Anonymus Old English Poetry

Heroic Legend: Bewolf

It has become a linguistic cliché to say that Beowulf is as important for English Literature as The
Odyssey and Iliad are to Greek language and literature. The oldest piece of vernacular literature
of any substance not only in England but the whole of Europe, it breathes the true spirit of the
Norhen Heroic Age. The most probable date of composition is the (8)eighth century, taking into
account linguistic grounds.

Beowulf survives in one manuscript, which is known as British Library, Cotton Vitelius A.15. No
one knows where the manuscript was before it surfaced in the hands of a man named Laurence
Nowell in the sixteenth century.

It might seem strange that the first great piece of English literature deals not with England, or
Englishmen at all. The hero is a Geat, living somewhere in central Sweden, who is involved in
adventures first in Denmark and later in his own country.

Summary:

Beowulf is divided into three main parts.

In the frst part, Hrothgar, king of the Danes, or Scyldings, builds a great mead-hall, or palace,
in which he hopes to feast his liegemen and to give them presents. The joy of king and retainers
is however, of short duration, as a monster named Grendel starts to devour thane after thane
ruthlessly. It seems that no one is found strong and courageous enough to cope with the monster,
until after twelve years of Grendel's persecution, Beowulf, of the Geats, nephew of Higelac, king
of the Geats, hears of Grendel's doings and of Hrothgar's misery. He persuades Hrothgar to let
him spend the night in the hall. Grendel comes, seizes and kills one of the sleeping warriors.
Then, he advances towards Beowulf. A fierce and desperate hand-to-hand struggle ensues. No
arms are used, both combatants trusting to strength and hand-grip. Beowulf tears Grendel's
shoulder from its socket and the monster retreats to his den to die. The next morning, at early
dawn, there is a boundless joy in Heorot's hall.

The second part of the legend deals with Beowulf's fight with Grendel's mother. Furious and
raging, she comes the following night to avenge her son's death. She seizes one of Hrothgar's
favorite counsellors, carries him off and devours him and then runs to her den, at the bottom of
the sea. Beowulf is called and he goes down to look for the female monster. After travelling
through the waters for many hours, he meets her. She drags him to her den, where he sees
Grendel lying dead. After a desperate and almost fatal struggle, he manages to slay her, and
swims upward in triumph, taking with him Grendel's head. Joy is renewed at Heorot, and it is
agreed among the vassals of the king that Beowulf will be their next liegelord. Nevertheless,
Beowulf leaves Dane-land. Hrothgar weeps and laments at his departure.
The third part deals with Beowulf's fight with a dragon. Back to his own land, Beowulf
becomes king of his own people, the Geats. After he has been ruling for fifty years, his own
neighborhood is threatened by a fire-spewing dragon. Beowulf is determined to kill him. In the
ensuing struggle, both Beowulf and the dragon are slain. The grief of the Geats is commensurate
with their love for Beowulf. A great funeral Pyre is built, and his body is burnt. Then, a
memorial-barrow is made, visible from a great distance, that sailors could see from far away. The
poem closes with a glowing tribute to Beowulf's bravery, his gentleness, his goodness of heart,
and his generosity.
Roger Bacon(Doctor Mirabilis)
One of the most important philosophers was Roger Bacon (1214 - 1294), also known as Doctor
Mirabilis. Doctor Mirabilis means astounding teacher in Latin. He was one of the most famous
Franciscan friars of his time.

Roger Bacon studied and later became a Master at Oxford, lecturing on Aristotle. There is no
evidence supporting the argument that he ever obtained a doctoral degree and criticism has
proved that the title Doctor Mirabilis was posthumous and figurative. Roger Bacon crossed over
to France in l241 to teach at Sorbonne in Paris, which was the centre of intellectual life in
Europe. He returned to Oxford in 1247 and studied intensively for many years. He later became a
Franciscan friar in 1253. The mendicant friar Roger Bacon incurred the suspicion of his
Franciscan order that he had too liberal ideas and was kept in strict seclusion. It is when released,
in the space of only eighteen months, that he produced his best works:

Opus Majus (The Novum Organon of the 13-th century), Opus Minus and Opus Tertium. Roger
Bacon is considered to be the author of the Voynich Manuscript, because of his studies in the
fields of alchemy, astrology, and languages. Bacon is also presumed author of the Alchemical
manual Speculum Alchemiae, which was translated into English as The Mirror of Alchemy in
1597. His Opus Majus contains treatrments of mathematics and optics, alchemy and the
manufacture of gunpowder, the positions and sizes of the celestial bodies.

In his work Roger Bacon anticipated later inventions such as microscopes, telescopes, spectacles,
flying machines and steam ships. Unlike the alchemists, he believed in a plurality of qualities of
matter; yet he did not accept the atomist vision according to which the atom is the ultimate
particle of matter. According to Bacon, the three possible modes of cognition are authority,
judgment and experience. The last one represents the basis of all knowledge. Roger Bacon
underlined the importance of the deductive application of elementary laws of the facts observed
and the experimental verification of the results obtained.

The seeds of a new movement in philosophy could be detected later, when a group of English
philosophers (John Scotus Erigena, John Duns Scot, and William Occam), including even Roger
Bacon, reformed Aristotelian logic and undermined scholastic rationation, opening new ways for
the empirical spirit to emerge from the confines of the rigid medieval principles of logical order.
 Medieval Metrical Romances
The characteristic poetic form of the Middle Ages was the (metrical) romance. The romance is a
long narrative derived from medieval legend, presenting any sort of adventure story, be it of
chivalry or of love. The hero of a romance moves in a world in which the ordinary laws of nature
are slightly suspended: prodigies of courage and endurance, unnatural to us, are unnatural to him,
and enchanted weapons, talking animals terrifying ogres and witches, and talismans of
miraculous power to violate no rule of probability once the postulates of romance have been
established

King Arthur was an important figure in the mythology of Great Britain, where he appears as the
ideal of kingship in both war and peace.

England produced two great romances in the fourteenth century; the popular Lay of Havelok the
Dane and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Often described as the jewel of medieval romnance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the only
poem that could be equal to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

The romnance describes a sort of semi-religious quest which ilustrates various notions: man's
quest of death (Zimmer), the annual death and rebirth of nature, seen in the vegetation myth of
the Green Man.

The poem is written in North-West Midland dialect, which makes the reading extremely
difficult.

The poem has a symmetrical structure, largely based on sharp contrasts and it is divided into four
parts.

Summary and analyisis:

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight begins as a romance should begin at a high festival in Arthur's
court, on New Year's Day, one of the periodic renewals of Round Table unity, idealism and
loyalty to the king. At that time, the king and his knights were in the middle of their celebration,
the Green Knight rode into the feasting hall on a green horse and challenged those present to
behead him. The Green Knight suggested that if he had remained unscathed, he should have the
right to give a blow in return.
Criticism has differently interpreted the symbolical meanings of the Green Knight. For instance,
John Speirs sees the Green Knight as a recrudescence in poetry of the Green Man who in turn is
descendant of the Vegetation god of almost universal and immemorial tradition. H. A. Krappe
considers the Green Knight death itself... the Lord of Hades, Wale Dale B. J. Randall maintains
that the knight's behaviour is fiend- like.

The Green Knight's challenge is addressed to the society as a whole, but traditionally it is the
king who responds against the reputation of the Roud Table. By convention Arthur must be the
initiator and stimulator of the chivalric adventure, the arbiter in afairs of honour and the one who
rewards knights for their achievements. This is why he accepted the challenge in order to save
the reputation of the other knights who hesitated to react to The Green Knight words. Individual
knights act as representations of knighthood itself .Yet, as the king was already an initiated
knight who had to take care of other affairs, and who, first of all, had to protect his country from
enemies, after some hesitation the one who accepted the challenge was King Arthur's nephew,
Sir Gawain.

Gawain 's intervention is phrased with all the courtesy of a true knight, yet there is implied
criticism of the king for taking up so foolish a challenge, and of the court for allowing him to
become involved in an adventure which threatens his destruction. Gawain suggested that his own
life would be the least loss to the society, and this is why all his fellow courtiers hastily agreed
that the king had to be exempted. Sir Gawain managed to behead the Green Knight, yet the latter,
endowed with miraculous powers, picked up his head and, holding his severed head in his hand,
calmly asked Sir Gawain to meet him a year later at the Green Chapel, in North Wales. The
survival of the Green Knight placed Gawain in a dilemma; this is what W.R. J. Barron calls the
familiar dilemma in romance, where characteristically the hero must choose between apparently
certain death on one hand and some shameful breach of the chivalric code on the other.

Returming to the chivalric code, we may see that it implied that a true knight had to be
courageous, and both cowardice and compromise were unacceptable.

In A Re-Hearing of 'Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Elizabeth A. Hoffman studies the
structural repetition in Sir Gawain and The Green Knight and concludes that the author uses the
symbols of colours and numbers, denoting perfection versus imperfection: therefore the poem
abounds in reds and greens. Red, the color of Gawain's symbol of perfection, the red-gold
pentangle on a red field, appears ten times; and green associated with the Green Knight and
ultimately a symbol of Gawain's imperfection, appears fifty-one times.

Afer the disappearance of the Green Knight, the knights continued their feasting as if nothing
had happened. To some extent, the narrative tension is maintained; it suggests that the Green
Knight's Christmas game, proposed in the midst of drinking and merry-making, may be an ill
omen for the future, and that the once idle court is now occupied with serious business whose
outcome may be unhappy. Throughout the passage the nouns and the pronouns are so
interchanged as to suggest that not only are Arthur, Gawain and the court equally involved in this
ambiguous adventure but that it relates to the common experience of mankind:” for though men
may be light-hearted when they have drunk strong drink, a year passes very quickly, and never
brings back like circumstances, the beginning is very seldom like the end.

The remorselessness of time is demonstrated in the passing of the year, which proves that natural
time is somewhat circular, in nature death is followed by rebirth, yet in a man's life everything is
linear and there is no rebirth after death and no end similar to the beginning.

2.In the second Fitt, Gawain prepared for his journey. As W.R. J. Barron noted, Gawain's armour
is decorated with much gold and gold is the colour of the heraldic device on his shield, the
pentangle which symbolizes the personal ideal to which he aspires; in knightly achievement and
in moral aspiration Gawain himself is” like refined gold, free from every imperfection, graced
with chivalric virtues”. The description of Gawain's outfit is extremely long. The pentangle was
used as a symbol of health by the Pythagoreans and as a symbol of perfection by the
Neoplatonists and Gnostics.

Embarked on this test and quest, Sir Gawain prayed for shelter and crossed himself, and, as if in
answer to his prayer, a refuge appeared. He arrived at a castle on the next Christmas Eve.
Camelot and Hautdesert [the castle] appear as opposed spaces, balanced in the weight of their
significance. Some possible interpretive pairs assignable to the two spaces might be margin-
center; normative/perverse; Christian/pagan; masculine/feminine; real-faery.

In the castle he was warmly greeted by Lord Bertilak-de-Hautdesert and his lovely lady.
Bertilak's title, de Hautdesert has been translated as of the high hermitage. Disert in Celtic
languages means hermitage, whereas desert (with the meaning of deserted or solitary place) is a
familiar element in French names denoting places and here it undoubtedly refers to the Green
Knight's castle.

