ENGLISH LITERATURE

The Anglo-Saxons
Some important dates that must be remembered are the following:
Ø Second half of 300 A.D.: the Roman conquerors left Britain because of the arrival of the
barbarians from the north. They were obliged to leave the island because the Roman Empire
wasn’t able to defend itself anymore.
Ø 410 A.D.: The withdrawal of the Romans is completed under emperor Honorius.
Ø 450 A.D.: the tribes of Angles, Saxons and Jutes conquered Britain.
Ø 476 A.D.: complete fall of the Roman Empire.
Ø 597 A.D.: a mission led by Rome helped the spread of Christianity in England.

The spread of Christianity

Under emperor Constantin, Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. In
597 A.D., as said, a mission led by Saint Augustin (who must not be confused with Augustin of
Hippo) spread the religion in the British Isles. We already had a form of Christianity, which was
principally followed by the Celts. However, the biggest part of the population was pagan. Because
of this, the Roman emperor considered that it was necessary to Christianise the people who lived
under the Roman colonies. The Celtic cross was a diffused symbol of Celtic Christianity in that
period.

The two names of Great Britain

“Britannia” was the name of the British Isles under the Roman Empire. It came from Latin, and it
meant “land of the Tattooed”. “England” was the name given by the Anglo-Saxons, and it meant
“land of Angles”.

The Anglo-Saxons
After the withdrawal of the Romans, three tribes invaded and conquered Great Britain: the Angles,
from Sweden; the Saxons, from north Germany; the Jutes, from Jutland (Denmark). Before these
tribes, Celtic people lived in the Isles (around 700 B.C.). When the conquerors arrived, they built
their villages in places which they considered as comfortable. Because of this, they avoided the
geographically complicated areas which were part of Wales, Scotland and Ireland. In fact, these
places where difficult places to live in, due to the conformation of the territory, which was mostly
made of mountains and stones.
The Celtic population escaped from the invaders, finding a refuge in these areas. This is why, in
places such as Wales, Ireland and Scotland, Celtic traditions are still present.

Old English period

“Old English” refers to German dialects spoken by Jutes, Angles and Saxons. The West-Saxon dialect
is considered the first standard written language in England, and it’s the language in which the first
literary works were written (see Beowulf). However, before the Christianisation of England, all the
literary works were oral, since people was not educated and couldn’t write nor read. It was not until
the arrival of Roman monks in the British Isles that oral works started to be written down. Among
them, Beowulf was one of the most important. However, since the monks who wrote down the
works were Christian, they tended to change some details of them, adding Christian elements where
once you could find pagan ones.
The end of old English occurs after the invasion of the Normans, who arrived in England in 1066. It
will be substituted by Middle English in 1150.

Literal genres
In Anglo-Saxon literature we can find five different types of genres: elegiac, poetry, religious,
riddles (indovinelli) and the prose.

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Riddles were popular in indigenous cultures as well, because they were also didactic and used to
teach people.
The Epic is a genre that deals with recollection of a glorious past in the national history of a country,
the praise of the brave deeds of heroes, the lament at their death. It is a heroic and military society,
but it also deals with supernatural and mythological events. The epic always includes a didactic aim.
The Elegy is a lament of an individual, a lyrical poem, generally in the form of a dramatic
monologue. An isolated speaker laments his loss of something: friendship, favour or past splendour.
The mood is melancholic, and it can be an individual’s loss rather than a collective story. The idea
of isolation in the culture of this historical period was the worst destiny that you could have. You
could not possibly survive on your own. Anglo-Saxon imagination was haunted by the possible
dissolution of the clan due to internal conflict or external attack.
In the plot of “Beowulf” (an epic) three heroic deeds are introduced: the defeat of the
monster Grendel, the killing of his mother and the killing of a fire-breathing dragon. The Christian
elements were added later, and the idea of a Christian God replaced the pagan idea of fate. We also
have changes from a clan-based system to a feudal society: king, baron, lords, vassals and servers,
and, at the lowest, slaves.
King Alfred wrote “The Anglo-Saxon Chronicles”, which are a very important historical text of this
period, and it gives us lots of information about those years.

“Beowulf”
“Beowulf” is part of the English epic, but the plot is set in Scandinavia. It’s part of the oral literature,
and it’s a poem (not a prose). As already said, it was written down by monks after the
Christianisation of England. It must also be noted, that it was written using the Latin alphabet, which
was introduced by saint Augustin, and not the runic one, which was used by the population only
for inscriptions. Thanks to the Christianisation, many gospel words where introduced from Latin to
OE.

• Plot
Beowulf is a warrior, a knight (in the poem he is called a “thane”). He belongs to the tribe of Geats,
who live in Geatsland, southern Sweden, and they have a king, Hygelac.
Beowulf decides to leave his country in order to help a population, the Danes, to fight a big monster,
Grendel, and its mother. The monster is half human, but he eats human flesh and he likes to ransack
villages and cities. Especially, he ransacks the mead-hall (“mead” = idromele), which is a place in the
centre of the village where people meet, drink and chat.
At the end of the poem, Beowulf succeeds in killing the monster and his mother. When he goes back
to Sweden, he becomes king of Geats. However, he needs to fight another enemy, a dragon, and he
will end up getting killed by it.

• Analysis
This piece of literature is a record of a pagan world, in which the loyalty to the family, to one king
and to the group was celebrated. The individual alone is considered as lost. There were bonds that
kept people together, and the lord had to make important decisions in order to protect the tribe.
There were also duties towards the lord and towards the guests, which were to be honoured. There
was a strong believe in fate, that couldn’t be defeated. Pagan world was different from the Christian
world also because of the glory that was to be sought in this life and not after death, according to
pagans. Brave deeds added to one’s glory in this world.
The poem is divided in two halves by a break or caesura, it is full of kenning, and there are no
rhymes. We can also find alliterations (repetitions of consonant sounds especially at the beginning
of several words or syllables that are close together), and assonances (repetition of vowel sound in
several words of parts of words). Each line has four stresses, two in the first part and the other two
in second part.

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• Beowulf defeats Grendel
In the first part of the text, it talks about the arrival of Grendel, who arrives in the mead-hall and
kills one of the soldiers. The words used here are quite harsh and crude. You see the monster tearing
the man apart and sucking at his veins. He eats huge parts of its flesh. What happens then, is that he
turns to another man and tries to eat him. However, the next warrior is Beowulf, who grabs the
monster by his hand. His grip is so strong that Grendel understands that he is not a normal man.
Grendel can’t run away. For the first time, he is afraid of a man.
Grendel is described as the upholder of evil (metaphor, line 11).
What happens then is that Beowulf grabs Grendel, who cannot move anymore. Other thanes come
in help and these men are described as “battle friends”. They come to bring “what aid they could”.
In the following scene, Grendel has been wounded (“flesh-framed”, so the flesh was showing, line
27). We have the description of the wound, in a very harsh way. This description of violence was
typical in epic literature. “To Beowulf the glory of this fight was granted” (Beowulf immediately
understands that he has won the fight against Grendel). Grendel runs away, he’s not dead yet. He
goes back to his den, which is down some slopes.
After the defeat of Grendel, just the day after, a song about Beowulf is composed. The following
passage describes this song. The monster has finally been defeated. “Beowulf’s prowess was praised in
song”. The song simply becomes the epic, the poem which nowadays we study.
The final part describes how oral poetry was composed, so it was composed soon after a certain
deed was accomplished by a hero (last 4 lines).

The Middle Age

The medieval romance
In this period the description of the characters in heroic poetry was more realistic and sterner (more
obscure), whereas the romance was more escapist and the marvellous and the supernatural didn’t
always have an aim, while in the epic they did: here in the romance they were just introduced
because of the new taste for marvellous. The romance was produced for its own sake. The epic, as
we already said, deals with the origin of a country or population. Fighting is necessary, whereas in
romance fighting becomes almost a sport, like in tournaments: it’s a matter of fiction, it is
stylised. Chivalry is often present in romances: it is the idea of a knight fighting for his lord: they
had to follow a code of behaviour, they should be an example of honour and courtesy. The romance
includes stories of knights that fight for principles.
“Romance” comes from the French word “romance” which means vernacular, the language spoken
by people (these works where in fact written in vernacular and not in Latin). There are three different
categories of romance, according to the matter they deal with:
Ø Matter of France (Charlemagne and his paladins, and the crusades);
Ø Matter of Britain (deals with King Arthur and the knights of the round table);
Ø Matter of Rome (episodes and events from the Aeneid).

Matter of Britain
In this period, in England three languages were spoken. French was the language of administration,
while English was the language of the population. The song of deeds (“La chanson des Gestes”) was
very popular both in Britain and France. It is about brave or heroic deeds made by romance’s heroes.
“La chanson de Roland” is a typical example of chanson des gestes, which is a poem in French and has
Christian themes inside of it. It presents the values a hero has to have (loyalty to the king, exaltation
of disinterested heroism, love for one’s country).
As to the matter of Britain, the first romances dealing with it were first written in French: “Roman de
brut” is the most famous example, written by a Norman, which tells the adventures of a character,
Brutus, who is thought of being one of the descendants of Enea, and he is the beginner of the dynasty
that develops to King Arthur and the knights. Later on, a version of this work called “Brut” will be
written, but the new element is that it was written in Middle English and not in French. So, “Brut”
is the first romance written in English.

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The most important one is, instead, “La morte d’Arthur”, which is in Middle English and was written
by Thomas Malory in 1470. It is a prose version of the Arthurian legend and it establishes itself as
the canonical version of King Arthur’s stories.
Another important example of romance is “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. It is a verse romance of
2500 alliterative lines, copied in 1400 ca. Alliteration is used to emphasise the importance of certain
words. The work’s plot talks about Gawain, who is one of the knights of the round table and who
also is Arthur’s nephew. The romance tells about the appearance of a mysterious green knight, who
issues a challenge to the knights, then accepted by Gawain. The romance tells about 1001 adventures
lived by the hero, after which Gawain wins the challenge. You can find the chivalry call expressed
at his best.
Finally, the dream poems are also very important. These works narrate a dream that the author has.
The medieval ones usually had allegorical meanings, so they represented the reality through
symbols. The allegories have the aim to teach people something about their lives.
For example, “Pearl” is a dream poem, allegorical, and it came to us in the same manuscript as
Gawain’s one. The plot turns around the narrator, who is looking for a lost jewel in the garden, but
while he is looking for it, he falls asleep and has a dream: a beautiful woman appears to him, and he
identifies this woman as Pearl, his dead daughter, who in the meantime has become a queen and
the bride of Christ. So, it is obviously allegorical. Pearl is the symbol of grace, beauty. When he tries
to reach and touch her, she disappears, and he wakes up. The dream is inspirational for the narrator.
“Piers Plowman” is another dream poem. It tells the story of a journey of Will in his quest for the true
Christian life and salvation. During this dream, Will meats Piers Plowman, who becomes his
spiritual guide. It is the first work where the church isn’t presented in a very positive way. The
Church of Rome seems like it has detached itself from its real Christian aim. “The Canterbury tales”
will show this growing criticism very well. The work is partially satirical, and it is also quite
allegorical. It also presents certain real details. The journey is one of the most frequent topos in
literature, because it usually represents life. In his journey, Will encounters abstract personifications:
Dowell, Dobet, Dobest, representing the three stages of good behaviours.

• “Sir Gawain and the green knight”

This is the extract of a romance written in the period of King Arthur. In this passage we have the
appearance of the green knight. He interrupts the banquet. A weird noise is described, a noise of a
person, and the king must interrupt his banquet to understand what is going on. This knight
appears, and he issues a challenge, carried out by sir Gawain. This passage describes the knight,
who is green from the top to the bottom. He’s almost a giant, he is handsome and strong, he is richly
dressed, so we also understand that he must be rich. He has many garments which are embroider
(line 37).
The appearance of the knight gives the opportunity to the knights of the round table to live
adventures which are also challenges. Gawain will have to face 1001 adventures in order to win this
challenge.

Medieval drama
It is another important genre of Middle Age. It has didactic aim, but it is also social and has a comedy
aim. Medieval drama represented was the beginning of drama, which becomes the most important
form of art during Renaissance. It is the root of drama and it was born in a very different context,
because it was born in the liturgy, in the mass, and had a religious role. It played the same role as
painting in Italy during the Renaissance. It was created because many people were uneducated, so
one had to find a way to teach people. In Italy they used visual art, because painting was used by
the Church. In England, this role was played by medieval drama.
The purpose was to communicate the teachings of religion in a simple and attractive way. What
happened is that, within the mass, when people read from the Bible or the gospel, some of these
parts (the nativity, the resurrection, etc.) were particularly suitable to be performed. Thus, on certain
occasions like Christmas or Easter, some parts were performed. People took different roles. Some

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moments were very dramatic, and they were performed. The mass per se can be considered as a
play between the priest and the believers, and there is also a script.
This was the beginning of liturgical drama. These dramatized parts became always more important:
people liked them, and they also were important because they helped people to learn new things.
Later on, they were performed either on carriages (pageants) or outside the church.
The earliest evidence of religious theatre in English goes back to 14th century, the first texts in
manuscript to 15th century.
The Eastern Trope is one of the scenes which were written and played in the church. The resurrection
of Jesus Christ was here transformed into the script of a play.

Miracle and mystery plays

Theatre began being brought outside the church in order to reach a wider part of the population.
Pageants were stages on wheels, where plays were performed. The pageants mark a point where the
performance of these plays passed into lay hands (mani laiche). Pageants were financed by the guilds,
so medieval corporations. They sponsored the plays that were probably written by local clerics. Each
guild was responsible for a wagon with its scene.
Miracle and mystery plays are the two first types of medieval dramas. They could cover different
topics, from the Ancient Testament to the New Testament.
The script of the plays was still in the hands of local clerics, and we have many plays which are
anonymous. They were usually included in a manuscript that only said the name of the city in which
they were written. They could be written both in a vernacular language and educated language.
What happened is that little by little these religious representations started including comic
situations, which weren’t part of religion. They were added only in order to entertain. The first
example we have is “The second Shepherd’s play”. The protagonist steals a sheep and hides it in order
not to be discovered. This creates a funny situation.
In many cases, mystery and miracle plays were contained in manuscripts, which were called of
cycles. They were anonymous and written in vernacular speech. “The second Shepherd’s play” is the
masterpiece of the cycle of Wakefield. As we said, these kinds of plays usually took inspiration from
the Old and the New Testament. As in these religious works, also here we have the description of a
nativity (in fact, in the plot we have the parody of the nativity). In the play, there is an episode which
is introduced only with an entertaining purpose. The protagonist is Mak, a sheep stealer. He steals
and hides a sheep, and so all the people come to look for the stolen lamb.

Morality plays
They normally don’t deal with parts or episodes of the Old or New testament, but they usually have
allegorical figures as characters. These allegorical figures are usually the representation of vices and
virtues. One mortality play that stands out is “Everyman”, written by an anonymous author.
Everyman represents the human kind. He deals with the battle of good and evil. Everyman is the
protagonist, and the play describes his journey from birth to death. He is almost at the end of his
journey, and he needs someone to accompany him towards death, but none of those who he
considered his best friends wants to (neither Fellowship or Goods, which are the allegorical
representation of material goods). Only Good Deeds and Knowledge comfort him and accompany
him to the tomb. This means that our richness will not be useful on the day of our death. Thus, this
represents a moral message. You should not spend your life devoting yourself to richness. You
should pursue a life of good actions, in order to be able to go to heaven. The aim was to educate
people who couldn’t read about these values.
Little by little, the secular episodes (lay episodes) are added into the miracle, mystery and morality
plays. In the secular plays, the characters become more humanised. You have realistic details
inserted into these plays, and they become more and more detailed. Medieval drama, which started
as religious art, becomes a moment of entertainment for people, so it didn’t have an educative aim
anymore.

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Interviews
They are morality plays where the realistic and comic details live together. The interviews were
offered as entertainment between the courses of a banquet between aristocrats. This signed the
transition from the medieval to the secular drama and became a way to entertain the public.
John Skelton’s “Magnfycence”, where the protagonist is tempted by vices and then he learns to follow
the advices of perseverance, is the first important example of interview we have. The main interest
here is the education of the prince, which is typically a Renaissance element (see, for example,
Machiavelli). The lesson here is moderation and measure. It had the aim to criticise the behaviour of
normal people.
Another example of interview is “The play called the four PP”. It is a very comic interview written by
John Heywood. The message conveyed here is a little bit misogynist. The pilgrim Palmer, the
Pardoner, the Pothecary and the Pedlar are the protagonists, and their names are defined by the jobs.
In the plot, they compete to tell the biggest lie. The Palmer is the judge of the competition. The
Pothecary tells the story of a miraculous cure; the Pardoner tells the story of a visit to Hell, saying
that he went there and met a woman neighbour, which was so crazy that, after her, Lucifer didn’t
want to host women in Hell anymore; the Pedlar wins by declaring that he has never seen a women
with a bad temper or losing her patience. He wins because this is a big lie for the time. This is why
it is very misogynist.

Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400)

He is considered as the Dante Alighieri of English literature, because he is the first who writes a long
poem mainly in verse, and he is the first to use Middle English. He somehow ennobles it. “The
Canterbury tales” is one of the most important works of English literature.
Chaucer was also a politician and he served with the English army in France and was also sent to
several missions in different continents. He spent many years in Italy, and because of this he was
very influenced by Italy and France in his works. Many sonneteers imitated him. His most original
contributions are those born from the impact with Italian culture.

“The house of fame” (1378 – 1380).

“The house of fame” is a dream poem. It is again an attempt to elevate Middle English, to see how far
it could go. The story tells about a man falling asleep. The narrator finds himself in a glass temple
with all the images of headers of the past. The story is a meditation on the nature of fame and how
much it will last.
“The parliament of fowls”
It is again a dream poem, and it has an allegorical message. Scipio is the protagonist, and he appears
to the narrator in a dream. In the dream, Nature (which is an allegorical figure) is gathering a
parliament of birds. Each bird will have to choose a mate. The birds in the play represent a hierarchy,
which goes from the upper class, the nobles, to the lower class. This work represents the medieval
society and the ideals that characterised it: in fact, in the medieval age, the general conception of a
society divided into a hierarchy was highly shared. People thought that it was not possible to change
their social situation, because each of us was born in a certain social class for a certain reason.
Whoever tried to change that, would suffer. The message conveyed is that the hierarchy is a law by
nature. It is a central idea of the medieval mind.

“Troilus and Crisade” (1382 – 1386)

The two main characters of this romance are Troilus and Crisade, two young man and woman whose
story is also narrated in many other works, such as the “Iliad” or in Boccaccio’s “Decameron”.
Chaucer’s romance, in fact, is mainly inspired by these two works, even if “Decameron” was the one
which had a major influence on it. However, “Decameron”’s tale could be considered more
misogynist that the work written by Chaucer.
The plot of “Troilus and Crisade” turns around the unfortunate love that these two lovers live. In fact,
at the beginning of the romance, they both are deeply in love. However, at a certain point Crisade’s
love disappears. Nevertheless, Troilus continues to love her. In Boccaccio’s tale (“Filostrato”), the

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moral of the story is that women cannot be trusted. In this romance, on the other hand, Crisade is
described as sincerer: in fact, at a certain point she also explains why she changed her mind. She is
a multi-faceted character. The message conveyed here is more realistic.
In addition to the dramatic part, Chaucer also inflects the sorrow by adding humorous parts.

”The Canterbury Tales” (1387)

”The Canterbury Tales” is a work composed by a frame and a series of stories contained in it. It is
highly inspired by Boccaccio’s “Decameron”. In fact, the “Decameron” has the exact same structure:
the protagonists, young men and women, gather together outside of Florence, trying to escape the
plague. In order to pass time, they start telling each other stories. In the same way as in the
“Decameron”, the stories told in Chaucer’s work are told in order to pass time.
However, it is also possible to notice some differences between the two works: for example, the
“Decameron”’s characters all belong to the same social class, while Chaucer’s work shows different
nuances of the middle class, also presenting the description of characters belonging to other levels
of the society, such as the knight (who belongs to the highest part of the society) and the ploughman
(who belongs to the lowest class of the society). We have a nun, a monk, a friar, a parson, a clerk, a
merchant, a haberdasher, a weaver, a dyer, a cook, a doctor of physic, a pardoner, a prioress, a knight
and a ploughman. However, it is not possible for us to find many other characters who don’t belong
to the middle class: in fact, nobles wouldn’t face a pilgrimage, because they wouldn’t accept to travel
with people of the middle class; on the other hand, people from the lowest part of the society
couldn’t afford such travels.
Chaucer’s work is mainly written in verse: the General Prologue (so the frame) and the prologues of
each story are written in iambic pentameter (also used by Shakespeare in his sonnets). The iambic
pentameter is the most common meter in english literature. In Chaucer’s work, the verses are made
of five iambs, which in English indicate an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable. The
aim is the meter, made of two syllables, one unstressed, the other one stressed. It gives a very specific
rhythm to the verse.
The plot starts in an inn (the Tabard Inn, in Southwark). It is spring, so the season of the year which
represents rebirth. In fact, the pilgrims are about to face a journey towards their purification and
renewal. The host of the inn suggests that each pilgrim tells four story each, two during the travel
towards st. Thomas Becket’s tomb (the destination of their journey) and two on their way back. Since
the pilgrims are a total of 30, we should have 120 tales. In reality, the work only presents 24 stories:
it was, in fact, unfinished.
The destination of the journey, as said, is st. Thomas Becket’s shrine in Canterbury. He was
considered the saint patron of England, because he was one of the most important figures of the
battle between the power of the church and the power of the monarchy. In England, he is considered
a martyr.
The fact that the journey starts in an inn has also an allegorical meaning: the pilgrims leave one of
the most mundane places in the village, a place of vice and luxury, in order to reach Canterbury, the
holy city.
In the work, Chaucer himself is one of the pilgrims. However, Chaucer “auctor” and Chaucer “agens”
are very different. In fact, Chaucer agens shows sympathy to the pilgrims who travel with him,
whereas Chaucer auctor is characterised by a strong irony (note that also in Dante’s “Divina
Commedia” we can find a Dante auctor and a Dante agens: this shows the strong influence that the
Italian literature had on Chaucer).
Chaucer uses rhyming couplets (rima baciata). He is the first to use the iambic pentameter in the
period of the middle age (while the first poet to use it in the modern english period is Thomas Wyatt).
”The Canterbury Tales” is a mix of realistic and allegorical elements: the journey per se represents
men’s life, from the material and human world to the celestial one. However, during this allegorical
journey, Chaucer introduces many different realistic elements, used not only to describe but also to
strengthen his satire against the members of the clergy and the middle class. Through the telling of
many different tales, the work is able to give us numerous examples of the medieval fiction: we can
find fables, romances, and tales with religious themes.

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 [It must be remembered that fables and fairy tales are two completely different genres:
fables have animals as protagonists, which are allegorical representations of vices and
virtues; fairy tales, on the other hand, present many magical or surrealistic elements.
However, they both have a moral at the end.]

As said, many characters from different levels of social classes are described in the story. One of
them is the Pardoner, called like this because he sells pardons for the Church. Selling pardons during
the Middle Age was a very common way used by the Church in order to make some money: people
would buy it with the promise that all their sins would be cancelled and that they would go to
heaven. The Pardoner also sells relics, that he tells people once belonged to famous Saints. The
Pardoner’s figure is particularly mean and hideous: he is a very proud man and he is very confident.
However, one night, after having drank, he admits that all the relics he sells are fake. After this, a
querelle starts and he is strongly criticised. Chaucer’s description of this men clearly moves a critique
against the Church during Middle Age.
As already explained, each pilgrim’s story is about a personal event that is connected to them. The
Pardoner’s story tells about three men who are looking for death in order to kill her. Instead, they
find a treasure. Because of the fact that they all want to keep the money, they fight each other, killing
themselves.
Another important character is the Wife of Bath. She is a strong, emancipated woman, who has
already participated to three pilgrimages. She has travelled around the world, visiting places such
as Rome and Santiago De Compostela.
The Wife of Bath is very good at making clothes (she’s even better than the women who live and
work in the Flanders, a country which once was famous for their ability in making clothes). She is
described as a very religious woman: she’s always at the church, and she is the first one who steps
on the altar every mass. In fact, no other woman wants to go ahead her, and whoever dares to, will
be a victim of her rage. However, the Wife of Bath seems to be very rich, too (her clothes are
described as very expensive and of good quality: her hose is scarlet red and very tight, and she has
a wide hat, as big as a shield, and a big cloak, which allows her to cover her hips).
The text in which she is described also underlines that the Wife of Bath has had many lovers in her
life: in fact, she has been married five times, and all of her husbands married her “at the church’s
door” (meaning that each of them probably died, and she didn’t have to get divorce). She also had
many relationships in her youth.
She sits easily on the back of the horse (meaning that her legs are wide spread, making her gown go
up and showing her thighs). Another important characteristic is that she has a big, round and red
face, and she has a gap between her front teeth (in the Middle Age, it was a common idea that women
who had a gap between their teeth would be very lascivious). In the text, Chaucer says that the Wife
of Bath was “skilfully wandering by the way”, meaning that she was used to get out of the path
(obviously in a metaphorical way). She loves to laugh and joke and she knows many remedies to
the sorrows of love. Her emancipation is particularly evident in her look, her body, her clothes and
her past life. The tale told by the Wife of Bath tells about the rape of a young lady, which was abused
by a knight. He is then judged by a jury of women, and he is given an exemplar punishment. The
interesting fact about this tale is the topic, which talks about violence against women, and the way
the knight is judged and punished.
Another important topic in ”The Canterbury Tales” in anticlericalism, which is often present in the
description of characters. Especially, we can find many characters who are linked to the religious
world and who are part of the clergy: the already analysed Pardoner, the Monk, the Prioress, the
Friar and the Parson.
Apart from the Parson, who is described as a good Christian man, who leads the gospel choir and
gives to the poor people, living himself in poverty too, all the other religious characters are described
with negativity and a strong criticism.

8
The Friar is a man who has married many women in his life. He hasn’t respected the vote of chastity.
He likes frequenting land owners, noble women and rich people in general, and he likes to surround
himself with luxurious people and things. In conclusion, he doesn’t lead the life a friar should lead.
The Monk is described as a very virile man, who likes going haunting with horses and greyhounds.
He likes to eat, he likes to dress up, he likes to haunt and he likes to spend money. Again, his
character is not coherent with the religious values he should base his life on.
In the end, we have the Prioress. She is the nun in charge of the convent. She appears more as a noble
lady than a nun. She is very elegant, and she tries to act like a real lady. Initially, she appears to be
very sensitive, but she cares more about animals than she does about men. The Prioress could be
compared to Alessandro Manzoni’s character la Monaca di Monza. In fact, la Monaca di Monza is a
lady who was forced by her family to take the vows. It was a very common procedure during the
Middle Age: the first born would take the lead of the family. All the other children would either be
forced to take the vows or would have to marry the son or daughter of another family in order to
create alliances. It is most likely that the Prioress was forced by her family to take the vows, even if
she probably would have preferred becoming part of the upper class.
Her description tells us that the Prioress is not a very religious character: in fact, she sings a lot, she
likes to tell stories, she tries to speak French and she wears very elegant clothes. Chaucer insists a
lot on her clothing: in particular, the Nun is wearing a bracelet made of coral beads with a pendant
attached to it, which says “amor vincit omnia”, so “love always wins”. It is however obvious that the
love the bracelet is referring to is not the love of God, but the love between two human beings.

The Lollardy
The Lollardy was a movement which spread in England in the fourteenth century, so the period in
which Chaucer was alive. It was an historical movement which attacked the power of the Church,
at the time seen as very corrupted. The Lollards wanted to reform the Church, and they also arrived
to criticise many of its dogmas. In a certain way, they were the anticipators of Luther and the
reformation of the Church under Henry VIII and the Lutherans. The dogma of transubstantiation
was also strongly criticised by the Lollards.
In the fourteenth century, England lived the spread of the bubonic plague and of the Black Death.
By the Lollards, these and many other plagues were seen as a punishment sent by God to the clergy,
which wasn’t able to give the right example to the population.
The Lollardy is somehow referred to in Chaucer’s anticlericalism.

The Renaissance
The period of the Renaissance starts after the end of the last medieval war, the War of the Roses: it
was a war fought between the York and the Lancaster that lasted thirty years. It was won by the
Lancaster, and their son, Henry, who then married a Tudor, was the beginner of the new dynasty.
Henry VII will be in fact the first king in the period of the Renaissance.
In this era, we have a revival of the values of the classic period. Renaissance develops during
Humanism: men aren’t interested in God anymore, but they see themselves as the centre of the
universe. The centre of interest in knowledge and philosophy is now the man.

The sonnet
A new kind of literature developed, inspired by the models of the past. Especially, English poets
were inspired by the Sicilian school in Italy. A particular type of poem, called sonnet, developed in
Italy and was soon of inspiration for the English literature.
Obviously, it is possible to find some differences between the Italian and the English sonnet. They
are both made of fourteen lines. However, the Italian sonnet is made of two stanzas of four lines
(quatrains) and two stanzas of three lines (tercets). The English sonnet (introduced in England by
Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard) is instead composed by three quatrains and a finishing couplet.
At the beginning of Renaissance, many Italian sonnets were taken and translated in English by Wyatt
and Howard. The pattern was similar to the original one. The ideal transmitted by the sonnets,
however, was very different.

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Petrarch’s sonnets were the ones which mainly inspired Wyatt and Howard. In his sonnets, the poet
used to talk about the famous courtly love, l’amor cortese, which was one of the main topics of poetry
in that period in Italy. The protagonist of his work is usually Laura, the woman he loves, ported as
an angel-woman, closer to God than to men. She represents in fact a link between men and God: she
must lead humans on the right path, in order to help them reach the Divine.
In the Italian sonnet, the poet’s idea is argued during the whole composition: the author poses many
questions in order to reach a conclusion, a solution. In the English sonnet, on the other hand, the
problem is presented in the first three stanzas, while in the finishing couplet the author finds the
way to solve his problems.
Thomas Wyatt was the poet which invented the English sonnet. As many other authors, he was not
only a poet, but also a politician and a diplomat. He in fact worked for Henry VIII. At Henry VIII’s
court, he met a woman, Anne Boleyn, with whom he fell in love. However, the king fell in love with
that woman, too. Because of that, Wyatt was obliged to forget his love for her. In this situation,
poetry becomes an instrument to express the poet’s disappointment and frustration. In fact, as it can
be seen in the following sonnet, with Thomas Wyatt poetry isn’t used anymore to talk about a
perfect, angelic woman and the love the poet feels for her. In the English sonnet, the woman becomes
more realistic and the poet uses poetry to express his sorrow and sufferance.

Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind,

But as for me, hélas, I may no more.
The vain travail hath wearied me so sore,
I am of them that farthest cometh behind.
Yet may I by no means my wearied mind
Draw from the deer, but as she fleeth afore
Fainting I follow. I leave off therefore,
Sithens in a net I seek to hold the wind.
Who list her hunt, I put him out of doubt,
As well as I may spend his time in vain.
And graven with diamonds in letters plain
There is written, her fair neck round about:
Noli me tangere, for Caesar's I am,
And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.

Here, the protagonist isn’t Laura anymore, but Anne Boleyn. The sonnet expresses the frustration of
Wyatt, who had to give up on the woman he loved. The protagonist of the sonnet is a hind, which
finds itself in the middle of a deer haunt. The metaphor here represented is men who chase a woman
to get her. However, the author declares that he will not be a part of this haunt, because he cannot.
The rhyme scheme is ABBA, ABBA, CDDC, EE.
Wyatt completely changes the theme of Petrarch’s sonnet. Laura becomes a real woman; the poet
loves her but can’t have her because of someone else.
Henry Howard is the second sonneteer considered very important: he is the one who created the
blank verse, so the iambic unrhymed pentameter.

The Tudors
The Tudor dynasty started with Henry VII, who took the power after the end of the War of Roses.
Henry’s son then took the throne, becoming Henry VIII, one of the most important sovereigns of
this period. Henry VIII was a renaissance scholar. During his life, he got married six times (divorced,
beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived).
Henry VIII’s biggest deed was to break the relationship with the Church of Rome: this happened
after that Henry VIII asked the Pope to divorce from Catherine of Aragon, a Spanish catholic queen,
in order to marry Ann Boleyn. When the Pope declined the permission, Henry VIII decided to take
distance from the Pope and the Church (breach with Rome).
The breach with Rome is very important for the English reformation that took place under Henry
VIII. By breaking the relationship with Rome, the king created a new English Church, called
Anglican. The monarch became not only the head of the reign, but also the head of the church.
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The fight between the Church of Rome and the English monarchy was very rough before Henry
VIII: as we have already seen, Thomas Becket fought side by side with the Church of Rome, in order
to limit the power of the monarch. With the new king, the power of the monarchy over the church
became clear.
With this breach, many reformations were made: monasteries were suppressed, the church’s riches
were confiscated, many art treasures were destroyed.
After the death of Henry VIII, his son Edward VI took the throne. His mother was Jane Seymour,
Henry’s third wife. Edward VI continued his father’s reformation. However, Henry’s reformation
had only been a political reformation; on the other hand, Edward changed the church also on a
theological level. He issued the Protestant Reformation, and published the “English book of prayers”,
which replaced the Latin missal. The shape and the furnishing of the churches were changed: they
now looked poorer, simpler. This was done because simplicity and poverty were an allegorical
representation of purity. They meant purification of the ritual and the worship. No visual richness
was left inside the churches.
The successor of Edward VI was Mary Tudor, also known as Bloody Mary, called like this due to
her persecution against the Protestants. Mary Tudor was in fact Catherine of Aragon’s daughter.
Thus, she was a catholic. She thought of the Church of Rome as the only real church. She brought
Catholicism back in England. She wasn’t very loved by the English people.
After Mary Tudor, Elizabeth I took the throne. She was a very clever woman, who succeeded in
finding a balance between Anglicanism and Protestantism (remember that Anglicanism and
Protestantism are two different religious movement. All those who didn’t conform with
Anglicanism were called non-conformists).

Humanism
Humanism is the movement that gives rise to the Renaissance. It starts after the fall of
Constantinople to the Turks in 1453. Constantinople was a very rich city, which offered a shelter to
many Greek poets and literates. After the fall of the city, all these people left Constantinople, moving
towards West Europe, and Italy in particular. They brought with them many classical works coming
from the Greek and Latin literature, also those which had been banished during the Middle Age
because considered pagan and non-conforming to the catholic culture of the time.
With the migration of Greek literates to Italy and the spread of classical works, people started to
study again books that belonged to the past, rediscovering the values that once characterised the
culture.
With Humanism, men are again at the centre of the attention. God is forgotten, and the world now
turns around the human species.
One of the most important works written during the period of Humanism is the book “Utopia”, by
Thomas Moore, which turns around the explanation of the ideal state of Humanism. Another
important work is “The Praise of the Folly”, written by Erasmus of Rotterdam.
Humanism views humans as solely responsible for the promotion and development of individuals
and emphasises a concern for man in relation to the world. Humanists thought that personal thought
was more important and stronger than medieval scholasticism: it was important to believe and think
with your mind and not to believe everything the school taught. The saying Ipse dixit wasn’t valid
anymore.

The English Renaissance

In Italy, Renaissance developed in the 14th century, while in England it spread only around the 16th
century, under Henry VIII.
One of the most important peculiarities of Renaissance is the curiosity that characterises men of that
period: the discovery of the new world becomes central (see for example Cristopher Columbus and
the discovery of America, 1492). Men sailed the seas in order to discover new lands and new
cultures. This meant not only the expansion of the borders, but also an expansion of prospective and
view. These mind-opening discoveries were also helped by the fact that the breach with Rome had
rose new values in people’s mind, according to the faith of each person.

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During the Renaissance, we also live the invention of the printing press. The first printer in England
was William Caxton, and the first book published was “Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers”.

A few dates
Ø 1517: Martin Luther’s articles are published
Ø 1534: Start of the Anglican Church (Act of Supremacy)
Ø 1536: publication of Copernicus’s “On the revolution of the celestial Spheres” (in Shakespeare’s
works you find many references to the Ptolemaic system, so a geocentric view).
Ø 1549: Edward VI’s Act of Uniformity, which enforces the use of the “English book of prayers”
Ø 1559: Elizabeth’s Act of Supremacy and Uniformity, which avoided the extremes of catholic
and Protestant. It was published “The book of common prayers”. She wanted to find balance in
her religious policy. The book was common, so it was for everyone. Puritans weren’t happy
with this. The queen became the governor, not the head of the church.

The Elizabethan age

The Elizabethan age coincides with the start of the Renaissance. As already said, Elizabeth was a
very clever and balanced woman, who was able to find solutions to problems. Because of that, the
Elizabethan age is a period of balance and unity under the crown. It is an era of relative peace in
England. Queen Elizabeth consolidated the Anglican Church, she succeeded in finding a balance
between religions, and she encouraged many explorers to travel around the world. Under Elizabeth
I, we have the beginning of the British Empire.
In 1588, the British Victory won against the Spanish Invincible Armada, making England a seafaring
power. The control of the seas allowed the British Empire to expand its trades with other Countries,
and it brought the foundation of the first colonies.
During the Elizabethan age, colonies became extremely important: they offered England raw
materials; they represented a shelter for poor people (in fact, during the Renaissance, Europe was
overcrowded. People who were forced to leave the continent, could find a place where to live in the
colonies); in the end, they also represented a place where all the uncomfortable people (criminals,
religious extremists, etc.) could be sent (see, for example, Australia).

The drama during the Elizabethan age

Elizabeth was a very cultured woman, who loved drama and theatre. Many dramatists, such as
Shakespeare, rose and became famous in this period. Drama became a very important moment of
entertainment for people: different levels of society gathered together and spent time watching the
play.
However, not everyone agreed with the development of the theatre: the Puritans (which were
extremist Protestants) attributed drama directly to Satan. They condemned drama because they
thought that it distracted people from work: in fact, it was a common idea between puritans that, in
order to obtain purification and mercy, people had to work. It was a way to pay back God of the
abilities he had given you, and it was as important as praying. Puritans normally belonged to the
middle class, whose life was based on earning money through work and fatigue. Puritans also saw
imagination as negative, because it would distract people from real life. In addition to that, puritans
thought that the theatre would help the spread of diseases and infections.
Before Elizabeth, the actors were itinerant. When the queen took the power, they were obliged to
find a patron, an owner which would employ them. In 1572, queen Elizabeth issued the Vagrant
Act: during this period, in fact, many people were unemployed and, in order to earn money, they
would steal and commit crimes. The Vagrant Act put out of law all the people who didn’t have an
employment or an employer. Because of this, actors were forced to form companies, usually under
noble men, who would finance the play (see Lord Chamberlain’s company, the first Shakespeare’s
company).
Actors would act in playhouses: they were usually built in the East side of London, on the south
bank of the Thames, and they would rise a flag when a performance was on. Playhouses would have

12
octagonal or polygonal shapes. The stage was a platform, surrounded by people on three sides. The
theatres usually didn’t have a roof, so when the weather was bad, the play would be cancelled.
The shape of the theatre allowed a bigger interaction between the audience and the actors (while
nowadays there is no interaction between the two of them). Some people believe that the shape of
the playhouses took after the buildings for animal baiting, while others believe that they were built
after inns (in fact, itinerant actors would usually stop and act in inns after long travels).
The play was in the daylight; the practice of doubling (one actor playing many roles) was quite
common; women were not allowed to act, and female parts would be played by young boys, with
softer voices (cross-dressing became quite widespread, also because of this); there were no painted
scenes and the props were minimal. Space and time were all created by the actions of the actor. The
most important part of the play was the text.
In the late Elizabethan age, we also have the invention of private theatres, which are more similar to
nowadays theatres: they were more constructed, they were in aristocrats’ houses and the topic of
the play was more cultivated than the one in public theatres.
The most important poets of this period are Sir. Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, while the most
important playwrights are Christopher Marlowe, Ben Jonson and William Shakespeare.
During the Elizabethan age, the demand for plays and drama was always growing, and people
especially asked for plays that were original and diverse, since drama was a very popular genre at
the time, and anyone tried to write plays in order to become famous and rich. The authors were the
suppliers of the plot, they had to find inspiration for their works, and they had to be fast at writing,
because there was the need to have plays for the performance.
Since copyright didn’t exist, often writers decided not to publish their works: they feared that they
could be copied by other playwrights. This is why we have the birth of pirate copies, that is to say
copies which were published by the actors after the premier of the play, who tried to remember the
plot of the piece and then wrote it down and proceeded to sell it as the original play. Next to the
pirate copies, it is possible to find “foul papers”, which were published drafts of the play, written
and unrevised by the author himself. Because of this, they were usually full of errors and were
different from the finished work.
In writing their works, authors would usually find an inspiration in the study of classics, romances,
Italian novellas (see “The Palace of Pleasure”, a translation by William Painter, which took inspiration
by a collection of Italian novellas, or “Plutarch’s Lives”, a collection of biographies of the most
important historical figures. Most of the characters in this play are taken from Holinshed’s
“Chronicles”, which was a record of the most important events of English history) and, last,
contemporary events (see “The Tempest” by Shakespeare, which was inspired by the shipwreck of a
ship which was heading to America).
As said, the classics were studied in many universities by scholars who wanted to reach a bigger
knowledge. In the University of Oxford, many scholars who then became important authors of that
period studied from classical sources (see Lily, Greene, Peele, Kyd, Nash, Lodge and Marlowe, for
example, who were called the University Wits). For what concerns Shakespeare, he was not part of
the University Wits: in fact, he attended a grammar school, which was only for those who had
already received an education. Shakespeare was strongly criticised by Peele, who also accused him
of copying the University Wits’ works.
Classical authors such as Seneca, Terence and Plautus were used as inspiration by the playwrights
of the Elizabethan age: Seneca was a model for the tragedy, while Terence and Plautus were seen as
models for the comedy. Many times, these classical authors were not only an inspiration for
contemporary playwrights, but many of their works would be plagiarised (for example,
Shakespeare’s “The comedy of Errors” is basically the copy of one of Plautus’s works).
There are a few stock ingredients that can be recognised in these two genres: the comedy is usually
characterised by mistaken identities, misunderstandings, the idea of the double and any kind of plot
motivated by love (Shakespeare’s plays are very often based on a love story). The tragedy, on the
other hand, usually presents the idea of faith and revenge. In Seneca’s plays, it is very difficult to
find scenes of violence, while Shakespeare was famous for his taste for blood and violent situations.

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“Hamlet” by Shakespeare and “Spanish Tragedy” by Kyd are two examples of this blood-thirst that
characterised the people of this period.
During the Elizabethan age, drama can be divided into four branches: comedy; tragedy;
tragicomedy; historical plays. Later on, this division will be overcome (see, for example, the
bourgeoise drama).
“Ralph Roister Doister” is the first comedy written in English, by the author Nicolas Udall. It was
inspired by Plautus and Terence. Nicolas Udall received his education in a public school (which is
very exclusive and very expensive, scuola privata). He was headmaster at Eton. His works were
inspired by past authors, and one of the elements that helps us understand it is the theme of the miles
gloriosus, which is very frequent in his plays. John Lily, another important playwright of the period,
turned to Greek legends to write his works. Shakespeare dealt with the classics, but he also took
inspiration from many Italian novellas. Jonson wrote satirical comedies set in London, which were
also called city comedies and criticised men’s behaviour, judging their greed and avidity.
“Gorboduc” is the first tragedy, inspired by Seneca and written by Sackville and Norton. Tragedies
usually had a didactic purpose: in this case, it was rather political than moral. The plot of this tragedy
goes about a divided kingdom and the fights between the population. “Gorboduc” was one of the
plays which inspired Shakespeare in writing “King Lear”.
We then have history plays, which always have a moral. History plays are usually based on real
events that happened in the past, and they have the aim to educate people in order to prevent them
from making the same mistakes which were made in the past. History plays were “a mirror for
magistrates”: people in charge of the power should learn from them and do better than their
predecessors. This type of play also allowed governors of the Elizabethan age to strengthen their
roles as defenders of the country: people would in fact judge the past rulers and admire Elizabeth
and the rest of the court.

Christopher Marlowe (1564 – 1593)

Christopher Marlowe is one of the most important playwrights that lived during the Shakespearian
époque. He was born the same year as Shakespeare, but he died early. He was a scholar, and he was
part of the University Wits at Cambridge. He also worked as a spy in the service of the queen, and
this might be one of the reasons why he died so early: he either was killed during one of his missions
by an enemy, or he was eliminated by the queen because considered unreliable.
Christopher Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker, so he was not part of the nobles. He mainly wrote
for the theatre: in his production, we only find one poem.
His plays are characterised by the presence of just one character: the protagonist of the plot is the
only person with a relevance. The characters in Marlowe’s plays are wicked: they are characterised
by a vice, a central flow which moves them towards their aim. They are described as monolithic
characters, because they don’t evolve during the development of the play. On the contrary, this
central flow will be the cause of their defeat. The characters in Marlowe are grandiose in their
wickedness. They are overreaches. They don’t respect the bonds made by God. They would do
anything to fulfil their dreams, and this also implies not respecting God’s law. The three principal
characters that can be remembered in Marlowe’s plays are Tamburlaine, who is ambitious; Barabas
the Jew, who seeks for vengeance; Faustus, who wants to achieve complete knowledge. In order to
reach their aims, the three characters end up in a sort of competition against God, which, of course,
they will eventually lose.
Marlowe’s plays are characterised by the presence of shocking and extreme actions, which were
happily welcomed by the population of that period, which felt their taste for sensation and extreme
actions satisfied. Marlowe’s works can be considered mannerist.

“Tamburlaine the great”

“Tamburlaine the Great” talks about the rise to power and decline and death of a Scythian shepherd.
The protagonist is able to rise to power thanks to his ambition, which cannot be stopped. His central
flow becomes the vigour that pushes him towards power.

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Tamburlaine is inspired by a real conqueror, Timur, a soldier and emperor who ruled in the 14th
century, subduing the Persians, the Tartars, the Syrians and the Turks. He had destroyed anything
that lied on his path towards power and greatness.
The play is all centred around this figure: we don’t find other characters that support or are
important to the play.
The idea of the over-reacher is central, and his grandeur seems to lie only on his wickedness.

“The Jew of Malta”

“The Jew of Malta” is a play that deals with prejudices against Jews, that were quite common at the
time. In the plot, the governor of Malta decides that only the Jews should contribute in paying the
taxes, which must be played with half of the riches that each of them owns. When the governor
proceeds in confiscating all of their riches, instead of half of them, Baraba, the protagonists, starts to
seek for vengeance. Baraba’s reaction ends up being a grotesque wickedness, which, paradoxically,
makes him great.
In the play, it is also possible to find a critique against the greed and avidity of the Christians.

“The tragical history of doctor Faustus”

“The tragical history of doctor Faustus” play is inspired by Goethe’s “Faust”, which was based on a
medieval legend itself.
The plot talks about Faustus, who makes a bargain with the devil: the protagonist will obtain
boundless knowledge, riches and pleasures, in exchange for his soul. At the end of the play, Faustus
realises that he must follow the devil in hell to honour his pact, which he proceeds to do without
fighting: this may represent an evolution of the character, which seems to be torn between sin and
repentance. Differently from the other characters, in this play Marlowe describes Faustus as not so
monolithic: he in fact slightly changes during the development of the plot, feeling repentance and
understanding that he has lost the fight against God. We have for the first time in his works the
representation of a realistic man.

“Edward II” (1592)

“Edward II” is an history play and a tragedy at the same time. It presents four characters: Edward,
his lover Gaveston (first example of homosexuality), Edward’s wife Isabella and her lover Mortimer.
The play shows a clash between private and public life, mixing these two spheres and allowing the
audience to meet disaster in it. At the end of the play, Edward is murdered.
It is possible to find an important theme in this play, a question that becomes very frequent in the
works of this period: if a king if not up to his role, should he remain king?
As said, many other works have dealt with this theme, see for example “The Tempest” or “Richard
II”, both from Shakespeare.

William Shakespeare (1564 – 1616)

There are many blank spaces in Shakespeare’s biography, not much is known about him and his life.
Some references about his person can be found in other authors’ works, such as in Greene or in
Francis Meres’s praise in “Palladis Tamia”. There are some conspiracies according to which
Shakespeare’s name would be a pseudonym of the name Giovanni Scrollalansa: these conspiracies
spread the idea that Shakespeare would be an Italian author who emigrated to England, changing
his identity. This conspiracy is based on the strong presence of elements of the Italian novella in the
playwright’s works. Other people spread the idea that “Shakespeare” was not a single person, but
a workgroup. However, references to his person in other authors’ works confirmed the fact that
Shakespeare wasn’t the name used by a workgroup, neither was it a pseudonym used by an Italian
poet emigrated to England.
Shakespeare didn’t care about success nor richness: this is why many of his works weren’t
published. His main interest was the success of the plays themselves. As already said, many of his
works were published as pirate copies, while others were published as foul papers. There is only
one authoritative edition of his plays, the “First Folio”, published in 1623: it is a collection of 18 of his

15
works, which was edited by H. Condell and J. Heminges. They worked on Shakespeare’s original
drafts, which had signs and notes on them written by the author himself. This collection, however,
doesn’t include all of Shakespeare’s works. “The Tempest” is the first play in the First Folio, and this
is interesting because it was the last work written by Shakespeare alone (the plays that followed “The
Tempest” were most certainly written with the cooperation of other authors).
The noun “folio” is linked to a way in which the pages of the collection were printed: we talk about
a folio when the sheet is divided in two parts, on which we can find the written play. On the other
hand, when the plays were published as pirate copies, they would also be named “bad quartos”.
Again, a “quarto” is a method of pressing sheets: in this case, the sheet is divided in four parts, and
not in two, like in the folio. Next to the “bad quartos”, it was also possible to find “good quartos”,
so written forms of the play which could be in a certain way “certified” and couldn’t be associated
to the pirate copies.
The “First Folio” is not the only source in which we can find Shakespeare’s works. Other plays (16)
were published singly. They were published as unrevised drafts (the good quartos), directly written
by the author but, as said, not corrected nor controlled in any way. It was quite common for critics
to have to study for a long time different copies, in order to understand which were original and
which were bad quartos. Scholars would compare different versions in order to define which one
was the good quarto.
In order to simplify their work, critics would follow three methods:
Ø External evidences: scholars would analyse different texts to see if any of them mentioned or
referred to a particular play their author had attended. If they did, that meant that most certainly
the play was in the same period as the critique;
Ø Internal evidences: critics would pay attention if the play mentioned a certain event which
happened in a certain date;
Ø Stylistic evidences: the style of the author would be analysed and studied. Eventually, it would
be linked to a period of his life, which corresponded to a certain change in his writing, in his
vocabulary, etc.
Shakespeare was an extraordinary story-teller, and his capability of working with words allowed
him to become the famous playwright he was. He widely drew on Italian novellas and classical
works such as “Plutarch’s life” and Holinshed’s “Chronicles”. He was not a University Wit, but he
attended a grammar school in Stratford. He then moved to London, where he lived his life: the city-
life was probably very important to him, because it helped him to meet different realities and
different types of people. It must have been a very inspirational experience for him. London was an
echo of everything that happened in the antique and modern world.
Most of Shakespeare’s value lies in his ability to transform every day’s speech in poetry. His plays
present many rhetorical figures, unexpected locutions, etc. He plaid a big attention to the language:
see for example “The Tempest”. In the play, the noble characters usually speak through rhymes, while
peasants use prose. The only moment in which they all speak in prose is at the beginning of the play,
during the shipwreck: this is an element that represents the fact that in front of nature, social classes
are worth nothing, and everyone is on the same level.
Shakespeare’s poetry was mainly based, as said, on the blank verse, thus the iambic pentameter.

The difference between tragedy and comedy

Comedies are usually characterised by a happy ending, which is reached at the end of the play, after
a tragic beginning, characterised by chaos and disorder. The happy ending is generally brought by
a marriage, which is a symbol of social aggregation. Marriage always represents the union of two
families, which has as aim the construction of a future society. The focus in Shakespeare’s comedies
is always love.
In tragedies you have the opposite process: you start in a condition of balance and unity, and little
by little this harmony collapses. This fall is connected to the fall of the hero, caused by a fatal flow.
The death of the protagonist usually involves the death of the whole world: the kingdom falls, the
society disintegrates, etc.

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In Shakespeare’s comedies, the protagonists are usually the women. They are represented as witty
and enterprising. Cross-dressing was a very common characteristic in Shakespeare’s plays (men
would dress as women and act). Shakespeare’s comedies are characterised by disharmony and
general difficulties that interfere with the development of the two protagonists’ love. These obstacles
are often the cause of misunderstandings.
Comedies’ aim was usually entertainment: Shakespeare rarely wanted to instruct the audience
through his plays. However, sometimes it is also possible to find some types of lesson, which are
usually represented by the foul characters (see for example Bottom in “A midsummer night’s dream”).
Another important characteristic of Shakespeare’s comedies is “the play within the play”: we find
this both in the character of Bottom and partly in Hamlet. The play within the play was a typical
characteristic of Plautus’s works: it is a literary device or conceit in which one story is told during
the action of another story. Mise en abyme is the French term for the same literary device.
We can also find a contraposition between city and nature: the city is normally described as an
obscure entity. On the other hand, nature is pure and kind to human beings. Nature is the symbol
of the pastoral world.
Last, the sets of the comedies were usually invented: the cities that Shakespeare mentioned in his
works were fantastic locations, generated by the imagination of the author (e.g.: “A midsummer
night’s dream”’s Athens does not refer to the Greek city, even though the name is the same: the author
refers to a city that he has invented).

Shakespeare’s tragedies and mystery plays

• “Romeo and Juliet”
“Romeo and Juliet” is a mix between comedy and tragedy. The play begins as a comedy: the main
topic is in fact love between a young man and a young woman, which is however obstructed by the
two’s families. The two protagonists can be described as two star-crossed lovers in the hands of faith.
It is the first tragedy written at the outset of Shakespeare’s career.
As already mentioned, the two lovers seem not to be in charge of their destiny and their life: they
seem in fact to be victims of unfortunate, random events. The tragedy lies in the extinction of love,
which is destroyed by hate, but also by the lack of knowledge that derives from miscommunication:
the characters have problems in communicating throughout all the play. This is usually caused by
change of faith, whose medium is speed.
Because of this, many have criticised the play: Shakespeare seems not to attribute Romeo and Juliet
any vice or flow. In fact, as said, they seem to be more victims rather than guilty characters.

• “Hamlet”
“Hamlet” was written between 1600 and 1606. An important characteristic of this tragedy, just like
other tragedies, is the presence of the so-called “strategic opacity”: it seems like Shakespeare doesn’t
want to provide a clear explanation of why certain situations take place. There is always a key-
explanatory element that is missing. The “strategic opacity” is often used in tragedies because it
causes the lack of some passages which could help explaining parts of the tragedy. The lack of full
explanation leaves us somehow in a stage of suspense, which helps the playwright with the
development of the plot.
“Hamlet” is a revenge tragedy, like Seneca’s tragedies. However, even if Hamlet knows that his uncle
Claudius is guilty of killing his father, the revenge takes place only in act V, so at the very end of the
final scene.
The protagonist knows that his uncle is guilty thanks to a scene in which Shakespeare uses the tactic
of the “play within the play”: a ghost goes to Hamlet and shows him the murder of his father. Also
Claudius is present to this play within the play, and his surprised reaction is the reason why Hamlet
is able to understand that Claudius is guilty. However, the revenge doesn’t take place immediately
after the play, but it will only happen after a long time of Hamlet’s thinking and doubting. The whole
play is characterised by an atmosphere of uncertainty and doubt. Hamlet reflects on many issues,
like the meaning of human life, his role in the world, etc. His attitude of doubt and interrogation is
very modern and often mirrors Shakespeare’s society’s thoughts: the modern man, in fact, hasn’t

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got certainties anymore. All his past ideas are now cancelled, God hasn’t got the same importance
as before, and the humans don’t know who they are anymore. Men don’t know what their place in
the world is, and they don’t consider themselves as privileged beings anymore. Because of this,
Hamlet is a paradigm of modern men, who are asking questions in order to find answers.

• “Othello”
“Othello” is the tragedy of jealousy. Again, Shakespeare uses the “strategic opacity” to hide the
explanation to many situations: for example, at the beginning it is not clear why Jago decides to tell
Othello that Desdemona is cheating on him. His hate is not explained, and this creates a situation of
suspense. Othello is controlled by passion and jealousy.
Another name for Othello is The Moor of Venice: he is in fact a merchant, who is valued by his ability
of speech, which ennobles him and makes him part of the highest class. However, little by little,
throughout the play Othello loses his human attitudes and he becomes a prey of jealousy and
passion.
At the end of the plot, Othello understands that Jago played him, and he will eventually commit
suicide. The ending of the play begs one question: did Othello deserve to die because of his actions,
or does his repentance help to ennoble him again?

• “King Lear”
“King Lear” is the story of an old king who abdicates and leaves his kingdom to his three daughters.
However, in order to decide who deserves the kingdom, he suggests a challenge: each of his
daughters has to demonstrate her love for the father through words. The challenge will be won by
two of King Lear’s daughters, Regan and Gonerril. The third daughter Cordelia, however, loses the
challenge: in fact, she declares to the father her inability to express her feelings through words,
because the love for the father is much bigger than anything words could ever represent. King Lear
is offended by this declaration, and he sends Cordelia to exile. However, at the end of the plot, King
Lear will find himself in difficulty dealing with Regan and Gonerril’s behaviour (they aren’t in fact
able to reign and they don’t respect their father’s authority anymore), and he understands that
Cordelia was the only one who really loved him.
In the plot, we find another character, Gloucester, who is fooled by his bastard son Edmund in
thinking that his legitimate son Edward is plotting against him. At the end of the play, Gloucester
will end up being tortured, and the description of the scene is one of the most violent which
Shakespeare ever wrote.
The main themes of the tragedy are: wounded pride, vanity, and the difficulties fathers may
encounter when trying to understand their children.

• “Macbeth”
”Macbeth” is set in Scotland and was inspired by Holinshed’s “Chronicles”.
The main theme of the story is an ambition which cannot be stopped. The protagonist, Macbeth, is
a noble and prayed warrior, who fights for his king, Duncan, and honours the kingdom. However,
after hearing the prophesy of three witches, Macbeth conceives the idea of killing the king and taking
his place, which seems to be his destiny. Here, Shakespeare plays with the idea of magic and he
seems to be posing a question to the audience: does Macbeth kill the king and take his place because
it was his destiny, or does he kill the king because of the prophesy of the three witches, creating in
this way his own destiny?
At the beginning of the play, Macbeth hesitates, but in the end his thirst of power wins over his
morality, and the protagonist kills Duncan, taking his crown. In order to maintain his secrets,
Macbeth commits a long list of murders.
During the whole plot, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth’s wife, sits beside him. She appears as a ruthless and
ambitious woman. Eventually, she will be punished for her behaviour: in fact, she will become sterile
and she will completely lose her mind. Lady Macbeth is a central character.

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• “Antony and Cleopatra”
“Antony and Cleopatra” is another love play, like “Romeo and Juliet”. However, Antony and Cleopatra
are not as young as the two lovers from Verona: in fact, they are both described as grizzled and with
wrinkles. Another different characteristic is that they both are characters who belong to ancient
history. Next to the conflict between love and hate, it is also possible to find a conflict between two
different worlds: the Roman and the Egyptian one.
The tragedy tells about a love so grand, “that to know his confines one would have to find out a new
heaven, a new heart”. However, it also deals with clashes caused by stereotypes.
At the end of the play, Antony will decide to leave the rational world of Rome, to which he belongs,
to join Cleopatra in her world. In order to do this, Antony will have to fight the emperor Octavian,
who will win the duel and kill him.

