two followers of God who risk death to stand up for him.
Paradise Lost also presents a number of Protestant Christian positions: the union of the Old and New Testaments, the unworthiness of mankind, and the importance of Christ’s love in man’s salvation. Nonetheless, the poem does not present a unified, cohesive theory of Christian theology, nor does it attempt to identify disbelievers, redefine Christianity, or replace the Bible. Instead, Milton’s epic stands as a remarkable presentation of biblical stories meant to engage Christian readers and help them to be better Christians.

Women and Marriage

Much of Milton’s social commentary in Paradise Lost focuses on the proper role of women. In Book IV he makes clear that he does not think men and women are equals, alluding to biblical passages that identify man as the master of woman. Although Milton viewed women as inferior to men, believing that wives should be subservient to their husbands, he did not see himself as a woman-hater. In Paradise Lost, he distances himself from the misogyny popular in his time—the belief that women are utterly inferior to men, essentially evil, and generally to be avoided. Milton’s character Adam voices this harsh view of womankind, but only after the fall, as an expression of anger and frustration. Put simply, Milton’s early views in Paradise Lost may be misogynistic by today’s standards, but he nevertheless presents Eve’s wifely role as an important one, as Adam and Eve help one another to become better and more complete individuals.
Milton’s views on marriage are mainstream today, but they were viewed as shocking and heretical in his own time. Milton was a pioneer for the right of divorce in an age when divorce was prohibited by nearly all denominations. In fact, the only grounds for a lawful divorce in Milton’s time was usually sexual incompatibility due to unlawful relations with other parties. But in his Doctrine of Discipline and Divorce, Milton expresses his belief that any sort of incompatibility—sexual, mental, or otherwise—is justified grounds for a divorce. In the same essay, he argues that the main purpose of marriage is not necessarily procreation, as most people thought at that time, but to bring two people together in completion. He felt that conversation and mental companionship were supremely important in a marriage, and admits that his first marriage might have failed due to a lack in this regard. He also argued that the partners in a marriage must complement each other. His portrayal of Adam and Eve after the fall is a vivid example of his belief that two people can complement each other, smoothing out one anothers’ faults and enhancing each others’ strengths.

The Epic

At the early age of sixteen, Milton already aspired to write the great English epic. As he read the classical epics in school—Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid—he began to fantasize about bringing such artistic brilliance to the English language.
Milton considered many topics for his epic. Early on, he thought that the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table was a noble topic. Then, as he grew slightly older, he hoped to write an epic about Oliver Cromwell, who took control of England in 1653 after helping to dethrone and execute King Charles. Judging from these two topics, it is clear that Milton wanted to write his epic on a distinctly British topic that would inspire nationalist pride in his countrymen. Such a topic would also mimic Homer’s and Virgil’s nationalist epics of strong, virtuous warriors and noble battles. However, Milton abandoned both of these ideas, and for a time gave up the notion of writing an epic at all.
But in the mid-1650s, Milton returned to an idea he had previously had for a verse play: the story of Adam and Eve. He concluded that the story might fail as a drama but succeed as an epic. In 1656 the blind Milton began to recite verse each morning to one of his two daughters, who wrote his poem down for him. Milton continued to dictate Paradise Lost for several years, finishing in 1667 when it was first published in ten books. Milton soon returned to revise his epic, redividing it into twelve books (as the classical epics were divided), and publishing it in its authoritative second edition form in 1671.
Later in 1671 he published his final work: Paradise Regained, the sequel to his great epic. Due to his strong religious beliefs, Milton thought that this work surpassed Paradise Lost in both its art and its message, though most readers today would disagree.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

The Importance of Obedience to God

The first words of Paradise Lost state that the poem’s main theme will be “Man’s first Disobedience.” Milton narrates the story of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, explains how and why it happens, and places the story within the larger context of Satan’s rebellion and Jesus’ resurrection. Raphael tells Adam about Satan’s disobedience in an effort to give him a firm grasp of the threat that Satan and humankind’s disobedience poses. In essence, Paradise Lost presents two moral paths that one can take after disobedience: the downward spiral of increasing sin and degradation, represented by Satan, and the road to redemption, represented by Adam and Eve.
While Adam and Eve are the first humans to disobey God, Satan is the first of all God’s creation to disobey. His decision to rebel comes only from himself—he was not persuaded or provoked by others. Also, his decision to continue to disobey God after his fall into Hell ensures that God will not forgive him. Adam and Eve, on the other hand, decide to repent for their sins and seek forgiveness. Unlike Satan, Adam and Eve understand that their disobedience to God will be corrected through generations of toil on Earth. This path is obviously the correct one to take: the visions in Books XI and XII demonstrate that obedience to God, even after repeated falls, can lead to humankind’s salvation.

The Hierarchical Nature of the Universe

Paradise Lost is about hierarchy as much as it is about obedience. The layout of the universe—with Heaven above, Hell below, and Earth in the middle—presents the universe as a hierarchy based on proximity to God and his grace. This spatial hierarchy leads to a social hierarchy of angels, humans, animals, and devils: the Son is closest to God, with the archangels and cherubs behind him. Adam and Eve and Earth’s animals come next, with Satan and the other fallen angels following last. To obey God is to respect this hierarchy.
Satan refuses to honor the Son as his superior, thereby questioning God’s hierarchy. As the angels in Satan’s camp rebel, they hope to beat God and thereby dissolve what they believe to be an unfair hierarchy in Heaven. When the Son and the good angels defeat the rebel angels, the rebels are punished by being banished far away from Heaven. At least, Satan argues later, they can make their own hierarchy in Hell, but they are nevertheless subject to God’s overall hierarchy, in which they are ranked the lowest. Satan continues to disobey God and his hierarchy as he seeks to corrupt mankind.
Likewise, humankind’s disobedience is a corruption of God’s hierarchy. Before the fall, Adam and Eve treat the visiting angels with proper respect and acknowledgement of their closeness to God, and Eve embraces the subservient role allotted to her in her marriage. God and Raphael both instruct Adam that Eve is slightly farther removed from God’s grace than Adam because she was created to serve both God and him. When Eve persuades Adam to let her work alone, she challenges him, her superior, and he yields to her, his inferior. Again, as Adam eats from the fruit, he knowingly defies God by obeying Eve and his inner instinct instead of God and his reason. Adam’s visions in Books XI and XII show more examples of this disobedience to God and the universe’s hierarchy, but also demonstrate that with the Son’s sacrifice, this hierarchy will be restored once again.

