一、学习目的和要求
通过本章学习，了解文艺复兴运动和人文主义思潮产生的历史，文化背景，认识该时期文学创作的基本特征和基本主张，及其对同时代及后世英国文学乃至文化的影响；了解该时期重要作家的文学生涯，创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物刻画，语言风格，思想意义等；同时结合注释，读懂所选作品，了解其思想内容和写作特色，培养理解和欣赏文学作品的能力。
二、考核要求
(一) 文艺复兴时期概述
1. 识记：（1）文艺复兴时期的界定
（2）历史文化背景
2. 领会: （1）文艺复兴运动的意义与影响
（2）文艺复兴时期的文学特点
（3）人文主义的主张及对文学的影响
3. 应用：文艺复兴，人文主义及玄学诗等名词的解释
Brief Introduction to the Renaissance Period
I. 应用
Definitions of the Literary Terms:
1. The Renaissance: The Renaissance marks a transition from the medieval to the modern world. Generally, it refers to the period between the 14th & 17th centuries. It first started in Italy, with the flowering of painting, sculpture & literature. From Italy the movement went to embrace the rest of Europe. The Renaissance, which means "rebirth" or "revival," is actually a movement stimulated by a series of historical events, such as the re-discovery of ancient Roman & Greek culture, the new discoveries in geography & astrology, the religious reformation & the economic expansion. The Renaissance, therefore, in essence is a historical period in which the European humanist thinkers & scholars made attempts to get rid of those old feudalist ideas in medieval Europe, to introduce new ideas that expressed the interests of the rising bourgeoisie, & to recover the purity of the early church from the corruption of the Roman Catholic Church.
2. Humanism: Humanism is the essence of the Renaissance. It sprang from the endeavor to restore a medieval reverence for the ancient authors and is frequently taken as the beginning of the Renaissance on its conscious, intellectual side, for the Greek and Roman civilization was based on such a conception that man is the measure of all things. Through the new learning, humanists not only saw the arts of splendor and enlightenment, but the human values represented in the works. Renaissance humanists found in the classics a justification to exalt human nature and came to see that human beings were glorious creatures capable of individual development in the direction of perfections, and that the world they inhabited was theirs not to despise but to question, explore, and enjoy. Thus, by emphasizing the dignity of human beings 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, but had the ability to perfect himself and to perform wonders. Thomas More, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare are the best representatives of the English humanists.
3. Spenserian stanza:
Spenserian stanza was invented by Edmund Spenser. It is a stanza of nine lines, with the first eight lines in iambic pentameter & the last line in iambic hexameter, rhyming ababbcbcc.
4. Metaphysical poetry: The term "metaphysical poetry" is commonly used to name the work of the 17th century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellious spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan love poetry. The diction is simple as compared with that of the Elizabethan or the Neoclassic periods, and echoes the words and cadences of common speech. The imagery in drawn from the actual life. The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet's beloved, with God, or with himself.
5. The Renaissance hero: A Renaissance hero refers to one created by Christopher Marlowe in his drama. Such a hero is always individualistic and full of ambition, facing bravely the challenge from both gods and men. He embodies Marlowe's humanistic ides of human dignity and capacity. Different from the tragic hero in medieval plays, who seeks the way to heaven through salvation and god's will, he is against conventional morality and contrives to obtain heaven on earth through his own efforts. With the endless aspiration for power, knowledge, and glory, the hero interprets the true Renaissance spirit. Both Tamburlaine and Faustus are typical in possessing such a spirit.
（二） 该时期的重要作家
1.一般识记：重要作家的文学生涯
2.识记：重要作品及主要内容
3.领会：重要作家的创作思想，艺术特色及其代表作品的主题结构，人物塑造，语言风格，艺术手法，社会意义等。
4.应用：（1）莎士比亚和邓恩诗歌的主题，意象
（2）喜剧《威尼斯商人》的主题和主要人物性格分析
（3）哈姆雷特的性格分析
（4）史诗《失乐园》的结构，人物性格，语言特点等的分析
I. Edmund Spenser
1. 一般识记
Brief Introduction to the Author
English poet，born in London, England, about 1552,and died in London, Jan 13, 1599.
