英国文学史习题第二、三部分

Part II The Renaissance I Fill in the blanks 1 The 16th century in England was a period of the breaking up of relations and the establishing of the foundations of 2 broke off with the Pope dissolved all the monasteries and abbeys in the country confiscated their lands and proclaimed himself head of 3 The old English aristocracy having been exterminated in the course of the War of a new nobility totally dependent on King s power come to the fore 4 Absolute monarchy in England reached its summit during the reign of 5 was the first to introduce the sonnet into English literature In Elizabethan time the three greatest sonnet writers are William Shakespeare and 6 Hamlet Othello King Lear and are generally regarded as Shakespeare s four great tragedies 7 During the twenty two years of his literary work Shakespeare produced plays narrative poems and sonnets 8 The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus is one of s best plays And it is him who made the principal vehicle of expression in drama 9 is often referred to as the poets poet 10 Pope described Francis Bacon as the of mankind Bacon s works may be divided into three classes the the the works II Find out the match from column B for each item in column A I Find out the author and his work A B 1 Thomas More a Gorge Green 2 Edmund Spenser b Eupheus 3 John Lyly c The Fairy Queen 4 Marlowe d Utopia 精品文库 欢迎下载2 5 Robert Greene e The Jew of Malta II The relationship with Hamlet A B 1 Ghost a friend 2 Claudius b mother 3 Queen Gertrude c father 4 Horatio d girlfriend 5 Polonius e girlfriend s father 6 Ophelia f uncle III The character in the play A B 1 The Merchant of Venice a Desdemona 2 As You Like It b Cordelia 3 Hamlet c Juliet 4 King Lear d Ophelia 5 Othello e Portia 6 Romeo and Juliet f Rosalind III Define the literary terms listed below 1 Renaissance 1 The word meaning rebirth is commonly applied to the movement or period which marks the transition from the medieval to the modern in Western Europe 2 In the usual sense of the word Renaissance suggests especially the 14th 15th 16th and early 17th centuries the dates differing for different countries 3 It is best to regard the Renaissance as the result of a new emphasis upon and a new combination of tendencies and attitudes already exiting stimulated by a series of historical events The new humanistic learning resulted from the rediscovery of classical literature is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious intellectual side since it was to the treasures of classical culture and to the authority of classical writers that the people of the Renaissance turned for inspiration 精品文库 欢迎下载3 2 sonnet 1 It is a lyric poem of 14 lines with formal rhyme scheme expressing different aspects of a single thought mood or feeling sometimes resolved or summed up in the last lines of the poem 2 The form originated from medieval Italy in about 1230 1240 and reached its peak with the Italian poet Petrarch In the first half of the 16th century Thomas Wyatt introduced the Italian sonnet into England and established English sonnet The most famous English sonnet sequences appeared in Elizabethan times including Sir Philip Sidney s Astrophil and Stella 1591 Edmund Spenser s Amoretti 1595 and Shakespeare s Sonnets 1593 1598 3 The two main forms of the sonnet are the Patrarchan or Italian and the English or Shakespearean The former consists of an octave or eight line stanza and a sestet or six line stanza The octave has two quatrains rhyming abba abba the first quatrain presents the theme the second develops it The sestet is built on a few different rhymes arranged cddcee cdecde cdccdc or cdedce the first three lines exemplify or reflect on the theme and the last three lines bring the whole poem to a unified close Philip Sidney s sonnets are excellent examples of this style in the English language 4 The English sonnet consists of three quatrains each rhymed differently with a final independently rhymed couplet that makes an effective unifying climax to the whole The rhyme scheme is abab cdcd efef gg 3 humanism 1 Broadly this term suggests any attitude which tends to exalt the human elements or stress the importance of human interests as opposed to the supernatural divine elements or as opposed to the grosser animal elements 2 In a more specific sense humanism suggests a devotion to those studies supposed to promote human culture most effectively in particular those dealing with the life thought language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome In literary history the most important use of the term is to designate the revival of classical culture which accompanied the Renaissance 精品文库 欢迎下载4 4 tragedy 1 Tragedy is concerned with the harshness and apparent injustice of life 2 It usually recounts an important and causally related series of events in the life of a person of significance The events would culminate in trials and catastrophes of a hero who falls down from power and whose eventual death leads to the downfall of others Often the hero s fall from happiness is due to a weakness in his character a weakness such as the excessive pride of Faustus the overweening ambition of Macbeth or the uncontrolled jealousy of Othello which brings self destruction 3 The tragic action aroused feelings of awe in the audience who often leave the theatre with a renewed sense of the seriousness and significance of human life The word catharsis is often used to describe the audience s feelings It means the purging from the mind of the feelings of pity and fear the play has aroused 5 essay 1 The term refers to literary composition devoted to the presentation of the writer s own ideas on a topic and generally addressing a particular aspect of the subject Often brief in scope and informal in style the essay differs from such formal expository forms as the thesis dissertation or treatise 2 The development of the form may be considered a result of the Renaissance