The Fall as Partly Fortunate

After he sees the vision of Christ’s redemption of humankind in Book XII, Adam refers to his own sin as a felix culpa or “happy fault,” suggesting that the fall of humankind, while originally seeming an unmitigated catastrophe, does in fact bring good with it. Adam and Eve’s disobedience allows God to show his mercy and temperance in their punishments and his eternal providence toward humankind. This display of love and compassion, given through the Son, is a gift to humankind. Humankind must now experience pain and death, but humans can also experience mercy, salvation, and grace in ways they would not have been able to had they not disobeyed. While humankind has fallen from grace, individuals can redeem and save themselves through continued devotion and obedience to God. The salvation of humankind, in the form of The Son’s sacrifice and resurrection, can begin to restore humankind to its former state. In other words, good will come of sin and death, and humankind will eventually be rewarded. This fortunate result justifies God’s reasoning and explains his ultimate plan for humankind.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, and literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Light and Dark

Opposites abound in Paradise Lost, including Heaven and Hell, God and Satan, and good and evil. Milton’s uses imagery of light and darkness to express all of these opposites. Angels are physically described in terms of light, whereas devils are generally described by their shadowy darkness. Milton also uses light to symbolize God and God’s grace. In his invocation in Book III, Milton asks that he be filled with this light so he can tell his divine story accurately and persuasively. While the absence of light in Hell and in Satan himself represents the absence of God and his grace.

The Geography of the Universe

Milton divides the universe into four major regions: glorious Heaven, dreadful Hell, confusing Chaos, and a young and vulnerable Earth in between. The opening scenes that take place in Hell give the reader immediate context as to Satan’s plot against God and humankind. The intermediate scenes in Heaven, in which God tells the angels of his plans, provide a philosophical and theological context for the story. Then, with these established settings of good and evil, light and dark, much of the action occurs in between on Earth. The powers of good and evil work against each other on this new battlefield of Earth. Satan fights God by tempting Adam and Eve, while God shows his love and mercy through the Son’s punishment of Adam and Eve.
Milton believes that any other information concerning the geography of the universe is unimportant. Milton acknowledges both the possibility that the sun revolves around the Earth and that the Earth revolves around the sun, without coming down on one side or the other. Raphael asserts that it does not matter which revolves around which, demonstrating that Milton’s cosmology is based on the religious message he wants to convey, rather than on the findings of contemporaneous science or astronomy.

Conversation and Contemplation

One common objection raised by readers of Paradise Lost is that the poem contains relatively little action. Milton sought to divert the reader’s attention from heroic battles and place it on the conversations and contemplations of his characters. Conversations comprise almost five complete books of Paradise Lost, close to half of the text. Milton’s narrative emphasis on conversation conveys the importance he attached to conversation and contemplation, two pursuits that he believed were of fundamental importance for a moral person. As with Adam and Raphael, and again with Adam and Michael, the sharing of ideas allows two people to share and spread God’s message. Likewise, pondering God and his grace allows a person to become closer to God and more obedient. Adam constantly contemplates God before the fall, whereas Satan contemplates only himself. After the fall, Adam and Eve must learn to maintain their conversation and contemplation if they hope to make their own happiness outside of Paradise.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, and colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Scales in the Sky

As Satan prepares to fight Gabriel when he is discovered in Paradise, God causes the image of a pair of golden scales to appear in the sky. On one side of the scales, he puts the consequences of Satan’s running away, and on the other he puts the consequences of Satan’s staying and fighting with Gabriel. The side that shows him staying and fighting flies up, signifying its lightness and worthlessness. These scales symbolize the fact that God and Satan are not truly on opposite sides of a struggle—God is all-powerful, and Satan and Gabriel both derive all of their power from Him. God’s scales force Satan to realize the futility of taking arms against one of God’s angels again.

Adam’s Wreath

The wreath that Adam makes as he and Eve work separately in Book IX is symbolic in several ways. First, it represents his love for her and his attraction to her. But as he is about to give the wreath to her, his shock in noticing that she has eaten from the Tree of Knowledge makes him drop it to the ground. His dropping of the wreath symbolizes that his love and attraction to Eve is falling away. His image of her as a spiritual companion has been shattered completely, as he realizes her fallen state. The fallen wreath represents the loss of pure love.

YEAR III - JULIUS CAESAR THEMES, MOTIFS AND SYMBOLS

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work.

Fate versus Free Will

Julius Caesar raises many questions about the force of fate in life versus the capacity for free will. Cassius refuses to accept Caesar’s rising power and deems a belief in fate to be nothing more than a form of passivity or cowardice. He says to Brutus: “Men at sometime were masters of their fates. / The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings” (I.ii.140–142). Cassius urges a return to a more noble, self-possessed attitude toward life, blaming his and Brutus’s submissive stance not on a predestined plan but on their failure to assert themselves.
Ultimately, the play seems to support a philosophy in which fate and freedom maintain a delicate coexistence. Thus Caesar declares: “It seems to me most strange that men should fear, / Seeing that death, a necessary end, / Will come when it will come” (II.ii.35–37). In other words, Caesar recognizes that certain events lie beyond human control; to crouch in fear of them is to enter a paralysis equal to, if not worse than, death. It is to surrender any capacity for freedom and agency that one might actually possess. Indeed, perhaps to face death head-on, to die bravely and honorably, is Caesar’s best course: in the end, Brutus interprets his and Cassius’s defeat as the work of Caesar’s ghost—not just his apparition, but also the force of the people’s devotion to him, the strong legacy of a man who refused any fear of fate and, in his disregard of fate, seems to have transcended it.

Public Self versus Private Self

Much of the play’s tragedy stems from the characters’ neglect of private feelings and loyalties in favor of what they believe to be the public good. Similarly, characters confuse their private selves with their public selves, hardening and dehumanizing themselves or transforming themselves into ruthless political machines. Brutus rebuffs his wife, Portia, when she pleads with him to confide in her; believing himself to be acting on the people’s will, he forges ahead with the murder of Caesar, despite their close friendship. Brutus puts aside his personal loyalties and shuns thoughts of Caesar the man, his friend; instead, he acts on what he believes to be the public’s wishes and kills Caesar the leader, the imminent dictator. Cassius can be seen as a man who has gone to the extreme in cultivating his public persona. Caesar, describing his distrust of Cassius, tells Antony that the problem with Cassius is his lack of a private life—his seeming refusal to acknowledge his own sensibilities or to nurture his own spirit. Such a man, Caesar fears, will let nothing interfere with his ambition. Indeed, Cassius lacks all sense of personal honor and shows himself to be a ruthless schemer.
Ultimately, neglecting private sentiments to follow public concerns brings Caesar to his death. Although Caesar does briefly agree to stay home from the Senate in order to please Calpurnia, who has dreamed of his murder, he gives way to ambition when Decius tells him that the senators plan to offer him the crown. -Caesar’s public self again takes precedence. Tragically, he no longer sees the difference between his omnipotent, immortal public image and his vulnerable human body. Just preceding his death, Caesar refuses Artemidorus’s pleas to speak with him, saying that he gives last priority to his most personal concerns. He thus endangers himself by believing that the strength of his public self will protect his private self.