2. 识记His Major Works
Spenser's most important work & masterpiece is The Faerie Queene, a great poem of its age. A complex moral, religious, & political allegory, it is also an epic that exalts Queen Elizabeth Ⅰ& the English nation. According to Spenser's own explanation, his principal intention is to present through a "historical poem" the example of a perfect gentleman: "to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous & gentle discipline." Its principal hero is the Arthur of medieval legend. The six books of the poem illustrate the nature of particular virtues, such as, temperance & justice. Other major works of Spenser are The Shepheardes Calender(1579), a poem consisting of 12 eclogues-corresponding to the 12 months of the year; Epithalamion (1595), a poem expressing the deep personal feelings occasioned by the poets second marriage; Amoretti (1595), a series of sonnets.
3. 领会His Influence
1) Main qualities of Spenser's poetry
①a perfect melody
②a rare sense of beauty
③a splendid imagination
④a lofty moral purity & seriousness
⑤a dedicated idealism
2) In his writing, Spenser drew on the conventions & thought of Classical, medieval, & Renaissance literature. However, he added to his fusion of these diverse elements much that was original, & his works inspired many later English poets. He created a new stanza, called the Spenserian stanza, which is well suited to narrative verse. His skills in writing melodious English verse & his combination of emotion, erudition, & spiritual vision have won him the admiration of generations of English poets. It is his idealism, his love of beauty, &his exquisite melody that make him known as "the poets' poet."
4. 应用
The Faerie Queene:
1) It is a long, allegorical poem. In the poem, Spenser dramatized political, religious, & moral themes by personifying them, or making them characters.
2)Plot: The story, which is set against a background of Arthur & medieval legend, deals with the adventures of six knights of the court of the fairy queen named Gloriana, who represents Queen Elizabeth Ⅰ of English.
The faerie Queen was left unfinished at Spenser's death. It was originally planned as a 12-book poem. But only 6 books were completed. The poem is particularly admired for the melodic beauty of its language & for its rich content of philosophical & mythological material presented in the form of vivid narratives.
II. Christopher Marlowe
1. 一般识记
Brief Introduction
English dramatist & poet,born in Canterbury, England, Feb, 6,1567, died in Deptford, England, May 30, 1593. Marlowe was the first great English Dramatist. He brought to the English stage a new concept of tragedy, one in which the drama centers around the struggles of a man overwhelmed by his passions & ambitions.
2. 识记
His Major Works
His most famous tragedies are Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta, Tamburlaine & Edward Ⅱ. In his plays, Marlowe used blank verse, which he molded into a superb instrument for expressing intense emotions. After his development of blank verse it became the standard medium for English dramatic & epic poetry. His non-dramatic poetry includes Hero & Leander, "the Passionate shepherd to His love," & a verse translation of Ovid's Amores.
Marlowe's Doctor Faustus (about 1589), generally considered his best play, was based on a real Dr. Faustus, who was later associated with a medieval legend of a man selling his soul to the devil. The play's dominant moral is human rather than religious. It celebrates the human passion for knowledge, power & happiness; it also reveals man's frustration in realizing the high aspirations in a hostile moral order. The last scene, in which Faustus confronts his doom, brilliantly renders the fear & agony of a condemned man.
The Jew of Malta (about 1589) illustrates Marlowe's outstanding portrayal of character. Its hero, Barabas the Jew, served as the model for Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In about 1592. Marlowe wrote one of the first successful English historical dramas, Edward Ⅱ。 It is his most dramatically mature play & exhibits his mastery of characterization, stage craft & rhetoric.
