The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Traduzioni di Letteratura Inglese

Scarica The Norton Anthology of English Literature e più Traduzioni in PDF di Letteratura Inglese solo su Docsity! Letteratura inglese The Middle Ages The Middle Ages designates the time span from the collapse of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance and Reformation. The adjective ‘MEDIEVAL’: coined from Latin medium (middle) and aevum (age), refers to whatever was made, written or thought during the Middle Ages. RENAISSANCE: so named by nineteenth-century historians and critics because they associated it with a ‘rebirth’ or revival of Latin and, especially, of Greek learning and Literature. REFORMATION: the powerful religious movement that began in the early sixteenth century and repudiated the supreme authority of the Roman Catholic Church. 1485: the year of the accession of Henry VII and the beginning of the Tudor dynasty, is an arbitrary but convenient year to mark the ‘end’ of the Middle Ages in England. Although the Roman Catholic Church provided continuity, the period was one of enormous historical, social and linguistic change. We can divide the Middle Ages into three primary sections: Anglo-Saxon Literature, Anglo-Norman Literature, Middle English Literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth centuries. Anglo-Saxon Literature From the first to the fifth century, England was a province of the Roman Empire and was named Britannia after its Celtic- speaking inhabitants, the Britons. The Britons adapted themselves to Roman civilization, of which the ruins survived to impress the poet of ‘The Wanderer’, who refers to them as ‘the old works of giants. During the fifth century the Roman legions, in a vain attempt to protect Rome itself from the Germanic tribes, left the island vulnerable to seafaring Germanic invaders. They belonged to three tribes: the Angles, the Saxons (from which the counties of Essex, Sussex and Wessex) and the Jutes. The Anglo-Saxon occupation extended over decades of fighting against Britons that finally were confined to the mountainous region of Wales, where the modern form of their language is spoken alongside English today. They had become Christians in the fourth century with the emperor Constantine, but for about 150 years after the beginning of invasion, Christianity was maintained only in the remote regions where Anglo-Saxons, yet pagan, failed to penetrate. In the 597 a Benedictine monk, St. Augustine of Canterbury was sent by pope Gregory as a missionary to King Ethelbert of Kent: within 75 years the island was once more predominantly Christian. Before Christianity there had been no books. The impact of Christianity on literacy is evident from the fact that the first extended written specimen of the Old English is a code of laws promulgated by Ethelbert of Kent. After the conversion, England produced many distinguished churchmen like: • Bede (Ecclesiastical History of the English People) - 731; • Alcuin (735-804) a man of wide culture who became friend and adviser of the Frankish emperor Charlemagne, whom he assisted in making the Frankish court a great center of learning. In the ninth century the Christian Anglo-Saxons were subjected to new Germanic invasions by the Danes, this raid date inspired ‘The Battle of Maldon’ (X century), the last of the Old English poems. The Danes occupied the northern part of the island but they were stopped by Alfred, king of the west Saxons. He was also an enthusiastic patron of literature, in fact he translated various works from Latin, like Boethius’s ‘Consolations of Philosophy’, and he instigated the beginning of the ‘Angle-Saxon Chronicle’. Practically all of Old English poetry is preserved in copies made in the West Saxon dialect after the reign of Alfred. The Anglo-Saxon invaders brought a tradition of oral poetry: literacy was mainly restricted to servants of the church and Germanic heroic poetry continued to be performed orally in alliterative verse and was at time used to describe current events (‘The Battle of Maldon’ commemorates a Viking victory in which the Christian English invoke the ancient code of honor that obliges a warrior to avenge his slain lord or to die beside him). These poems shows that the aristocratic heroic values of Germanic society continued to inspire both clergy and laity in the Christian era: this world shares many characteristics with the heroic world described by Homer. Christian writers like the Beowulf poet were fascinated by the distant culture of their pagan ancestors and by the inherent conflict between the heroic code and a religion that teaches that we should ‘forgive those who trespass against us’ and that ‘all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword’. The Beowulf poet looks back on the ancient world with admirations for the courage of which it was capable and at the same time with elegiac sympathy for its inevitable doom. I-V: ROMANI V: INVASORI GERMANICI 597: CONVERSIONE AL CRISTIANESIMO L’IMPATTO CRISTIANO NELLA LETTERATURA IX SECOLO: THE DANES AND KING ALFRED I POEMI ANGLO- SASSONI E L’ORALITÀ BEOWULF E I TEMI DELLA POESIA IN OLD ENGLISH The world of Old English poetry’s often elegiac: men are said to be cheerful in the mead hall, but even there they think of war, of possible triumph but more possible failure. Romantic love, one of the principal topics of later literature, appears hardly at all. The poetic diction, formulaic phrases, and repetitions of parallel syntactic structures, which are determined by the versification, are difficult to reproduce in modern translation. Poetic language is created out of a special vocabulary that contains a multiplicity of terms for lord, warrior and so on. The overall effect of the language is to formalize and elevate speech: a favourite device, known by the rhetorical term litotes, is ironic understatement, more than a figure of thought, irony is also a mode of perception in Old English poetry. The formal and dignified speech of Old English poetry was always distant from the everyday language of the Anglo- Saxons, and this poetic idiom remained remarkably uniform throughout the roughly three hundred years that separate Casdmon’s Hymn from the Battle of Maldon. This clinging to old forms - grammatical and orthographic as well as literary – by the Anglo-Saxon church and aristocracy conceals from us the enormous changes that were taking place in the English language and the diversity of its dialects. The dramatic changes between Old and Middle English did not happen overnight or over the course of a single century. The Normans displaced the English ruling class with their own barons and clerics, whose native language was a dialect of Old French that we call Anglo-Norman. Without a ruling literate class to preserve English traditions, the custom of transcribing vernacular texts in an earlier form of the West- Saxon dialect was abandoned, and both language and literature were allowed to develop unchecked in new directions. Litote: Formulazione attenuata, ottenuta mediante la negazione del contrario: risultato non cattivo (buono), notizie non buone (cattive), danno non indifferente (piuttosto grave). IL LINGUAGGIO POETICO CONFRONTO TRA OLD ENGLISH E MIDDLE ENGLISH Bede (673-735) and Cædmon’s Hymn The venerable Bede (the title by which he is known to the posterity) became a novice at the age of seven and spent the rest of his life at the neighboring monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow. Although he may never have traveled beyond the boundaries of his native district, Northumbria, he achieved an international reputation as one of the greatest scholars of his age. He wrote in Latin and his most popular and enduring work is the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. The History tells about the Ango-Saxon conquest and the vicissitudes of the petty kingdoms that comprises Anglo-Saxon England: Bede main theme, however, is the spread of Christianity and the growth of the English church. The Histoy is also a moral work and hagiography that contains may story of saints and miracles like the Cædmon’s Hymn. Bede tells how Cædmon, an illiterate cowherd employed by the monastery of Whitby, miraculously received the gift of song, entered the monastery, and became the founder of a school of Christian poetry. Cædmon was clearly an oral-formulaic poet, one who created his work by combining and varying formulas, units of verse developed in a tradition transmitted by one generation of singers to another. In this respect he resemble the singers of the Homeric poems and oral-formulaic poets recorded in the twentieth century, especially in the Balkan countries. Although most Old English poetry was written by lettered poets, they continued to use the oral-formulaic style. The Hymn is a good example of the way Old English verse. Beowulf Beowulf, the oldest of the great long poems written in English, may have been composed more than twelve hundred years ago, in the first half of the eighth century, although some scholars would place it as late as the tenth century. As is the case with most Old English poems, the title has been assigned by modern editors, for the manuscript do not normally give any indication of title or authorship. Linguistic evidence shows that the poem was originally composed in the dialect of what is today the Midlands of England, but in the unique late-tenth-century manuscript preserving the poem, it has been converted into the West-Saxon dialect. In 1731, before any modern transcript of the text had been made, the manuscript was seriously damaged, so several lines and words have been lost from the poem. Many of the words and formulaic expressions in Beowulf can be found in other Old English poems, but there are also an extraordinary number of hapax legomena: words recorded only once in a language. Although the poem itself is English in language and origin, it deals not with native Englishmen but with their Germanic forebears, especially with two south Scandinavian tribes, the Danes and the Geats. The historical period of the poem is some centuries before it was written. The one datable fact of history mentioned in the poem a raid on the Franks in which Hygelac, the king of Geats and Beowulf’s lord, was killed, and this raid occurred in the year 520. Yet the poet’s elliptical references to quasihistorical and legendary material show that his audience was still familiar with many old stories, the outlines of which we can only infer. Although Hrothgar and Beowulf are portrayed as morally upright and enlightened pagans, they frequently affirm the values of Germanic heroic poetry: the most important of human relationship was the one existed between the warrior and his lord, based less on subordination of one man’s will to another than on mutual trust and respect. The poem turns on Beowulf’s three great fights against preternatural evil, which inhabits the dangerous and demonic space surrounding human society. He undertakes the fight against Grendel to save the Danes from the monster and to exact revenge for the men Grendel has slain, but also to demonstrate his strength and courage and to enhance his personal glory. Hrothgar’s magnificent gifts become the material emblems of that glory. Revenge and glory also motivate Beowulf’s slaying of Grendel’s mother: he undertakes his last battle against the dragon only because there is no other way to save his own people. A dignified elegiac mood pervades Beowulf. The poem opens and closes with the description of a funeral and is filled with laments for the dead. Our first view of Beowulf is of an ambitious young hero, at the end, he has become an old king, facing the dragon and death. The entire poem could be viewed as the poet’s lament for heroes like Beowulf who went into the darkness without the light of the poet’s own Christian faith. The Mystery Plays The increasing prosperity and importance of the towns was shown by performances of the Mystery Plays, a sequence or cycle of plays based on the Bible and produced by the city guilds. Medieval mystery plays had an immensely confident reach in both space and time. In York, for example, the theatrical space and time of this urban, amateur drama was that of the entire city, lasting from sunrise to the entire long summer holiday. The time represented ran from the Fall of the Angels and the Creation of the World right through the End of Time, in the Last Judgment. Between these extremities each cycle presents key episode of Old Testament narrative, before presenting a concentrated sequence of freely interpreted New Testament plays focused on the life and Passion of Christ. The Church had its own drama in Latin, dating back to the tenth century, which developed through the dramatization and elaboration of the liturgy. Even though the vernacular plays at times echo their Latin counterparts and although their authors may have been clerics, the mysteries represent an old and largely independent tradition of vernacular religious drama as early as the twelfth century a Play of Adam in Anglo-Norman French was performed in England, a dramatization of the Fall with highly sophisticated dialogue, characterization, and stagecraft. During the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the great English mystery cycles were formed in provincial: they were the production of the city itself, with particular responsibility for staging and performance devolving onto the city guilds. A guild was also known as a ‘mystery’ from Latin ministerium, whence the phrase ‘mystery plays’. Most of our knowledge of the plays, apart from the texts themselves, comes through municipal and guild records, which tells us a great deal about the evolution, staging and all aspects of the production of the cycles. The cycles were performed every year at the time of one of two great early summer festivals: Whitsuntide, the week following the seventh Sunday after Easter, or Corpus Christi, a week later. They served as both religious instruction and entertainment for wide audiences, including unlearned folk like the carpenter in The Miller’s Tale. Thus the cycles were public spectacles watched by every layer of society, and they paved the way for the professional theatre in the age of Elizabeth I. The Angel’s Gloria in The Shepherds’ Play, with their messages of mercy and hope, unite actors and audience in a common faith. Yet the first shepherd’s opening speech, complaining of taxation and the insolent exploitation of farmers by ‘gentlery-men’, shows how the plays also served as vehicles of social criticism and reveal many of the rifts and the tensions in the late-medieval social fabric. The particular intersection of religious and civic institutions that made the cycles possible was put under strain from the beginning of the Reformation in England (1530). Given the strength of civic institutions, the cycles survived into the reign of Elizabeth, but partly because they were identified with Catholic Church, were suppressed by local ecclesiastic pressures in each city in the late 1560 and 1570. The last performance of the York Cycle in 1569 is very nearly coincident with the opening of the first professional theatre in Whitechapel (London) in 1567. Middle English literature in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 12TH CENTURY: The styles of The Owl and the Nightingale and Ancrene Riwle show that both poetry and prose were being written for sophisticated and well-educated readers whose primary language was English. THROUGHOUT THE THIRTEENTH AND EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURIES: although French continued to be the principal language of Parliament, law, business and high culture, English was gaining ground. Several authors of religious and didactic works in English state that they are writing for the benefit of those who do not understand Latin or French. Anthologies were made of miscellaneous works adapted from French for English readers and original pieces in English. Most of the nobility were by now bilingual, children of the nobility and the merchant class are now learning French as a second language. 1360: the linguistic, political and cultural climate had been prepared for the flowering of Middle English literature in the writings of Chaucer, Gower, Langland and the Gawain poet. The Fourteenth Century War and disease were prevalent in the Middle Ages but never more devastatingly than during the Fourteenth Century. In the wars against France, the gains of two spectacular English victories, at Crecy and Poitiers, were gradually frittered away in futile campaigns that ravaged the French countryside without obtaining any clear advantage for the English. In 1348 the first and most virulent epidemic of the bubonic plague (the Black Death) swept Europe, wiping out a quarter to a third of the population. Giovanni Boccaccio’ description of the plague in Florence, with which he introduces the ‘Decameron’ vividly portrays its ravages. In 1381 attempts to enforce wage controls and to collect oppressive new taxes provoked a rural uprising in Essex and Kent that dealt a profound shock to the English ruling class. The movement was quickly suppressed but not before sympathizers in London had admitted the rebels through two city gates, which had been barred against them. The insurgents burned down the palace of the hated duke of Lancaster, and they summarily beheaded the archbishop of Canterbury and the treasurer of England, who had taken refuge in the Tower of London. The church had become the target of popular resentment because of the wealth, worldliness, and venality of many of the higher clergy. LA NASCITA DEI MYSTERY PLAYS MISTERI RELIGIOSI CON UNA CERTA INDIPENDENZA LE GILDE LA FUNZIONE SOCIALE LA FINE DEI MISTERY PLAYS LA MORTE NERA MOVIMENTI INSURREZIONALI POPOLARI In the portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer’s merchant, we see the budding of capitalism based on credit and interest. Cities like London ran their own affairs under political powerful mayors and aldermen. Edward III, chronically in need of money to finance his wars, was obliged to negotiate for revenues with the Commons in the English Parliament, an institution that became a major political force in this period. The Crown become involved in the country’s economic affairs, and his involvement led to a need for capable administrators. These were no longer drawn mainly from the church, as in the past, but from a newly educated laity that occupied a rank somewhere between that of the lesser nobility and the upper bourgeoisie. The career of Chaucer is typical of this class. In the fourteenth century, a few poets and intellectuals achieved the status and respect formerly accorded only to the ancients: • Marie de France and Chretien de Troyes had dedicated their works to noble patrons and address themselves as entertainers and sometimes as instructors to court audiences. • Dante made himself the protagonist of the Divine Comedy, the sacred poem, as he called it, in which he revealed the secrets of the afterlife. After his death, manuscripts of the work were provided with lengthy commentaries and public readings and lectures were devoted to it. • Francis Petrarch won an international reputation as a man of letters. He wrote primarily in Latin and contrived to have himself crowned ‘poet laureate’ in emulation of the Roman poets whose works he imitated, but his most famous work is the sonnet sequence he wrote in Italian (Thomas Wyatt). Giovanni Boccaccio was among Petrarch's most ardent admirers and carried on a literary correspondence with him. Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale is based on a Latin version Petrarch made from the last tale in Boccaccio’s Decameron; in his prologue, the Clerk refers to Petrarch as ‘lauriat poete’ whose sweet rhetorical illuminated all Italy with his poetry. In The House of Fame, he relates a dream of being snatched up by a huge golden eagle (the eagle and many other things in this work were inspired by Dante), who transports him to the palace of the goddess Fame, there he gets to see phantoms, like the shades in Dante’s poem, of all the famous authors of antiquity. Like Dante and Petrarch, Chaucer had an ideal of great poetry and, in his Troilus at least, strove to emulate it. But in The House of Fame and in his final work, The Canterbury Tales, he also views that idea ironically and distances himself from it. William Langland says in an autobiographical passage, added to the third and last version of his great poem Piers Plowman, that he lived in London on Cornhill (a poor area of the city) among ‘lollers’: a slang term for the unemployed and transients. Langland assailed corruption in church and state, but he was certainly no radical. He does not condone rebellion and his religion is not revolutionary, he nevertheless presents the most clear- sighted vision of social and religious issues in the England of his day. Piers Plowman is also a painfully honest search of the right way that leads to salvation. His poem belongs to the ‘Alliterative Revival’ a final flowering in the late fourteenth century of the verse form that goes all the way back to Anglo-Saxon England. Anglo-Saxon traditions held out longest in the west and north, away from London, where Chaucer and his audience were more open to literary fashions from the Continent. John Gower is a third major late fourteenth-century English poet. While his first and second large works are written in French and Latin verse respectively, his Confessio Amantis is written in English octosyllabic couplets. Gower’s first two works are severe satires; the Confessio, by the contrast, broaches political and ethical issues from an oblique angle. Its primary narrative concerns the treatment of a suffering lover. His therapy consists of listening to, and understanding, many other narratives, many of which are drawn from classical sources. Like Chaucer, Gower anglicizes and absorbs classical Latin literature. The work of a fourth major fourteenth-century English poet, who remains anonymous, is known only through a single manuscript, which contains four poems all thought to be by a single author: • Cleanness and Patience, two biblical narratives in alliterative verse; • Pearl, a moving dream vision in which a grief-stricken father is visited and consoled by his dead child, who has been transformed into a queen in the kingdom of heaven; • and Sir Gawain and the Green Knights, the finest of all English romances. The plot involves a folklore motif of a challenge by a supernatural visitor, first found in an Old Irish tale. The poet has made this motif a challenge to King Arthur’s court and has framed the tale with allusions at the beginning and end to the legends that link Arthur’s reign with the Trojan War and the founding of Rome and of Britain. The poet has a sophisticated awareness of romance as a literary genre and plays a game with both the hero’s and the reader’s expectations of what is supposed to happen in a romance. Julian of Norwich is a fifth major writer of this period. The first known woman writer in the English vernacular, the anchoress Julian participate in a Continental tradition of visionary writings, often by women. She spent a good deal of her life meditating and writing about a series of visions, which she called ‘showings’, that she had received when she was thirty years old. While very carefully negotiating the danger of writing as a woman, and of writing sophisticated theology in the vernacular, Julian manages to produce visionary writings that is at once penetrating and serene. CHAUCER COME APPARTENENTE ALLA NUOVA BORGHESIA RICONOSCIMENTI POETICI NEL 14 SECOLO L’INFLUENZA EUROPEA IN CHAUCER WILLIAM LANGLAND: CONTRO LA CORRUZIONE JOHN GOWER: CONFESSIO AMANTIS L’ANONIMO DI SIR GAWAIN JULIAN OF NORWICH: LA PRIMA DONNA A SCRIVERE IN INGLESE Since the siege and the assault was ceased at Troy, The walls breached and burnt down to brands and ashes, The knight that had knotted the nets of deceit Was impeached for his perfidy, proven most true,(1) It was high-born Aeneas and his haughty race That since prevailed over provinces, and proudly reigned Over well-nigh all the wealth of the West Isles. (2) Great Romulus (3) to Rome repairs in haste; With boast and with bravery builds he that city And names it with his own name, that it now bears. Ticius to Tuscany, and towers raises, Langobard (4) in Lombardy lays out homes, And far over the French Sea, Felix Brutus (5) On many broad hills and high Britain he sets, most fair. Where war and wrack and wonder By shifts have sojourned there, And bliss by turns with blunder In that land's lot had share. And since this Britain was built by this baron great, Bold boys bred there, in broils delighting, That did in their day many a deed most dire. More marvels have happened in this merry land Than in any other I know, since that olden time, But of those that here built, of British kings, King Arthur was counted most courteous of all, Wherefore an adventure I aim to unfold, That a marvel of might some men think it, And one unmatched among Arthur's wonders. If you will listen to my lay but a little while, As I heard it in hall, I shall hasten to tell anew. As it was fashioned featly In tale of derring-do, And linked in measures meetly By letters tried and true. 1. The treacherous knight is Aeneas, who was a traitor to his city, Troy, according to medieval tradition, but Aeneas was actually tried ("impeached") by the Greeks for his refusal to hand over to them his sister Polyxena. 2. Perhaps Western Europe. 3. The legendary founder of Rome is here given Trojan ancestry, like Aeneas. 4. The reputed founder of Lombardy. "Ticius": not otherwise known. 5. Great-grandson of Aeneas and legendary founder of Britain; not elsewhere given the name Felix (Latin "happy"). Sir Gawain and the Green Knight The finest Arthurian romance in English survives in only one manuscript, which also contains three religious poems. Nothing is known about the author except what can be inferred from the works. The dialect of the poems locates them in a remote corner of the northwest midlands between Cheshire and Staffordshire, and details of Sir Gawain’s journey north show that the author was familiar with the geography of the region. But if author and his audience were provincials they were also highly sophisticated and well acquainted both with the international culture of the high Middle Ages and with ancient insular traditions. Sir Gawain belongs to the so-called Alliterative Revival. After the Norman Conquest, alliterative verse doubtless continued to be recited by oral poets: at the beginning the Gawain poet pretends that his romance is an oral poem and asks the audience to ‘listen’ to a story, which he has ‘heard’. Alliterative continued to appear in Middle English texts like Layamon’s Brut, Piers Plowman and a splendid poem known as The Alliterative Morte Arthure. In making Sir Gawain, Arthur’s sister’s son, the preeminent knight of the Round Table, the poet was faithful to an older tradition. The thirteenth- century French romances, which in the next century became the main sources of Sir Thomas Malory, had made Sir Lancelot the best of Arthur’s knights and Lancelot’s adultery with Queen Guinevere the central event on which the fate of Arthur’s kingdom turns. In Sir Gawain Lancelot is only one name in a list of Arthur’s knights. Arthur is still a youth, and the court is in its springtime. The main plot belongs to a type folklorists classify as the ‘Beheading Game’, in which a supernatural challenger offers to let his head cut off in exchange for a return blow. The earliest written occurrence of this motif is in the Middle Irish tale of Bricriu’s Feast. The Gawain poet could have encountered it in several French romances as well as in oral tradition. But the outcome of the game here does not turn only on the champion’s courage as it does in Bricriu’s Feast: the poet has devised another series of tests for the hero that link the beheading with his truth, the emblem of which is the pentangle displayed on Gawain’s coat of arms and shield. The word truth in Middle English, as in Chaucer’s ballade of that name, means not only what it still means now, but what is conveyed by the old-fashioned variant from the same root: troth - that is, faith pledged by one’s word and owed to a lord, a spouse, or anyone who puts someone else under an obligation. The poet has framed Gawain’s adventure with references in the first and last stanzas to what are called the ‘Brutus books’, the foundation stories that trace the origins of Rome and Britain back to the destruction of Troy. A cyclical sense of history as well as the cycles of the seasons of the year, the generations of humankind, and of individual lives runs through Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The poem is written in stanzas that contain a group of alliterative lines, the number of lines varies. The line is longer and does not contain a fixed number or pattern of stresses like the classical alliterative measure of Old English poetry. Each stanza closes with five short lines rhyming ABABA. The first of these rhyming lines contains just one stress and is called the ‘bob’; the four three-stress lines that follow are called the ‘wheel’. The Wife of Bath "The Wife of Bath's Tale" is the best-known of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It provides insight into the role of women in the Late Middle Ages, the character is one of his most developed ones, with her Prologue twice as long as her Tale. Chaucer also goes so far as to describe two sets of clothing for her in his General Prologue. The tale is often regarded as the first of the so-called "marriage group" of tales, which includes the Clerk's, the Merchant's and the Franklin's tales. The tale is an example of the "loathly lady" motif. The story begins when a man rapes a young lady. He is sentenced to death by the King, but the Queen asks for mercy. She gives the knight a year and a day to find out what women really want. The man hunts the entire year, and gets many different answers, from the different women he asks. After a year passed he was on his way to back the castle to tell the queen his answer when he saw many young women. They disappeared and left one old lady. The old lady gives him the answer but in return wants to marry him. The man is forced to marry the old woman after she gives him the correct answer, which was sovereignty from their husbands. On their honeymoon he hides from her and she gives him the choice of her old ugly self, who would never cheat on him or a pretty woman who might cheat on him. He gives her the power to make the decision on her own, and in return she turns herself into a pretty and faithful young woman he had truly wanted. A good Wif was ther of biside Bathe, But she was somdeel deef, and that was scathe. Of cloth-making she hadde swich an haunt, She passed hem of Ypres and of Gaunt.(1) In al the parissh wif ne was ther noon That to the offring (2) bifore hire sholde goon, And if ther dide, certain so wroth was she That she was out of alle charitee. Hir coverchiefs ful fine were of ground— I dorste swere they weyeden ten pound That on a Sonday weren upon hir heed. Hir hosen weren of fin scarlet reed, Ful straite yteyd,(3) and shoes ful moiste and newe. Bold was hir face and fair and reed of hewe. She was a worthy womman al hir live: Housbondes at chirche dore(4) she hadde five, Withouten other compaignye in youthe— But therof needeth nought to speke as nouthe. And thries hadde she been at Jerusalem; She hadde passed many a straunge streem; At Rome she hadde been, and at Boloigne, In Galice at Saint Jame, and at Coloigne (5) She coude muchel of wandring by the waye: Gat-toothed (6) was she, soothly for to saye. Upon an ambler (7) esily she sat, Ywimpled wel, and on hir heed an hat As brood as is a bokeler or a targe,(8) A foot-mantel aboute hir hipes large, And on hir feet a paire of spores sharpe. In felaweshipe wel coude she laughe and carpe: Of remedies of love she knew parchaunce, For she coude of that art the olde daunce.(9) A good man was ther of religioun, And was a poore Person0 of a town, But riche he was of holy thought and werk. He was also a Ierned man, a clerk, That Cristes gospel trewely wolde preche; His parisshens devoutly wolde he teche. Benigne he was, and wonder diligent, And in adversitee ful pacient, And swich he was preved ofte sithes. a bit deaf/ a pity skill surpassed angry headcovers / texture dare / weighed were leggings / red supple not counting now foreign knew veiled riding skirt spurs talk as it happened parson faithfully parishioners wonderfully proved / times 1. Ypres and Ghent ("Gaunt") were Flemish cloth- making centers. 2. The offering in church, when the congregation brought its gifts forward. 3. Tightly laced. 4. In medieval times, weddings were performed at the church door. 5. Rome, Boulogne (in France), St. James (of Compostella) in Galicia (Spain), and Cologne (in Germany) were all sites of shrines much visited by pilgrims. 6. Gap-toothed, thought to be a sign of amorous- ness. 7. Horse with an easy gait. 8. "Bokeler" and "targe": small shields. 9. I.e., she knew all the tricks of that trade. The Fifteenth Century In 1399 Henry Bolingbroke, the duke of Lancaster, deposed his cousin Richard II, who was murdered in prison, as Henry IV he successfully defended his crown against several insurrections. The premature death of his successor, Henry V in 1422, left England exposed to civil wars known as the War of the Roses (the red rose being the emblem of the house of Lancaster, and the white of York). These wars did not end until 1485, when Henry Tudor defeat Richard III at Bosworth Field and acceded to the throne ad Henry VII. The most prolific poet of the 15th century was the monk John Lydgate who produced dream visions; a life of the Virgin; translations of French religious allegories; a Troy Book; the Siege of Thebes (framed as a new Canterbury Tale), the poem The Fall of Princes, a free translation of a French work itself based on a Latin work by Boccaccio (the late medieval idea of tragedy, namely that emperors, kings and other famous men enjoy power and fortune only to be cast down in misery). A self-styled imitator of Chaucer, Lydgate had a reputation almost equal to Chaucer’s in the 15th century. The other significant poet of the first half of the 15th century is Thomas Hoccleve. Like Lydgate, Hoccleve also wrote for powerful Lancastrian patrons, but his poetry is strikingly private, painfully concerned as it often is with his penury and mental instability. The Lancastrian authorities responded to the reformist religious movement known as Lollardy in draconian ways: they introduced a statute for the burning of heretics. Despite this, many writers continued to produce religious works in the vernacular. Margery Kempe made pilgrimages to Holy Land, Rome, Santiago and to shrines in Northern Europe. These she records, in the contest of her fraught and painful personal life, in her Book of Margery Kempe. Both Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, in highly individual ways, allow us to see the medieval church and its doctrine from a female point of view. Social, economic and literary life continued as they had throughout all of the previously mentioned wars. The prosperity of the towns was shown by performances of the Mystery Plays, a sequence or cycle of plays based on the Bible and produced by the city guilds. The century also saw the development of the Morality Plays, in which personified vices and virtues struggle for the soul of Mankind or Everyman. Performed by professional players, the morality plays were precursors of the professional theater in the reign of Elizabeth I. The best of Chaucer’s imitators was Robert Henryson, who, in the last quarter of 15th century, wrote The Testament of Cresseid (continuation of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde) and also the Moral Fahilis of Esope, among which The Cock and the Fox, included here, is a remake of Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. The works of Sir Thomas Malory gave the definitive form in English to the legend of King Arthur and his knights. Malory spent years in prison translating in English a series of Arthurian romances. Malory was a passioned devoted to chivalry, which he personified in his hero Sir Lancelot. In the jealousies and rivalries that finally break up the round table and destroy Arthur’s kingdom, Malory saw a distant image of the civil wars of his own time. A manuscript of Malory’s work fell into the hands of William Caxton who had introduced the new art of printing by movable type to England in 1476. Caxton divided Malory’s tales into the chapters and books of a single long work, as though it were a chronicle history and gave it the title of Morte Dathur. Caxton also printed The Canterbury Tales, some of Chaucer’s earlier works, and Gower’s Confessio Amantis, Caxton himself translated many of the works he printed for English readers: a history of Troy, a book on chivalry, Aesop’s fables and so on. The new technology extended literacy and made books more easily accessible to new classes of readers. Printing made the production of literature a business. CONTESTO STORICO: LA GUERRA DELLE DUE ROSE LA PRIMA METÀ: JOHN LYDGATE E THOMAS HOCCLEVE LA PRODUZIONE RELIGIOSA: MARGERY KEMPE I MYSTERY PLAYS E I MORALITY PLAYS ROBERT HENRYSON LA LEGGENDA ARTURIANA PER MALORY LA STAMPA A CARETTERI MOBILI IN INGHILTERRA: CAXTON Everyman Is a late example of a kind of medieval drama known as the morality play. Morality plays apparently evolved side by side with the Mystery plays, although they were composed individually and not in cycles. Both mysteries and moralities addressed questions of the ultimate fate of the soul. The mysteries dramatized significant events in biblical and sacred history, the moralities dramatized allegories of spiritual struggle. Typically, a person named Everyman or Human or Mankind is faced with a choice between a pious life in the company of such associates as Mercy, Discretion and Good Deeds and a dissolute life among riotous companions like Lust or Mischief. Everyman is about the day of judgement that every individual human being must face eventually. Everyman lacks the broad, even slapstick, humor of many morality plays that portray as clowns the vices that try to lure the Everyman figure away from salvation. The play contains a certain grim humor in showing the haste with which the hero’s fair-weather friends abandon him when they discover what is the problem. The play inculcates its austere lesson by the simplicity and directness of its language and of his approach. A sense of urgency builds, one by one Everyman’s supposed resources fail him as time is running out. Ultimately knowledge teaches him the lesson that every Christian must learn in order to be saved. The play was written near the end of the 15th century. It is probably a translation of a Flemish play, although it is possible that the Flemish play is the translation and the English Everyman the original. CAST OF CHARACTERS MESSENGER, KNOWLEDGE, GOD, CONFESSION, DEATH, BEAUTY, EVERYMAN, STRENGTH, FELLOWSHIP, DISCRETION, KINDRED, FIVE-WITS, COUSIN, ANGEL, GOODS, DOCTOR, GOOD DEEDS HERE BEGINNETH A TREATISE HOW THE HIGH FATHER OF HEAVEN SENDETH DEATH TO SUMMON EVERY CREATURE TO COME AND GIVE ACCOUNT OF THEIR LIVES IN THIS WORLD, AND IS IN MANNER OF A MORAL PLAY [Enter MESSENGER.] MESSENGER I pray you all give your audience, And hear this matter with reverence, By figure a moral play. The Summoning of Everyman called it is, That of our lives and ending shows How transitory we be all day. The matter is wonder precious, But the intent of it is more gracious And sweet to bear away. The story saith: Man, in the beginning Look well, and take good heed to the ending, Be you never so gay. You think sin in the beginning full sweet, Which in the end causeth the soul to weep, When the body lieth in clay. Here shall you see how fellowship and jollity, Both strength, pleasure, and beauty, Will fade from thee as flower in May. For ye shall hear how our Heaven-King Calleth Everyman to a general reckoning. Give audience and hear what he doth say. [Exit MESSENGER.