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Exam

Welcome to the final exam. You may take this exam at any time between now and midnight on Sunday. The rules are that you must limit your test-taking to 2 hours, and you may not consult books, notes, or any other outside source for help in answering the questions.

When you have finished, please email your answers to me at sallytslc AT hotmail DOT com.

I. Identify or define thirty of the following in one to three complete sentences

Lady Macbeth
Petrarch
Hrothgar
Caedmon
John Milton
Banquo
Sir Gawain
Pardoner
Macduff
William Shakespeare
Grendel
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
The Wanderer
Samuel Pepys
Jules Verne
T.S. Eliot
Jane Austen
thane
mystery play
Weird Sisters
Charles Dickens
Mary Shelley
Nun's Priest
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Walter Raleigh
Birnham Wood
meter
Geoffrey Chaucer
Shakespearean sonnet
Petrarchan sonnet
Duncan
Wyrd
Everyman
Rood
iambic pentameter
kenning
alliteration

II. Sonnets: Identify the kind of sonnet and the rhyme scheme

1.


I FIND no peace, and all my war is done;
I fear and hope; I burn and freeze like ice;
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on;
That looseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not, yet can I 'scape nowise;
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device, [by my own choice]
And yet of death it giveth none occasion.
Withouten eyen, I see; and without tongue I plain; [lament]
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health;
I love another, and thus I hate myself;
I feed me in sorrow, and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both death and life;
And my delight is causer of this strife.

2.

Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore,
So do our minutes hasten to their end;
Each changing place with that which goes before,
In sequent toil all forwards do contend.
Nativity, once in the main of light,
Crawls to maturity, wherewith being crown'd,
Crooked elipses 'gainst his glory fight,
And Time that gave doth now his gift confound.
Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow:
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth, despite his cruel hand.

3.

One day I wrote her name upon the strand,
But came the waves and washed it away:
Again I wrote it with a second hand,
But came the tide, and made my pains his prey.
Vain man, said she, that doest in vain assay
A mortal thing so to immortalize,
For I myself shall like to this decay,
And eek my name be wiped out likewise.
Not so (quoth I), let baser things devise
To die in dust, but you shall live by fame:
My verse your virtues rare shall eternize,
And in the heavens write your glorious name.
Where whenas Death shall all the world subdue,
Out love shall live, and later life renew.

4.

Because I breathe not love to everyone,
Nor do not use set colors for to wear,
Nor nourish special locks of vowed hair,
Nor give each speech a full point of a groan,
The courtly nymphs, acquainted with the moan
Of them who in their lips Love's standard bear,
What, he! say they of me, Now I dare swear
He cannot love; no, no, let him alone.
And think so still, so Stella know my mind;
Profess indeed I do not Cupid's art;
But you, fair maids, at length this true shall find,
That his right badge is but worn in the heart;
Dumb swans, not chatt'ring pies, do lovers prove;
They love indeed who quake to say they love.


5.

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
I am the city where you will not stay,
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
I am the lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, though you will not cheer me,
I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me

III. Chronology: arrange these writers, works, and events into chronological order (you don't have to give dates, just put them in order from earliest to latest)

1. Geoffrey Chaucer
Battle of Hastings
Caedmon
Petrarch
T.S. Eliot
Macbeth
John Milton

2. Henry VIII
The Second Shepherds Play
The Dream of the Rood
Jane Austen
Astrophil and Stella
Romans leave England

3. Edmund Spenser
Charles Dickens
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Mary Shelley
Samuel Pepys
Jules Verne
The Wanderer

4. Elizabeth Barrett Browning
William Shakespeare
Jane Austen
Canterbury Tales


5. I Sing of a Maiden
development of the sonnet
Beowulf
Alfred, Lord Tennyson

IV. Meter: copy out the following lines and mark the stressed syllables with a `, or put them in boldface (or however your computer will allow you to emphasize the stressed syllables).

1. That time of year thou mayest in me behold

2. Four score and seven years ago

3. The Creator's might and his mind-plans

4. My mind to me a kingdom is

5. Whan that Aprille with his showres soote

6. When my love swears that she is full of truth,
I do believe her, though I know she lies.

7. As in a shady nook I stood behind,
Just then returned at shut of evening flowers.

8. Nay, to fight, in good faith, is far from my thought.
There are about on these benches but beardless children.

9. The hoard-guard took heart, once more his breast swelled with his breathing.

10. Is that the reason why he tempts us thus?

You Absolutely Must Check This Out

A History of English in Ten Acts

Very fun interactive. For each age, click on the beer bottle, bomb, swinging jester puppet thingy, the sword and shield, and other objects to learn about the period and its language. The "new 20th-century words" are a little tiresome: not awful, but tiresome-ish.