Tamburlaine is a play about an ambitious & pitiless Tartar conqueror in the fourteenth century who rose from a shepherd to an overpowering King. By depicting a great hero with high ambition & sheer brutal force in conquering one enemy after another, Marlowe voiced the supreme desire of the man of the Renaissance for infinite power & authority.
3. 领会His Achievements & Influence
Achievements: Marlowe's greatest achievement lies in that he perfected the blank verse & made it the principal medium of English drama.
His second achievement is his creation of the Renaissance hero for English drama.
The theme of his works is the praise of the Renaissance spirit.
His influence: A man of wide learning, Marlowe was one of the extra ordinary poets & playwrights of his time. "Marlowe's mighty line," as Ben Jonson called his blank verse, was one of the most important contributions to the art of English literature.
4. 应用Dr. Faustus
The selection of ActⅠfrom Dr. Faustus is mainly about Faustus is showing his great ambition, that is, if he had many souls, he would give them all to the Devil so that he could control the world. In portraying Faustus, a more introspective & philosophical figure than Tamburlaine, Marlowe praises his soaring aspiration for knowledge while warning against the sin of pride since Faustus's downfall was caused by his despair in God & trust in Devil.
Ⅲ. William Shakespeare
1. 一般识记Brief Introduction
William Shakespeare was the greatest writer of plays who ever lived. His friend & fellow playwright Ben Jonson said that Shakespeare was "not of an age but for all time." The 18th-century English essayist Samuel Johnson described his work as "the mirror of life." The 19th-century English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge spoke of "myriad-minded Shakespeare." The 20th-century English dramatist George Bernard Shaw stressed his "enormous power over language."
2. 识记His Life & Career
The exact date of Shakespeare's birth is not known, but his baptism was recorded on April 26, 1564, in the parish register of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-on-Avon. Since it was customary to baptize infants within two or three days of birth, April 23 is regarded as a reasonable birth date. It is also the date on which he died in 1616. Generally, his dramatic career is divided into 4 periods.
The First Period (1590-1594)-five historical plays & four comedies:
Henry Ⅵ, part Ⅰ (1590)
Henry Ⅵ, part Ⅱ (1590)
Henry Ⅵ, part Ⅲ (1591)
Richard Ⅲ (1592)
Titus Andronicus (1593)
The Comedy of Errors (1592)
The Two Gentlemen of Verona (1594)
The Taming of the Shrew (1593)
Love's Labor's Lost (1594)
The Second Period (1595-1600)-five historical plays, six comedies & two tragedies:
Richard Ⅱ (1595)
King John (1596)
Henry Ⅳ, Part Ⅰ & Part Ⅱ(1597)
Henry V (1598)
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595)
The Merchant of Venice (1596)
Much Ado About Nothing (1598)
As You Like It (1599)
Twelfth Night (1600)
The Merry Wives of Winsor (1598)
Romeo & Juliet (1595)
Julius Caesar (1599)
The Third Period (1601-1609)-Seven tragedies & two dark comedies:
Hamlet
Othello
King Lear
Macbeth
Antony & Cleopatra
Troilus & Cressida
Coriolonus
All's Well That Ends Well
Measure for Measure
The Fourth Period (1609-1612)-Romantic tragic-comedies & two plays:
Pericles
Cymbeline
The Winte's Tale
The Tempest
Henry Ⅷ
The Two Noble Kinsmen
Shakespeare's authentic non-dramatic poetry consists of two long narrative poems: Venus & Adonis & The Rape of Lucrece & his sequence of 154 sonnets.
3. 领会His Influence
1) Contributions to language
Many words and commonly used phrases have been added to everyday English vocabulary through their appearance in Shakespeare's works.
2) Effects on literature
Shakespeare's plays & poetry have had a pervasive influence on world literature. Most of the great literary figures of the world have been inspired & stimulated by his achievement.
On the whole, however, Shakespeare's contribution has been to the language & spirit of later writing rather than to its form. References & parallels to Shakespeare's phraseology have occurred in literature since the 16th century.