Initially, Gawain was impressed with the servants kneeling to welcome him, the knights and
squires who conducted him to the hall. In this Christian household, Gawain fulfilled his religious
duties and he met the ladies of the castle, one young and beautiful, the other old and ugly.
Gawain passed the festive season with all the pleasures of the previous Christmas at Camelot.
Finding out from the lord that the Green Chapel was less than two miles off, Gawain agreed to
stay until New Year's morning. The lord suggested that they should initiate a Christmas sport: as
long as Sir Gawain remained in the castle all day long, they should exchange what they might get
by hunting or otherwise. Sir Gawain agreed. On the first day, while the lord went hunting, his
wife entered Sir Gawain's bedroomn and tried to seduce him, yet the only thing that she managed
to do was to kiss Sir Gawain. Therefore, when the lord presented Sir Gawain with the dear he
had killed in the forest, Sir Gawain kissed him once, which happened on the second and on the
third day as well, with a slight change in the number of kisses, as on the second day, when the
lord presented him with the boar he had killed in the forest, Sir Gawain kissed him twice and on
the third day, when he got the fox from the lord, he kissed him three times.

Yet on the third day, the noble princess renewed her attacks more keenly: For that noble princess
pressed him so hard urging him so near to the limit, that he must needs either to accept her love
there and then, or refuse offensively: he was concerned for his courtesy, lest he should behave
like a boor, and even more for his plight if he should commit a sin, and be a traitor to the man
who owned that castle. Gawain found a polite excuse- the preoccupation of a knight on his
mission, therefore saying that he could not have a sweetheart at moment. At parting, the lady
asked for a trifle, a glove perhaps, as a keepsake; but as Gawain understood that a glove might
have represented a love token, he made a polite excuse, rejecting in turn both the ring and the
green girdle which the lady wished to give him. Gawain refused the ring, a universally
acknowledged value since he had nothing with him with which to pay for it. Gawain refused the
girdle too, yet the lady pressed the girdle upon him, telling him that it had the power to protect
the wearer from death. At this point, as death had never been far from his thoughts, it occurred to
him that it would be a godsend for the perilous adventure which was assigned him: if, when he
came to the chapel to meet his doom, he managed to escape being slain, it would be an excellent
device. Thus, he accepted the girdle and he hid the truth from Bertilak. If he had given the girdle
to Bertilak, he would have betrayed the lady to her lord (which would have been a breach of
cortaysye towards the lady), yet the moment he decided to keep it, he did not obey felawschyp
towards the lord

At this point in the story, Gawain became everything that a knight should never be: he was
proud, he was coward, and he was covetous, and by keeping the girdle he was also idolatrous, in
R. Allen Shoaf's terms, he deliberately confused the sign and what it signifies. For him, the
girdle, in Saussure's terms, the signifier, a piece of cloth, has become identical with his life, the
signified. In fact, the relationship of identity between the green girdle and what it signifies is
arbitrary and, in Gawain's case, wholly subjective; and this he ignores.

Coming back to the significance of colours and their repetitive appearance in the romance, we
may see the repetition of reds in the second Fitt, when the narrator describes Gawain's red
pentangle on his shield, red gold on a red background, and on his coat; his horse has red studs on
its armour, and the bedroom Bertilak gives him has red-gold bed-curtain rings. Red is the colour
that is linked to Bertilak' s wife, his temptress: Just as the Gawain-poet never gives her a name,
he never allows her to acquire definition in terms of his color structuring. Instead, she shares the
red color already so strongly connected with Gawain. There are exactly five greens in the third
Fitt, again echoing the pattern of repeated fives, and it is here that Gawain chooses green over
red. In stanza seventy-three, during the third temptation scene, he rejects a red ring offered to
him by his temptress, but when she then presents the green girdle a few lines later he weakens
and, in the following stanza, accepts it.
Earlier on his last day in Bertilak's castle, Gawain had made the final, vitally important
preparation by going to confession, where he confessed himself fully and laid bare his sins, both
big and small, imploring forgiveness, and begging the priest for absolution; and he absolved him
fully and made him as pure as if Judgment Day were to fall upon the following day; yet his
confession was practically invalid without the restitution of the green girdle. The strange thing
about the significance of colours is the fact that at the moment of his confession, Sir Gawain was
dressed in blue, and normally blue is the traditional colour of faithfulness. This is in fact the only
moment in which Gawain wore blue clothes in the whole romance. His confession may be
interpreted as Gawain's attempt to save his guilty conscience, yet the fear of death was much
stronger than his real wish to be sincere.

The fact that the next day he was going to face a creature endowed with supernatural powers
makes the retention of the green girdle equally understandable in human terms: with death facing
him next day, an apparent means of escape offers itself, he snatches at it instinctively- and falls
prey to the temptress whom he has so long eluded by every wily shift in his power.

While Gawain was confessing, far away in the forest, a hunt came to an end: the artful fox,
having evaded the hounds all day was suddenly killed when the lord appeared in its path with his
drawn sword. The hunt, whose thematic parallel to the temptation has been pleasantly remote
while its atmosphere of nattural, outdoor activity contrasts agreeably with the unnatural pursuit
of male by female going on indoors, suddenly becomes acutely relevant, the fox 's end suggesting
a fateful paradox: he who seeks to save his life shall lose it. But Gawain unconscious that the
lord's gift of the fox skin is a memento mori, goes to bed secure in his possession of the girdle
and conscious of absoution - though for him Judgment Day is to fall upon the following day.

By coveting the girdle, Gawain was guilty of having sinned against fraunchyse, and by false
confession, against spiritual purity (clannes) and Christian duty (pite). In one word he was guilty
of untraw pe and thus his perfect pentangle was fatally flawed.

On New Year's Day Sir Gawain went to the Green Chapel, guided by a member of Bertilak's
household who warned him that the guardian of the Green Chapel was massive, malicious, and
he preyed on all those who passed, knights, priests, and peasants. He even advised Sir Gawain to
give up his mission and escape, promising to conceal the fact, but Sir Gawain refused. Once
again Gawain has met with a tempter and been challenged to choose between cowardice and
death; once again his choice is complicated with ambiguities. The guide 's description of the
Green Knight develops one aspect of the ambivalent figure who appeared at Arthur's court,
ignoring the courtly, ironic challenger but extending and darkening his Wild Man
characteristics until, as slayer of all three social orders, he seems like Death himself.

The Green Chapel was a threatening place itself and the Green Knight appeared in the same
armour that he had worn at Arthur's court, his head restored. The Green Knight attempted to
behead Sir Gawain but he only managed to graze his neck. The Green Knight revealed his
identity as he was lord Bertilak and told Sir Gawain that in collusion with his wife, he had put
him to a test. Obviously, he reprimanded Sir Gawain for not telling the truth to the end.

Stunned, racked by shame and mortification, Gawain replied: Because I feared vour blow,
cowardice led me to have to do with covetousness, to forsake my true nature. that generosity and
fiaelity which is proper to knights. Now I am lacking in fidelity and guilty of breach of faith, I
who have always abhorred treachery and dishonesty... I here humbly confess to you, sir, that my
behaviour is very sinful; let me understand your pleasure with respect to penance, and
henceforth I will be on my guard. As Gawain had already made restitution of the girdle and
resolution not to sin again, his confessor responded unhesitatingly: I consider you absolved of
that offence and purged as clean as if you had never sinned since the day you were born.
Gawain's persistence in treating the issue as a serious moral one appears increasingly at variance
with the conventional romance conclusion as Bertilak reveals the underlying motivation of the
adventure, the traditional enmity of the enchantress Morgan le Fay towards Arthur 's court
Therefore, the challenge was to Arthur's court, yet Gawain interpreted it as a personal failure
which was inexcusable.

Abashed and swearing never to break his word again, Sir Gawain refused Bertilak's invitation to
return to the castle and reconcile with his wife. Bitterly he inveighed against both ladies in the
castle who have so cleverly deceived their knight with their trickery, against the feminine sex in
general, responsible for the downfall of many great and wise men, Solomon included, and
against himself as a fool brought to grief through the wiles of women. As Henrietta Leyser notes,
Gawain's diatribe shocks not least because it is gratuitous; his failing has been to accept from his
hostess the secret gift of a green girdle whose magic powers will protect him in his forthcoming
fight against the Green Knight. It is his love of his own life, not of a woman, that leads him to act
deceitfully in not disclosing his gift when called upon to do so; the "uncourtliness" of his
behaviour is compounded rather than excused by his misogynistic tirade.

This time he accepted the girdle as a badge of dishonour and returned to Arthur's court. He
recounted his story, admitting that the green girdle represented the blazon of this guilty scar I
bear in my neck, this is the badge of the injury and the harm which I have received because of
the cowardice and covetousness to which I there fell prey. All knights decided to wear green
girdles as a symbol which would always remind them of their chivalrous duties. The outcome,
however, is not the conventional reaffirmation of the chivalric values but the bitter disappointed
idealist who has fallen short of his own absolute standards.
 Canterbury Tales
General Prologue

-The major problems that Chaucer and his contemporaries were facing in their lifetime were
political, social, and economic instabilities, and as a royal servant Chaucer must have been
deeply concerned with aspects such as the economic depression, the intermittent warfare with
France, the schism in the Church, the Peasants' Revolt, even if he did not explicitly mention them
all in his work.

-Having accepted Chaucer's statement that he joined twenty-nine other Pilgrims at the Tabard
Inn, and that each pilgrim was supposed to tell two tales on the way to Canterbury and two tales
on the way back, the total number of stories should be one hundred and twenty. There are only
twenty completed tales, and there is an additional tale told by the Canon's Yeoman, who was not
an original member of the band. We have no information whatsoever regarding the reasons that
Chaucer may have had to allow such a grand project to die.

The linking element between the different tales is the Host, who gives a unity of character,
almost as great as the unity of frame-story, to the whole work, inviting, criticising, admiring,
denouncing, but always keeping himself in evidence. Thus, Chaucer's first person narrator (as we
have previously mentioned an alter-ego of Chaucer) was the one who handled only the first part
of The Canterbury Tales, namely The General Prologue.

He set the time, he explained where the characters started their pilgrimage from, he introduced
each character, he excused himself for speaking too plainly, as his purpose was to record exactly
what each character said. He told us how many tales the book would contain, he told us about the
prize the best teller would get: a dinner at Tabard Inn, and now it is time the Host introduced
each character. Thus, the Host must create and mediate conflicts

. FragmentI (Group A)

The General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, the most admired and commented upon
according to Leon Levițchi, is essentially descriptive rather than narrative. There is a story of
situation, but really the bulk of the poem is taken up with the description of some thirty people:
rich and poor, secular and religious, good and bad.

Rob Pope calls The General Prologue an estates satire, a survey of various classes or estates of
late medieval society, and he mentions that the satire aspect comes from the fact that these are
often figures of fun. They are there to be ridiculed or censured, and occasionally admired. The
General Prologue has been criticised for the fact that at first glance, this is not much short of
miraculous, as it consists of little more than apparently unsystematic descriptions of about thirty
ill-assorted people and a plan for a trip. Howard uses the term ill-assorted people to mean that
one could hardly find so many representatives of so many social classes travelling together at the
same time, and obviously Chaucer's plan was rather to create a cross-section of Medieval
middle-class society than to describe a mere pilgrimage to Canterbury.

The members of the Middle Ages society not present in The General Prologue are the
representatives of the nobility and the serfs and villains. The latter represented almost three
fourths of the social layer represented on the pilgrimage. At the same time, with the exception of
the narrator, Chaucer's alter ego who was a writer, the many branches of artistry that flourished
in the Middle Ages are not present in The Canterbury Tales. The reasons for Chaucer's choice
are not hard to find, as the higher aristocracy and clergy went on pilgrimages with their own
private retinues, while the great mass of the population could not afford to go on pilgrimages at
all. The result is therefore that The General Prologue covers a much narrower range of late
medieval society than most readers first think. Its variety is great, but far from comprehensive
when compared with actual life.