Great summary of our year!

Next Term Paper Assignment: Online Presentation: Your Writer's Life

We're handling this paper by writing it in stages -- having outlined it, you're now drafting it section by section and presenting each section to the rest of the group, who are required to read your presentation and strongly encouraged to ask you questions about the information you present.

How to turn your outline and your research notes into a piece of writing? Some of you have done this before, and some of you haven't; either way, a brief review is in order, especially to ensure that we all know how to use outside sources in our writing without committing plagiarism.

First of all, read this. It's my lecture from last year defining plagiarism and demonstrating how to handle quotations. Includes links to Diana Hacker's indispensable site, which you MUST visit and familiarize yourself with, if you haven't already.

In writing and presenting this first section on your writer's life, you're going to be dealing with information that's largely common knowledge; that is, you can find the date of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's birth ANYWHERE. No one person owns that information. So even if you didn't know it before, and you had to look it up, you don't have to document information like that. This will probably be true of just about all the information you present in this section. You might not have known it before, but most any fact of your author's life will be common knowlege and appear in at least three sources.

The only exceptions would be those kinds of instances where nobody really knows where someone went or what he or she did during a period of time, and various people speculate about what might have happened.

So, say your author just goes missing for a period of years in his middle twenties. He leaves university, and we don't know where he is until he turns up at the age of forty writing advertisements for a mulch factory, but several sources you've read have theories about what he might have been doing during those "lost years."

What you do is that you write your own sentences about what we do know and don't worry about documenting them:

Alphonse Q. Author was born in Lithuania and attended South Lithuania Elementary School until the age of nineteen. At this time his teachers decided that he was a genius and graduated him from the third grade. From there he proceeded to enroll in medical school. After his graduation from medical school at the age of 22, he all but disappears from history for a period of roughly eighteen years.

Okay, up to this point we're dealing with common knowledge. All you have to do is tell the story. But now we're wading into uncertain waters. We've read various theories about what happened during those lost years. Here's how we handle them: we're still telling the story, but we invite other voices to contribute.

So first you write a topic sentence which sounds something like this: What, exactly, Author did during those eighteen years is a matter for debate.

That's you, signalling us that you're going to invite some other people to talk now. Or at least, you're going to tell us what they say in your own words, just as you might repeat someone else's words in a conversation without quoting that person directly: Mom SAID for you to come in the house now.

So you might write the following:

What, exactly, Author did during those eighteen years is a matter for debate. Some scholars, like Horatio Z. Professorbreath, believe that he spent the entire time trying to scrape a piece of chewing gum off the bottom of his shoe.

You got this piece of speculation from a book or article by Dr. Professorbreath, and it's NOT common knowlege. ONLY Dr. Professorbreath holds this view. So here, even though you've paraphrased in your own words, you will want to document your source. Inside the sentence, ie before the period after "shoe," you will write this: (23) to signal that you took this information from Dr. Professorbreath's book, page 23. You will give complete information about the book -- title, publisher, etc -- on your Works Cited page at the end of your paper. You don't need to mention even Dr. Professorbreath's name in your documentation here, because you've mentioned him in your sentence. Just give the page number and move on.

Continue your discussion of this debate, in the same paragraph, by integrating some direct quotations, for variety's sake, like this:

What, exactly, Author did during those eighteen years is a matter for debate. Some scholars, like Horatio Z. Professorbreath, believe that he spent the entire time trying to scrape a piece of chewing gum off the bottom of his shoe (23). On the other hand, it is argued that during some of this time, "surely he at least ate a peanutbutter sandwich" (Scholarnose 268)."We are almost certain that he went to the movies, as references to movies appear in his later work." (Expertio 910). And, as the noted critic Joe Critique has observed, "He must have slept sometime" (47). Ultimately, however, these years remain a mystery.

See how you've done that? The paragraph begins and ends with YOUR voice. It's a discussion panel, and you are the moderator. You set the terms for the conversation: we're talking about how nobody can agree on Alphonse Q. Author's whereabouts. You've already concluded that nobody really knows. You just want to let these other people have their say, so that you can demonstrate that it's all a big question mark. Sometimes you speak for them; sometimes you work their words into your sentence; sometimes you let them say their piece all on their own. But at the end of the paragraph, you remind us of what you wanted us to know all along.

Also, you can see how we've handled other instances of documentation -- the less information about your source you can work into the sentence, the more you put in the parentheses. Again, familiarize yourself with Diana Hacker's MLA documentation for humanities papers; there you'll find the proper formatting for any kind of source you can think of.