Perhaps the greatest inspiration to subsequent authors has been Shakespeare's capacity to depict life in all its complexity & to illuminate man's character & destiny.
4. 领会 His Major Works
1) Drama
A. The Merchant of Venice
Theme: to praise the friendship between Antonio & Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit & loyalty, & to expose the insatiable greed & brutality of the Jew.
Plot: The play has a double plot (P39)
B. Hamlet
Hamlet is generally regarded as Shakespeare's most popular play on the stage, for it has the qualities of a "blood-and-thunder" thriller & a philosophical exploration of life & death. And the timeless appeal of this mighty drama lies in its combination of intrigue, emotional conflict & searching philosophic melancholy.
The play opens with Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, appearing in a mood of world-weariness occasioned by his father's recent death & by his mother's hasty remarriage with Claudius, his father's brother. While encountering his father's ghost, Hamlet is informed that Claudius has murdered his father & then taken over both his father's throne & widow. This, Hamlet, is urged by the ghost to seek revenge for his father's "foul & most unnatural murder." Trapped in a nightmare world of spying, testing & plotting, & apparently bearing the intolerable burden of the duty to revenge his father's death, Hamlet is obliged to inhabit a shadow world, to live suspended between fact & fiction, language & action. His life is one of constant role-playing, examining the nature of action only to deny its possibility, for he is too sophisticated to degrade his nature to the conventional role of a stage revenger. By characterizing Hamlet, Shakespeare successfully makes a philosophical exploration of life & death.
C. The Tempest
The Tempest, an elaborate & fantastic story, is known as the best of his final romances. The characters are rather allegorical & the subject full of suggestion. The humanly impossible events can be seen occurring everywhere, in the play. The playwright resorts to the supernatural atmosphere & to the dreams to solve the conflict. To Shakespeare, the whole life is no more than a dream. Thus, The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life & society in his late years.
2) Poems
A. Sonnets
The first 126 sonnets are apparently addressed to a handsome young nobleman, presumably the author's patron. The poems express the writer's selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the young man.
Twenty of the sonnets are about a young woman characterized as a " dark lady," whom the poet distrust but cannot resist. The poems addressed directly to her are perhaps the most remarkable in the sequence because their unsentimental tone is unlike that of traditional love sonnets.
A philosophical theme that appears in many of the sonnets is that of time as the destroyer of all mortal things. Also expressed in the poems is the author's disillusionment with the false ness of earthly life.
The form of the poems is the English Variation of the traditional Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet, Shakespeare's sonnets have three quatrains, or groups of four lines, & a final couplet. Their rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. A theme is developed & elaborated in the quatrains, & a concluding thought is presented in the couplet.
B. Other poems
Venus & Adonis, in which Shakespeare made his first bid for literary patronage & fame, is a conventional Elizabethan narrative poem. Its mythological story, taken from Ovids Metamorphoses, tells of the passionate love goddess who woos the reluctant youth Adonis.
The Rape of Lucrece, another narrative of passion, is based on the semi historical story of the rape of a chaste Roman matron by Tarquin, son of the king of Rome.
5. 领会His Major Theme
1) Shakespeare is against religious persecution & racial discrimination, against social inequality & the corrupting influence of gold & money.
2) He was a humanist of the time & accepted the Renaissance views on literature.
6. 领会His Literary Achievements
1) Characterization
His major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the inner conflict of his characters. Shakespeare also portrays his characters in pairs. Contrasts are frequently used to bring vividness to his characters.
The women in the plays are vivid creations, each differing from the others. Shakespeare was fond of portraying "mocking wenches," such as Kate of the Taming of the Shrew, Rosaline of Love's Labor's Lost, & Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing, but he was equally adept at creating gentle & innocent women, such as Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, & Cordelia in King Lear. His female characters also include the treacherous Goneril & Regan, the iron-willed Lady Macbeth, the witty & resourceful Portia, the tender & loyal Juliet, & the alluring Cleopatra.