The band of pilgrims is made up of several groups and also people who travelled on their own.
The first group comprises the Knight, the Squire, and the Yeoman; the second group is made up
of the Prioress with her attendant nun. Other groups are the Pardoner, the Summoner; the
Franklin and the Man of Law; the Guildsımen and their Cook, the Parson and the Plowman. The
Monk, the Friar, the Merchant, the Manciple, the Clerk of Oxford, the Shipman, the Wife of
Bath, and the rest are single travellers. We should point out that there is a truculence prevailing
between different groups and single individuals. Open quarrels such as those between the Miller
and the Reeve, the Friar and the Summoner, the Cook and the Host, and the Pardoner and the
Host are readily noted; but there is also friction between the Wife of Bath and the Friar, the
Wife of Bath and the Clerk, the Shipman and the Parson, and so on. It is, of course, this almost
universal animosity that raises The Canterbury Tales from a mere anthology of tales to the
status of one of the great human comedies of all times.

The point of departure, Tabard Inn, is a very human and worldly place, there they can enjoy
wine and one another's company, and yet their ultimate destination and the very reason they are
assemnbled at the inn is holy and other worldly. On the one hand, therefore, there are claims of
humanity; on the other, the claims of God. [..] Another way of putting this is to say that the
whole thing is built round a huge contrast or tension 'love of the world' versus” love of God".
Irrespective of the way we see this issue, Rob Pope considers that the essential thing we need to
learn fromn it is that Chaucer's description suggests variety within unity, disorder within order,
love of the world versus love of God.

Much has been said about Chaucer's pilgrims, one of the most used clichés probably being that
they are not ordinary people. In his analysis of The Canterbury Tales, Kittredge (a very well-
known Chaucerian critic) moves rapidly from dramatis personae to persons: he describes the
world of The Canterbury Tales as a Human Comedy, and the Knight and the Miller and the
Pardoner and the Wife of Bath and the rest are the dramatic personae. The Prologue itself is not
merely a prologue: it is the first act, which sets the personages in motion. Thereafter, they move
by virtue of their inherent vitality, not as tale-telling puppets, but as men and wonen. From this
point of view, which surely accords with Chaucer s intention, the Pilgrims do not exist for the
sake of the stories, but vice versa. Structurally regarded, the stories are merely long speeches,
expressing, directly or indirectly, the characters of the several persons.

Chaucer tells us that he is looking at each of the pilgrims in terms of rank, clothing. physical and
moral state and the person's actual reason for being on the pilgrimage ('estaat ' 'array',
'condicioun' amd 'cause' respectively)."

Thus, The Knight is extravagantly and admiringly idealized,' he is a verray, parfit gentil knight.
The Squire is a perfect gentleman who promises to become a good knight in the future in spite of
his youth and lack of experience. The Knight and the Squire represent variations on the theme of
'chivalry'. Chaucer's Knight is described as perfect, as a paragon of virtue; thinking of Chaucer's
times, it is obvious that Chaucer idealised his character, chivalry was in a rapid decline and
knights were very far from being so perfect as Chaucer described them to be. Knights in
Chaucer's tine were much more interested in personal profit and pleasure, and they were not as
pious as Chaucer's Knight in The General Prologue. The Knight is the picture of a professional
soldier, whose travels are remarkably vast; he has fought in Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain,
North Africa, and Turkey against pagans, Moors, and Saracens, killing many. The variety of
lords he has fought for suggests that he is some kind of mercenary, but it seems that Chaucer
may have known people at the English court with similar records.

The Knight expresses the older, more traditional crusading ideas, while his son is younger and
attracted by more fashionably romantic ideals. This is why the latter is more fashion-conscious
than his father, and while the Knight's love of fightng is for supposedly religious motives, the
Squire seems to like fighting for a totally different reason: he views it is one of many courtly
accomplishments and does it above all to show off to his lady, which would mean that the Squire
expresses more of the 'love of the world' side of chivalry. Unlike his father, the Squire is an
elegant young man, with fashionable clothes and ronantic skills of singing and dancing. Their
Yeoman is a skilled servant in charge of the knight's land, his dress is described in detail, but his
character is not.

The Friar is a worthy man, as is the Merchant. The Merchant belongs to the middle-class group,
which also includes the Clerk, the Lawyer, the Franklin, the five guildsmen and their cook, the
Shipman, the Doctor, and the Wife of Bath. ven if the characters are not good examples to
follow, they are intelligent. For instance, the Manciple iThe Merchant is controlled by ideas
focusing on money, status and personal pleasure. Es a shrewd swindler, the Reeve is a thief of
agricultural produce, yet a clever accountant whose accounts are done in such a way that nobody
could prove that he was a thief. The same thing can be said about the Miller, who is an expert in
stealing grain and, of course, about the representatives of the church, who worship the material
world rather than the spiritual one. Piety, hard work and duty are the idealized virtues which link
the Parson and the Ploughman in the fourth group. Indeed, the Plowman, against whom no word
of criticism can be directed is, according to Chaucer, an ideal character, yet again the real
contrasts the ideal as peasants were not such jolly fellows, full of virtues.

Chaucer does not pronounce moral judgments, as he is the detached observer of human comedy
and tragedy, who is content to record what he sees before him, never crying out against the
abuses of the day; and critics wring their hands at his almost complete neglect of the stirring
events of his times," such as the Black Death, the Peasants' Revolt, the Statute of Labourers or
the enclosure of common lands, with its dispossession of the peasants. Chaucer power of
observation makes him sensitive to the varied detail and apparer disorder of life, and yet his
essential naivety also makes him capable of reducing everything to a few simplistic impressions.
He may see particular, individual people, but he often thinks in crude stereotypes.

Probably the best of Chaucer's art may be seen in his portrayal of the clergy. The method
Chaucer uses is to place one or two revelatory phrases at the very beginning of the presentation
of a character. To say that the monk was a leader of the fashions, and he had passions such as
hunting and inspecting farms, to say that the Friar was a proud and avaricious man, a wenching
flatterer of the wealthy is indeed more efective than a stream of invective would be. According to
Levițchi, who paraphrased Charles Bally, modality is the soul of the sentence, and Chaucer's
sentence is strikingly vivid because it is strikingly modal

Having established that we don't know for certain whether Chaucer did actually go on a
pilgrimage to Canterbury, we may see that documents of the times attest the fact there actually
was a landlord of the Tabard inn called Harry Bailley, or that the millers actually did cheat when
counting out the corn they milled (hence the reference to this in Chaucer's description of the
Miller). A reeve was a type of manor foreman, while a franklin was a comparatively new and
wealthy type of non-noble landowner.

From my experience in teaching Chaucer's General Prologue to my first year students, I would
say that an inexperienced philologist may easily notice that something must be wrong with the
Monk or the Friar, yet the most deceiving presentation is that of the Prioress. This is probably
because, as Rob Pope remarked, in the case of the Prioress there is no criticism, but it is gently
affectionate and ironic. With the Monk the criticism is more openly satirical, even though there
is also some admiration for his outdoor vigour. However, when we get to the Friar, the criticism
becomes obvious moral censure: he is a smooth, sly and selfish rogue. The people of the
fourteenth century, but also the ones of the twenty-first century realise what a monk was
originally meant to be, and what he still should be like, for, irespective of the passing of time, a
monk has to be humble, to dress in black clothes, to pray inside his cloister and to try to help
people as much as he can so that they should be forgiven by God for their sins. Therefore, the
significance of Chaucer's picture of a luxury-loving, hard-riding sportsman-businessman who
neither studied nor laboured with his hands nor remained within his cloister would not be lost
upon the readers. The same can be said about the Friar, as readers would contrast the flattering
and the attempt to avoid the sick and the poor people.

The longest part of the Prioress' description is based on her manners of eating, which is enough
proof that instead of taking care of spiritual values, she is very much concerned with very
material and trivial matters. Again, Chaucer uses several words, this time several times, in order
to suggest that the nun was eating meat (the word meat is repeated twice in ten lines, and there
are also occurrences of morsel, sauce, and grease). This time Chaucer does not forget to mention
that Four courtliness she had a special zest, as if he had done it only for the sake of metrical
purposes (to rhyme with breast), then going back to the second half of the description of the
nun's manners at table. We may infer that, as the pilgrimage took place in Spring, this may have
been the period when people were supposed to fast, because Easter was coming soon, and if
normal people do not fast throughout the whole Lent, at least the representatives of the church
should do it, which is contradicted by Chaucer because he also tells us that the monk's favourite
meal was a roasted swan.

The fact that the Nun was very entertaining/ Pleasant and friendly in her ways, and straining/ To
counterfeit a courthy kind of grace points out the extravagancies of the nun who, instead of
praying and showing a humble attitude, was trying to seem dignified in all her dealings.

The Prioress is rather too kind to animals, while there is no mention of her kindness to people.
Finally, she has a costly set of beads around her rnn, which should be used for prayer, but end in
a brooch ambiguously inscribed Amor vincit omnia (Virgil's Love conquers all). She has a Nun
with her, and three priests

Chaucer was ironic not only to the clergy but also to other social classes: for instance the doctor
is criticised for his ill treatment of his patients. Being more of an astrologist than a physician, he
investigates his patients' humour and he reads their stars:

The cause of every malady you 'd got

He knew, and whether dry, cold, moist or hot

He knew their seat, their humour and condition.

The medieval concept of humour is essentially diferent from what the term means nowadays. In
the Middle Ages, four humours were recognised, each of which represented a distinct
psychological and physiological type. Chaucer s explanation of the four humours is also to be
found in The Nun's Priest's Tale. The melancholic person was reckoned to be cold and dry and
identified with earth; the phlegmatic was cold and moist like water: the choleric was dry and hot
like fire, the sanguine was warm and moist like air. In this way”humours” were tied in with the
physical side of human beings; their bodily flows and drives.
Chaucer concludes that the Doctor was a perfect practicing physician, who gave his patients
medicines from time to time. He was also a good businessman, since giving people medicines
meant sending them to the apothecaries in a tribe, and thus each made money from the other 's
guile;/ They had been friendly for a goodish while.

What is interesting about Chaucer's irony is the fact that after presenting the doctor's care for
himself (ln his own diet he observed some measure;/ There were no superfluities some pleasure/
Only digestives, nutritives and such.), pointing out that he did not tell his patients about the diet
that they should have observed, Chaucer places, as if for the sake of rhyme and rhythm, the
following line:

He did not read the Bible very much.

In order to interpret this line, we need to remember that, while the priest was supposed to take
care of his Christians' souls, the doctor was supposed to take care of their bodies. Doctors were
made to take the Hippocratic oath by which they would promise to do their best to save their
patients life. Thus, reading the Bible for a doctor was as essential as it was for a priest, as he
would take the Hippocratic oath, his right hand on the Bible; had he not been familiar with the
content of the Bible, the doctor would have made his oath invalid.

Alchemical connotations appear in the portrait of the Doctor in the lines: Gold stimulates the
heart, or so we're told/ He therefore had a special love of gold, the excuse the perfect Doctor
used in order to take money from the patients who were doomed to die in pestilences.

The doctor's portrait is just another one in which the use of such words as 'ful wel', the best,
gentil' or noble' when refering to figures who, from the rest of their description, appear anything
but. [...] The audience is thereby encouraged to smile knowingly at the objects of his naīve
enthusiasm and artfully misplaced praise.