“The Tempest”
“The Tempest” was performed for the first time on the 1st November 1611, before king James I at
Whitewall, by the King’s Men, Shakespeare’s company. However, it can be presumed that the play
had already been performed other times, most likely at the Globe Theatre, so Shakespeare’s
company’s theatre.
It is difficult to understand which of “The Tempest”’s versions can be considered the real and official
one: in fact, many versions were performed, and the play usually slightly changed from time to time.
After the performance of 1611, another one was made in 1613, on the occasion of the king’s daughter,
Elizabeth, engagement to an Elector Palatine (which was a title given to German princes). This
version, however, had been changed for the occasion: in fact, since the play was being made in order
to celebrate a future wedding, there was the need to insert into it a scene of celebration. Because of
this, Shakespeare decided to cut some pieces of the play and to substitute them with what is called
a masque (a play characterised by beauty, richness and special effects. In this case, the masque
represented the celebration of the wedding between Miranda and Ferdinand).
The version of the play that we have nowadays is the one which was performed in 1613 (without
the masque, but with all the cuts made by Shakespeare).
“The Tempest” was included in the First Folio, and it appears only in this collection of plays. It was
carefully edited by Condell and Heminges, who, as said, took the version of 1613. It is most likely
like that because at the time very few of Shakespeare’s works were so carefully divided: it was
evident that the play had been divided in order to insert other scenes (thus, the masque).
In general, there are no real sources for “The Tempest”, whereas other Shakespeare’s plays took
inspiration from many sources, such as Italian novellas or Greek and Latin works. Scholars found
German and Spanish writings in which the authors described a shipwreck and a governor with
magical powers. However, it doesn’t seem probable that Shakespeare took inspiration from those
works.
Instead, it is easier to believe that the author found inspiration in a shipwreck which took place in
1609 in the Bermudas, and which was reported on many pamphlets. The cause of the shipwreck was
mutinies. Even though the shipwreck in the play is set in the Mediterranean, there are some
references to the event happened in 1609 (see I.ii.229: in this verse, Ariel mentions the Bermudas,
providing an evidence of the source of the play).
In general, it is believed that Shakespeare took inspiration from three pamphlets.
The first one was written by William Strachey, who was probably a friend of the author’s.
Shakespeare took inspiration from this pamphlet, especially when he refers to St. Elmo’s fire (I.ii.196-
198: the description of the fire on the deck of the boat most likely refers to an electrical phenomenon
called, in fact, St. Elmo’s fire, which causes fire in these tropical places, and which probably set on
fire the ships on the Bermudas’ shipwreck. See note p. 34.).
The second pamphlet’s author was Silvester Jourdain. In his writing, he mentions that the voyagers
drank to each other when they believed they were going to die. In the play, we find this action
mentioned in I.i.53. Additionally, in the same pamphlet Jourdain mentions the wonder of the
passengers when they landed on the Bermudas, just like Shakespeare’s characters.

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Last, in all three pamphlets we find a strong emphasis put on the Divine Providence, which brings
salvation to the voyagers. Providence is also included in the play.
The idea of the storm is associated to the idea of inner experience, which can help people to
transform, to evolve and to understand themselves in a better way. There is a connection between
the physical and the moral in both the play and the pamphlets. At the end, the protagonists of the
matter, whether it is fictional or nonfictional, live a human renewal thanks to Providence. The
element of divine providence is also often mentioned by Prospero, when he talks about his voyage.
In fact, when Prospero was adrift on the boat with Miranda, he was helped by a man, who gave him
food and drink. This man’s name was Gonzalo, a counsellor of King Alonso of Milan. It is very
important to remember that Gonzalo not only gave Prospero provisions, but he also gave him the
books of magic, which helped Prospero to become a magician. Gonzalo is the most positive figure
in the play, because he is always optimistic, and he always helps those in need.
Another important element is that Shakespeare often refers to the new world, meaning that he
acknowledged his existence, which was important in that historical period characterised by curiosity
and discovery of the world. There was the idea that a new world could offer a new life. A reference
to this is present at the end of the play: when Miranda sees the royal party, she exclaims “Oh, brave
new world!” (V.i.183). The answer she receives is from Prospero, who says “‘tis new to thee”, meaning
that he is already used to this world of lux, vices and corruption. This means that Shakespeare didn’t
completely agree with the idea of going to the new world to bring civilisation and religion, and he
didn’t completely believe that the new world represented a new life. There is a sense of ambiguity
in this renewal of the world.
Shakespeare wants to convey a message which isn’t completely clear: we can almost find another
example of “strategic opacity”. The message of the pamphlet is acquired but also revisited.
There is another work which could be considered as a source for Shakespeare’s play, and it is the
essay “Of the Cannibals” by Michel de Montaigne. De Montaigne was a French philosopher, often
considered controversial because he rarely followed the ideas that were shared by the society of his
time. In his essay, de Montaigne talks about the possibility that the south-American populations
(thus, the natives) could be considered as more civilised than the European population. Through
this essay, the philosopher wants to convey a message of criticism against European society and
their sense of superiority. De Montaigne supports the idea that also the natives have positive sides,
and the idea that their way of living could be better than ours.
The contrast between nature and art becomes a theme of the play. The characters of the play often
represent nature or art: for example, Caliban represents nature, while Prospero represents art
intended like knowledge. Nature and art are very often debated themes, and art has always been
connected to the concept of nurture (in this case a spiritual, intellectual nurture). Note that the name
“Prospero” comes from the Latin “I cause to succeed”, which already suggests his role in the play.
Again, Shakespeare is often ambiguous in transmitting of his beliefs: Caliban is half beast half devil.
He is seen as bad, but he speaks both in verses and prose: this means he is also described as a
character with nobility. He seems to be superior to Trinculo and Stephano, who represent art but are
ignorant and arrogant characters. Shakespeare sometimes seems to support art while sometimes he
seems to support nature.
According to other theories, Shakespeare could have found inspiration to this play in some works,
such as Thomas’s “History of Italy”, which talks about confused stories on banishment and
usurpation. In the historical period in which Shakespeare lived, Italy was divided into many small
states in which alliances enmities changed with great rapidity. This organisation leads us to think
that the human characters of “The Tempest” took inspiration from the Italian situation of the time.
In the late stages of his career Shakespeare seemed to have the habit of collaborating with other
dramatists also writing for the King’s Men, for example John Fletcher. Works like “Pericles” (1608 –
1609), “Henry VIII” (1612 – 1613) and “The Two Noble Kinsmen” (1613) are the products of such
collaboration. “Cymbeline” (1609 – 1610), “The Winter’s Tale” (1610 – 1611) and “The Tempest” (1611)
are instead part of a linked group: they share the same violence of expression, unreality of
atmosphere, and improbability of the plot.

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• Characters
Prospero: The play’s protagonist, and father of Miranda. Twelve years before the events of the play,
Prospero was the duke of Milan. His brother, Antonio, in concert with Alonso, king of Naples,
usurped him, forcing him to flee in a boat with his daughter. The honest lord Gonzalo aided
Prospero in his escape. Prospero has spent his twelve years on the island refining the magic that
gives him the power he needs to punish and forgive his enemies.
Miranda: The daughter of Prospero, Miranda was brought to the island at an early age and has never
seen any men other than her father and Caliban, though she dimly remembers being cared for by
female servants as an infant. Because she has been sealed off from the world for so long, Miranda’s
perceptions of other people tend to be naïve and non-judgmental. She is compassionate, generous,
and loyal to her father.
Ariel: Prospero’s spirit helper. Ariel is referred as “he,” but his gender and physical form are
ambiguous. Rescued by Prospero from a long imprisonment at the hands of the witch Sycorax, Ariel
is Prospero’s servant until Prospero decides to release him. He is mischievous and ubiquitous, able
to traverse the length of the island in an instant and to change shapes at will. He carries out virtually
every task that Prospero needs accomplished in the play.
Caliban: Another of Prospero’s servants. Caliban, the son of the now-deceased witch Sycorax,
acquainted Prospero with the island when Prospero arrived. Caliban believes that the island
rightfully belongs to him and has been stolen by Prospero. His speech and behaviour is sometimes
coarse and brutal, as in his drunken scenes with Stephano and Trinculo (II. ii, IV.i), and sometimes
eloquent and sensitive, as in his rebukes of Prospero in Act I, scene ii, and in his description of the
eerie beauty of the island in Act III, scene ii (III.ii.130-138).
Ferdinand: Son and heir of Alonso. Ferdinand seems in some ways to be as pure and naïve as
Miranda. He falls in love with her upon first sight and happily submits to servitude in order to win
her father’s approval.
Alonso: King of Naples and father of Ferdinand. Alonso aided Antonio in unseating Prospero as
Duke of Milan twelve years before. As he appears in the play, however, he is acutely aware of the
consequences of all his actions. He blames his decision to marry his daughter to the Prince of Tunis
on the apparent death of his son. In addition, after the magical banquet, he regrets his role in the
usurping of Prospero.
Antonio: Prospero’s brother. Antonio quickly demonstrates that he is power-hungry and foolish. In
Act II, scene i, he persuades Sebastian to kill the sleeping Alonso. He then goes along with
Sebastian’s absurd story about fending off lions when Gonzalo wakes up and catches Antonio and
Sebastian with their swords drawn.
Sebastian: Alonso’s brother. Like Antonio, he is both aggressive and cowardly. He is easily
persuaded to kill his brother in Act II, scene i, and he initiates the ridiculous story about lions when
Gonzalo catches him with his sword drawn.
Gonzalo: An old, honest lord, Gonzalo helped Prospero and Miranda to escape after Antonio
usurped Prospero’s title. Gonzalo’s speeches provide an important commentary on the events of the
play, as he remarks on the beauty of the island when the stranded party first lands, then on the
desperation of Alonso after the magic banquet, and on the miracle of the reconciliation in Act V,
scene i.
Trinculo & Stephano: Trinculo, a jester, and Stephano, a drunken butler, are two minor members of
the shipwrecked party. They provide a comic foil to the other, more powerful pairs of Prospero and
Alonso and Antonio and Sebastian. Their drunken boasting and petty greed reflect and deflate the
quarrels and power struggles of Prospero and the other noblemen.
Boatswain: Appearing only in the first and last scenes, the Boatswain is vigorously good-natured.
He seems competent and almost cheerful in the shipwreck scene, demanding practical help rather
than weeping and praying. And he seems surprised but not stunned when he awakens from a long
sleep at the end of the play.

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• Act I, scene I – The Storm at the Sea
In the first scene of the first act we are presented with the collapse of the social roles due to a natural
disaster, which brings us to the contrast between nature and social conventions: human strength
disappears in front of natural phenomena, turning strong men into weak characters. Political power
and social hierarchies become here completely vain.
The first scene is characterised by a startling, violent realism: the reader is immediately plunged into
the fury and the confusion of the storm. On the other hand, the rest of the play is instead
characterised by a strange, wonderful and unnatural atmosphere, which gives the audience the
impression of having been transported into a fairy-tale. This general sensation is strengthened by
numerous images of sleep and dreams in the whole play.
The realism of the scene I is given by many elements: loud noises and voices are necessary to the
shipmen, who have to shout in order to be heard upon “a tempestuous noise of thunder and lightning”.
The language used by the mariners contributes in giving a sense of realism, too: in fact, they often
use technical terms, typical of the nautical world. Another important characteristic is the fact that
during the play many sound effects were added to the performance: these had the aim to create a
more realistic atmosphere, and they were probably created with human voices, drums, rockets,
stones, etc. Finally, the use of the prose, the quick pace and the presence of swear words in the
dialogues helped in the creation of the realism we were talking about before.
However, it is also possible to find many elements which contribute in creating an atmosphere more
linked to the unnatural and marvellous world of the fairy tales: for example, it is often possible to
hear voices and songs coming of nowhere; banquets and masques mysteriously appear and
disappear; the characters often feel the sensation of having to act, but they feel paralysed, unable to
intervene.
A sense of strangeness pervades the whole atmosphere of the play, since the characters see strange
phenomena occurring around them (e.g.: the characters’ clothes are still dry after the shipwreck). In
fact, the characters believe that there are some magical powers at work. What happens is that each
character projects something of themselves inside these strange situations: for example, the villains
believe that these phenomena are the devil’s work (III, iii, 102-103 and V, i, 129). The villains also
believe that these magical events could be a punishment for their actions. Alonso, for instance, is
pervaded by a sense of guilt, and through his suffering he will somehow get redemption; Sebastian
on the other hand reacts in an aggressive way and wants to fight against this “devil’s creation”.
Some characters judge these magical situations as miracles (V, i, 227 – 228): Alonso says that these
cannot be natural events, and their strangeness seems to belong to something divine. Another
quotation which can be found is at V, i, 242 – 244: strangeness here is described as something which
comes from magic (“and there is in this business more than nature”).

• Act I, scene II
This scene is mostly occupied by Prospero, who shares his story with Miranda and tells her about
his magical powers. The island is here seen from Prospero’s point of view. Prospero suggests that
during the shipwreck they were helped by divine providence. However, when Prospero goes on
with the description of how they survived (they were left on a boat adrift), the reader sees that his
explanation belongs more to the men’s world: it’s not told as a fairy-tale or a miracle, so it doesn’t
seem like Providence really saved them. Prospero also underlines that he was helped by Gonzalo,
who, as we’ve already mentioned, has given Prospero his magical powers (I, ii, 161). Prospero’s
magical power’s explanation is integrated with a story about his past in politics and government,
thus reality and magic are melted together.
Prospero is the embodiment of art, knowledge and study. In fact, he acquired his powers after a long
process of studying. He devoted himself to the study of nature, so his powers can be described as
“natural”, based on his knowledge of nature and its mechanisms. His powers belong to white, and
not black, magic. He underlines this when he says that it is a knowledge that he obtained through
observation of natural phenomena: his knowledge is thus very similar to scientists’ works.
Nevertheless, in V, i, 48 – 50 it is possible to find an example of black magic. However, that is the
only situation in which Prospero uses black magic.

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In 1962 – 1964, Jan Kott wrote a work called “Shakespeare Our Contemporary”: in this work, Kott
explains Prospero’s speech about his magic, which is described by the author more as scientific
rather than magical. Kott says that in the past Prospero’s abilities could be seen as magic, since it
was a period in which people didn’t have a wide knowledge of science or natural mechanisms.
However, nowadays’ readers could consider Prospero’s power as something merely based on
scientific knowledge (an example of this can be found at V, i, 41 – 44: in this passage Prospero
describes his magical powers: this description seems very scientific, and with further analysis it
could easily refer to the beginning of a nuclear era, caused by an explosion. In his work, Kott says
that Prospero seems to be “a man who knows more”, just like a scientist. Prospero can see beyond
common men’s knowledge). Prospero seems thus to represent the renaissance men, and Kott
underlines this comparison between Prospero’s drama and the Renaissance men’s drama: they
embody a new reality and a new approach to it.
Shakespeare’s works must be contextualised on the base of the events of the period he lived in:
Ø 1492: Cristopher Columbus reached the New World (San Salvador);
Ø 1516: “Utopia” by Thomas More;
Ø 1519: Magellano’s circumnavigation around the world and Cortez’s conquest of Mexico;
Ø 1519: Leonardo da Vinci died;
Ø 1532: Machiavelli wrote Il Principe, Pizzarro conquered Peru;
Ø 1543: Copernicus’ De revolutionibus orbium coelestium;
Ø 1559: Elizabeth came to the throne;
Ø 1564: Michelangelo died, and Galileo was born;
Ø 1580: Essays by Montaigne (translated into English in 1603);
Ø 1600: Giordano Bruno was burnt for heresy.
He lived in a period of great change, voyages and discovery of new lands. The scientific method was
invented, thus a new way of approaching science. Renaissance brought the revolution of astronomy
and a whole new vision of the universe and its organisation. All the certainties that men previously
had disappeared, and they lived a new reality. In Renaissance, the man is shown in all his power
and potentials but also in his smallness, because he becomes one between the many.
All of these characteristics are present in Prospero’s character.
You can also read Prospero’s tale as referred to Machiavelli’s “Prince”. Antonio supplants Prospero
and doesn’t respect the sequence of the legitimate heir. The story Prospero tells Miranda is a story
of conspiracy and violence, and a story of division between politics and ethics. Because of that,
Antonio could be the embodiment of the prince Machiavelli talks about. In fact, in Machiavelli
usually the aim justifies the means: if a prince wants to obtain something, it doesn’t matter the way
he fulfils his objectives, the important is to fulfil them (“il fine giustifica i mezzi”).
In this play, Shakespeare respects the classical unities of Aristotle: a single action, a single place,
within the course of a single day. These are the unities of action, place and time. In other tragedies,
Shakespeare doesn’t often respect the three unities: strangely, he does respect them in “The Tempest”.
In fact, the place of the tragedy is the island. The events which are set in other places are just referred
to, you never see their representation: they are not part of the performance.
The unity of time is respected because the action begins and ends within one day; furthermore, the
action of the performance lasts exactly as the performance itself: the tempest that Ariel has caused
started two hours after midday (I, ii, 239 – 241, “at leats two glasses”). Prospero knows that everything
must happen between two o’clock and six o’clock. Thus, the play and the performance last exactly
the same time, so about 3 or 4 hours.
The unity of action is a little bit more difficult to be described. There actually is one action which is
repeated: the central action is based on dissertation. The story of dissertation is replicated over and
over again by different characters, and several conspiracies are created by each of them: Prospero is
ousted from power by Antonio; Ariel is ousted by Sycorax; Caliban is ousted by Prospero; Sebastian
and Antonio try to kill and oust Alonso; Trinculo, Stephano and Caliban try to supplant Prospero.
The island of the shipwreck doesn’t represent a utopian world, but it’s the representation of reality.
Some critics read “The Tempest” like a play within the play, with two prologues (first the storm and
shipwreck, then the story narrated by Prospero) and two epilogues (first Prospero’s final monologue

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and then the final scene of reconciliation. Prospero’s monologue has been read by some as a goodbye
to the scenes by Shakespeare).
“The Tempest” can also be read as a morality play, led by Prospero. Since the play and the
performance lasted the same, the audience often went through the same ordeals of the characters.
The play is about a physical but also psychological tempest: also because of this, it could be
considered a morality play. The characters must face some ordeals and experience an interior
tempest which is characterised by a sensation of strangeness and therapeutic madness. The suffering
caused by Prospero’s magic is a punishment but also a cure, because it allows them to understand
what has happened and to feel guilty for what they did. This madness makes them conscious of
something they didn’t know about themselves: it is described as a soothing music, “a solemn air”.
Prospero has often been compared to a psychiatrist, a doctor helping the characters to go through a
therapy which will make them better men.
In the play, Gonzalo acts like the fool, and because he is a fool he is not reckoned as at the same level
of other people and he can often say the truth, because no one will pay attention to him. Gonzalo is
often mocked inside the play; however, he often conveys the truth. Gonzalo interprets the characters’
insanity as a consequence of their guilt (see V, i, 205 – 213).
At the end of the play there is a sort of return to the moral order. The circle closes and everybody
goes back to the point of departure. In repeating itself, the play has also shown the frailty of the
characters. Prospero is again the duke of Milan, everybody rules on his dukedom as before, and
even Caliban becomes the king of the island again. Because of the “happy ending”, we cannot talk
about a tragedy, but a tragicomedy. The repetition of history and the fact that even the bad characters
get their power back seems to show that evil is inseparable from human nature. The concept here
conveyed is then Theatrum Mundi: the story narrated in the play could repeat itself in any situation
or part of the world.
The play, which could be read as a fairy-tale, treats in reality very serious themes, such as contrast
between nurture and nature, dissertation, conspiracies, evilness, etc. It also reflects the crisis of the
Renaissance men.
The end of the play is a moment of reconciliation, but i doesn’t end with an “happy ever after”: for
the moment, the order has been established again, but there is no guaranty that what happened will
not happen again. The future is outside the play.
One of the first readings of “The Tempest” after Shakespeare’s death spread the idea that the play
was in fact a fairy-tale, and it was performed that way. It was also seen as an allegory for poetic
inspiration: Prospero in the end would leave his magic powers, becoming the actor, the man on the
stage. In this context, if Prospero is read as the dramatist, Ariel could represent the poetic inspiration.
However, magic causes sufferance to the characters which are subjected to it, so the fact that Ariel
should represent poetic inspiration is actually in contrast with the sorrow provoked by magic.
Other critics saw this play as the representation of initiation ceremonies. Thus, there have been
allegorical meanings given to the play.
Supernatural and fantastic elements are an important part of the play, but they are treated in a
realistic way.
Ariel’s character has a great importance, too. Caliban’s mother hosted Ariel. Ariel is the first
inhabitant, the indigenous of the island. He’s the servant, he obeys Prospero’s orders and becomes
his angel and executioner, meaning he inflicts punishment for him.
He’s but air and he’s referred to as a bird, he’s not visible except for Prospero. He’s just the effects
that he produces, such as light, voice and music to the others. He’s not just Caliban’s opposite:
Caliban is all matter, and Ariel all air, but you can’t say one is bad and the other is good. Sometimes
Ariel seems very cruel in inflicting pains for Prospero and he gives an “innocent cruel” vibe, so he
resembles kids in this aspect. He also has a detachment in tormenting people, he seems to be pleased
with his ingenuity (ingegno), he’s self–pleased and likes being able to exercise his powers. He’s aware
of this ingenuity, whereas he’s not really aware of the sufferings he inflicts. Only at one point he’s
aware (act V, I, 17–20).
Ariel has a distinctive language, very delicate and musical. He seems to be very far from matter,
from the earth. Freedom is his deepest desire, what he most wants. He used to be performed as a

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ballerina, because it seems to evoke the sense of an airy spirit, such as his. Kott also says that he
should be played by a young man with a melancholic face and shouldn’t have a precise historical
costume, whereas nowadays he’s played with a costume that is usually black or grey and which
tends to be as neutral/transparent as possible.
We then have Caliban, the Slave. He’s considered the most important character after Prospero. This
is also supported by poetry, because the way he speaks, along with Prospero’s and Ariel’s, is the
highest. He starts speaking in prose only when the other characters speak to him in prose. He seems
to be the opposite of Ariel, but he speaks in verses, just like him. He’s not a completely comical
character, even if it may seem, but this only happens when he’s with other comical characters, like
Trinculo and Stephano, because he is himself tragi–comical. His language makes him as noble as the
other characters in many parts of the play. He has his own individuality, he’s very new: Shakespeare
for his character takes inspiration from a person of the new world, in fact there’s nothing like him in
Shakespeare’s plays nor does he look like anything from the time as well; he’s close to an allegory,
he’s depicted as one of the inhabitants of America, that discoverers had described after their
journeys. However, he isn’t the figure of the noble savage, which is a philosophical interpretation of
people who came from the new world, a projection of philosophical ideas. Through this image the
European civilisation was criticised, scholars criticised the corruption and wanted to stigmatise
some aspects of it, inventing this image of the noble savage. Of course, there are different kinds of
humanity, but Europeans idolised only the good aspects of it, the noble savage is obviously a
western construction meant to stigmatise what went wrong in European civilisation. Scholars
wanted to underline that sometimes, we should learn from them (their respect for nature for
example). Caliban is completely made of natural instincts, he’s untouched by art. From the very
beginning, he has material desires, speaks a material language, and expresses concrete realities. He’s
also punished physically, by Ariel who pinches him, hits him and torments him. He can also arouse
pity however, for example in act III, ii, 90–3 and 135–143. We could say that is amoral, not immoral,
because he’s before morality, before men.
He’s more than just the monster defined by others, he has learnt to speak and also this can be seen
in act I, ii, 364–5, in Caliban’s first appearance. He enters by cursing Prospero. He has scientific
knowledge such as astronomy, he makes references to the sun and the moon. At first Caliban had
welcomed Prospero and Miranda and had shown them the best parts of the island, but then he says
that he should be damned for having done that. There has been a passage from him being the ruler
of the island to then himself being a subject, a slave. Prospero shows his superiority over him, as he
treated him with humanity and lodged him in his own cell until he tried to violate his daughter.
Miranda pitied him and tried to teach him to speak and other stuff (example of post-colonial
criticism). The idea given is that Caliban could not exist nor define the world around him, unless
somebody else had taught him to do so, for example Miranda. Caliban answers “you taught me
language and the vantage I have from that, is that now I know how to curse”, these lines are interpreted as
a rebellion, which actually took place in the lands that were colonised through language, writing
and literature; a language was imposed to the people of the colonies. Caliban’s plan is to defeat
Prospero and prevent him from achieving the education of the island. Caliban remains in the island
and after the reconciliation everything is put back in his place, so he’ll stay whereas Prospero will
go back.
Trinculo and Stephano are grotesque and comic characters, Caliban is indeed grotesque and tragic,
some critics have given different interpretations to him, one is him as a personification of the
proletariat, the lower classes. He’s a complex character with many readings to him.

• The epilogue
We find a sort of frame (what happens within the island), two prologues and one main story (play
within the play). Prospero is a magician who renounced at his magic but also an actor who is
deprived of his role.
The most famous quote is after the masque (to wish fertility and a numerous offspring to the happy
couple) in act IV, I ,156–7 when Prospero says: “We are such stuff / As dreams are made on, and our little
life is rounded with a sleep”. This refers to the fleetingness of the masque and caducity of life.

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Shakespeare’s geography is poetic and functional to the play, but he wasn’t interested in giving
accuracy. Italy for his connotation was perfect for some of his plays in the Elizabethan conception
so he used it, but some references are incorrect, for example he says that some characters sailed from
Milan in one of his plays.
Where is the island of “The Tempest” though? It could be Malta, Pantelleria or Lampedusa from the
references given, it is unsure. But for sure Shakespeare knew about the Bermudas and the new world
as they’re mentioned in the text (there is also a reference to Sycorax’s god - witch, mother of Caliban
- is Setebos, a god from Patagonia in act I, ii, 374–5). This shows that knowledge about the new world
had become common, everybody knew about it and not only voyagers.

• Post-Colonial interpretation of the play

A canon is a body of texts, a set of reading practices, assumptions about genre, literature and writing,
and it is usually connected to a community and a country. This implies assumptions about what is
considered good literature. “The empire writes back” (the title refers to the idea of fighting back
through writing; colonised people were criticising the empire through their writings – literature had
a political role in the development of their independencies, the progress of emancipation but also
the passage to a kind neo-colonialism, as a sign was left forever) written in 1989 by Ashcroft, Griffiths
and Tiffin, three Australian scholars, from the colonies, introduces the approach which implied the
subversion of the British canon. This book suggests a new approach to literature: for example, the
look at the reality from the periphery and not from the centre of the empire. This subversion also
meant the bringing to consciousness of these practices and institutions that decided what the canon
was, and the proposal of a new canon, or an addition to it. Before people didn’t believe that post-
colonial literature could be considered at the same level as British literature, it wasn’t considered as
such until scholars attacked the canon. They considered postcolonial reading as independent
literatures, taking into consideration the cultural, religious and economic background of the
colonies. The same thing happened for the feminist point of view in canonical texts, that could give
different perspectives perhaps of the same texts. A new approach to reading new texts was given,
without the canon, taking into consideration also the effects of colonialism, such as concepts like
hybridity and “in–betweenness”. Another important concept in post-colonial reading is the “other”,
which acknowledges the existence of what is not European, that could be of two types: the colonist
and the colonised, which are both aborigines. They may have a different ontology or philosophy of
existence, his societies were described as paradigmatic, with a cyclic interpretation of the world:
everything was ordered, fixed, given for them. In a paradigmatic world the communication is
between men and the world, and not between men and men, like in a syntagmatic society. The
Eurocentric view defines otherness, and uses the relative term “other”, but the point is to detach
from this view and see things from the margin with the new canon.
A scholar, George Lamming from Barbados, wrote “The pleasure of exile”, where he dismantles the
hierarchy of Prospero, Ariel and Caliban: this is the rereading of the play from the periphery and it
gave different resources to the text, giving other lines of hypocrisy to Prospero. It stresses Caliban’s
eagerness to help Prospero and Miranda and underlines the fact that Prospero seems to imply that
Caliban didn’t exist, couldn’t have ideas without Prospero, so it stresses Caliban’s point of view.
Caliban’s instincts are underlined, but in this work they are not seen as faults. In Lamming’s work,
Prospero’s words are often read in a way of superiority. Prospero is seen as the bad character.
Caliban represents the colonised, who used the language imposed by the colonisers to rebel and
defend themselves. In this sense, inside the play Caliban says “my profit on it [the language] is to curse”:
Caliban uses English to rebel against Prospero.
According to Lamming, Caliban is not the creature outside the civilisation: he sees him as a real
human being (specifically a West Indian) whose human status is denied by the European (Prospero)
who claims to an exclusive human condition.
In Lamming we also meet the theme of good government: Prospero is the legitimate duke of Milan
and he is trying to regain power on another territory (in this case, Caliban’s island).
George Lamming also rewrote “The Tempest” from the point of view of the colonised.

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Hybridity is one of the elements that we find in the texts produced in the post-colonial period. The
authors which produced these works were free, but they depended on the colonisers on many levels,
especially economic or political. This type of approach to literature is new and interesting. Also, the
in-betweenness is a very important element of postcolonial readings of the play.
“The Stranger in Shakespeare” (1973) is a work written by Leslie Fiedler. It is a text about the borderline
figures which define the limits of humans in Shakespeare. For Fielder, it is possible to find in
Shakespeare’s works figures who are considered as “strangers”: in this case, we talk about Jews (like
in “The Moor of Venice”), women (who at the time were often seen as incomplete human beings if
compared to men) and witches. According to Fiedler, however, the representation of West Indians
in Caliban was the ultimate stranger. With Caliban, we find “the last stranger whom this globe can
know, until we meet the first extra-terrestrial”. Fiedler concludes his work by saying that the play
represents the first encounter of Europe with figures that cannot be accommodated within the
medieval idea of a close tripartite world (Europe, Asia and Africa).
Ania Loomba is another postcolonial writer: in 1998 she wrote “Colonialism/Postcolonialism”. In this
work, Caliban curses Prospero, yet he cannot revolt outright. He must in fact obey because his art is
more powerful that Caliban’s. Loomba describes that Prospero has a power which is exercised by
his servant Ariel. Prospero’s power is continuously exercised through violence.
“The Tempest” has been read as a paradigm, as a model, and it’s the first play to be read with a
postcolonial point of view. This has created a series of fictional works and many rewrote or
attempted to rewrite the play and the works of the canon.
Lamming has also written “The Tempest” in two novels in a postcolonial perspective.
Edward Said is seen as the father of postcolonial criticism. He wrote the work “Culture and
Imperialism”. Lamming said that Said wanted to show the history behind Caliban, who in
Shakespeare’s play seems not to have a past. Lamming wrote:

“Caliban is the excluded which is eternally below possibility... He is seen as an occasion, a state of
existence which can be appropriated and exploited to the purpose of another’s own development. If
that is so, then Caliban must be shown to have a history that can be perceived on its own, as the
result of Caliban’s own effort. [...] The main thing is to be able to see that Caliban has a history
capable of development, as part of the process of work, growth and maturity to which only Europeans
had seemed entitled. Each new American reipscription of the Tempest is therefore a local version of
the old grand story, invigorated and inflected by the pressures of an unfolding political and cultural
history. [...] For modern Latin Americans and Caribbeans, it is Caliban himself not Ariel, who is the
main symbol of hybridity, with its stranger and unpredictable mixture of attributes. This is truer to
the Creole, or mestizo composite of the new America.”