2) Plot Construction
Shakespeare's plays are well known for their adroit plot construction. He seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek & Roman sources. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense & apprehension.
3) Language
In Shakespeare's time, English grammar & spelling were not yet formalized, so Shakespeare could freely inter charge the various parts of speech, using nouns as adjectives or verbs, adjectives as adverbs, & pronouns as nouns. Such freedom gave his language an extraordinary flexibility, which enabled him to express his thoughts as easily in poetry as in prose.
Most of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry is in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. His bland verse is especially beautiful & mighty. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary & idiom. His coinage of new words & distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader.
7. 应用Selected Readings
1) Sonnet 18
Theme: a profound meditation on the destructive power of time & the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves.
Imagery: a summer's day-youth
the eye of heaven-the sun
2) The Merchant of Venice
Theme: To praise the friendship between Antonio & Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit & loyalty, & to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew.
3) Hamlet
This is one part of Hamlet's most famous monologue. Hamlet, facing the dilemma of action & mind, is hesitating whether he should revenge for his father, which may bring him death, or he should suffer & hide his hatred for his uncle in his deep heart, which may secure his life.
IV. Francis Bacon
1. 一般识记Brief Introduction
English Renaissance philosopher, essayist, statesman, born in London, England, Jan 22,1561 and died in London, April 9 1626.
One of the outstanding figures of the Renaissance, Bacon made important contributions to several fields. His chief interest were science philosophy, but he was also a distinguished man of letters & held several high governmental positions during the reign of king JamesⅠ. He was one of the earliest & most eloquent spokesmen for experimental science. He lays the foundation for modern science with his insistence on scientific way of thinking & fresh observation rather than authority as a basis for obtaining knowledge.
2. 识记His works
As an author, Bacon is most famous for his Essays, which deal with such subjects as honor, friendship, love, & riches. Written in a terse, polished style, with many learned allusions & metaphors, the essays rank with the finest in English literature.
Bacon's other important literary works include The New Atlantis, an account of an ideal society & an imaginary voyage, & The History of the Reign of King Henry Ⅶ, a perceptive psychological study of Henry's mind & characters.
His works can be divided into three groups：
First group: The Advancement of Learning (1605)
Novum Organum (1620) (Latin version)
Second group: Essays
Apophthagmes New & Old (1605)
The History of the Reign of Henry Ⅶ (1622)
The New Atlantis (unfinished)
Third group: Maxims of Law
The Learned Reading upon the
Stature of Uses (1642)
3. 领会 His Major Works
Essays
The term "essay" was borrowed from Montaigne's Essais, which appeared from 1580 to 1588. Bacon learned from Montaigne, the first great modern essayist, the economic & flexible way of writing. However, as a practical & prudential man, he intends to write for the ambitious Elizabethan & Jacobean youth of his class & tell them how to be efficient & make their way in public life.
Bacon's essays are famous for their brevity, compactness & powerfulness. The essays are well arranged & enriched by Biblical allusions, Metaphors & cadence.
4. 领会His achievements
As a literary man, Bacon is the first English essayist, whose Essays won him a high place in the history of English literature.
As a philosopher, he is the founder of English materialistic philosophy. He advocates the inductive method of reasoning. In his famous plea for progress, Bacon demands three things: 1) the free investigation of nature, 2) the discovery of facts instead of the blind belief in theories 3) the verification of results by experiment rather than by argument. In our day, these are the ABC of science, but in Bacon's time they were revolutionary, Marx called him "the real father of English materialism & experimental science of modern times in general."
5. 应用 Of Studies
Of Studies is the most popular of Bacon's 58 essays. It analyzes what studies chiefly serve for, the different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies, & how studies exert influence over human character. Forceful & persuasive, compact & precise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacon's mature attitude towards learning. Bacon's language is neat, priest, & weighty. It is some what affected, like the water in the reservoir, restricted & confined.
