00514--The structure of Pygmalion/Play/George Bernard Shaw




          The structure of Pygmalion/Play/George Bernard Shaw
Shaw’s ‘Pygmalion’ is a very well-constructed play.  It has:
 exposition,
complication, and,
conclusion
Act-1 works as exposition.  Main characters are introduced.  Prof.Higgins, the hero of the play claims that he can train ignorant and ill-educated flower girl, Eliza Doolitle in such a way that after six months people will accept her as a Duchess. 
 In Act-II and Act-III, the complication takes place.  Eliza’s training has started.  She begins to change in her speaking, dressing and manners after the training.  Now she is presented at the Ambassador’s party.  This event works as the climax.  It comes between Act-III and Act-IV, the complication sets in Higgins behaves in callous manners and Eliza did not have soft feelings of love for him.  She resents her treatment as an experiment.  Act-IV and Act-V function with spirited discussion of the consequences of Eliza’s education.  Higgins becomes totally dependent upon Eliza.  There takes place a verbal sword play between them.  Finally, Eliza accepts Freddy as husband and leaves Higgins, and Prof.Higgins laughs out the whole affairs. 


Thus the play progresses from ignorance to knowledge, the myth fades into the reality the didacticism turns from Phonetics to life and Eliza’s spirit evolves from darkness to light.  Thus the construction of the play is logical, artistic and elegant. 


00513-- VOLPONE (1606) /PLAY/by BEN JONSON





1.      VOLPONE (1606) /PLAY/by BEN JONSON
Ben Jonson did not possess Marlowe’s poetic power, but his career on the whole was more productive and better rounded.  One of the best of his plays is Volpone.  It is a harsh and scathing exposure of human greed in terms which are at the same time horrifying for their baseness and yet mockingly humorous.  The rich and avaricious Volpone, aided by his wily servant, Mosca (The Fly), pretends that he is dying.   He tricks his equally greedy friends into giving him costly gifts of gold and jewels, leading each one to believe that he has a chance of becoming heir to Volpone’s great wealth. 

When the friends have been bled, one of them having disinherited his son in Volpone’s favour, another having offered him his wife, Volpone spreads the rumour that he has died, and confounds the hopefuls/candidates by a will making Mosca his heir.  Mosca, seizing the upper hand, tries to keep Volpone legally dead, but succeeds only in bringing the house of cards down upon the heads of the whole unsavoury crew. 


Volpone is an impressive play, similar in quality and texture to the almost forgotten plays of Machiavelli.  In 1928 the Theatre Guild produced it in an adaption for the modern stage by Stefan Zweig, and it has since been made into a French film. 


00512--What is the dramatic function of the Good and Bad Angels in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?


What is the dramatic function of the Good and Bad Angels in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus?

Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus in its use of the personified Good and Bad Angels reveals the influence of the older morality play tradition.  Morality drama was allegorical and didactic, and usually dealt with the struggle of an everyman-type figure against the forces of evil represented frequently by the Seven Deadly Sins.    Man’s victory emphasized the positive forces of grace and a life following religious and ethical teachings.  The negative aspect, or man’s defeat, was the reverse of this movement, and dramatists found this appealing because it offered the moral lesson that retributive justice punished sin.  Obviously there is a close relationship between tragedy and this latter process, and Doctor Faustus is a type of reverse morality play because it is concerned with spiritual defeat and not victory. 

In Doctor Faustus the Good and Bad Angel, as in the morality play, contend for Faustus’s soul.  They represent in an exterior way the interior conflict of Faustus between good and evil.  The Good and Bad Angel appear repeatedly throughout the play to show the recurring torment within Faustus’s soul.  The Good Angel signifies the presence of grace, and repeatedly urges Faustus to repent.  The Bad Angel represents evil and the forces leading Faustus to damnation.  Dramatically, these personified figures offered Marlowe a way, other than the soliloquy, to present Faustus’s spiritual struggle.    