Said said that there are three ways the colonised can act against the colonisers: the first one is to
behave like Ariel, who obeys to Prospero’s orders; then we have Caliban, who fights back; last, we
have a Caliban who tries to go back to a pre-colonial self. There was in fact a movement which
wanted to rediscover the values which had been erased by the colonisers: its name was négritude.
In fact, here is what Said wrote:

“How does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past? One choice
is to do as Ariel does, that is, as a willing servant of Prospero. Ariel does what he is told obligingly,
and when he gains his freedom, he returns to his native element, a sort of bourgeois native untroubled
by his collaboration with Prospero. A second choice is to do like Caliban, award of and accepting his
mongrel (of mixed breeding) past but not disabled for future development. A third choice is to be a
Caliban who sheds his current servitude and physical disfigurements in the process of discovering
his essential, pre-colonial self. This Caliban is behind the nativist and radical nationalisms that
produced concepts of négritude, Islamic fundamentalism, Arabism, and the like.”

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History plays
History plays, or also histories, were written with an educational aim and were used to instruct or
indoctrinate (just like the church’s use of medieval drama). The purpose of histories was also
celebratory: they wanted to compare old monarchs’ behaviour with the behaviour of contemporary
governors, contrasting it and elevating the figure of the king who was in charge in that period.
Shakespeare’s history plays were usually written to celebrate the Tudor family.
Histories were addressed to all kind of people and social classes: since they were played in theatre,
they were accessible to everybody, and also those who didn’t have an education could learn about
history.
Even nowadays, history plays are performed in theatres or cinemas: this is because they convey a
message about general concepts which can be also found today, like the nature of power, the value
of politics and the figure of good politicians as opposed to the bad ones. For example, Richard III’s
character was once seen as a possible representation of Hitler’s person.
Shakespeare’s historical plays can be divided into two groups. The first group includes “Henry VI”
part I, II and II and “Richard III”; the second group includes “Richard II” and “Henry IV” part I and
II. The first group deals with parts of history that happened chronologically after the events present
in the second group.

• First group
The first group includes “Henry VI” part I, II and II and “Richard III”.
Henry VI was the last heir of the Lancaster family, before the War of the Roses broke out. His father
died when he was very young, so he became king at the age of 9 months. Because of this, a reagent
took his place until he became older. Henry VI is described as the emblem of the unsuitable king,
who lacks every possible political skill. Nevertheless, he is not described as a bad human being.
The same theme of the bad governor is presented in “The Tempest”, too: Prospero is in fact a bad
ruler, who only cares about his magical powers.
Between his many failures, Henry VI also managed to lose all the English possessions in France,
which had been conquered by Henry V in the past. King Henry VI’s weakness was one of the reasons
why the War of the Roses broke out.
Richard III was the last heir of the York dynasty. The play of which he is the protagonist represents
the symbol of the evil on a grand scale. Richard is a character who doesn’t stop in front of anything
and anybody, just like Marlowe’s characters. He is also seen as the emblem of the Machiavellian
thought: he is in fact a politician who acts not accordingly to a moral but accordingly to political
logic.
Through the whole play, it is possible to see the weakness of Richard, who is also composed by his
malicious irony, his mocking and his cruel streak. “Richard III” is one of the most performed plays,
and his figure was linked to many of the dictators of the 20th century.
Central themes of the first group are: the responsibility of the king, who must have the qualities of
a real governor; the necessity of national unity; the disaster caused by opposing forces; the
legitimacy of the kingship, which can be contested when the governor is not up at his role, even if
he represents the symbol of God’s will.

• Second group
The second group includes “Richard II” and “Henry IV” part I and II.
Richard II was the last heir of the Plantagenets. The play deals with the problem of a king who is not
up to his role. Richard II is a weak character who rules in an incorrect way. At the end of the play,
he is obliged to abdicate, and he will be murdered. His successor was Henry IV.
Even if Richard II is not a good governor, he is not described as a bad person: you perceive that he
also has good qualities, like Henry VI. Richard II is a good person in the wrong place, thus he is seen
as a tragic hero.
Henry IV is instead a good king, who faces the rebellion of the noble men who did not support him.
He also had to deal with his own successor, Henry V. In the play, we have the rise of a stereotypical

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character, called Falstaff: he is a big man, who likes drinking, eating and fornication. He becomes
the leader and the symbol of a dissolute and hedonistic life.
After the death of Henry IV, the son becomes a good and mature king. He will lead England towards
the role of most powerful country of Europe. He will also marry a French princess, and their son
will become heir of the French and the English throne.

Shakespeare’s sonnets
Shakespeare wrote a collection of sonnets, which don’t have a title but are numbered. The collection
was published for the first time in 1609, it was not authorised and was in an in-quarto volume.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are divided into two parts. From no. 1 to no. 126, they are concerned with
Fair Youth, while from 127 to 154 Shakespeare refers to a Dark Lady. We are not sure who Fair Youth
and the Dark Lady are. The book with Fair Youth is dedicate to a certain W. H., who then could be
the protagonist himself.
Why does Shakespeare refer to a Fair Youth? If this nobleman is his patron, it is a way to honour
and celebrate him.
For the Dark Lady, she could be his wife or just a mistress: she is called Dark Lady because she is
dark in complexion and hair.
The themes dealt with in the collection were very common in sonnets, for example the immortality
of poetry and the immortality that it conveys to the author. Another theme is procreation (from
sonnet 1 to 7 Shakespeare urges the Fair Youth to marry a woman and procreate to make his beauty
continue in his offspring. The first two theme thus suggest people how to become immortal, in a
certain way.
There are many other topics dealt with: e.g. the time is seen as a destroyer, and injustice seems to
triumph. There are also some specific facts, such as the discrepancy between the poet’s age and his
friend’s age, the estrangement and reconciliation between the poet and the youth, the absence of his
friend.
In the sonnets addressed to the Dark Lady, we have the description fo the woman and the
relationship between the woman and the poet. She is described as a real woman (we already saw
this type of woman in Wyatt’s poem).

• Sonnet 18 – Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day

The rhyme scheme is ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The Fair Youth is better than a summer day. “So long
as man can breathe, or eyes can seem / so long lives thus, and this gives life to thee”.
The topic of the poem is the duration of the Fair Youth’s beauty. Shakespeare underlines that Fair
Youth will survive in the poetry.

• Sonnet 116 – Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Love of true minds will not bend, it will be constant, even if the two lovers are far away. Love lasts
even if the lovers become older, even if time passes. Love doesn’t change, but it resists until death.
“If this be error and upon me proved / I never writ, nor no man ever loved”.

• Sonnet 130 – My mistress’ eyes

It is a sonnet about the dark lady. It is very famous because the description of the woman negates
all the stereotypes through which all women were described in Dolce Stil Novo. Shakespeare rejects
and somehow mocks these stereotypes. “And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare /as any she belied
with false compare”: in the couplet Shakespeare says that he loves her so much, even if she isn’t as
beautiful as the woman from Dolce Stil Novo. Shakespeare dismantles all the stereotypes. In the
couplet he says that all the women are described as angles are in reality exalted with false
compliments.

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The Stuarts
Jacobean and Caroline Drama
This kind of drama develops after Shakespeare. A great part of it was under James I, but also under
Charles I (their names are the reason why the drama had this name).
Ben Jonson (1572 – 1637) is one Shakespeare’s contemporaries. He’s generally tied to the Jacobean
theatre, because he had a longer life than Shakespeare and so he experienced the Jacobean theatre
rather that the Elizabethan theatre. He was a classicist and he was keen on editing and taking care
of his works, unlike Shakespeare, who was mostly a man of theatre.
Jonson respected the classical unities of time, place and action. He must be remembered for his
numerous masques (which were a genre of Jacobean theatre: it was a show which used a lot of
special effects and attractions. The masque was generally performed in noblemen’s houses. They
were based on rich costumes, music, dances, etc.), which were loved by king James I. The masques
also followed the Italian model and they introduced the painted scene, a background: the use of
perspective became here important.
Texts in masques were quite conventional and not really important, but they often presented
allegorical symbols. Jonson wrote 28 masques. His most famous masque is “Pleasure Reconciled to
Virtue”, which was a masque to celebrate James. There are many references to the classic and
renaissance culture.
Jonson also invented the so-called “The Antimasque”: it was a sort of introduction of the masque
per se. It can be described as the first stage of the masque, where grotesque figures appear and
perform chaos and disorder. Then, the music changes, and we have the beginning of the masque,
which is characterised by order and harmony.
In Jonson’s masques the king was always a point of reference. In the perspective scenery, the figure
of the king was always in the point where the lines of convergence of the perspective met.
Jonson also wrote a lot of satirical city comedies. He was a point of reference for the new school
called of “cavalier poets”, which juxtaposes to metaphysical poetry. The city comedies were
connected to the city of London, which at the time was seen as the centre of the world. London is a
sort of inspiration for Jonson.
Ben Jonson wrote these city comedies, which were satirical; there is a sardonic relish for the varied
and colourful London life of his days. Thus, London is mocked by the author, and with the city also
the people who lived there. In Jonson in particular there is a sense of humour which could be defined
as a little cruel: he is not a comedian, he is a satirist. He writes with cool irony of contemporary
human foibles, as he considered Plautus and Terence had done. Jonson believed that most human
beings had faults, and those who are perfect are very rare.
Jonson’s comedy is also known as comedy of Humours. The comedy of humours is based on a
theatre developed by Hippocrates: according to him, human beings have humours, which are very
important: blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile. Each of these humours have an influence on
people: if they are balanced, everything works well. However, not many people are equilibrated:
blood represents a passionate character; phlegm represents a phlegmatic, passive character; black
bile represent a melancholic, depressed character; last, yellow bile is part of a choleric, angry
character. Black bile was associated to earth and autumn; blood was associated to air and sprig;
yellow bile was associated to fire and summer; and phlegm was associated to water and winter.
Ben Jonson wrote “Everyman in his Humour” (1598) and “Everyman out of his Humour” (1599). A
character who has a prevalence of a humour is called a humorous character. In his plays you
generally find the presence a character who represents the prevalence of a humour. Characters who
are well balanced are usually called round characters, but in Jonson’s plays characters aren’t usually
well developed.
Jonson’s main plays are “Bartholomew Fair”, “Volpone” and “The Alchemist”. Jonson was a very
idiosyncratic man, who had lived a picturesque and violent life and was everything but a balanced
man.
In “The Alchemist” the plot is the following: Lovewit abandons his house because of the epidemic
plague. His servant Face and Subtle, a fake alchemist, engages in a series of deceptions to fulfil
people’s desires. The deceived characters are petty and silly, while the deceivers can be described as

30
ingenious. The deceived characters are thus not better than the deceivers: at the end you don’t even
feel sympathy for the deceived. In this play, the moral judgment is basically suspended. The formers
are not better than the latter. The law might punish them, but the play absolves them.
“Volpone” is a satire about greed and lust. It is also a satirical denunciation of hypocrisy. Volpone is
an Italian man, very rich. He pretends to be almost dead in order receive gifts and money. This time
the punishment falls on the guilty, but again we have an ambiguous sense of the moral: at the end
the deceivers and the deceived belong to the same nature.
The middle class is usually the target of city comedies.
Other city comedies that must be remembered are those from Thomas Middleton: “A trick to Catch
the Old one” (where we have a fight between a young nephew and an old, avaricious uncle: at the
end the vice of the youth wins), “A Chaste Maid in Cheapside” (it is about the exuberance of London
life, it has sparking language, and double-dealing and lies are the norm. The middle class is
portrayed as obsessed by money, social climbing and sex), and “Women Beware Women”.
During the Jacobean theatre, we also have two new types of tragedy: the revenge tragedy and the
domestic tragedy. “The Revenger’s Tragedy” is an example of revenge tragedy written by Middleton,
while “A Woman killed with Kindness” by Thomas Heywood and “The Duchess of Malfi” by Webster
are examples of domestic tragedy. These tragedies were usually set in Italy, which was generally
considered as a corrupted country, so more suitable for more morbid tragedies.
In revenge tragedies, you really have the revenge taking place on the spot. Sometimes the plots were
implausible, but in general authors didn’t care that much about the plot.
“A Woman killed with Kindness” is about a woman who betrays her husband, and she gets locked in
her remote house. At the end, she is forgiven, but on her death’s bed.
“The Changeling”, written by Thomas Middleton with William Rowley, is the story of a woman,
Beatrice, who is promised to Alonso, but she is in love with another man, Alsemero. Beatrice asks
her father’s servant, de Flores, to kill Alonso. The reward is not money but Beatrice herself, whom
he seized by force. A situation of attraction/repulsion for de Flores from Beatrice is born. We have
almost a situation of Stockholm syndrome. De Flores at the end kills Beatrice. There is also the
presence of a subplot, set in a lunatic asylum. The class and the asylum seem to have a lot in common,
because they are both dominated by the unreason of the passion.

During James I we have the creation of the Commonwealth, which will be led by Cromwell. The
world of the second half of the seventeenth century was completely different from the world of the
first part.

Metaphysical poetry
In the first half of the seventeenth century, we have two factions of poets: the cavalier poets and
metaphysical poets. Cavalier poets belonged to the court and supported the monarchy, and their
type of poetry was very traditional. The themes were celebratory, and they redefined the classical
themes of poetry.
The metaphysical poetry was the real innovation of this period. John Danne was one of the most
important representors of the metaphysical poetry. These poets were criticised for a long time and
were rediscovered only recently, especially thanks to the work made by T. S. Eliot.
The word “metaphysical” doesn’t necessarily concern with religion. “Meta” means “beyond”: what
is metaphysical is concerned with the fundamental problems of the nature of the universe and man’s
place in it. This is however the literal meaning, which is quite misleading, because metaphysical
poetry doesn’t necessarily deal with this.
“Metaphysical” is a derogatory term coined by Dryden and was also used by Samuel Johnson. It
however described their poetry correctly. Dr. Johnson said that “the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked
together by violence. Nature and art are ransacked for illustrations, comparisons and allusions”. For dr.
Johnson their poetry consists of “combinations of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in
things apparently unlike”, thus it is an artificial and obscure poetry.
Many were the characteristics that mad metaphysical poetry innovative: it was very witty (wit is the
quickness of intellect and the liveliness of fancy); the metaphors used were unusual, and it was

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possible to find analogies between two apparently distant images, ideas or concepts (we here talk
about the conceit); the images used were part of the natural science, geography, alchemy, medicine,
astronomy and mathematics; the tone used by the poet inside the poem was colloquial; many were
the sexual images expressed with a religious language and many were the religious images
expressed with a sexual language.
John Donne (1572 – 1631) is one of the main representors of metaphysical poetry. He was born in a
catholic family and he had studied at Oxford and Cambridge, but he was not awarded a degree
because of his religion. Between 1589 and 1591 he made some travels in Spain and Italy, which
brought him in contact with adventures, excitement and action. He wrote many works, such as
“Elegies” and “Satires”, but he started his passion for poetry only around 1590.
During his life, Donne was also appointed private secretary to an important official in Elizabeth’s
government (Sir Thomas Egerton). In 1601 he also clandestinely married Anne More, niece of his
employer: this marriage caused him to lose the job. After the marriage, he probably wrote his first
collection of poems, called “Songs and Sonnets”, even if it is difficult to date it exactly.
Between 1609 and 1611, Donne wrote the “Holy Sonnets”, which are two anti-Catholic pamphlets
about the renunciation of the catholic faith. John Donne was known as a great preacher and thinker,
and he also took the Holy Orders in the Anglican Church. He was the vicar of St. Paul’s Church from
1621 to his death.
After his death in 1633 it was published “Songs and Sonnets”, which was a collection of all his love
poems: the interesting thing is the fact that he never followed the scheme usually used by poetry.
The form was in fact dictated by the message delivered in the poem.
Donne had an unusual notion of love: in his poem, the main focus was not the beloved person, but
the relationship itself. The language used could either have a high erotic charge or it could invite to
a spiritual union which goes beyond the physical and sentimental. The woman was not seen as a
distant object, but as a real partner: in fact, in many poems she is being asked to accept the amorous
experience proposed by the poet.
As already mentioned, love and religion are two of the main themes of Donne’s poetry. We often
find dramatic monologues and a dramatic tension which characterises his literal production, which
is delivered with the directness of the speaking voice. Donne often uses both Latinism and simple
words of Anglo-Saxon origins. The speaking voice used can be assertive, ironic or meditative, but
there is always the exploration of a situation, feeling, state of mind in a mix of emotional and rational
terms. A thesis is demonstrated and then a line of reasoning is followed. Each poem of the author
explores the numerous faces of love and the poems are usually based on psychological concrete data
that are covered under a rhetorical web of fascinating artifice. The religious metaphors are used in
his love poems and metaphors of physical love appear in religious poems.
The famous author T. S. Eliot made some researches on John Donne, acknowledging some of his
main features: his fidelity to emotions as he finds them, Recognition of the complexity of feeling and
its rapid alterations and antithesis; John Donne can be considered modern because he neither
suppresses nor he falsifies and expresses complicated states of mind. Furthermore, it is impossible
to isolate his ecstasy, sensuality and cynicism.

The Commonwealth
The Commonwealth lasted from 1649 to 1658, and it represented the only non-monarchic period of
Great Britain’s government. The state was governed by the Parliamentarian forces, which for the
most part belonged to the Puritan middle-classes. In this period, Cromwell was the head of the
Parliament. He was also Puritan. He was appointed Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.
Milton was a puritan and supporter of Cromwell’s rule and was appointed secretary of foreign
languages in Cromwell’s government.
In 1642 the civil war broke out: the Royalists fought against the Parliament. The royalists were called
cavaliers, and they included aristocrats, clergy of the Church of England and the gentry; on the other
hand, the parliamentarians were called Roundheads. The creation of the Commonwealth occurred
after the Roundheads won the civil war.

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The puritans were Protestants, Calvinists, so they didn’t follow the scholar application of the Bible:
the scholarly interpretation of the Bible spread the idea that people could communicate with God
only through the churchmen. The puritans had the idea that everyone was capable of reading the
holy texts. The idea was that men should be in direct contact with God: the priest was, according to
them, a man amongst other men, and he didn’t have a higher position which allowed him to speak
with God.
The Protestants’ main idea was the Calvinistic theory of predestination: all men are born sinner and
they are bound to damnation. According to them, only God’s grace could save men, requiring of
him a holy life of hard work and discipline. The Protestants thought that you had to follow a life of
hard work and discipline to get salvation; if you were successful in your life, this meant that God’s
grace was with you. This encouraged people to be sober and strict in their lifestyle. However, on the
other hand, it could also cause problems: people would not help those in need anymore, because
they were thought to be damned by God’s decision (if they weren’t, they wouldn’t need help or
money). Poverty was considered almost as a sin and it was connected to moral degradation (e.g.: In
“Moll Flanders” we have this theme, where the protagonist does everything in her power to avoid
poverty).
From 1642 to 1660 Puritans closed theatres because of the strict lifestyle they led. Theatres were
considered sinful: they distracted people from their job, and they inflamed passions and thus
encouraged behaviours which weren’t considered puritans.

A few dates
Ø 1620: The Pilgrim Fathers landed in America (they were puritans, so they brought Puritanism
in America);
Ø 1642: the civil war broke out and the theatres were closed by the puritans;
Ø 1649: execution of the king and Commonwealth in England;
Ø 1653: Cromwell was appointed Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland;
Ø 1658; Cromwell died.

John Milton (1608 – 1674)

He was born when Shakespeare was still alive. He was a classicist and could write and read Latin,
Greek and Italian. He was a committed Protestant and Humanist, who felt his poetic inspiration was
a gift from God. He was extremely serious and sober: this helped him in the studies of high literature
to prepare himself for his creative work. In 1637 he made a European tour, and when he came back,
he decided to take part to Cromwell’s party.
Before “Paradise Lost” he wrote and published two poems: “L’allegro” e “Il pensieroso”, where he
juxtaposes gaiety and melancholy, action and contemplation, thus the joys of two different types of
lives. We find the hedonist against the contemplative and the juxtaposition between pagans and
Christians or the court against the Puritans: the lifestyle of “Il pensieroso” seems to be closer to the
puritans’ life, while “L’allegro “seems to belong more to the pagan life or the courtesan life.
Milton believed that the role of intellectuals was very important: he thought that they had the
responsibility to contribute to the history and civilisation of the country. Each of his works has a
moral and political message. However, there is not a sense of superiority, but just a sense of
responsibility: there isn’t a hierarchical view were the writer is above the others. According to
Milton, classics and holy texts are the basis for the formation of the intellectual.
On one hand Milton was a poet, but he was also a politician and an intellectual. We find a lot of
essays or works that he wrote that are engaged on a political point of view. An example is “Doctrine
and Discipline of Divorce”: it was a pamphlet published in 1643 and it resulted from a personal
experience (he didn’t have a happy marriage). Milton justifies divorce for reasons of mutual
incompatibility or personality clash. Puritans admitted divorce just in case of betrayal, but not for
the reasons Milton presented: his pamphlet was thus considered very original.
Other pamphlets are: “Areopagitica”, which is about freedom of the press; “Of Education”, which is
about the reformation of the traditional educational system; “The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates”,
which is about the right to depose and punish tyrants. It was published after Charles I’s execution

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in 1649. In this treaty he says that people have the right to depose tyrants, because the people is free
by nature.
He wrote many essays and pamphlets under Cromwell’s protectorate. Milton was a republican,
against the monarchy. He wrote “The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth”, in which
he defences the republican cause.
After the Restoration, he started writing “Paradise Lost”. It was one of his very last works, in which
however he couldn’t speak freely about politics, like he did during Cromwell’s Republic.

“Paradise Lost”
“Paradise Lost” conveys a political message. It was written after Milton had become blind, so he
dictated it to a ghost-writer. First, he wanted to make his poem in the shape of twice the length of
classical drama (10 books). In 1674 the books became 12, as in the Aeneid. References to drama and
tragedy are as important as those to the classical world and the epic literature.
“Paradise Lost” is an epic, because epic always celebrates the origins of a people, and generally it tells
about the victory of it. “Paradise Lost” is however the story of a defeat. It is written in the shape of an
epic, but it tells a defeat, as tragedy does.
At the beginning of the poem, we find a literal fall, which prefigures the fall of Men: the fall of Satan,
the head of the angels that rebelled to God. The fall of Adam and Eve become the archetype of the
Fall of Men. The poem begins in medias res, and then it goes back to the fall of Satan.
Epic celebrates the deeds of hero’s who are the mythical ancestors of a nation, while here Milton
wants to celebrate the ancestors of the whole human race. We find in the work a mix of classical epic
and biblical characters and events. The classical celebrates the Golden Age, now departed and lost
forever.
At the beginning of Book I, we find an invocation of the Muse, like in the Greek literature: however,
Milton talks to a Christian Muse, so he leaves behind the pagan world. It is an example of how a
rhetorical device is changed in a Christian way.
Paradise represents the Golden Age of humanity: Milton underlines repeatedly in the poem that the
arguments of the work aren’t less heroic than the deeds told in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The epic
tells of a nation’s collective identity, so shared values, beliefs and common notions.
After the beginning in medias res, the author goes back to what happened before: the story is in fact
made of flashbacks and flash forwards, even though we already know by the title of the poem that
the plot will not end with a victory but in resigned acceptance.
Even if the poem has an epic base, we find no positive hero: in the early books, Satan seems to
incarnate the virtues of a hero, even if he is defeated and exiled from Paradise. This has caused many
scholars to believe that Milton wanted to portrait Satan as the hero: this is, however, not possible,
due to Milton’s strong belief in God and religion. The values that should help build a strong
civilisation are those which can be found in Adam and Eve before their Fall: humility, meekness,
temperance, friendship, conjugal love and labour. These virtues do not belong to Satan’s character.
Before the Fall, these virtues are natural; however, after the work, they become something Adam
and Eve have to fatigue in order to have.
Before the Fall, the relationship of Adam and Eve is based on shared thoughts and feelings and
solidarity. Their sexuality is innocent, and they are free of the excess of lust and passion. After the
Fall, on the other hand, they are inflamed by carnal desire.
The marital relationship described as a model is based on the submission of a woman to her man:
because of this, Adam’s superiority is often emphasised. When this relationship changes, Adam
damns himself with his love for Eve. On one hand, the idea that marriage should be based on
common feelings and thoughts was new; however, Milton was a son of his time, so the marital
relationship had many characteristics typical of that period.
The ethics of labour conveyed by the author reflect the puritan values: they were in contrast with
the ideals of elegant indolence of the aristocratic class. Middle class (puritans) had not inherited their
wealth, so they were against the lifestyle led by the nobles. Work, according to the puritans’ view,
is considered important, because it represents a gift which was given by God to men. Work justifies
men’s privileged place in nature, and it justifies their intelligence. Nature is also God’s creation, but,

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according to Protestants’ view, it must be dominated and organised. This attitude wanted to justify
men’s control over nature. Work is considered a privilege that men have: in Eden, in fact, man was
in charge of nature, and had to control it, because it could be excessive.
After the Fall, Adam and Eve spend fruitless hours in mutual accusation. Only in book X they finally
recognise they have been the cause of their damnation.
The final two books illustrate the possibility of salvation through the intercession and incarnation of
Jesus Christ: however, this time, Adam and Eve have to conquer their Paradise through their
behaviour, which must be the result of a sober life, made of labour and integrity.
Finally, the Archangel Michael exposes the future coming of Christ and the corruption of medieval
Church.
In the poem, Milton sketches out the model of the new bourgeois family, a family which belongs to
the middle class and which has puritan values. They should live in a “Paradise within”, so they
should create a Paradise themselves in which they behave as good Christians.
Milton uses unrhymed iambic pentameter. He also presents the blank verse and not the heroic
couplet, like Shakespeare did. Milton rejects the verse of aristocratic culture, thus the heroic couplet,
in favour of formal rigour. However, some have criticised his syntax, such as T. S. Eliot, because its
forms were proper to Latin and not to English language.

• Introduction
Milton opens “Paradise Lost” by formally declaring his poem’s subject: humankind’s first act of
disobedience toward God, and the consequences that followed from it. The act is Adam and Eve’s
eating of the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, as told in Genesis, the first book of the Bible.
In the first line, Milton refers to the outcome of Adam and Eve’s sin as the “fruit” of the forbidden
tree, punning on the actual apple and the figurative fruits of their actions. Milton asserts that this
original sin brought death to human beings for the first time, causing us to lose our home in paradise
until Jesus comes to restore humankind to its former position of purity.
Milton’s speaker invokes the muse, a mystical source of poetic inspiration, to sing about these
subjects through him, but he makes it clear that he refers to a different muse from the muses who
traditionally inspired classical poets by specifying that his muse inspired Moses to receive the Ten
Commandments and write Genesis. Milton’s muse is the Holy Spirit, which inspired the Christian
Bible, not one of the nine classical muses who reside on Mount Helicon—the “Aonian mount” of
I.15. He says that his poem, like his muse, will fly above those of the Classical poets and accomplish
things never attempted before, because his source of inspiration is greater than theirs. Then he
invokes the Holy Spirit, asking it to fill him with knowledge of the beginning of the world, because
the Holy Spirit was the active force in creating the universe.
Milton’s speaker announces that he wants to be inspired with this sacred knowledge because he
wants to show his fellow man that the fall of humankind into sin and death was part of God’s greater
plan, and that God’s plan is justified.
The beginning of “Paradise Lost” is similar in gravity and seriousness to the book from which Milton
takes much of his story: the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible. The Bible begins with the
story of the world’s creation, and Milton’s epic begins in a similar vein, alluding to the creation of
the world by the Holy Spirit. The first two sentences, or twenty-six lines, of “Paradise Lost” are
extremely compressed, containing a great deal of information about Milton’s reasons for writing his
epic, his subject matter, and his attitudes toward his subject. In these two sentences, Milton invokes
his muse, which is actually the Holy Spirit rather than one of the nine muses. By invoking a muse,
but differentiating it from traditional muses, Milton manages to tell us quite a lot about how he sees
his project. In the first place, an invocation of the muse at the beginning of an epic is conventional,
so Milton is acknowledging his awareness of Homer, Virgil, and later poets, and signalling that he
has mastered their format and wants to be part of their tradition. But by identifying his muse as the
divine spirit that inspired the Bible and created the world, he shows that his ambitions go far beyond
joining the club of Homer and Virgil. Milton’s epic will surpass theirs, drawing on a more
fundamental source of truth and dealing with matters of more fundamental importance to human
beings. At the same time, however, Milton’s invocation is extremely humble, expressing his utter

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dependence on God’s grace in speaking through him. Milton thus begins his poem with a mixture
of towering ambition and humble self-effacement, simultaneously tipping his hat to his poetic
forebears and promising to soar above them for God’s glorification.
Milton’s approach to the invocation of the muse, in which he takes a classical literary convention
and reinvents it from a Christian perspective, sets the pattern for all of “Paradise Lost”. For example,
when he catalogues the prominent devils in Hell and explains the various names they are known by
and which cults worshipped them, he makes devils of many gods whom the Greeks, Ammonites,
and other ancient peoples worshipped. In other words, the great gods of the classical world have
become—according to Milton—fallen angels. His poem purports to tell of these gods’ original
natures, before they infected humankind in the form of false gods. Through such comparisons with
the classical epic poems, Milton is quick to demonstrate that the scope of his epic poem is much
greater than those of the classical poets, and that his worldview and inspiration is more
fundamentally true and all-encompassing than theirs. The setting, or world, of Milton’s epic is large
enough to include those smaller, classical worlds. Milton also displays his world’s superiority while
reducing those classical epics to the level of old, nearly forgotten stories. For example, the nine muses
of classical epics still exist on Mount Helicon in the world of “Paradise Lost”, but Milton’s muse
haunts other areas and has the ability to fly above those other, less-powerful classical Muses. Thus,
Milton both makes himself the authority on antiquity and subordinates it to his Christian
worldview.
The Iliad and the Aeneid are the great epic poems of Greek and Latin, respectively, and Milton
emulates them because he intends “Paradise Lost” to be the first English epic. Milton wants to make
glorious art out of the English language the way the other epics had done for their languages. Not
only must a great epic be long and poetically well-constructed, its subject must be significant and
original, its form strict and serious, and its aims noble and heroic. In Milton’s view, the story he will
tell is the most original story known to man, as it is the first story of the world and of the first human
beings. Also, while Homer and Virgil only chronicled the journey of heroic men, like Achilles or
Aeneas, Milton chronicles the tragic journey of all men—the result of humankind’s disobedience.
Milton goes so far as to say that he hopes to “justify,” or explain, God’s mysterious plan for
humankind. Homer and Virgil describe great wars between men, but Milton tells the story of the
most epic battle possible: the battle between God and Satan, good and evil.

