1.)A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly characteristic of the popular poetry and song of the British Isles from the later medieval period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas, Australia and North Africa. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides. The form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love song and the term is now often used as synonymous with any love song, particularly the pop or rock power ballad.

Origins

The ballad probably derives its name from medieval French dance songs or "ballares" (from which we also get ballet), as did the alternative rival form that became the French Ballade. In theme and function they may originate from Scandinavian and Germanic traditions of storytelling that can be seen in poems such as Beowulf. The earliest example we have of a recognisable ballad in form in England is ‘Judas’ in a 13th-century manuscript.

European Ballads have been generally classified into three major groups: traditional, broadside and literary. In America a distinction is drawn between ballads that are versions of European, particularly British and Irish songs, and 'native American ballads', developed without reference to earlier songs. A further development was the evolution of the blues ballad, which mixed the genre with Afro-American music. For the late 19th century the music publishing industry found a market for what are often termed sentimental ballads, and these are the origin of the modern use of the term ballad to mean a slow love song.

The traditional, classical or popular (meaning of the people) ballad has been seen as originating with the wandering minstrels of late medieval Europe. From the end of the 15th century we have printed ballads that suggest a rich tradition of popular music. We know from a reference in William Langland's Piers Plowman, that ballads about Robin Hood were being sung from at least the late 14th century and the oldest detailed material we have is Wynkyn de Worde's collection of Robin Hood ballads printed about 1495

Broadside ballads (also known as 'roadsheet’, ‘stall’, ‘vulgar’ or ‘come all ye’ ballads) were a product of the development of cheap print in the 16th century. They were generally printed on one side of a medium to large sheet of poor quality paper. In their heyday of the first half of the 17th century, they were printed in black-letter or gothic type and included multiple, eye-catching illustrations, a popular tune tile, as well as an alluring poem. By the 18th century, they were printed in white letter or roman type and often without much decoration (as well as tune title). These later sheets could include many individual songs, which would be cut apart and sold individually as "slipsongs." Alternatively, they might be folded to make small cheap books or "chapbooks" which often drew on ballad stories. They were produced in huge numbers, with over 400,000 being sold in England annually by the 1660s. Many were sold by travelling chapmen in city streets or at fairs. The subject matter varied from what has been defined as the traditional ballad, although many traditional ballads were printed as broadsides. Among the topics were love, religion, drinking-songs, legends, and early journalism, which included disasters, political events and signs, wonders and prodigies.

Literary or lyrical ballads grew out of an increasing interest in the ballad form among social elites and intellectuals, particularly in the Romantic movement from the later 18th century. Respected literary figures like Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott in Scotland both collected and wrote their own ballads, using the form to create an artistic product. Similarly in England William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced a collection of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, including Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’.

The term, "folk song," covers a vast array of musical styles, but is most commonly used to refer to a narrative song that uses traditional melodies to speak on a particular topic. Often, topical folk songs address social and political issues such as work, war, and popular opinion.

Many folk songs have been around so long that nobody is entirely sure who their composers were. Often these songs are passed down within a community, and they evolve over time to address the issues of the day. Such songs include "We Shall Overcome," and "I Shall Not be Moved," as well as other spirituals.

Other timeless folk songs have definite origins, such as Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land," or Pete Seeger's "If I Had A Hammer." These songs are often so poignant, honest, and timeless, that they become enmeshed into the culture, and are known by just about everyone.

Folk songs are typically about a community of people, and the issues they feel are important to them.

Contemporary folk songs cover topics from love and relationships to racism, terrorism, war, voting, education, and religion, among other things.

Примеры баллад:

Lord Thomas and Fair Annet is an English folk ballad

Lord Thomas (or Sweet Willie) is in love with Fair Annet, or Annie, or Elinor, but she has little property. He asks for advice. His father, mother, and brother (or some of them) advise that he should marry the nut-brown maid with a rich dowry. His mother promises to curse him if he marries Annet and bless him if he marries the nut-brown maid. His sister warns her that her dowry may be lost and then he will be stuck with nothing but a hideous bride. Nevertheless, he takes his mother's advice.

Fair Annet dresses as splendidly as she can and goes to the wedding. The nut-brown maid is so jealous that she stabs Annet to death. Lord Thomas stabs both the nut-brown maid and himself to death. A rose grew from Fair Annet's grave, a brier from Lord Thomas's, and they grew together.

Sweet William's Ghost is a folk song, collected by Francis James Child in 1868 as Child ballad number 77

A lover, usually named William or a variant, appears as a ghost to his love, usually Margaret or a variant. He asks her to release him from his promise to marry her. She may insist that he actually marry her, but he says that he is dead; she may insist that he kiss her, but he says that one kiss would kill her; she may insist on some information about the afterlife, and he tells her some of it; he may tell her that his promise to marry her is a hellhound that will destroy him if she does not free him. In the end she always releases him from his promise, although in some versions she then dies upon his grave.

2.) The Normans. The name Norman, which is a softened form of Northman, tells its own story. The men who bore the name came originally from Scandinavia,--bands of big, blond, fearless men cruising after plunder and adventure in their Viking ships, and bringing terror wherever they appeared. It was these same "Children of Woden" who, under the Danes' raven flag, had blotted out Northumbrian civilization in the ninth century. Later the same race of men came plundering along the French coast and conquered the whole northern country; but here the results were altogether different. Instead of blotting out a superior civilization, as the Danes had done, they promptly abandoned their own. Their name of Normandy still clings to the new home; but all else that was Norse disappeared as the conquerors intermarried with the native Franks and accepted French ideals and spoke the French language. So rapidly did they adopt and improve the Roman civilization of the natives that, from a rude tribe of heathen Vikings, they had developed within a single century into the most polished and intellectual people in all Europe. The union of Norse and French (i.e. Roman-Gallic) blood had here produced a race having the best qualities of both,--the will power and energy of the one, the eager curiosity and vivid imagination of the other. When these Norman-French people appeared in Anglo-Saxon England they brought with them three noteworthy things: a lively Celtic disposition, a vigorous and progressive Latin civilization, and a Romance language. We are to think of the conquerors, therefore, as they thought and spoke of themselves in the Domesday Book and all their contemporary literature, not as Normans but as Franci, that is, Frenchmen.

