William shakespear (1564-1616)

His oeuvre includes 5 long poems, 154sonnets, 37 plays (comedies, tragedies, farces)

1. The Optimistic Period (1590-1601) – poems, sonnets, comedies:

“The Comedy of Errors”

“The Two Gentlemen of Verona”

“A Midsummer-Night’s Dream”

“The Merchants of Venice”

“As You Like It”

“Twelfth Night”

Two tragedies:

“Romeo and Juliet”

“Julius Caesar”

Historical plays (chronicles): “King Henry VI”, “The Tragedy of King Richard III”, etc.

A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines, written in iambic pentameter. Each line has ten syllables with a stress on every other syllable. Sh’s sonnets were addressed to the so-called “dark lady” and his friend.

Sh’s comedies were written to take the spectator away from everyday troubles. They are written in a light and playful manner, have harmonious composition, language flows very smoothly.

2. The Pessimistic Period (1601-1608)

Tragedies:

“Hamlet, Prince of Denmark”

“Othello, the Moor of Venice”

“King Lear”

“Macbeth”

“Antony and Cleopatra”, etc.

Sh’s tragedy portrays some noble figure caught in a difficult situation when some weakness of his nature is exposed. For instance, Macbeth strives for power, King Lear demands blind submission, etc.

Calamity arises through man’s actions upon which depend not only his own fate, but also that of an entire nation.

Sh’s characters are universal personalities of great depth and unusual intellects. They are never static as Sh’s attention is concentrated on the hero’s development.

3. The Romantic Period (1608-1612)

Romantic plays (dramas): “Cymbeline”, “The Winter’s Tale”, “The Tempest”, “Henry VIII” – fantastic and allegorical.

2. English literature during the bourgeois revolution John Milton (1608-1674)

“Paradise Lost” is an epic poem, written in blank verse, published in 1667.

It consists of 12 books. It treats oа a biblical theme. The poem shows the struggle between God and Satan in the Universe. The “hero” of the poem is a Man; the “villain” of the poem is Satan. The subject of the poem is the Fall of Man and the promise of his redemption.

In the poem two states of Mankind are vividly represented and juxtaposed: its harmonious, devoid of any troubles existence in Edam and life, full of cares, obstacles after the expulsion. Polarity, controversy, juxtaposition – the building blocks of the concept of “Paradise Lost” find their realization in the system of binary oppositions to whom the author resorts: good – evil, life – death, God – Satan, heaven – earth, paradise – hell, live – hate, immortal – mortal, beast – angel, perverse – divine, forbid – gift, lost – gained, sin- law, day – night, beginning – end, fight – peace, open- secret, etc.

3. Enlightenment (neoclassicism) or the age of reason

An Intellectual Revolution

The phrase «Age of Reason» describes an emphasis in attitudes and beliefs. People may not have been more reasonable between 1650 and 1780 than at any other time, but during that period great claims were made for reason and for what it might achieve. This attitude can be seen most clearly in the way the people of the period thought about nature.

For centuries people had believed that natural phenomena were the result of some kind of direct interference with nature. Comets and eclipses of the sun were ominous warnings from God, earthquakes and plagues the proof of His wrath. Witches and fairies caused blighted crops, deformed babies, sudden deaths. Early scientists had to work against such assumptions. Their radically different vision of nature, developed throughout the seventeenth century, triumphed with the publication, in 1687, of Isaac Newton's “Principia Mathematica”.

In the new scientific method which Newton practiced, one began with an analysis of all the facts relevant to a phenomenon, then developed an explanation, formulated that explanation mathematically, and finally tested it by experiment. The implication was that events in nature are not the result of external influence. Rather, nature now appeared to be a system governed by laws which are simple in form, apply uniformly to everything, and can be expressed in mathematical language.

While this new way of looking at nature resolved old fears and anxieties, it also created problems. The new scientific method of thinking raised serious questions about old religious assumptions. Other intellectual disciplines sought to achieve similar results, but it was much more difficult to create a scientific explanation for human nature or society. Yet the ideal of systematic, rational thought based on empirical fact continued to dominate the era.

The Restoration

In England the Age of Reason begins with the final rejection of the Puritans and religious extremism. On May 29,1560, Charles Stuart, long an exile in France, finally returned to London as Charles II. In accepting his return the English people, exhausted with twenty years of religious and political strife, restored the old monarchy and the old church.