Misinterpretations and Misreadings

Much of the play deals with the characters’ failures to interpret correctly the omens that they encounter. As Cicero says, “Men may construe things after their fashion, / Clean from the purpose of the things themselves” (I.iii.34–35). Thus, the night preceding Caesar’s appearance at the Senate is full of portents, but no one reads them accurately: Cassius takes them to signify the danger that Caesar’s impending coronation would bring to the state, when, if anything, they warn of the destruction that Cassius himself threatens. There are calculated misreadings as well: Cassius manipulates Brutus into joining the conspiracy by means of forged letters, knowing that Brutus’s trusting nature will cause him to accept the letters as authentic pleas from the Roman people.

The circumstances of Cassius’s death represent another instance of misinterpretation. Pindarus’s erroneous conclusion that Titinius has been captured by the enemy, when in fact Titinius has reunited with friendly forces, is the piece of misinformation that prompts Cassius to seek death. Thus, in the world of politics portrayed in Julius Caesar, the inability to read people and events leads to downfall; conversely, the ability to do so is the key to survival. With so much ambition and rivalry, the ability to gauge the public’s opinion as well as the resentment or loyalty of one’s fellow politicians can guide one to success. Antony proves masterful at recognizing his situation, and his accurate reading of the crowd’s emotions during his funeral oration for Caesar allows him to win the masses over to his side.

Inflexibility versus Compromise

Both Brutus and Caesar are stubborn, rather inflexible people who ultimately suffer fatally for it. In the play’s aggressive political landscape, individuals succeed through adaptability, bargaining, and compromise. Brutus’s rigid though honorable ideals leave him open for manipulation by Cassius. He believes so thoroughly in the purpose of the assassination that he does not perceive the need for excessive political maneuvering to justify the murder. Equally resolute, Caesar prides himself on his steadfastness; yet this constancy helps bring about his death, as he refuses to heed ill omens and goes willingly to the Senate, into the hands of his murderers.
Antony proves perhaps the most adaptable of all of the politicians: while his speech to the Roman citizens centers on Caesar’s generosity toward each citizen, he later searches for ways to turn these funds into cash in order to raise an army against Brutus and Cassius. Although he gains power by offering to honor Caesar’s will and provide the citizens their rightful money, it becomes clear that ethical concerns will not prevent him from using the funds in a more politically expedient manner. Antony is a successful politician—yet the question of morality remains. There seems to be no way to reconcile firm moral principles with success in politics in Shakespeare’s rendition of ancient Rome; thus each character struggles toward a different solution.

Rhetoric and Power

Julius Caesar gives detailed consideration to the relationship between rhetoric and power. The ability to make things happen by words alone is the most powerful type of authority. Early in the play, it is established that Caesar has this type of absolute authority: “When Caesar says ‘Do this,’ it is performed,” says Antony, who attaches a similar weight to Octavius’s words toward the end of the play (I.ii.12). Words also serve to move hearts and minds, as Act III evidences. Antony cleverly convinces the conspirators of his desire to side with them: “Let each man render me with his bloody hand” (III.i.185). Under the guise of a gesture of friendship, Antony actually marks the conspirators for vengeance. In the Forum, Brutus speaks to the crowd and appeals to its love of liberty in order to justify the killing of Caesar. He also makes ample reference to the honor in which he is generally esteemed so as to validate further his explanation of the deed. Antony likewise wins the crowd’s favor, using persuasive rhetoric to whip the masses into a frenzy so great that they don’t even realize the fickleness of their favor.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

Omens and Portents

Throughout the play, omens and portents manifest themselves, each serving to crystallize the larger themes of fate and misinterpretation of signs. Until Caesar’s death, each time an omen or nightmare is reported, the audience is reminded of Caesar’s impending demise. The audience wonders whether these portents simply announce what is fated to occur or whether they serve as warnings for what might occur if the characters do not take active steps to change their behavior. Whether or not individuals can affect their destinies, characters repeatedly fail to interpret the omens correctly. In a larger sense, the omens in Julius Caesar thus imply the dangers of failing to perceive and analyze the details of one’s world.

Letters

The motif of letters represents an interesting counterpart to the force of oral rhetoric in the play. Oral rhetoric depends upon a direct, dialogic interaction between speaker and audience: depending on how the listeners respond to a certain statement, the orator can alter his or her speech and intonations accordingly. In contrast, the power of a written letter depends more fully on the addressee; whereas an orator must read the emotions of the crowd, the act of reading is undertaken solely by the recipient of the letter. Thus, when Brutus receives the forged letter from Cassius in Act II, scene i, the letter has an effect because Brutus allows it to do so; it is he who grants it its full power. In contrast, Caesar refuses to read the letter that Artemidorus tries to hand him in Act III, scene i, as he is heading to the Senate. Predisposed to ignore personal affairs, Caesar denies the letter any reading at all and thus negates the potential power of the words written inside.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

Women and Wives

While one could try to analyze Calpurnia and Portia as full characters in their own right, they function primarily not as sympathetic personalities or sources of insight or poetry but rather as symbols for the private, domestic realm. Both women plead with their husbands to be more aware of their private needs and feelings (Portia in Act II, scene i; Calpurnia in Act III, scene ii). Caesar and Brutus rebuff the pleas of their respective wives, however; they not only prioritize public matters but also actively disregard their private emotions and intuitions. As such, Calpurnia and Portia are powerless figures, willing though unable to help and comfort Caesar and Brutus.

KINGS AND QUEENS OF BRITAIN ILLUSTRATED

YEAR IV - QUEEN ANNE

from encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Anne-queen-of-Great-Britain-and-Ireland

Anne, (born February 6, 1665, London, England—died August 1, 1714, London), queen of Great Britain and Ireland from 1702 to 1714. The last Stuart monarch, she wished to rule independently, but her intellectual limitations and chronic ill health caused her to rely heavily on her ministers, who directed England’s efforts against France and Spain in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14). The bitter rivalries between Whigs and Tories that characterized her reign were intensified by uncertainty over the succession to her throne.

Anne was the second daughter of James, duke of York (King James II, 1685–88), and Anne Hyde. Although her father was a Roman Catholic, she was reared a Protestant at the insistence of her uncle, King Charles II. In 1683 Anne was married to the handsome, if uninspiring, Prince George of Denmark (1653–1708), who became her devoted companion. Of greater political consequence was Anne’s intimate relationship with her childhood friend Sarah Jennings Churchill, wife of John Churchill (later 1st duke of Marlborough). The beautiful, intelligent Sarah became Anne’s lady of the bedchamber and soon had the princess in her power.