Summary of the Norman Period. The Normans were originally a hardy race of sea rovers inhabiting Scandinavia. In the tenth century they conquered a part of northern France, which is still called Normandy, and rapidly adopted French civilization and the French language. Their conquest of Anglo-Saxon England under William, Duke of Normandy, began with the battle of Hastings in 1066. The literature which they brought to England is remarkable for its bright, romantic tales of love and adventure, in marked contrast with the strength and somberness of Anglo-Saxon poetry. During the three centuries following Hastings, Normans and Saxons gradually united. The Anglo-Saxon speech simplified itself by dropping most of its Teutonic inflections, absorbed eventually a large part of the French vocabulary, and became our English language. English literature is also a combination of French and Saxon elements. The three chief effects of the conquest were (1) the bringing of Roman civilization to England; (2) the growth of nationality, i.e. a strong centralized government, instead of the loose union of Saxon tribes; (3) the new language and literature, which were proclaimed in Chaucer. (остальное можно не читать)

At first the new literature was remarkably varied, but of small intrinsic worth; and very little of it is now read. In our study we have noted: (1) Geoffrey's History, which is valuable as a source book of literature, since it contains the native Celtic legends of Arthur. (2) The work of the French writers, who made the Arthurian legends popular. (3) Riming Chronicles, i.e. history in doggerel verse, like Layamon's Brut. (4) Metrical Romances, or tales in verse. These were numerous, and of four classes: (a) the Matter of France, tales centering about Charlemagne and his peers, chief of which is the Chanson de Roland; (b) Matter of Greece and Rome, an endless series of fabulous tales about Alexander, and about the Fall of Troy; (c) Matter of England, stories of Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Robin Hood, etc.; (d) Matter of Britain, tales having for their heroes Arthur and his knights of the Round Table. The best of these romances is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (5) Miscellaneous literature,--the Ancren Riwle, our best piece of early English prose; Orm's Ormulum; Cursor Mundi, with its suggestive parallel to the Miracle plays; and ballads, like King Horn and the Robin Hood songs, which were the only poetry of the common people.

The Conquest. At the battle of Hastings (1066) the power of Harold, last of the Saxon kings, was broken, and William, duke of Normandy, became master of England. Of the completion of that stupendous Conquest which began at Hastings, and which changed the civilization of a whole nation, this is not the place to speak. We simply point out three great results of the Conquest which have a direct bearing on our literature. First, notwithstanding Cæsar's legions and Augustine's monks, the Normans were the first to bring the culture and the practical ideals of Roman civilization home to the English people; and this at a critical time, when England had produced her best, and her own literature and civilization had already begun to decay. Second, they forced upon England the national idea, that is, a strong, centralized government to replace the loose authority of a Saxon chief over his tribesmen. And the world's history shows that without a great nationality a great literature is impossible. Third, they brought to England the wealth of a new language and literature, and our English gradually absorbed both. For three centuries after Hastings French was the language of the upper classes, of courts and schools and literature; yet so tenaciously did the common people cling to their own strong speech that in the end English absorbed almost the whole body of French words and became the language of the land. It was the welding of Saxon and French into one speech that produced the wealth of our modern English.

Naturally such momentous changes in a nation were not brought about suddenly. At first Normans and Saxons lived apart in the relation of masters and servants, with more or less contempt on one side and hatred on the other; but in an astonishingly short time these two races were drawn powerfully together, like two men of different dispositions who are often led into a steadfast friendship by the attraction of opposite qualities, each supplying what the other lacks. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which was continued for a century after Hastings, finds much to praise in the conquerors; on the other hand the Normans, even before the Conquest, had no great love for the French nation. After conquering England they began to regard it as home and speedily developed a new sense of nationality. Geoffrey's popular History, written less than a century after the Conquest, made conquerors and conquered alike proud of their country by its stories of heroes who, curiously enough, were neither Norman nor Saxon, but creations of the native Celts. Thus does literature, whether in a battle song or a history, often play the chief role in the development of nationality. Once the mutual distrust was overcome the two races gradually united, and out of this union of Saxons and Normans came the new English life and literature.

Literary Ideals of the Normans. The change in the life of the conquerors from Norsemen to Normans, from Vikings to Frenchmen, is shown most clearly in the literature which they brought with them to England. The old Norse strength and grandeur, the magnificent sagas telling of the tragic struggles of men and gods, which still stir us profoundly,--these have all disappeared. In their place is a bright, varied, talkative literature, which runs to endless verses, and which makes a wonderful romance out of every subject it touches. The theme may be religion or love or chivalry or history, the deeds of Alexander or the misdeeds of a monk; but the author's purpose never varies. He must tell a romantic story and amuse his audience; and the more wonders and impossibilities he relates, the more surely is he believed. We are reminded, in reading, of the native Gauls, who would stop every traveler and compel him to tell a story ere he passed on. There was more of the Gaul than of the Norseman in the conquerors, and far more of fancy than of thought or feeling in their literature. If you would see this in concrete form, read the Chanson de Roland, the French national epic (which the Normans first put into literary form), in contrast with Beowulf, which voices the Saxon's thought and feeling before the profound mystery of human life. It is not our purpose to discuss the evident merits or the serious defects of Norman-French literature, but only to point out two facts which impress the student, namely, that Anglo-Saxon literature was at one time enormously superior to the French, and that the latter, with its evident inferiority, absolutely replaced the former. "The fact is too often ignored," says Professor Schofield, "that before 1066 the Anglo-Saxons had a body of native literature distinctly superior to any which the Normans or French could boast at that time; their prose especially was unparalleled for extent and power in any European vernacular." Why, then, does this superior literature disappear and for nearly three centuries French remain supreme, so much so that writers on English soil, even when they do not use the French language, still slavishly copy the French models?