V. John Donne
1.一般识记 Donne & the Metaphysical Poetry
John Donne: English poet & Clergyman, born in London, England, 1572, and died in London, Mar. 31 1631. Donne is the leading figure of the 17th-century "metaphysical school." His poems give a more inherently theatrical impression by exhibiting a seemingly unfocused diversity of experiences & attitudes, & a free range of feelings & attitudes, & a free range of feelings & moods. The mode is dynamic rather than static, with ingenuity of speech, vividness of imagery & vitality of rhythms, which show a notable contrast to the other Elizabethan lyric poems, which are pure, serene, tuneful, & smooth running. The most striking feature of Donne'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. "Metaphysical Poetry" is commonly used to name the work of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellions spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan Love poetry. The diction is simple as compared with echoes the words & cadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from the actual life. The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet's beloved, with God, or with himself. George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, & Thomas Traherne are also considered to be metaphysical poets. They wrote on a variety of religious & secular themes, & to express their ideas, they used startling, highly imaginative comparisons known as conceits. A conceit is a combination of thoughts or images that are not usually associated with one another.
The finest works of the metaphysical poets combine intellectual subtlety with great emotional power. The poems reflect a broad knowledge of science, art, & other branches of learning. At the same time, metaphysical poems express an intense awareness of common human feelings & experiences, such as jealousy, the loss of religious faith, the complexities of love & the fear of death. Although the imagery of metaphysical poetry is frequently strained, the language is often as natural & direct as ordinary speech.
2识记His major works
In his life, Donne wrote a large number of poems & prose works, His poems are especially admired for their unique combination of passionate feeling & intellectual wit. Many of his poems rank with the finest in the English language. Among his most famous works are the poems Death Be Not Proud, "Go & Catch a Falling Star," The Ecstacy, & A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.
Most of The Elegies & Satires & a good many of The Songs & Sonnets were written in the early period. He wrote prose works mainly in the later period. His sermons, which are very famous, reveal his spiritual devotion to God as a passionate preacher.
His works are classified as songs & sonnets, epistles, elegies, & satires. When read in chronological order, the poems reveal his development from "Gay Jack Donne," a reckless & cynical youth, to Dean John Donne, a man devoted to God.
Donne's great prose works are his sermons, which are both rich & imaginative, exhibiting the same kind of physical vigor & scholastic complexity as his poetry. For example, the well-known Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1623-1624). Written when he was seriously ill, they contain the famous passage: "No Man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, & therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."
3. 领会 Characteristics of His Poems
Donne's poetry is subtle, complex, & often startling. He made expert use of such poetic techniques as the paradox, a statement that seems contradictory but actually contains truth, & the conceit, a pertinent comparison between 2 apparently dissimilar things.
His early Lyrics most exist in The Songs & Sonnets. Love is the basic theme. Donne holds that the nature of love is the union of soul & body. The operations of the soul depend on the body. Idealism & cynicism about love coexist in Donne's love poetry.
As a religious poet, his chief power is shown in the Holy Sonnets & the last hymns.
In his poems, Donne frequently applies conceits, i.e. extended metaphors involving dramatic contrasts. His poetry involves a certain kind of argument, sometimes in rigid syllogistic form. With the brief, simple language, the argument is continuous throughout the poem.
4. 应用Selected Readings
1) Death Be Not Proud, one of Donne's Holy Sonnets, is an almost Startling put-down of poor death. Staunchly Christian in its pare expectation of the resurrection, Donne's poem personifies death as an adversary swollen with false pride & unworthy of being called "mighty & dreadful." Donne gives various reasons in accusing death of being little more than a slave bossed about by fate, chance, kings & desperate men-a craven thing that keeps bad company, such as poison, was & sickness. Finally, Donne taunts death with a paradox: "death, thou shalt die."
The sonnet is written in the strict Petrarchan pattern. It reveals the poet's belief in life after death: death is eternal.