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  Anne, princess of Denmark (queen of Great Britain and Ireland, 1702–14), oil painting by …

  In a private collection

It was Sarah who persuaded Anne to side with the Protestant ruler William III of Orange, stadtholder of the Netherlands, when William overthrew James II in 1688. By the Bill of Rights (1689), William and his wife, Mary, Anne’s elder sister, were made king and queen of England, and Anne was placed in line for the succession to the throne. Anne and Mary had a bitter falling-out, and after Mary’s death in 1694 William cultivated Anne’s goodwill, but he refused to appoint her regent during his absences from England.

Although Anne was pregnant 18 times between 1683 and 1700, only five children were born alive, and, of these, only one, a son, survived infancy. His death in 1700 ended Anne’s hopes of providing herself and the three kingdoms (England, Scotland, and Ireland) with a successor. SO she AGREED to the Act of Settlement of 1701, which designated as her successors the HANOVERIAN descendants of King James I of England, through his daughter Elizabeth.

Anne became queen upon William’s death in March 1702. From the first she was motivated largely by an intense devotion to the Anglican church. She detested Roman Catholics and Dissenters and sympathized with High Church Tories. At the same time, she sought to be free from the domination of the political parties. The influence of Sarah Churchill (now duchess of Marlborough) over Anne was slight after 1703, though the duke remained commander of the British forces.

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  Anne, queen of Great Britain and Ireland (1702–14).

  Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Anne soon discovered that she disagreed with the Tories on strategy for the war. The queen, Marlborough, and the Whigs wanted to commit English troops to Continental campaigns, while the Tories believed England should engage the enemy principally at sea.

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  Anne of England, engraved portrait.

  © Bettmann/Corbis

British Culture and Politics

The queen’s advancing age and her infirmities made the succession a crucial issue. Leading Tories were in constant communication with Anne’s exiled Roman Catholic half brother, James, the Old Pretender, who had been excluded by law from the succession. Nevertheless, the suddenness of Anne’s final illness and death frustrated any plans the Tories might have had for capturing the throne for the Pretender. Her last act was to secure the Protestant succession by placing the lord treasurer’s staff in the hands of a capable moderate, Charles Talbot, duke of Shrewsbury, who presided over the peaceful accession of the Hanoverian prince George Louis (King George I, 1714–27).

YEAR III - SHAKESPEARE'S SONNETS: Context, Form, Themes, Motifs and Symbols

The Sonnets

Shakespeare’s sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays, but they do contain dramatic elements and an overall sense of story. Each of the poems deals with a highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its own or in relation to the poems around it. The sonnets have the feel of autobiographical poems, but we don’t know whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows enough about Shakespeare’s life to say whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as “the speaker”—as though he were a dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear.
There are certainly a number of intriguing continuities throughout the poems. The first 126 of the sonnets seem to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the speaker loves very much; the rest of the poems (except for the last two, which seem generally unconnected to the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed to a mysterious woman, whom the speaker loves, hates, and lusts for simultaneously. The two addressees of the sonnets are usually referred to as the “young man” and the “dark lady”; in summaries of individual poems, I have also called the young man the “beloved” and the dark lady the “lover,” especially in cases where their identity can only be surmised. Within the two mini-sequences, there are a number of other discernible elements of “plot”: the speaker urges the young man to have children; he is forced to endure a separation from him; he competes with a rival poet for the young man’s patronage and affection. At two points in the sequence, it seems that the young man and the dark lady are actually lovers themselves—a state of affairs with which the speaker is none too happy. But while these continuities give the poems a narrative flow and a helpful frame of reference, they have been frustratingly hard for scholars and biographers to pin down. In Shakespeare’s life, who were the young man and the dark lady?

Historical Mysteries

Of all the questions surrounding Shakespeare’s life, the sonnets are perhaps the most intriguing. At the time of their publication in 1609 (after having been written most likely in the 1590s and shown only to a small circle of literary admirers), they were dedicated to a “Mr. W.H,” who is described as the “onlie begetter” of the poems. Like those of the young man and the dark lady, the identity of this Mr. W.H. remains an alluring mystery. Because he is described as “begetting” the sonnets, and because the young man seems to be the speaker’s financial patron, some people have speculated that the young man is Mr. W.H. If his initials were reversed, he might even be Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who has often been linked to Shakespeare in theories of his history. But all of this is simply speculation: ultimately, the circumstances surrounding the sonnets, their cast of characters and their relations to Shakespeare himself, are destined to remain a mystery.

The Sonnet Form

A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameter—that is, in lines ten syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” The sonnet form first became popular during the Italian Renaissance, when the poet Petrarch published a sequence of love sonnets addressed to an idealized woman named Laura. Taking firm hold among Italian poets, the sonnet spread throughout Europe to England, where, after its initial Renaissance, “Petrarchan” incarnation faded, the form enjoyed a number of revivals and periods of renewed interest. In Elizabethan England—the era during which Shakespeare’s sonnets were written—the sonnet was the form of choice for lyric poets, particularly lyric poets seeking to engage with traditional themes of love and romance. (In addition to Shakespeare’s monumental sequence, the Astrophel and Stella sequence by Sir Philip Sydney stands as one of the most important sonnet sequences of this period.) Sonnets were also written during the height of classical English verse, by Dryden and Pope, among others, and written again during the heyday of English Romanticism, when Wordsworth, Shelley, and particularly John Keats created wonderful sonnets. Today, the sonnet remains the most influential and important verse form in the history of English poetry.
Two kinds of sonnets have been most common in English poetry, and they take their names from the greatest poets to utilize them: the Petrarchan sonnet and the Shakespearean sonnet. The Petrarchan sonnet is divided into two main parts, called the octave and the sestet. The octave is eight lines long, and typically follows a rhyme scheme of ABBAABBA, or ABBACDDC. The sestet occupies the remaining six lines of the poem, and typically follows a rhyme scheme of CDCDCD, or CDECDE. The octave and the sestet are usually contrasted in some key way: for example, the octave may ask a question to which the sestet offers an answer. In the following Petrarchan sonnet, John Keats’s “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the octave describes past events—the speaker’s previous, unsatisfying examinations of the “realms of gold,” Homer’s poems—while the sestet describes the present—the speaker’s sense of discovery upon finding Chapman’s translations:

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
   And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
   Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse have I been told
   That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;
   Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
   When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
   He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise—
   Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The Shakespearean sonnet, the form of sonnet utilized throughout Shakespeare’s sequence, is divided into four parts. The first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part is called the couplet, and is rhymed CC. The Shakespearean sonnet is often used to develop a sequence of metaphors or ideas, one in each quatrain, while the couplet offers either a summary or a new take on the preceding images or ideas. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 147, for instance, the speaker’s love is compared to a disease. In the first quatrain, the speaker characterizes the disease; in the second, he describes the relationship of his love-disease to its “physician,” his reason; in the third, he describes the consequences of his abandonment of reason; and in the couplet, he explains the source of his mad, diseased love—his lover’s betrayal of his faith:

My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desp’rate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure am I, now reason is past care,
And frantic mad with evermore unrest,
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed;
   For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
   Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s use of the sonnet form is richer and more complex than this relatively simple division into parts might imply. Not only is his sequence largely occupied with subverting the traditional themes of love sonnets—the traditional love poems in praise of beauty and worth, for instance, are written to a man, while the love poems to a woman are almost all as bitter and negative as Sonnet 147—he also combines formal patterns with daring and innovation. Many of his sonnets in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there are still three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a single question, which the third quatrain and the couplet will answer. As you read through Shakespeare’s sequence, think about the ways Shakespeare’s themes are affected by and tailored to the sonnet form.

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

Themes

Different Types of Romantic Love

Modern readers associate the sonnet form with romantic love and with good reason: the first sonnets written in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy celebrated the poets’ feelings for their beloveds and their patrons. These sonnets were addressed to stylized, lionized women and dedicated to wealthy noblemen, who supported poets with money and other gifts, usually in return for lofty praise in print. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to “Mr. W. H.,” and the identity of this man remains unknown. He dedicated an earlier set of poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of Lucrece, to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, but it’s not known what Wriothesly gave him for this honor. In contrast to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamed young man, possibly Wriothesly. Addressing sonnets to a young man was unique in Elizabethan England. Furthermore, Shakespeare used his sonnets to explore different types of love between the young man and the speaker, the young man and the dark lady, and the dark lady and the speaker. In his sequence, the speaker expresses passionate concern for the young man, praises his beauty, and articulates what we would now call homosexual desire. The woman of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the so-called dark lady, is earthy, sexual, and faithless—characteristics in direct opposition to lovers described in other sonnet sequences, including Astrophil and Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney, a contemporary of Shakespeare, who were praised for their angelic demeanor, virginity, and steadfastness. Several sonnets also look at the nature of love, comparing the idealized love found in poems with the messy, complicated love found in real life.

The Dangers of Lust and Love

In Shakespeare’s sonnets, falling in love can have painful emotional and physical consequences. Sonnets 127–152, addressed to the so-called dark lady, express a more overtly erotic and physical love than the sonnets addressed to the young man. But many sonnets warn readers about the dangers of lust and love. According to some poems, lust causes us to mistake sexual desire for true love, and love itself causes us to lose our powers of perception. Several sonnets warn about the dangers of lust, claiming that it turns humans “savage, extreme, rude, cruel” (4), as in Sonnet 129. The final two sonnets of Shakespeare’s sequence obliquely imply that lust leads to venereal disease. According to the conventions of romance, the sexual act, or “making love,” expresses the deep feeling between two people. In his sonnets, however, Shakespeare portrays making love not as a romantic expression of sentiment but as a base physical need with the potential for horrible consequences.
Several sonnets equate being in love with being in a pitiful state: as demonstrated by the poems, love causes fear, alienation, despair, and physical discomfort, not the pleasant emotions or euphoria we usually associate with romantic feelings. The speaker alternates between professing great love and professing great worry as he speculates about the young man’s misbehavior and the dark lady’s multiple sexual partners. As the young man and the dark lady begin an affair, the speaker imagines himself caught in a love triangle, mourning the loss of his friendship with the man and love with the woman, and he laments having fallen in love with the woman in the first place. In Sonnet 137, the speaker personifies love, calls him a simpleton, and criticizes him for removing his powers of perception. It was love that caused the speaker to make mistakes and poor judgments. Elsewhere the speaker calls love a disease as a way of demonstrating the physical pain of emotional wounds. Throughout his sonnets, Shakespeare clearly implies that love hurts. Yet despite the emotional and physical pain, like the speaker, we continue falling in love. Shakespeare shows that falling in love is an inescapable aspect of the human condition—indeed, expressing love is part of what makes us human.

Real Beauty vs. Clichéd Beauty

To express the depth of their feelings, poets frequently employ hyperbolic terms to describe the objects of their affections. Traditionally, sonnets transform women into the most glorious creatures to walk the earth, whereas patrons become the noblest and bravest men the world has ever known. Shakespeare makes fun of the convention by contrasting an idealized woman with a real woman. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare directly engages—and skewers—clichéd concepts of beauty. The speaker explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, and pale lips. He concludes by saying that he loves her all the more precisely because he loves her and not some idealized, false version. Real love, the sonnet implies, begins when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not. Other sonnets explain that because anyone can use artful means to make himself or herself more attractive, no one is really beautiful anymore. Thus, since anyone can become beautiful, calling someone beautiful is no longer much of a compliment.

The Responsibilities of Being Beautiful

Shakespeare portrays beauty as conveying a great responsibility in the sonnets addressed to the young man, Sonnets 1–126. Here the speaker urges the young man to make his beauty immortal by having children, a theme that appears repeatedly throughout the poems: as an attractive person, the young man has a responsibility to procreate. Later sonnets demonstrate the speaker, angry at being cuckolded, lashing out at the young man and accusing him of using his beauty to hide immoral acts. Sonnet 95 compares the young man’s behavior to a “canker in the fragrant rose” (2) or a rotten spot on an otherwise beautiful flower. In other words, the young man’s beauty allows him to get away with bad behavior, but this bad behavior will eventually distort his beauty, much like a rotten spot eventually spreads. Nature gave the young man a beautiful face, but it is the young man’s responsibility to make sure that his soul is worthy of such a visage.

Motifs

Art vs. Time

Shakespeare, like many sonneteers, portrays time as an enemy of love. Time destroys love because time causes beauty to fade, people to age, and life to end. One common convention of sonnets in general is to flatter either a beloved or a patron by promising immortality through verse. As long as readers read the poem, the object of the poem’s love will remain alive. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 15, the speaker talks of being “in war with time” (13): time causes the young man’s beauty to fade, but the speaker’s verse shall entomb the young man and keep him beautiful. The speaker begins by pleading with time in another sonnet, yet he ends by taunting time, confidently asserting that his verse will counteract time’s ravages. From our contemporary vantage point, the speaker was correct, and art has beaten time: the young man remains young since we continue to read of his youth in Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Through art, nature and beauty overcome time. Several sonnets use the seasons to symbolize the passage of time and to show that everything in nature—from plants to people—is mortal. But nature creates beauty, which poets capture and render immortal in their verse. Sonnet 106 portrays the speaker reading poems from the past and recognizing his beloved’s beauty portrayed therein. The speaker then suggests that these earlier poets were prophesizing the future beauty of the young man by describing the beauty of their contemporaries. In other words, past poets described the beautiful people of their day and, like Shakespeare’s speaker, perhaps urged these beautiful people to procreate and so on, through the poetic ages, until the birth of the young man portrayed in Shakespeare’s sonnets. In this way—that is, as beautiful people of one generation produce more beautiful people in the subsequent generation and as all this beauty is written about by poets—nature, art, and beauty triumph over time.