emphasis on the individual which fostered exploration of one s inner self in relation to the outside world 6 classicism 1 As a critical term classicism is a body of doctrine thought to be derived from or to reflect the qualities of ancient Greek criticism Classicism stands for certain definite ideas and attitudes mainly drawn from the critical utterances of the Greeks and Romans or developed through an imitation of ancient art and literature These include restraint restricted scope dominance of reason sense of form unity of design and aim clarity simplicity balance attention to structure and logical organization chasteness in style severity of outline moderation self control intellectualism decorum respect for tradition imitation conservation and good sense IV Answer the following questions 1 Give a summary about the English literature during the Renaissance period 精品文库 欢迎下载5 Answer a English literature in the Renaissance Period is usually regarded as the highlight in the history of English literature In the second period of English Renaissance that is in Elizabethan Period English literature developed with a great speed and made a magnificent achievement b The greatest and most distinctive achievement of Elizabethan literature is the drama Thus appeared a group of excellent dramatists They are John Lyly Thomas Kyd George Peele Robert Greene Christopher Marlowe William Shakespeare and Ben Johnson c Next to the drama is the lyrical poetry Elizabethan poetry is remarkable for its variety its freshness its youthfulness and its romantic feeling A group of great poets appeared such as Thomas Wyatt Henry Howard Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser In that time writing poetry became a fashion and Queen Elizabeth herself was also a poet d Besides drama and poetry there were also some prose writings though not so many such as Thomas More s Utopia which may be thought as the first literary masterpiece of the English Renaissance and Francis Bacon s Essays which makes the author one of the best essayists in English literature 2 Give a brief comment on The Merchant of Venice Answer a Of Shakespeare s earlier comedies The Merchant of Venice is certainly the most outstanding one in which Shakespeare creates tension ambiguity a self conscious and self delighting artifice that is at once intellectually exciting and emotionally engaging The sophistication derives in part from the play between high outgoing romance and dark forces of negativity and hate b The traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassano to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty wit and loyalty and to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew but later especially after the holocaust committed by the Nazi Germany during the Second World War it is very difficult to see Shylock as a conventional evil figure And many people today tend to regard the play as a satire of the Christian hypocrisy and their false standard of friendship and love their 精品文库 欢迎下载6 cunning ways of pursuing worldliness and their unreasoning prejudice against Jews 3 Read Bacon s Of Studies carefully and use it as an example to illustrate Bacon s writing style Answer Bacon s essays are famous for their brevity compactness and powerfulness Yet there is an obvious stylistic change in his Essays The sentences in the first edition are charged and crowded with symmetries They are composed in a rather affected way However the final edition not only enlarges the range of theme but also brings forth the looser and more persuasive style The essays are well arranged and enriched by biblical allusions metaphors and cadence V For each of the quotation listed below please give the title of the literary work from which it is taken then give a brief analysis of them 1 To be or not to be that is the question Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles And by opposing end them To die to sleep With this regard their currents turn awry And lose the name of action Answer 1 This quotation is taken from Hamlet 2 Analysis Hamlet is urged by the ghost to seek revenge for his father s foul and most unnatural murder But Hamlet has none of the single minded blood lust of the earlier revenges It is not because he is incapable of action but the cast of his mind is so speculative so questioning and so contemplative That action when it finally comes seems almost like defeat diminishing rather than adding to the stature of the hero Trapped in a nightmare world of spying testing and plotting and apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father s death Hamlet is obliged to 精品文库 欢迎下载7 inhabit a shadow world to live suspended between fact and fiction language and action His life is one of constant role playing examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger For such a figure soliloquy is a natural medium a necessary release of his anguish and some of his questioning monologues possess surpassing power and insight which have survived centuries of being torn from their context But our interest is not only in Hamlet the tragic hero for this play but also Shakespeare s most detailed exposure of a corrupted court an unweeded garden in which there is nothing but a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours By revealing the power seeking the jostling for place the hidden motive the courteous superficialities that veil lust and guilt Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy and treachery and general corruption at the royal court 2 Shall I compare thee to a summer s day Thou art more lovely and more temperate So long as men can breathe or eyes can see So long lives this and this gives life to thee Answer 1 This poem is taken from Shakespeare s Sonnets 2 Analysis Though they are well with the general tradition of Elizabethan sonnet cycles Shakespeare s sonnets are in several ways unique The principal person addressed by the poet is not a woman but a young man the