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英国部分

The Renaissance Period

1. Renaissance :between 14th and mid-17th century.

2. Renaissance means rebirth or revival, is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the rediscovery of ancient Roman and Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography and astrology, the religious reformation and the economic expansion.

3. the Renaissance, therefore in essence is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers and Scholars made attempt to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in Medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the purity of the rising bourgeoisie, and to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic church.

4. Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance

(1) Capable of individual development in the direction of perfection.

(2) They inhabited was theirs not to despise by to question, explore and enjoy.

(3) By emphasizing the dignity of human being and the Importance of the present life, they voiced their beliefs that man did not only have the right to enjoy the beauty of this life

(4) Tomas More, Christopher Marlow and William Shakespeare are the best representative of the English humanist.

5 Metaphysical poetry: Metaphysical is characterized by passionate thought succession of concentrated image, exercise of elaborate ingenuity and “wit”, John Done was the famous of the Metaphysical poet. The Metaphysical Poets were men of learning and to show their learning was their endeavour.

Edmund Spencer

Masterpiece: The Faerie Queene (allegory)

Christopher Marlowe University wits

Important plays: Tambulaine, Dr.Faustus, The Jewof Meta Edmund II

Marlowe voiced the supreme desire of the man of the Renaissance of infinite powers and authority

(1) Perfected the blank verse.

(2) Creation of the Renaissance hero to English drama ,it embodies Marlowe’s ideal of human dignity and capacity.

Dr.Faustus: aspiring for knowledge, the play’s dominant moral is human rather than religious, it celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power and happiness , it also reveals man’s frustration in realizing the high aspiration in a hostile moral order and the confinement to time is the cruelest fact of man’s condition.

William Shakespeare

1. Works: 154 sonnets, 38 plays, 2 long poems Comedy :Merchant of Venice.

2 4 great tragedies: Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth

Each portrays some noble hero, who face the injustice of human fate is closely connected with the fate of the whole nation, each hero has his weakness of nature. Hamlet, the melancholic scholar-prince, faces the dilemma between action and mind: Othello’s inner weakness is made use of by the outside evil force; the old King Lear who is unwilling to totally give up his power makes himself suffer, from treachery and infidelity; Macbeth’s lust for power stirs up his ambition and leads him to incessant crime.

3 Merchant of Venice

In this play, Shakespeare has created tension: ambiguity, a self conscious and self-delighting artifice that is at once intellectually existing and emotionally engaging . The sophistication derives in part from the play between high, outstanding romance and dark faces of negating and hate the traditional theme of the play is to praise the friendship between Antonio and Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty , wit and loyalty, and to explore insuitable greed and brutality of the Jew.

4 Hamlet.

The play has the qualities of a “blood-and-thunder” thriller and a philosophical exploration of life of life and death, the timeless appeal of his mighty drama lies in its combination of injustice, emotional conflict and searching philosophic melancholy. Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world , to live suspended between fact and fiction, language and action. His life is one of the constant role-playing examining the nature of acting only to deny its possibility. For such a figure, soliloquy is a natural medium, a necessary release of his anguish; and some of his questioning monologue posses surpassing power and insight. By revealing the power-seeking, the jostling for place , the hidden motives, the courteous superficialities that veil lust and guilty, Shakespeare condemns the hypocrisy and treachery and general religious corrupting at the royal count.

Francis Bacon

1 Masterpiece: Essay; Novum Organum.

2 Novum Organum: most impressive display of Beacon’s intellect. The argument is for the use of inductiveness of reason in scientific study.

3 Beacon suggests the inductive reasoning, i.e, proceeding from the particular to the general , in place of the

Aristotelian method , the deductive reasoning ,i.e. proceeding from the general to the particular.

4 Beacon’s essay are famous for their brevity, compactness and powerfulness.

John Done

Metaphysical poetry

The most striking feature of Done’s poetry is precisely its tang of reality, in the sense that it seems to reflect life in a real rather than a poetical world.. Done frequently applies conceits.

John Milton

Three major poetical works:

Paradise lost , Paradise Regained, Samson Agonists The freedom of the will is the keytone of Milton.s creed.

Paradise Lost

The epic is the masterpiece of John Milton

The story is drawn from the Old Testament of the Bible, which tells how Satan, after being defeated in his rebel against God, temps Adam and Eve to eat the apples for the Forbidden Tree, and causes the Fall of Man.

Satan, in the image of a rebel , still determines to fight back against God when he and his followers are cast into the Hell. The features of the character include his boldness, unbending ambition and his unconquerable will. The poem, as in other writing, is full of biblical and classical allusion, and is in a Latinized style with one sentence running perhaps across several lines. But, the majesty of expression suits well the sublimity of the poet’s thought.

The Neoclassic Period

1 Between the return of the Stuarts to the English throne in 1660 and the full assertion of Romanticism which came with the publication of lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798

1. Enlightenment or the Age of reason

The Enlightenment movement was a progressive intellectual movement which flourished in France and swept the whole western Europe at the time

Its propose was to enlighten the whole world with the light of modern philosophical and artistic ideas. The enlightenmenters celebrated reason or rationally, equality and science. They called for a reference to order, reason and rule , yield place to “eternal truth” “eternal justice” and “natural equality”

They believed that human beings were limited , dualistic and imperfect literature at the time , heavily didactic and moralizing.