Other times in this section of your paper when you'll want to include other voices besides your own:

*you might want to quote another source as saying, for instance, that your author was good or bad at school

*you might opt to use another source's words to describe a relationship with a parent, a friend, or a spouse

*it's good to quote an outside source as saying that your subject was happy or unhappy at a certain period, content or not content with what he was doing, etc. (sometimes it's just good to hear subjective things like that from someone besides you -- if you can quote that author as saying things about himself or herself, even better).

So, to summarize, your presentation should include both your own voice (which should be the dominant voice we hear) and the voices of some of your sources, which may include the voice of the author you're writing about. Vary your use of sources, sometimes paraphrasing in your own words and sometimes using direct quotations, either as parts of your sentences or as their own complete sentences or passages. If a piece of information is not common knowledge, be sure to document where it came from.

Random Comments on Writing About Literature (For Term Papers and other occasions)

On writing about a poem, and how the poet's use of language points to larger themes or ideas; or, how to close-read a couple of lines of poetry:

For example -- and I'm taking something from another poet, William Blake -- a
poem about a chimneysweep begins "A little black figure in the snow/Crying
'Weep, weep," in notes of woe." Blake is writing about how England in the
Industrial Revolution is a fallen place, and he seizes on child labor (little
boys were used as chimneysweeps, because they could fit into tight places, and
they frequently died very young as a consequence of this work) as a
manifestation of the evil and disordered state of things.

So Blake wants to suggest the little chimneysweep as both a victim and a sign of
fallenness. He makes him appear pathetic -- "a little black figure in the snow"
(he's little, a helpless child; it's cold; and to the passerby he doesn't even
look human; he's just a "figure," a shape or a number). The chimneysweep cries
"Weep! Weep!" because he's so little he can't pronounce 'sweep,' but his cries
also suggest that anyone hearing him ought to weep for him.

On writing about a non-fiction work, in this case the Diary of Samuel Pepys, in literary terms, dealing with both rhetoric and themes and the relationships between the two:

To push
things a little farther, you can treat it as a literary work and look at his use
of language and literary devices, just as if this were a novel or poem. Even in
our everyday writing or speaking, we do use metaphor, simile, images, and other
rhetorical tools to shape how our voices are heard.

So for instance, you can look at the way he writes about other people. How can
you tell whom he likes and whom he doesn't? What does he betray about himself
-- his beliefs, his political leanings, his background, his preferences -- by
the language he uses about the things he observes? What does his account of a
disaster like the plague or the Great Fire tell you about the way he sees the
world -- what is man's relationship with the world around him? What role does
God play? What about kings and rulers? How is the world ordered, in his view?

Remember how, in Macbeth, we could tell that Shakespeare believed in a natural
order of things, and in not upsetting the hierarchy -- even nature revolts, in
the form of storms, when Macbeth usurps the throne. Under James I, this would
have been the kind of thing you'd want to be writing, of course . . . if you
liked the feel of your head on your shoulders, and you wanted to keep working.

But Pepys is living in a very different time -- how does he feel about the
divine order of things, about hierarchy, etc? How can you tell these things from
his diary, even if he's not spelling them out explicity?

On questions you can ask about a novel (in this case Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice:

If we're going to say her work is "ideological," how is it so?
What did she believe about the way the world was ordered? Is she like
Shakespeare in Macbeth, in believing that there's a natural order and hierarchy
to things which should not be violated (remember how once Macbeth usurps the
throne, it never stops storming, because the whole universe is outraged at the
breach of order?), or does she believe that order exists to be shaken up? In
which state -- order or disorder -- are people happy and fulfilled?

So then in your third section you can apply these questions directly to Pride
and Prejudice, showing how it demonstrates her convictions about these things.
You should

*give a summary of characters and plot
*discuss these larger themes (order vs. disorder)
*compare and contrast scenes and characters associated with order with those
associated with disorder (for example, the Bennet household, Lydia and Wickham)
and show whether order or disorder leads to greater happiness and human
flourishing.

Some Random Small Notes:

*When you write the title of a book, you either italicise it (if you're using a computer); or you underline it. This is the rule for whole books like novels or diaries, magazines, collections of poetry or short stories, encyclopedias, and the like.

*When you write the title of a poem, short story, magazine article, or other shorter work contained in a larger one, you put it in quotation marks.

Thus:

Pride and Prejudice
"Paradise Lost," reprinted in Milton's Poetical Works

"Jane Austen, Marriage, and Pride and Prejudice," an article in Lady-Novelists' Life magazine.

A Literary Timeline

Read this very complete timeline of English history and literature from the prehistoric era to the present -- well, to 1979, which in the grand scheme of things is close enough to the present.

I've caught a few mistakes -- for example, I think the author of this timeline may mean that Oxford was founded around 1210. It definitely predates Cambridge, which began when some disgruntled scholars left Oxford and wound up in the town on the banks of the River Cam. Hugh de Balsham, Bishop of Ely, founded Peterhouse College, the first Cambridge college, in 1284.