• Satan’s speech (page 13 – booklet)

Satan is already in Hell. He looks around, studying Hell. He tries to consulate himself and also his
followers that this place is as good as Heaven, and the reason is because it is better to rule in hell
than to obey in Heaven. This part made scholars underline Satan’s role in “Paradise Lost” and
Milton’s parent sympathy towards Satan.
Satan is referred to as the “lost Arch Angel”. He acknowledges that God has won, so he can do
whatever he wants, and the devil accepts his will of exiling him of Heaven. Satan underlines that he
is the same as God, just like the angel, but God is just stronger, and this is what made him victorious.
However, Satan claims his equality to God.
Satan says farewell to Paradise and then greets Hell, accepting his role as its owner. Satan says that
his behaviour will not change just because he is now in Hell: he will remain true to himself and be
the same as he was in Heaven. “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of
Heav’n”: an important sentence in which Satan recognises that it doesn’t matter the place in which
you are: it all depends on the way you live. Satan also says: “Here at least we shall be free”, so he is
trying to consulate his followers by proclaiming freedom.
The most famous lines of this speech are, as already said, “better to reign in Hell, that serve in Heaven”.
Here you see a fierce spirit: Satan really embodies the values of epic and he reminds us of Achille.
He doesn’t want to surrender, and even when he is defeated, he keeps on claiming his superiority
and his pride. He also remains the same, keeping his power and now governing over Hell.

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The Restoration
In 1660 we have the Restoration of the Monarchy (which brought, between many things, also the
restoration of the theatres). After being an engagé writer, Milton, who didn’t have Cromwell’s
protection anymore, turned into a different type of writing: poetry. As said, he also wrote “Paradise
Lost” in this period.

Restoration Drama
The theatres that re-opened in 1660 were very different from the theatres of the Elizabethan age. The
king was Charles II, who was called back from his exile to France in order to govern on England
again. When he came back, he brought a new taste for the arts and poetry, which was typical of the
French population: French models, and also Spanish, spread across the country, joining theatres and
drama.
The Elizabethan drama was somehow revived, but then a new type of comedy and tragedy
developed: we generally refer to this phenomenon as Restoration Drama.
Playhouses had new shapes, and they came closer to the shape nowadays’ theatres have. The new
theatres were indoors, so they had to have artificial lights; they were U shaped and there was a
division between the stage and were the public sat; there were a dozen or more rows of benches
surrounded by boxes (palchi) and with two tiers of galleries above. Two important novelties of the
Restoration Drama were that women were now allowed to act and that theatres now had movable
painted scenes, which allowed them to be more elaborate, differently from the Elizabethan Drama,
which had very few props and a very simple scene.

Restoration Comedy
The influences of the Restoration Comedy were Molière and the Spanish comedies of intrigue.
In the restoration comedy written in this period there is a tendency to criticise the middle classes,
which were becoming more relevant in economy, having earned their incomes through hard work.
The values and virtues that characterised the Puritans were ridiculed in the plays. The subject matter
was basically the metropolitan high society.
The plays were written by upper class playwright and the public was mainly composed of upper-
class people, unlike the Elizabethan drama. The middle classes were treated with scorn, because
they represented the classes that had supported the Puritans and Cromwell’s Civil War.
The Restoration Comedy is a Comedy of Manners, but yet a satirical type of comedy. It deals with
the manners and customs of the time and mocks them. It is a type of comedy based on love, intrigues,
etc. In this contest the word “wit” becomes very important, because it is considered as the virtue par
excellence in this world: it has a different meaning from the metaphysical drama, where it meant
ingenuity, the ability to make conceits. In the comedy of manners “wit” becomes the ability to talk,
to speak brilliantly. The characters affirm themselves through their ability of speech. The wit
becomes the hero in these types of comedies.
On the other hand, in these comedies, people from the countryside are depicted as clumsy and seen
as uneducated and non-wits. There is also, however, a satire on the frivolousness of the upper class.
In the comedy of manners, we also find a character which is known as the Fop: he is the object of
ridicule, because he tries too hard to be a wit (a would-be wit). His excess also shows the
inconsistency of the values of all the others. The Fop is characterised by affectation: he is exaggerated
in the attention he gives to his dresses, he shows off and dissimulate.
The most important restoration comedies are
Ø “The Man of Mode” by G. Etherege (which is about a Fop who is full of affectation and presumption
and who embodies the code and values of high society, unmasking its superficial essence. We
also have a wit, Dorimant, who is inspired by the poet and libertine Earl of Rochester);
Ø “The County Wife” by W. Wycherley;
Ø “Love for Love” (a comedy of sex: it shows a couple which has problems. In comedies of manners
you often find love and marriage as represented through the economic point of view: also, the
title alludes to a contract. We obviously find both the Fop and the Wit) and “The Way of the Worlds”
by W. Congreve;

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Ø “The Recruiting Officer” by G. Farquhar;
Ø “Sir Patient Fancy” by A. Behn (the only one written by a woman: Virginia Woolf even mentioned
her in “A “Room of One’s Own”. Into his comedy you see the reality represented from a woman’s
point of view. Through the character of the comedy, Behn denounces forced marriages, which
were very common in that period. It is a sex comedy, meaning a comedy about a battle between
the two sexes: in this sense the comedies of manners are comedies of sex, because they show a
different behaviour the two genders have towards life).

Restoration Tragedy
The tragedy was also important in this period. The master of Restoration tragedy is Dryden, who
followed models coming from the French tragedy. The Restoration tragedy is completely different
from the Elizabethan tragedy, which was very violent and exhibitionist. On the other hand,
Restoration tragedy tried to avoid all the excesses in images and language (even Shakespeare was
considered a little too violent for this period’s standards, and some parts of his plays were in fact
cut). There is a sort of return to the classical aesthetic.
There is a famous essay of romantic poetry, called “Of Dramatic Poetry” and written in 1668, where
Dryden describes what the verse of tragedy should be, that is to say the heroic couplet.
John Dryden was a poet and a playwright, and as most of literary masters, he was involved in
politics, but he celebrated the king and the monarchy, differently from Milton. Some of his poetry is
celebrative, but then at a certain point he converted to Catholicism and was thus deprived of the title
of Poet Laureate. He was an excellent translator of classics, but he was mostly remembered for his
heroic tragedies. As said, he thought that tragedies should use heroic couplets; however, one of his
tragedies was written in blank verses.
“The Indian Emperor”, one of his tragedies, was inspired by Ariosto’s “Orlando Furioso”. In the
tragedy, we find the themes of love, duty and honour, which should lead the actions of the
protagonist. The formal elegance of the heroic couplet perfectly suited this kind of tragedy.
“All for Love” is the tragedy written in blank verses, and it is also the tragedy which made him
famous. It represents a sort of rewriting of the play “Antony and Cleopatra”, but Dryden gives also a
personal and psychological view of the characters. This tragedy was written in 1678.
Another play written by Dryden is “Marriage à la Mode”: it is a comedy. It is interesting because it is
connected to a set of paintings and engravings that can be found at the National Gallery in London.
Between the paintings that inspired this play we find “Hogarth: The Marriage Contract”; “Hogarth:
Shortly After the Marriage”; “The Bagnio”.
John Bunyan is another author of this period, who wrote “The Pilgrim’s Progress”. He was a
Protestant and a nonconformist preacher, and because of that he was arrested: he spent 12 years in
jail, and during this time he produced his most famous work, which was finished in 1677.
“The Pilgrim’s Progress” is a work which represents a religious allegory, and which received an
enormous success. It is written in prose, and it talks about a dream pilgrimage in the Celestial city.
It is considered one of the staple readings of English literature, especially in America. The
protagonist, whose name is Christian, recalls in some way the morality plays of “Everyman” and
“Piers Plowman”. The progress addressed to in the title is represented in the journey of the
protagonist itself.
In the plot of the story, Christian crosses symbolic places, such as the Valley of Humiliation, the
Valley of the Shadow of Death, and Doubting Castle, where he meets various allegorical characters.
He has to overcome difficulties and obstacles of every kind, and at the end of the story he is able to
reach the Celestial City, with his friend Hopeful. Another fellow pilgrim, Faithful, is put to death in
Vanity Fair, a place where everything is for sale (gold, silver but also wives, children, titles, lives,
etc). Here the pilgrims are taken to court and tried, as their values and principles are diametrically
opposed to those of their judges (who don’t want to buy everything).
The whole story was strongly influenced by the experience Bunyan lived in prison; in the plot it is
also easily possible to find a critique against the absurdity of the legal logic.
In a certain way, Bunyan’s work reminds the reader of Milton. The author here gives the most
important inhabitants of Vanity Fair, the courtiers of Beelzebub, the names of the vices and sins that

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the Puritans associated with the aristocracy. Furthermore, Hell is described as the place of the false
values of aristocracy. In addition to the description of the structure of this work, it is possible to say
that the attention to details, some aspects of the places and characters, the tone of the narration and
its dialogues are thoroughly realistic. People enjoyed it because the Pilgrim is an ordinary person
facing extraordinary adventures, as in the novel, thus it was not read for religious reasons only.
Also, Aphra Behn can be added to the list of this period’s authors. She wrote “Oroonoko, or the royal
slave” in 1688, which was written in prose. The plot is the following: an African prince is captured
by the British and convicted to Surinam with his beloved Imoinda. He rebels; therefore, he is tortured
and dies as an honourable hero. Surinam was an English colony where the writer had lived part of
her life, thus her ability to eye-witness the places she described gives her a very modern
characteristic, which will be used in the novel as well. The protagonist of “Oroonoko” is not a noble
savage. He is a complex being and belongs to a refined civilisation. He also embodies many
principles, such as honour, honesty, and spiritual love for his beloved. We can find here the
contraposition between a royal slave (which is an oxymoron per se) and world of European avid
merchants and ruthless colonisers. It is possible to find the criticism of slave trade and of
Colonialism. The whole work represents a mix of romance, autobiography and travelogue.
The situation outside Britain in this period was also very complicated: between 1500 and 1870, the
African slave trade was very big, and the slaves were graded from west and central Africa to the
new world, especially to Brazil. Some people were traded, while others were captured through raids.
Between 9.4 and 12 million African arrived by force in the new world. In 1682, William Penn set the
Quaker colony of Pennsylvania.

After the Restoration

In 1685 Charles II died, converting to Catholicism on his deathbed. Another Stuart got to the throne:
James II. The problem with him was, however, that he was a widower: he remarried a catholic. The
parliament called then another king, William of Orange, who was the husband of one of James II’s
daughters, Mary. This brought in 1688 the Glorious Revolution, called like this because the civil war
didn’t break out this time, but James II was deposed and had to leave England. William and Mary
became king and queen of Great Britain, after signing a contract, the so-called Bill of Rights: in
exchange of the throne, it allowed the parliament alone to raise taxes, control an army and pass laws.
With another bill, the Catholics were excluded from the possibility of ascending to the throne.
In 1701 we have the Act of Settlement, which allowed Mary to become queen when William died in
1702.
In 1714, Queen Anne died. Since the Act of Settlement excluded Catholics from the possibility of
taking the throne, the successor of Queen Anne was George I of Hanover, who was the great-
grandson of James I. He was then followed by George II, George II, George IV, William IV and,
finally, Queen Victoria. During this époque, two major parties emerged inside the parliament: the
Tories and the Whigs. In addition to that, a new peculiarity was that now the prime ministers ruled
the country.
In 1756 the Seven Years’ War broke out: it was a war made by England against France, Spain and
Austria. In 1763 the Treaty of Paris brought to Britain a great part of India, Quebec and Dakar (which
was in Africa). These new conquests allowed the empire to keep on growing.
In 1783, the British empire experienced the American revolution, which caused the loss of a lot of
American colonies. Another important war which occurred in these years is the war against France
in 1793.
• The first part of the century, the one under Queen Anne, is called Augustan Age: the poets of this
period were thus called Augustan Poets, mainly because their works were inspired by Latin authors.
The Augustan age was called so after the period of Roman history which had achieved political
stability and power, as well as the flourishing of the arts. Optimism encouraged faith in progress
and human perfectibility: literature had to educate and improve society. This is one of the reasons
why satirical poetry was born. This period was also characterised by a desire for balance, symmetry
and refinement, and these feelings could mainly be found in architecture (e.g. St. Paul’s Cathedral,
made by Christopher Wren. It embodies the characteristics of neo-classicism).

39
The same necessity for balance and symmetry was reflected in poetry as well. One of the main poets
of the Augustan Age is Alexander Pope (1688 – 1744), who was also the first English poet to make a
living from his literary output. Pope had faith in the educative value of poetry, which he considered
a means to say “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed”. He was a humanist and loved the
clarity and elegance of classic poetry. One of his most famous works is “Essay on Criticism”, where
he exalts the imitation of Nature; he also translated the “Iliad”, and this allowed him to gain financial
independence.
Pope’s poetry’s structure is characterised by the use of the heroic couplet, like Dryden’s. Very known
works of his are “Pastoral” (1707), which was inspired by Virgil, and “The Rape of the Lock”, (1712),
which is a mock-heroic poem. It tells about the snipping of a love-lock from the head of a beautiful
girl named Belinda, which caused a quarrel between two aristocratic families. It was based on a real
fact. In “The Rape of the Lock” it is possible to find allusions to greatest literary works, such as the
“Aeneid” but also “Paradise Lost”. It is written in a sophisticated and elegant language and form. The
society of Pope’s time is usually the object of his satire (especially the fatuousness, superficiality and
exteriority of the upper classes). The first Italian translation of this work is “Il ricciolo rapito”, which
was an allusion to Alessandro Tassoni’s “La secchia rapita” (1621, an Italian mock-heroic poem, the
beginner of this genre in Italy).
Pope’s latest satirical production includes “The Dunciad”, written in 1728. It presents a harsher tone
than the previous work. Through “The Dunciad”, Pope presents a corrosive satire of the British
literary world, represented as the empire of dullness, ruled by dunces (stupid or slow at learning).
Pope represents the antithesis of a real poet for the Romantics, because of his lack of feelings, his use
of sophisticated language and the primacy given to form. However, Pope was able to conjugate
satire, elegance and rigour, and he was the master of heroic couplets. In general, his satire can be
distinguished by Swift’s, because it is marked by bitterness and disgust.
Jonathan Swift was born in Ireland in 1667, and he died in 1745. He was an Anglican priest, dean
of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. He promoted the rights of Ireland in a number of writings: the
most famous is “A Modest Proposal” (1729), a pamphlet attacking the politics of the English which
had caused Ireland’s state of poverty. Here Swift presents a paradox: he suggests selling Irish
children as quality meat for the tables of the rich English, filling the pamphlet with understated
ferocity.
Other pamphlets by Swift that can be remembered are “The Battle of the Books” (1697), which sets out
a battle between ancient and modern writers, to the disadvantage of the moderns; and “A Tale of a
Tub” (1704), which is on the contemporary political and religious controversies and on the practice
of vituperation (vituperio = insulti, offese) in cultural debates.
However, Swift’s most famous work is “Gulliver’s Travels”, which was abbreviated and simplified,
reduced to its first two parts to serve as an adventure story for children. Its source was “The True
History”, a work by the Greek author Lucian: a tale of fantastic journeys undertaken by a group of
lost mariners. Travellers’ tales were very popular at the time (see Defoe’s “Robinson Crusoe”).
“Gulliver’s Travels” is composed of four books: the protagonist is a ship’s surgeon, an honest person
but not particularly perspicacious, thus a gullible character (Gulliver = gullible). Gulliver isn’t an
ironic character: he praises the English institutions and he believes that every country around the
world should be colonised by England.
In the first book, Gulliver undergoes a shipwreck on the island of Lilliput: here he is a giant among
very small people; in the second book, he ends up in Brobdingnag, where its inhabitants are 12 times
bigger than he is; in the third book, he ends on the flying island of Laputa, where the inhabitants are
devoted to abstract speculations and unable to do practical activities. He also meets the learned men
of Balnibarbi, (their aim is to discover things of great practical utility, but they engage in useless
experiments). Finally, he meets the Struldbrugs, a race of immortals, growing decrepit and miserable
because they cannot die; in the fourth book, Gulliver ends in the land of intelligent and rational
horses (Houyhnhnms) and a filthy man-like race (the Yahoos). When he goes back, he cannot stand
living with his relatives and goes to live in the stable, because the smell of humans repels him.
Gulliver’s tales are for Swift an occasion of ferocious satire against King George I, his Prime Minister
Walpole, the administration of justice and the squabbles (battibecchi) between Protestants and

40
Catholics. His satire attacks false ideas, pettiness, hypocrisy and injustice and he gives a fantastic
but also a ferocious representation of society.
This neo-classic period lasted until mid-century. The term “neo-classicism” especially refers to art,
whose aim was believed being the imitation of nature.
This first part of the century was also characterised by the strong presence of reason, continuing the
trend of the second half of 1600 and beginning a new period called Enlightenment. People had faith
in the authority of reason, and science and the rationalistic spirit weren’t seen as a challenge to
religion, but as a means for a better understanding of the order and harmony of a God-created
universe. New methods of inquiring into nature were invented, and they weren’t based on the
accepted authorities but on the mathematical-physical experimental method. We have the birth of
the so-called deism, thus the theological position based on a compromise between religion and
science. Because of the new importance given to science, many societies were created: the Royal
Society (founded in 1662, with Charles II’s patronage) gave propulsive force to this view: it’s motto
was “nullius in verba” (on the word of no one).
In 1687, Newton published “Principia Mathematica”, which brought science in the top ranks of
learning. With harmony, order and reason, men could control everything, even nature. This brought
scientific discoveries and technological development.
• The end of the 18th century is characterised on the other hand by a new sensibility and a new idea
of poetry: there is a new relationship with nature, and this relationship predicted one of the most
important characteristics of romanticism. We in fact talk about Pre-Romanticism.
The 18th concluded with the progressive evolution of the society: the increased leisure and comfort
among the upper class encouraged the habit of reading; journalism became a profession and novels
were often published in series in newspapers; women, who were denied access to public life of any
kind, constituted a major market for fiction; coffee-houses were created, thus places for social
debating and professional networking.
A very important event that characterised the second half of the 18th century was the Industrial
Revolution, which brought a shift from agrarian and handicraft economy to an industrial one, based
on machine manufacture. Raw materials from the colonies gave impetus to industries; we have the
invention of the steam-engine; an enterprising class owned the capital; the Empire was a huge
market to sell products.

The Novel
The middle class was characterised by a practical attitude to reality, an enterprising spirit and a
focus on hard labour.
The Novel can be described as the genre of the Bourgeoisie. The birth of this new genre was possible
thanks to many elements: a stable government, a growing empire, material prosperity,
individualism established as major characteristics of the period. The rise of the Middle Class caused
the new man, the bourgeois, to seek profits all over the world: wealthy merchant class who
controlled trades. The Middle Class and its empowerment encouraged the development of the
Industrial Revolution.
The novel is the literary genre of the rising bourgeoisie, because it showed its values. Novelists and
the reading public shared the same interests and values. According to Hegel, the novel could be
described as the epic of a prosaic middle-class world.
It is important to note that there is a difference between the novel and the romance: romances
generally talk about Kings and Queens, heroes, miraculous events, magic and impossible enterprises
told in an elevated language; on the other hand, novels are close to readers: they might tell of
unusual or curious events, but these belong to our world. We find thus a verisimilitude.
“Don Quixote” is an example for English novelists: it shows how the world of the romance was in
conflict with the real world. It is the story of a knight who still believes in chivalric values and travels
around with his servant in search of noble deeds to fight for. His enemies are in fact windmills, and
his lady, symbol of courtly love, is a vulgar peasant woman. Don Quixote appears ridiculous because
he sees ghosts of a past that does not exist any longer. He has read too many romances.

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One of the branches of the Novel is the Realistic Novel, which presents the following characteristics:
the author and the public share the same world; it tells of common life in ordinary speech; the stories
told in the realistic novels are generally invented, they are fictional, but they could, however, be
situations which could happen in real life (e.g: In “Robinson Crusoe”’s frontispiece, the author
pretends his protagonist is real: “This is the story of... written by the protagonist himself”; Richardson
says he is the editor of Pamela’s letters, the heroine of his epistolary novel); last, we have the use of
first person narrator.
The stories of novels used to promote the values of Middle Class: they were entertaining, but they
also had a didactical purpose. In the first novels, such as those of Defoe or Richardson, the values
which could be found were typical of the Puritans’. In terms of structure, the novel was generally
composed of three volumes. Generally, novels were read by women, who had much more time than
men and had to find something to entertain themselves.
Mikhail Bakhtin is a critic who wrote “The Dialogic Imagination” (1975), in which he included four
essays on language and the novels written in the 1940s. The first essay goes about epic and novel. In
this essay, Bakhtin wrote:

“The novel is a contemporary form constantly renewing itself in response to the transformations
taking place in the modern world: a genre in becoming and therefore always incomplete”.

Another critic, Ian Watt, wrote in 1957 “The Rise of the Novel”, in which he underlines the connection
between the rise of the novel and the rise of middle class. In fact, they reflect the same economic and
psychological individualism. “Robinson Crusoe”, “Moll Flanders” and also Richardson’s “Pamela”
show this. Both Defoe and Richardson belonged to the middle class, therefore they present puritan
values in their novels. On the other hand, another novelist, Henry Fielding, belonged to the higher
class: he in fact presented the theme of justice of the peace.
According to Watt, the novel has a serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people: society
must value every individual highly enough to consider him proper subject of literature; there is a
variety in the life of individuals described in the novels so as to arouse interest in other ordinary
people (the readers).
Defoe and Richardson are the first writers in English literature who did not take their plots from
mythology, history, legends or previous literature. In this they differ from Chaucer, Shakespeare or
Milton who, like the authors of ancient Greece, habitually used traditional plots, because they
accepted the natural premise that Nature is complete and unchanging, so its records, whether
legendary or historical, constitute a definitive repertoire of human experience.
These factors depend on the rise of individualism in society: social values were in fact no longer
based on the church, the family, the township, the guild or other collective units, but on the
individual.
Central themes of Individualism are the independence of the individual both from other individuals
and tradition or social forms, meaning the autonomy of the individual with regard to his particular
social status or personal capacity. Individualism is a characteristic of modern society, due to two
major historical causes: the spread of Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist or Puritan forms, and
the rise of modern industrial capitalism. In the 16th century the rise of national states and the
Reformation challenged the substantial social homogeneity of mediaeval Christendom. “For the first
time, the Absolute State faced the Absolute Individual”- F. W. Maitland, a jurist, historian father of British
legal history, (1850-1906). The foundations of the new order were laid after the Glorious Revolution
(1689).
In 1700, we live the rise of Capitalism: the commercial and industrial classes (middle class) had
achieved greater political and economic power, becoming the prime agents in bringing about the
individualist social order and gaining more and more importance in the reading public. Capitalism
brought an increase of economic specialisation and this, combined with a less rigid and
homogeneous social structure and a less absolutist and more democratic political system,
enormously increased the individual’s freedom of choice.

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Richard Steele, the editor of “The Tatler”, a daily newspaper founded in 1709, with Addison (co-
editors of The Spectator, 1711-12) and Defoe set the seal of literary approval on the heroes of
economic individualism.
Philosophy was strongly touched by individualism, too: the great Empiricists of the 17th century
were vigorous individualists, sharing the thought of the political vanguard of nascent
individualism. Among the most important names, we remember Bacon, Hobbes and Locke. Bacon
applies his inductive method to an accumulation of factual data about a great number of particular
individuals.
Thomas Hobbes (1588 – 1679) is one of the most known philosophers of this period: he developed
the idea of the so-called egocentric psychological constitution of the individual. Bellum omnium contra
omnes (“war of everyone against everyone”) is the sentence which represents the most his ideals:
according to him, men had to survive on earth by making war against other men, for homo homini
lupus (“the man is a wolf among other men”).
According to Hobbes, the way out of the state of nature into political society and government is by
mutual contracts: because of this, the philosopher was in favour of political absolutism, and thought
that it was the absolute monarch’s duty to guarantee human rights. Because of this, Hobbes was of
the idea that people had to respect the monarch.
Next to Hobbes, another important philosopher can be recognised in John Locke. Locke's political
theory was founded on the social contract theory. He defended the claim that men are by nature free
and equal against claims that God had made all people naturally subject to a monarch. Governments
exist by the consent of the people in order to protect the rights of the people and promote the public
good. Governments that fail to do so can be resisted and replaced with new governments. A good
state is based on a contract between people and King.
Locke also spread the idea of indefeasibility (intoccabilità) of individual rights against those of the
Church, the family or the King.
The birth of the Modern urbanisation brought: the rise of individualism, of a well-defined criminal
class and of a complex system for handling it made of law-courts, informers and crime reporters like
Defoe; and a new attitude to society and its laws: the individual’s orientation to life was determined
not by his/her acceptance of the positive values of society but by his/her own personal aims, which
are restrained only by the legal power of authority. While in the Middle Age the examples of Christ
and St. Francis gave sanction to the view that poverty was not a sin, but it will enhance the
individual’s prospect of salvation, in the 17th century a new emphasis on the economic achievement
was reached. The opposite point of view came to be accepted: indigence was shameful and
considered as evidence of present wickedness and future damnation. As already seen, Defoe’s
heroes, along with others, would rather steal than beg (“Give me no Poverty lest I steal”– Moll
Flanders).
It is also possible to find a link between the birth of Individualism and the Colonial development:
John Gay, in his “The Beggar’s Opera”, mark the golden age of highwaymen (banditi). The work
represents a satirical ballad opera set among thieves and whores. It is the representation of the
transportation of criminals from the urbanised centres to places such as North America, where
plantations were present between 1717 and 1775.

Daniel Defoe (1660 – 1731)

Daniel Defoe was part of the middle class. He did a lot of jobs before becoming a novelist in 1719:
he had been a merchant and thus travelled a lot; he worked for a politician to gather information
(agent), he was a journalist (from here we can understand his interest in writing and for other
cultures) and thus wrote many treatises and pamphlets.
Daniel Defoe was also a dissenter, thus he dissented from the Anglican Church in order to become
a Protestants. His dissension was what brought him to write the pamphlet “The Shortest Way with
the Dissenters”, which ironically promoted the suppression of anybody who dissented from the
Anglican Church.
Defoe promoted both in his novels and essays the values of the Middle Class and the ethos of
capitalism. According to him, it was completely necessary to give absolute value to competition,

43
merit and enterprising spirit: it was thus a right of people to rebel against an unjust ruler and an
overthrow hierarchy and privilege, in order to recreate a new order. The author in fact once said:
“The man is not rich because he is honest, he is honest because he is rich”: according to puritan values, in
fact, poverty was seen as a sin and richness was seen as purity of the soul and honesty.
Defoe had a casual attitude to his writing: inconsistencies in details in his works are in fact a common
characteristic. It is possible to find, for example, repetitions and parenthesis, an unpremeditated
stumbling rhythm, long and involved sequences of co-ordinate sentences, which are usually very
long. However, it must be recognised that no previous author could represent the way of speaking
of an uneducated person so naturally.
Usually, two methods of reporting are used in novels:
1) the alternation of fully realised scenes and passages of less detailed summary (Defoe’s story is
told with a hundred realised scenes whose average length is less than 2 pages and an equally large
number of passages containing rapid connective synopses, meaning that a large proportion of the
book is occupied by uninspired summary);
2) it is possible to find groups of episodes: for example, if we take “Moll Flanders”, we find groups
related to Moll’s seduction by the Elder Brother or groups about the discovery of the incestuous
marriage with her half-brother. Each episode is divided into important scenes alternated with bare
summary, causing the emotional force of the episode to be weakened.
The aim of his narrative technique is to reproduce a convincing likeness to the autobiographical
memoir of a person. Defoe’s prose is not well-written in the ordinary sense, but it is very effective
in keeping us very close to the consciousness of Moll as she struggles to make her recollections clear.
Defoe’s factual prose was influenced by the Royal Society, which encouraged this kind of prose in
scholarly and scientific writing. Factual prose was thus characterised by a mathematical plainness.
Defoe’s language contains a very high amount of Anglo-Saxon words, like Bunyan’s “Pilgrim
Progress”.
The simple and positive quality of Defoe’s prose embodies the new values of the scientific and
rational outlook of the late 17th century. This was the tendency of new styles of preaching (which
Defoe found in the books of Reverend Richard Baxter, for example). We find here the concept of
plainness, which represents the supreme aim, although the most educated of his readers could
consider him clumsy and repetitive, thus very simple, since repetition the simplest of rhetorical
devices. In response to them, Defoe said: “preaching sermons is speaking to a few of mankind, printing
books is talking to the whole world”.
Defoe’s training was in the hard school of journalism. From 1704 to 1713, for 9 years, he edited the
thrice-weekly newspaper The Review. The gift or readability of his works comes from this practice.
It is possible to find a direct connection between his career as a journalist and pamphleteer and the
search of verisimilitude: often Defoe explains, argues and looks for evidence about his arguments.
Moll’s moralising attitude comes from the sermons, too.

“Robinson Crusoe”
“Robinson Crusoe” is Defoe’s first novel, written in 1719, inspired by the story of Alexander Selkirk.
He represents the quintessential homo economicus, who is entirely defined by his properties. He
reflects the characteristics of the middle-class man, a man who completely depends on what he
owns: in fact, when the ship wrecks at the beginning of the story, he goes back to it in order to rescue
all the objects which haven’t been destroyed by the crash. He removes everything he can from the
ship before it sinks, and then he proceeds in doing the inventory of his possessions.
Defoe has much in common with the empiricists in supporting individualism as a virtue. All of
Defoe’s heroes pursue money, which he characteristically called “the general denominating article in
the world”. They pursue it methodically according to the profit and loss book-keeping (contabilità).
According to Defoe, our civilisation is based on individual contractual relationships as opposed to
the unwritten, traditional and collective relationships of previous societies. Robinson’s purpose
(unlike Ulysses or Autolycus) is profit. The world is his territory.
Robinson’s autobiography refers to a genre in Protestant literature: the biographical account which
is serving as a lesson and a warning. The language used in the novel is the language of journalism

44
and preachers, which was considered appealing to a public of merchants and craftsmen. In fact, it
contained the idioms of the people, the liveliness of the spoken language, the concreteness of speech
and the choice of words that potential readers would want to read. This is a long way from the
language of romance.
In the novel, Robinson basically recreates a civilisation on the island he lands: it is a civilisation that
strongly resembles to the civilisation he knows. It is based on middle class’s values, thus work,
religion, fatigue and duty. It is possible to find religious overtones: before the shipwreck, Robinson
had in fact rebelled against the paternal authority, leaving with the ship even if the father prohibited
him to do it. The shipwreck represents a punishment, but God has also offered him the chance of
salvation. This situation represents a trial that he must undergo. Determination, discipline and
courage lead him to success: at the end of the novel, not only he survives, but he also thrives and
goes back home as a rich and honourable man.
The themes of imperialism and post-colonial reading of the novel are two of the main features of
“Robinson Crusoe”.
The desert island is a perfect place to show his qualities and demonstrate that he deserved to be
saved by God’s Providence. Robinson organises a «primitive» empire, becoming in this way the
prototype of the British coloniser: his stay is not a return to nature but a chance to exploit and
dominate nature. The life Robinson creates on the island is not an alternative to the English one but
an exaltation of 18th century’s England and its ideals of mobility, material productiveness and
individualism.
On the island, Robinson is not completely lonely: he meets a native which he takes under his
protection. He will call him Friday, in honour of the day he met him.

