Alliterative verse (accentual metre) – generally, a four-stress line, which is divided into two half

lines of two stresses each: the first or second stress, or both, must alliterate with the third; the fourth
is usually nonalliterative

in OE alliterative verse all vowels are considered to alliterate

CHRISTIAN LITERATURE OF ANGLO-SAXON ENGLAND

• verse paraphrases and translations of Biblical stories

• lives of saints
• sermons and doctrinal materials
• more personal poems

The Dream of the Rood

It appears in the Vercelli manuscript. A fragment of the poem, written in runes, can be found on the
8th century Ruthwell Cross.

Warriors society
The most important of human relationships is that between the warrior (the thane) and his lord.

Germania (98 A.D.) by Tacitus

• comitatus – the bond between the lord and his thane

• among other things, comitatus ensures that neither the lord not the warrior leaves the field of
battle before the other

KINSHIP – relationship between male relatives

• if one of his kinsmen had been killed by someone, a man had the special duty of either
killing the killer or demanding from him the payment of wergild („manprice”)
• blood feud – a very long fight between two families or groups in which each group kills
members of the other group in oreder to punish the group for earlier murders

HEROIC POETRY
• Beowulf – found in manuscript of the late 10th/ late 11th century (Beowulf manuscript)
• the time of its composition is not clear
• the action is set in the 6th century

BOASTING
• indicates the importance of fates
• FATE = WYRD, one of the Norns, female beings who rule the destiny of gods and men
• boasting is already testing fate

CHRISTIAN VS. PAGAN MOTIVES IN BEOWULF

• Hrothgar's minstrel sings a Story of Creation
• Grendel is said to be a descendant of Cain
• the sword with which Beowulf kills Grendel's mother is decorated with the Old Testament
sceny of the destruction of the Giants by the Flood
• Beowulf is buried with pagan ceremonies
The Wanderer - an elegy from the Exeter Book

UBI SUNT motif (motive)

Where are (all those who were before us)?

Deor's Lament
• Stanzas of 'Deor' end with a refrain, which is unusual for Old English poetry
• The refrain may be translated into modern English as “That evil ended, so also may this!”

The Wife's Lament - a lonely wife is exiled from her home, living in a cave and blaming her absent
husband for her fate

The Husband's Message - is an anonymous Old English poem, 53 lines long and found in the Exeter
Book. The poem is cast as the private address of an unknown first-person speaker to a wife,
challenging the reader to discover the speaker's identity and the nature of the conversation, the
mystery of which is enhanced by a burn-hole at the beginning of the poem.

The Ruin - follows The husband's Message in Exeter Book

Battle of Maldon - describes a defeat of the East – Saxon militia by Vikings in 991

NORMAN CONQUEST
Battle of Hastings 1066 – fought between the Norman army of William the Conqueror and the
English army led by Harold Godwinson
BAYEUX TAPESTRY (C.1070)

University of Oxford – late 11th century

University of Cambridge – 1209

Layamon's Brut (c.1200)

• verse chronicle, mixing rhyme and alliteration
• based on the French Roman de Brut by Wace
• Roman de Brut based on the Latin Historia Regnum Brittaniae (History of the kings of
Britain, c.1130 – 1136) by Geoffrey of Monmouth:
Kings of Britain descended from Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas the Trojan (Virgil's Aeneid)

King Arthur, mortaly wounded during the battle with the forces of Mordred, is taken to the island of
Avalon.

According to Geoffrey's history, Stonehenge was built by the magic powers of Merlin.

The 12th century France:

• The French old national epics – the chansons de geste (Beowulf)
• are replaced by chivalric romances
romance – a work written in the “romance language” - that is, in French language

Fighting against monsters

Courtly love
Roman de la Rose
begun by Guillaume de Lorris (c. 1230)
completed by Jean de Meun (c. 1275)
• As a dream allegory the poem proved profoundly influential over a succession of Middle
English poems
• Started a new tradition of literature concerning love which can be both pure and sensual

Chivalric code
• A squire (giermek) was ceremonially dubbed by his liege – lord (more often his king) and
became a knight
• swore a binding oath of loyalty to his lord
• pledged himself:
1) to protect the weak (a group which included all women)
2) to right wrongs
3) to defend the Christian faith