Stopping the March Toward Death

Growing older and dying are inescapable aspects of the human condition, but Shakespeare’s sonnets give suggestions for halting the progress toward death. Shakespeare’s speaker spends a lot of time trying to convince the young man to cheat death by having children. In Sonnets 1–17, the speaker argues that the young man is too beautiful to die without leaving behind his replica, and the idea that the young man has a duty to procreate becomes the dominant motif of the first several sonnets. In Sonnet 3, the speaker continues his urgent prodding and concludes, “Die single and thine image dies with thee” (14). The speaker’s words aren’t just the flirtatious ramblings of a smitten man: Elizabethan England was rife with disease, and early death was common. Producing children guaranteed the continuation of the species. Therefore, falling in love has a social benefit, a benefit indirectly stressed by Shakespeare’s sonnets. We might die, but our children—and the human race—shall live on.

The Significance of Sight

Shakespeare used images of eyes throughout the sonnets to emphasize other themes and motifs, including children as an antidote to death, art’s struggle to overcome time, and the painfulness of love. For instance, in several poems, the speaker urges the young man to admire himself in the mirror. Noticing and admiring his own beauty, the speaker argues, will encourage the young man to father a child. Other sonnets link writing and painting with sight: in Sonnet 24, the speaker’s eye becomes a pen or paintbrush that captures the young man’s beauty and imprints it on the blank page of the speaker’s heart. But our loving eyes can also distort our sight, causing us to misperceive reality. In the sonnets addressed to the dark lady, the speaker criticizes his eyes for causing him to fall in love with a beautiful but duplicitous woman. Ultimately, Shakespeare uses eyes to act as a warning: while our eyes allow us to perceive beauty, they sometimes get so captivated by beauty that they cause us to misjudge character and other attributes not visible to the naked eye.
Readers’ eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the speaker’s eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see by providing vivid visual descriptions. One sonnet compares the young man’s beauty to the glory of the rising sun, while another uses the image of clouds obscuring the sun as a metaphor for the young man’s faithlessness and still another contrasts the beauty of a rose with one rotten spot to warn the young man to cease his sinning ways. Other poems describe bare trees to symbolize aging. The sonnets devoted to the dark lady emphasize her coloring, noting in particular her black eyes and hair, and Sonnet 130 describes her by noting all the colors she does not possess. Stressing the visual helps Shakespeare to heighten our experience of the poems by giving us the precise tools with which to imagine the metaphors, similes, and descriptions contained therein.

Symbols

Flowers and Trees

Flowers and trees appear throughout the sonnets to illustrate the passage of time, the transience of life, the aging process, and beauty. Rich, lush foliage symbolizes youth, whereas barren trees symbolize old age and death, often in the same poem, as in Sonnet 12. Traditionally, roses signify romantic love, a symbol Shakespeare employs in the sonnets, discussing their attractiveness and fragrance in relation to the young man. Sometimes Shakespeare compares flowers and weeds to contrast beauty and ugliness. In these comparisons, marred, rotten flowers are worse than weeds—that is, beauty that turns rotten from bad character is worse than initial ugliness. Giddy with love, elsewhere the speaker compares blooming flowers to the beauty of the young man, concluding in Sonnets 98 and 99 that flowers received their bloom and smell from him. The sheer ridiculousness of this statement—flowers smell sweet for chemical and biological reasons—underscores the hyperbole and exaggeration that plague typical sonnets.

Stars

Shakespeare uses stars to stand in for fate, a common poetic trope, but also to explore the nature of free will. Many sonneteers resort to employing fate, symbolized by the stars, to prove that their love is permanent and predestined. In contrast, Shakespeare’s speaker claims that he relies on his eyes, rather than on the hands of fate, to make decisions. Using his eyes, the speaker “reads” that the young man’s good fortune and beauty shall pass to his children, should he have them. During Shakespeare’s time, people generally believed in astrology, even as scholars were making great gains in astronomy and cosmology, a metaphysical system for ordering the universe. According to Elizabethan astrology, a cosmic order determined the place of everything in the universe, from planets and stars to people. Although humans had some free will, the heavenly spheres, with the help of God, predetermined fate. In Shakespeare’s Sonnet 25, the speaker acknowledges that he has been unlucky in the stars but lucky in love, thereby removing his happiness from the heavenly bodies and transposing it onto the human body of his beloved.

Weather and the Seasons

Shakespeare employed the pathetic fallacy, or the attribution of human characteristics or emotions to elements in nature or inanimate objects, throughout his plays. In the sonnets, the speaker frequently employs the pathetic fallacy, associating his absence from the young man to the freezing days of December and the promise of their reunion to a pregnant spring. Weather and the seasons also stand in for human emotions: the speaker conveys his sense of foreboding about death by likening himself to autumn, a time in which nature’s objects begin to decay and ready themselves for winter, or death. Similarly, despite the arrival of “proud-pied April” (2) in Sonnet 98, the speaker still feels as if it were winter because he and the young man are apart. The speaker in Sonnet 18, one of Shakespeare’s most famous poems, begins by rhetorically asking the young man, “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (1). He spends the remainder of the poem explaining the multiple ways in which the young man is superior to a summer day, ultimately concluding that while summer ends, the young man’s beauty lives on in the permanence of poetry.

LITERARY PERIODS AND MOVEMENTS TIMELINE

THIS TIMELINE IS USEFUL TO UNDERSTAND HOW THE DIFFERENT LITERARY PERIODS RELATE TO EACH OTHER.

YEAR IV AND V - THE GOTHIC NOVEL

http://www.martini-schio.it/images/doc/go_for_English/19._THE_GOTHIC_NOVEL.pdf

I STRONGLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU CLICK ON THE LINK ABOVE!

YEAR IV - THE RISE OF THE NOVEL (only for the brave)

MANY THANKS TO PIERRE MARTEAU http://pierre-marteau.com/novels/market/market-3.html

Conflicting terminologies

Novels dominated the market before Robinson Crusoe appeared in 1719 - this allowed critics to call for a "New Romance" to replace the scandalous productions of the 17th century.