In his General Prologue apology, Chaucer reveals his attempt to repeat the other pilgrims'
words, which may make his story true and objective, but also vulgar or rude:

Whoso shal telle a tale after a man,

He moot reherce as ny as evere he kan

Everich a word, if it be in his charge,

Al speke he never so rudeliche and large.

Apart from the Ars Poetica that Chaucer creates in his General Prologue, it is worth noting that
the writer inserts in the text different interventions from different characters who speak about the
way the tales should be structured or conceived by the ones who present them. For instance, as
Laura Kendrick noted, no pilgrim, with the exception of Chaucer the pilgrim, announces that he
will tell a rhymed tale, although several pilgrims' prologues imply or specify that their tales will
be in the plain speech of prose. The Parson clearly rejects both alliterative verse ("geeste") and
rhymed verse, and, like the Man of Law, promises a tale in prose-as does Chaucer the pilgrim in
his second attempt at a pleasing tale. The Host's general attitude toward rhyme seems to be that
it is a waste of time and needlessly complicates comprehension of the story: he tells the Clerk to
cut the colors (a rhetorical term that could refer to sound patterns and rhyme), the figures, and
other quaint terms, and to speak plainly (which the Clerk agrees to do). This may be a simple
man's reaction to a comnplicated style, a simple man would rather have the plain truth than the
one adorned in complicated symbols and allegories:

Telle us som murie thyng of aventures.

Youre termes, youre colours, and youre figures,

Keepe him in stoor til so be that ye endite

Heigh style, as whan that men to kynges write.

Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, we yow preye,

That we may understonde what ye seye.

Rob Pope distinguished six types of stories in The Canterbury Tales: court romances, fabliaux,
sermons, holy lives, confessions and moral tracts.

Court romances are tales which explore refined notions of love and war in a court setting. The
plot usually revolves around the competition between two noble men for one noble woman.
Court romances are characterized by elaborate, highly idealized forms of courtship (sometimes
called "courtly love") and elaborately ritualistic behaviour in general. Thus, The Knight's Tale,
The Squire s Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, The Franklin's Tale may be
considered court romances.

Fabliaux are exactly at the opposite end: stories dealing with an extended joke or trick, usually
set amongst the lower orders of combinations of raw sex and knockabout violence, and by the
end everyone has received a kind of Justice. Obviously, while court romances are sublimely
abstract and idealized, fabliaux are grotesquely concrete and physical. While court romances
draw on stories of solemn knights and ladies, fabliaux take as their main characters tradesmen,
minor clerics and the peasantry

Critics decided that the fabliaux were not tavern fare, composed by the vulgar for the vulgar, yet
it must be admitted that, just as the fabliaux's action of cuckoldry and physical aggression
breaks the rules of polite peacetime behavior, so the raw vocabulary of many fabliaux infringes
the rules of polite and courtly speech to which respectable bourgeois or courtly audiences would
ordinarily conform.
The main concern of the fabliaux is cuckoldings, beatings, and elaborate practical jokes. Greed,
hypocrisy, and pride are invariably punished, but so too are old age, mere slow-wittedness, and,
most frequently, the presumption of a husband, especially an old one, who attempts to guard his
wife's chastity. The protagonists of fabliaux, who are always both witty and young, are the
people whom society ordinarily scorns - dispossessed intellectuals (lecherous priests, wayward
monks, penniless students), clever peasants, and enthusiastically unchaste wives. Their victims
are exactly the opposite: prosperous merchants, hard-working tradesmen, women who try to
remain chaste

The Reeve's Tale takes the basic form of the fabliau, such as The Miler's Tale does. The Cook's
Tale (fragment), The Canon's Yeoman's Tale. The Friar's Tale and The Summoner's Tale are
fabliaux as well.

Rob Pope divided Chaucer's religious writings into four major categories: sermons, holy lives,
confessions and moral tracts.

Medieval sermons were basically exhortations to embrace and shun vices. Essentially oral and
ofien highly rhetorical, they were the main way in which Christian doctrine was communicated.
Rob Pope discusses the four types of material that usually represented the composition of a
medieval preacher's sermon: an abstract theme (such as gluttony, avarice or charity), a biblical
story or quotation (for instance the story of the Good Samaritan), popular stories and proverbs, or
classical stories and maxims for a more learned congregation and a contemporary event (such as
for instance a local riot or a bout of plague). The three full sermons appearing in The Canterbury
Tales are The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, The Nun's Priest's Prologue and Tale and The
Parson's Tale. In each case we carry with us a strong image of the preacher. As well as the
sermon he delivers. We see him both as a human individual and as a divine authoriv figure

Holy lives resemble court romances, with the exception that the heroes and heroines are holy
people, not knights or ladies. Holy lives were one of the most popular of medieval literary genres
and they told of the life, miracles, and martyrdom of the hero or heroine. Like knights, saints
have adventures, often involving long journeys through exotic places, and they too meet and
overcome enemies and obstacles, usually winning through to some kind of triumph at the end.
[…] The final triumph is not a knight winning a fight or the hand of his lady, but a holy person-
often a woman- defeating the devil and his supporters. Significantly, this usually means
martyrdom for the heroine, being stoned or boiled in oil, and there is often at least the threat of
rape. […] For all their apparent piety, they often strike the modern reader as sensationally
sadistic.

Chaucer used the holy life as his main base in the following tales: The Clek's Tale, The Man of
Law's Tale, The Physician's Tale, The Prioress Tale and The Second Nun's Tale. There are
elements of the holy life in The Kright's Tale and The Frankin's Tale.
Confessions are not often used by Chaucer. To be more precise, there is only one confession in
The Canterbury Tales: The Parson's Tale. The Parson instructs the other pilgrims how to
recognise, confess and renounce each of the seven deadly sins in tun. Rob Pope interprets The
Parson's Tale as a confession manual, concluding with a prayer from Chaucer himself. This
prayer is sometimes called the "retraction" and is itself a kind of confession. In it the author
(presumably towards the end of his life) looks back over all his writings, recognizing that some
may help him to heven, whereas others certainly will not! He concludes with a prayer to "Lord
Jesus Christ and his blessed Mother, and all the Saints of heven. beseeching them that they from
henceforth to the end of my life may send me grace to be sory for my Sins anad to look to my
salvation.

Thinking of the Wife of Bath's Prologue for instance, we may notice that she looks back over her
life and confesses openly to past loves and her sins, so we may conclude that there are several
tales which use confession as their main base such as The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale, as
well as other tales and prologues in which the characters confess about the tricks of their trades
and sins in general: The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale and The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and
Tale.

The moral tracts are, according to Rob Pope, the common type of writing used by Chaucer in
The Canterbury Tales. The critic defined them as being similar to sermons while lacking the oral
style of the latter. Like the sermon, it tends to be concerned with virtues and vices, the trials and
tribulations of the world, heaven and hell, and so forth. Unlike the sermon it is not particularly
diversified by incidental stories or direct address to the reader/audience. In short, moral tracts
are high on analytical distinctions and low on dramatic impact. They often have the broken-up,
schematized and labeled look of reference books (which they often were) rather than works you
would sit down and read all the way through. Thus, we may see that the moral tract represented
the main base of The Monk's Tale and The Parson's Tale.

As it has previously been mentioned, Chaucer does not use thes of not use these six forms in a
pure form, but he rather tends to mix them. This mixing of different materials and perspectives is
one of the chief features of Chaucer 's art and ... the overall result is one of sheer variety.
 The English Popular Ballads
Sundry shorter poems, lyrics, of whatever purpose, hymns, "flytins, " political satires, mawkish
stories in verse, sensational journalism of Elizabethan days and even the translation of
Solomon's Song, have gone by the name of ballad. Ballad societies have published a vast
amnount of street-songs, broadsides and ditties such as Mme. de Sèvignè knew in Paris under
the name of Pont-neuf; for many readers, unfortunately, there is no diference between these
"ballads" and Chevy Chase or Sir Patrick Spens.

The popular ballad, however, now in question, is a narrative poem without any known author or
any marks of individual authorship such as sentiment and reflection, meant, in the first instance,
for singing. and connected, as its name implies, with the communal dance, but submitted to a
process of oral tradition among people free from literary infuences and fairly homogeneous.

Ballads belonging to the Arthurian cycle originating from French romances and lays. Their
origin may be traced back to British, Welsh, and Irish sources.

Depending on their origins, popular ballads may be classified as follows:

-ballads borrowed from the East, irrespective of the route by which they came to England (Get
up and Bar the Door, traceable to the 40 Vezirs)

-native ballads, English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, developing local subjects (The Battle of
Ottenrbum, King John and the Bishop)

-ballads of Scandinavian origin (Sir Aldingar).

-a few ballads that seem to have come from Spain (King Estmere)

Irrespective of their origin or theme, the fifteenth-century ballads are all characterized by
simplicity in both grammar and style. The grammar that we may speak about in the case of
ballads is the grammar of spoken English.The connection between clauses is chietly of the
coordinating type, often asyndentic.

Repetition is the predominant syntactical figure of speech, be it incremental repetition or

syntactic parallelism.

Natural description is not to be met in most of the ballads. In all cases external nature is only
mentioned as a background: the forest in the ballads of outlawry or in Crow and Pie, the sea in
Kemp Owyne, the garden in The Gardener

The dominant note of a ballad, as far as its subject matter is concerned, is the presence of a
narrative kernel; in spite of its lyric origins, the ballad belongs to the epic genre as it contains a
story. The story is dramatic, developing rapidly towards the denouement.
All ballads are concerned with vital human problems and relations viewed in a most
unsophisticated manner against the background of primary emotions; domestic relations marked
by stupidity and ambition (Get up and Bar the Door), man in relation to the unknown (Thomas
Rhymer), enduring love (Sweet Wiliams Ghost), war (Chevy Chase).

From the point of view of their content, there are ballads of domestic relations, ballads of
superstition, humorous ballads, ballads of love and death, historical ballads, ballads of outlawry.

Ballads of domestic relations deal with exiled husbands, quarrelling sisters or brothers, cruel
step mothers, or cruel mothers-in-law. Among them we may mention Cruel Mother, the story of
a child murder, and Two Sisters, featuring the drowning of one sister by the other.

Ballads of superstition, as their title suggests, deal with superstitious beliefs, enchantments and
different tests and quests which make them somewhat similar to medieval romances. Sweet
Wiliam's Ghost, entirely based on superstition, preserved in numerous variants, tells us the story
of a dead lover who returns to his lady-love and forces her to follow him into the realm of the
dead Thomas the Rhymer, or Thomas Rymer generally

Humorous ballads relate humorous incident of domestic life or show the wisdom of simple
people who can solve unexpectedly major problems. Get up and Bar the Door is the story of a
good wife who prepares puddings for Martinmas. The basic conflict in this ballad is the one
between man and woman, or more precisely, husband and wife, a battle of the wills. As the wind
is blowing hard, her husband asks her to bar the door, but she refuses, and after a dispute they
decide that the one who speaks first will have to bar the door. At midnight two strangers enter
the house. They get no answer from the husband and wife, and so they eat the white and the
black puddings, until one of them suggests:

Here, man, take ye my knife,

Do you take off the auld man 's beard

And I'll kiss the goodvife.