2) The Sun Rising
The persona apostrophizes the sun as " unruly" because the sun enters the lovers' secret room without their approval. The speaker criticizes the sun pays too much attention to such things as sex & that he should not be behaving so tediously as to stick to his rule & enter without thinking twice into such a place as lovers dwell.
Ⅵ. John Milton
1.一般识记 Brief Introduction
John Milton, English poet & prose writer, born in London, England, Dec. 9, 1608, and died in London, Nov 8, 1674.
Milton was one of the greatest poets in the English language & one of the towering figures in all literature. His masterpiece, Paradise Lost, is considered the unsurpassed English epic poem. It is a powerfully imaginative & dramatic work, based in part on the Biblical story of the temptation & fall of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. Milton, a deeply religious man, wrote the epic " to justify the ways of God to men." He is also famous for his graceful lyric poems, such as Lycidas, L'Allegro, & for his intensely moving sonnets.
Milton was a great master of language, & his poetry, both epic & lyric, is admired for its sublime eloquence & rich musical quality.
2. 识记His literary achievements
Milton's literary achievements can be divided into three groups: the early poetic works, the middle prose pamphlets & the last great poems.
1) Education & Early Poetry
Milton's education would ordinarily have led him to a post in the Church of England. He was a Puritan, however, & his religious vies conflicted with those of the Church. After his 7 years at Cambridge, therefore, he retired in 1632 to his father's estate at Horton. His famous poems L'Allegro & IL Penseroso were probably written in 1631, before his withdrawal from Cambridge. These are companion pieces that contrast the temperaments of the cheerful, active man & the melancholy, reflective man. In his early works, Milton appears as the inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature. Lycidas (1637) is a typical example. All of Milton's early works reflect his interest in Greek & Latin poetry, which greatly influenced his style. His poems contain a wealth of classical references, figures of speech, & other poetic devices, all masterfully blended into his rich verse.
2) Middle Period & Prose Pamphlets
In 1638, Milton began a 15-month tour of the Continent, where he met the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei. Upon his return to England he became deeply involved in the political & religious struggle between Parliament, which was then dominated by the Presbyterians, & the followers of king CharlesⅠ, who supported the Church of England. Milton sided with Parliament & began to write a series of pamphlets attacking the power of the bishops & the rituals of the Church. In 1652 he suffered great personal tragedy with the total loss of his eyesight & the death of his wife & infant son In spite of his blindness, Milton continued his official duties until 1655. During these tragic years of his life he wrote some of his most poignant & beautiful sonnets. They include On His Blindness, which reveals the consolation he found in religious faith, & Methought 1 Saw My Late Espoused Saint, written as a tribute to his second wife. Another of his greatest sonnets, On the Late Massacre in Piedmont, commemorated the slaughter of a sect of religious martyrs in 1655. Areopagitica (1644) is probably his most memorable prose work. It is a great plea for freedom of the press. Its style is smooth & calm.
3) Later Years & Major Poetry
After the Restoration in 1660, Milton was imprisoned. His release was brought about mainly through the efforts of his friends, notably the poet Andrew Marwell, After that time he devoted himself to his 3 major poetical works: Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), & Samson Agonistes (1671). Among the three, the first is the greatest, indeed the only generally acknowledged epic in English literature since Beowulf; & the last one is the most perfect example of the verse drama after the Greek style in English.
3.领会His Major Works
1) Lycidas
It is a collection of elegies dedicated to Edward king, a fellow undergraduate of Milton's at Cambridge, who was drowned in the Irish Sea. The poem begins with grief & a feeling of immaturity; then the grief is deepened by the sense of irrecoverable loss in the silencing of a young poet. With this bitter sense of loss, Milton asks why the just & good should suffer. These emotions swell to a passionate call for the consolation of art. The poem moves from a sad apprehension of death, through regret, to passionate questioning, rage, sorrow & acceptance. The feelings begin in a low key but move on to the large questions of divine justice & human accountability. The climax of the poem is the blistering attack on the clergy, i.e. the "Shepherds," who are corrupted by self-interest.