And Webster's play is The Duchess of Malfi. Not Malf.

You can click on any hotlinked name in the timeline for more notes and information, though the biographies don't seem to be very complete.

I'll be back shortly with more detailed information and brief readings for the following:

John Donne
George Herbert
Robert Herrick
Andrew Marvell
John Dryden
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Gerard Manley Hopkins

You don't have to know a huge amount about them right now, but getting a taste of them and seeing where they fall on the timeline will be useful to you in seeing how the tradition develops and ideas come in and out of vogue.

Ps -- Just for fun, since she's linked, you might want to take a look at Margery Kempe, in the Middle English period. She was a mystic who wasn't canonized; there were lots of those wandering around at the time, and looking at her life gives you a window into what the culture of the time was like, and into the kinds of excesses of piety which people sometimes indulged in, which the Church didn't actually promote, but which seemed to be very common nonetheless. Margery Kempe at one point in her life received the gift of tears -- she went about crying loudly, and apparently she made herself really obnoxious to the people around her. Once she went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and her fellow pilgrims hated her so much they wanted to have her taken off the boat. She is also the author of the first known autobiography in English, and the first such work by a woman. So in that way she's noteworthy as more than just a curiosity.

Sample Partial Outline

I've been asked for some clarification regarding what I want to see in an outline. I still need to work on what the third section would look like, but here is a sample of how I'd expect the first two sections -- I and II to look:

Your Section I should be biography. So you would have something like this:

I. Alfonsus Q. Author led a long and interesting life.
A. Even his early life was eventful.
1. He was born in Uzbekistan.
a. His mother was a shoemaker
b. His father sold bongo drums
c. He had seventeen brothers and sisters

B. He attended school from 1897 to 1964.
1. He was a slow learner
2. His teachers labeled him a daydreamer
3. He was poor at geometry

C. He left school at 14
1. He joined his father's bongo-drum business
2. Later he sold shoes
3. All this time he was writing his first novel.

OK, this is silly, but do you see what I mean? In the real paper, you would flesh this out by using quotations from other sources and adding more detail (and varying your sentence structure -- a whole paper of these sentences would be really monotonous). But this is enough to give you a real blueprint to work from -- by the time you've done your outline, your paper's half-written, which makes the next steps much easier.

Your second section (II) would be about your writer's literary career, and would look like this:

II. Alfonsus Q. Author enjoyed a long and spectacularly unsuccessful career as a writer.
A. His first novel, The Sound of Bongo Drums, was a failure.
1. It sold two copies.
2. His mother bought one; so did his father
3. His publisher paid him to go away.

B. His second novel, Dreaming of Shoes, was also unsuccessful.
1. This one sold three copies
2. His grandparents bought one
3. His publisher made him pay, then sent him away

Hopefully this will help folks begin to visualize what to do with their (non-fictitious) author-topics.

Exam

On Friday, May 15, we will have an exam covering the year. It will be a short-answer test: fill-in-the-blanks, identification, one-sentence-type answers. You should limit your test-taking time to 90 minutes. The test will cover:

*Anglo-Saxons: Caedmon, Wanderer, Dream of the Rood, Beowulf

*Middle Ages: Chaucer, Middle English lyrics, Sir Gawain

*Renaissance: sonnets, Shakespeare (incl. Macbeth)

*writers covered in term papers: you will need to pay attention to each other's presentations on each person's author's life and work.

*literary terms covered during the year, including identification of kinds of sonnets, rhyme schemes, meter.

*I will be posting short readings and biographical information for writers not covered by term papers, to fill in our literary timeline. There will be exam questions pertaining to these readings.

Most of this information I think you all know without having to do heavy-duty review, but you will need to start now, going back over what we've covered. I will shortly post a timeline of authors and readings, so that you can move forward. These will be short, but will fill in the development of English literature to the twentieth century.

Research Paper Outline

Also don't forget that by NEXT WEDNESDAY, April 29, you're submitting to me an outline for your paper.

It should look like this:

I. Biography

A. Early Life
1. fact
2. fact
3. fact
(and so on)

B. Education
1. fact
2. fact
3. fact

C. Adult life
1. fact
2. fact
3. fact

II. Literary Career
A. Early career
1. works written
2. themes and concerns
3. response to work
a. successful or not
b. critics liked it or didn't

B. Mid-Career (same as above)

C. Late Career (same as above).

III. A close look at his/her work

here, how you structure your outline will depend on whether you're looking at ONE major work, or at a series of shorter works, like poems. You could divide this section thus:

A. Work
1. plotlines
2. themes
3. what critics have to say

Or something like that. I'll have to think further about this section. As you start to put the outline together and have questions, ask them, and we'll work this section out together. Again, ask on the yahoo group, because it's very likely that everyone will have similar questions.