To understand this curious phenomenon it is necessary only to remember the relative conditions of the two races who lived side by side in England. On the one hand the Anglo-Saxons were a conquered people, and without liberty a great literature is impossible. The inroads of the Danes and their own tribal wars had already destroyed much of their writings, and in their new condition of servitude they could hardly preserve what remained. The conquering Normans, on the other hand, represented the civilization of France, which country, during the early Middle Ages, was the literary and educational center of all Europe. They came to England at a time when the idea of nationality was dead, when culture had almost vanished, when Englishmen lived apart in narrow isolation; and they brought with them law, culture, the prestige of success, and above all the strong impulse to share in the great world's work and to join in the moving currents of the world's history. Small wonder, then, that the young Anglo-Saxons felt the quickening of this new life and turned naturally to the cultured and progressive Normans as their literary models.

THE NORMANS. The Normans who conquered England were originally members of the same stock as the 'Danes' who had harried and conquered it in the preceding centuries--the ancestors of both were bands of Baltic and North Sea pirates who merely happened to emigrate in different directions; and a little farther back the Normans were close cousins, in the general Germanic family, of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. The exploits of this whole race of Norse sea-kings make one of the most remarkable chapters in the history of medieval Europe. In the ninth and tenth centuries they mercilessly ravaged all the coasts not only of the West but of all Europe from the Rhine to the Adriatic. 'From the fury of the Norsemen, good Lord, deliver us!' was a regular part of the litany of the unhappy French. They settled Iceland and Greenland and prematurely discovered America; they established themselves as the ruling aristocracy in Russia, and as the imperial body-guard and chief bulwark of the Byzantine empire at Constantinople; and in the eleventh century they conquered southern Italy and Sicily, whence in the first crusade they pressed on with unabated vigor to Asia Minor. Those bands of them with whom we are here concerned, and who became known distinctively as Normans, fastened themselves as settlers, early in the eleventh century, on the northern shore of France, and in return for their acceptance of Christianity and acknowledgment of the nominal feudal sovereignty of the French king were recognized as rightful possessors of the large province which thus came to bear the name of Normandy. Here by intermarriage with the native women they rapidly developed into a race which while retaining all their original courage and enterprise took on also, together with the French language, the French intellectual brilliancy and flexibility and in manners became the chief exponent of medieval chivalry.

The different elements contributed to the modern English character by the latest stocks which have been united in it have been indicated by Matthew Arnold in a famous passage ('On the Study of Celtic Literature'): 'The Germanic [Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish'] genius has steadiness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for its excellence. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for its defect.' The Germanic (Anglo-Saxon and 'Danish') element explains, then, why uneducated Englishmen of all times have been thick-headed, unpleasantly self-assertive, and unimaginative, but sturdy fighters; and the Norman strain why upper-class Englishmen have been self-contained, inclined to snobbishness, but vigorously aggressive and persevering, among the best conquerors, organizers, and administrators in the history of the world.

THE UNION OF THE RACES AND LANGUAGES. LATIN, FRENCH, AND ENGLISH. That their own race and identity were destined to be absorbed in those of the Anglo-Saxons could never have occurred to any of the Normans who stood with William at Hastings, and scarcely to any of their children. Yet this result was predetermined by the stubborn tenacity and numerical superiority of the conquered people and by the easy adaptability of the Norman temperament. Racially, and to a less extent socially, intermarriage did its work, and that within a very few generations. Little by little, also, Norman contempt and Saxon hatred were softened into tolerance, and at last even into a sentiment of national unity. This sentiment was finally to be confirmed by the loss of Normandy and other French possessions of the Norman-English kings in the thirteenth century, a loss which transformed England from a province of the Norman Continental empire and of a foreign nobility into an independent country, and further by the wars ('The Hundred Years' War') which England-Norman nobility and Saxon yeomen fighting together--carried on in France in the fourteenth century.

In language and literature the most general immediate result of the Conquest was to make of England a trilingual country, where Latin, French, and Anglo-Saxon were spoken separately side by side. With Latin, the tongue of the Church and of scholars, the Norman clergy were much more thoroughly familiar than the Saxon priests had been; and the introduction of the richer Latin culture resulted, in the latter half of the twelfth century, at the court of Henry II, in a brilliant outburst of Latin literature. In England, as well as in the rest of Western Europe, Latin long continued to be the language of religious and learned writing--down to the sixteenth century or even later. French, that dialect of it which was spoken by the Normans--Anglo-French (English-French) it has naturally come to be called--was of course introduced by the Conquest as the language of the governing and upper social class, and in it also during the next three or four centuries a considerable body of literature was produced. Anglo-Saxon, which we may now term English, remained inevitably as the language of the subject race, but their literature was at first crushed down into insignificance. Ballads celebrating the resistance of scattered Saxons to their oppressors no doubt circulated widely on the lips of the people, but English writing of the more formal sorts, almost absolutely ceased for more than a century, to make a new beginning about the year 1200. In the interval the 'Anglo-Saxon Chronicle' is the only important document, and even this, continued at the monastery of Peterboro, comes to an end in 1154, in the midst of the terrible anarchy of Stephen's reign.