• Plot
Robinson Crusoe is an Englishman from the town of York in the seventeenth century, the youngest
son of a merchant of German origin. Encouraged by his father to study law, Crusoe expresses his
wish to go to sea instead. His family is against Crusoe going out to sea, and his father explains that
it is better to seek a modest, secure life for oneself. Initially, Robinson is committed to obeying his
father, but he eventually succumbs to temptation and embarks on a ship bound for London with a
friend. When a storm causes the near deaths of Crusoe and his friend, the friend is dissuaded from
sea travel, but Crusoe still goes on to set himself up as merchant on a ship leaving London. This trip
is financially successful, and Crusoe plans another, leaving his early profits in the care of a friendly
widow. The second voyage does not prove as fortunate: the ship is seized by Moorish pirates, and
Crusoe is enslaved to a potentate in the North African town of Sallee. While on a fishing expedition,
he and a slave boy break free and sail down the African coast. A kindly Portuguese captain picks
them up, buys the slave boy from Crusoe, and takes Crusoe to Brazil. In Brazil, Crusoe establishes
himself as a plantation owner and soon becomes successful. Eager for slave labour and its economic
advantages, he embarks on a slave-gathering expedition to West Africa but ends up shipwrecked
off of the coast of Trinidad.
Crusoe soon learns he is the sole survivor of the expedition and seeks shelter and food for himself.
He returns to the wreck’s remains twelve times to salvage guns, powder, food, and other items.
Onshore, he finds goats he can graze for meat and builds himself a shelter. He erects a cross that he
inscribes with the date of his arrival, September 1, 1659, and makes a notch every day in order never
to lose track of time. He also keeps a journal of his household activities, noting his attempts to make
candles, his lucky discovery of sprouting grain, and his construction of a cellar, among other events.
In June 1660, he falls ill and hallucinates that an angel visits, warning him to repent. Drinking
tobacco-steeped rum, Crusoe experiences a religious illumination and realizes that God has
delivered him from his earlier sins. After recovering, Crusoe makes a survey of the area and
discovers he is on an island. He finds a pleasant valley abounding in grapes, where he builds a shady
retreat. Crusoe begins to feel more optimistic about being on the island, describing himself as its
“king.” He trains a pet parrot, takes a goat as a pet, and develops skills in basket weaving, bread
making, and pottery. He cuts down an enormous cedar tree and builds a huge canoe from its trunk,
but he discovers that he cannot move it to the sea. After building a smaller boat, he rows around the

45
island but nearly perishes when swept away by a powerful current. Reaching shore, he hears his
parrot calling his name and is thankful for being saved once again. He spends several years in peace.
One day Crusoe is shocked to discover a man’s footprint on the beach. He first assumes the footprint
is the devil’s, then decides it must belong to one of the cannibals said to live in the region. Terrified,
he arms himself and remains on the lookout for cannibals. He also builds an underground cellar in
which to herd his goats at night and devises a way to cook underground. One evening he hears
gunshots, and the next day he is able to see a ship wrecked on his coast. It is empty when he arrives
on the scene to investigate. Crusoe once again thanks Providence for having been saved. Soon
afterward, Crusoe discovers that the shore has been strewn with human carnage, apparently the
remains of a cannibal feast. He is alarmed and continues to be vigilant. Later Crusoe catches sight of
thirty cannibals heading for shore with their victims. One of the victims is killed. Another one,
waiting to be slaughtered, suddenly breaks free and runs toward Crusoe’s dwelling. Crusoe protects
him, killing one of the pursuers and injuring the other, whom the victim finally kills. Well-armed,
Crusoe defeats most of the cannibals onshore. The victim vows total submission to Crusoe in
gratitude for his liberation. Crusoe names him Friday, to commemorate the day on which his life
was saved and takes him as his servant.
Finding Friday cheerful and intelligent, Crusoe teaches him some English words and some
elementary Christian concepts. Friday, in turn, explains that the cannibals are divided into distinct
nations and that they only eat their enemies. Friday also informs Crusoe that the cannibals saved the
men from the shipwreck Crusoe witnessed earlier, and that those men, Spaniards, are living nearby.
Friday expresses a longing to return to his people, and Crusoe is upset at the prospect of losing
Friday. Crusoe then entertains the idea of making contact with the Spaniards, and Friday admits
that he would rather die than lose Crusoe. The two build a boat to visit the cannibals’ land together.
Before they have a chance to leave, they are surprised by the arrival of twenty-one cannibals in
canoes. The cannibals are holding three victims, one of whom is in European dress. Friday and
Crusoe kill most of the cannibals and release the European, a Spaniard. Friday is overjoyed to
discover that another of the rescued victims is his father. The four men return to Crusoe’s dwelling
for food and rest. Crusoe prepares to welcome them into his community permanently. He sends
Friday’s father and the Spaniard out in a canoe to explore the nearby land.
Eight days later, the sight of an approaching English ship alarms Friday. Crusoe is suspicious. Friday
and Crusoe watch as eleven men take three captives onshore in a boat. Nine of the men explore the
land, leaving two to guard the captives. Friday and Crusoe overpower these men and release the
captives, one of whom is the captain of the ship, which has been taken in a mutiny. Shouting to the
remaining mutineers from different points, Friday and Crusoe confuse and tire the men by making
them run from place to place. Eventually they confront the mutineers, telling them that all may
escape with their lives except the ringleader. The men surrender. Crusoe and the captain pretend
that the island is an imperial territory and that the governor has spared their lives in order to send
them all to England to face justice. Keeping five men as hostages, Crusoe sends the other men out to
seize the ship. When the ship is brought in, Crusoe nearly faints.
On December 19, 1686, Crusoe boards the ship to return to England. There, he finds his family is
deceased except for two sisters. His widow friend has kept Crusoe’s money safe, and after traveling
to Lisbon, Crusoe learns from the Portuguese captain that his plantations in Brazil have been highly
profitable. He arranges to sell his Brazilian lands. Wary of sea travel, Crusoe attempts to return to
England by land but is threatened by bad weather and wild animals in northern Spain. Finally
arriving back in England, Crusoe receives word that the sale of his plantations has been completed
and that he has made a considerable fortune. After donating a portion to the widow and his sisters,
Crusoe is restless and considers returning to Brazil, but he is dissuaded by the thought that he would
have to become Catholic. He marries, and his wife dies. Crusoe finally departs for the East Indies as
a trader in 1694. He revisits his island, finding that the Spaniards are governing it well and that it
has become a prosperous colony.

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• The description of Friday

“He was a comely (attraente) handsome fellow, perfectly well made; with straight strong limbs, not
too large; tall and well shaped, and, as I reckon, about twenty-six years of age. He had a very good
countenance, not a fierce and surly (scontroso) aspect; but seemed to have something very manly in
his face, and yet he had all the sweetness and softness of an European in his countenance too,
especially when he smiled. His hair was long and black, not curled like wool; his forehead very high
and large, and a great vivacity and sparkling sharpness in his eyes. The colour of his skin was not
quite black, but very tawny (bruno); and yet not of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians,
and Virginians, and other natives of America are; but of a bright kind of dun (opaco) olive colour.
[...] His nose was small not flat like the negroes [...]”

Even in the physical description of Friday, there are some pieces of the passage reported above in
which it is clear the comparison made by Robinson between the native of the island and the
European look. Because of some features that characterise him (underlined), Friday is considered by
Robinson as “comely”: he in fact has “the sweetness and softness of an European”, and his hair is “long
and black”, and not “curled like wool”. Even the colour of Friday’s skin is beautiful according to
Robinson, and not “of an ugly yellow nauseous tawny, as the Brasilians, and Virginians, and other natives
of America”.

“He came running to me, laying himself down upon the ground , with all possible signs of a humble
thankful disposition, [...]. At last he lays his head flat upon the ground, close to my foot, and sets my
other foot upon his head, as he had done before; and after this, made all the signs of subjection,
servitude, and submission imaginable, to let me know how he would serve me as long as he lived.”

In the passage here reported, it is possible to see the attitude of Friday towards Robinson: he
immediately recognises Crusoe as his owner, at the point that he lets him put his foot on his own
head. In this way, Friday promises Robinson that he will serve him for the rest of his life.

“I made him know his name should be Friday, which was the day I saved his life. I called him so for
the memory of the time. I likewise taught him to say Master, and then let him know, that was to be
my name; I likewise taught him to say yes and no, and to know the meaning of them [...].”

Again, we find here an example of the relationship between Robinson and Friday, which is clearly
hierarchical. Robinson is seen as the owner, the conqueror of the island. He gives Friday his new
name, and he teaches him the word “master”, which will be from that moment on Robinson’s name.
Then he also teaches him basic words: it is again the representation of the necessity of the English
population to bring civilisation in the uncivilised world.

“Moll Flanders”
It can be considered a picaresque novel. The first novel of this kind was “Lazarillo de Tormes”, so it is
a genre which arrived from Spain: generally, a picaresque novel can be described as an
autobiographical account of the life and adventures of a person of the lower classes, usually an
orphan, in a hostile world. “Moll Flanders” was also influenced by Elizabethan lowlife tales. One of
the most known is “The Unfortunate Traveller” by Thomas Nashe (1594).
The picaresque novel in England turned into the adventures “on the road” of a character (e.g. parts
of Fielding’s “Tom Jones” and “Joseph Andrew”).
“Moll Flanders” however is actually close to the original idea which lies behind the picaresque novel.
The frontispiece of the novel was very long. It reported the following words:

“The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, & c. Who was Born in Newgate, and
during a Life of continu'd Variety for Threescore Years, besides her Childhood, was Twelve Years a
Whore, five times a Wife (whereof once to her own Brother), Twelve Years a Thief, Eight Years a

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 Transported Felon in Virginia, at last grew Rich, liv'd Honest, and died a Penitent. Written from
her own Memorandums.”

• Plot
Moll Flanders is born to a mother who has been convicted of a felony and who is transported to
America soon after her birth. As an infant, Moll lives on public charity, under the care of a kind
widow who teaches her manners and needlework. She grows into a beautiful teenager and is
seduced at an early age. Abandoned by her first lover, she is compelled to marry his younger
brother. He dies after a few years, and she marries a draper who soon flees the country as a fugitive
from the law. She marries yet again and moves to America, only to find out that her husband is
actually her half-brother. She leaves him in disgust and returns to England, where she becomes the
mistress of a man whose wife has gone insane. He renounces his affair with Moll after a religious
experience.
Moll's next marriage offer is from a banker whose wife has been cheating on him. Moll agrees to
marry him if he can obtain a divorce, and meanwhile she travels to the country and marries a rich
gentleman in Lancashire. This man turns out to be a fraud--he is as poor as she is--and they part
ways to seek their fortunes separately. Moll returns to marry the banker, who by this time has
succeeded in divorcing his wife. He dies soon after, however, and Moll is thrown back upon her
own resources once again. She lives in poverty for several years and then begins stealing. She is quite
talented at this new "trade" and soon becomes an expert thief and a local legend. Eventually she is
caught, imprisoned, and sentenced to death. In prison at Newgate, she reunites with her Lancashire
husband, who has also been arrested. They both manage to have their sentences reduced, and they
are transported to the colonies, where they begin a new life as plantation owners. In America, Moll
rediscovers her brother and her son and claims the inheritance her mother has left her. Prosperous
and repentant, she returns with her husband to England at the age of seventy.

• Characters
Moll Flanders: The narrator and protagonist of the novel, who actually goes by a number of names
during the course of her lifetime. Born an orphan, she lives a varied and exciting life, moving
through an astonishing number of marriages and affairs and becoming a highly successful
professional criminal before her eventual retirement and repentance. "Moll Flanders" is the alias she
adopts, or rather is given by the criminal public, during her years as an expert thief.
Moll's Mother: A convicted felon, Moll's mother was transported to the American colonies soon
after her daughter was born. She reappears as Moll's mother-in-law midway through the novel,
when Moll travels to Virginia with the husband who turns out to be her half-brother. She leaves her
daughter a sizable inheritance when she dies, which Moll reclaims in America at the end of the novel.
The Nurse: A widow in Colchester who takes care of the child Moll from the age of three through
her teenage years. The sudden death of this nurse precipitates Moll's placement with a local wealthy
family.
The Elder Brother: One of the two brothers in the family with which Moll spends her teenage years,
he falls in love with her. She becomes the mistress of this older brother, under the mistaken
understanding that he intends to marry her when he comes into his inheritance.
Robert: The younger of the two brothers who fall in love with Moll. He eventually marries her, in
spite of his family's disapproval, but dies after five years.
The Draper: Moll's second husband, a tradesman with the manners of a gentleman. His financial
indiscretions sink them into poverty, and he eventually escapes to France as a fugitive from the law.
The Plantation Owner: A man who marries Moll under the deception that she has a great fortune.
Together they move to Virginia, where he has his plantations. There, Moll learns that he is actually
her half-brother and leaves him to return to England.
The Gentleman: A well-to-do man who befriends Moll and eventually makes her his mistress. His
wife is mad, but he keeps Moll for six years before an illness and religious experience prompt him
to break off the affair.

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The Banker: A prosperous man whom Moll agrees to marry if he will divorce his unfaithful wife.
They live happily for several years, but he then dies.
Jemy: Also called James and "my Lancashire husband," he is the only man that Moll has any real
affection for. They marry under a mutual deception and then part ways. Eventually they are reunited
in prison and begin a new life together in America.
"My Governess": Moll's landlady and midwife, later her friend and confederate in crime. She helps
Moll manage an inconvenient pregnancy and initiates her into the criminal underworld.
Humphrey: Moll's son by the husband who was also her brother. She meets him with an
overwhelming affection on her return to America, and he very generously helps her get established
there.

• Analysis
While Robinson represents the spirit of the homo economicus, Moll represents the feminine version of
this character: she was constrained by necessity to a life of crime and sinfulness. She becomes thus a
thief and a prostitute but concludes her life with freedom and prosperity. The plot of the novel was
very implausible; nevertheless, it brought an enormous commercial success to the book. At the end
of the novel, her final repentance works in her favour and somehow redeems her bad behaviour.
The novel is an epitome of the middle class’ period and the age of puritans.
In the same way as Robinson, Moll rejects emotional experience. There is no psychological insight
into the character, because it was seen by puritans as an impediment to the rational accumulation of
capital and the social definition (status) that this implies. In a way, Moll is Crusoe’s female
counterpart: like Crusoe’s, her reflections have an economic basis and are carried on in strict logical
sequences. We find a rudimentary psychology. Moll embodies many traits that are regarded as
bourgeoise: she is obsessed with gentility and keeping up appearance; she is characterised by stress-
less individualism; she regards poverty as a sin; she prefers theft to being poor. Moll’s main aims
are self-assertion and material benefit. In the book, she wonders why Providence could have been
so kind to her, and this declaration leaves “the reader to improve the thoughts”: at the end of the
book she basically thanks God for all the possibilities she has had to be redeemed. Robinson too
asked himself a similar question and then said: “the ways of Providence are inscrutable”.
The name “Moll” is in reality a nickname: nicknames were in fact indicative of characteristics,
qualities or defects of the characters themselves. Through the nickname, Defoe lets us know what
kind of woman Moll is (in fact, in the slang of the time “Moll” meant a woman of low repute, often
the girlfriend of a criminal. “Moll Cut-Purse” was also the name of a notorious female thief,
immortalised in two plays of the 17th century). In the book Moll does not know how she came to be
called by such a name, but she assumes it when she takes shelter in the Mint (a sanctuary for debtors)
after the bankruptcy of her second husband, the draper.
The name “Flanders” has a geographical origin: the Flanders were a region in Belgium, next to
Holland. At the time, Flemish women were renowned for cloth-making abilities, weaving fine
Flanders linen. Moll’s association with lace, needlework and mending begins in her infancy. For her,
working with the needle equates with being a gentlewoman but she naively (and ironically) admires
a “Madam” (the town whore). Another interesting fact is that at the time Flemish, Dutch women had
a reputation as prostitutes in England, and it was also possible to find a famous brothel in London
known as Holland’s Leaguer. Moll’s cloth-making ability also alludes to Chaucer’s Wife of Bath.
It is possible to make a comparison with Richardson’s “Pamela”. Richardson deals in his novels with
social mobility, and he talks about it in a different way than Defoe. Social mobility was linked to the
fact that very often in that period people tried to climb social ladders, trying to become a part of the
highest class. Pamela is a maid who succeeds in marrying the master of the house. She thus becomes
a lady. Moll, on the other hand, is a different kind of character: at the very beginning of the novel,
she claims she wants to become a lady through her work. However, this statement makes everyone
laugh: this is because it was not possible for women to become ladies through work. She has to find
a husband: she marries the younger brother of the family. At the end, Moll uses her beauty and her
body to survive: critics read this as a behaviour that a labourer could to survive: she uses her capital.

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The book has received some critics caused by its moral inadequacy and primitive fictional technique.
However, the text is a revelation of the mercantile mind, and it perfectly reflects the morality of
measurement. “Robinson Crusoe” is Defoe’s most popular and powerful work. But since E.M.
Forster’s “Aspects of the Novel”, “Moll Flanders” has been considered as the best single work for
Defoe’s investigating methods and his place in the tradition of the novel.
The subject presented in “Robinson Crusoe” and “Moll Flanders” is very different. However, they both
present many similarities. Moll’s crimes and Robinson’s travels are both rooted in the dynamic of
economic individualism. The spread of the ideal of individualism had caused the increase of
criminality in that period’s society: Moll is the representor of this society, where everyone tries to
affirm themselves as individuals, even though not everybody has the same opportunities.
We have said that “Moll Flanders” is a picaresque novel: the Spanish picaro (which historically comes
out of the break of the feudal social order) is not so much a complete individual personality. His
adventures are a literary convention for the presentation of a variety of satiric observations and
comic episodes. He does not really suffer the deep stings of pain and death. Some of Moll’s actions
may be similar to those of the picaro but there is much more identification and sympathy, thus the
reader and author take her problems much more seriously. Furthermore, in Defoe’s work we find
characters such as whores, shoplifters, adventurers and pirates, who are presented as victims of the
environment in which they live. In addition to that, the sanctions of the law are rigorous, and
punishments are part of the reality, and not a convention. In conclusion, in “Moll Flanders” the
context is more serious, and the story shows the dangers of the criminal activity.
On the point of view of the descriptions, in “Moll Flanders” Defoe focuses on the materiality of the
objects and their solidity: these factors are easily linkable to the importance given to one’s properties
(“I am what I own”). Defoe’s pays little attention to the internal consistency of his story. For example,
at a certain point Moll gives a gold watch to her son “that I stole from a gentlewoman’s side” at a meeting
house in London, but there is only one episode like that in the romance and Moll did not succeed in
stealing the watch. Defoe had a faint recollection of what he had written 100 pages before.
It is also possible to find many discontinuities which suggest that the work was not conceived as a
coherent whole, but worked piecemeal, very rapidly and without subsequent revision.
The story falls into two main parts: the first and longer one is devoted to her life as a wife, while the
second is devoted to her criminal life and the consequences. The first part is composed of five
episodes, each one ending with the death or departure of a husband. It is possible to find two main
episodes narrated in the first part: the abortive affair with the married man at Bath, and the
stratagems by which her friend, the Redriff widow (p. 116), secures herself a mate (p. 113 – 120).
In the second part, Moll turns into a thief: this happens only when she can no longer be expected to
be courted for a mistress or wife. This one is considered the most interesting part of the book. Its
connection with the rest of the plot is that it finally leads to her arrest and the reunion with James in
prison, to her later transportation (with James, too) and eventually to her return to Virginia and her
family there.
As already mentioned, Moll had five husbands throughout her whole life: the first marriage was a
consequence of her seduction by the Elder brother. It represents a symbolic prelude to the novel as
a whole. This marriage is an example of social climbing, but she is less “virtuous” than Pamela.
During this marriage, Moll had 2 children. The second marriage is with the draper, who goes
bankrupt and has to run away to avoid debtors’ prison. One son dies. The third marriage (with half-
brother) leads her to Virginia: thank to this travel, Moll discovers her mother and the secret of her
birth. She has 3 children, but one dies. However, at the end of the book we only learn about one son
(incongruity of the plot). Her fourth husband is called in many ways: James, Jemy (p. 211), the Irish
or Lancashire husband, the highwayman. He’s connected with the later part of the book from Moll’s
trial at the Old Bailey onwards. She has only one son, who is later given away for adoption. The fifth
marriage is with the clerk, after he has divorced (p. 242). He dies of a blow for having lost his money
giving a loan to a friend. She gives birth to two children. Moll is by now 48.
The first two marriages were contracted out of expediency, so Defoe considered them immoral.
However, they were at least legal, differently from the other three. They begin soon after her first

50
assumption of the surname Flanders (at the Mint): this whole path represents a moral decline. Moll
is becoming the sort of woman her name suggests.
In addition to that, the third marriage is incestuous (however, she discovers it later).
After the break up, Moll lives an affair with a married man she meets at Bath. When she gets
pregnant, she is assisted “by three or four of the best Citizens Wives of Bath”.
As it is possible to understand, Moll had many children, some of which died soon. The woman
doesn’t develop a strong bond with her children: in fact, she is callous (spietata) in treating all of
them, apart from Humphry, the one who lives in Virginia (who guarantees her inheritance and the
plantations). The majority of children are just quickly mentioned in the story, only to be forgotten,
and left in the care of relatives or foster-mothers. In this case, Moll is the representation of a heartless
mother. In general, she doesn’t consider personal relationship very important: she only cares about
partnerships.
Leslie Stephen has reproached Defoe with a lack of psychological analysis: all of Moll’s reactions are
prompted by profit or danger, and according to the writer psychological details would be
superfluous. In the novel, we are told very little about Moll’s personality. There is a particular
deficiency in dealing with personal relationships and very little is said about the quality of Moll’s
loves: she confesses of “having lain with 13 men”, so Defoe focuses on the quantity, but not on the
quality. Again, we find an incongruity: we only know of six of them and we cannot be sure which
of them she preferred.
In “Moll Flanders”, we find a principle that was not common at that time: female equality, in which
Defoe really believed. Some critics have in fact seen in Moll the representor of proto-feminism: for
Moll being a gentlewoman means not going to service, but having an autonomous job, “to work for
myself” (p. 50), being economically independent (first having a regular job and then an illicit, criminal
activity). In the upper classes, however, this was not possible: a regular job for a woman and the
status of gentlewoman were not compatible, so marriage was the only possible job (J. Austen deals
with this issue, too, a century later).
In the novel, it is also possible to find the theme of the importance of education: Moll can make her
capital profit because of her enterprising spirit and intelligence but also for the education she has
indirectly received in the host family where she lived when she was 17-18 years old (p. 55-6). She is
called “Betty”, the generic name for a chambermaid (see also Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”).
Another central theme in the novel is that of marriage: women were in an uncompetitive position in
the marriage market: this is a point frequently made by Defoe (see for example what the sister says
about men: “they marry rich women and make love to beautiful ones as lovers, mistresses”, p. 58). Women
were “bought” through their dowries and commercial terms were often applied to marriage (p. 104
we find the term “sold”). In conclusion, in the novel it is possible to find many considerations about
love and marriage (e.g.: p. 103 and 112).
However, Moll isn’t only “merch” for a good marriage: in many passages of the novel she can be
described as a husband hunter. She often tries to run the marriage “game” herself (p. 103 – 104),
wanting the money and the status of a married woman, a wife. One big example of this is the
marriage with the draper: however, this wedding will not end according to her plans, since her
husband ends in bankrupt and has to run away in order to avoid legal problems. Because of this,
Moll ends up “having a husband but no husband”: she is in fact legally married, but she is alone because
her husband has left.
After the end of Moll’s second marriage, the woman is again on the market to look for a third
husband: this causes Defoe to make a critic of prudential matches. According to the author, women
who consent to such alliances are “little more than legal prostitutes”. However, this is what Moll is
actually looking for (it is possible to make a comparison with Jane Austen’s idea of marriage). Defoe
also wrote an essay about this topic, called “Conjugal Lewdness: or Matrimonial Whoredom” (1727),
later renamed “A Treatise Concerning the Use and Abuse of the Marriage Bed”.
Inside the novel, men have the control of the marriage: an example of this is the episode of the
woman neighbour: she enquires about him. The man is resented and therefore he leaves her. The
idea that comes through is that men want to control the game, without being judged or controlled

51
by their wives: they probably know that women are able to win when the ally and form a coalition.
Another example of female comradeship is the alliance Moll forms with her governess.
To conclude, there are also some scenes inside the novel that can be considered central in terms of
moral comments: for example, we find one at pages 59 – 61 (where Moll’s judgement is obfuscated
by vanity and pride); at p. 364 – 365 we find an example of repentance; p. 254 – 256, where we find
the description of the beginning of her career and a moral.

“Roxana, or the Fortunate Mistress”

It is another novel written by Defoe in 1724. It is again the story of a woman who is abandoned by
her husband. However, she does not start from the same miserable condition as Moll. Roxana is
married to a rich gentleman who loses his fortune and deserts her. She becomes a prostitute from
necessity but then continues to practice her profession even when she is not in need any longer.
Roxana has No faith in gentlemanly behaviour or generosity: she understands that she has to
provide for herself. She even refuses to marry a rich nobleman in order not to lose her financial
independence. She does not want to become a man’s property.

Samuel Richardson
“Pamela” and “Clarissa” are his most known novels. They both are epistolary novels, while Defoe
preferred the form of the memoires or the journal. Richardson’s novels are very long and are all
made of letters: they thus use first person narrator, just like in Defoe. However, being epistolary
novels, there is a major focus on the psychological side of the protagonists. If you think of Defoe and
Richardson together there are some differences in the narration that can be highlighted: the novel of
Defoe represents a quite primitive novel, with incongruities and no psychological insight; in the
novel of Richardson we find for the first time a focus of the psychological side.
Richardson was a purer. He married his boss’s daughter, so in a way he also climbed the social
ladder. Richardson was not really used to write: he discovered his ability as a novelist by chance.
He in fact wrote two books, one about his apprentice (“The Apprentices Vade Mecum”) and the other
which was called “The Familiar Letters on Important Occasions”, a guide book meant to provide model
letters that could be imitated by semi-literate readers. This book gave him the idea of an epistolary
novel.
Richardson’s characters «write to the moment», they write about their experiences as they happen,
they have no time to reflect on them and immediately put them down hot on the page. This almost
puts them in comparison with real people, who communicate their experience with immediacy. It is
up to us readers to reflect on them and draw from them the necessary lessons.

“Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded” (1740)

“Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded” is an epistolary novel made up of letters and journals, which are for the
most part written by the protagonist. It is the story of a maid, Pamela Andrews, whose virtue is
repeatedly and unsuccessfully attacked by her master, Mr. B (remember that Fielding will invent a
sort of an ironic sequel to “Pamela”, “Joseph Andrews” in fact, in which it will be possible to find a
Mrs. B). Mr. B wants Pamela to become his mistress, but after being rejected by her, he will end up
marrying her: the virtue is here rewarded.
Throughout the whole novel it is possible to find a strong moralising aim, which reflects the strong
puritan middle–class scheme of reward for virtue and punishment for sins. These are the same
principles of hard work and conjugal love, accompanied by the condemnation of the debauchery of
aristocracy previously promoted by Milton. In the novel it is possible to find the practical application
of the mercantile bourgeoisie’s code of behaviour and outlook.
As already mentioned, while talking about “Moll Flanders”, Richardson also promotes a
revolutionary principle of the middle class, that is to say social mobility: he tells the story of a person
of the lower middle class, who succeeds in joining the elevated ranks of the upper gentry. In fact,
the middle class swept away the medieval principle whereby everyone should live and die in the
same social class they were born.

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In Richardson’s novel there is psychological analysis, missing from most of previous fiction. The
reader is taken into the character’s mind and is invited to share their innermost feelings and moods.
In contrast to Defoe’s novels, there is a sense of personal development within the story. Richardson’s
characters are not static. Furthermore, his insights into man’s mind influenced Jane Austen.
From the point of view of the narrative technique used by Richardson, the author uses the first-
person narrator, using the points of view of many different individuals in order to describe the same
event: this allows the reader to develop a complete opinion about the situation presented.
The author’s narrative technique has much in common with the dramatic technique, because
characters introduce one another using letters instead of speech and the action is made up by a series
of scenes. This method gives the action immediacy. The language used is that of ordinary people
(but some parts could not have been written by a maid-servant. Richardson intervenes to correct
some of the irregularities of common speech and makes it more formal). Yet, this fact can be
considered a revolution, because the language of normal people entered the realm of literature.
The epistolary novel was not only a characteristic of Richardson’s production: although he wrote
many novels of this king (e.g. “Pamela”, “Clarissa” and “Sir Charles Grandison”), letter writing was in
vogue in that period. We find any examples of epistolary novel, such as J.J. Rousseau’s “Julie ou La
Nouvelle Héloїse” (1761) J. W. Goethe’s “Leiden des Jungen Werther” (1774) or U. Foscolo’s “Le ultime
lettere di Jacopo Ortis” (1818).
There are many defects that can be found in Richardson’s production: his style is uneven, his
learning is narrow, his pious morality often seems hypocritical and the treatment of his themes is
full of contradictions. However, he was very influential and innovative for his time: he developed a
new genre (the epistolary novel) which provided new ways of revealing the human character and
dramatizing human relations.
Many critics and other authors have shared different opinions about Pamela’s behaviour inside the
novel: Richardson himself recognised Pamela’s choices as virtuous and he thought that she should
be rewarded. On the other hand, Fielding thought her behaviour was hypocritical. According to
William Empson, Pamela is “unconsciously scheming”. Or is she conscious of what is at stake?
Her modernity must be recognised: her resistance, her “impudence” are a modern response to the
arrogance or the principle of authority, which the aristocracy and the upper classes had for centuries
regarded as prerogatives.