General Guidelines for Your Outline:

*Do not use source material in your outline. All parts of your outline should be in your own words

*Resist the temptation to write your whole paper in your outline. Each number or letter entry in the outline should be ONE BRIEF SENTENCE. You're just building a skeleton for your paper, remember.

*Every 1 has to have a 2; every A has to have a B.

*give actual information in your outline. You should NOT write: "I am going to talk about Orville Pennypacker's school days here." You SHOULD write: "Orville Pennypacker was educated at Hunsford Grammer School from 1787-1923." Or whatever. (poor Orville: third grade was hard for him . . . )

*If you have questions, ask them.

Term Papers and the Research Process

Now that you have your topic, hopefully you've already started your research. For those of you who haven't done a term paper before, as well as those of you who could use a research refresher, here are some tips:

*Sources

All sources are not equal. For your paper, you will want to seek out, as much as possible, what are called reliable sources. This means that you want to read material pertaining to your subject which is reliably accurate, intelligent, and written for thoughtful, intelligent readers.

For example: what about Wikipedia? We all use it. I often link to Wiki entries. But how reliable is it, really? Entries are updated and corrected all the time. Anyone can create a Wikipedia entry, and it doesn't matter whether he's an expert on the subject at hand, or only THINKS he is. And you, the reader, can't always know whether the information you're reading is sound, or whether it's just somebody's crackpot theory. The more you know about the subject, the more you can make those kinds of judgments, but you, as a student, probably don't yet know how to judge the soundness of information about, say, whether or not Christopher Marlowe really wrote some of Shakespeare's plays.

So you want to be careful to find information you can trust. Wikipedia isn't a bad place to start for background, but you want to try to find the following:

*reliable encyclopedias, like the Encyclopedia Britannica (tends to have very high-quality articles on subjects, and a high level of reliability, even among encyclopedias)

*reliable books, by authors who are experts in the field. What you're not looking for is a title like Did Shakespeare Really Exist, and Other Renaissance Conspiracy Theories. I just made that up, but see what I mean? You don't want sensationalistic, "I'm going to tell you something NOBODY KNOWS" kind of information. The odds are that if NOBODY KNOWS IT, it probably didn't happen. Straight facts may be boring, but that's what you're looking for.

*reliable articles, in print journals or on the internet, by authors who are experts in the field. See above.

If you have trouble finding information, let me know, and I'll help you look online. For any of the authors on our list, there should be plenty of stuff out there.

*What, Exactly, Am I Looking For?

Remember that the paper we're doing is divided into three sections: biography, literary career, and exposition, or explanation, of some examples from that literary career. So you're looking for information pertaining to those three broad categories. You want facts about your writer's life. You want facts about his or her writing career, including what kinds of literature he or she produced and an overview of everything he or she wrote. Finally, you want to locate a novel or other prose work, or a fairly generous group of poems to read, plus some of what we call "criticism," which doesn't mean information about whether the works are good or bad, but simply articles or books which discuss what's going on in those works (sort of in the same way we've talked about Beowulf, MacBeth, etc.).

*How Can I Organize the Material I find?

Notecards. Folks from last year will remember this.

1. Get yourself a pack of index cards. If possible, get the multicolored kind, which has pink, yellow, blue, green, etc. all in one pack. If you have all-white ones, label them: a pile for "biography," a pile for "career," and a pile for "poems/novel/etc." Either way, you want your cards to be coded so that once you have gathered information and written it down on them, you can divide them according to the sections of your paper.

2. When you do your research, and you come across a passage in a book, article, or whatever that you think you could use in your paper, COPY IT DOWN VERBATIM on one side of an index card. No piece of information should be so large that it takes up more than one card. At most, you want 3-4 sentences. But copy it EXACTLY in the author's words. On the other side of the card, write down the source from which you took the passage, in THIS EXACT FORMAT:

Author's last name, Author's first name. Book Title, Underlined. Where Published: Publisher, copyright date. Page number/s.

If you've taken the quotation from a magazine, a book chapter, or an encyclopedia entry, do it like this:

Last name, First name. "Title of Article, Chapter, or Entry." Book or Magazine Title, Underlined. then publication info and page numbers as above.

For further, more specific information about how to list different kinds of sources, check out this page on Diana Hacker's excellent research-paper-writing site. The page I'm giving you is the "How to Do a Works Cited" page, but you'll want to follow the formats she describes. Essentially, when you go to make a Works Cited page for your final paper, all you'll have to do is copy the information straight off your cards.