It must not be supposed, notwithstanding, that the Normans, however much they despised the English language and literature, made any effort to destroy it. On the other hand, gradual union of the two languages was no less inevitable than that of the races themselves. From, the very first the need of communication, with their subjects must have rendered it necessary for the Normans to acquire some knowledge of the English language; and the children of mixed parentage of course learned it from their mothers. The use of French continued in the upper strata of society, in the few children's schools that existed, and in the law courts, for something like three centuries, maintaining itself so long partly because French was then the polite language of Western Europe. But the dead pressure of English was increasingly strong, and by the end of the fourteenth century and of Chaucer's life French had chiefly given way to it even at Court.

As we have already implied, however, the English which triumphed was in fact English-French--English was enabled to triumph partly because it had now largely absorbed the French. For the first one hundred or one hundred and fifty years, it seems, the two languages remained for the most part pretty clearly distinct, but in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries English, abandoning its first aloofness, rapidly took into itself a large part of the French (originally Latin) vocabulary; and under the influence of the French it carried much farther the process of dropping its own comparatively complicated grammatical inflections--a process which had already gained much momentum even before the Conquest. This absorption of the French was most fortunate for English. To the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary--vigorous, but harsh, limited in extent, and lacking in fine discriminations and power of abstract expression, was now added nearly the whole wealth of French, with its fullness, flexibility, and grace. As a direct consequence the resulting language, modern English, is the richest and most varied instrument of expression ever developed at any time by any race.

THE RESULT FOR POETRY. For poetry the fusion meant even more than for prose. The metrical system, which begins to appear in the thirteenth century and comes to perfection a century and a half later in Chaucer's poems combined what may fairly be called the better features of both the systems from which it was compounded. We have seen that Anglo-Saxon verse depended on regular stress of a definite number of quantitatively long syllables in each line and on alliteration; that it allowed much variation in the number of unstressed syllables; and that it was without rime. French verse, on the other hand, had rime (or assonance) and carefully preserved identity in the total number of syllables in corresponding lines, but it was uncertain as regarded the number of clearly stressed ones. The derived English system adopted from the French (1) rime and (2) identical line-length, and retained from the Anglo-Saxon (3) regularity of stress. (4) It largely abandoned the Anglo-Saxon regard for quantity and (5) it retained alliteration not as a basic principle but as an (extremely useful) subordinate device. This metrical system, thus shaped, has provided the indispensable formal basis for making English poetry admittedly the greatest in the modern world.

3.) The English literary language has had a long and peculiar history. Throughout the stages of its development there has been a struggle for progressive tendencies, which, on the one hand, aim at barring the lan¬guage from the intrusion of contaminating elements, such as jargonisms, slang, vulgarisms and the like, and, on the other hand, at manifesting themselves in protest against the reactionary aspirations of some zealous scholars to preserve the English language in a fixed form.

The English language, as is known, is the result of the integration of the tribal dialects of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes who occupied the British Isles in the 3rd—5th centuries. The first manuscripts of the language belong to the 8th century. But the language of the 8th and consecutive centuries is so unlike present-day English that Englishmen do not understand it. This language is called Anglo-Saxon or Old Eng¬lish. Old English is a dead language, like Latin or classic Greek. Like them and like the Russian language, it is an inflected language. The Old English period lasted approximately until the end of the twelfth century.

During the next stage in its development, known as the Middle English period, the English language rapidly progressed towards its present state. By this time it had greatly enlarged its vocabulary by borrowings from Norman-French and other languages.

The structure of the language had considerably changed due to the loss of most of the inflections and also to other very important changes.

By the middle of the thirteenth century Norman-French, which had been the official language since the Norman Conquest in 1066, was almost completely ousted by English. In 1362 Parliament was first opened in English, and a few years later court proceedings were ordered to be carried on in English and not in French, "which was too little known."

The New English period, as it is called, is usually considered to date from the fifteenth century. This is the beginning of the English language known, spoken and written at the present time.

This period cannot yet be characterized by any degree of uniformity in the language. The influence of the various dialects was still strongly felt, but the London dialect was gradually winning general recognition. According to many historians of the English language, by the latter part of the 15th century the London dialect had been accepted as the standard, at least in writing, in most parts of the country. This should to a very great extent be attributed to Caxton, the first English printer, who in his translations and in the books he printed used the current speech of Lon¬don. Caxton writes that he was advised by learned men to use the most curious terms that he could find, and declares that he found himself m a dilemma "between the plain, rude and curious. But in my judgement", he goes on, "the common terms that be daily used been lighter to under¬stand than the old and ancient English." Puttenham, author of "The Art of English Poesie," declares that as the norm of literary English “…ye shall therefore take the usual speech of the court, and that of London and the shires lying about London within LX (sixty) miles and not much above” (Baugh, Albert C. Op.cit., p. 275.)

But the process of establishing the London speech as a single norm throughout the country was very slow and hardly perceptible. Even the language of the 16th century, according to C.Wyld, “… both in printed works and in private letters, still shows considerable dialectal individualism. The Standard… is not yet completely fixed” (Wyld, H.C. A History of Modern Colloquial English,Ldn,1925,p.102).

In the s i x t e e n t h c e n t u r y literary English began markedly to flourish. The rapid development of printing went parallel with the general growth of culture, to which much was contributed by the two universities, Oxford and Cambridge.

In the second half of the 16th century, a century marked by the political and economical rise of England, literature began to flourish in all forms – drama, poetry and prose. The works of literary criticism written at the time show the interest awakened in poetry and drama. Frequent translations were now made from Greek and Latin classic writers. Edmund Spenser, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and, later, Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher and many other writers of the period exerted a very great influence on the growth and perfection of the English literary language.

The freedom of the use of language so characteristic of this epoch was often subjected to wise and moderate restrictions set by these writers. So, for example, Ben Jonson, while accepting Quintillian’s statement that “ … custom is the most certain mistress of language,” at the same time warns “not to be frequent with every day coining”, nor to use words from past ages which were no longer in use, that is ,archaic words as, for instance, Chaucerisms.

