Studying English Literature

G.B. Shaw’s Freedom actually belongs to one of the series of radio talks delivered by him in 1935 on the B.B.C. As it was intended for the larger circles in their capacity as listeners, the lecture seems to be free from theoretical jargons. But Shaw can be very much deceptive in what he says. For, behind his homour lies the satire of the contemporary social condition. Not only that, his simple talk was actually a denunciation of the conventional and capitalist view of freedom. Politically Shaw conformed to democratic socialism, a variant of Marxism, according to which the society should try to reach the socialist political condition gradually by the democratic means. The concept of freedom, which Shaw satirises, was the fundamental principle of Enlightenment, and he does so because in a capitalist society, according to the Marxian view, freedom of the individual can never be realised. Shaw begins the essay with the proposition that a person can be called completely free in such a cond...

Sonnet No. 1 Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show, That She, dear She, might take some pleasure of my pain, Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know, Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain, I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe; Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain, Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burn’d brain. But words came halting out, wanting Invention’s stay; Invention, Nature’s child, fled stepdame Study’s blows; And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way. Thus, great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes, Biting my truand pen, beating myself for spite, ‘Fool’ said my Muse to me, ‘look in thy heart and write’. (from Astrophil and Stella) L ike other creative persons of the period, Sidney also came under the influence of sonneteering. Thus a series of sonnets addressed to a single lady, expressing and r...

It was perhaps sheer pedantic myopia that, when Jeremy Collier published his essay A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage in 1698, he made Congreve a particular target of his criticism. That Collier had a case is undeniable, but he forgot that a true artist does have as sincere obligation to society as a churchman. Had he waited before publishing his essay till the production of The Way of the World ( 1770), he could have perhaps understood that truth; for, in the play The Way of the World Congreve seems to understand the “immorality and profaneness” of a society, upon the matrices of which Restoration plays were made. He was seriously thinking of an alternative pattern of behaviour and an alternative set of codes of conduct. The very title of the play, The Way of the World points to the ‘way’ the hero and heroine (and by implication the spectators) should adopt in order to come out of the grip of the fashionable society. The whole story is an illustratio...

On the second half of the 11th century William, the Duke of Normandy, built up an army with the help of the local warlords and invaded England and defeated the English king Harold II to become the king in the year 1066. This incident, known as the Norman Conquest, was destined to exercise a profound influence on the social, political and religious life of the English people; in fact, this incident changed the course English history and culture. The immediate consequence of the Conquest was the introduction of feudalism, a new kind of aristocracy. Along with this came French as the normal language of the aristocracy, which continued to be used at least for two hundred years. English, however, remained the language of the mass, of the uncultivated. Again, all the important positions in the church were given to the French clergy, who would use Latin as their vernacular and as the language for learning. This provided the much-needed stimulus to the intellectual life of the English people, ...

In introducing the pilgrims of The Canterbury Tales in the General Prologue , Chaucer draws upon the traditional themes of “estates satire”. The “estates satires”, common through out the medieval Europe, aimed at giving an analysis of society in terms of hierarchy, social profession and morality. The Prologue differs from the standard patterns of “estates satire” in a number of significant ways, but the model remains none-the-less crucial. The most fundamental difference occurs in Chaucer’s presentation of a naïve and gullible narrator, Chaucer the pilgrim. This projection of a fictional narrator poses some problems of perspective regarding the presence of absolute moral judgement in the poem. But at the same time, it allows Chaucer to remain a member and an observer as well in the pilgrimage so that he can exploit the gaps for irony and humour without pronouncing absolute moral judgements. However, Chaucer is a secular writer whose attitude to life is based on the principle of a br...

In The Way of the World, his last comedy, Congreve seems to come to realise the importance for providing an ideal pair of man and woman, ideal in the sense that the pair could be taken for models in the life-style of the period. But this was almost impossible task, where the stage was occupied by men and women, sophisticated, immoral, regardless of the larger world around them, and preoccupied with the self-conceited rhetoric as an weapon to justify their immoral activities within a small and restricted area of social operation. Congreve could not avoid this, and for this, he had to pave his way through the society by presenting a plot which, though complicated enough for a resolution, aims at the ideal union between the hero and heroine—Mirabell and Millament. They emerge as the triumphant culmination of the representative characters of the whole period, of course not types, for they are real enough to be human. Congreve endowed his hero and heroine with all the qualities typical of t...

“It was a saying of Zoroaster,” in his Oration Pico Della Mirandola recalls, “that the soul is winged and that when the wings drop off she falls again into the body, and then after his wings have grown again sufficiently, she flies back to heaven.” Towards the end, after his headlong fall into the body, Faustus’s wings seem to grow again. But the body proves too heavy for the wings, with his pride and failure to repent, to lift him up to heaven. He has lived out his twenty four years of “prophit and delight/of power, of honour, of omnipotence” in exchange of his soul to Lucifer. Now, the circle in which he conjures has shrunk into the smallest circle in a series of gradual degradation—from astronomy through cosmography and statecraft to finally his private chamber. Yet he is provided with good counselling of the good Angel and the Old Man. But he is trapped by the metaphor of Lucifer as “sovereign Lord” with Mephistophilis as emissary empowered to punish a traitor. He can only conceive...

By transplanting the Faust-myth into the English Morality framework, Marlow tapped the hidden potentials of both the myth and dramatic form. But Doctor Faustus was to be overdetermined thematically by its surrounding culture. This culture found in the myth of Icarus and Prometheusian archetype of betrayal, that is, human aspirations repeatedly colliding with some implacable and impersonal forces, social, political, natural or divine, and consequently yielding to frustration, common to human psyche. The Renaissance philosophy and art highlighted the perplexing juxtaposition of the angelic human being, a creature of reason under the paternal benevolence of God side by side with a human being as a beast of appetite subject to God’s terrible wrath. In philosophy, on the one side were the spiritual reconstructions, which emerging from Ficino’s neo-Platonism and Pico Della Mirandola’s Oration suggest that human being can exalt themselves by reason and love into something like divinity....