Do take the time to provide all the information I've just described on EACH notecard. It may seem like a pain in the neck, but trust me. You are not going to remember where you got every piece of information you wrote down, and since you DO have to tell me where every piece of information comes from, obviously going back through all those books, articles and websites would be an even bigger pain. Do it right, pay attention to details, and you will be a happy camper.

Hacker also has more good information on finding and using sources. I HIGHLY recommend your reading around the "Humanities" section of her site. If you need to have anything clarified, just let me know on the yahoo list -- odds are that if you have a particular question, other people will have the same question.

Obviously, too, I can't check notecards. You'll need to enlist someone at home to work with you on that. This step in the research process isn't hard, just kind of fiddly, but it will make your life so much easier at the end of the day.

Macbeth: The Real Story

Among other things, this might help you answer that "anachronism" question.

Shakespeare drew on the Chronicles of Raphael Holinshed for many of his dramatic plots, including that of Macbeth.

Here you will find a series of links providing the history of the legend on which Macbeth is based, excerpts from Holinshed's Chronicles relating to Macbeth, and more.

Here you can read about discrepancies between the story as Holinshed tells it, and the story as Shakespeare presents it in dramatic form.

Here you'll encounter a discussion of Shakespeare's altering of Holinshed's version of the story for political reasons -- his troupe, the Kings Men, performed for the court of James I, successor to Elizabeth I, and for a play at court you'd certainly want to communicate all the support in the world for your royal benefactor, because among other things you like having a head.

Another brief discussion about Shakespeare and Holinshed

When I asked that anachronism question, what I meant was an example of something that would have existed in Shakespeare's era, but not in Macbeth's historical era.

Shakespeare's "Macbeth" (Nicol Williamson): start of play

Here's a different production. One more thing to consider: how do the witch's words "Fair's foul and foul's fair" play out in Macbeth? What is foul but looks fair, and fair but looks foul? What does it mean that fairness (goodness) and foulness (evil) are reversed and confused?

Shakespeare's "Macbeth" (Ian McKellen) "Tomorrow and Tomo...

Here's an interesting comment from this video:

"That is the tragedy and the heart of the Tomorrow monologue. Hell is repetition, and this is what Macbeth faces in this moment - the horrific desperation of an continuation with no change and no end. In this moment of clarity he sees the path forward in the light of his life and, subconsciously if not directly, chooses to end that life, preferring death over the hell of existence."

Why exactly has Macbeth's life become hell? What is it that he has to live with, "tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow," which makes it all meaningless?

Shakespeare: "Macbeth" (Judi Dench) - sleepwalking scene

Why is Lady Macbeth sleepwalking? In what ways does Macbeth also "sleepwalk?"

Shakespeare's "Macbeth" (Ian McKellen) "If it were done...

For those of us who have read Julius Caesar, what do you think about this scene between the Macbeths, and the scenes between Brutus and Cassius (and Brutus's soliloquy) in which they decide to kill Caesar?

"Macbeth" - Dench/McKellen -1979, Trevor Nunn, Dir.

I haven't previewed every single comment on this video, but the conversation seems interesting and worth reading, just to see what kinds of things people talk about when they talk about Shakespeare in performance. You can decide whether this performance by Judi Dench corresponds to your mental picture of Lady Macbeth.

And a Bonus Poem for Holy Week

You don't have to do anything with this poem, except read and be blown away by it. It's a stunning example of the power of the sonnet, even in 20th-century verse (bonus points to anyone who can tell me which kind of sonnet this is, though!). The poet, Charles Causely, lived virtually his whole life, except for service in World War II, in Cornwall, in the west of England, teaching in a primary school. He died in, I believe, 2004.

I Am the Great Sun

From a Normandy crucifix of 1632


I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
I am the city where you will not stay,
I am your wife, your child, but you will leave me,
I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
I am the lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, though you will not cheer me,
I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

Charles Causley
From Collected Poems 1951-2000
London: Picador, 2000

Wishing everyone a blessed Holy Week and a joyous Easter.

Research Project

We will be devoting a good bit of the last two months of the year to independent research projects, focused on English writers who were either Shakespeare's contemporaries or his successors. Your 10-page paper will include the following:

1. a biographical section in which you tell your writer's life story
2. a section in which you discuss your writer's work and major concerns/themes (what he or she wrote about, thought about, cared about, was obsessed by).
3. a section in which you discuss in detail one work (or, if a poet, two or three shorter poems) by your writer

No two people may research the same writer.

To write this paper, you will need both to read about your writer, and to read what your writer has written. A novel, a large body of poems, etc, will be as good an introduction to your writer as a book ABOUT that writer.