In their use of the language there were two tendencies among the writers of this age: one was the free and almost unrestricted use of new words and forms, coined or imported into the English language; the other was the revival of archaic words, the latter being the counter-weight to the former. Two names may be called to mind as representing the two tendencies: Spenser, on the one hand, Shakespeare, on the other. Spenser tried to preserve the old English words, especially those denoting abstract ideas, which had been replaced by words of French or Latin origin. He praised these words as being more expressive than the borrowed ones.

On the contrary, Shakespeare advocated in his sonnets and plays the unrestricted use of words of all kinds and particularly new coinages. Shakespeare himself coined many new words. Marlowe and Fletcher drew widely on the resources of vernacular English and this, to a large extent, explains the remarkable vigor and expressiveness of their language.

To give a general idea of the factors influencing the development of literary English in the 15th and 16th centuries, it will suffice to point out the following three:

1) A common interest in classical literature during the Renaissance and hence the application of classical grammar, spelling and rhetoric to the English language. Attempts were made by scholars to force the classical norms into the English language.

2) A desire to keep the language pure, to retain and revive old English words and as far as possible old English morphological and syntactical forms. This tendency has been called a r c h a i c p u ri s m. The influence of archaic purism led to an acute struggle against the intrusion of foreign words, particularly those of Latin and continental French origin, and as a consequence of this struggle an orientation towards the obsolescent forms of the language.

3) An orientation towards the living, developing and rapidly changing norms of the colloquial language. Free use was made of the inherent properties of the English language as they had materialized by this time, for example, free use of conversion, word-composition, derivation and semantic change. In the domain of syntax and word-order too, there was already considerable freedom of usage.

The Protestant Reformation, which gradually gained strength and popularity throughout the 16th century, played a great role in the development of the English literary language. Books on religion, translated or composed in strong, simple, living English with few “learned” words, and understandable to the masses of ordinary people, were by act of Parliament placed in the churches and read aloud. Parts of the Bible and later the whole Bible, were also translated in the same manner. By order of Queen Elizabeth I a Bible was placed in every church and people flocked to read it or hear it read. (Up to the reign of Elizabeth it had been forbidden to read the Bible in English and people were punished and burnt to death for doing so.)

The interaction of these three factors is reflected in the grammars and books or rhetoric of the time, which serve to illustrate to the present-day reader the fluctuation of the norms then existing, as well as the linguistic ideas, tastes and credos of the scholars who laid down the law. The uncritical applications of the laws of Latin grammar to the norms observed in the English language were objected to even in the 16th century. Philip Sidney, for instance, stated that the English language must have its own grammar. He saw that such grammatical categories as case, gender, tense and mood, which are natural to Latin, could not be applied mechanically to English.

However, books on rhetoric have played a considerable part in establishing the norms of literary English in the 16th as well as in the following centuries. As far back as in 1524 Leonard Cox published a textbook entitled “The Arte or Crafte of Rhetorique” which was followed by a series of works of this kind. Many of them have helped to lay the foundation for the study of the laws of composition and of the ways and means to make writing emphatic in order that the desired effect on the reader should be achieved and the main function of language – communication – guaranteed to the full.

It was not only the syntactical aspect of the English literary language that was influenced by the laws of rhetoric. The choice of words was also predetermined by the laws set by the rhetoricians of the 16th century. Latin words, either directly or through the French language, poured into the English literary language because English had never had, or had lost, the words required to give expression to scientific ideas. Sir Thomas More, for example, introduced into the English language a great many words in spite of the opposition of the purists of the time. To him the English language owes such words as absurdity, acceptance, anticipate, compatible, comprehensible, congratulate, explain, fact, indifference, monopoly, neces¬sitate, obstruction, paradox, pretext and many others. Philip Sidney is said to have coined such words as emancipate, eradicate, exist, extin¬guish, harass, meditate and many other words and phrases. As illustra¬tions we have chosen words which have found a permanent place in the English stock of words. Most of them have already passed into the neut¬ral layer of words. A great many words introduced by men-of-letters in the 16th century and later have disappeared entirely from English literature.

Further, there were great difficulties in spelling. No two writers spelt all words exactly alike. From the Old English period up to the 15th century there had been chaos in English spelling. The Old English system, which was phonetic, had broken down because the language had changed. Then besides that, no writer knew exactly how to spell bor¬rowed words—in the Latin, the French or the Norman-French way, or according to the rules which individual writers applied in their own way when spelling words of English origin(1). Even the publication of dictionaries, which began in the middle of the 17th century, did not fix English spelling. One of. the first dictionaries was called "Table Alphabetical conteyning and teaching the true writing and understand¬ing of hard usual English words." This was the first dictionary confined entirely to the English language. Spelling was one of the problems which the English language began consciously to face-in the 16th century and it was fairly settled before the end of the 17th century.

And yet this period is characterized mainly by freedom of the norms used in the literary language. The interaction of the lively everyday speech and the unstable rules of English grammar led to a peculiar enrichment of the literary language.

The 16th century may justly be called crucial in establishing the norms of present-day literary English. Both of the tendencies mentioned above have left their mark on the standard English of to-day. Sixteenth-century literary English could not, however, be called standard English because at that time there was no received standard.

Seventeenth-century literary English is characterized by a general tendency to refinement and regulation. The orientation towards classical models, strong enough in 16th century English, as¬sumed a new function, that of refining, polishing and improving the lit¬erary language. This was, of course, one of the trends leading to the final establishment of the norms of literary English.