—Enter GOD.] GOD I perceive, here in my majesty, How that all creatures be to me unkind, Living without dread in worldly prosperity. Of ghostly0 sight the people be so blind, Drowned in sin, they know me not for their God. In worldly riches is all their mind: They fear not of my righteousness the sharp rod; My law that I showed when I for them died They forget clean, and shedding of my blood red. I hanged between two,(1) it cannot be denied: inform always thoughtless 1. I.e., the two thieves between whom Christ was crucified. A female monarch in a male world In the last year of Mary’s reign, the Scottish Calvinist minister John Knox thundered against what he called “the monstrous regiment of women”. After the Protestant Elizabeth came to the throne the following year, Knox and his religious brethren were less inclined to denounce all female rulers, but in England, as elsewhere in Europe, there remained a widespread conviction that women were unsuited to wield power over men. In the legal sphere, Crown lawyers advances the theory of the king’s two bodies. As England’s crowned head, Elizabeth’s person was mystically divided between her mortal “body natural” and the immortal “body politic”. While the queen’s natural body was inevitably subject to the failings of human flesh, the body politic was timeless and perfect. In political terms, therefore, Elizabeth’s sex was a matter of no consequence, a thing indifferent. Elizabeth, who had received a fine humanist education and an extended, dangerous lesson in the art of survival, made it immediately clear that she intended to rule in more than name only. Like many Renaissance monarchs, Elizabeth was drawn to the idea of royal absolutism, the theory that ultimate power was quite properly concentrated in her person and indeed that God had appointed her to be His deputy in the kingdom. Opposition to her rule, in this view, was not only a political act but also a kind of impiety, a blasphemous grudging against the will of God. In reality, Elizabeth’s power was not absolute. The government had a network of spies, informers, and agents provocateurs, but it lacked a standing army, a national police force, an efficient system of communication, and an extensive bureaucracy. Above all, the queen had limited financial resources and needed to turn periodically to an independent and often recalcitrant Parliament. Ambassadors, courtiers, and parliamentarians all submitted to Elizabeth’s cult of love, in which the queen’s gender was transformed from a potential liability into a significant asset. Those who approached her generally did so on their knees and were expected to address her with the most extravagant compliments; she in turn spoke, when it suited her to do so, in a comparable language of love. The court moved in an atmosphere of romance, with music, dancing, plays and the elaborate, fancy dress entertainments called masques. The queen adorned herself in dazzling clothes and rich jewels. England’s leading artists, such as the poet Edmund Spenser and the painter Nicholas Hilliard, enlisted themselves in the celebration of Elizabeth’s mystery, likening her to the goddesses of mythology and the heroines of the Bible: Diana, Astraea, Cynthia, Deborah. The cultural sources of the so-called “cult of Elizabeth” were both secular (her courtiers could pine for her as the cruelly chaste mistress celebrated in Petrarchan love poetry) and sacred (the veneration that under Catholicism had been due to the Virgin Mary could now be directed toward England’s semi-divine queen). The kingdom in danger Because of the fight between Catholics and Protesters there were continual fears of conspiracy, rebellion, and assassination. Suspicion swirled around Mary, queen of Scots, who had been driven from her own kingdom and had taken refuge in England. Fears of Catholic conspiracies intensified greatly after Spanish imperial armies invaded the Netherlands and after the assassination of Europe’s other major Protestant leader, William of Orange. The queen’s life seemed to be in even greater danger after pope Gregory XIII’s proclamation that the assassination of the great heretic Elizabeth would not constitute a mortal sin. The immediate effect of the proclamation was to make life more difficult for English Catholics, most of whom were loyal to the queen but who fell under grave suspicion. Elizabeth’s spymaster Walsingham unearthed another assassination plot in the correspondence between the queen of Scots and the Catholic Anthony Babington, the wretched Mary’s fate was sealed. After a public display of vacillation and perhaps with genuine regret, Elizabeth signed the death warrant, and her cousin was beheaded. Elizabeth learned that Philip II, her former brother-in-law, was preparing to send an enormous fleet against her island realm. The Invincible Armada was to sail first to the Netherlands, where a Spanish army would be waiting to embark and invade England. Barring its way was England’s small fleet of well-armed and highly maneuverable fighting vessels. The Invincible Armada reached English waters in July 1588, only to be routed in one of the most famous and decisive naval battles in European history: the Spanish fleet was dispersed and all but destroyed violent storms. As England braced itself to withstand the invasion that never came, Elizabeth appeared in person to review a detachment of soldiers assembled at Tilbury, on the Thames estuary. Dressed in a white gown and a silver breastplate, she declared that through some among her councilors had urged her not to appear before a large crowd of armed men, she would never fail to trust the loyalty of her faithful and loving subjects. She said: I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too. The English and the Otherness In 1485, most English people would have devoted little thought to their national identity. If asked to describe their sense of belonging, they would probably have spoken first on the international community of Christendom and secondly on their local region, such as Kent or Cumberland. The extraordinary events of the Tudor era, from the encounter with the new world to the break with Rome, made many people newly aware and proud of their Englishness. At the same time, they began to perceive those who lay outside the national community in new, and often negative, ways. In the wake of Reformation, the most prominent others were those who had until recently been more or less the same, that is, the Catholics of wester Christendom. But other groups were also instrumental in the project of English self-definition. UNA DONNA AL POTERE TEORIA DEI DUE CORPI DEL RE L’ASSOLUTISMO RINASCIMENTALE IL CULTO PER L’AMORE DELLA REGINA LA PAURA DELLE COSPIRAZIONI I NEMICI CATTOLICI L’INVICINBILE ARMADA E LA SCONFITTA IL DISCORSO L’IDENTITÀ NAZIONALE INGLESE Medieval England’s Jewish population, the recurrent object of persecution, extortion, and massacre, had been officially expelled by King Edward I in 1290, but Elizabethan England harbored a tiny number of Jews or Jewish converts to Christianity. Villagers paid pennies to itinerant fortunetellers who claimed to be descended from Abraham or masters of kabalistic mysteries; and London playgoers enjoyed the spectacle of the downfall of the wicked Barabbas in Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta and the forced conversion of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Jews were not officially permitted to resettle in England until the middle of the seventeenth century, and even then their legal status was ambiguous. Writers, printers, and patrons The career of professional writer in 16th century England was almost impossible: there was no such things as author’s copyright, no royalties paid to an author according to the sale of his book. Writers sold their manuscripts to the printer or booksellers outright, for ridiculously price. Before Elizabeth’s reign, state control of printed books was poorly organized. In 1557 the Stationers’ Company became responsible for the licensing of books. Two years later, the government commanded the Stationers only to license books that had been approved by either six Privy Councilors or the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London. The censors largely focused their attention on works of history, which often had political implications for the present, and on religious treaties. Plays and secular poetry occasionally sold well (Shakespeare’s Henry IV was printed 7 times in 25 years), but they could not compete with publishing blockbusters such as The Psalms in English Meter, published 124 times between 1583 and 1608. We normally find plays and poetry in quartos (or octavos), small volumes which had four (or eight) pages printed on each side of a sheet which was then folded twice (or three times) and stitched together. The more imposing folio format (in which the paper was folded only once, at two pages per side of a sheet) tended to be reserved not just for longer works but for those regarded as meriting especially respectful treatment. Edmund Spenser’s huge poem the Faerie Queene was printed as a quarto both in 1590 and in 1696. A decade after hid death, though, as the poet reputation grew, his epic appeared again (1609), this time as a folio. Elizabethan writers of exalted social standing, like Sir Philip Sidney, though of themselves as courtiers, statesmen, and landowners; poetry was for them an indispensable social grace and a deeply pleasurable exalted form of play. Financial rewards for writing prose or poetry came mostly in the form of gifts from wealthy patrons. In addition to the court and the great families as dispensers of patronage, the city of London and the two universities also had a substantial impact on the period’s literature. London was the center of the book trade, the nursery of a fledgling middle-class reading public, and the home of the public theaters. Before Elizabeth’s time, the universities were mainly devoted to educating the clergy but in the second half of the century, the sons of the gentry and the aristocracy were going in increasing numbers to the universities and the Inns of Court (law school), not in order to take religious orders or to practice law, but to prepare for public service or the management of their estates. Other less affluent students, such as Marlowe and Spenser, attended Oxford and Cambridge on scholarship. Women had no access to grammar schools, the universities, or the Inns of Court and, when not altogether illiterate, received for the most part only a rudimentary education. While Protestantism, with its emphasis on reading Scripture, certainly helped to improve female literacy in the 16th century, girls were rarely encouraged to pursue their studies. Indeed while girls were increasingly taught to read, they were not necessarily taught to write, for the latter skill in women was considered to be at the very least useless, at the worst dangerous. Tudor style: ornament, plainness, and wonder Renaissance literature is the product of a rhetorical culture, a culture steeped in the arts of persuasion and trained to process complex verbal signals. In 1512, Erasmus published a work called De copia that taught its readers how to cultivate copiousness, verbal richness, in discourse. In Renaissance England, certain syntactic forms or patterns of words known as figures were shaped and repeated in order to confer beauty or heighten expressive power. Figures were known by their Greek and Latin names. Those who received a grammar-school education throughout Europe at almost any point between the Roman Empire and the 18th century probably knew by heart the names of up to one hundred such figures. According to one scholar’s count, William Shakespeare knew and made use of about two hundred: That time of year thou mayst in me behold When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang Upon those boughs which shake against the cold, Bare ruin'd choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. In me thou see'st the twilight of such day As after sunset fadeth in the west, Which by and by black night doth take away, Death's second self, that seals up all in rest. In me thou see'st the glowing of such fire That on the ashes of his youth doth lie, As the death-bed whereon it must expire, Consum'd with that which it was nourish'd by. This thou perceiv'st, which makes thy love more strong, To love that well which thou must leave ere long. Alliteration: the repetition of the same consonant sounds in the same lines of poetry. Imagery: The use of imagery enables readers to understand the writer’s feelings and emotions. Symbolism: the act of using symbols to signify ideas and qualities, giving them symbolic meanings different from literal meanings such as “Black night “and “sunset fadeth.” Both night and sunset symbolically stand for end or death. Consonance: The repetition of the same consonant sounds in the same line, such as /b/ sound in “Which by-and-by black night doth take away.” Personification: To attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects such as “Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest” as if death is human to have a self. Metaphor: Such as, “When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang”, “the twilight of such day”, “black night” and “glowing of such fire that on the I PREGIUDIZI NEI CONFRONTI DEGLI EBREI LA CARRIERA DI SCRITTORE LA CENSURA IL PRESTIGIO DEGLI AUTORI: QUARTO O FOLIO POSIZIONE SOCIALE DEGLI SCRITTORI L’ISTRUZIONE UNIVERSITARIA L’ISTRUZIONE FEMMINILE L’USO DI FIGURE RETORICHE SONETTO 73 ashes of his youth doth lie.” These metaphors convey the late stages of his life. These phrases represent present, past, and future time. Metonymy: A figure of speech that replaces the name of things with something else with which it is closely associated. Here “bare ruin choirs” substitute the stripped branches. It is a subtle, poignant amplification of the perception of decay, through the succession of images from winter (or late fall) to twilight of the last glow of a dying fire. Each of these images is in turn sensitively explored, so that, for example, the season is figured by bare boughs that shiver, as if they were human, and they were anthropomorphized three branches in turn are figured as the ruined choirs of a church where services were once sung. No sooner is the image of singers in a church choir evoked than these singers are instantaneously transmuted back into the songbirds who, in an earlier season, had sat upon the boughs, while these sweet birds in turn to conjure up the poet’s own vanished youth. And this nostalgic gaze extends, at least glancingly, to the chancels of the Catholic abbeys reduced to ruins by Protestant iconoclasm and the dissolution of the monasteries. The effect is what Christopher Marlowe called infinite riches in a little room. Many 16th century poems were written to be set to music, but even those that were not often aspire in their metrical and syllabic virtuosity to the complex pleasures of madrigals or to the sweet fluency of airs. In poetry and music, as in gardens, architectures, and dance, Elizabethans had a taste for elaborate, intricate, but perfectly regular designs. The world is made by Symmetry and proportion – wrote Thomas Campion, who was both a poet and a composer. – and is in that respect compared to Music and Music to Poetry. Renaissance poetry is interested not in representational accuracy but in the magical power of exquisite workmanship to draw its readers into fabricated worlds. In his Defense of Poesy, the most important work of literary criticism in 16th century England, Sydney claims that this magical power is also a moral power. All other arts, he argues, are subjected to fallen, imperfect nature, but the poet alone is free to range within the zodiac of his own wit and create a second nature, superior to the one we are condemned to inhabit: ‘Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden.’ The poet’s golden world is not an escapist fantasy; it is a model to be emulated in real life. Human sinfulness has corrupted life, robbing it of the sweet wholesomeness that it had once possessed in Eden, but poetry can mark the way back to a more virtuous and fulfilled existence. The almost inexhaustible range of motives was given some order by literary conventions that functioned as shared cultural codes, enabling poets to elicit particular responses from readers and to relate their words to other times, other languages, and other cultures. Among the most prominent of the clusters of conventions in the period were those that defined the major literary modes: pastoral, heroic, lyric, satiric, elegiac, tragic, and comic. They helped to shape subject matter, attitude, tone and values, and in some cases – sonnet, verse epistle, epigram, funeral elegy, and masque, to name a few – they also governed formal structure, meter, style, length, and occasion. The conventions of the pastoral mode present a world inhabited by shepherds and shepherdesses who are concerned not just to rend their flocks but to fall in love and to engage in friendly singing contests. The most famous pastoral poem of the period is Marlowe’s The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, an heroic invitation whose promise of gold buckles, coral clasps, and amber studs serves to remind us that, however much it sings of naive innocence, the mode is ineradicably sophisticated and urban. With its rustic characters, simple concerns, and modest scope, the pastoral mode was regarded as situated at the opposite extreme from heroic, with its values of honor, martial courage, loyalty, leadership, and endurance and its glorification of a nation or people. The chief genre here was the epic, typically a long exalted poem in the high style, based on a heroic story from the nation’s distant past and imitating Homer and Virgil in structure and motif. In 16th century. England the mayor success in heroic poetry is Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Yet the success of the Faerie Queene owes much to the fact that the poem is a generic hybrid, in which the conventions of classical epic mingle with those of romance, medieval allegory, pastoral, satire, mythological narrative, comedy, philosophical meditation, and many others in a strange, wonderful blend. The spectacular mixing of genres in Spenser’s poem is only an extreme instance of a general Elizabethan indifference to the generic purity admired writers, principally on the Continent, who adhered to Aristotle’s Poetics. The Elizabethan theater A permanent, freestanding public theater in England dates only from Shakespeare’s own lifetime. A London playhouse, the Red Lion, is first mentioned in 1567. But it is quite misleading to identify English drama exclusively with the new playhouses, for in fact there was a rich and vital theatrical tradition in England stretching back for centuries. Townspeople in late medieval England mounted elaborate cycles of plays (mystery plays) depicting the great biblical stories. By the 15th century, and probably earlier, there were organized companies of players traveling under noble patronage. This practice explains why the professional acting companies of Shakespeare’s time, including Shakespeare’s own, attached themselves to a nobleman and were technically his servants. Before the construction of the public theaters, the playing companies often performed short plays called ‘interludes’ that were staged dialogues on religious, moral and political themes. Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucrece, for example, pits a wealthy but dissolute nobleman against a virtuous public servant of humble origins. Another major form of theater was the morality play, a dramatization of the spiritual struggle of the Christian soul. As Everyman demonstrates, these dramas derived their power from the poignancy and terror of an individual’s encounter with death. By the later 26th century, many churchmen, particularly those with Puritan leanings, were steadfastly opposed to the theater, but some early Protestant Reformers, such as John Bale, tried their hand at writing plays. Thomas Norton, who wrote the first English tragedy in blank verse, Gorboduc or Ferrex and Porrex was also a translator of the great Reformer John Calvin. Gorhoduc was closely modeled on the works of the Roman playwright Seneca, and Senecan influence, including violent plots, resounding rhetorical speeches, and ghosts thirsting for blood, remained pervasive in the ANALISI LA MUSICA E LA SIMMETRIA IL COMPITO MORALE DELLA POESIA I MOTIVI E I GENERI LO STILE PASTORALE LO STILE EROICO: L’EPICA MYSTERY PLAYS E MORALITY PLAYS: TEATRO PRIMA DEL TEATRO L'INFLUENZA DEI CLASSICI NEL TEATRO ELISABETTIANO The Shepheardes Calender Pastoral poetry was an influential classical form whose most famous practitioners were the Alexandrian poet Theocritus (III century B.C.) and the Roman poet Virgil (I century B.C.). The singers of the pastoral, or eclogue, were depicted as simple rustics who inhabited a world in which human beings and nature lived in harmony, but the form was always essentially urban, and Spenser, a Londoner, was self-consciously assuming a highly conventional literary role. That role enabled him at once to lay claim to the prestige of classical poetry and to insist upon his native Englishness, an insistence that is signaled by the deliberately archaic, pseudo- Chaucerian language. The rustic mask also allowed Spenser, in certain of the eclogues, to make sharply satirical comments on controversial religious and political issues of his day, such as Elizabeth's suppression of Puritan clergy in the Church of England, and to reflect on his own marginal position. The twelve eclogues of Tke Shepheardes Calender are titled for the months of the year. Each is prefaced by an illustrative woodcut representing the characters and theme of the poem and picturing, in the clouds above, the sign of the zodiac for that month, and each is accompanied by a commentary ascribed to "E. K.," who also wrote an introductory epistle to the work as a whole. The months are all written in a different form. For example, April has a lyrical "laye" which honors the Queen. Maye gives off characterization and greater description. As the reader passes through each month and gets closer to the end of the year, the wording becomes less beautifully lyrical and more straightforward; closing together the poem the way the month of December closes up the year. Spenser uses rhyme differently in each month. There is a very cyclical pattern that shows off the kind of style that Spenser was going for, making the reader feel as though they are going through the cycle of each year just as the narrator does. The months all have repetition of elements and arguments. The style of the poem is also influenced by writers such as Chaucer and Skelton. Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) He set out, consciously and deliberately, to become the great English poet of his age: in a culture in which most accomplished poetry was written by those who were principally interested in something else his ambition was altogether remarkable, and it is still more remarkable that he succeeded in reaching his goal. Unlike Poets like Wyatt or Sidney, Spenser was born to parents of modest means and station, he nonetheless received an impressive education, first at the Merchant Taylors’ School and then at Pembroke College, Cambridge, as a ‘sizar’ or poor scholar. Here he started as a poet by translating some poems for a volume of anti-Catholic propaganda. After receiving his degrees, he served as personal secretary and aide to several prominent men, including the earl of Leicester, the queen’s principal favorite: here he came to know Sir Philip Sidney, a courtier who sought to promote a new English poetry: Spenser’s contribution to the movement was The Shepheardes Calendar, published in 1579 and dedicated to Sidney. In The Shepheardes Calender Spenser uses a deliberately archaic language, partly in homage to Chaucer, whose work he praised as a well of English undefiled, and partly to achieve a rustic effect (keeping the simplicity of pastoral poetry’s shepherd singers). Sidney did not entirely approve and in the 18th century Samuel Jonson described the language as studied barbarity. For Spenser was attempting to conjure up a native English style to which he could wed the classic mode of the pastoral. Moreover since pastoral was traditionally viewed as the prelude in a great national poet’s career to more ambitious undertakings, Spenser was also in effect announcing his extravagant ambition. Spenser was a prolific and daring experimenter: the poems of The Shepheardes Calendar use no fewer than thirteen different metrical schemes. In his later poems he went on to make further innovations: the special rhyme scheme of the Spenserian sonnet; the remarkably beautiful adaptation of the Italian canzone forms for the Epithalamion and Prothalamion; and the nine-line or ‘Spenserian’ stanza of The Faerie Queene, with its hexameter line at the end, are the best-known. Spenser is sometimes called the ‘poet’s poet’ because so many later English poets learned the art of versification from him (Shelley, Byron, Keats). The year after the publication of The Shepheardes Calender, Spenser went to Ireland as secretary and aide to Lord Grey of Wilton, he spent the rest of his career in Ireland, holding various minor government posts and hence participating actively in the English struggle against those who resisted colonial domination. The grim realities of that struggle may be glimpsed in distorted and on occasion direct from throughout Spenser’s writings. Those writings include an anonymously published political tract, A View of the Present State of Ireland, which was unusual in its time both for its genuine fascination with Irish culture and for the ruthlessness of the policies it prescribed. Spenser’s attitudes toward Ireland and his conduct there raise difficult questions concerning the relationship between literature and colonialism. He was rewarded for his efforts in Ireland with a castle and many acres of expropriated land in the province of Munster, where he was visited by another colonist and poet, Sir Walter Ralegh, to whom Spenser showed the great chivalric epic on which he was at work. With Ralegh’s influential backing, Spenser traveled to England and published, in 1590, the first three books of The Faerie Queene. He was rewarded with a handsome pension of fifty pounds a year for life. Soon after, he published a volume of poems called Complaints; a pastoral called Colin Clouts Come Home Againe; his sonnet cycle, Amoretti, and two wedding poems, Epithalamion and Prothalamion. The six-book Faerie Queene was published in 1596, with some revisions in the first part and a changed ending to Book 3 to provide a bridge to the added books; the two so-called Mutability Cantos and two stanzas of a third appeared posthumously in the edition of 1609. In 1598 there was an uprising in Munster, and rebels burned down the house in which Spenser lived. He died in Westminster on January 1599 and was buried near his beloved Chaucer in wat is now called the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Spenser cannot be put into neatly labeled categories. His work is steeped in Renaissance Neoplatonism but is also earthy and practical. He is a lover and celebrator of physical beauty yet also a profound analyst of good and evil in all their perplexing shapes and complexities. Strongly influenced by Puritanism in his early days, he remained a throughout Protestant all his life, and portrayed the Roman Catholic church as a demoniac villain in The Faerie Queene; yet his understanding of faith and of sin owes much to Catholic thinkers. He is a poet of sensuous images yet also something of an iconoclast, deeply suspicious of the power of images to turn into idols. He is the author of the most memorable literary idealization of Elizabeth I, yet he fills his poem with coded criticism of the queen. He is a backward-looking poet who paid homage to Chaucer, used archaic language, and compared his own age unfavorably with the feudal past. Yet as a British epic poet and poet-prophet, he points forward to the poetry of the Romantics and especially Milton – who himself paid homage to the ‘sage and serious’ Spenser as ‘ a better teacher than Scouts or Aquinas’. The Shepheardes Calender (1-19) Goe little booke(1): thy selfe present, vai piccolo libro: presentati da solo, As child whose parent is unkent:
 Come un bambino il cui genitore è sconosciuto: To him that is the president A colui che è modello di Of noblesse and of chevalree, nobiltà e cavalleria, And if that Envie barke at thee, e se quella invidia abbona verso di te As sure it will, for succoure flee Come sicuramente farà, per salvarti scappa Under the shadow of his wing,(2) sotto l’ombra della sua ala And asked, who thee forth did bring, e se ti chiede, chi ti ha portato innanzi,
 A shepheards swaine saye did thee sing, rispondi che un ragazzo pastore ti ha cantato, All as his straying flocke he fedde: tutto il libro mentre nutriva il gregge ha cantato: And when his honor has thee redde, e quando suo onore ti avrà visto, Crave pardon for my hardyhedde. Chiedi perdono per la mia temerarietà. But if that any aske thy name, ma se qualcuno ti chiede il tuo nome,
 Say thou wert base begot with blame: rispondi che tu sei pieno di colpa: For thy thereof thou takest shame. Poiché quindi tu ti assumi la vergogna. And when thou art past jeopardee, e quando tu hai superato il rischio, Come tell me, what was sayd of mee: vieni a dirmi cosa è stato detto di me And I will send more after thee. E io manderò più (libri) dopo di te. IMMERITO. INDEGNO The terms selfe, goe, booke, aske, mee, thee have got the ‘E’ esthetic; The term thy is for your and thee is for you. Thou means you subject, while thee indicates you object. Welt: were Art: are Takest: take In chevaleree the two ending ee are for y Line 2 simile : book as a child. Line 5: Personification: the Envie is represented as the antagonist of the Speaker (the author). The Book is the object, Sydney is the helper probably to him refers ‘the shadow of his wing’. Line 6: Enjanbemant Line 9: Alliteration of the ‘S’; Lines 10-15: Alliteration of the ‘F’. Line 17: Repetition of Me. THE COMPOSITION PRESENTS A CIRCULAR STRUCTURE: GO AND COME BACK. (1): A deliberate echo of Chaucer’s line “Go litel bok, go litel myn tragedye” (Troilus and Criseyde); (2): Maybe the protective sponsorship of Sir Philip Sidney, to whom this poem dedicated the book. The Faerie Queene In a letter to Sir Walter Ralegh, appended to the first, 1590, edition of The Faerie Queene, Spenser describes his exuberant, multifaceted poem as an allegory, an extended metaphor or ‘dark conceit’, and invites us to interpreter the characters and adventures in the several books in terms of the particular virtues and vices they enact or come to embody. These heroes are the knight of Holiness, the knight of temperance, the knight of Chastity, the knight of Friendship, the knight of Justice and the knight of Courtesy. The complexity is heightened by the inclusion, in addition to the moral allegory, of a historical allegory to which Spenser calls attention, in the letter to Ralegh, by observing that both the Faerie Queene and Belphoebe are personifications of Queen Elizabeth. Some of Spenser’s characters are identified by conventional symbols and attributes that would have been obvious to readers of his time. For example: they would know immediately that a woman who wears a miter and scarlet clothes and dwells near the river Tiber represents the Roman Catholic Church, which had often been identified by Protestant preachers with the Whore of Babylon in the Book of Revelation. The poem is also an epic. In moving from The Shepheardes Calender to The Faerie Queene Spenser deliberately fashioned hirself after the great Roman poet Virgil, who began his poetic career with pastoral poetry and moved on to his epic poem, the Aeneid. If The Faerie Queene is thus an epic celebration of Queen Elizabeth, the Protestant faith and the English nation, it is also a chivalric romance, full of jousting knight and damsels in distress, dragons, witches enchanted trees, wicked magicians, giants, dark caves, shining castles, and ‘payriims’. As a romance, Spenser’s poem is designed to produce wonder, to enthrall its readers with sprawling plots, marvelous adventures, heroic characters, ravishing descriptions, and esoteric mysteries. The whole of The Faerie Queene is written in a remarkable nine-line stanza of closely interlocking rhymes (ABABBCBEC), the first eight lines with five stress each (iambic pentameter) and the final line with six stresses (iambic hexameter or alexandrine). The stanza gives the work a certain formal regularity, but the various books are composed on quite different structural principles. Amoretti and Epithalamion In the early 1590s the widowed Spenser wooed and won Elizabeth Boyle, whom he married in Ireland in 1594. The next year he published a small volume that included the sonnet sequence Amoretti (little loves or little cupids) and the Epithalamion. Several of the sonnets explicitly address an ‘Elizabeth’, and the volume’s subtitle, ‘Written not long since’, suggests that these poems, taken together, are a portrait of Spenser’s recent courtship and marriage. It was unusual to write sonnets about a happy and successful love; traditionally, the sonneteer’s love was for someone painfully inaccessible. Spenser rehearses some the conventional motifs of frustration and longing, but his cycle of polished, eloquent poems leads toward joyous possession. Thus, for example, in sonnet 67 (‘Lyke as a huntsman after weary chace’), he transforms a Petrarchan lament into a vision of unexpected fulfillment. Spenser’s great celebration of his fulfillment is the Epithalamion: a wedding song whose Greek name conveys that it was sung on the threshold of the bridal chamber. The genre, which goes back at least as far as Sappho was widely practiced by the Roman poets, particularly Catullus, and imitated in the Renaissance. Its elements typically include an invocation of the Muses, followed by celebratory description of the procession of the bride, the religious rites, the singing and dancing at the wedding party, the preparations for the wedding night, and the sexual consummation of the marriage. In long, flowing stanzas, Spenser follows these conventions closely, adapting them with exquisite delicacy to his small-town Irish setting and native folklore. But his first stanza announces a major innovation: ‘So I unto myself alone will sing’. Traditionally, the poet of an epithalamion was an admiring observer, a kind of master of ceremonies; by combining the roles of poet and bridegroom, Spenser transforms a genial social performance into a passionate lyric utterance. Sonnet 75 One day I wrote her name upon the strand, un giorno scrissi il suo nome sulla spiaggia, but came the waves and washed it away: ma arrivò un’onda e lo lavò via agayne I wrote it with a second hand, di nuovo l’ho scritto una seconda volta but came the tyde, and make my paynes his pray. Ma arrivò la marea, e fece dei miei dolori la sua preda. Vayne man, said she, that doest in vaine assay, stupido uomo, disse lei, che invano cerchi a mortall thing so to immortalize, di rendere una cosa mortale immortale for I my selve shall lyke to this decay, anche io per come sono, sono soggetta alla mortalità and eek my name bee wyped out lykewize. E così anche il mio nome verrà spazzato via come questo. Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize Non è così, dissi io, non si lascia che le cose fondamentali (come te) To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame: muoiano nella polvere, ma devi vivere di gloria: my verse your vertues rare shall eternize, i miei versi renderanno eterne le tue rare virtù, and in the hevens wryte your glorious name. E scrivo nei cieli il tuo nome glorioso. Where whenas death shall all the world subdew, e quando la morte sottometterà tutto il mondo our love shall live, and later life renew. Il nostro amore vivrà e si rinnoverà alla vita. The first quatrain depicts the lyrical voice’s attempt to immortalize his loved one. The stanza starts by setting the scene: “One day”. The lyrical voice writes the name of his loved one on the sand of a beach but the waves wash the writing away (“I wrote her name upon the strand,/But came the waves and washed it away”). The lyrical voice writes the name in the sand again, but, as before, the waves wash the name away. The action of the wave symbolizes how time will destroy all man-made things. To emphasize this action the waves are personified as they “washed it away” and “made my pains his prey”. Notice also, the way in which the lyrical voice refers to his own writing (“my pains”) and how this works as a metaphor (“his prey”) for the relationship that the words have with nature and time. The second quatrain describes a dialogue that the lyrical voice has with his loved one. The woman reacts to the writing and tells the lyrical voice that his attempts are in vain, as mortal things such as herself cannot live forever. The woman introduces a new perspective: she emphasizes her mortal nature because she will also disappear like the words in the sand (“For I myself shall like to this decay/And eek my name be wiped out likewise”). Thus, it is useless to write her name because she, as the words in the sand, will eventually disappear. Time and nature are cruel and destroy man-made things. The third quatrain presents the lyrical voice’s response to what his loved one said. In this stanza, there is a volta (turn) and the tone of Sonnet 75 changes. Up to this moment, both the lyrical voice and his loved one emphasized on the mortal nature of them and their creations. Nevertheless, the lyrical voice says the opposite in this stanza. The lyrical voice tells the woman that the “baser things” will disappear, but she will live on. Notice the alliteration in these lines. The lyrical voice, a poet, will immortalize his loved one in his poems and, because of that, she will live forever (“My verse, your virtues rare shall eternize, And in the heavens write your glorious name”). By immortalizing his loved one, the lyrical voice puts her on a heavenly space, as she will be “in the heavens” with her “glorious name”. Now, the alliteration is made with “v” sounds, and they are much softer than the “d”sounds in the previous lines. The final couplet summarizes the message of the poem. According to the lyrical voice, even if everything comes to an end (“Where whenas death shall all the world subdue”), their love will survive (“Out love shall live, and later life renew”). There is alliteration in the first line with a “w” sound and with an “l” sound in the second line. The immortal quality in love and death is contrasted to the briefness in life. Throughout the poem there is a very melodic and stable rhythm that is formed with the regular rhyme scheme and the iambic pentameter. These devices make the sonnet calm and pleasant to the ear, while creating a very detailed picture. Sonnet 75’ by Edmund Spenser is a traditional love sonnet that depicts a speaker’s attempts to make his true love immortal. Throughout the poem, the speaker describes writing his lover’s name in the sand, only to watch it be washed away by the tide. No matter how many times it happens, he labors on. He even continues to write after his lover tells him that she has no desire to live forever. He doesn’t believe that she should reside along with the baser things of the world. Spenser concludes with his speaker suggesting that his love is going to endure throughout time. ‘Sonnet 75’ by Edmund Spenser is a traditional Spenserian sonnet, formed by three interlocked quatrains and a couplet. It has an ABAB BCBC CDCD EE rhyme scheme and it is written in iambic pentameter. Hero and Leander Marlowe's mythological erotic poem is a free and original treatment of a classic tale about two ill-fated lovers. The story derives from a version by the Alexandrian poet Musaeus (fifth century C.E.), but in its blend of poignancy and irony Hero and Leander is closer to that of the Roman poet Ovid, who briefly recounts the story in two epistles of his Heroides and who refers to it in one of his Elegies, which Marlowe translated. Hero and Leander is a rich and elusive poem: it is comic, erotic, decorative, cruel; now swiftly narrative, now digressive, playful, and yet, in a light way, philosophical. The characters are evidently not intended to be consistent or psychologically credible; they inhabit a World of fancy, of strange contrasts between innocence and the wild riot of amorous intrigues among the gods that is Ovid's subject matter. Hero is paradoxically a nun vowed to chastity and a devotee of Venus, the love goddess; Leander is both a sharp, sophisticated seducer and an incredibly innocent novice in sex. Hero and Leander cannot be precisely dated. Marlowe left his poem unfinished; George Chapman, the playwright and translator of Homer, undertook to complete it. Chapman's moralizing, weightily philosophical continuation, which divides the poem into "sestiads" (named after Sestos, where Hero lived), was published shortly after Marlowe's fragment. Doctor Faustus Marlowe's major dramas, Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and Doctor Faustus, all portray heroes who passionately seek power—the power of rule, the power of money, and the power of knowledge, respectively. Each of the heroes is an overreached, striving to get beyond the conventional boundaries established to contain the human will. Unlike Tamburlaine, whose aim and goal is "the sweet fruition of an earthly crown," and Barabas, the Jew of Malta, who lusts for "infinite riches in a little room," Faustus seeks the mastery and voluptuous pleasure that come from forbidden knowledge. To achieve his goal Faustus must make—or chooses to make—a bargain with Lucifer. This is an old folklore motif: the story's power over its original audience is vividly suggested by the numerous accounts of uncanny events at performances of the play: strange noises in the theater or extra devils who suddenly appeared among the actors on stage, causing panic. In the opening soliloquy, Marlowe's Faustus bids farewell to each of his studies- logic, medicine, law, and divinity—as something he has used up. He turns instead to black magic, but the devil exacts a fearful price in exchange: the eternal damnation of Faustus's soul. Faustus aspires to be more than a man. His fall is caused by the same pride and ambition that caused the fall of the angels in heaven and of humankind in the Garden of Eden. But it is characteristic of Marlowe that he makes this aspiration nonetheless magnificent. Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593) The son of a Canterbury shoemaker, Christopher Marlowe was born two months before William Shakespeare. In 1580 he went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, on a scholarship that was ordinarily awarded to students preparing for the ministry. He held the scholarship for the maximum time, six years, but did not take the holy orders. Instead, he began to write plays. When he applied for his Master of Arts degree in 1587, the university was about to deny it to him on the ground that he intended to go abroad to join the dissident English Catholics at Rheims. But the Privy Council intervened and requested that because Marlowe had done the queen “good service”, evidently as some kind of secret agent, he be granted his degree at the next commencement. Before he left Cambridge, Marlowe had certainly written his tremendously successful play, Tamberlaine and perhaps also the tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage. Tamburlaine dramatises the exploit of a fourteenth-century Mongol warrior who rose grime humble rose from humble origins to conquer a huge territory that extended from the Black Sea to Delhi. His hero is the vehicle for the expression of boundless energy and ambition, the impulse to strive ceaselessly for absolute dominance. Yet Tamburlaine’s conquests are achieved not only by force of arms, but also by his extraordinary mastery of language (high astounding terms). The English theater audience had never before heard such resonant, immensely energetic blank verse. The great period of Elizabethan drama was launched by the so-called “Marlowe’s mighty line”. From the time of his first theatrical success, when he was twenty-three, Marlowe had only six years to live. They were not calm years. In 1589 he was involved in a brawl with one William Bradley, in which the poet Thomas Watson intervened and killed Bradley. Both poets were jailed, but Watson got off on a plea of self-defense, and Marlowe was released. In 1591 Marlowe was living in London with the playwright Thomas Kyd, who later, under torture, gave information to the Privy Council accusing him of atheism and treason. On May 30, 1593, an informer submitted a note to the Council which, branded him with atheism, sedition, and homosexuality. Four days later, at an inn Marlowe was killed by a dagger thrust. Modern scholars have discovered that the murderer and the others present in the room at the inn had connections to the world of spies, double agents, and swindlers to which Marlowe himself was in some way linked. Those who were arrested in connection with the murder were briefly held and then quietly released. On the bare surface, Marlowe's tragic vision seems for the most part religiously and socially conventional. Tamburlaine at last suffers divine retribution and death at the end of the sequel, Tamburlaine Part II; the central character of The Jew of Malta is a monstrous anti-Semitic caricature; Doctor Faustus and Edward II (which treats the tragic fate of a homosexual king) demonstrate the destruction that awaits those who rebel against God or violate the official moral order. Yet there is a force at work in these plays that relentlessly questions and undermines conventional morality. The crime for which Tamburlaine is apparently struck down is the burning of the Muslim Koran; the Jew of Malta turns out to be, if anything, less ruthless and hypocritical than his Christian counterparts; and Edward II's life of homoerotic indulgence seems innocent in comparison with the cynical and violent dealings of the corrupt rebels who turn against him. Marlowe's plays, written in the turbulent years before his murder at the age of twenty-nine, have continued to fascinate and disturb readers and audiences. The immediate source of the play is a German narrative called, in its English translation , The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. That source supplies Marlowe's drama with the scenes of horseplay and low practical joking that contrast so markedly with the passages of huge ambition. It is quite possible that these comic scenes are the work of a collaborator; but no other Elizabethan could have written the first scene (with its brilliant representation of the insatiable aspiring mind of the hero), the ecstatic address to Helen of Troy, or the searing scene of Faustus's last hour. And though compared with these celebrated passages the comic scenes often seem crude, they too contribute to the overarching vision of Faustus's fate: the half-trivial, half-daring exploits, the alternating states of bliss and despair, the questions that are not answered and the answers that bring no real satisfaction, the heroic wanderings that lead nowhere. Prologue (1-28) Chorus: il coro: Not marching now in fields of Thrasimene, Non più marciando ai campi del Trasimeno Where Mars did mate the Carthaginians dove Marte sposò i guerrieri Cartaginesi Nor sporting in the dalliance of love né gustando i piaceri dell’amore In courts of kings where state is overturned nelle corti dei re dove lo stato è capovolto Nor in the pomp of proud audacious deeds, nè nel fasto d'alte audaci azioni, intends our Muse to vaunt his heavenly verse: la nostra Musa vuol dispiegare il suo verso divino: Only this (Gentlemen) we must perform Solo questo (signori) dobbiamo render nota The form of Faustus’ fortunes good or bad La forma delle fortune di Faust, buone o cattive To patient judgments we appeal our plaud Ci appelliamo al vostro plauso per un paziente giudizio And speak for Faust in his infancy: E parliamo di Faust fin dalla sua infanzia: Now is he born, his parents base of stock, dunque nacque da gente di basso ceppo In Germany, within a town called Rhodes in Germania, in una città chiamata Roda Of riper years to Wittenberg he went e in età matura andò a Wittenberg Wheareas his kinsmen chiefly brought him up. Dove i parenti vollero educarlo So soon he profits in divinity E tanto egli avanzò in teologia, the fruitful plot of scholarism graced, scendendo come una grazia sulle terre accademiche that shortly he was graced with doctor’s name che ben presto ebbe per grazia il nome di dottore. Excelling all, wose sweet delight disputes E fu il più bravo di tutti a disputare divinamente In heavenly matters of theology sui temi celesti della teologia Till, swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit Fin quando, gonfio di astuzia e presunzione His waxen wings did mount above his reach, troppo in alto lo spinsero le sue ali di cera And melting heavens conspired his overthrow. e i cieli le sciolsero, decretando la sua caduta. For falling to a devilish exercise, Poiché, precipitando in demoniache attività, and glutted more with learning’s golden gifts, e ormai sazio dei doni aurei della sapienza, he surfeits upon cursed necromancy: si getta affamato sulla negromanzia nothing so sweet as magic is to him, niente gli è più caro di quell’arte which he prefers before his chiefest bliss. che egli antepone perfino al sommo bene. And this the man that in his study sits. E questi è l'uomo che al suo studio siede. The Chorus, a single actor, enters and introduces the plot of the play. It will involve neither love nor war, he tells us, but instead will trace the “form of Faustus’ fortunes”. The Chorus chronicles how Faustus was born to lowly parents in the small town of Rhode, how he came to the town of Wittenberg to live with his kinsmen, and how he was educated at Wittenberg, a famous German university. After earning the title of doctor of divinity, Faustus became famous for his ability to discuss theological matters. The Chorus adds that Faustus is “swollen with cunning” and has begun to practice necromancy, or black magic. The Prologue concludes by stating that Faustus is seated in his study. The Chorus’s introduction to the play links Doctor Faustus to the tradition of Greek tragedy, in which a chorus traditionally comments on the action. Although we tend to think of a chorus as a group of people or singers, it can also be composed of only one character. Here, the Chorus not only gives us background information about Faustus’s life and education but also explicitly tells us that his swelling pride will lead to his downfall. The story that we are about to see is compared to the Greek myth of Icarus, a boy whose father, Daedalus, gave him wings made out of feathers and beeswax. Icarus did not heed his father’s warning and flew too close the sun, causing his wings to melt and sending him plunging to his death. In the same way, the Chorus tells us, Faustus will “mount above his reach” and suffer the consequences. The way that the Chorus introduces Faustus, the play’s protagonist, is significant, since it reflects a commitment to Renaissance values. The European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries witnessed a rebirth of interest in classical learning and inaugurated a new emphasis on the individual in painting and literature. In the medieval era that preceded the Renaissance, the focus of scholarship was on God and theology; in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the focus turned toward the study of humankind and the natural world, culminating in the birth of modern science in the work of men like Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton. The Prologue locates its drama squarely in the Renaissance world, where humanistic values hold sway. Classical and medieval literature typically focuses on the lives of the great and famous—saints or kings or ancient heroes. But this play, the Chorus insists, will focus not on ancient battles between Rome and Carthage, or on the “courts of kings” or the “pomp of proud audacious deeds”. Instead, we are to witness the life of an ordinary man, born to humble parents. The message is clear: in the new world of the Renaissance, an ordinary man like Faustus, a common-born scholar, is as important as any king or warrior, and his story is just as worthy of being told. William Shakespeare (1564-1616) William Shakespeare was born in the small market town of Stratford-on-Avon in April (probably April 23) 1564. His father, a successful glovemaker, landowner was elected to several important posts in local government but later suffered financial and social reverses, possibly as a result of adherence to the Catholic faith. Shakespeare almost certainly attended the free Stratford grammar school, where he could have acquired a reasonably impressive education, including a respectable knowledge of Latin, but he did not proceed to Oxford or Cambridge. There are legends about Shakespeare's youth but no documented facts. Some scholars are tempted to associate him with "William Shakeshafte," a young Catholic actor. But the first unambiguous record we have of his life after his christening is that of his marriage at age eighteen, to Anne Hathaway. We possess no information about his activities for the next seven years, but by 1592 he was in London as an actor and apparently already well known as a playwright. At this time, there were several companies of professional actors in London and in the provinces. We know of his long and fruitful connection with the most successful troupe, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, who later, when James I came to the throne, became the King's Men. Shakespeare not only acted with this company but eventually became the principal playwright. Then as now, making a living in the professional theater was not easy: civic officials and religious moralists regarded playacting as a sinful, time-wasting nuisance and tried to ban it altogether, government officials exercised censorship over the contents of the plays and so on. But Shakespeare's company, which included some of the most famous actors of the day, nonetheless thrived and in 1599 began to perform in the Globe, a fine, open-air theater that the company built for itself on the south bank of the Thames. The company also performed frequently at court and at Blackfriars, an indoor London theater. Already by 1597 Shakespeare had so prospered that he was able to purchase New Place, a handsome house in Stratford where his wife and daughters resided, while the playwright, living in rented rooms in London, pursued his career. Shortly after writing The Tempest, he retired from direct involvement in the theater and returned to Stratford. In March 1616, he signed his will; he died a month later, leaving the bulk of his estate to his daughter Susanna. Shakespeare began his career as a playwright by writing comedies and history plays. The earliest of these histories seem theatrically vital but crude, as does an early attempt at tragedy, Titus Andronicus. But Shakespeare quickly moved on to create a sequence of profoundly searching and ambitious history plays, Richard II, the first and second parts of Henry IV, and Henry V, which together explore the death throes of feudal England and the birth of the modern nation-state ruled by a charismatic monarch. In the same years he wrote a succession of romantic comedies (The Merchant of Venice, The Merry' Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It) whose poetic richness and emotional complexity remain unmatched. Hamlet initiated an outpouring of great tragic dramas: Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra. These plays seem to mark a major shift in sensibility, an existential and metaphysical darkening. The comedies Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure, are sufficiently different from the earlier comedies—more biting in tone, more uneasy with comic conventions, more ruthlessly questioning of the values of the characters and the resolutions of the plots—to have led some modern scholars to classify them as "problem plays" or "dark comedies." Another group of plays, among the last that Shakespeare wrote, seem similarly to define a distinct category. Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, and The Tempest written when Shakespeare had developed a remarkably fluid, dream-like sense of plot and a poetic style that could veer, apparently effortlessly, from the tortured to the ineffably sweet, are now commonly known as the "romances." The "romances" are deeply concerned with patterns of loss and recovery, suffering and redemption, despair, and renewal. They have seemed to many critics to constitute a self-conscious conclusion to a career that opened with histories and comedies and passed through the dark and tormented tragedies. Shakespeare himself apparently had no interest in preserving for posterity the sum of his writings: he wrote plays for performance by his company, and his scripts existed in his own handwritten manuscripts or in scribal copies, in playhouse prompt books, and probably in pirated texts based on shorthand reports of a performance or on reconstructions from memory by an actor or spectator. None of these manuscript versions has survived. Eighteen of his plays were published during his lifetime in the small-format, inexpensive books called quartos; to these were added eighteen other plays, never before printed, in the large, expensive folio volume of Mr. William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, Tragedies published seven years after his death. This First Folio is prefaced by a poem of Ben Jonson's, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time." That Shakespeare is "for all time" does not mean that he did not also belong to his own age. It is possible to see where Shakespeare adapted the techniques of his contemporaries and where, crucially, he differed from them. Shakespeare rarely invented the plots of his dramas, preferring to work, often quite closely, with stories he found ready-made in histories, novellas, narrative poems, or other plays. The mystery and morality plays, still popular during his childhood, taught him that dramas worth seeing must get at something central to the human condition as well as narrate the crucial actions, and that they should reach not only the educated elite but also the great mass of ordinary people. From these and other theatrical models, Shakespeare learned how to construct plays around the struggle for the soul of a protagonist, how to create theatrically compelling and subversive figures of wickedness, and how to focus attention on his characters' psychological, moral, and spiritual lives, as well as on their outward behavior. Shakespeare thought that the spectacle of human destiny was vastly more compelling when it was attached not to generalized abstractions but to particular people, people whom he realized with an unprecedented intensity of individuation: not Youth but Viola, not Everyman but Lear. No other writer of his time was able to create and enter into the interior worlds of so many characters, conveying again and again a sense of unique and irreducible selfhood. In the plays of Shakespeare's brilliant contemporary Marlowe, the protagonist overwhelms virtually all of the other characters; in Shakespeare, by contrast, even relatively minor characters, for example the fool in King Lear, make astonishingly powerful claims on the audience's attention. Shakespeare had the power to multiply himself marvelously. Shakespeare was singularly alert to the fantastic vitality of the English language. His immense vocabulary bears witness to an uncanny ability to absorb terms from a wide range of pursuits and to transform them into intimate registers of thought and feeling. He had a seemingly boundless capacity to generate metaphors, and he was virtually addicted to word play. Anachronism is rarely a concern for Shakespeare. His ancient Romans throw their caps into the air and use Christian oaths: to this extent he pulled everything he touched into his contemporary existence. The settings of his plays, for example, ancient Britain in King Lear, were for Shakespeare not realistic representations of particular historical times and places but imaginative displacements into alternative worlds that remain strangely familiar. Though on occasion he depicts ghosts, demons, and other supernatural figures, the universe Shakespeare conjures up seems resolutely human-centered and secular: the torments and joys that most deeply matter are found in this world, not in the next. Activists and ideologues of all political stripes have viewed him as an ally: he has been admiringly quoted by kings and by revolutionaries, by fascists, liberal democrats, socialists, republicans, and communists. At once an agent of civility and an agent of subversion, Shakespeare seems to have been able to view society simultaneously as an insider and as an outsider. His plays can be interpreted and performed in many contradictory ways. The centuries-long accumulation of these interpretations and performances, far from exhausting Shakespeare's aesthetic appeal, seems only to have enhanced its perennial freshness. ACT I, scene V. Inverness. Machbeth’s castle Enter Lady Macbeth, reading a letter. Entra Lady Macbeth, leggendo una lettera. LADY MACBETH They met me in the day of success: and I have Nel giorno della vittoria mi incontrarono, e ho learned by the perfectest report, they have more in ho appreso dal più perfetto degli annunci che esse hanno them than mortal knowledge. When I burned in desire in sé una conoscenza più che mortale. Quando io ardevo dal desiderio to question them further, they made themselves air, di chiedere a loro ulteriori notizie, loro tramutarono sè stesse in aria into which they vanished. Whiles I stood rapt in nella quale sono svanite. Mentre io ero rapito dallo the wonder of it, came missives from the king, who sbigottimento, giunsero messaggeri del Re, i quali all-hailed me 'Thane of Cawdor;' by which title, tutti insieme mi salutarono ‘Sire di Cawdor’; con il cui titolo before, these weird sisters saluted me, and referred in precedenza, queste fatali sorelle mi salutarono, e mi riferirono me to the coming on of time, with 'Hail, king that del tempo a venire con ‘Salve, tu che Re shalt be!' This have I thought good to deliver sarai un giorno!’ Ho pensato bene di comunicarti thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou questo, mia carissima compagna di grandezza, affinchè mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing, by being tu non perdessi i diritti della gioia ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it ignorando quale grandezza ti sia promessa. Serba questo to thy heart, and farewell.' nel cuore e addio.” Glamis thou art, and Cawdor; and shalt be Sei Glamis, e Caword, e sarai
 What thou art promised: yet do I fear thy nature; ciò che ti è stato promesso: eppure io temo la tua natura;
 It is too full o' the milk of human kindness
 È troppo ricolma del latte dell’umana gentilezza To catch the nearest way: thou wouldst be great; per prendere la via più breve: tu vorresti essere grande;
 Art not without ambition, but without Non sei privo di ambizione, ma senza 
 The illness should attend it: what thou wouldst highly,
 disturbo vorresti raggiungere la meta: ciò che altamente desideri That wouldst thou holily; wouldst not play false,
 Lo vorresti santamente; non vorresti far falso gioco, And yet wouldst wrongly win: thou'ldst have, great Glamis, ma tuttavia vorresti vincere barando: tu vorresti, grande Glamis, That which cries 'Thus thou must do, if thou have it’; ciò che grida, ‘Così tut devi fare, se vuoi averlo”;
 And that which rather thou dost fear to do
 E vorresti ciò che temi maggiormente di fare Than wishest should be undone.' Hie thee hither,
 Più di ciò che desideri che non sia fatto. Vieni presto, That I may pour my spirits in thine ear; che io posso versare il mio coraggio nelle tue orecchie,
 And chastise with the valour of my tongue e correggere con il valore della mia lingua
 All that impedes thee from the golden round, tutto ciò che ti tiene lontano dall’aureo cerchio,
 Which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem con cui il fato e l’aiuto metafisico sembrano 
 To have thee crown'd withal. Averti già incoronato. Enter a Messenger Entra un messaggero What is your tidings? Quali notizie? MESSENGER MESSAGGERO The king comes here to-night. Il Re giunge qui stasera. LADY MACBETH Thou'rt mad to say it:
 Sei pazzo a dirlo! Is not thy master with him? who, were't so, non c’è il tuo padrone con lui? Se forre così Would have inform'd for preparation. Mi avrebbe informata per i preparativi. MESSENGER MESSAGGERO So please you, it is true: our thane is coming: con vostra licenza, è vero: il nostro signore sta giungendo. One of my fellows had the speed of him, uno dei miei compagni lo precede 
 Who, almost dead for breath, had scarcely more Ed era con il fiato quasi mozzato, che a malapena Than would make up his message. Ne aveva per comunicare il messaggio.
 LADY MACBETH Give him tending;
 Abbi cura di lui He brings great news. Porta con sè grandi notizie Exit Messenger Esce il messggero The raven himself is hoarse È rauco lo stesso corvo 
 That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan Che annuncia gracchiando l’ingresso fatale di Duncan
 Under my battlements. Come, you spirits Sotto i miei bastioni. Venite, voi spiriti
 That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, tesi ai pensieri di morte, toglietemi il sesso 
 And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full E riempitemi tutta dalla testa ai piedi 
 Of direst cruelty! make thick my blood; della crudeltà più terribile! Addensate il mio sangue;
 Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
 Sbarrate l’accesso e il passaggio al rimorso, That no compunctious visitings of nature Che il pellegrino di una natura pentita
 Shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between Non scuota il mio proposito truce, né mantenga l’armonia tra
 The effect and it! Come to my woman's breasts, l’effetto ed esso! Venite ai miei seni di donna, And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers, e mutate il mio latte in fiele, voi ministri dell’assassinio, Wherever in your sightless substances Ovunque voi siate nelle vostre essenze invisibili
 You wait on nature's mischief! Come, thick night, al servizio di un’indole maliziosa! Vieni, densa notte, And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, e saziati nel fumo più grigio dell’inferno,
 That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, perché il mio affilato pugnale non veda le ferite che apre,
 Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, né il cielo sbirci tra le cortine delle tenebre 
 To cry 'Hold, hold!' Per gridare ‘Ferma, ferma!’. Enter Macbeth Entra Macbeth Great Glamis! worthy Cawdor! Grande Glamis! Nobile Cawdor!
 Greater than both, by the all-hail hereafter! E di entrambi più grande, per il saluto che verrà in futuro!
 Thy letters have transported me beyond Le tue lettere mi hanno trasportato oltre
 This ignorant present, and I feel now Questo presente ignaro, e io sento adesso 
 The future in the instant. Il futuro immediato.
 MACBETH
 My dearest love, mio carissimo amore,
 Duncan comes here to-night. Duncan viene qui stasera.
 LADY MACBETH
 And when goes hence? E quando parte da qui?
 MACBETH
 To-morrow, as he purposes. Domani, a quanto ha deciso.
 LADY MACBETH
 O, never
Shall sun that morrow see! Oh, mai il sole vedrà quel domani!
 Your face, my thane, is as a book where men Il tuo volto, mio sire, è come un libro dove gli uomini
 May read strange matters. To beguile the time, possono leggervi strani argomenti. Per ingannare il tempo,
 Look like the time; bear welcome in your eye, assumi la sembianza del tempo; porta il tuo benvenuto negli occhi, Your hand, your tongue: look like the innocent flower, nella mano, nella lingua; prendi l’aspetto del fiore innocente, But be the serpent under't. He that's coming Ma sii il serpente che vi cova sotto. A colui che sta per giungere Must be provided for: and you shall put Occorre provvedere: e affida 
 This night's great business into my dispatch; alla mia prontezza la grande opera di questa notte Which shall to all our nights and days to come Che per tutte le notti e i giorni a venire Give solely sovereign sway and masterdom. Sola ci darà il potere sovrano e il dominio. MACBETH
 We will speak further. Ne parleremo più tardi.
 LADY MACBETH
 Only look up clear; Mostra soltanto un’aria serena;
 To alter favour ever is to fear: un aspetto alterato è sempre da temere 
 Leave all the rest to me. Tutto il resto lascialo a me. Exeunt Escono. In Inverness, Macbeth’s castle, Lady Macbeth reads to herself a letter she has received from Macbeth. The letter announces Macbeth’s promotion to the thaneship of Cawdor and details his meeting with the witches. Lady Macbeth murmurs that she knows Macbeth is ambitious, but fears he is too full of “th’ milk of human kindness” to take the steps necessary to make himself king. She resolves to convince her husband to do whatever is required to seize the crown. A messenger enters and informs Lady Macbeth that the king rides toward the castle, and that Macbeth is on his way as well. As she awaits her husband’s arrival, she delivers a famous speech in which she begs, “you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here, / And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full / Of direst cruelty”. She resolves to put her natural femininity aside so that she can do the bloody deeds necessary to seize the crown. Macbeth enters, and he and his wife discuss the king’s forthcoming visit. Macbeth tells his wife that Duncan plans to depart the next day, but Lady Macbeth declares that the king will never see tomorrow. She tells her husband to have patience and to leave the plan to her. The letter, read alone on stage by Lady Macbeth, reiterates the Witches' prophecy of Act I. Significantly, in his letter, Macbeth says nothing of their prophecy to Banquo; perhaps he is already afraid of its implications. Equally significantly, he sets up Lady Macbeth as his "dearest partner of greatness." She will indeed become his partner in crime, but much more than that: Apart from the fatal blow itself, she will be responsible for controlling Macbeth's passions and his actions. Immediately after she finishes the letter, Lady Macbeth's mind goes to work. Her words "shalt be" uncannily reflect those of the Witches' prophecy. At this point, Lady Macbeth herself has virtually become an agent of Fate, just like the Weird Sisters. But immediately her thoughts turn to possible failings in her husband. He is "too full of the milk of human kindness" to commit murder; he would be great, he would have a high position, he would wrongly win that position, but in each case, some other aspect of his character would not. In this case, she says, there is only one solution. She must "pour [her] spirits in thine ear." Any member of Shakespeare's audience who had seen his play Hamlet four years previously would be more than aware of the significance of this line, for in that play the good King Claudius is murdered by poison administered through the ear. The scene is rapidly becoming darker. Lady Macbeth is one of the most powerful female characters in literature. The fact that we meet her alone on stage means that we are privy to her innermost thoughts, which are filled with the imagery of death and destruction. And when she speaks, in her next soliloquy, of her "fell purpose," her intentions are described in the most grotesque and frightening terms. First she bids the spirits to literally deprive her of her femininity, to thicken her blood, and to stop her ability to weep. Next, she prays that those same evil spirits should suckle her, converting what should be her nourishing mother's milk to "gall" (bitterness). Lastly, she calls upon the night itself to hide her actions in a "blanket" of darkness. It is no coincidence that these last words reflect those of Macbeth in the previous scene: Shakespeare is creating a strong verbal bond between husband and wife that will continue throughout the play. When Macbeth enters his castle, his wife greets him in a way that again recalls the words of the Witches; in particular the words "all-hail" and "hereafter" chill the audience, for they are the exact words spoken to Macbeth by the Witches. The dialogue that follows their initial encounter is fast, urgent, and disturbing. Shakespeare uses half-line breaks to intensify the drama of the moment, each "partner in crime" picking up the rhythm of the other's speech: Shakespeare uses the same technique immediately after the murder. In the lines that follow, Lady Macbeth uses several significant metaphors of concealment: Macbeth's face is like "a book, where men / May read strange matters"; then, in a brilliantly ironic reference to the Genesis story, "Look like the innocent flower, / But be the serpent under it". The apparent paradise promised by the Witches is soon to become a hell. An important psychological point is also made: Lady Macbeth herself does not hide her feelings in the same way that Macbeth does. She is not rapt in wonderment, simply practical. The last line of the scene, "Leave all the rest to me," is quite modern in its tone. With this blunt and chilling imperative, Lady Macbeth completes her transformation from woman to man. From now on, she plays on the reversal of roles; she has adopted the role of "man of action," forcing her husband into the more passive role of accomplice. ACT V, scene V. Dunsinane. Within the castle. Dunsinane. Dentro il castello Enter MACBETH, SEYTON, and Soldiers, with drum and colours Entrano Macbeth, Seyton, e soldati con tamburi e bandiere. MACBETH Hang out our banners on the outward walls; Piantate i nostri vessili sui baluardi;
 The cry is still 'They come:' our castle's strength Il grido è ancora ‘Arriviamo’: il nostro castello è solido Will laugh a siege to scorn: here let them lie E si farà beffe dell’assedio : se ne stiano pure là
 Till famine and the ague eat them up: finchè la fame e la peste non l’abbiano mangiati
 Were they not forced with those that should be ours, Se non fossero stati rafforzati da quelli che avrebbero dovuto essere dei nostri We might have met them dareful, beard to beard, avremmo potuto fronteggiarli audacemente, barba contro barba, And beat them backward home. E battuti rimandarli a casa A cry of women within Un pianto di donne all’interno What is that noise? Cos’era quel rumore? SEYTON It is the cry of women, my good lord. È il pianto delle donne mio buon sire. Exit Esce MACBETH I have almost forgot the taste of fears; ho quasi dimenticato il gusto della paura;
 The time has been, my senses would have cool'd V’è stato un tempo in cui i miei sensi si sarebbero gelati To hear a night-shriek; and my fell of hair A udire un grido nella notte, e la cresta dei miei capelli Would at a dismal treatise rouse and stir A un lugubre racconto si sarebbe drizzata e animata
 As life were in't: I have supp'd full with horrors; come se la vita vi albergasse. Mi sono ingozzato di orrori Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts La sciagura, familiare ai miei pensieri di strage, Cannot once start me. Non può stanarmi più. Re-enter SEYTON Rientra Seyton Wherefore was that cry? Cos’era quel pianto? SEYTON The queen, my lord, is dead. La Regina, mio sire, è morta. MACBETH She should have died hereafter; avrebbe dovuto morire in seguito
 There would have been a time for such a word. Ci sarebbe stato un tempo per questa parola. To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, domani, e domani, e domani Creeps in this petty pace from day to day Striscia a piccoli passi giorno per giorno To the last syllable of recorded time, fino all’ultima sillaba del tempo ricordato
 And all our yesterdays have lighted fools E tutti i nostri ieri hanno rischiarato a dei pazzi 
 The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! La via che porta alla morte polverosa. Spegniti, spegniti, breve candela! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player La vita è solo un’ombra che cammina, un povero attore That struts and frets his hour upon the stage Che s’esibisce impettito e si sdilinquisce per la sua ora sulla scena And then is heard no more: it is a tale E poi non se ne sa più niente. È una storia 
 Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, narrata da un’idiota, piena di strepitio e furore, Signifying nothing. Che non significa niente. Within the castle, Macbeth blusteringly orders that banners be hung and boasts that his castle will repel the enemy. A woman’s cry is heard, and Seyton appears to tell Macbeth that the queen is dead. Shocked, Macbeth speaks numbly about the passage of time and declares famously that life is “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing”. A messenger enters with astonishing news: the trees of Birnam Wood are advancing toward Dunsinane. Enraged and terrified, Macbeth recalls the prophecy that said he could not die till Birnam Wood moved to Dunsinane. Resignedly, he declares that he is tired of the sun and that at least he will die fighting. This scene, like Scene 3, starts with a bold imperative: "Hang out our banners on the outward walls." Macbeth's speech is warlike and defiant, his strength mirrored in that of the castle and men who surround him; his curse on the enemy vivid and graphic in its use of metaphor: "Here let them lie / Till famine and the ague (disease) eat them up… ". But the curse is empty rhetoric: in his play Troilus and Cressida, written two or three years earlier, Shakespeare had written that man's ambitious appetite for power, once it has preyed on everything in its path, can eat up only itself. Power-seeking tyrants tend toward self-destruction; if this curse falls on anyone, it's likely to be the curser. At this point, Macbeth hears a heart-stopping scream. While a servant is dispatched to find the cause, Macbeth confesses in a brief soliloquy that such noises no longer have the power to frighten him. The audience recalls other noises: the owl-shriek that Lady Macbeth heard during Duncan's murder; the voice that Macbeth heard crying "Macbeth shall sleep no more!" and the fateful knocking at the door, all in Act II, Scene 2. But in a phrase that calls to mind the banquet scene (Act III, Scene 4), Macbeth admits that he has "supp'd full with horrors" and that his familiarity with slaughter means that such sounds can no longer amaze him. The report of Lady Macbeth's death perhaps comes as no surprise, either to Macbeth or to Shakespeare's audience. The word "hereafter" recalls the "hereafter" of the Witches' first prophecy; their "hereafter" was the future that Macbeth was to inherit as king. But the word also refers, ironically, to the heavenly "hereafter," which Macbeth seems intent on denying for himself. In the hands of a sensitive actor or director, this exact word is what triggers the poetic outpouring on the nature of Time, which follows it. The famous lines "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" have a resigned, almost wistful tone to them, occasioned not only by the death of his wife but also by Macbeth's entire loss of purpose. Although there is perhaps an underlying bitterness at lost opportunity in the words "petty," "fools," "frets" and "idiot," for a man who has received such desperate news, this is not a desperate speech. In fact, compared with some of Macbeth's earlier "set pieces," its rhetoric is controlled, its metaphors precise: Time is like a path to "dusty death," and our lives are as "brief" as a candle. We are like shadows, or actors, on the stage of life. Again, the question occurs, as it did in Act I, Scene 7: How can a man who is capable of such poetic thought act as he does? Macbeth's musings on this topic are cut dead by still another message, which reports what the audience already knows, the fulfillment of the second prophecy, the movement of the woods. Once again, Macbeth's response is both angry and reflective: "I… begin to doubt th'equivocation of the fiend / That lies like truth…” To the servant, he must hotly deny the truth he has been told — to keep his public appearance and satisfy his own doubt — but he must also secretly accept the truth of the prophecy, even if logic persuades him that a moving wood is a lie. It is an understandably human reaction to such a paradoxical problem that Macbeth admits that he is literally stuck "There is no flying hence, nor tarrying here" or, in his words from Act III, Scene 4, "Returning were as tedious as go o'er." On a psychological as well as a military level, Macbeth can neither move forward nor backward, neither advance nor retreat. In this case, and with his gaze firmly fixed on the universe as a whole, Macbeth can only call, like King Lear, on the elements themselves: "Come wind, blow wrack!" he cries. It is the bold cry of a hopeless man. Jacobean tragedies, Shakespeare’s King Lear for example, depict the catastrophes that ensue when these hierarchies rupture, and both the social order and the natural order disintegrate. Yet this conceptual system was itself beginning to crumble. William Harvey’s discovery that blood circulated in the body shook received views on the function of blood, casting doubt on the theory of the humors. Galileo’s telescope provided evidence confirming Copernican astronomical theory, which dislodged the earth from its stable central position in the cosmos and set it whirling around the sun. Several decades later Milton embraced the new science, proudly recalling a visit during his European tour to “the famous Galileo”. In Paradise Lost he would make complex poetic use of the astronomical controversy, considering how and how far, humans should pursue scientific knowledge. Patrons, Printers and Acting Companies Many writers of the period depended in one way or another upon literary patronage. A Jacobean or Caroline aristocrat, like his medieval forebears, was expected to reward dependents in return for services and homage. In the early 17th century, although commercial relationships were rapidly replacing feudal ones, patronage pervaded all walks of life: governing relationship between landlords and tenants, masters and servants, kings and courtiers. Writers were assimilated into this system partly because their works reflected well on the patron, and partly because their all- around intelligence made them useful members of a great man’s household. Because the patronage relationship often took the form of an exchange of favours rather than a simple financial transaction, its terms were very variable and are difficult to recover with any precision at this historical remove. The patronage system required the poets involved to hone their skills at eulogizing their patrons generosity and moral excellence. Jonson’s epigrams and many of Lanyer’s dedicatory poems evoke communities of virtuous poets and patrons joined by bonds of mutual respect and affection. Presenting a poem to a patron or circulating it among the group of literary people who surrounded the patron, did not require printing it. In early 17th century England, the reading public for sophisticated literary works was tiny and concentrated in a few social settings: the royal court, the universities, and the Inns of Court, or law schools. In these circumstances, manuscript circulation could be an effective way of reaching one’s audience. So a great deal of writing remained in manuscript in early 17th century England. The collected works of many important writers of the period – John Donne, George Herbert, William Shakespeare – appeared in print only posthumously. Nonetheless, the printing of all kinds of literary works was becoming more common. Writers such as Francis Bacon who hoped to reach large number of readers with whom they were not acquainted, usually arranged for the printing of their texts soon after they were composed. Until 1640 the Stuart kings kept in place the strict controls over print publication originally instituted by Henry VIII, in response to the ideological threat posed by the Reformation. King Henry had given the members of London’s Stationer’s Company a monopoly on all printing; in for their privilege, they were supposed to submit texts to prepublication censorship. The licensing system located not only primary responsibility for a printed work, but its ownership, with the printer rather than with the author. Printers typically paid writers a onetime fee for the use of their work, but the payment was scanty, and the authors of popular texts realized no royalties from the many copies sold. As a result, no one could make a living as a writer in the early 17th century by producing best sellers. The first writer formally to arrange for royalties was apparently John Milton, who received five pounds up front for Paradise Lost, and another five pounds and two hundred copies at the end of each of the first three impressions. Still, legal ownership of and control over a printed work remained with the printer: authorial copyright would not become a reality until the early 18th century. In monetary terms, a more promising outlet for writers was the commercial theater, which provided the first literary market in English history. Just as printers were legally the owners of the texts they printed, so theatre companies, not playwrights, were the owners of the texts they performed. Typically, companies guarded their scripts closely, permitting them to be printed only in times of financial distress or when they were so old that printing them seemed unlikely to reduce the paying audience. As a result, many Jacobean and Caroline plays are lost to us or available only in corrupt or posthumous versions. For contemporaries, though, a play was “published” not by being printed but by being performed. While the commercial theatres were profitable businesses that made most of their money from paying audiences, several factors combined to bring writing for the theatre closer to the Stuart court than it had been in Elizabeth’s time. The Elizabethan theatre companies had been officially associated with nobleman who guaranteed their legitimacy. Early in his reign James brought the major theatre companies under royal auspices. Shakespeare company, the most successful of the day, became the King’s Men. Royal patronage, which brought with it tangible rewards and regular court performances, naturally encouraged the theatre companies to pay more attention to courtly taste. Jacobean Writers and Genres Some Elizabethan genres fell out of favour, long allegorical or mythological narratives, sonnet sequences, and pastoral poems. The major poets of these years, Jonson, Donne and Herbert promoted a variety of “new” genres: Love elegy and satire after the classical models of Ovid and Horace, epigram, verse epistle, meditative religious lyric, and country- NUOVE IDEE SCIENTIFICHE IL MECENATISMO IL SISTEMA DEL PATRONATO LA CIRCOLAZIONE MANOSCRITTA LA STAMPA E LA CENSURA L’INESISTENZA DEL COPYRIGHT IL TEATRO E L’AUTORIALITÀ TEATRO COMMERCIALE E TEATRO REALE NUOVI GENERI house poem. Although these poets differed enormously from one another, all three exercised an important influence on the poets of the next generation. A native Londoner, Jonson first distinguished himself as an acute observer of urban manners in a series of early, controversial satiric plays. Donne, like Jonson, spent most of his life in or near London, often in the company of other writers and intellectuals. Yet unlike Jonson’s, most of Donne’s poetry concerns itself not with a crowded social panorama, but with a dyad, with the relationship between the speaker and one single other being, a woman or God, that in its intensity blots out the claims of lesser relationships. Love for Donne encompasses an astonishing range of emotional experience, from the lusty impatience of To His Mistress Going to Bed to the cheerful promiscuity of The Indifferent to the Mysterious platonic telepathy of Air and Angels, from the vengeful wit of The Apparition to the postcoital tranquillity of The Good Morrow. We find echoes of Donne’s style in many later poets like Herbert. George Herbert, the younger son of a wealthy, cultivated, and well-connected family, seemed destined in early adulthood for a brilliant career as a diplomat or government servant. Yet he turned his back on worldly greatness to be ordained a priest in the Church of England. Herbert’s poetry is shot through with the difficult and joy of his renunciation. Literary ambition appears to Herbert a temptation that must be resisted. Instead, Herbert seeks other models for poetic agency: the secretary taking dictation from a master, the musician playing in harmonious consort with others, the member of a church congregation who speaks with and for a community. The Jacobean period also saw the emergence of what would become a major prose genre, the familiar essay. The works of the French inventor of the form, Michel de Montaigne, appeared in English translation in 1603, influencing Shakespeare as well as such later writers as Sir Thomas Rrowne. Yet the first essay in English, the work of Francis Bacon, the Novum Organum, present pithy, sententious sometimes provocative claims in a tone of cool objectivity, tempering moral counsel with an awareness of the importance of prudence and expediency in practical affairs. The reigns of the first two Stuart kings mark the entry of Englishwomen, in some numbers, into authorship and publication. Most female writers of the period were from the nobility or gentry; all were much better educated than most women of the period, many of whom remained illiterate. The Caroline Era 1625 - 1640 When King Charles came to the throne in 1625 the changed style of the court directly affected the arts and literature of the Caroline period. Charles and his queen, Henrietta Maria, were art collectors on a large scale and patrons of such painters as Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyke. The conjunction of chivalric virtue and divine beauty or love, symbolized in the union of the royal couple, was the dominant theme of Caroline court masques. The religious tensions between the Caroline court’s Laudian church and the Puritan opposition produced something of a culture war. In 1633 Charles reissued the Book of Sports, originally published by his father, prescribing traditional holiday festivity and Sunday sports in every parish. William Prynne staked out the most extreme Puritan position, publishing a tirade of over one thousand pages against stage plays, court masques, Laudian church rituals, stained- glass windows, mixed dancing, and other outrages, all of which he associated with licentiousness, effeminacy, and the seduction of popish idolatry. Milton’s astonishingly virtuosic early poems respond to the tensions of the 1630s. Milton repudiated both courtly aesthetic and Prynne’s wholesale prohibitions, developing reformed versions of pastoral, masque, and hymn. In On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity, the birth of Christ coincides with a casting out of idols and a flight of false gods, stanzas that suggest contemporary Puritan resistance to Archbishop Laud’s policies. The Revolutionary Era 1640 - 1660 The execution of Charles I was understood at the time, and is still seen by many historians today, as a watershed event in English history. Whatever caused the outbreak of hostilities, there is no doubt that the twenty-year period between 1640 and 1660 saw the emergence of concepts central to bourgeois liberal thought for centuries to come: religious toleration, separation of church and state, freedom from press censorship, and popular sovereignty. When the so- called Long Parliament convened in 1640, it did not plan to execute a monarch or even to start a war. It did, however, want to secure its rights in the face of King Charles’s perceived absolutist tendencies. Refusing merely to approve taxes and go home, as Charles would have wished, Parliament insisted that it could remain in session until its members agreed to disband. The collapse of effective royal government meant that the machinery of press censorship, which had been a Crown responsibility, no longer restrained the printing of explicit commentary on contemporary affairs of state. As the rift widened between Parliament and the king in 1641, Charles sought to arrest five members of Parliament for treason, and Londoners rose in arms against him. In the First Civil War (1624-1646) Parliament and the Presbyterian clergy that supported it had limited aims. They hoped to secure the rights of the House of Commons, to limit the king’s power over the army and the church, but not to depose him. In 1648, after a period of negotiation and a brief Second Civil War, the king’s army was definitively defeated. His supporters were captured or fled into exile, losing position and property. Yet Charles, imprisoned on the Isle of Wight, remained a threat. He was a natural rallying point for those disillusioned by parliamentary rule. Charles repeatedly attempted to escape and was accused of trying to open the realm to a foreign invasion. After the king’s execution, the Rump Parliament, the part of the House of Commons that had survived the purge, immediately established a new government “in the way of a republic, without king or House of Lords”. After Charles I’s execution, the Scots and the Irish immediately proclaimed his eldest son, Prince Charles, the new king. The prince, exiled on the Continent, was attempting to enlist the support of a major European power for an I MAGGIORI POETI DELL’EPOCA: JONSON, DONNE, HERBERT L’ESSAY E FRANCIS BACON AUTRICI MILTON LA NUOVA ESTETICA DELLA CORTE TENSIONI RELIGIOSE MILTON LE RAGIONI ALLA BASE DELLA RIVOLUZIONE LA PRIMA E LA SECONDA GUERRA CIVILE SCOZZESI E IRLANDESI invasion. The formidable Oliver Cromwell, now undisputed leader of the army, crushed external threats, suppressing rebellions in Ireland and Scotland. The Irish war was especially bloody, as Cromwell’s army massacred the Catholic natives in a frenzy of religious hatred. The problem of succession remained unresolved, however. When Oliver Cromwell died in 1658, his son, Richard, was appointed in his place, bus he had inherited none of his father’s leadership qualities. The new Parliament immediately recalled the exiled prince, officially proclaiming him King Charles II on 1660. The period that followed, therefore, is called Restoration: it saw the restoration of the monarchy and with it the royal court, the established Church of England, and the professional theatre. Literature and Culture 1640 - 1660 The English civil war was disastrous for the English theater. One of Parliament’s first acts after hostilities began in 1642 was to abolish public plays and sports, as “too commonly expressing lasciviously mirth and levity”. As the king’s government collapsed, the patronage relationship centered upon the court likewise disintegrated. Many leading poets were staunch royalists, or Cavaliers, who suffered considerably in the war years. With their usual networks of manuscript circulation disrupted, many royalist writers printed their verse. Their poems celebrate the courtly ideal of good life: good food, plenty of wine, good verse, hospitality, and high-spirited loyalty, especially to the king. One characteristic genre is the elegant love lyric, often with a carpe diem theme. The Cavaliers wrote movingly of the relationship between love and honour, of fidelity under duress, of like-minded friends sustaining one another in a hostile environment. They presented themselves as amateurs, writing verse in the midst of a life devoted to more important matters: war, love, the king’s service. Several prose works by royalist sympathizers have become classics in their respective genres. Thomas Hobbes, the most important English philosopher of the period, another exile in Paris, developed his materialist philosophy and psychology there and, in Leviathan, his unflinching defence of sovereignty based on a theory of social contract. The revolutionary era gave new impetus to women’s writing. The circumstances of war placed women in novel, occasionally dangerous situations, giving them unusual events to describe and prompting self-discovery. The autobiographies of royalists Lady Anne Halkett and Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published after the Restoration, report their experiences and their sometimes daring activities during those trying days. While most writers during this period were royalists, two of the best, Andrew Marvell and John Milton, sided with the republic. Marvell wrote most of the poems for which he is still remembered while at Nunappleton, tutoring the daughter of the retired parliamentary general Thomas Fairfax; in 1657 he joined his friend Milton in the office of Cromwell’s Latin Secretariat. Marvell’s finest political