The earliest romance:

Tristan and Isold by an Anglo – Norman poet named Thomas

Chrétien de Troyes
(French poet, late 12th century)
Perceval - the first velnacular (macierzysty) story of the quest for the Holy Grail

The subjects of English romances:

• the 'matter' of Rome – included the whole of antiquity, not only Rome
• the 'matter' of France – the tales of Charlemagne and his knights or stories concerned with
the struggle against the advancing Saracens (Muslims)
• the 'matter' of Britain – Arthurian stories or tales dealing with later knightly heroes

King Horn (c. 1225)

Princess Rymenhild

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

the author is anonymous, he lived in the north – west Midlands of England in the second half of the
14th century

The Gawain poet

• The manuscript which preserves Sir Gawain contains 3 other poems
• All the four poems are examples of the so – called “Alliterative Revival” (c. 1350 – 1500)
• Pearl
• Cleanness
• Patience

'Ricardian poets' (after Richard II, who reigned from 1377 to 1399)
• Gawain poet
 • Geoffrey Chaucer
• John Gower
• William Langland
1. Common features:
• mainly narrative
• sophistication of style
• stress on moral and theological point of stories

Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1342 – 1400)

1340s – Black Death (bubonic plague)
Chaucer's more important works:
• The Book of the Duchess (c. 1368) – dream allegory; death of the Duchess of Lancaster
• The House of Fame (c. 1380) – dream allegory
• Troilus and Criseyde (c. 1385) – not a dream allegory
• The Legend of Good Women (unfinished) – dream vision; the first English work which uses
heroic couplets (two lines rhyming AA, BB, CC etc.; aiambic pentameter)
• The Canterbury Tales - Pilgrims going to the shrine of Thomas Becket of Canterbury
1. Characters represent the three “estates of the realm”: nobility, clergy and commoners
2. The thirty pilgrims are each to tell two tales on the way to the shrine and two on the way
back
3. 120 tales in total, but only 24 found after Chaucer's death
4. Variety of genres: courtly romance, saints' lives, moral fables, rude jokes, beast fables,
sermons, penitential stories
5. Irony used for the first time in English literature
The Knight embodies the spirit of chivalry
The Parson represents the true mission of the Church
The Ploughman represents the blessedness of holy poverty

The tales are in separate sections or fragments: there are 10 fragments, each containing from 1 to 6
tales

FRAGMENT 1:
• General Prologue
• The Knight's Tale (chivalric romance)
• The Miller's Tale
• The Reeve's Tale
• The Cook's Tale
“swyved for her sustenance” - “she fucked for a living”

John Gower (c. 1330 – 1408)

(is said to be personal friend of Chaucer)

Gower's main work:

Confessio Amantis (''The Lover's Confession'')
• 30 000 – line poem in octosyllabic couplets
• The Prologue details the numerous failings in the three states of the realm
• The main section uses the structure of the Christian confession, with the narrator, Amans
(the Lover) confessing his sins against love to Genius, Venus's chaplain
• In the course of this confession a multitude of individual tales are told as exempla
William Langland (c. 1332 – c. 1386)

Langland's main work:

Piers Plowman
• a dream – vision (of Long Will) in an alliterative style
• survives in three versions known as A, B, C texts
• Long Will falls asleep and has a vision of a tower set upon a hilland a fortress in a deep
valley
• between these symbols of heaven and hell is a ''fair field full of folk'', representing the world
of mankind
• Piers enters the narrative now and then as a kind of alter ego of Will
• FIRST PART – ways of reforming contemporary England: ideal of ''Do Well''
• SECOND PART – search for ''Do Well'', ending with a dissillusioned view of society
• THIRD PART – history of man's salvation, ending with the constrast between the idealistic
beginnings of the Church under St Peter (identified now with Piers), and its present corrupt
condition

Sir Thomas Malory (c. 1416 – 1471)

Malory's main work:

Le morte d'Arthur (finished c. 1470, published 1485)
• Malory gathered together a variety of Arthurian tales in English and French
• created the final version of the matter of Britain romance
• emphasis on chivalry as a kind of moral code of honour
• Malory traces the Arthurian story from the King's begetting, birth, education and assumption
of power to his and his court's tragic decay
• the narrative devotes long sections to the careers of various knights of the Round Table