Another humorous ballad is, King John and the Bishop

Historical ballads deal with wars and the ill-blood between England and Scotland in a period
previous to the union of 1707. Examples include Queen Eleanor's Confession, Gude Wallace,
Hugh Spencer's Feats in France, Durham Field. Chevy Chase or The Hunting of the Cheviot,
Flodden Field. |

Ballads of outlawry, often referred to as Greewood ballads, are mainly centred round the figure
of Robin Hood. Regardless of variants, localizations or groups, it has been ascertained that the
ballads convey to the reader (listener) the echo of the people's fight against the Norman
conquerors, on the one side, and the echo of the people's fight against the feudal barons, on the
other. Robin Hood is the most celebrated hero of the outlawry ballads circulated in the South and
in the central districts of medieval England, and the ballads generally describe him as a
champion of liberty and social justice, valiant, resourceful, devoted to the poor and needy, a
sworn enemy of the feudal lords.
 The Medieval Drama
The medieval drama has its origins in the earliest dialogues in the church, which were called
antiphons or responsories. They represented answers given by the congregation to the priest
based on biblical paraphrases and they were usually devoted to Christmas or Easter, yet thev
soon touched on other subjects as well.

Pantomimes are to be mentioned too as they played a very important role in the development of
religious drama. They were generally on the theme of Christ 's adoration by the magi and the
shepherds at the time of the Christmas Service. They were eventually linked together, therefore
becoming liturgical dramas, performed near the altar.

The earliest formal drama in England arose from an attempt to show the people, in a vivid and
impressive way, their relationship to God, their part in God's work in the world, their propensity
to sin and their hope of salvation, as portrayed in a succession of dramatized examples of God's
dealings with Man, from the Creation and the Fall through to Christ 's sacrifice, the
Resurrection, and The Last Judgment. The typical medieval forms of drama (mysteries,
moralities, and miracles) showed that Man was prone to sin, always rejecting good and seeking
evil in no matter what epoch. He had to accept, as the drama showed, that the everyday fact of
death and dissolution was no final act at all, that the constant battle within himself between
good and evil was a necessary part of God's plan for humanity, was indeed the only way by
which he could progress from half-beast to sanctified soul.

No sample of a Latin liturgical drama has been preserved in England, but there are traces of an
eleventh-century transitional drama called Le Jeu d'Adanm.in which Latin seems to have been
abandoned already. The drama included three main parts: the fall of Adam and Eve, Abel's death,
the processions of the prophets who announced the coming of Jesus Christ.

Evidence of female participation in these plays was small, limited to dances and processions,
minor interludes, however spectacular. The parts of female characters, even of Mary or of her
mother Anne, were played by young men. Customarily this has been taken as further evidence of
the exclusion of women from public roles. [..] Women, debarred by their sex from priestly
functions and by their education from the language of the liturgy, could therefore take part only
as spectators.

At the same time, religious drama continued to undergo a process of secularisation, and it was
crystallised in three main forms: mysteries, miracles and moralities.

Mysteries were liturgical dramas based on stories from the Bible (the term is derived from the
Latin ministerum: service). They contained accompanying antiphonal song, such as the Quem
Quaertis, a short musical performance set at the tomb of the risen Christ. Initially they were very
simple structures. but later on they were developed with tropes, verbal embellishment of the li
and became more and more elaborate.
Thus they became a series of connected dialogues, divided in acts and scenes, starting with the
Creation, dealing with the Passion and ending with the Day of Judgment.

Miracles drew on the lives and deeds of Christian saints and martyrs: Marry Magdalene, St.
George's Passion, the Apocryphal Gospels, and pious legends; a certain historical or traditional
foundation underlied the plot, and the object was to teach and enforce truths of the Catholic faith.
Miracle plays were performed in Latin, unlike Mysteries which were meant to be understood by
the common man.

Moralities represented a fifteenth-century development of the Miracles and they had the
dramatic form of the pulpit sermon. They were nearest the mystery in manner of production,
costumes, and general tone; [...] the morality might almost be classed as a religious play. In the
age-long attempt to portray the dual nature of Man, in whom good and evil perpetually fight for
supremacy, the playwrights lighted on the allegorical method. They conceived the diferert
desires and appetites of Man as personalities, named them Greed, Pride, Varity, Good Will,
Patience, and the like, and caused them to weave their plots so as to capture the soul of the hero,
who was called Everyman, Humanum Genus, or Man. Besides the personified desires, typical
characters of a morality would be the Doctor, the Priest, or a public officer, and God and the
Devil who influence characters, giving them virtues or vices.

The main intention of both miracles and moralities was clearly religious; while miracles aimed
at faith, the teaching of dogma, moralities taught people the Christian doctrine.

English literature contains four complete or nearly complete extant English biblical collections of
plays: the York cycle of forty-eight pageants; the Towneley plays of thirty-two pageants, the N
Town plays of forty-three pageants (also called the Ludus Coventriae cycle or Hegge cycle) acted
probably in Lincolnshire or Norfolk, and the Chester cycle of twenty-four pageants. The contents
of these Miracles deal with the Fall of Lucifer, the Creation and Fall of Man, Cain and Abel,
Noah and the Flood, Abraham and Isaac, the Nativity, the Raising of Lazarus, the Passion, and
the Resurrection. Other pageants included the story of Moses, the Procession of the Prophets,
Christ's Baptism, the Temptation in the Wilderness, and the Assumption and Coronation of the
Virgin.

The morality' plays, unlike the earlier drama, did not use ready-made, known Biblical stories;
they personified the good and bad qualities which every member of the audience, felt to be
inherent in his human nature, and the plot' was the direct dramatization, the acting-out, of the
conflicis inevitably arising from the mixed nature of Man. Thus, they were the first type of drama
which was more didactic than religious.

Everyman- condition of man to sin

 Francis Bacon

Francis Bacon (22 January l561 – 9 April 1626) was born at York House, Strand London, as the
youngest of five sons of Sir Nicholas Bacon, Lord Keeper of the Great Seal under Elizabeth I.
Graduating from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1573 at the age of 12, he met the Queen, who,
impressed by his precious intellect, would call him The Young Lord Keeper.

He is known as the greatest philosopher of the Renaissance, the one proclaiming the relief of
man's estate, the one who rejected the deductive method of the Schoolmen and embraced the
inductive method that was based on practical results in order to arrive at general conclusions. He
was knighted in 1603, became Baron Verulam in 1618, and Viscount St Albans in 1621.He
began his professional life as a lawyer, but he became best known as a philosophical advocate
and defender of the scientific revolution. His popularisation of the inductive methodology for
scientific inquiry was often called the Baconian method.

Bacon's works include his Essays (1597), as well as the Colours of Good and Evil and the
Meditationes Sacrae (1597). Bacon also wrote In Felicem Memoriam Elzabethae, (1609) and
various philosophical works which constiute the fragmentary and incomplete Instauratio magna,
the most important part of which is the Novum Organum (published in 1620). Francis Bacon's
survey of the evolution of learning and of its practical achievements to his own day enabled him
to assess the meritsand demerits of his predecessors. Moreover his unbounded confidence in
man's power to subdue nature and harness its energies in the service of the progress of material
civilization proved a great impulse to successive generations of thinkers and scientists. What
Bacon did was not so much to propose an actual philosophy but rather to advocate a method for
developing philosophy, whereas philosophy at the time used the deductive syllogism to interpret
nature. This was the inductive method that the inquirer needed in order to free his mind from the
four types of idola (Idols) which represented for Bacon false notions or tendencies distorting the
truth: idola tribus which are common to the race; idola specus, which are peculiar to the
individual; idola fori, coming trom the misuse of language; idola theatri, which result from an
abuse of authority. The outcome of induction is the discovery of forms, the ways in which
natural phenomena occur, the causes from which they proceed.

For Francis Bacon, religion was distinct from philosophy, as they were applied to two totally
different approaches: religion was based on faith (revelation - we are told Believe, do not search
in The Bible, so religion is irrational), while philosophy is based on reason.
 Thomas More
Thomas More (1478-1535) was born in London, on February 7, 1478, and was educated at St
Anthony's School. While studying at Oxford under Thomas Linacre and William Grocyn, he
wrote comedies and studied Greek and Latin literature. He started to translate a Latin biography
of the Italian humanist Pico della Mirandola, which was printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1510.
Around 1494 More returned to London to study law. was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1490, and
became a barrister in 1501. One of More's close friends was Desiderius Erasmus(1466-1536).

More helped Henry VIII in writing his Defence of the Seven Sacraments, a repudiation of Luther,
and wrote an answer to Luther's reply under a pseudonym.

More disapproved of King Henry VIII's plan to divorce Catherine of Aragon and dared not to
attend the coronation of Anne Boleyn in June 1533, a gesture that upset the King. In 1534 he was
one of the people accused of complicity with Elizabeth Barton, the nun of Kent who opposed
Henry's break with Rome, but the Lords refused to pass the bill until More's name was struck off
the list. In April 1534, More refused to swear to the Act of Succession and the Oath of
Supremacy, and was committed to the Tower of London on April 17. Thus, he was found guilty
of treason and was beheaded on July 6, 1535. More was beatified in 1886 and canonized by the
Catholic Church as a saint by Pope Pius XI in 1935.

In his biography on More, John Farrow describes him in the following terms: He was fifty-seven
when he climbed the scaffold, respected for goodness and wisdom, learning and wit. He was a
statesman and a patriot, but high office had never been permitted to usurp the duties of a parent.
He was the friend of Erasmus, and he had been the confidant of the prince who sent him to his
death. He had written Utopia, and he had been Lord Chancellor of England, but in all manner of
circumstance his conduct was characterized by a humility and calmness of spirit which did not
desert him at the end. He was then calm enough to jest with his executioner, humble enough to
invite the prayers of the crowd. Splendid and triumphant was his final utterance, that he died
"the King's good servant, but God's first.

Thomas More's Utopia represented an emblematic work for the Renaissance; it offers its readers
a picture of an ideal state founded entirely on reason. Thomas More's Utopia is made up of two
parts. The first part of the book faithfully describes the realities of England in the fifteenth
century: the starvation of the poor, the wars that resulted in practices such as stealing (the poor,
despite the danger of being hanged, stole in order to survive), the unfair laws, the arbitrary rule
of the monarch, as well as the grim reality that the unnatural breeding of sheep resulted in having
more sheep than men in England: your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so
small eaters, as I hear say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and
swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses
and cities.
Like Erasmus in his Moriae Encomium, More denounced his contemporan society which he
presented as a conspiracy of the rich against the poor, where the upper classes led a life of
pleasure or waged profitable wars whereas the lower classes were forced to a miserable life,
driven off the newly-enclosed land a prey to starvation and unlawfulness

2. Describing all these with a heavy heart, More proposed a better world in the second part of his
book, the world of Utopia (the land of nowhere) in which men lived happily, where there was no
evil and no injustice, where private property was given up and exploitation abolished. His
narrator Hythlodeus, an alter ego of the writer, considers that the root of social evil lays in
money and private property: I do fully persuade myself that no equal and just distribution of
things can be made, nor that perfect wealth shall ever be among men, unless this property is
exiled and banished. But so long as it shall continue, so long shall remain among the most and
best part of men the heavy and inevitable burden of poverty and wretchedness. The world More
presents is saturnalian. [..] The inhabitants of Utopia, for instance, make their meanest objects
out of gold and silver and give precious gems to their children as toys. In a fine jest, More writes
that ambassadors, unaware of Utopian customs, once arrived at the island richly dressed in gold
chains. The islanders took the visitors to be slaves, and assumed that their simply dressed
servants were the actual emissaries.

