A History of English Literature

The stanza of eight pentameters rhyming ababbcbc turns slowly, pausing as the point ofbalance is reached in the central couplet ...

grand masterpiece to observe’, yet they objected to Spenser’s adoption of a style suited to ‘medieval’ romance, preferring a mod ...

The Ocean to Cynthia (pub. 1870) and ‘Methought I saw the grave where Laura lay’. This claims that, thanks to The Faerie Queene ...

O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! Whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; whom none hath dared, thou has done; and whom a ...

Besides his Ovid, Marlowe also translated the first book of Lucan into blank verse. The Elegies from Ovid are polished and witty ...

from the drinking song ‘Back and Side Go Bare, Go Bare’ to the artful madrigal ‘My love in her attire doth show her wit.’ Litera ...

The balancing of ‘patrimony’ and ‘personage’, ‘Nature’ and ‘Fortune’, ‘person’ and ‘possessions’, and other elements of composit ...

episcopal order and doctrine of the Church of England, appealing to natural law as well as the Bible. His closely reasoned moder ...

Contents William Shakespeare 108 Shakespeare’s life 108 The plays preserved 111 Luck and fame 112 The drama 112 The commercial t ...

church and take communion. This may have been the cause of an apparent decline in his fortunes. His conscientious objection cont ...

human life, its comic potential and its tragic difficulties. They show no sign of anti- symbolic Reformation thinking. He left s ...

1609 his mother died. From 1610 he spent more time in Stratford. In February 1616 his daughter Judith married, and on 23 April 1 ...

Shakespeare to semi-divine status was taken seriously in Germany and even in France. In 1818 Keats entitled a poem ‘On sitting d ...

was no ‘set’ of scenery to be changed, though there were rich costumes. As one scene ended, another began as an actor entered sa ...

Andronicus, and the martial pageantry ofHenry VI, but his romance comedies combined action with literary high spirits. Public dr ...

his beloved, the ‘divine Zenocratë’. His hubris in challenging the gods is not punished; he merely dies. Like the protagonists o ...

actor-playwright learned from Kyd how to construct a play, how to vary it, how to build intensity. The order of the plays Shakes ...

Histories The Folio classification by kinds is rough,counting classical history plays as tr agedies, and has caused trouble, for ...

on unsentimental classical precedents.Richard IIIis based on More’s prose History of Richard III (written in 1513 in Latin and E ...

that ‘we seize into our hands, / His plate, his goods, his money and his lands’. The disinheriting of Lancaster’s son, Henry Bol ...