00511--Agincourt/poem/Michael Drayton



     Agincourt/poem/Michael Drayton
The title under which Drayton wrote this was The Ballad of Agincourt.  This poem and to the Virginian Voyage are, according to Hardin Craig, two of the best ballads in English.  Both of them are classified as odes.  They are Horatian rather than Pindaric odes, though they lack the detached meditation and streak of scepticism associated with the former.  It doesnot strictly measure up a standard ballad which is a narrative song, dramatic and impersonal, characterised by the absence of sentimentality and a tragic conception of life.  It does not follow the ballad stanza which is a quatrain in alternate iambic trimester and tetrameter, with the second and fourth lines rhyming.  The devices of refrain and incremental repetition are also absent.  It tells the story with action and dialogue.  It exhibits the personal emotion of the poet, that is, his patriotism.  However, it can be considered a variant form invented by Drayton to suit his need.   It is, as John Buxton remarks, metrical tour de force with the verse beating a tattoo for King Harry and his men with supreme gallantry.  Drayton kept on revising and polishing this poem from 1606 to 1619, till he could make clear, to use the words of Harold Child, the ringing tramp of the marching army.  With its stanzas of eight short, crisp lines, rhyming aaabcccb, it is the model for a war poem.

Agincourt refers to the Battle of Agincourt (Agincourt was a 

village in France, where the battle took place) fought in 1415, in which the English King, Henry V won a victory over the French.  Drayton in the poem, pays a glowing tribute to Henry V whose heroism according to him, sweeps away everything before him.  

00510--Song to Celia/lyric/Ben Jonson




S           Song to Celia/lyric/Ben Jonson
  Song to Celia is from Ben Jonson’s The Forest.  John F.M.Dovaston was the first to point out in 1815 that song to Celia was constructed from passages in the prose epistles of Philostratus.  Ben Jonson is indebted to him for the bantering tone and the ingenious conceit.  But he has so skilfully transformed the borrowing that the poem appear original and, to use the words of George Parfit, thoroughly English in Diction, syntax and rhythm.  W.M.Evans observes that the happy marriage of words and music is responsible for its excellence.

The first eight lines express how the poet esteems the kiss of Celia superior to wine and Jove’s nectar.  The next eight lines suggest that she can influence and improve upon Nature; for she makes the garland fresh and lends her fragrance to it, which is more pleasant and lasting than its own sweet smell.  This conceit smacks of the metaphysical concept of unified sensibility.  The poem, thus extols the unique and and almost divine trait of Celia.


The poem may be divided into two eight-lined stanzas with the rhyme scheme abcb abcb, each line consisting of eight syllables.  It is marked by classical poise, elegance, subdued emotion and an urban tone.


00509-- Care-charmer Sleep/sonnet/by Samuel Daniel

         

     
 Care-charmer Sleep/sonnet/by Samuel Daniel
Care-charmer Sleep is a sonnet in Delia.  Like Sidney, Daniel addresses sleep.  In the first quatrain, he describes sleep as a care-charmer, the brother of death and son of dark night.  He requests sleep to relieve him of the agony caused by his unfulfilled love.  I the second quatrain he says that the waking hours of the day will make him mourn his misfortune.  In the third quatrain he asks dream not to visit him during the night, unfolding the painful desires of the day.  In the couplet he expresses his wish not to wake up from his sleep lest he be tormented by the disdain of the mistress.


 Lever praises Daniel for the formal perfection achieved by him in his sonnet structure—a perfection unmatched in the work of any of his contemporaries except Shakespeare—and for the subtle variations of metre in consonance with the implication of these traits.  Daniel achieves his effect with monosyllabic words.  Long vowel and diphthongs are used to produce a slow movement in consonance with the heaviness of his heart.  The sonnet consists of three quatrains with a final couplet, having the rhyme scheme abab cdcd efef gg.


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