Thomas Wyatt
Thomas Wyatt (1503-1524), a lyrical poet and a diplomat, was the first sonneteer to introduce
the Italian sonnet into English literature; he embarked first on translating some Petrarchan
sonnets into English (he made fifteen translations and he initially wrote ten imitations). He
became the key of English Petrarchanism."
 WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE DRAMA

Romeo and Juliet

Summary:

In the streets of Verona, Italy another brawl breaks out between the servants of the feuding noble
families of Capulet (Gregorio& Sampson) and Montague. Benvolio, a Montague, tries to stop the
fighting, but he is himself embroiled when Tybalt, a rash Capulet, arrives on the scene. After
citizens outraged by the constant violence beat back the warring factions, Prince Escalus, the
ruler of Verona, attempts to prevent any further conflicts between the families by decreeing
death for any individual who disturbs the peace in the future.

Romeo, the son of Montague, runs into his cousin Benvolio, who had earlier seen Romeo
moping in a grove of sycamores. After some prodding by Benvolio, Romeo confides that he is in
love with Rosaline, a woman who does not return his affections. Benvolio counsels him to forget
this woman and find another, more beautiful one, but Romeo remains despondent.

Meanwhile, Paris, a kinsman (count) of the Prince, seeks Juliet’s hand in marriage. Her father
Capulet, though happy at the match, asks Paris to wait two years, since Juliet (13) is not yet even
fourteen. Capulet dispatches a servant (Peter) with a list of people to invite to a masquerade and
feast he traditionally holds. He invites Paris to the feast, hoping that Paris will begin to win
Juliet’s heart.

Romeo and Benvolio, still discussing Rosaline, encounter the Capulet servant bearing the list of
invitations. Benvolio suggests that they attend, since that will allow Romeo to compare his
beloved to other beautiful women of Verona. Romeo agrees to go with Benvolio to the feast, but
only because Rosaline, whose name he reads on the list, will be there.

In Capulet’s household, young Juliet talks with her mother, Lady Capulet, and her nurse about
the possibility of marrying Paris. Juliet has not yet considered marriage, but agrees to look at
Paris during the feast to see if she thinks she could fall in love with him.

The feast begins. A melancholy Romeo follows Benvolio and their witty friend Mercutio to
Capulet’s house. Once inside, Romeo sees Juliet from a distance and instantly falls in love with
her; he forgets about Rosaline completely. As Romeo watches Juliet, entranced, a young
Capulet, Tybalt, recognizes him, and is enraged that a Montague would sneak into a Capulet
feast. He prepares to attack, but Capulet holds him back. Soon, Romeo speaks to Juliet, and the
two experience a profound attraction. They kiss, not even knowing each other’s names. When he
finds out from Juliet’s nurse that she is the daughter of Capulet —his family’s enemy —he
becomes distraught. When Juliet learns that the young man she has just kissed is the son of
Montague, she grows equally upset.
As Mercutio and Benvolio leave the Capulet estate, Romeo leaps over the orchard wall into the
garden, unable to leave Juliet behind. From his hiding place, he sees Juliet in a window above the
orchard and hears her speak his name. He calls out to her, and they exchange vows of love.

Romeo hurries to see his friend and confessor Friar Lawrence, who, though shocked at the
sudden turn of Romeo’s heart, agrees to marry the young lovers in secret since he sees in their
love the possibility of ending the age-old feud between Capulet and Montague. The following
day, Romeo and Juliet meet at Friar Lawrence’s cell and are married. The Nurse, who is privy to
the secret, procures a ladder, which Romeo will use to climb into Juliet’s window for their
wedding night.

The next day, Benvolio and Mercutio encounter Tybalt —Juliet’s cousin —who, still enraged
that Romeo attended Capulet’s feast, has challenged Romeo to a duel. Romeo appears. Now
Tybalt’s kinsman by marriage, Romeo begs the Capulet to hold off the duel until he understands
why Romeo does not want to fight. Disgusted with this plea for peace, Mercutio says that he will
fight Tybalt himself. The two begin to duel. Romeo tries to stop them by leaping between the
combatants. Tybalt stabs Mercutio under Romeo’s arm, and Mercutio dies. Romeo, in a rage,
kills Tybalt. Romeo flees from the scene. Soon after, the Prince declares him forever banished
from Verona for his crime. Friar Lawrence arranges for Romeo to spend his wedding night with
Juliet before he has to leave for Mantua the following morning.

In her room, Juliet awaits the arrival of her new husband. The Nurse enters, and, after some
confusion, tells Juliet that Romeo has killed Tybalt. Distraught, Juliet suddenly finds herself
married to a man who has killed her kinsman. But she resettles herself, and realizes that her duty
belongs with her love: to Romeo.

Romeo sneaks into Juliet’s room that night, and at last they consummate their marriage and their
love. Morning comes, and the lovers bid farewell, unsure when they will see each other again.
Juliet learns that her father, affected by the recent events, now intends for her to marry Paris in
just three days. Unsure of how to proceed—unable to reveal to her parents that she is married to
Romeo, but unwilling to marry Paris now that she is Romeo’s wife—Juliet asks her nurse for
advice. She counsels Juliet to proceed as if Romeo were dead and to marry Paris, who is a better
match anyway. Disgusted with the Nurse’s disloyalty, Juliet disregards her advice and hurries to
Friar Lawrence. He concocts a plan to reunite Juliet with Romeo in Mantua. The night before her
wedding to Paris, Juliet must drink a potion that will make her appear to be dead. After she is
laid to rest in the family’s crypt, the Friar and Romeo will secretly retrieve her, and she will be
free to live with Romeo, away from their parents’ feuding.

Juliet returns home to discover the wedding has been moved ahead one day, and she is to be
married tomorrow. That night, Juliet drinks the potion, and the Nurse discovers her, apparently
dead, the next morning. The Capulets grieve, and Juliet is entombed according to plan. But Friar
Lawrence’s message explaining the plan to Romeo never reaches Mantua. Its bearer, Friar John,
gets confined to a quarantined house. Romeo hears only that Juliet is dead.
Romeo learns only of Juliet’s death and decides to kill himself rather than live without her. He
buys a vial of poison from a reluctant Apothecary, then speeds back to Verona to take his own
life at Juliet’s tomb. Outside the Capulet crypt, Romeo comes upon Paris, who is scattering
flowers on Juliet’s grave. They fight, and Romeo kills Paris. He enters the tomb, sees Juliet’s
inanimate body, drinks the poison, and dies by her side. Just then, Friar Lawrence enters and
realizes that Romeo has killed Paris and himself. At the same time, Juliet awakes. Friar
Lawrence hears the coming of the watch. When Juliet refuses to leave with him, he flees alone.
Juliet sees her beloved Romeo and realizes he has killed himself with poison. She kisses his
poisoned lips, and when that does not kill her, buries his dagger in her chest, falling dead upon
his body.

The watch arrives, followed closely by the Prince, the Capulets, and Montague. Montague
declares that Lady Montague has died of grief over Romeo’s exile. Seeing their children’s
bodies, Capulet and Montague agree to end their long-standing feud and to raise gold statues of
their children side-by-side in a newly peaceful Verona.

Themes:

-The forcefulness of love: Romeo and Juliet is the most famous love story in the English literary
tradition. Love is naturally the play’s dominant and most important theme. The play focuses on
romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between Romeo and
Juliet. In Romeo and Juliet, love is a violent, ecstatic, overpowering force that supersedes all
other values, loyalties, and emotions. 

-Violence:

-Faith:

Symbols:

-The Poison: Poison symbolizes human society’s tendency to poison good things and make them
fatal, just as the pointless Capulet-Montague feud turns Romeo and Juliet’s love to poison. After
all, unlike many of the other tragedies, this play does not have an evil villain, but rather people
whose good qualities are turned to poison by the world in which they live.
 Hamlet

Summary:

On a dark winter night, a ghost walks the ramparts of Elsinore Castle in Denmark. Discovered
first by a pair of watchmen, then by the scholar Horatio, the ghost resembles the recently
deceased King Hamlet, whose brother Claudius has inherited the throne and married the king’s
widow, Queen Gertrude. When Horatio and the watchmen bring Prince Hamlet, the son of
Gertrude and the dead king, to see the ghost, it speaks to him, declaring ominously that it is
indeed his father’s spirit, and that he was murdered by none other than Claudius. Ordering
Hamlet to seek revenge on the man who usurped his throne and married his wife, the ghost
disappears with the dawn.

Prince Hamlet devotes himself to avenging his father’s death, but, because he is contemplative
and thoughtful by nature, he delays, entering into a deep melancholy and even apparent madness.
Claudius and Gertrude worry about the prince’s erratic behavior and attempt to discover its
cause. They employ a pair of Hamlet’s friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to watch him.
When Polonius, the pompous Lord Chamberlain, suggests that Hamlet may be mad with love for
his daughter, Ophelia, Claudius agrees to spy on Hamlet in conversation with the girl. But
though Hamlet certainly seems mad, he does not seem to love Ophelia: he orders her to enter a
nunnery and declares that he wishes to ban marriages.

A group of traveling actors comes to Elsinore, and Hamlet seizes upon an idea to test his uncle’s
guilt. He will have the players perform a scene closely resembling the sequence by which Hamlet
imagines his uncle to have murdered his father, so that if Claudius is guilty, he will surely react.
When the moment of the murder arrives in the theater, Claudius leaps up and leaves the room.
Hamlet and Horatio agree that this proves his guilt. Hamlet goes to kill Claudius but finds him
praying. Since he believes that killing Claudius while in prayer would send Claudius’s soul to
heaven, Hamlet considers that it would be an inadequate revenge and decides to wait. Claudius,
now frightened of Hamlet’s madness and fearing for his own safety, orders that Hamlet be sent
to England at once.

Hamlet goes to confront his mother, in whose bedchamber Polonius has hidden behind a
tapestry. Hearing a noise from behind the tapestry, Hamlet believes the king is hiding there. He
draws his sword and stabs through the fabric, killing Polonius. For this crime, he is immediately
dispatched to England with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. However, Claudius’s plan for Hamlet
includes more than banishment, as he has given Rosencrantz and Guildenstern sealed orders for
the King of England demanding that Hamlet be put to death.

In the aftermath of her father’s death, Ophelia goes mad with grief and drowns in the river.
Polonius’s son, Laertes, who has been staying in France, returns to Denmark in a rage. Claudius
convinces him that Hamlet is to blame for his father’s and sister’s deaths. When Horatio and the
king receive letters from Hamlet indicating that the prince has returned to Denmark after pirates
attacked his ship en route to England, Claudius create a plan to use Laertes’ desire for revenge to
secure Hamlet’s death. Laertes will fence with Hamlet in innocent sport, but Claudius will
poison Laertes’ blade so that if he draws blood, Hamlet will die. As a backup plan, the king
decides to poison a goblet, which he will give Hamlet to drink should Hamlet score the first or
second hits of the match. Hamlet returns to the vicinity of Elsinore just as Ophelia’s funeral is
taking place. Stricken with grief, he attacks Laertes and declares that he had in fact always loved
Ophelia. Back at the castle, he tells Horatio that he believes one must be prepared to die, since
death can come at any moment. A foolish courtier named Osric arrives on Claudius’s orders to
arrange the fencing match between Hamlet and Laertes.

The sword-fighting begins. Hamlet scores the first hit, but declines to drink from the king’s
proffered goblet. Instead, Gertrude takes a drink from it and is swiftly killed by the poison.
Laertes succeeds in wounding Hamlet, though Hamlet does not die of the poison immediately.
First, Laertes is cut by his own sword’s blade, and, after revealing to Hamlet that Claudius is
responsible for the queen’s death, he dies from the blade’s poison. Hamlet then stabs Claudius
through with the poisoned sword and forces him to drink down the rest of the poisoned wine.
Claudius dies, and Hamlet dies immediately after achieving his revenge.