2) Paradise Lost
Paradise Lost, an epic poem in 12 books, written in blank verse, represents the fullest expression of Milton's genius. The poem vividly portrays the story of Satan's rebellion against God & his tempting of Adam & Eve to eat the fruit of the forbidden Tree of Knowledge. The theme is the "Fall of Man," i.e. man's disobedience & the loss of Paradise, with its prime cause-Satan. Although Adam is the central figure in Paradise Lost, it is the villain, Satan, who emerges for many readers as the most interesting character in the poem, In Paradise Lost, Milton used the conventions of ancient Greek & Latin epics & enriched his poem with reference to classical mythology & literature.
Working through the tradition of a Christian humanism, Milton wrote Paradise Lost, intending to expose the ways of Satan & to "justify the ways of God to men." At the center of the conflict between human love & spiritual duty lies Milton's primary concern with freedom & choice; the freedom to obey God's prohibition on eating the apple & the choice of disobedience made for love. In the fall of man Adam discovered his full humanity. But man's fall is the sequel to another & more stupendous tragedy, the fall of the angels. By lifting his argument to that degree, Milton raises the problem of evil in a more intractable form. Milton holds that God created all things out of Himself, including evil. There was evil in Heaven before Satan rebelled: Pride, Lust, Wrath, & Avarice were there. At the glorification of the son these forces erupted & were cast forth. But God suffered them to escape from Hell & infect the Earth. And then the tragedy was re-enacted, but with a difference-"Man shall find grace." But he must lay hold of it by an act of free will. The freedom of the will is the keystone of Milton's creed. His poem attempts to convince us that the unquestionable truth of Biblical revelation means that an all-knowing God just allows Adam & Eve to be tempted &, of their free will, to choose sin & its inevitable punishment. And, thereby, it paves the way for the voluntary sacrifice of Christ which showed the mercy of God in bringing good out of evil.
3) Paradise Regained
Milton followed Paradise Lost with a shorter & less brilliant religious religious epic, Paradise Regained, which describes the New Testament story of Christ's victory over Satan in the wilderness.
4) Samson Agonistes
Milton's last important work was the magnificent poetic drama Samson Agonistes, which presents the Biblical story of Samson in the form of a Greek tragedy. The blind & suffering Samson is strongly reminiscent of Milton himself.
The theme of Samson Agonistes is a more vital & personal one. The picture of Israel's mighty champion, blind, alone, afflicted by thoughtless enemies but preserving a noble ideal to the end, is a fitting close to the life work of the poet himself. The poet's aim was to present in English a pure tragedy, with all the passion & restraint which marked the old Greek dramas. The whole poem strongly suggests Milton's passionate longing that he too could bring destruction down upon the enemy at the cost of his own life. In this sense, Samson is Milton.
6. 应用Selected Reading
Analyze Satan, the hero in John Milton's Paradise Lost.
Milton's Paradise Lost is a long epic of which the theme is the "Fall of Man" with its prime cause-Satan. In Heaven, Satan led a rebellion against God. Defeated, he & his angels were cast into Hell, However, Satan refused to accept his failure, vowing that "all was not lost" & that he would seek revenge for his down fall. In order to achieve his ambition, Satan managed to tempt Adam & Eve, the first human beings created by God, to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge against God's instruction. Satan is the real hero of the poem. Like a conquered & banished giant, he remains obeyed & admired by those who follow him down to hell. He is firmer than the rest of the fallen angels. It is he, who, passing through the guarded gates of hell & boundless chaos, amid so many dangers, & overcoming so many obstacles, makes man revolt against God. Though defeated, he prevails, since he was won from God the third part of his angels, & almost all the sons of Adam. Though wounded, he triumphs, for the thunder which overwhelmed him left heart still unvanquished.