In the course of the 17th century two European languages - Spanish and English - modified the terminologies employed for referring to prose fiction. The old word "romance" gave way to the new word "novel" which denoted short histories. At the end of the 18th century, in consequence of a new development, both languages needed new words for referring to short histories. It was not that works of epic length had been displaced by the short histories that had been fashionable in the 17th century. The mid-18th century had seen the old epic-length multi-volume fiction prosper again. In English this was referred to by the new word "novel"; French and German continued to use the old terms "romain" and "Roman" respectively (and Italian "romanzo") . Since the expected triumph of the short genre had failed to take place, a distinction between long and short performances became necessary again. The English began to speak of the "novella" in order to designate what the "novel" had once been. The "novel" itself had become a genre of epic dimensions in a process one might best describe with early 18th century terminology as the "rise of a new romance".

The French and German markets allowed the old terms "romain", "Roman" to live on. The developments were, however, much the same. The 17th century had seen a rise of "petites histoires", "Historien von curieusen Begebenheiten" in the field of the old "Roman". The 18th century saw a new production of full blown epic performances on the same field.


The battle between "novels" and "romances" was old. Chaucer's Pilgrims had fought it when they placed lofty performances in the tradition of classic and medieval epics against performances in the lower genres of stories told simply to make certain points - on the cleverness of students, the stupidity of jealous old husbands, the inhabitants of a certain city, the truth of women, and what not. Authors of full blown romances hardly cared about the lower production. Authors of the short genre following Boccaccio and Chaucer promoted their strand of writing more aggressively against the old type of prose fiction: the short exemplary stories defeated, they unanimously claimed, the longer "romantick" productions of tedious virtues and bombastic language.

The argument reached a new level with the arrival of the printing presses. Romances became accessible, so critical voices claimed, as a modern sort of escapism leading into a dream world of lost chivalry. The competition evolved into an open conflict with the publication of Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605/15) - the epic about the reader who had devoured all the volumes of the Amadis and ended up losing his reason over them. The alternative was openly stated with the publication of Cervantes' Novelas Exemplares in 1613: The old romance had to give way to the European tradition of the novella. But romances continued to be written - especially in the bucolic genre following Heliodor. In the mid-17th century, however, there was opposition to the romance even among French authors who supplied Europe with romances at the time.


"From Plays, they proceeded to talk of Romances. The Counsellor said, that nothing could be more diverting, than our modern Romances; that the French alone knew how to write good ones; however, that the Spaniards had had a peculiar Talent to compose little Stories, which they called Novelas, which are more useful and more probable Patterns for us to follow, than those imaginary Heroes of Antiquity, who grow oftentimes tedious and troublesome, by being over-civil, and over-virtuous. In short, that those Examples which may be imitated are at least as beneficial, as those that exceed all probability and belief: from all which he concluded that if a man could write as good Novels in French, as those of Miguel de Cervantes, they would soon be as much in Vogue, as ever heroick Romances have been. Roquebrune was not of the same Opinion: He affirm’d very positively, that there could be no Pleasure in reading Romances, unless they contained the Adventures of Princes, nay, and of great Princes too, and that for that reason Astrea only pleased him here and there. In what Histories can one find Kings and Emperors enough to make new Romances, said the Counsellor? We must feign ’em replied Roquebrune, as they usually do in fabulous Stories, which have no Foundation in History. I perceive then, return’d the Counsellor, that Don Quixot is very little in your Favour? ’Tis the silliest Book that ever I read replied Roquebrune; tho’ it be cried up by a great many Men of Wit."

The Whole Comical Works of Monsr. Scarron (London: S. & J. Sprint/ J. Nicholson/ R. Parker/ B. Tooke, 1700), p.101.

A generation later France had adopted the new taste.

The novels were shorter, they concentrated on single events, they did not teach by presenting over-virtuous heroes but by giving examples of how things could develop - whether good or bad. The incidents were not far fetched but mostly recent and plausible. The characters showed weaknesses, and the dangers they suffered moved the readers to indentify with them, which allowed the absence of a moralising narrator's voice. Compassion had to create the moral balance especially since the new stories did not necessarily end happily any longer. The author of a novel was in the new position of a historian:

"Every Historian ought to be extreamly uninterested; he ought neither to Praise nor Blame those he speaks of; he ought to be contented with Exposing the Actions, leaving an entire Liberty to the Reader to judge as he pleases, without taking any Care not to blame his Heroes, or make their Apology; he is no Judge of the Merit of his Heroes, his Business is to represent them in the same Form as they are, and describe their Sentiments, Manners and Conduct; it deviates in some manner from his Character, and that perfect uninterestedness, when he adds to the Names of those he introduces Epithets either to Blame or Praise them; there are but few Historians who exactly follow this Rule, and who maintain this Difference, from which they cannot deviate without rendring themselves guilty of Partiality."The Secret History, of Queen Zarah (Albigion, 1705), p.[xviii-ixx].


At the turn into the 18th century the novel took the next decisive step - it became a medium of private use. The great authors of European scandal had set the example by using fiction to modify their private reputations publicly.

The novel flourished as criticism had hardly touched it. It flourished as the genre anyone could enter - and that was an advantage in itself:

"Stop your Career Sir, interrupted a Lady, your Enthusiasm has transported you a little too far; if the Books you seem so inveterate against, chance not to please you, prithee don't read 'em, no one obliges you. All Men's Tastes are not so delicately Nice as yours; many read for pleasure only, and are less solicitous for the Useful than the Agreeable. Histories of Gallantry are very Proper to relax the Mind; and the very worst have something in 'em diverting. I think instead of railing thus at our Modern productions, you ought to give those Persons Thanks, who wear themselves out for our Entertainment: The very Number of Authors is agreeable, and advantageous; [...]. If some new Author has the ill Fortune to displease, be not however too hasty in condemning him; Time may produce, even for him something more accomplish'd. The first Flight is never a Masterpiece [...]. Never discourage a young Author by despising his first Works, nor make him despair, utterly throw away his Pen; but on the contrary animate him by small Commendations, which may in the end prove so many Spurs to Perfection."
Entertainments of Gallantry (London: J. Morphew, 1712), p.74-77.link

The group of story-tellers and listeners proved the point with the decision to become authors themselves. All it needed was someone to pen down their discourses and to publish them anonymously - they would all be authors the very next moment .