At this moment, a Norwegian prince named Fortinbras, who has led an army to Denmark and
attacked Poland earlier in the play, enters with ambassadors from England, who report that
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead. Fortinbras is stunned by the gruesome sight of the entire
royal family lying sprawled on the floor dead. He moves to take power of the kingdom. Horatio,
fulfilling Hamlet’s last request, tells him Hamlet’s tragic story. Fortinbras orders that Hamlet be
carried away in a manner befitting a fallen soldier.

Themes: Madness and the mistery of death

Symbols: Yorick s skull, (hamlet contemplate death and think about the human condition in
front of death)
 A midsummer night s dreams

Summary:

Theseus, duke of Athens, is preparing for his marriage to Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, with
a four-day festival of pomp and entertainment. He commissions his Master of the Revels,
Philostrate, to find suitable amusements for the occasion. Egeus, an Athenian nobleman, marches
into Theseus’s court with his daughter, Hermia, and two young men, Demetrius and Lysander.

Egeus wishes Hermia to marry Demetrius (who loves Hermia), but Hermia is in love with
Lysander and refuses to comply. Egeus asks for the full penalty of law to fall on Hermia’s head
if she flouts her father’s will. Theseus gives Hermia until his wedding to consider her options,
warning her that disobeying her father’s wishes could result in her being sent to a convent or
even executed. Nonetheless, Hermia and Lysander plan to escape Athens the following night and
marry in the house of Lysander’s aunt, some seven leagues distant from the city. They make their
intentions known to Hermia’s friend Helena, who was once engaged to Demetrius and still loves
him even though he jilted her after meeting Hermia. Hoping to regain his love, Helena tells
Demetrius of the elopement that Hermia and Lysander have planned. At the appointed time,
Demetrius stalks into the woods after his intended bride and her lover; Helena follows behind
him.

In these same woods are two very different groups of characters. The first is a band of fairies,
including Oberon, the fairy king, and Titania, his queen, who has recently returned from India to
bless the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. The second is a band of Athenian craftsmen
rehearsing a play that they hope to perform for the duke and his bride. Oberon and Titania are at
odds over a young Indian prince given to Titania by the prince’s mother; the boy is so beautiful
that Oberon wishes to make him a knight, but Titania refuses. Seeking revenge, Oberon sends his
merry servant, Puck, to acquire a magical flower, the juice of which can be spread over a
sleeping person’s eyelids to make that person fall in love with the first thing he or she sees upon
waking. Puck obtains the flower, and Oberon tells him of his plan to spread its juice on the
sleeping Titania’s eyelids. Having seen Demetrius act cruelly toward Helena, he orders Puck to
spread some of the juice on the eyelids of the young Athenian man. Puck encounters Lysander
and Hermia; thinking that Lysander is the Athenian of whom Oberon spoke, Puck afflicts him
with the love potion. Lysander happens to see Helena upon awaking and falls deeply in love with
her, abandoning Hermia. As the night progresses and Puck attempts to undo his mistake, both
Lysander and Demetrius end up in love with Helena, who believes that they are mocking her.
Hermia becomes so jealous that she tries to challenge Helena to a fight. Demetrius and Lysander
nearly do fight over Helena’s love, but Puck confuses them by mimicking their voices, leading
them apart until they are lost separately in the forest.

When Titania wakes, the first creature she sees is Bottom, the most ridiculous of the Athenian
craftsmen, whose head Puck has mockingly transformed into that of an ass. Titania passes a
ludicrous interlude doting on the ass-headed weaver. Eventually, Oberon obtains the Indian boy,
Puck spreads the love potion on Lysander’s eyelids, and by morning all is well. Theseus and
Hippolyta discover the sleeping lovers in the forest and take them back to Athens to be married
—Demetrius now loves Helena, and Lysander now loves Hermia. After the group wedding, the
lovers watch Bottom and his fellow craftsmen perform their play, a fumbling, hilarious version
of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. When the play is completed, the lovers go to bed; the fairies
briefly emerge to bless the sleeping couples with a protective charm and then disappear. Only
Puck remains, to ask the audience for its forgiveness and approval and to urge it to remember the
play as though it had all been a dream.

Themes: Love difficulty, Dreams, Jealousy

 The Merchant of Venice

Summary:

Antonio, a Venetian merchant, complains to his friends of a melancholy that he cannot explain.
His friend Bassanio is desperately in need of money to court Portia, a wealthy heiress who lives
in the city of Belmont. Bassanio asks Antonio for a loan in order to travel in style to Portia’s
estate. Antonio agrees, but is unable to make the loan himself because his own money is all
invested in a number of trade ships that are still at sea. Antonio suggests that Bassanio secure the
loan from one of the city’s moneylenders and name Antonio as the loan’s guarantor. In Belmont,
Portia expresses sadness over the terms of her father’s will, which stipulates that she must marry
the man who correctly chooses one of three caskets. None of Portia’s current suitors are to her
liking, and she and her lady-in-waiting, Nerissa, fondly remember a visit paid some time before
by Bassanio.

In Venice, Antonio and Bassanio approach Shylock, a Jewish moneylender, for a loan. Shylock
nurses a long-standing grudge against Antonio, who has made a habit of berating Shylock and
other Jews for their usury, the practice of loaning money at exorbitant rates of interest, and who
undermines their business by offering interest-free loans. Although Antonio refuses to apologize
for his behavior, Shylock acts agreeably and offers to lend Bassanio three thousand ducats with
no interest. Shylock adds, however, that should the loan go unpaid, Shylock will be entitled to a
pound of Antonio’s own flesh. Despite Bassanio’s warnings, Antonio agrees. In Shylock’s own
household, his servant Launcelot decides to leave Shylock’s service to work for Bassanio, and
Shylock’s daughter Jessica schemes to elope with Antonio’s friend Lorenzo. That night, the
streets of Venice fill up with revelers, and Jessica escapes with Lorenzo by dressing as his page.
After a night of celebration, Bassanio and his friend Gratiano leave for Belmont, where Bassanio
intends to win Portia’s hand.

In Belmont, Portia welcomes the prince of Morocco, who has come in an attempt to choose the
right casket to marry her. The prince studies the inscriptions on the three caskets and chooses the
gold one, which proves to be an incorrect choice. In Venice, Shylock is furious to find that his
daughter has run away, but rejoices in the fact that Antonio’s ships are rumored to have been
wrecked and that he will soon be able to claim his debt. In Belmont, the prince of Arragon also
visits Portia. He, too, studies the caskets carefully, but he picks the silver one, which is also
incorrect. Bassanio arrives at Portia’s estate, and they declare their love for one another. Despite
Portia’s request that he wait before choosing, Bassanio immediately picks the correct casket,
which is made of lead. He and Portia rejoice, and Gratiano confesses that he has fallen in love
with Nerissa. The couples decide on a double wedding. Portia gives Bassanio a ring as a token of
love, and makes him swear that under no circumstances will he part with it. They are joined,
unexpectedly, by Lorenzo and Jessica. The celebration, however, is cut short by the news that
Antonio has indeed lost his ships, and that he has forfeited his bond to Shylock. Bassanio and
Gratiano immediately travel to Venice to try and save Antonio’s life. After they leave, Portia
tells Nerissa that they will go to Venice disguised as men.

Shylock ignores the many pleas to spare Antonio’s life, and a trial is called to decide the matter.
The duke of Venice, who presides over the trial, announces that he has sent for a legal expert,
who turns out to be Portia disguised as a young man of law. Portia asks Shylock to show mercy,
but he remains inflexible and insists the pound of flesh is rightfully his. Bassanio offers Shylock
twice the money due him, but Shylock insists on collecting the bond as it is written. Portia
examines the contract and, finding it legally binding, declares that Shylock is entitled to the
merchant’s flesh. Shylock ecstatically praises her wisdom, but as he is on the verge of collecting
his due, Portia reminds him that he must do so without causing Antonio to bleed, as the contract
does not entitle him to any blood. Trapped by this logic, Shylock hastily agrees to take
Bassanio’s money instead, but Portia insists that Shylock take his bond as written, or nothing at
all. Portia informs Shylock that he is guilty of conspiring against the life of a Venetian citizen,
which means he must turn over half of his property to the state and the other half to Antonio. The
duke spares Shylock’s life and takes a fine instead of Shylock’s property. Antonio also forgoes
his half of Shylock’s wealth on two conditions: first, Shylock must convert to Christianity, and
second, he must will the entirety of his estate to Lorenzo and Jessica upon his death. Shylock
agrees and takes his leave.

Bassanio, who does not see through Portia’s disguise, showers the young law clerk with thanks,
and is eventually pressured into giving Portia the ring with which he promised never to part.
Gratiano gives Nerissa, who is disguised as Portia’s clerk, his ring. The two women return to
Belmont, where they find Lorenzo and Jessica declaring their love to each other under the
moonlight. When Bassanio and Gratiano arrive the next day, their wives accuse them of
faithlessly giving their rings to other women. Before the deception goes too far, however, Portia
reveals that she was, in fact, the law clerk, and both she and Nerissa reconcile with their
husbands. Lorenzo and Jessica are pleased to learn of their inheritance from Shylock, and the
joyful news arrives that Antonio’s ships have in fact made it back safely. The group celebrates its
good fortune.

Themes: Friendship, Revenge

Symbols: The Pound of Flesh

 Othello
Summary:

Othello begins on a street in Venice, in the midst of an argument between Roderigo, a rich man,

and Iago. Roderigo has been paying Iago to help him win Desdemona's hand in marriage. But
Roderigo has just learned that Desdemona has married Othello, a general whom Iago
begrudgingly serves as ensign. Iago says he hates Othello, who recently passed him over for the
position of lieutenant in favor of the inexperienced soldier Michael Cassio.

Unseen, Iago and Roderigo cry out to Brabanzio that his daughter Desdemona has been stolen by
and married to Othello, the Moor. Brabanzio finds that his daughter is indeed missing, and he
gathers some officers to find Othello. Not wanting his hatred of Othello to be known, Iago leaves
Roderigo and hurries back to Othello before Brabanzio sees him. At Othello’s lodgings, Cassio
arrives with an urgent message from the duke: Othello’s help is needed in the matter of the
imminent Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Not long afterward, Brabanzio arrives with Roderigo and
others, and accuses Othello of stealing his daughter by witchcraft. When he finds out that Othello
is on his way to speak with the duke, Brabanzio decides to go along and accuse Othello before
the assembled senate.

Brabanzio’s plan backfires. The duke and senate are very sympathetic toward Othello. Given a
chance to speak for himself, Othello explains that he wooed and won Desdemona not by
witchcraft but with the stories of his adventures in travel and war. The duke finds Othello’s
explanation convincing, and Desdemona herself enters at this point to defend her choice in
marriage and to announce to her father that her allegiance is now to her husband. Brabanzio is
frustrated, but acquiesces and allows the senate meeting to resume. The duke says that Othello
must go to Cyprus to aid in the defense against the Turks, who are headed for the island.
Desdemona insists that she accompany her husband on his trip, and preparations are made for
them to depart that night.