poem, An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland, celebrates Cromwell’s providential victories even while inviting sympathy for the executed king and warning about the potential dangers of Cromwell’s meteoric rise to power. Milton committed himself to the English republic as soon as the conflict between the king and Parliament began to take shape. His loyalty to the revolution remained unwavering despite his disillusion when it failed to realize his ideals: religious toleration for all Protestants and the free circulation of ideas without prior censorship. In a series of treatises he argued for church disestablishment and for the removal of bishops, for a republican government based on natural law and popular sovereignty, for the right of the people to dismiss from office and even execute their rulers, and most controversial even to his allies, in favour of divorce on the grounds of incompatibility. Milton also wrote several sonnets, revising that small, love-centred genre to accommodate large private and public topics: a Catholic massacre of proto-Protestants in the foothills of Italy, various threats to intellectual and religious liberty. Milton probably wrote some part of Paradise Lost in the late 1650s and completed it after the Restoration, encompassing it all he had thought, read, and experienced of tyranny, political controversy, evil, deception, love, and the need for companionship. This cosmic blank-verse epic assimilates and critiques the epic tradition and Milton’s entire intellectual and literary heritage, classical and Christian. Yet it centres not on martial heroes but on a domestic couple who must discover how to live a good life day by day, in Eden and later in the fallen World, amid intense emotional pressures and the seduction of evil. IL PROBLEMA DELLA SUCCESSIONE CONSEGUENZE DELLA GUERRA CIVILE GLI ARTISTI MONARCHICI HOBBES SCRITTURA FEMMINILE GLI AUTORI REPUBBLICANI JOHN MILTON The Temple Unlike the learned and witty style of the work of his friend John Donne, George Herbert's style in his volume of religious poetry, The Temple, is deceptively simple and graceful. But it is also marked by self-irony, a remarkable intellectual and emotional range, and a highly conscious artistry that is evident in the poems' tight construction, exact diction, perfect control of tone, and enormously varied stanzaic forms and rhythmic patterns. These poems reflect Herbert's struggle to define his relationship to God through biblical metaphors invested with the tensions of relationships familiar in his own society: king and subject, lord and courtier, master and servant, father and child. None of Herbert's secular English poems survives, so his reputation rests on this single volume, published posthumously. The Temple contains a long prefatory poem, The Church-Porch, and a long concluding poem, Church Militant, which together enclose a collection of 177 short lyrics entitled The Church, among which are sonnets, songs, hymns, laments, meditative poems, dialogue poems, acrostic poems, and more. Herbert's own description of the collection is apt: "a picture of the many spiritual conflicts that have passed between God and my soul." Easter Wings Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store, signore, che creasti l’uomo in ricchezza e abbondanza, Though foolishly he lost the same, sebbene scioccamente egli li perse, Decaying more and more Decadendo sempre più, Till he became Finchè egli divenne Most poor: molto povero With thee
 Con te let me rise o fammi sorgere As larks, harmoniously, come allodole, armoniosamente,
 And sing this day thy victories: E cantare in questo giorno le tue vittorie: Then shall the fall further the flight in me. Poi la caduta favorirà il volo in me My tender age in sorrow did begin: la mia tenera età nel dolore iniziò And still with sicknesses and shame E ancora con malattia e vergogna. Thou didst so punish sin, tu così hai punito il peccato That I became Che io divenni Most thin. Più tuo With thee Con te
 Let me combine, fammi unire, And feel this day thy victory; e sentire le tue vittorie;
 For, if I imp my wing on thine, poiché, se io unisco la mia alla tua, Affliction shall advance the flight in me. L’afflizione aumenterà il volo in me. This poem is one of Herbert’s best-known. It contains some of his clearest musings on religion and several literary devices, not to mention the shape of the lines themselves, that shows his ability to experiment with form. It is a fairly simple, yet quite moving, Christian poem that addresses the fall of man and the speaker’s desire to rise. By using the shape of a bird’s wings, the poet is able to emphasize the nature of the fall and rise the speaker is experiencing. The poem begins with the speaker addressing the creation of humankind, specifically Adam. He describes the man’s foolishness and how he threw away everything good that God gave him. It is because of this person’s choice that the speaker suffers today. But, he’s not content to stay that way. He asks God throughout this poem to allow him to rise out of the darkness and into the light. Easter Wings is a two stanza shape poem, meaning that each stanza is organized so that the lines form a particular shape. The two ten- line stanzas, when originally published, appeared horizontally on the page in the shape of two sets of wings. Now, the poem is generally reversed so that the stanzas appear like two hourglasses. George Herbert (1592-1633) The fifth son of an eminent Welsh family, Herbert (and his nine siblings) had an upbringing carefully monitored by his mother, Magdalen Herbert, patron and friend of Donne and several other scholars and poets. Herbert was educated at Westminster School and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he Latin poetry: elegies on the death of Prince Henry, witty epigrams, poems on Christ's Passion and death, and poems defending the rites of the English church. In 1620 he was appointed public orator for the university. This was a step toward a career at court or in public service, as was his election as the member of Parliament from Montgomery. But that route was closed off by the death of influential patrons and the change of monarchs. Like Donne, Herbert hesitated for some years before being ordained, but in 1630 he took up pastoral duties in the small country parish at Bemerton. His small book on the duties of his new life, A Priest to the Temple; or, The Country Parson, testifies to the joy, but also to the aristocratic uneasiness, with which he embraced that role. In chronic bad health, he lived only three more years, performing pastoral duties assiduously, writing and revising his poems, playing music, and listening to the organ and choir at nearby Salisbury Cathedral. Herbert locates himself in the church through many poems that treat church liturgy, architecture, and art but his primary emphasis is always on the soul's inner architecture. Unlike Donne's poems, Herbert's poems do not voice anxious fears about his salvation or about his desperate sins and helplessness, his anxieties center rather on his relationship with Christ. Many poems register the speaker's distress over the vacillations and regressions in this relationship, and over the instability in his own nature, purposes, and temperament. In several dialogic poems the speaker's difficulties and anxieties are alleviated or resolved by the voice of a divine friend heard within or recalled through a Scripture text, as in The Collar. In poem after poem, he has to come to terms with the fact that his relationship with Christ is always radically unequal, that Christ must both initiate it and enable his own response. His recourse is to develop a biblical poetics that renounces conventional poetic styles, to depend instead on God's "art" displayed in the language, metaphors, and symbolism of the Bible. He makes scant use of Donnean learned imagery, but his scriptural allusions carry profound significances. A biblical metaphor provides the unifying motif for the volume: the New Testament temple in the human heart (1 Corinthians 3.16). Another recurring biblical metaphor represents the Christian as plant or tree or flower in God's garden, needing pruning, rain, and nurture. Herbert was profoundly influenced by the genre of the emblem, which typically associated mysterious but meaningful pictures with explanatory text. Shaped poems like The Altar or Easter Wings present image and picture at once; others, like The Windows, resemble emblem commentary. Other poems allude to typological symbolism, which reads persons and events in the Old Testament as types or foreshadowings of Christ, the fulfillment or antitype. Often, as in The Bunch of Grapes, Herbert locates both type and antitype in the speaker's soul. The lines follow a simple ABABACCDC rhyme scheme and make use of iambic stresses. This means that in each metrical foot the first beat is unstressed and the second stressed. The lines vary greatly in length, from two words and two syllables up to nine words and ten syllables. A reader should also consider how the length of the lines and their positioning is influenced by their content. For example, the lines that are the most hopeful and uplifting are the longest, at the beginning and end of each stanza. While in contrast, the more depressing lines are shorter. Enjambement, is seen through the transitions between lines. The moments in which the poet does not use end-punctuation are most commonly enjambed. For example, the transitions between lines four, five, six, and seven. Assonance is the use and reuse of the same vowel sound within words that are next to one another or close together. For instance, the “i” vowel sound in the last lines of the poem with words such as “I,” “imp,” “thine,” and “flight”. Alliteration is a similar device. It occurs when words are used in succession, or at least appear close together, and begin with the same sound. For example, “more” and “more” in line three of the first stanza and “fall,” “further,” and “flight” in line ten of the first stanza. In the first stanza of ‘Easter Wings,’ the speaker begins by addressing the Christian God as Lord. This god created “man in wealth and store”. Adam, the first man, was created with everything he could’ve ever needed. He had that which should’ve made him happy—food, shelter, comfort. Without stating it explicitly, Herbert alludes to the Fall in the next lines. He does not go into detail about Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. Instead, he goes straight to the “foolishness” of humankind and the loss of everything that God created for them. Things decayed “more and more” until “man” became “poore”. As the lines shrink, so does the happy and hopeful imagery. The darkest lines of the poem are the shortest. Then, as they expand, things become cheery once more. In the second half of this stanza, the speaker brings themselves into the poem. He addresses God and asks that he be allowed to “rise” as a “lark”. This simile compares the speaker to a bird that is elevated above the foolishness of humankind. The speaker would like to rise above Adam’s choices. It is also at this point in the poem that the speaker introduces the theme of Easter. It is with “thee” that he wants to rise. This is an allusion to the holiday traditionally celebrated to honor Christ rising from the dead. In the last lines of the stanza, he asks that he be allowed to “sing” of victories and rise as far as the fall took mankind down. In the second stanza the speaker continues to use first-person pronouns. He says that he was born into sorrow because of the first man and his choices. He is still impacted by what Adam and Eve did. The lines shrink and the imagery becomes more depressing. He speaks about the darkness of his own life, the sickness, and the sin. All of this feels inescapable until the lines start to grow again. The poem turns around in the center of the second stanza by emphasizing how With thee, or with God, the speaker is going to rise. The speaker knows that he needs God’s help to fly. So he’s going to imp, or support himself with the feathers from God’s wings. This is how the speaker intends to rise above the sin that’s at the root of the human race. John Milton (1608-1674) As a young man, John Milton proclaimed himself the future author of a great English epic. He promised a poem devoted to the glory of the nation, centering on the deeds of King Arthur or some other ancient hero. When Milton finally published his epic thirty years later, readers found instead a poem about the Fall of Satan and humankind, set in Heaven, Hell, and the Garden of Eden, in which traditional heroism is denigrated and England not once mentioned. What lay between the youthful promise and the eventual fulfillment was a career marked by private tragedy and public controversy. In his poems and prose tracts Milton often explores or alludes to crises in his own life: worries about fleeting time, the choice of a vocation and early death, painful disappointment in marriage, and the catastrophe of blindness, manifesting in this the heightened 17thcentury concern with the self. His works inscribe and help construct some basic Western concepts and attitudes that were taking on modern form in his lifetime: companionate marriage, the new science and the new astronomy, freedom of the press, religious liberty and toleration, republicanism, and more. It is scarcely possible to treat Milton's career separately from the history of England in his lifetime, not only because he was an active participant in affairs of church and state, but also because when he signed himself "John Milton, Englishman," he was presenting himself as England's prophetic bard. As well, no English poet before Milton fashioned himself quite so self- consciously as an author. The young Milton deliberately set out to follow the steps of the ideal poetic career, beginning with pastoral and ending with epic. His models for this progression were Virgil and Spenser: he called the latter "a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas.” Milton's family was bourgeois, cultured, and staunchly Protestant. His father was a scrivener as well as an amateur composer with some reputation in musical circles. Milton had a younger brother, Christopher, who practiced law, and an elder sister, Anne. At age 17 he wrote a funeral elegy for the death of Anne's infant daughter and later educated her two sons, Edward and John. Milton had private tutors at home and also attended one of the finest schools in the land, St. Paul's: he was deeply grateful to his father for his excellent early education, especially in languages (Latin, Greek, Hebrew and its dialects, Italian, and French: later he learned Spanish and Dutch). In 1625 Milton entered Christ's College, Cambridge. He was briefly suspended during his freshman year over some dispute with his tutor, but he graduated in 1629 and was made Master of Arts three years later. As his surviving student orations indicate, he was profoundly disappointed in his university education, reviling the scholastic logic and Latin rhetorical exercises that still formed its core as "futile”. He went to university with the serious intention of taking orders in the Church of England but became increasingly disenchanted with the lack of reformation in the church under Archbishop William Laud, and in the hindsight of 1642 he proclaimed himself "church-outed by the prelates." Above all, Milton came to believe more and more strongly that he was destined to serve his language, his country, and his God as a poet. He began by writing occasional poetry in Latin, the usual language for collegiate poets and for poets who sought a European audience. Milton wrote some of the century's best Latin poems, but as early as 1628 he announced to a university audience his determination to glorify England and the English language in poetry. In his first major English poem, the hymn On the Morning of Christ's Nativity, Milton portrayed himself as a prophetic bard. Two or three years later Milton wrote the companion poems L'Allegro and II Penseroso, achieving a stylistic tour de force by creating from the same meter (octosyllabic couplets) entirely different sound qualities, rhythmic effects, and moods. These poems celebrate, respectively, Mirth and Melancholy, defining them by their ancestry, lifestyles, associates, landscapes, activities, music, and literature. After university, as part of his preparation for a poetic career, Milton undertook a six-year program of self-directed reading in ancient and modern theology, philosophy, history, science, politics, and literature. He was profoundly grateful to his father for sparing him the grubby business of making money and also for financing these years of private study, followed by a fifteen-month "grand tour" of France, Italy, and Switzerland. While he was in Italy he exchanged verses and learned compliments with various Catholic intellectuals and men of letters, some of whom became his friends. Milton could always maintain friendships and family relationships across ideological divides. In 1645 his English and Latin poems were published together in a two-part volume. Poems of Mr. John Milton. Upon his return to England, Milton opened a school and was soon involved in Presbyterian efforts to depose the bishops and reform church liturgy, writing five "antiprelatical tracts" denouncing and satirizing bishops. He wrote successively on church government, divorce, education, freedom of the press, regicide, and republicanism. From the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 until his death, Milton allied himself with the Puritan cause, but his religious opinions developed throughout his life, from relative orthodoxy in his youth to ever more heretical positions in his later years. Some of Milton's treatises were prompted by personal concerns or crises. He interrupted his polemical tract, The Reason of Church Government Urged Against Prelaty, to devote several pages to a discussion of his poetic vocation and the great works he hoped to produce in the future. His tracts about divorce were motivated by his personal experience of a disastrous marriage. Aged thirty-three, inexperienced with women, and idealistic about marriage as in essence a union of minds and spirits, he married a young woman of seventeen, Mary Powell, who returned to her royalist family just a few months after the marriage. In response, Milton wrote several tracts vigorously advocating divorce on the grounds of incompatibility and with the right to remarry. The fact that these tracts could not be licensed and were roundly denounced in Parliament, from pulpits, and in print prompted him to write Areopagitica, an impassioned defense of a free press and the free commerce in ideas against a Parliament determined to restore effective censorship. Just after Charles I was executed, Milton published The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates which defends the revolution and the regicide and was of considerable importance in developing a "contract theory" of government based on the inalienable sovereignty of the people—a version of contract very different from that of Thomas Hobbes. Milton was appointed Latin Secretary to the Commonwealth government and to Oliver Cromwell's Protectorate, which meant that he wrote the official letters—mostly in Latin—to foreign governments and heads of state. He also wrote polemical defenses of the new government: Eikonoklastes, to counter the powerful emotional effect of Eikon Basilike, supposedly written by the king just before his death, and two Latin Defenses upholding the regicide and the new republic to European audiences.