William Caxton (c. 1415 – c. 1492)

set up a printing press near Westminster Abbey in 1476. Printing contributed to standarization of
English
Caxton printed Malory's Le morte d'Arthur and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Arthur is said to be buried in Glastonbury

1485 – the end of the Middle Ages, beginning of the Renaissance; the end of the War of the Roses

1485 – Accesion of Henry Tudor ( the House of Lancaster)

The Protestants Reformation begun in 1517 with Martin Luther's attacks on the Church

1521 – publishing of the Martin Luther's Passional Christi and Antichristi (Pope as the Antichrist
signing divulgances?)

Henry VIII established himself as both the head of the state and the head of the Church in 1533.
• the lands of the Catholic Church were taken by the Crown and sold off
• shrines were ransacked for gold and jewels
Sir Thomas More (1478 – 1535) (he was accused of treason and executed)

More's most important work:

Utopia (1516, written in Latin)
• depicts a fictional island society and its religious, social and political customs
• 'utopia' is a Greek pun on ou-topos (no place) and eu-topos (good place)
• Utopia contrasts the chaotic social life of European states with the perfectly orderly,
reasonable social arrangements of Utopia
• Utopia is governed by an elected Prince
• in Utopia there is communal ownership of land, private property does not exist, and
therefore there is no poverty
• every household has two slaves. The slaves are either from other countries or are Utopean
criminals
• men and women are educated alike
• clothes are the same for the men and women
• sex before marriage is prohibited and is punished by a lifetime of enforced celibacy
• marriage is preceded by mutual naked inspection in the presence of a respected elder
• adultery is punished by enslavement
• religious tolerance (with the exception of atheists)

THE MESSAGE OF THE BOOK

• the name of the traveller describing the island is Raphael Hythloday

• Raphael may allude to archangel Raphael, God's messanger
• in the last sentence of the book, the narrator, More, claims, that he cannot agree with
everything that the traveller (Raph) has related
• Hythloday is a Greek compound meaning “expert in nonsense”
• Utopia is a forerunner of the Utopian literary genre, in which ideal societies and perfect
cities are detailed
• in 20th century the genre gave way to its opposite – dystopia
• dystopia is the vision of the society that is the opposite of Utopia. A dystopian society is one
in which the conditions of life are miserable, characterized by poverty, oppression, violence
and disease

Nineteen Eighty – Four by George Orwell (1949)

The Italian Renaissance started in 14th century

Petrarch (1304 – 1374) (father of humanism)

Il Canzoniere (Song Book) – popularized the sonnet form. Its central theme is the poet's unrequited
love for Laura.

Petrarchan tradition of love poetry:

• The lady is distant, unattainable
• The poet approaches her from time to time only to be rejected, at which point he laments his
misfortune, accuses her with a mixture of love and resentment, and finds continouing
 inspiration from his frustration

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503 – 1542) (the first successful translator and imitator of Petrarch)

Wyatt used the Italian sonnet form (ABBA ABBA “problem” CDE CDE “solution”
“Whoso list to hunt” (Who cares to hunt)

Henry Howard Earl of Surrey (1517 – 1547)

• Howard popularized the English sonnet form (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG)
• Wyatt and Howard were first printed together in 1557, in which is now known as Tottel's
Miscellany, in which two modern verse – forms reached print in England for the first time
• Sonnet
• an unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse), first used in Howard's translation of a
fragment of Virgil's Aeneid

Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586)

Elizabethan Age 1558 – 1603

• Sidney is the author of the first sonnet sequence in English, titled Astrophel and Stella,
written in 1580s and published in 1591

Sir Edmund Spenser (1552 – 1599)

Spenser is the author of the sonnet sequence titled Amoretti (1595) (it consists of 89 sonnets)
• A rhyming pattern based on the fusion of both Italian and the English rhyming scheme:
ABAB BCBC CDCDC EE
• Unlike in traditional sonnets, the love presented is happy and successful one
• Sonnet 75

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

Shakespeare is the author of a sequence of sonnets consisting of 154 sonnets, published in 1609

The cycle seems to fall into 3 groups:

1. Sonnets from 1 to 126 are addressed to (or concern) a young man, who is known as 'Fair
Youth'
• the first 17 sonnets in this group are called procreation sonnets
• from sonnets 18 (“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?”) the speaker wants to
immortalise the youth in his poetry
2. Sonnets 127 – 152 are addressed to a woman commonly known as 'Dark Lady', because
her hair is said to be black and her skin 'dun'
3. The last 2 of the sonnets are free adaptations of a classical Greek poem having no addressee.
 RENAISSANCE NARRATIVE LITERATURE

Sir Edmund Spenser (1532 – 1599)

The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596)

• an allegorical work
• Queen Elizabeth I is Gloriana, the Faerie Queene
• The word 'fairyland' used for the first time
• The Knights of the queen undertake a series of adventures
• Each of the knights represents allegorically one virtue
• Spenser completed only 6 books out of intended 12
• modern political settlement shown as legitimized by reference to the mythical “Trojan” past

Sir Philip Sidney (1554 – 1586)

The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (1590 (published), completed c. 1580)

• A romance told in 5 prose acts, which are divided by verse – singing competitions between
shepherds
• The story of two princes shipwrecked on the shore of Arcadia
• They fall in love with the daughters of a local kings
• The name 'Pamela' appears for the first time in the work

EARLY DRAMA

Mystery plays – represented events from the Bible

Miracle plays – represented episodes from the lives of the saints

• Morality plays – allegories in which the protagonist is met by personifications of various

moral traits
• The Summoning of Everyman (late 15th century)

Rediscovery of classical plays around the middle of 16th century

• comedies by Terence and Plautus – comedies of intrigue, full of stereotyped characters
• tragedies by Seneca – sought to dramatize the danger of disputed succession to the throne

• The first purpose-built permanent theatre was constructed in 1576 by James Burbage. It was
called “The Theatre”
• The Globe was built in 1599
• There were then 5 other big theatres in London of about 200 000 inhabitants
• Plays were performed rarely for more than 10 days

Shakespeare's Globe was reopened to the public in 1997

• In the Elizabethan times there were developed companies of actors under the patronage of
powerful or wealthy individuals
 • There were usually 10 to 15 full members in such a group with 3 or 4 boys (they played the
females)
• No women were allowed to appear on the stage
• Shakespeare, who was also a leading actor of the time, belonged to a group called Lord
Chamberlain's Men

Thomas Kyd (1558 – 1594)

• The Spanish Tragedy or Hieronimo is Mad Again (between 1582 and 1592)
• It established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy
• The main character is Hieronimo, a father determined to revenge the murder of his son

Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593)

• Belonged to the so-called university-wits, a group of late 16th century English playwrights
who were educated at the universities
• Wrote 7 plays
• Pioneered the use of blank verse in drama
• Killed in what appeared to be a drunken fight
The tragical History of Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) (full title of Faustus)

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

• Born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564 to a successful middle-class glove-maker

• Attended local grammar school
• In 1582 he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her
• Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and
playwright
• His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558 – 1603) and James I (ruled 1603 –
1625)
• Shakespeare retired to Stratford and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two

ARGUMENTS AGAINST SHAKESPEARE'S AUTHORSHIP OF THE PLAYS

• No university education
• No letters or signed manuscripts written be Shakespeare survive
• His three-paged will (only signed by him) lists no books, journals or plays
• The will makes no mention of the valuable shares in the Globe Theatre

FOUR PERIODS IN SHAKESPEARE'S WRITING CAREER

• FIRST PERIOD: until the mid 1580s (not sure it's right)
comedies influenced by Roman models (Comedy of Errors)
history plays in the popular chronicle tradition (Richard III)
tragedy Titus Andronicus
• SECOND PERIOD: began in about 1595 with the tragedy Romeo and Juliet and ended with
the tragedy of Julius Ceasar in 1599
1. greatest romantic comedies
A Midsummer Night's Dream
• THIRD PERIOD: c. 1600 – 1608
1. “problem plays”: Measure for Measure
2. greatest tragedies (hamartia – a tragic flow or error of judgment)
Hamlet (error of hesitation)
Othello (jealousy, error of judgment)
King Lear (error of judgment)
Macbeth (crime)
• FOURTH PERIOD: after 1608
romances / tragicomedies (The Tempest)