In Cyprus the following day, two gentlemen stand on the shore with Montano, the governor of
Cyprus. A third gentleman arrives and reports that the Turkish fleet has been wrecked in a storm
at sea. Cassio, whose ship did not suffer the same fate, arrives soon after, followed by a second
ship carrying Iago, Roderigo, Desdemona, and Emilia, Iago’s wife. Once they have landed,
Othello’s ship is sighted, and the group goes to the harbor. As they wait for Othello, Cassio
greets Desdemona by clasping her hand. Watching them, Iago tells the audience that he will use
“as little a web as this” hand-holding to ensnare Cassio (II.i.169).

Othello arrives, greets his wife, and announces that there will be reveling that evening to
celebrate Cyprus’s safety from the Turks. Once everyone has left, Roderigo complains to Iago
that he has no chance of breaking up Othello’s marriage. Iago assures Roderigo that as soon as
Desdemona’s “blood is made dull with the act of sport,” she will lose interest in Othello and seek
sexual satisfaction elsewhere (II.i.222). However, Iago warns that “elsewhere” will likely be with
Cassio. Iago counsels Roderigo that he should cast Cassio into disgrace by starting a fight with
Cassio at the evening’s revels. In a soliloquy, Iago explains to the audience that eliminating
Cassio is the first crucial step in his plan to ruin Othello. That night, Iago gets Cassio drunk and
then sends Roderigo to start a fight with him. Apparently provoked by Roderigo, Cassio chases
Roderigo across the stage. Governor Montano attempts to hold Cassio down, and Cassio stabs
him. Iago sends Roderigo to raise alarm in the town.

The alarm is rung, and Othello, who had left earlier with plans to consummate his marriage, soon
arrives to still the commotion. When Othello demands to know who began the fight, Iago feigns
reluctance to implicate his “friend” Cassio, but he ultimately tells the whole story. Othello then
strips Cassio of his rank of lieutenant. Cassio is extremely upset, and he laments to Iago, once
everyone else has gone, that his reputation has been ruined forever. Iago assures Cassio that he
can get back into Othello’s good graces by using Desdemona as an intermediary. In a soliloquy,
Iago tells us that he will frame Cassio and Desdemona as lovers to make -Othello jealous.

In an attempt at reconciliation, Cassio sends some musicians to play beneath Othello’s window.
Othello, however, sends his clown to tell the musicians to go away. Hoping to arrange a meeting
with Desdemona, Cassio asks the clown, a peasant who serves Othello, to send Emilia to him.
After the clown departs, Iago passes by and tells Cassio that he will get Othello out of the way so
that Cassio can speak privately with Desdemona. Othello, Iago, and a gentleman go to examine
some of the town’s fortifications.

Desdemona is quite sympathetic to Cassio’s request and promises that she will do everything she
can to make Othello forgive his former lieutenant. As Cassio is about to leave, Othello and Iago
return. Feeling uneasy, Cassio leaves without talking to Othello. Othello inquires whether it was
Cassio who just parted from his wife, and Iago, beginning to kindle Othello’s fire of jealousy,
replies, “No, sure, I cannot think it, / That he would steal away so guilty-like, / Seeing your
coming” (III.iii.37–39).

Othello becomes upset and moody, and Iago furthers his goal of removing both Cassio and
Othello by suggesting that Cassio and Desdemona are involved in an affair. Desdemona’s
entreaties to Othello to reinstate Cassio as lieutenant add to Othello’s almost immediate
conviction that his wife is unfaithful. After Othello’s conversation with Iago, Desdemona comes
to call Othello to supper and finds him feeling unwell. She offers him her handkerchief to wrap
around his head, but he finds it to be “[t]oo little” and lets it drop to the floor (III.iii.291).
Desdemona and Othello go to dinner, and Emilia picks up the handkerchief, mentioning to the
audience that Iago has always wanted her to steal it for him.

Iago is ecstatic when Emilia gives him the handkerchief, which he plants in Cassio’s room as
“evidence” of his affair with Desdemona. When Othello demands “ocular proof” (III.iii.365) that
his wife is unfaithful, Iago says that he has seen Cassio “wipe his beard” (III.iii.444) with
Desdemona’s handkerchief—the first gift Othello ever gave her. Othello vows to take vengeance
on his wife and on Cassio, and Iago vows that he will help him. When Othello sees Desdemona
later that evening, he demands the handkerchief of her, but she tells him that she does not have it
with her and attempts to change the subject by continuing her suit on Cassio’s behalf. This drives
Othello into a further rage, and he storms out. Later, Cassio comes onstage, wondering about the
handkerchief he has just found in his chamber. He is greeted by Bianca, a prostitute, whom he
asks to take the handkerchief and copy its embroidery for him.

Through Iago’s machinations, Othello becomes so consumed by jealousy that he falls into a
trance and has a fit of epilepsy. As he writhes on the ground, Cassio comes by, and Iago tells him
to come back in a few minutes to talk. Once Othello recovers, Iago tells him of the meeting he
has planned with Cassio. He instructs Othello to hide nearby and watch as Iago extracts from
Cassio the story of his affair with Desdemona. While Othello stands out of earshot, Iago pumps
Cassio for information about Bianca, causing Cassio to laugh and confirm Othello’s suspicions.
Bianca herself then enters with Desdemona’s handkerchief, reprimanding Cassio for making her
copy out the embroidery of a love token given to him by another woman. When Desdemona
enters with Lodovico and Lodovico subsequently gives Othello a letter from Venice calling him
home and instating Cassio as his replacement, Othello goes over the edge, striking Desdemona
and then storming out.

That night, Othello accuses Desdemona of being a whore. He ignores her protestations, seconded
by Emilia, that she is innocent. Iago assures Desdemona that Othello is simply upset about
matters of state. Later that night, however, Othello ominously tells Desdemona to wait for him in
bed and to send Emilia away. Meanwhile, Iago assures the still-complaining Roderigo that
everything is going as planned: in order to prevent Desdemona and Othello from leaving,
Roderigo must kill Cassio. Then he will have a clear avenue to his love.

Iago instructs Roderigo to ambush Cassio, but Roderigo misses his mark and Cassio wounds him
instead. Iago wounds Cassio and runs away. When Othello hears Cassio’s cry, he assumes that
Iago has killed Cassio as he said he would. Lodovico and Graziano enter to see what the
commotion is about. Iago enters shortly thereafter and flies into a pretend rage as he “discovers”
Cassio’s assailant Roderigo, whom he murders. Cassio is taken to have his wound dressed.

Meanwhile, Othello stands over his sleeping wife in their bedchamber, preparing to kill her.
Desdemona wakes and attempts to plead with Othello. She asserts her innocence, but Othello
smothers her. Emilia enters with the news that Roderigo is dead. Othello asks if Cassio is dead
too and is mortified when Emilia says he is not. After crying out that she has been murdered,
Desdemona changes her story before she dies, claiming that she has committed suicide. Emilia
asks Othello what happened, and Othello tells her that he has killed Desdemona for her
infidelity, which Iago brought to his attention.

Montano, Graziano, and Iago come into the room. Iago attempts to silence Emilia, who realizes
what Iago has done. At first, Othello insists that Iago has told the truth, citing the handkerchief as
evidence. Once Emilia tells him how she found the handkerchief and gave it to Iago, Othello is
crushed and begins to weep. He tries to kill Iago but is disarmed. Iago kills Emilia and flees, but
he is caught by Lodovico and Montano, who return holding Iago captive. They also bring Cassio,
who is now in a chair because of his wound. Othello wounds Iago and is disarmed. Lodovico
tells Othello that he must come with them back to Venice to be tried. Othello makes a speech
about how he would like to be remembered, then kills himself with a sword he had hidden on his
person. The play closes with a speech by Lodovico. He gives Othello’s house and goods to
Graziano and orders that Iago be executed.

Themes: Jealousy

Symbols: The Handkerchief

The handkerchief symbolizes different things to different characters. Since the handkerchief was
the first gift Desdemona received from Othello, she keeps it about her constantly as a symbol of
Othello’s love. Iago manipulates the handkerchief so that Othello comes to see it as a symbol of
Desdemona herself—her faith and chastity.
 Christopher Marolwe

The Tragical history of doctor Faustus

Summary:

Doctor Faustus, a well-respected German scholar, grows dissatisfied with the limits of traditional
forms of knowledge —logic, medicine, law, and religion —and decides that he wants to learn to
practice magic. His friends Valdes and Cornelius instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his
new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Despite Mephastophilis’s
warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells the devil to return to his master, Lucifer, with an
offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for 24 years of service from Mephastophilis. Meanwhile,
Wagner, Faustus’s servant, has picked up some magical ability and uses it to press a clown
named Robin into his service.

Mephastophilis returns to Faustus with word that Lucifer has accepted Faustus’s offer. Faustus
experiences some misgivings and wonders if he should repent and save his soul; in the end,
though, he agrees to the deal, signing it with his blood. As soon as he does so, the words “Homo
fuge,” Latin for “O man, fly,” appear branded on his arm. Faustus again has second thoughts, but
Mephastophilis bestows rich gifts on him and gives him a book of spells to learn. Later,
Mephastophilis answers all of his questions about the nature of the world, refusing to answer
only when Faustus asks him who made the universe. This refusal prompts yet another bout of
misgivings in Faustus, but Mephastophilis and Lucifer bring in personifications of the Seven
Deadly Sins to prance about in front of Faustus, and he is impressed enough to quiet his doubts.

Armed with his new powers and attended by Mephastophilis, Faustus begins to travel. He goes
to the pope’s court in Rome, makes himself invisible, and plays a series of tricks. He disrupts the
pope’s banquet by stealing food and boxing the pope’s ears. Following this incident, he travels
through the courts of Europe, with his fame spreading as he goes. Eventually, he is invited to the
court of the German emperor, Charles V (the enemy of the pope), who asks Faustus to allow him
to see Alexander the Great, the famed fourth-century b.c. Macedonian king and conqueror.
Faustus conjures up an image of Alexander, and Charles is suitably impressed. A knight scoffs at
Faustus’s powers, and Faustus chastises him by making antlers sprout from his head. Furious, the
knight vows revenge.

Meanwhile, Robin, Wagner’s clown, has picked up some magic on his own, and with his fellow
stablehand, Rafe, he undergoes a number of comic misadventures. At one point, he manages to
summon Mephastophilis, who threatens to turn Robin and Rafe into animals (or perhaps even
does transform them; the text isn’t clear) to punish them for their foolishness.

Faustus then goes on with his travels, playing a trick on a horse-courser along the way. Faustus
sells him a horse that turns into a heap of straw when ridden into a river. Eventually, Faustus is
invited to the court of the Duke of Vanholt, where he performs various feats. The horse-courser
shows up there, along with Robin, a man named Dick (Rafe in the A text), and various others
who have fallen victim to Faustus’s trickery. But Faustus casts spells on them and sends them on
their way, to the amusement of the duke and duchess.

As the 24 years of his deal with Lucifer come to a close, Faustus begins to dread his impending
death. He has Mephastophilis call up Helen of Troy, the famous beauty from the ancient world,
and uses her presence to impress a group of scholars. An old man urges Faustus to repent, but
Faustus drives him away. Faustus summons Helen again and exclaims rapturously about her
beauty. But time is growing short. Faustus tells the scholars about his pact, and they are horror-
stricken and resolve to pray for him. On the final night before the expiration of the twenty-four
years, Faustus is overcome by fear and remorse. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. At
midnight, a host of devils appears and carries his soul off to hell. In the morning, the scholars
find Faustus’s limbs and decide to hold a funeral for him.

Themes: Power as a Corrupting Influence

Symbols: Blood plays multiple symbolic roles in the play. When Faustus signs away his soul, he
signs in blood, symbolizing the permanent and supernatural nature of this pact.