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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.
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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