“Clarissa”
“Clarissa” was published between 1747 and 1749. It is a gigantic epistolary novel made up of eight
volumes. In the novel it is possible to find a denunciation of the older order made by the young
woman, even if she is part of it. Through this novel, Richardson wants to underline the strong dislike
he felt towards aristocracy.
In the novel, Clarissa resists the advances of a man who wants to possess her: Lovelace, her admirer
and persecutor. Eventually, he drugs and rapes her. After this event, Clarissa will go mad, and after
her recovery she will have lost all her will to live. After Clarissa’s death, Lovelace is killed bu the
protagonist’s cousin. The atmosphere is suddenly that of the Jacobean tragedy. Lovelace repents,
but his death sentence is a sentence passed on an entire social system, «the old order» (i.e. the
aristocracy as ruling class), with its false values, insolence and arrogance, and treatment of women
as commodities. It is a battle fought by the Protestant middle classes.
Inside the novel, however, it is possible to find a subtle and disturbing relationship between Clarissa
and Lovelace. Clarissa represents the symbol of the victims of male violence. Some critics depicted
her as a negative character: she is self-obsessed and in love with the virtue and the victimhood.
Clarissa is attracted by Lovelace’s charm; on the other hand, she wants to resist him, because she
distrusts his motives. When her refuse finally becomes absolute, Lovelace becomes obsessed by her,
and this increases his violent instinct.

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Henry Fielding
Fielding was born in an aristocratic family. He followed classical studies at Eton, and he attended
the university of Leiden. He used to write for the theatre, and his plays were parodies of the
fashionable repertoire. In 1737 the Licensing Act was issued, and his plays were censored. Because
of this, he stopped working for the theatre. He began studying law, becoming a magistrate and
devoting his life to social reforms. In this period, he also wrote satirical articles for newspapers and
magazines. He edited “The Champion” for three years.
He started writing novels by chance with “An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews” (1741), a
parody of Richardson’s “Pamela” (1740): Fielding found in the moralism of the book a new object of
contempt and parodic skills. The name “Shamela” comes from “shame” or “sham” (fake) plus
“Pamela” (her surname was Andrews). “An Apology for the Life of Mrs Shamela Andrews” is a satire of
the hypocrisy of “Pamela” and the protagonist of the novel herself. He also criticises the epistolary
novel for its pretension to be able to be “to the moment”.
It is possible to find some links between the work of Richardson and those of Fielding: “Pamela
Andrews” becomes “Shamela Andrews”, who will be followed by “Joseph Andrews”, who is
Pamela’s brother. This novel represents a parody of Richardson’s “Pamela”, too.
Unlike Defoe’s and Richardson’s works, Fielding’s novels have their distinguishing elements not in
social change but in the neo – classical literary tradition. As said, the novel was the literary genre of
the middle class, written and read by middle class people, representing the values and ethics of the
middle class. However, Fielding’s novel seems to follow an independent path towards development
in the Augustan world of letters. So how does he fit into the previous definition of novel?
Fielding’s celebrated formula of the novel (see “Preface” to Joseph Andrews) results from the fact
that in his works we find is a literary product of the modern world (the novel in fact) which is also
characterised by the continuation of an old and honoured tradition: the epic, which was the first
narrative form on a large scale and of a serious kind. Hegel regards the novel as a manifestation of
the spirit of epic under the impact of a modern prosaic world.
Both Defoe and Richardson depreciated the classics: in his pamphlet “The Felonious Treaty”, Defoe
tells that the siege of Troy was all for “the rescue of a whore”. The whole epic is reduced to a moral
judgement on Helen. This was typical of the middle-class attitude based on the primacy of ethical
considerations. He condemns the bawdy (licenziosi) Latin authors and says there was not a moralist
among the Greeks but Plutarch. He also condemns Homer for being a bad historian. However, the
value of epic and oral tradition in general is not for being repository of facts.
According to Richardson, the epic’s false code of honour, like that of the heroic tragedy, was
masculine, bellicose, aristocratic and pagan: it was unacceptable to Richardson, whose novels are
largely devoted to attacking this ideology and replacing it by a radically different one, in which
honour is internal, spiritual and available, without distinction of class or sex, to all who had the will
to act morally.
Apparently, the only one of the three novelists who appreciated classics was Fielding: unlike Defoe
and Richardson, he was steeped (si era formato) in the classical tradition, but he was not a slavish
follower of previous rules. He felt that the growing anarchy of literary taste called for drastic
measures. He said: “No author is to be admitted into the Order of Critics, until he hath read over and
understood Aristotle, Horace and Longinus in their original language” (in the Covent Garden Journal) and
“a good share of learning was an essential prerequisite for those who wished to write such histories as these”
(in “Tom Jones”).
It is possible to compare the epic genres with Fielding’s novel: the epic was based on the similitude
and the marvellous, while Fielding’s novel is based on verisimilitude and formal realism, where he
adds the presence of the “surprising”; the epic was based on legends and myths, while Fielding
bases his novels on the stories he invents; in the epic we most likely find scenes of battles, while
Fielding mocks heroic duels; finally, the epic is characterised by the presence of heroic figures,
whereas Fielding’s characters are quite ordinary.

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“Joseph Andrews” (1742)
• Plot
Joseph Andrews, a handsome young footman in the household of Sir Thomas Booby, has attracted
the erotic interest of his master’s wife, Lady Booby. He has also been noticed by the parson of the
parish, Mr. Abraham Adams, who wishes to cultivate Joseph’s moral and intellectual potential.
Before he can start Joseph on a course of Latin instruction, however, the Boobys depart the country
for London, taking Joseph with them.
In London, Joseph falls in with a fast crowd of urban footmen, but despite his rakish peers and the
insinuations of the libidinous Lady Booby he remains uncorrupted. After a year or so Sir Thomas
dies, leaving his widow free to make attempts on the footman’s virtue. Joseph fails to respond to her
amorous hints, however, because he is too naïve to understand them; in a letter to his sister Pamela,
he indicates his belief that no woman of Lady Booby’s social stature could possibly be attracted to a
mere servant. Soon Joseph endures and rebuffs another, less subtle attempt at seduction by Lady
Booby’s waiting-gentlewoman, the middle-aged and hideous Mrs. Slipslop.
Lady Booby sends for Joseph and tries again to beguile him, to no avail. His virtue infuriates her, so
she sends him away again, resolved to terminate his employment. She then suffers agonies of
indecision over whether to retain Joseph or not, but eventually Joseph receives his wages and his
walking papers from the miserly steward, Peter Pounce. The former footman is actually relieved to
have been dismissed, because he now believes his mistress to be both lascivious and psychologically
unhinged.
Joseph sets out for the Boobys’ country parish, where he will reunite with his childhood sweetheart
and now fiancée, the illiterate milkmaid Fanny Goodwill. On his first night out, he runs into Two
Ruffians who beat, strip, and rob him and leave him in a ditch to die. Soon a stage-coach approaches,
full of hypocritical and self-interested passengers who only admit Joseph into the coach when a
lawyer among them argues that they may be liable for Joseph’s death if they make no effort to help
him and he dies. The coach takes Joseph and the other passengers to an inn, where the chamber-
maid, Betty, cares for him and a Surgeon pronounces his injuries likely mortal.
Joseph defies the Surgeon’s prognosis the next day, receiving a visit from Mr. Barnabas the
clergyman and some wretched hospitality from Mrs. Tow-wouse, the wife of the innkeeper. Soon
another clergyman arrives at the inn and turns out to be Mr. Adams, who is on his way to London
to attempt to publish several volumes of his sermons. Joseph is thrilled to see him, and Adams treats
his penniless protégé to several meals. Adams is not flush with cash himself, however, and he soon
finds himself trying unsuccessfully to get a loan from Mr. Tow-wouse with a volume of his sermons
as security. Soon Mr. Barnabas, hearing that Adams is a clergyman, introduces him to a Bookseller
who might agree to represent him in the London publishing trade. The Bookseller is not interested
in marketing sermons, however, and soon the fruitless discussion is interrupted by an uproar
elsewhere in the inn, as Betty the chambermaid, having been rejected by Joseph, has just been
discovered in bed with Mr. Tow-wouse.
Mr. Adams ends up getting a loan from a servant from a passing coach, and he and Joseph are about
to part ways when he discovers that he has left his sermons at home and thus has no reason to go to
London. Adams and Joseph decide to take turns riding Adams’s horse on their journey home, and
after a rocky start they are well on their way, with Adams riding in a stage-coach and Joseph riding
the horse. In the coach Mr. Adams listens avidly to a gossipy tale about a jilted woman named
Leonora; at the next inn he and Joseph get into a brawl with an insulting innkeeper and his wife.
When they depart the inn, with Joseph in the coach and Adams theoretically on horseback, the
absent-minded Adams unfortunately forgets about the horse and ends up going on foot.
On his solitary walk, Adams encounters a Sportsman who is out shooting partridge and who boasts
of the great value he places on bravery. When the sound of a woman’s cries reaches them, however,
the Sportsman flees with his gun, leaving Adams to rescue the woman from her assailant. The
athletic Adams administers a drubbing so thorough that he fears he has killed the attacker. When a
group of young men comes by, however, the assailant suddenly recovers and accuses Adams and
the woman of robbing and beating him. The young men lay hold of Adams and the woman and
drag them to the Justice of the Peace, hoping to get a reward for turning them in. On the way Mr.

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Adams and the woman discover that they know each other: she is Joseph’s beloved, Fanny Goodwill,
who set out to find Joseph when she heard of his unfortunate encounter with the Ruffians.
The Justice of the Peace is negligent and is about to commit Adams and Fanny to prison without
giving their case much thought when suddenly a bystander recognises Adams and vouches for him
as a clergyman and a gentleman. The Justice readily reverses himself and dismisses the charges
against Adams and Fanny, though the assailant has already slipped away and will not be held
accountable. Soon Adams and Fanny depart for the next inn, where they expect to meet Joseph.
Joseph and Fanny have a joyous reunion at the inn, and Joseph wishes to get married then and there;
both Mr. Adams and Fanny, however, prefer a more patient approach. In the morning the
companions discover that they have another inn bill that they cannot pay, so Adams goes off in
search of the wealthy parson of the parish. Parson Trulliber, who spends most of his time tending
his hogs rather than tending souls, reacts badly to Adams’s request for charity. Adams returns to
the inn with nothing to show for his efforts, but fortunately a generous Pedlar hears of the Pedlar
hears of the traveller’s’ predicament and loans Adams the money he needs.
After a couple more miles on the road, the travellers encounter a gregarious Squire who offers them
generous hospitality and the use of his coach but then retracts these offers at the last minute. Adams
discusses this strange behaviour with the innkeeper, who tells him about the Squire’s long history
of making false promises.
Walking on after nightfall, the companions encounter a group of spectral lights that Mr. Adams
takes to be ghosts but that turn out later to be the lanterns of sheep-stealers. The companions flee
the scene and find accommodations at the home of a family named Wilson. After the women have
retired for the evening, Mr. Adams and Joseph sit up to hear Mr. Wilson tell his life story, which is
approximately the story of a “rake’s progress” redeemed by the love of a good woman. Wilson also
mentions that since moving from London to the country, he and his wife have lost their eldest son
to a gypsy abduction.
The travellers, who are quite won over by the Wilson family and their simple country life, depart in
the morning. As they walk along, Mr. Adams and Joseph discuss Wilson’s biography and debate
the origins of human virtue and vice. Eventually they stop to take a meal, and while they are resting,
a pack of hunting dogs comes upon them, annihilates a defenceless hare, and then attacks the
sleeping Mr. Adams. Joseph and his cudgel come to the parson’s defence, laying waste to the pack
of hounds. The owner of the hounds, a sadistic Squire whom Fielding labels a “Hunter of Men,” is
at first inclined to be angry about the damage to his dogs, but as soon as he sees the lovely Fanny,
he changes his plans and invites the companions to his house for dinner.
The Hunter of Men and his retinue of grotesques taunt Mr. Adams throughout dinner, prompting
the parson to fetch Joseph and Fanny from the kitchen and leave the house. The Hunter sends his
servants after them with orders to abduct Fanny, whom he has been planning all along to debauch.
The servants find the companions at an inn the next morning, and after another epic battle they
succeed in tying Adams and Joseph to a bedpost and making off with Fanny. Luckily for Fanny,
however, a group of Lady Booby’s servants come along, recognise the milkmaid, and rescue her
from her captors. They then proceed to the inn where Adams and Joseph are tied up, and Joseph
gets to take out his frustrations on Fanny’s primary captor before they all set off again. Mr. Adams
rides in a coach with the obnoxious Peter Pounce, who so insults the parson that he eventually gets
out of the coach and walks beside Joseph and Fanny’s horse for the last mile of the journey.
The companions finally arrive home in Lady Booby’s parish, and Lady Booby herself arrives shortly
thereafter. At church on Sunday she hears Mr. Adams announce the wedding banns of Joseph and
Fanny, and later in the day she summons the parson for a browbeating. She claims to oppose the
marriage of the young lovers on the grounds that they will raise a family of beggars in the parish.
When Adams refuses to cooperate with Lady Booby’s efforts to keep the lovers apart, Lady Booby
summons a lawyer named Scout, who trumps up a legal pretext for preventing the marriage. Two
days later Joseph and Fanny are brought before the Justice of the Peace, who is perfectly willing to
acquiesce in Lady Booby’s plans.
The arrival of Lady Booby’s nephew, Mr. Booby, and his new wife, who happens to be Joseph’s sister
Pamela, thwarts the legal proceedings. Mr. Booby, not wanting anything to upset his young wife,

56
intervenes in the case and springs her brother and Fanny. He then takes Joseph back to Booby Hall,
while Fanny proceeds to the Adams home. The next day Lady Booby convinces Mr. Booby to join in
her effort to dissuade Joseph from marrying Fanny. Meanwhile, Fanny takes a walk near Booby Hall
and endures an assault by a diminutive gentleman named Beau Didapper; when the Beau fails to
have his way with Fanny, he delegates the office to a servant and walks off. Fortunately, Joseph
intervenes before the servant can get very far.
Joseph and Fanny arrive at the Adams home, where Mr. Adams counsels Joseph to be moderate and
rational in his attachment to his future wife. Just as Adams finishes his recommendation of stoical
detachment, someone arrives to tell him that his youngest son, Dick, has just drowned in the river.
Mr. Adams, not so detached, weeps copiously for his son, who fortunately comes running up to the
house before long, having been rescued from the river by the same Pedlar who earlier redeemed the
travellers from one of their inns. Adams rejoices and once again thanks the Pedlar, then resumes
counselling Joseph to avoid passionate attachments. Joseph attempts to point out to Adams his own
inconsistency, but to no avail.
Meanwhile, Lady Booby is plotting to use Beau Didapper to come between Joseph and Fanny. She
takes him, along with Mr. Booby and Pamela, to the Adams household, where the Beau attempts to
fondle Fanny and incurs the wrath of Joseph. When the assembled Boobys suggest to Joseph that he
is wasting his time on the milkmaid, Joseph departs with his betrothed, vowing to have nothing
more to do with any relations who will not accept Fanny.
Joseph, Fanny, the Pedlar, and the Adamses all dine together at an alehouse that night. There, the
Pedlar reveals that he has discovered that Fanny is in fact the long-lost daughter of Mr. and Mrs.
Andrews, which would make her the sister of Joseph and thereby not eligible to be his wife. Back at
Booby Hall, Lady Booby rejoices to learn that Joseph and Fanny have been discovered to be siblings.
Everyone then gathers at the Hall, where Mr. Booby advises everyone to remain calm and withhold
judgment until the next day, when Mr. and Mrs. Andrews will arrive and presumably will clear
things up.
Late that night, hi-jinks ensue as Beau Didapper seeks Fanny’s bed but ends up in Mrs. Slipslop’s.
Slipslop screams for help, bringing Mr. Adams, who mistakenly attacks Slipslop while the Beau gets
away. Lady Booby then arrives to find Adams and Slipslop in bed together, but the confusion
dissipates before long and Adams makes his way back toward his room. Unfortunately, a wrong
turn brings him to Fanny’s room, where he sleeps until morning, when Joseph discovers the parson
and the milkmaid in bed together. After being briefly angry, Joseph concludes that Adams simply
made a wrong turn in the night.
Once Adams has left them alone, the apparent siblings vow that if they turn out really to be siblings,
they will both remain perpetually celibate. Later that morning Mr. and Mrs. Andrews arrive, and
soon it emerges that Fanny is indeed their daughter, stolen from her cradle; what also emerges,
however, is that Joseph is not really their son but the changeling baby they received in place of
Fanny. The Pedlar suddenly thinks of the Wilson family, who long ago lost a child with a distinctive
birth-mark on his chest, and it so happens that Joseph bears just such a distinctive birth-mark. Mr.
Wilson himself is luckily coming through the gate of Booby Hall at that very moment, so the reunion
between father and son takes place on the spot.
Everyone except Lady Booby then proceeds to Mr. Booby’s country estate, and on the ride over
Joseph and Fanny make their wedding arrangements. After the wedding, the newlyweds settle near
the Wilsons. Mr. Booby dispenses a small fortune to Fanny, a valuable clerical living to Mr. Adams,
and a job as excise-man to the Pedlar. Lady Booby returns to a life of flirtation in London.

• Characters
Joseph Andrews: a handsome and virtuous young footman whom Lady Booby attempts to corrupt.
He is a protégé of Mr. Adams and the devoted but chaste lover of Fanny Goodwill. His adventures
in journeying from the Booby household in London back to the countryside, where he plans to marry
Fanny, provide the main plot of the novel.
Mr. Abraham Adams: a benevolent, absent-minded, impecunious, and somewhat vain curate in
Lady Booby’s country parish. He notices and cultivates Joseph’s intelligence and moral earnestness

57
from early on, and he supports Joseph’s determination to marry Fanny. His journey back to the
countryside coincides with Joseph’s for much of the way, and the vibrancy of his simple good nature
makes him a rival of Joseph for the title of protagonist.
Fanny Goodwill: the beautiful but reserved beloved of Joseph, a milkmaid, believed to be an orphan.
She endures many unsuccessful sexual assaults.
Sir Thomas Booby: the recently deceased master of Joseph and patron of Mr. Adams. Other
characters’ reminiscences portray him as decent but not heroically virtuous; he once promised Mr.
Adams a clerical living in return for Adams’s help in electing Sir Thomas to parliament, but he then
allowed his wife to talk him out of it.
Lady Booby: Sir Thomas’s widow, whose grieving process involves playing cards and
propositioning servants. She is powerfully attracted to Joseph, her footman, but finds this attraction
degrading and is humiliated by his rejections. She exemplifies the traditional flaws of the upper
class, namely snobbery, egotism, and lack of restraint, and she is prone to drastic mood swings.
Mrs. Slipslop: a hideous and sexually voracious upper servant in the Booby household. Like her
mistress, she lusts after Joseph.
Peter Pounce: Lady Booby’s miserly steward, who lends money to other servants at steep interest
and gives himself airs as a member of the upwardly striving new capitalist class.
Mr. Booby: the nephew of Sir Thomas. Fielding has adapted this character from the “Mr. B.” of
Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; like Richardson’s character, Mr. Booby is a rather snobbish squire who
marries his servant girl, Pamela Andrews.
Pamela Andrews: Joseph’s virtuous and beautiful sister, from whom he derives inspiration for his
resistance to Lady Booby’s sexual advances. Pamela, too, is a servant in the household of a predatory
Booby, though she eventually marries her lascivious master. Fielding has adapted this character
from the heroine of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela.

• Analysis
“Joseph Andrews” was his first work in the novel genre. He had to justify his enterprise, both to
himself and to his literary peers, by bringing it into line with the classical critical tradition. Readers
might expect Fielding’s novel (which was printed in different volumes) to be like the extravagant
French romances of the 17th century, but this is not the case. In the Preface he wants to explain what
sort of work his novel is.
Joseph (Pamela’s brother) is the footman of Lady Booby, the aunt of Mr. B. (who is now called squire
Booby. “Squire” means “signorotto di campagna”). Lady Booby advances to Joseph, who is pure and
faithful to Fanny and rejects her: he is thus thrown out. In this case, male chastity becomes a matter
for comedy.
It is possible to find some picaresque pictures inside the novel: for example, Joseph’s homecoming
from London to his Somerset village (where Lady Booby’s country residence is) creates a clear link
with Ulysses’ homecoming after the war of Troy: it is in fact complicated, difficult, full of adventures
and misadventures. A second example is when Joseph bumps into Parson Adams, the vicar of his
home village, and they travel together: this passage recalls a British version of Cervantes’ Don
Quixote (Don Quixote and Sancho Panza’s journey).
Finally, when they arrive at the village, they discover that Pamela has married Squire Booby. Joseph
and Fanny marry, overcoming the hostility of Lady Booby (backed up by Pamela).
Referring to the form, “Jospeh Andrews” is a stylish and entertaining novel, a combination that you
didn’t find before. It is possible to find irony and humour. We have a third-person omniscient,
intrusive or obtrusive narrator, who makes his presence explicit from the outset, comments on the
action, makes digressions, addresses the readers, constantly reminding them that they are reading a
novel.
Defoe and Richardson tried to hide the fictional nature of their works under the guise of journal or
memoirs and letters (e.g: see Robinson’s frontispiece: “written by himself”). In Fielding events are
true in the sense that they are based on those found on real life, but they are, of course, fictional,
invented.

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The novel presents a detached and patrician outlook on life. His view is ironic because life “furnishes
an accurate observer with the ridiculous”. According to Fielding, the conviction that virtue leads to
happiness is “a very wholesome and comfortable doctrine, and to which we have but one objection, that it is
not true”. Fielding condemns hypocrisy and rebels against the Puritan code of the age that
considered respectability synonymous with virtue.
There are many differences with the previous novels: Fielding’s notion of virtue is different from
Richardson’s. Joseph and Tom Jones are good-natured and good-hearted but not necessarily
“virtuous” as the Puritans meant virtue. They are not scheming or calculating. Tom is impudent,
exuberant, sometimes sexually promiscuous, but he is generous, honest, sincere.
With his novels Fielding addresses a large public, which includes the upper classes: he creates a
broad picture of the 18th century society.
In the creation of his characters, Fielding uses all information which he has collected from his
observation and experience. The characters and actions he describes are realistic, but not real
(readers cannot find “any degree of certainty” in them).
Fielding wants to give some order to the novel and elevate it as a genre, by associating it to the
ancient genre of epic: it is an attempt to bring the novel into line with classical doctrine. The author
presents his work as a comic variant of epic. The force of his argument depends on the term “comic”,
and he devotes most of his preface to the explanation of his idea of “comic”.
We find in “Joseph Andrews” a formal order, which reflects in the structure: it is in fact divided into
4 books, and each book is divided into chapters. The first chapter of each book is “the narrator’s
chapter”, where he expresses opinions, commentaries and reflections on literary theory.
It is possible to find a relationship also between Joseph and Abraham Adams: he is a man of good
nature. We find however a warning in Mr. Adams’ character, that is that good-natured people are
easily duped: vulnerability caused by good nature is always a big concern in Fielding’s works.
In the book, Fielding puts into practice the lesson of Swift: he uses the mock-heroic, exposing the
difference between what men are and what they claim to be. He also follows Cervantes’s lesson,
which teaches that there is a difference between privately good and publicly ridiculous.
As already mentioned, there are many examples of exposure of affectation: the lustful lady who
pretends to be chaste; the world and self-seeking clergyman who claims to be motivated by spiritual
ideas; the greedy and selfish landlords who pretend to be charitable. In a certain way, he brings on
a battle against hypocrisy.
In the novel, Fielding also explores the dangers of convention and the ambiguities of innocence.
Unlike Richardson’s serious moral tone, he exploits ambiguities for a comic purpose. We find inside
the plot different kinds of innocence: as examples of this we have Joseph, Fanny and Parson Adams.
Some critics have also considered the fact that Mr. Adams could be the real protagonist of the novel,
also because of the original title of the book, that is “The History and Adventures of Joseph Andrews and
of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams”.
Abraham Adams is a quixotic character: he represents what Fielding had learnt from Cervantes.
However, while Don Quixote mistook the real world because he lived in a world of imagination
created by his reading of romances, Adam mistakes the real world because he lives in the world of
Christian values which everybody else professes to live in but which, in fact, everybody else ignores.
Goodness, innocence and ignorance of the world go together in Adams: “I prefer a private school to a
public school, where boys can be kept in innocence and ignorance”. Other views shared however the idea
that Fielding followed the ideas of other authors in criticising Adam’s character, such as Milton (after
the Fall, humans can learn good only by evil: “a fugitive and cloistered virtue is not real virtue” and
Blake (according to whom innocence and experience are both necessary).
It must be noticed that for Fielding innocence meant the ignorance of the disparity between what
men are and what they profess; it meant believing literally in Christian charity. It is not the innocence
linked to chastity: in the author’s works there is not ignorance of sex in anybody’s part.
Adams is described: “as entirely ignorant of the ways of this world as any infant just entered into it could
possibly be. As he never had any intention to deceive, so he never suspected such a design in others. He was
generous, friendly, and brave, to an excess; but simplicity was his characteristic” (Book I, Ch. 3, p. 65). For

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him actions are more important than adherence to doctrine or “pure faith” (p. 113). Adam “never
saw farther into people than they desired to let him” (p. 166).
Fielding asserts that true goodness is gullible and ignorant. Adam lacks in knowledge of the world,
and this keeps him in perpetual poverty and no experience can root out his native innocence and
credulity. The author also believes that the sins of the flesh are venial compared to the hardness of
the spirit (that is to say selfishness, lack of compassion, indifference, cruelty and hypocrisy).
Since the novel is comic, Fielding exploits the comic potentialities of his moral code: Adam is
represented as silly and admirable, ludicrous and almost as a saint. However, the moral pattern is
always present and never destroyed. Adams does not know the world, but Fielding and his readers
do. The mock-heroic has among its several functions that of separating the author from his
characters.
“Joseph Andrews” is a novel on-the-road, which represents the English notion of the picaresque novel:
it gives a great variety of adventures which happen roadside, at inns, and in various places. Through
this novel, Fielding succeeds in offering a various description of the colours which characterise the
English landscape and life. The characters of the story are in the end more types that realised
individuals. In the novel, it is also possible to find glimpses of the social and economic life (for
example Mr Wilson’s story includes an account of the economic struggles of the professional writers
in the 1730s-40s, decline of literary patronage, hack writers working for booksellers.)
Inside the story it is not possible to find only one opinion about the law: Fielding is never very
precise about his point of view on the matter, and it often happens that the law changes according
to the person who is administering and interpreting it. The idea that judges are human and can make
mistakes is often present, and also corruption is another theme which Fielding focuses on: the law
is often subordinated to the rich and powerful.

• “The Preface”
In the Preface of the novel, Fielding is keen to underline the literary value of his work and looks to
classical works as a marker against which to situate his novel. His work is something new, never
attempted before: it is a comic epic poem in prose. It differs from romance for being light and for
introducing persons of inferior rank. He appeals to the classical genres to legitimise the presence of
his lower-class characters and the genre of the novel itself. He is present both as narrator (interpreter
of the events) and as the creator of the method he is using. He is the creator of a new art form and
explains it: this makes him the first theorist of the novel.
In the Preface, Fielding goes back to the rules that had been laid down for the epic and drama by
Aristotle. Both epic poetry and drama were divided into 2 genres: tragedy and comedy. Homer was
the father of epic poetry and gave us patterns of both, but epic comedy had gone completely lost
(while the Iliad is a good example of tragedy). According to the author, if epic comedy had survived,
it would have found many imitators.
Another idea of Fielding was that, if poetry was tragic and comic, prose could be like that too.
In the Preface, Fielding also focuses on the characteristics of the epic poetry and the comic romance
(thus, a novel).
The constituent parts of epic poetry, apart from metre, are: fable (storyline), action, characters,
sentiments and diction. If a work in writing has the same features but metre is epic too, we have
what is called an epic poem in prose.
A comic romance is, according to Fielding’s explanation, a comic epic poem in prose, differing from
comedy as serious epic differs from tragedy. Its action is more extended, it contains a larger number
of characters, also of inferior rank; the story is light and ridiculous; the ludicrous (comic) is its
sentiment and diction, but the burlesque is admitted too.
After having explained the characteristics of these two genres, Fielding underlines that he has not
used the burlesque in “Joseph Andrews”. Burlesque is, in fact, different from comic: the former of
burlesque is the exhibition of what is monstrous and unnatural; the delight of the reader rises from
absurdity, for example attributing the manners of the highest to the lowest. On the other hand, the
comic of ridiculous is a closer imitation of nature. The same difference is in painting between a
caricature and comic history-painting: in caricature we allow all licence; its aim is to show monsters

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not men. An example of burlesque in Fielding’s works is “Shamela”: Shamela’s whorish mother is
called Henrietta Maria Andrews (the name of the Catholic wife of Charles I) but her behaviour is
not lady-like at all. We find a discrepancy between Shamela’s words and deeds: burlesque distorts
the notion of virtue.
According to Fielding, villainy cannot be object of comic, nor can ugliness, infirmity and poverty.
The only source of the ridiculous or comic is affectation, which proceeds from two causes: vanity
(which makes us assume false characters in order to get applause) and hypocrisy (which allows us
to avoid censure by concealing our vices as virtues).

• Fielding and Richardson

Chaste, handsome, gifted with all virtues and graces, Joseph allows his creator to laugh at
Richardson’s moral world through the adventures and misadventures he encounters. The parody in
the novel, however, soon disappears. Fielding was writing a moral novel, too, but with a different
moral code. For Richardson virtue and reputation go together; for Fielding they rarely do.
To treat male chastity with the seriousness with which Richardson treated female chastity is to treat
it comically. A reformed rake makes the best husband but a girl who has once lost her virtue is
undone forever. The origins of these attitudes to marriage and the relation between the sexes go
behind the 18th century and can be traced far back in Western European history. Probably, it is a
view that has persisted up to recent times.
In “Joseph Andrews” Fielding’s purpose is not to criticise the traditional view, but to develop his own
idea of the difference between real and supposed virtue, goodness and public esteem. For Fielding
virtue is a matter of innate disposition (the good heart) rather than of public demonstration and the
signs of morality which are publicly approved bear little relation (or are even related in inverse
proportion) to real goodness.
Like the epic, Fielding’s novels (especially “Tom Jones”) present a sweeping panorama of a whole
society, as opposed to Richardson’s detailed picture of a very small social group. Pamela supplies a
framing device to “Joseph Andrews” but the movement of the middle section of the quest owes more
to the comic romances of Cervantes than to Richardson’s moral tale.
While Richardson elevates Pamela to the status of the gentry through her marriage to Mr B., Fielding,
in a typical device of romance (the baby-swap and the later recognition scene) reveals Joseph to be
a true-born member of a minor gentry. His marriage to Fanny (now daughter of Gaffar and Gammer
Andrews) does not violate social class or morality. At the end of “Joseph Andrews”, social relations
are realigned, whereas at the beginning gender relations are inverted. The situation of a lusty squire
pursuing a shy serving maid is replaced by that of a lascivious mistress making advances to a chaste
but virile manservant. An example of this inversion of genres can be found at p. 78, Book I, chapter
8, when Lady Booby tries to seduce Joseph: we find a strong affectation produced by hypocrisy
(which allows her to avoid censure by concealing vices as virtues).
Another example of affectation is present in the description of Joseph: we are not told that he is a
chaste prig (bacchettone), but we are told that he is a faithful lovers Fanny: it is thus his affectation
and not his lack of natural passion which governs his restraint.