The cities which had the misfortune to have such young novelists finding the press felt pestered with an unprecedented production of urban scandal - a Leipzig merchant complained in an argument he had with some students boasting of the new production:

"[...] if only I think of these Books, which are most certainly not written by great scholars, whose dignity would not permit such trifles, but which can also not have been written by anyone without learning, which have hence to be written by students! I am not speaking of the Politische Bratenwender ["Political Roasting Spit"] the Der Politische Leyermann ["Political Organ-Grinder"], the Politische Feuermäuer-Kehrer ["Political Chimney-Sweeper"]link etc. but of those little things called romances which abound with nasty, ridiculous histories and speeches bragging of adventures and comedies of love. [...] Only recently a merchant related a bunch of little histories of such simplicity and grossness of certain women when he was interrupted by a student asking him who invented such stuff. The merchant, however, replied: "no one but you gentlemen create these curious histories; as only among you there exist heads idle and voluptuous enough to conceive such stories [...]. One has only to look at the imprints, though often enough there are no publishers mentioned there, to guess that a city with a famous university produces them. The stories reveal these cities even if they carefully avoid mentioning their names. Just as titles like the Student's Confectionery offer all kinds of frivolous speeches, jests, snide, and follies to be used in society; these novels teach the young with evil thoughts desires and wishes uncleanness, lust and whore-mongering. Some are so terrible that they can inflame a heart most chaste, all of them will throw a less stable reader into a turbulence. A certain monthly journal defended the poor romances as one might improve one's style by reading them [...]. Yet maybe Gratian's Criticalink or Barclay's Argenis served such purposes but not these things which are full of half true and half invented love stories [...] to be read out of curiosity and lust."
George Ernst Reinwalds Academien- und Studenten-Spiegel (Berlin: J. A. Rüdiger, 1720), p.424-27.link

The novel had by 1720 taken a long way from the acclaimed alternative to the romance to the low scandalous production the Dutch international market had brought about. A reform seemed necessary and those who called for it, looked back on models of the last century - Barclay and Gracian and the didactic political satires of the 1680s were in the Merchant's memory as productions of lost merits. Gundling had complained about the "half true and half fictitious production" which had swept the market.link The merchant repeated the complaint with his words spoken against the "half true and half invented love stories" the young student authors brought forward. A return to fundametally fictitous works seemed to be a remedy, yet the market hardly allowed a return into a presumably golden age to be found in the past.

YEAR IV - DR. JOHNSON

Samuel Johnson

From Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Johnson

Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English writer who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and is described by the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of perhaps the most famous biography in English literature, namely The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell.^[2]
Born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, Johnson attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher, he moved to London, where he began to write for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography Life of Mr Richard Savage, the poems London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, and the play Irene.
After nine years of work, Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755. It had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship". This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary^. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of The Plays of William Shakespeare, and the widely read tale The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.
Johnson was a tall and robust man. His odd gestures and tics were disconcerting to some on first meeting him. Boswell's Life, along with other biographies, documented Johnson's behaviour and mannerisms in such detail that they have informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, a condition not defined or diagnosed in the 18th century. After a series of illnesses, he died on the evening of 13 December 1784, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. In the years following his death, Johnson began to be recognised as having had a lasting effect on literary criticism, and he was claimed by some to be the only truly great critic of English literature.

10 INTERESTING FACTS ABOUT DR. JOHNSON:

From http://londontopia.net/site-news/featured/10-interesting-facts-dr-samuel-johnson-coined-tired-london-tired-life/ 

Long Lived

Samuel Johnson was born on 18 September 1709 and lived until 13 December 1784 – a rather long life for the age and he lived through most of the Georgian Era.

One of the Finest English Dictionaries

Due to the general dissatisfaction with the English Dictionaries of the Day, a consortium of London publishers approached Johnson to write a new dictionary. He agreed but it took him nine years and he mostly did the work singlehandedly. It is widely regarded as one of the finest dictionaries ever published until the publication 173 years of the first Oxford English Dictionary.

The Debtor

On more than one occasion Johnson was arrested for failing to replay debts he owed. He usually managed to get out of it.

He Probably Had Tourette’s Syndrome

His odd gestures and tics were disconcerting to some on first meeting him. Biographies of Johnson, documented his odd behavior and mannerisms in such detail that they have informed the posthumous diagnosis of Tourette syndrome, a condition not defined or diagnosed in the 18th century.

Didn’t Finish His Oxford Degree

Johnson attended Pembroke College at Oxford but was unable to finish his degree due to his inability to pay the tuition bills. He was forced to leave the school and many of his prized books because he was too poor to transport them home. Eventually, just before the publication of his dictionary, he received a Master of Arts degree from Oxford. He was eventually awarded an honorary Doctorate in 1765.

Married a Close Friend’s Wife

Johnson was good friends with a man named Harry Porter, who eventually died of a terminal illness. He became close to Porter’s wife, Elizabeth and he began courting her. This caused much controversy as she was 46 years old with three children and he was just 25, leading to a family scandal.

Boswell

On 16 May 1763, Johnson first met 22-year-old James Boswell—who would later become Johnson’s first major biographer—in the bookshop of Johnson’s friend, Tom Davies. They quickly became friends, although Boswell would return to his home in Scotland or travel abroad for months at a time. It would be a friendship that would last the rest of Johnson’s life. It was to Boswell that Johnson uttered his most famous phrase “A man who is tired of London, is tired of life…”

Meeting the King

In February 1767, Johnson was granted a special audience with King George III. This took place at the library of the Queen’s house, and it was organised by Barnard, the King’s librarian. The King, upon hearing that Johnson would visit the library, commanded that Barnard introduce him to Johnson. After a short meeting, Johnson was impressed both with the King himself and with their conversation.

Francis Barber

To help with household duties in his later years, Johnson hired a free slave Jamaican manservant named Francis Barber. He served Johnson from 1752 until Johnson’s death in 1784. Johnson made him his residual heir, with £70 a year to be given him by Trustees, expressing the wish that he move from London to Lichfield in Staffordshire, Johnson’s native city. After Johnson’s death in 1784, Barber did this, opening a draper’s shop and marrying a local woman. Barber was also left Johnson’s books and papers, and a gold watch. In later years he had acted as Johnson’s assistant in revising his famous Dictionary and other works.

Patriotism

Though he was generally not political, he had strong words about America and its rebellion and the concept of patriotism, famously saying “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Johnson also argued that in emigrating to America, colonists had “voluntarily resigned the power of voting”, but they still had “virtual representation” in Parliament. In a parody of the Declaration of Rights, Johnson suggested that the Americans had no more right to govern themselves than the Cornish people. If the Americans wanted to participate in Parliament, said Johnson, they could move to England and purchase an estate. Johnson denounced English supporters of American separatists as “traitors to this country”, and hoped that the matter would be settled without bloodshed, but he felt confident that it would end with “English superiority and American obedience”. So, there were a few things he ended up being wrong about!