But the actual history of the development of standard English cannot be reduced to the interaction of learning and fashionable breeding. The development of the literary language is marked by the process of selection. The real creator of the literary form of the language remains the people, the actual lawgiver of the norms. Scientists and men-of-letters only fix what has already been established by general usage. New norms of usage cannot be imposed. But to historians of language the opin¬ions of writers and scholars of a given period as well as those of ordi¬nary people are of great value. They help to trace the fluctuating trends leading to the establishment of the norms of the period and influence to some extent the progress of literary English.

In the eighteenth century two men had a great influence on the de¬velopment of the norms of literary English. These were Jonathan Swift and Samuel Johnson.

In an attempt to regularize the use of English, Swift condemned both what he called "vulgar slanginess" and "intolerable preciosity". According to Swift, the "vulgar slanginess" came from a certain school of young men from the universities, "terribly possessed with fear of ped¬antry", who from his description wished to be what we should call 'up to date'". Samuel Johnson's attitude toward language is best expressed in his Grammar: "For pronunciation,, the best rule is to consider those as the most elegant speakers who deviate least from the written words." Faith¬ful to this doctrine Johnson in trying to "ascertain" the English language was mainly concerned with the usage of great English writers.

The gap between the literary and colloquial English of the 18th century was widening. The restrictions forced on the written language are felt in the speech of the characters in the novels and plays of this

The nineteenth century trends in literary English are best summarized in the following statement by McKnight:

"The spirit of purism was evidently alive in the early nine¬teenth century. The sense of a classical perfection to be striven for survived from the eighteenth century. The language must not only be made more regular, but it must be protected from the corrupting influences that were felt to be on all sides. Vulgarisms were to be avoided and new words, if they were to be tolerated, must conform not only to analogy but to good taste."2

This puristic spirit is revealed mainly in the attitude towards vocab¬ulary and pronunciation. Syntactical and morphological changes are not so apparent as lexical and phonetic ones and therefore are less ex¬posed to the criticism of the purists.

Many new words that were coming into use as, for example, reliable, environment, lengthy were objected to on the principle that they were unnecessary innovations replacing, e. g., trustworthy, scenery or circum¬stances and long. Macaulay protested against the use of talented, influen¬tial, gentlemanly. The tendency to protest against innovation, however, gradually gave way to new trends, those of the 19th century, which can be defined as the beginning of the recognition of colloquial English as a variety of the national language. Colloquial words and expressions cre¬ated by the people began to pour into literary English. The literary critics and men-of-letters objected to the maxims laid down by their predeces¬sors and began to lay the foundation for new theoretical concepts of the literary language.

Another feature of 19th century literary English to be noted is a more or less firmly established differentiation of styles, though this process was not fully appreciated by the scholars of the period.

In summing up the main features of the struggle to establish norms for 19th century literary English, special mention must be made of the two tendencies characteristic of this period. One was reactionary pur¬ism, the principles of which were laid down in the 17th and 18th centu¬ries and which became manifest in the struggle against any innovation no matter where it came from. The purist was equally against words borrowed from other languages, the coinage of new words and also seman¬tic changes in the native stock of words. This reactionary purism orien¬tated the literary language towards a revival of old words which had gone out of use and of constructions typical of earlier stages in the his¬tory of English. The end of the century led practically to no change in the general direction of the two tendencies.

4.) The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned the period roughly from the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the Late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe.

The English Renaissance was a cultural and artistic movement in England dating from the late 15th and early 16th centuries to the early 17th century. It is associated with the pan-European Renaissance that is usually regarded as beginning in Italy in the late 14th century; like most of northern Europe England saw little of these developments for more than a century later. The beginning of the English Renaissance is often taken, as a convenience, to be 1485, when the Battle of Bosworth Field ended the Wars of the Roses and inaugurated the Tudor Dynasty. Renaissance style and ideas, however, were slow in penetrating England, and the Elizabethan era in the second half of the 16th century is usually regarded as the height of the English Renaissance.

England had a strong tradition of literature in the English vernacular, which gradually increased as English use of the printing press became common by the mid 16th century. By the time of Elizabethan literature a vigorous literary culture in both drama and poetry included poets such as Edmund Spenser, whose verse epic The Faerie Queene did not become a dominating influence on English literature in the way that some foreign equivalents did for their countries. Instead the lyrics of William Shakespeare, Thomas Wyatt and others, typically circulating in manuscript form for some time before they were published, and above all the plays of English Renaissance theatre, were the outstanding legacy of the period.

The English theatre scene, which performed both for the court and nobility in private performances, and a very wide public in the theatres, was the most crowded in Europe, with a host of other playwrights as well as the giant figures of Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. Elizabeth herself was a product of Renaissance humanism trained by Roger Ascham, and wrote occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure at critical moments of her life. Philosophers and intellectuals included Thomas More and Francis Bacon. All the 16th century Tudor monarchs were highly educated, as was much of the nobility, and Italian literature had a considerable following, providing the sources for many of Shakespeare's plays. English thought advanced towards modern science with the Baconian Method, a forerunner of the Scientific Method. The language of the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, and at the end of the period the Authorised Version ("King James Version" to Americans) of the Bible (1611) had enduring impacts on the English consciousness.

To sum up, the Age of Elizabeth was a time of intellectual liberty, of growing intelligence and comfort among all classes, of unbounded patriotism, and of peace at home and abroad. For a parallel we must go back to the Age of Pericles in Athens, or of Augustus in Rome, or go forward a little to the magnificent court of Louis XIV, when Corneille, Racine, and Molière brought the drama in France to the point where Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson had left it in England half a century earlier. Such an age of great thought and great action, appealing to the eyes as well as to the imagination and intellect, finds but one adequate literary expression; neither poetry nor the story can express the whole man,--his thought, feeling, action, and the resulting character; hence in the Age of Elizabeth literature turned instinctively to the drama and brought it rapidly to the highest stage of its development.