A writer's life during the Restoration was not easy. First, there was the problem of money. A writer could not yet make a living through the sale of his books. An aristocratic patron was still the usual source of extra income. Second, literary fashion was changing. Restoration readers were no longer interested in the complicated syntax and lofty themes of Elizabethan prose. Their new interest in science required a prose style using «... a close, naked, natural way of speaking...». In the end poetry too shifted from the intensely personal subject matter and the complex imagery of the Metaphysical poets to a poetry about public issues written in plainspoken, reasoned English, and frequently in the newly popular heroic couplet, whose formality and order seemed in tune with the era.

Remarkably, the Restoration worked for twenty-five years. But on the death of Charles П the old specter of religious war reappeared. The new king, James II, was a Roman Catholic, and seemed (intemperately) determined to force a crisis. In 1688 the English responded by expelling him from the country in the Glorious Revolution. Parliament invited his daughter and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, to take the throne. They accepted, confirming Parliament's power over the monarchy. William and Mary ruled from 1689 to 1702, followed by Mary's sister, Anne, who occupied the throne until 1714. When she died without a heir Parliament again had to invite in a king, this time George I from the German duchy of Hanover. Since George and his son could barely speak English, Parliament ruled England.

The Augustans

The writers of the era of Queen Anne and George I styled theirs the Augustan Age because they saw a parallel between the new political and social stability of their day and Rome under Caesar Augustus. Hoping to equal the literary achievements of the Romans, the English Augustans wrote epics, satires, elegies, and tragedies just as their Roman predecessors had, and exercised great care in paralleling the form and content of their work with that of «the ancients». This did not inhibit their brilliance or their vigor. For one thing, much Augustan literature is written from a middle- class point of view. The bitter satire of Swift's “Modest Proposal”, the gentler moral persuasion of “The Spectator”, even Johnson's defiant letter to Lord Chesterfield are all directed against aristocrats.

This was the era when the middle class, the shopkeepers, traders, merchants, and government bureaucrats not only grew in numbers and in economic power, but also grew in self-consciousness and self-confidence: «... the middle state», says Robinson Crusoe's father (in «Robinson Crusoe», 1719) is «... the best State in the World...».

The middle class found its ideal social centre in the coffee-houses (England traded with many countries. The import of coffee and tea led to the establishment of coffee-houses). People went there to exchange news, to conduct business or to whisper political secrets and hold serious religious, philosophical and literary discussions. Each rank and profession had its own coffee-house.

The middle class exercised a growing influence on literature. Their new wealth now permitted them to buy books, аnd writers turned from the demands of aristocratic patrons to the open market, hoping to make a living there.

The middle-class readers preferred to read about people like themselves, so heroic tragedies give way to novels, and much Augustan literature is about London, the town where so many hack writers scraped a living with their pens and middle-class readers idled with a book.

The main interest in that time was in man and in the origin of his good and evil qualities. Men began to feel to feel that society had a great influence on them and that it could be reformed. They wanted to improve the world by teaching it. The fiction writers of the of the 18^th century started a movement for enlightening the people. That is way the literary period which evolved during the 17^th and the 18^th centuries (under the influence of classical, Greco-Roman, tradition) is called THE ENLIGHTENMENT.

The chief literary phenomena of the 18^th century were the reign of Classicism and Sentimentalism, the revival of romantic poetry, and the discovery of the modern novel.

The English classicists cultivated in their works formal elegance, balance and control of emotions. They revived the principles of antique Greek and Roman literature and observed strict rules in their writing.

Towards the middle of the century a new literary trend, sentimentalism, appeared. It marked a new stage in the evolution of the Enlightenment. The greatest representatives of the trend were S. Richardson, O. Goldsmith and L. Stern. They appealed to the hearts of people and made them sympathize with their heroes. Sentimentalists strove for primitive patriarchal life and rejected civilization in towns.

Whatever literary trends and movements appeared in the 18^th century all the writers of the Enlightenment aimed at the simplicity of style, truth to nature, reason, clarity, conversational ease and directness. They preferred the language of country-men and merchants to that of scholars and princes. They conveyed ideas which the mass of men would understand.

The English authors of the time formed two groups.

1 Group: the writers who hoped to better the world by teaching it:

Daniel Defore, Alexander Pope, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne.

2 Group: the writers who openly protested against the vicious social order:

Jonathan Swift, Henry Fielding, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Sheridan, Robert Burns.

But simultaneously, new ideas were developing. Again, this is evidenced in a new way of looking at nature. Newtonian science seemed to take the mystery out of natural events. But people still sensed a power and saw a special kind of beauty in forest and mountain. Not everyone lived in middle-class London, and the lives of farmer and worker did not strike everyone as meaningless. The poetry of the second half of the eighteenth century, such as the work of Gray and Burns, turns more and more to rural subjects, finding in them fresh sources of emotion. This development leads, by the end of the period, toward the Romantic Revolution.