Here's a schedule of due dates for this project, which you will need to mark on your calendar:

1. Wednesday April 15: report to me which writer you have chosen
2. Wednesday April 29: submit an outline of your research paper
3. Tuesday May 5: submit the section of your paper telling the life story of your writer -- this will be like a presentation of your writer to the rest of the class
4. Tuesday May 12: submit, again as a kind of online presentation, the section of your paper describing your writer's work and major concerns/themes.
5. Tuesday May 19: submit the last section of your paper, discussing one major work, or several short poems, by your writer
6. Friday May 22: complete rough draft due
7. Friday May 29 by 5 pm: final paper due.

Those of you who have done a research paper before will be familiar with the research process, but I'll post some lectures and links related to this process for those to whom this is new territory. Working in "chunks," completing a section at at time and presenting it to the class (you will be essentially teaching your classmates about this writer, since you are becoming an expert on him/her), will make ten pages manageable even if you've never written that long a paper before.

Here's the list of writers from which to choose:

Christopher Marlowe
Sir Walter Ralegh
Robert Southwell
John Donne
George Herbert
John Milton
Samuel Pepys
Samuel Johnson
Jonathan Swift
William Blake
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
John Keats
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Mary Shelley
Jane Austen
George Eliot (aka Mary Ann Evans -- she just used a male pen name)
Charles Dickens
Anthony Trollope
William Makepeace Thackeray
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Robert Browning
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
William Butler Yeats
T.S. Eliot

This takes us from Shakespeare's day into the 20th century in English literature, so it's quite a whirlwind tour. I'd like to have writers from every era represented, so that we can put together something of a literary timeline to correspond with the history represented here. You will want to do a little brief reading about all these writers in order to know which one you want to commit to living with for a while -- do some preliminary internet research by googling their names and seeing what you come up with by way of information about each one.

Again, no two people may do the same writer, and your choices are due a week from Wednesday: that's April 15.

The Scottish Play

By now everyone should have had plenty of time to read Macbeth -- actors refer to it as "The Scottish play," incidentally; it's an old actors' superstition that referring to this play by its title in a theatre brings bad luck. I don't know the story behind this supersition, but if anyone else does, or would like to find out, do share.

We're heading into Holy Week, so I'm giving you some writing to do, to be due next Tuesday, April 14, by 5 pm. No later. a combination of short answer and paragraphs. You may look back at the play while you're working on this for specific details, but please don't consult any other materials while you're answering the questions. Here goes:

Some Short Answer Questions:

1. Look up the word "anachronism" in the dictionary, and then find one example of an anachronism in the play.

2. List three "ill omens" which appear in the play.

3. List three references to blood.

4. Give an example of a scene in which the tone or mood seems different from the tone or mood of the rest of the play.

5. List three examples of prophecy or foretelling in the play.

Identify the following:

Birnham Wood
Macduff
Banquo
Duncan
Lady Macbeth
Weird Sisters
Thane of Cawdor
Thane of Glamis
Malcolm
Donalbain
Porter


Discussion: Choose three of the following questions to discuss in two or three paragraphs

1. Does Macbeth live in a universe -- the universe of the play, not our real universe -- in which free will exists, or is he a pawn of fate? Explain.

2. Aristotle defines a tragic hero as an essentially good character who suffers from a tragic flaw (usually hubris, or pride) which sets a chain of tragic events in motion. Does Macbeth fit Aristotle's definition? Why or why not? If he has a tragic flaw, what is it?

3. What role do female characters play in this tragedy?

4. What is the role of weather in this play? Give examples of moments in the play when the weather is mentioned, and discuss why this is significant.

5. Describe scenes in which blood is discussed, and describe the characters' reactions to it. What does blood symbolize or represent in this play?

6. Explain what this play has to say about kingship as opposed to tyranny, and discuss how various characters exemplify this opposition.

Again, I would like this assignment posted -- actually, let's say you'll post it AT 5 pm on Tuesday, April 14. No late work.

Thanks, everyone. We've had a flex month to read and catch up on other work, but we need to hit the road from now till the end of the year. Research paper assignments and options will be up shortly.

Sonnets: Something to Try in Lent, Or Any Time

Note: This post is taken from a longer article which will appear in a spring issue of Mater et Magistra magazine.

Let’s think about poetry-writing as an exercise. We tend to think of poetry in expressive terms: it’s all about putting your emotions into words, right? Well, not exactly. At least, I think it’s about something different. I’m a poet by vocation and training, and I tend to think in terms of craft. A poem, like any piece of art, is a thing which I make out of materials available to me: in other words, words. The 20th-century poet William Carlos Williams famously said that a poem is a “large or small machine made of words.” A poem is not the writer’s soul poured out on the page, though the end result may suggest that it is. A poem, at least as it’s being written, isn’t so much an act of inspiration as of writing a word, then another word, then another.