Summary of the Age of Elizabeth. This period is generally regarded as the greatest in the history of our literature. Historically, we note in this age the tremendous impetus received from the Renaissance, from the Reformation, and from the exploration of the New World. It was marked by a strong national spirit, by patriotism, by religious tolerance, by social content, by intellectual progress, and by unbounded enthusiasm.

Such an age, of thought, feeling, and vigorous action, finds its best expression in the drama; and the wonderful development of the drama, culminating in Shakespeare, is the most significant characteristic of the Elizabethan period. Though the age produced some excellent prose works, it is essentially an age of poetry; and the poetry is remarkable for its variety, its freshness, its youthful and romantic feeling. Both the poetry and the drama were permeated by Italian influence, which was dominant in English literature from Chaucer to the Restoration. The literature of this age is often called the literature of the Renaissance, though, as we have seen, the Renaissance itself began much earlier, and for a century and a half added very little to our literary possessions.

In our study of this great age we have noted (1) the Non-dramatic Poets, that is, poets who did not write for the stage. The center of this group is Edmund Spenser, whose Shepherd's Calendar (1579) marked the appearance of the first national poet since Chaucer's death in 1400. His most famous work is The Faery Queen. Associated with

Spenser are the minor poets, Thomas Sackville, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, and Philip Sidney. Chapman is noted for his completion of Marlowe's poem, Hero and Leander, and for his translation of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. Sidney, besides his poetry, wrote his prose romance Arcadia, and The Defense of Poesie, one of our earliest critical essays.

The major literary figures in the English Renaissance include:

• Francis Bacon

• Thomas Dekker

• John Donne

• John Fletcher

• John Ford

• Ben Jonson

• Thomas Kyd

• Christopher Marlowe

• Philip Massinger

• Thomas Middleton

• Thomas More

• Thomas Nashe

• William Rowley

• William Shakespeare

• James Shirley

• Philip Sidney

• Edmund Spenser

• John Webster

• Thomas Wyatt

About characters:

• Renaissance writers explored the relationships of literary characters and their society; the characters that populate Renaissance literature have greater autonomy and more fully realized personalities than their Middle Ages counterparts.

• Characters are often presented in debate with themselves and others as they investigate a course of action.

Shakespeare's dramas are usually divided into three classes, called tragedies, comedies, and historical plays. Strictly speaking the drama has but two divisions, tragedy and comedy, in which are included the many subordinate forms of tragi-comedy, melodrama, lyric drama (opera), farce, etc. A tragedy is a drama in which the principal characters are involved in desperate circumstances or led by overwhelming passions. It is invariably serious and dignified. The movement is always stately, but grows more and more rapid as it approaches the climax; and the end is always calamitous, resulting in death or dire misfortune to the principals.

A comedy, on the other hand, is a drama in which the characters are placed in more or less humorous situations. The movement is light and often mirthful, and the play ends in general good will and happiness. The historical drama aims to present some historical age or character, and may be either a comedy or a tragedy. The following list includes the best of Shakespeare's plays in each of the three classes; but the order indicates merely the author's personal opinion of the relative merits of the plays in each class. Thus Merchant of Venice would be the first of the comedies for the beginner to read, and Julius Cæsar is an excellent introduction to the historical plays and the tragedies.

Comedies. Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night's Dream, As You Like It, Winter's Tale, The Tempest, Twelfth Night.

Tragedies. Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello.

Historical Plays. Julius Cæsar, Richard III, Henry IV, Henry V, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra.

5.) A sonnet is a form of a poem that originated in Europe, mainly Italy: the Sicilian poet Giacomo da Lentini is credited with its invention.[1] They commonly contain 14 lines. The term "sonnet" derives only from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both meaning "little song" or "little sound". By the thirteenth century, it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. Writers of sonnets are sometimes called "sonneteers," although the term can be used derisively. One of the best-known sonnet writers is William Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them (not including those that appear in his plays). A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing ten syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; the last two lines are a rhyming couplet.

Traditionally, English poets employ iambic pentameter when writing sonnets, but not all English sonnets have the same metrical structure: the first sonnet in Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel and Stella, for example, has 12 syllables: it is iambic hexameters, albeit with a turned first foot in several lines. In the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the most widely used metres.

Sonnets were first written in Italian and were traditionally love poems. Though the sonnet is a form that can be experimented with, it has remained true to its original length of fourteen lines and its Anglicized meter of iambic pentameter. Petrarch developed the sonnet to one of its highest levels during early Renaisannce Italy, but it wasn't translated into English until the sixteenth century. From there, Shakespeare made the sonnet famous in England and others followed his lead.

The sonnet can be thematically divided into two sections: the first presents the theme, raises an issue or doubt, and the second part answers the question, resolves the problem, or drives home the poem's point. This change in the poem is called the turn and helps move forward the emotional action of the poem quickly, as fourteen lines can become too short too fast.

Most sonnets are one of two kinds:

• Italian (Petrarchan)- this sonnet is split into two parts, an octave and a sestet. The octave is composed of two envelope quatrains rhyming "abba abba" (Italian octave). The sestet's rhyme pattern varies, though it is most often either "cde cde" (Italian sestet) or "cdc dcd" (Sicilian sestet). The turn occurs at the end of the octave and is developed and closed in the sestet. Over the years, the Italian sonnet has been the most favored type of sonnet

English (Shakespearian)- this contains 3 Sicilian quatrains and one heroic couplet at the end, with an "abab cdcd efef gg" rhyme scheme. The turn comes at or near line 13, making the ending couplet quick and dramatic

Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet

The Petrarchan sonnet (also Petrarchanism or Petrarchian) is a verse form that typically refers to a concept of unattainable love. It was first developed by the Italian humanist and writer, Francesco Petrarca. Conventionally Petrarchan sonnets depict the addressed lady in hyperbolic terms and present her as a model of perfection and inspiration. This phrase is often used in reference to romantic literature, including analysis of Shakespeare.