dark lady when she appears is vastly different from the Delias and Celias of Petrarchan convention More importantly the depths of moral and aesthetic contemplation in Shakespeare s sonnets are far more profound than we find in other Elizabethan cycle With 3 exceptions 99 126 and 154 Shakespeare uses the sonnet in the popular English form first fully developed by Shakespeare The couplet usually ties the sonnet to one of the general themes of the series leaving the quatrains free to develop the poetic 精品文库 欢迎下载8 intensity which makes the separate sonnets so memorable Shakespeare s sonnets constitute a vast landscape of metaphor surprising often because it seems to anticipate the atmosphere of some of the later plays In this landscape are some vividly recognizable figures the poet the friend the Dark Lady and more indefinite the rival poet Part III The Period of Revolution and Restoration I Fill in the blanks 1 The 17th century was a period when impeded the further development of capitalism in England and the could no longer bear the sway of 2 There were religious division and confusion and a long bitter struggle between the people s Parliament and the Throne fighting against the who helped the king 3 After s death monarchy was again restored 1660 It was called the period of the 4 The Glorious Revolution in meant three things the supremacy of the beginning of and the final triumph of the principle of 5 The Puritans believed in of life Under the powerful influence of them the theatres were closed in And the Revolution Period is also called because the English Revolution was carried out under a religious cloak 6 Restoration created a literature of its own that was often and but on the whole and The most popular genre in the literature of the Restoration was that of whose chief aim was to entertain the licentious aristocrats 7 Donne entered the church in 1615 where he rose rapidly to be Dean of The first thing to strike the reader is Donne s extraordinary and penetrating The next is the which marks certain of the lighter poems and which represents a conscious reaction from the extreme of woman 精品文库 欢迎下载9 encouraged by the Petrachan tradition 8 Milton opposed the party and gave all his energies to the writing of dedicated to the people s liberties 9 Paradise Lost consisting of books tells how rebelled against God and how and were driven out of Eden And it presents the author s view in an form 10 In Revolution Period towers over his age as William Shakespeare towers over the Elizabethan Age and as Chaucer towers over the Medieval Period 11 During the civil war and commonwealth there were two leaders in England Cromwell the man of action and the man of thought 12 Milton and Bunyan represented the extreme of English life in the 17th century One gave us the only epic since the other gave us the only great 13 Bunyan s most important work is written in the old fashioned medieval form of and dream In the book Bunyan gives a vivid and satirical description of which is the symbol of London at the time of Restoration 14 The literature of the middle and later periods of the 17th century cultivated in the poetry of in the prose writing of and also in the plays and literary criticism of II Define the literary terms listed below 1 three unities Three rules or absolutes of 16th 17th century Italian and French drama broadly adapted from Aristotle s Poetics the unity of time which limits a play to a single day the unity of place which limits a play s setting to a single location and the unity of action which limits a play to a single story line 2 conceit 1 It comes from the Italian concetto meaning concept or idea and was uses in Renaissance poetry to mean a precise and detailed comparison of something more remote or abstract with something more present or concrete and often detailed through a chain of metaphors or similes 精品文库 欢迎下载10 2 Two types of conceit are often distinguished by specific names The Petrarchan conceit is a type of figure used in love poems that had been novel and effective in the Italian poet Petrarch but became hackneyed in some of his imitators among the Elizabethan sonneteers The metaphysical conceit is a characteristic figure in John Donne and other metaphysical poets of the 17th century The metaphysical poets exploited all knowledge for the vehicle of these figures and their comparisons whether succinct or expanded were often novel and witty and at their best startlingly effective 3 The metaphysical conceit fell out of favor in the 18th century when it came to be regarded as strained and unnatural But with the great revival of interest in the metaphysical poets during the early decades of the 20th century a number of modern poets exploited this type of figure At the beginning of The Love of J Alfred Prufrock for example T S Eliot compares the evening to a patient etherized upon a table 3 masque An elaborate form of court entertainment a mixture of drama music song and dance developed in the Renaissance Italy and transported to England during Elizabethan times The speaking characters who were often courtiers wore masks Comus 1634 by John Milton is probably the most important masque in English literature 4 pastoral A literary work dealing with and often celebrating a rural world and a way of life lived close to nature Pastoral denotes subject matter rather than form hence the terms pastoral lyric pastoral ode pastoral elegy pastoral drama pastoral epic and pastoral novel A poetic example of English pastoral poetic conventions occurs in Christopher Marlowe s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love 5 allegory 1 It is a fictional literary narrative or artistic expression that conveys a symbolic meaning parallel to but distinct from and more important than the literal meaning Allegory has 精品文库 欢迎下载11 also been defined as an extended metaphor The symbolic meaning is usually expressed through personifications and other symbols Related forms are the fab