The Age of Sensibility

While Pope was writing his neoclassical poetry (formally perfect, following classical rules, satirical
and didactic) and believed in “man as the measure of all things”, other themes and interests
emerged: the celebration of nature, a sombre view of the place of man in the world, meditation on
death and on man’s sad destiny.
The Romanticism, or the Age of Sensibility, is characterised by a strong emotion towards feelings
and nature. Among the most known authors of the pre – romanticism we remember James Thomson
(who wrote “The Season” in 1726 – 1730, which celebrates the “pure pleasures of the rural life”. The
most common themes are beauty of the natural landscape, the celebration of the simplicity and the
domesticity of country life and peasant labour, free from the corruption of urban life); William
Collins (who wrote “Ode to Everything”, where he presents a visionary idea of poetry) and Edward

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Young (who in “Night Thoughts”, 1742 – 1745, has the aim to “paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb”,
along with Robert Blair in “The Grave”).
We have in this period the birth of the so-called Grave Poetry, or Graveyard School Poetry. One of
the most known representors is Thomas Gray, with his “Elegy written in a Country Courtyard” (1751).
This elegy of poetry is perfect in form and uses an elevated language. In terms of structure we find
quatrains of ten iambic pentameters rhyming ABAB.
In the writing of this work, Gray was extremely affected by the death of Richard West, who was a
friend of his. The death becomes here a way of meditation on universal themes, such as man’s
destiny, equality, worldly ambition and humility. The death in question is that of poor rural people,
whose graves lack the ornaments of the tombs of the rich and powerful. We find a melancholic tone
and a meditative mood. The poet is the speaking voice in the poem.
Another work of Thomas Gray is the ode “The Bard”, which is connected to the idea of the Sublime,
that is, the celebration of primitive the spontaneous and the natural. Edward I had ordered the
killing of all the Welsh bards. The ode conveys the words of a surviving bard, who will eventually
commit suicide.
Primitivism, which could be considered a reaction to Classicism, will be of influence for all the
Romantic poets to come. Many poets of this pre–romantic period were part of the movement of
Primitivism. James Macpherson translated a fragment of Gaelic poetry (1759), “The Death of Oscur”.
After that, he made another translation of material collected in the “Highlands Fragments of Ancient
Poetry” (1760). Emboldened by his success, he published “Fingal”, an Ancient Epic Poem, declaring
it to be a translation of an epic by Ossian about the legendary hero Fin. All over Europe, Gaelic
poetry came to be acclaimed, and Ossian was considered as superior to Homer. However, no
manuscript was found: it was oral poetry re-invented by Macpherson.
Another known author is Thomas Chatterton, who claimed he had translated ancient poems too,
but they were spurious, thus he committed suicide.
With the beginning of the Romantic period, it is possible to make a comparison between the style of
classicism and that of Romanticism: neoclassical language is characterised by a controlled language
and a rigorous metre; we find poetic dictions; it follows the model of the classics; the propriety of
the subject matters; we find the notion of exemplary values; finally, the works of classicism were
satirical and didactical. On the other hand, Romantic poetry was spontaneous; it was free of
sophisticated rhetorical artifice; it was the bearer of emotions and overtones of irrationality the also
represented the genuine expression of the far-off ancestors of the people of the British Isles (the Celts,
thus the Welsh and the Scottish).
The Sublime is a central theme in the poetry of Romanticism. Edmund Burke wrote an essay about
it called “Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful” (1756 – 1759).
The Sublime can be described as a kind of beauty that scares and that is found in high or vast natural
landscapes, like forests, but also in natural events, such as stormy seas, and in small dangerous
things, too (spiders, snakes, etc.). The ordinary beauty, on the other hand, can be recognised in
normal things such as a garden or a park. The Sublime has a very important role in Romanticism,
because it arouses strong feelings, reverence and terror. The awe is a feeling linked to the Sublime:
it is an emotion of great respect and admiration, often combined with reverential fear.
Edmund Burke is the theorist of the Sublime: he says that “no passion so effectually robs the mind of all
its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. Whatever therefore is terrible, with regard to sight, is sublime too,
whether this cause of terror be endued with greatness of dimensions or not”.
The Gothic Novel is another genre of novel which develops during this period. Gray was a friend of
Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister. He published Gray’s poems and appreciated him as the
poet of the Sublime, an aesthetic category he found particularly congenial. He published the novel
“The Castle of Otranto”, which is a Gothic story (1746) which was presented as the translation of an
old Italian text. In this way, he created a new genre, thus the Gothic Novel. The features of the Gothic
Novel are: taste for the picturesque and the Sublime; predilection of mystery and the irrational;
complicated plots, stereotyped characters and happy endings; the plot usually goes about an
innocent young woman, persecuted by a wicked villain but rescued by her lover, and she has to face

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all sorts of danger. The reader is subjected to the Sublime emotion of terror, together with the
protagonist.
Gothic novels pushed to its extremes the “new sensibility” and the taste for “grave poetry”. The
boundary between death and life is no longer clear. The setting were usually old castles (with
gloomy vaults, dungeons, statues that bleed) in Italy or Spain. We find a taste for the exotic, along
with the sense of intrigue connected to Catholic countries. Walpole claimed that his aim was to fuse
novel and romance. He said: “I gave rein to my imagination; visions and passions choked me”. For
Walpole, “Gothic” means “medieval”, which is not the case with all writers in the genre. This is
because the Gothic was the architecture style of the Middle Ages.
Other famous Gothic novelists are the following: William Beckford with “Vathek” (1782); Ann
Radcliffe with “The Mysteries of Udolpho” (1794) set in France and Italy (the idea of Sublime is here
used in the descriptions of landscapes, such as the Alps and the castle of Udolpho); Matthew G.
Lewis with “The Monk” (1796), set in Spain (it goes about rape and incest. The girl is killed, and the
monk is sentenced to be burnt by the Inquisition, but he makes a pact with the devil and is dragged
down to hell. We don’t have a happy ending).
William Blake (1757 – 1827) is one of the most important authors of the period of Romanticism.
With him we find the concept of “Divine Vision”, or Imagination, which means to see more beyond
material reality, in order to go deeper into the life of things. According to Blake, God, the child and
the poet are gifted with Divine Vision.
William Blake was a visionary and a craftsman (an engraver).
Blake believed in the concept of complementary opposites: in his work “The Marriage of Heaven and
Hell” he wrote that “without contraries is no progression” (1790).
Many are the reasons why Blake can be considered an early Romantic: he rejected neoclassical
literary style and themes, stressed the importance of imagination over reason and believed that ideal
forms should be created from inner visions, and not from observations of nature. He wrote “Songs
of Innocence” (“The Lamb”, 1789), which was written before the outbreak of the French Revolution,
and where he spreads his enthusiasm for liberal ideas. In 1794, during the period of the Terror in
France, he wrote “Songs of Experience” (“The Tyger”): we find here a more pessimistic view of life.
We often find paired poems which comment on each other and offer two different views.
The lamb and the tyger are a metaphor for the good and the evil, the innocence and the experience,
both created by God: they complement each other, and this is necessary, because the possibility of
progress lies in the tension between opposites. The two states coexist not only in the human being,
but also in the Creator itself, who can be the God of love and innocence and the God of energy and
violence at the same time.
Blake was concerned with the social and political problems of his time: he supported the abolition
of slavery and the egalitarian principles of the French Revolution. He also sympathised with the
victims of the Industrial Revolution, such as the children and the lower classes. The disappointment
he felt after the failure of the French Revolution was reflected in his latest works: they are in fact
more obscure and prophetic, based on a personal system of “myths”. We find an esoteric ambiguity.

Along with Gothic Novels, in the 18th century we also find the so-called Historical Novels, whose
founder is considered Walter Scott (1771 – 1832). His novels are considered romantic because they
paid an homage to the noble past, they discovered its far-off roots, they included taste for natural
and wild landscapes, and the ruin and the depiction of humble and simple folks. Scott’s past is not
the classical one: he revalues the original past of a nation, in particular the Scottish one. According
to Scott, history does not only consist of the picture of Kings, Queens and Knights, but it is also the
picture of common people (for example brave rebels).
Almost all of 30 Scott’s novels are set in Scotland in the 18th century or in the Middle Age. Some
examples of his works are “Waverley” (1814), which is set in Scotland during the Jacobite uprising of
1745; “Ivanhoe” (1819), which is set during the reign of Richard I, so around 1194 (its plot is
historically inaccurate, but Scott demonstrates in this novel to be able to create a fantastic vision of
the world). In general, Scott’s works have been an example for Alessandro Manzoni and many
others, who were part of the European Romanticism.

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Another typical genre of the 18th century is the so-called Novel of Manners: its most know author is
Jane Austen, who was however considered anti-romantic.
The Novel of Manners was inspired by Fielding and Richardson. It uses irony as a way of expression,
and the main themes are the followings: the view on the condition of women in the early 1800 in the
upper-middle class and country gentry; marriage and love; the tension between spontaneity and
conventions and between the individual and the social code. In the Novel of Manners, we find a
picture of the English provincial life. However, history and nature are mostly absent.

Jane Austen
Jane Austen was a contemporary of Wordsworth (1770-1850), Coleridge (1772-1834) and Scott (1771-
1832) but she was considered an anti-romantic. She was the unpretentious daughter of a Hampshire
Anglican rector, and she was part of a large family (she is the youngest of 8 children: 6 sons and 2
daughters. Her sister Cassandra was also her best friend). Her life can be considered quite
uneventful. She attended the school in Oxford, Southampton and Reading. She had a strong passion
for reading: she read the works of Fielding, Richardson, Fanny and Burney. She also wrote plays for
the theatre within the family. She started writing early.
Between 1786 – 1793 she wrote the first writings for the family circle: they were parodies of the
literary fashions of the day (an example is “A History of England”, “written by a Partial, Prejudiced and
Ignorant Historian”, full of wit and burlesque. We find a fine sense of caricature).
The chronology of her works is obscure: many were written early and then revised for publication.
In 1794 – 1799 she wrote “Elinor and Marianne”, “First Impression” and “Susan”, which were
respectively the first versions of “Sense and Sensibility”, “Pride and Prejudice” and “Northanger Abbey”.
“Sense and Sensibility” was the first work to be published in 1811. She then returned to “Elinor and
Marianne” and eventually turned it into “Sense and Sensibility” after the rejections of “First
Impressions”. “First Impressions” was finished in 1797, while “Pride and Prejudice” was her second
work to be published in 1813. Finally, “Northanger Abbey” was published posthumously (together
with “Persuasion”) in 1818, but it was written in 1797 – 1798.
The sources of her novels are based on her knowledge and experience of the world: her life was lived
in provincial England. She belonged to the English country society neither of the lowest nor the
highest stratum. The raw material of her novel was thus in her daily routine of shopping, visits,
sewing, gossiping, letter writing and other trivial matters. The world presented in her books is an
18th century world in its habits, tastes and appearance, still untouched by the Industrial Revolution
(we have an unspoiled beauty of the countryside, cheerful farms, well-kept estates, clean provincial
towns, etc.). In her novels, she observed and learnt the world of social pretension and ambition, of
balls and visits and speculation about marrying, and of the fears and hopes of genteel people with
modest means.
The content of the novels can be described as the microcosm of life in its social aspect. A small section
of society is represented (upper-middle class and gentry). The focus is on a small community whose
most important unit is the family and whose largest unit is a circle of relatives, friends and
acquaintances. We find accuracy in the descriptions: the world is little and perfectly proportioned,
as in a miniature. Austen is known for her delicacy and precision, shrewd and ironic insight. There
is neither romanticism nor sentimentality in her novel, but an insight into the relationship between
individual temperament and social convention.
However, in Austen’s novels it is not possible to find historical accuracy: for example, during the
period of her writing the Napoleonic Wars were going on. No mention of them can be found, apart
from the appearance of soldiers as attractions for girls. From the point of view of her heroines
(socially and geographically connoted) this is the world as it appears: wars were fought by small
professional armies and the impact of them on the daily life of people living in the countryside was
negligible. It would have been unrealistic and artistically inappropriate to expand the world she
depicts to include affairs that were not relevant to the situations she was presenting.
Jane Austen’s Novel of Manner is also characterised by a certain decorum: we find no critical
apparatus, differently from Fielding’s works, and no announced moral purpose, as we did in

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Richardson. Her novels show the battle between the claims of personal morality and those of social
and economic propriety. According to the author, humans are social animals, they have to adapt to
a social code and respect it: we thus find a criticism against excesses, individualism, passionate love
not controlled by reason, exaggerations, and all the typical features of the “Romantic” or Byronic
hero. Men like Willoughby (“Sense and Sensibility”) or Wickham (“Pride and Prejudice”) represent a
constant menace in this social world (this is a great example of criticism against Romanticism).

“Sense and Sensibility”

It is directed against a fashionable taste, thus the enthusiasm for picturesque beauty and the self-
indulgent cultivation of feeling. Marianne Dashwood, the protagonist, is a believer in sensibility
who falls passionately in love with a man, Willoughby, who deludes and then rejects her. Finally,
she discovers a more moderate and realistic happiness with a man much older than she is. She works
out her salvation through the impact of social reality on her own sensibility. Marianne is educated
by life, like all of Austen’s heroines.
On the other hand, her sister Elinor, who controls her feelings with more decorum and a deeper
sense of the privacy of personal emotion, wins her way through various difficulties with the man
she loves, and, in the process, she acts as a contrast and complement to her younger sister.
The moral is that genteel but penniless ladies, who depend on their good looks and spirit to secure
a congenial marriage, must always beware of equally moneyless gallants who have nothing to offer
but their gallantry (like Willoughby and Wickham). When Lydia elopes with Wickham in “Pride and
Prejudice”, this represents a scandal for the Bennets.
In Austen’s novel, we also find an accurate description of women’s conditions during her period:
ladies could not inherit their properties and real estates, thus for example in “Sense and Sensibility”,
the Dashwood’s house in not inherited by Marianne, nor by Elinor, but by their stepbrother John.
The Bennets’ house will go to Mr Collins, the most direct male heir. Another example is when in
“Pride and Prejudice” Elizabeth rejects Mr. Collins: this represents a scandal to her mother, because
in this way she abandons the possibility of security and social position he offers.

“Mansfield Park” (1814)

• Plot
A young girl named Fanny Price comes to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and
Lady Bertram. Fanny's family is quite poor; her mother, unlike her sister Lady Bertram, married
beneath her, and Fanny's father, a sailor, is disabled and drinks heavily. Fanny is abused by her
other aunt, Mrs. Norris, a busybody who runs things at Mansfield Park, the Bertrams' estate. The
Bertram daughters, Maria and Julia, are shallow, rather cruel girls, intent on marrying well and
being fashionable. The elder son, Tom, is a roustabout and a drunk. Fanny finds solace only in the
friendship of the younger son, Edmund, who is planning to be a clergyman. Fanny grows up shy
and deferential, caught as she typically is between members of the Bertram family.
Sir Thomas leaves Mansfield Park for Antigua, where he owns plantations. In his absence, two new
figures arrive at Mansfield: Henry and Mary Crawford, the brother and sister of the local minister's
wife. Henry and Mary are attractive and cheerful, and they soon become indispensable members of
the Mansfield circle. Henry flirts extensively with Maria, who is engaged to marry the boring but
wealthy Rushworth. He also flirts with Julia when it suits his purposes. At first, Mary is interested
in Tom, the older son and heir, but she soon realises that he is boring and not really interested in
her. She finds herself increasingly attracted to Edmund, although the prospect of marrying a
clergyman does not appeal to her, and she is often cruel to him on this account. In the meantime,
Fanny has innocently fallen in love with Edmund, although she does not even admit this to herself.
Yates, a visiting friend of Tom's, proposes that the group should put on a play. His idea is eagerly
received by all except for Edmund and Fanny, who are horrified at the idea of acting. The play goes
on anyways, however; Maria and Henry, as well as Mary and Edmund (who has been prevailed
upon to take a role to avoid bringing in an outsider to play it), get to play some rather racy scenes
with one another. When one of the women cannot make a rehearsal, Fanny is pressured to take a

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role. She is almost forced to give in when Sir Thomas makes a sudden entrance, having arrived from
Antigua.
Sir Thomas is unhappy about the play and quickly puts a stop to the improprieties. Since Henry has
not declared his love, Maria is married to Rushworth. She and Julia leave Mansfield Park for London.
Relationships between the Crawfords and the Bertrams intensify. Edmund nearly proposes to Mary
several times, but her condescension and amorality always stop him at the last minute. He confides
his feelings to Fanny, who is secretly upset by them. In the meantime, on a lark, Henry has decided
to woo Fanny. He is surprised to find himself sincerely in love with her. Fanny has become
indispensable as a companion to her aunt and uncle, and on the occasion of her brother William's
visit, they give a ball in her honour. Some time after the ball, Henry helps William get a promotion
in the Navy. Using this as leverage, he proposes to Fanny, who is mortified and refuses. He continues
to pursue her. Her uncle is disappointed that she has refused such a wealthy man, and, as an indirect
result, she is sent to stay with her parents in their filthy house. Meanwhile, Edmund has been
ordained and continues to debate over his relationship with Mary, to Fanny's dismay.
Henry comes to see Fanny at her parents' and renews his suit. He then leaves to take care of business
on his estate. Fanny continues to receive letters from Mary encouraging her to take Henry's proposal.
A series of events then happen in rapid succession: Tom Bertram falls dangerously ill as a result of
his partying and nearly dies; Henry, who has gone not to his estate but to see friends, has run off
with the married Maria; Julia, upset over her sister's rash act, elopes with Yates, Tom's friend. Fanny
is recalled to Mansfield, bringing her younger sister Susan with her. Edmund has finally seen
through Mary, who has admitted that she would like to see Tom die so that Edmund could be heir,
and who has more or less condoned Henry and Maria's actions. He is heartbroken, but Fanny
consoles him. Maria and Henry eventually split, and she goes to the Continent to live with the evil
Mrs. Norris. Julia and Yates are reconciled to the family. Edmund finally comes to his senses and
marries Fanny, and Susan takes her place with the Bertrams. Edmund, Fanny, and the rest of those
at Mansfield live happily, while Henry, Mary, and Maria are cast out.

• Characters
Fanny Price: The protagonist. The daughter of a drunken sailor and a woman who married beneath
her, she comes to live with her wealthy uncle and aunt, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram. They take
her in as an act of charity to her parents. She is mistreated and always reminded of her "place" as a
charity ward, but she eventually comes to be an indispensable member of the family. Modest, always
proper, and, as she grows older, quite beautiful, Fanny is secretly in love with the Bertrams' son
Edmund but is the subject of proposals by the slick Henry Crawford.
Sir Thomas Bertram: A wealthy landowner and Fanny's uncle. He is authoritarian and rather hard
on his children until a series of disasters show him the error of his ways. He owns slaves on his
plantations in the Caribbean, a fact that hangs over the book. He means well and eventually does
right by Fanny.
Lady Bertram: Fanny's aunt; her mother's sister and Sir Thomas's wife. She is neurotic, a
hypochondriac, and lazy. A beauty in her youth, she values people's attractiveness over all else, yet
she is honest enough to admit how much Fanny means to her.
Edmund Bertram: The Bertrams' younger son. Since he will not be the heir to Mansfield, he will
become a clergyman. The only one of the Bertrams' children with a good head and a good heart,
Edmund is Fanny's closest companion. He rather blindly falls in love with Mary Crawford, which
almost leads to his downfall.
Maria Bertram: The Bertrams' older daughter. Vain and pretentious, she abuses Fanny and marries
the odious Rushworth for his fortune. Her self-indulgence eventually gets her in quite a lot of
trouble. Her name would have been pronounced "Mariah" (as in Mariah Carey).
Julia Bertram: The Bertrams' younger daughter. She is equally vain but slightly less cocky, since she
is younger and less beautiful than Maria. She follows Maria around, and, upon Maria's elopement,
she runs away with Yates, her brother Tom's friend.

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Tom Bertram: The Bertrams' older son and the heir to Mansfield. He lives to party and has gotten
into debt, for which Edmund will suffer. Eventually, his lifestyle catches up to him, as he nearly dies
from an illness caused by too much drinking.
Mrs. Norris: Sister to Fanny's mother and Lady Bertram; wife of the first parson at Mansfield
Parsonage. She has no children of her own and is an officious busybody, always trying to derive
glory from her association with the family. She is horribly cruel to Fanny, whom she is always
reminding of her "place" in the family.
Mary Crawford: Sister of Mrs. Grant, who is the wife of the second parson at Mansfield. She is
beautiful and charming, but also shallow and evil. She has been brought up poorly by an aunt and
uncle and has been subject to the influences of her fashionable friends. She becomes friends with a
reluctant Fanny, while Edmund falls in love with and nearly proposes to her.
Henry Crawford: Mary's brother. He is equally charming and possibly even more amoral, and he
possesses a sizeable estate. First Maria and Julia fall in love with him, and he takes to Maria, despite
her engagement. When Maria marries and the sisters leave Mansfield, he falls for Fanny and
proposes to her. Everyone is convinced he is a changed man. Eventually, he meets up with Maria
again, and the two run off, but their relationship ends badly.
William Price: Fanny's brother. Sir Thomas has gotten him a commission in the Navy, and Henry
gets him a promotion as part of his effort to seduce Fanny. William and Fanny are extremely close,
and he impresses everyone as a bright, capable young man. He represents a sort of ideal companion
for Fanny, although, as her brother, of course, he is not an eligible mate for her.
Rushworth: Maria's fiancé and then husband. He is an idiot and a bore, but quite wealthy. It is his
estate that the group visits early in the novel. He provides some comic relief with his stupid
comments.
Susan Price: Fanny's younger sister, with whom she gets reacquainted when she returns to her
family's home. Susan is a diamond in the rough, a smart girl with essentially good manners who is
stuck in a terrible home. Fanny brings her back to Mansfield Park with her, where she becomes a
new favourite of Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram.
Yates: Tom Bertram's friend, who proposes the amateur theatricals at Mansfield. He shows an
interest in Julia, which continues in London. After Maria runs off with Henry, Julia and Yates elope
and marry; they, however, are rehabilitated within the family.

• Analysis
“Mansfield Park”’s heroine is not as witty and vivacious as the young Elizabeth of “Pride and
Prejudice”, but she is shy, humble and kind girl called Fanny Price. Fanny is the most passive of
Austen’s heroines: in fact, all the decisions which involve her life are taken by other characters: her
fate depends on what other do.
In this novel, wit appears to be entirely on the evil side, unlike in “Pride and Prejudice”, where real
wit and virtue go together, at least in the principal characters.
In terms of the plot, the heroine is a passive character; on the other hand, in terms of the moral
pattern of the novel, she can be considered as quite active: Fanny’s behaviour, thoughts, reactions,
opinions and attitudes provide the moral norms in the book. She is not a martyr or a saint, but she
is the most morally strong character in all of Austen’s novels, in spite of her timidity and lack of
social brilliance.
Her refusal to marry charming Henry Crawford, who has captivated everyone else in the book but
her, and her maintenance of her refusal in spite of the well-meant pressure of her relatives is a
decisive action in the whole pattern of the novel.
In the novel, we find virtue and wit: virtue is gentle and tolerant in behaviour, but firm in moral
decision. Wit, on the contrary, in morally neutral: it can be good or evil, according on how it is used.
It can be one of the ways in which evil can disguise itself.
Observation, re-elaboration and moral rigour are Fanny’s qualities, but she cannot articulate them
because of her lack of self-esteem due to her humble social position. However, she sees further than
the others. Many don’t have a high esteem of her: her cousins Julia and Mary assume that she is both
socially and intellectually below them. However, Fanny is the only one doesn’t go astray in Sir

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Thomas’s absence. She is reliable, steady and coherent, and at the end her constancy will be
rewarded. We never find irony in Fanny’s description, but sympathy.
“Mansfield Park” is an enormously complicated novel, even by the standards of Jane Austen, who
creates characters and situations of unusual complexity in all her novels. Like other Austen novels,
this one is concerned with a young woman trying to find her place in the social order. Fanny comes
from a poor family but is being raised by her rich aunt and uncle. She prefigures the orphans of later
Victorian novels in her separation from her parents, who will not be the primary determinants of
her eventual status. Like other Austen heroines, Fanny will, in part, determine her status by
marrying. Since women could not enter the professions, marriage was the only way, in the
nineteenth century, to ascend or descend the social ladder. Fanny's mother has fallen downwards
quite a bit through her own marriage to a sailor who turns out to be a drunk; her aunt Lady Bertram
and her cousin Maria, on the other hand, do fairly well by marrying. While the marriages of others
have been formulated based on beauty and family connections, Fanny is to "earn" a marriage partner
based on her character. Virtue is definitely rewarded in this world, and it is the primary determinant
of an individual's eventual fate.
“Mansfield Park” is interested in far more than just the settling of social status, though. In part, it
takes up the age-old debate over whether "nature" (one's innate qualities) or “nurture" (the
environment in which one is raised) is the primary determinant of character. Fanny and her siblings,
and Mary and Henry Crawford, are ambiguous figures in this regard; all of them are shuttled
between different households growing up, and it is never clear whether it is their underlying
personalities or their situations that have made them what they are. This makes for much interesting
debate in the novel, particularly as Edmund struggles with his feelings for Mary and tries to justify
her behaviour. The idea of education is a part of this debate: can people change? Clearly, by the end
of the novel, both Sir Thomas and Edmund have learned something, and the role Edmund has
played in forming Fanny's mind (and, to a lesser extent, the influence Fanny has exerted over her
sister Susan) speaks to the capacity of some individuals to change for the better. Others, like Maria
and Henry, never seem to learn. Urban and rural settings are used as backdrops for this debate, with
the suggestion being made that city life promotes vice and inhibits one's moral development, while
growing up in a country house exposes a child to all that is good. The Bertram daughters and their
oldest brother complicate this, though.
This may be because country life is not free from corruption. This is Jane Austen's most socially-
aware novel. Sir Thomas is absent for nearly a third of the novel, tending to his business interests in
the Caribbean. He is a slaveholder, and this fact is directly addressed when Fanny asks him about
the slave trade. It is while he is gone that the family goes astray, and while this suggests the need for
paternal authority, it also implies that his affairs (trafficking in humans) are a moral liability. In
general, Austen is very aware of the world around her in this novel. She depicts urban poverty in
her portrait of Fanny's parents' home, and she uses the gossip sheets and other forms of then-modern
media to further her plot. This is also Austen's most sexually-aware novel (notice the dramatic,
nearly Freudian symbolism of the scene where Maria squeezes around the gate at Sotherton and the
scene where Fanny puts the amber cross pendant her brother has given her on a chain. Mrs. Price's
excessive child-bearing and Maria's dalliances also suggest sexuality rather directly for a novel
written in the 1810s.)
While “Sense and Sensibility” and “Pride and Prejudice” are considered, as one critic remarks "the gay
offspring of her youth”, “Mansfield Park” is a far more mature, darker novel, written by a woman who
had by then experienced more of the world. As Adolphus Alfred Jack remarked in his 1897 “Essay
on the Novel”, “Mansfield Park” is "more finished," "subtler," and "quieter than her earlier works". As
Austen grew older, he continues, "her powers grew and deepened...while Pride and Prejudice is gay,
Mansfield Park is sombre". Indeed, it is of interest to note that it is Mary Crawford, witty, active, and
unable to stand still, who is cast in the mould of other Austen heroines such as the effervescent
Elizabeth Bennet in “Pride and Prejudice” and the silly, meddling Emma Woodhouse in “Emma”,
while it is the weak, mild-mannered, motionless, often ill Fanny Price who remains the novel's
central character. Unlike the other heroines, who have a myriad of lessons to learn, Fanny possesses
the innate sensibility expected of a Regency lady of this era.

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These traditional values were of particular importance when the novel was written, in the aftermath
of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and amid the tumultuous beginnings of
industrialism, which drained the farm workers from the countryside and enticed them toward the
overcrowded city of London. In this regard, the novel can be viewed as an expression of a political
agenda: traditional values are represented by the bucolic country estate, Mansfield Park, while the
young characters, apart from Fanny Price, are seduced by the invading evil influences that are
represented by the bustling city of London. After all, Fanny Price, unlike most of Austen's other
heroines, never does go to London, and all of the characters who do travel to the city are "infected"
by a loosening of their better judgments and morals. As literary critic Amanda Claybaugh insists on
her introduction to the novel, "’Mansfield Park’ stands as Austen's most profound treatment of politics,
her richest response to the wars and revolutions of the times". Austen was an artist who utilised her art to
effect social change.
According to William Dean Howells in his 1895 “My Literary Passions”, "Austen is the most artistic of
the British novelists". In his estimation, "she was the first and last British novelist to treat material with
entire truthfulness", and it remains of some interest to note how critics and scholars have viewed the
novel. Avrom Fleishman's study of the novel, for example, suggests that "the structure of that part of
the plot which has to do with Sir Thomas Bertram's choice of a new daughter" resembles King Lear's attempt
to choose "one daughter among three". And indeed, near the end, Fanny seems much like Sir Bertram's
third daughter, "the daughter that he wanted". Furthermore, Sir Thomas is the very picture of the
traditional patriarch who treats Fanny like a daughter, especially when he punishes her by sending
her to Portsmouth to make her come to her senses and accept Henry's proposal of marriage. Another
critic, David Kaufmann, insists that Austen cleverly drew a parallel between the novel's original
three sisters: Lady Bertram, who married exceptionally well and moved up socially, Mrs. Norris,
who married a pastor and remained on her original rung of the social ladder, and Mrs. Price, who
married a lowly, drunken sailor. To achieve symmetry, the novel needed three daughters: Maria,
who more or less remains on the same social level until she disgraces herself and her entire family
by (despite her marriage to Mr. Rushworth) running away with Henry Crawford; Julia, who marries
down by eloping with the stage manager and friend of her brother Tom, Mr. Yates; Fanny, the
pseudo-daughter who marries up when she becomes the wife of Edmund Bertram. Fanny, at this
point, becomes a fully realised family member, standing next in line to be lady of the country estate.
“Mansfield Park” thematically centres on the issue of morality in three different layers of society: the
aristocratic Bertrams, the fashionable, city-dwelling Crawfords, and the down-and-out Prices.

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