Petrarch developed the Italian sonnet pattern, which is known to this day as the Petrarchan sonnet or the Italian sonnet. Because of the structure of Italian, the rhyme scheme of the Petrarchan sonnet is more easily fulfilled in that language than in English. The original Italian sonnet form divides the poem's 14 lines into two parts, an octave (first eight lines) and a sestet (last six lines).

The rhyme scheme for the octave is typically a b b a a b b a. The sestet is more flexible. Petrarch typically used c d e c d e or c d c d c d for the sestet. Some other possibilities for the sestet include c d d c d d, c d d e c e, or c d d c c d (as in Wordsworth's "Nuns Fret Not at Their Convents Narrow Room" poem). This form was used in the earliest English sonnets by Wyatt and others. For background on the pre-English sonnet, see Robert Canary's web page, The Continental Origins of the Sonnet.[1] In a strict Petrarchan sonnet, the sestet does not end with a couplet (since this would tend to divide the sestet into a quartet and a couplet). However, in Italian sonnets in English, this rule is not always observed, and c d d c e e and c d c d e e are also used.

The octave and sestet have special functions in a Petrarchan sonnet. The octave's purpose is to introduce a problem, express a desire, reflect on reality, or otherwise present a situation that causes doubt or conflict within the speaker. It usually does this by introducing the problem within its first quatrain (unified four-line section) and developing it in the second. The beginning of the sestet is known as the volta, and it introduces a pronounced change in tone in the sonnet; the change in rhyme scheme marks the turn. The sestet's purpose as a whole is to make a comment on the problem or to apply a solution to it. The pair are separate but usually used to reinforce a unified argument - they are often compared to two strands of thought organically converging into one argument, rather than a mechanical deduction. Moreover, Petrarch's own sonnets almost never had a rhyming couplet at the end as this would suggest logical deduction instead of the intended rational correlation of the form.[2]

The form also gave rise to an 'anti-Petrarchan' convention which may have revealed the mistress to be ugly and unworthy. The convention was also mocked, or adopted for alternative persuasive means by many of the Inn's of Court writers during the Renaissance.

Structure

The sonnet is split in two groups: the "octave" (of 8 lines) and the "sestet" (of 6 lines), for a total of 14 lines.

The octave (the first 8 lines) typically introduces the theme or problem using a rhyme scheme of abba abba. The sestet (the last 6 lines) provides resolution for the poem and rhymes variously, but usually follows the schemes of cdecde or cdccdc.

English (Shakespearean) sonnet

Shakespeare's sonnets are a collection of 154 sonnets, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality, first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. (although sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The quarto ends with "A Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of 47 seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal.

The first 17 poems, traditionally called the procreation sonnets, are addressed to a young man urging him to marry and have children in order to immortalise his beauty by passing it to the next generation.[1] Other sonnets express the speaker's love for a young man; brood upon loneliness, death, and the transience of life; seem to criticise the young man for preferring a rival poet; express ambiguous feelings for the speaker's mistress; and pun on the poet's name. The final two sonnets are allegorical treatments of Greek epigrams referring to the "little love-god"

Characters

When analysed as characters, the subjects of the sonnets are usually referred to as the Fair Youth, the Rival Poet, and the Dark Lady. The speaker expresses admiration for the Fair Youth's beauty, and later has an affair with the Dark Lady. It is not known whether the poems and their characters are fiction or autobiographical; scholars who find the sonnets to be autobiographical, notably A. L. Rowse, have attempted to identify the characters with historical individuals.[21]

6.) Emerging in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century, and reflecting a similar trend in continental literature at the time, literary sentimentalism or "sensibility" prioritized feeling. It developed primarily as a middle-class phenomenon, reflecting the emphasis on compassion or feeling as a desirable character trait in the newly emergent middle class. Although, on the one hand, the reader might take pleasure in feeling itself, in England by the 1770s the rise of sensibility was also linked to a growing activismhe awareness of and concern for the suffering of others reflected in, for example, the antislavery movement, concerns about child labor, and the campaigns for better hospitals, prison reform, and charity schools as well as in the response to the suffering associated with the rapid rise of industrial capitalism and the urban misery caused by exploitative labor practices.

The word "sentimental" is first known to have appeared in print in English in the 1740s. Becoming almost immediately popular, the term was used to describe the emotional state of a sensitive and "genteel" person, and sentiment began to play an important role in literature. As Louis Bredvold notes, "Drama and fiction had discovered that pathos could best soften the heart and raise the tear that betokens humanity" (pp. 416, 433). Among the earliest British novels that heralded the rise of sentimentalism were Samuel Richardson's Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740) and Clarissa (1747748); Oliver Goldsmith's The Vicar of Wakefield (1766); Laurence Sterne's A Sentimental Journey (1768); and Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling (1771). According to Paul Langford, Mackenzie's novel was a "deliberate attempt to portray the sentimentalist as a benevolent man" (p. 481). To be a "man of feeling" became a desirable goal even among middle-class men of business.

Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century.

ВТОРОЙ ВАРИАНТ ОТВЕТА.

Along with a new vision of love, sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking, passion over reason, and personal instincts of "pity, tenderness, and benevolence" over social duties. Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy for the poverty-stricken, expropriated peasants, wrote the "simple annals of the poor”. Writers of sentimentalism justly criticized the cruelty of the capitalist relations and the gross social injustices brought about by the bourgeois revolutions.But they attacked the progressive aspect of this great social change in order to eliminate it and sighed for the return of the patriarchal times which they idealized.Sentimentalism embraces a pessimistic outlook and blames reason and the Industrial Revolution for the miseries and injustices in the aristocratic-bourgeois society and indulges in sentiment, hence the definite signs of decadence in the literary works of the sentimental tradition.