Having a structure like the sonnet form makes it easier to decide roughly how many words will be in a line – or at least how many stressed syllables -- and what sorts of words, or sounds, each line should end with. Thinking about fulfilling that structure or form relieves the pressure every writer feels: the pressure to say something original and brilliant. Far from squelching the writer’s expressiveness, following the rules of form defuses his natural self-consciousness – think of it as becoming really absorbed in a game like Sudoku – and unlocks something in the mind which enables the writer to say things in ways which would not have been possible if he had been trying to think of them.

So let’s say that you'd like to try writing a sonnet. How will you go about it? Think of the English Catholic writer G.K. Chesterton’s adage that a thing worth doing is worth doing badly, and jump right in.

Your intent, from the get-go, is to conform to the rules of the sonnet. That’s all. It doesn’t matter what you’re writing about; in fact, you should probably aim, in your experiment, to write something as trivial and everyday and unexciting as possible, so that what you are focusing on is not an idea, or even on the meaning of the words themselves, but on working out the puzzle of rhyme and meter. In short, don’t get bogged down in trying to be poetic.

Meter is harder than rhyme; what you might do is first to reread some sonnets aloud, in a singsongy way, and then try speaking ordinary utterances in roughly iambic pentameter, as in I’m going to the store; d’you want to come? Make a dinner-table game of conversing in pentameter. Iambic pentameter is the closest poetic approximation of natural English speech, and if you practice at it a bit, you’ll soon start hearing it in ordinary utterance. Once you have the meter in your “ear,” you can experiment with writing lines in that meter. You don’t have to write anything strikingly original, beautiful, or poetic. I’m going to the store; d’you want to come would be a perfectly good first line for a sonnet. Then write a second line with the same rhythm, but a different end-sound.

I’m going to the store; d’you want to come?
I hear they’ve got a sale on rutabagas.

And so on. Your third line will have to rhyme with either “come” or “rutabagas,” depending on whether you’re writing a Shakespearean or Petrarchan sonnet. And the fourth line will either rhyme with “come,” if it’s a Petrarchan sonnet, or with “rutabagas,” if you’re being Shakespearean. So for example, you might end up either with this –

I’m going to the store; d’you want to come?(a)
I hear they’ve got a sale on rutabagas.(b)
Besides, they’re raffling off a trip to Vegas –(b)
I’d like a holiday. My room’s a slum(a)

Or this –

I’m going to the store; d’you want to come?(a)
I hear they’ve got a sale on rutabagas.(b)
On second thought, you’ve got to clean your room(a)
Before we hit the highway for Las Vegas. (b)

I am making this up off the top of my head, by the way, and you will already have seen one trap it’s possible to fall into. If you use the word “rutabagas” at the end of a line, you WILL be writing about Las Vegas, whether you really want to go there or not. You’ll make your life easier by writing lines that end in slow, or rain, or be.. Also note that while it’s easy to have a line be a complete sentence, you can break lines across syntax, like this:

I’m going to the store; d’you want to come
With me today, or do you want to sit
Alone and sulk and concentrate on quantum
Physics, and dig yourself into a pit
Of abject misery, et cetera, so on . . .


This technique of breaking lines at places that aren’t natural breaks in the sentence, periods or commas, is called enjambment, by the way, and it’s a means of getting more mileage out of your available words when you’re looking for ways to rhyme.

Once you’ve set up a rhyme scheme in the first stanza, you know whether you’re writing a Petrarchan or a Shakespearean sonnet, and your task from here on out is simply to follow the form. Don’t worry about being coherent. If you run out of things to say about going to the store and wishing you were going to Las Vegas, start talking about something else. The form will hold things together; in fact, it’s taking you wherever it wants you to go. You might want to go on talking about Las Vegas, but if the rhyme scheme won’t let you, clearly it’s tired of that idea and wants you to find another. In a contest of wills between your idea and the sonnet form, the form always wins. Always. It requires you to lay down whatever plans you might have made about what you wanted to say. It requires you to let it change your mind. In the poetry dance, the sonnet leads, and you let it surprise you. You might not know what you’re saying from one line to the next, but by the time you’ve finished line fourteen, you will have said something. More importantly, you will have accomplished a sonnet. And you will have trusted the form to take you places, which is an exercise in humility.

Finally, if you make a serious study of the sonnet, you will notice that poets who write sonnets tend to write a lot of them, in cycles. Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, not all on the same theme, but on a set of concerns which, if you read all his sonnets together, create the effect of the interwoven tapestry which is a mind at work. Read Shakespeare, read John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, read Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Edna St. Vincent Millay. You don’t have to spend hours over every single sonnet – pick two or three for in-depth discussion, but read an entire cycle by a given writer, because while a single sonnet is a gem, to read a cycle is to discover the whole glittering mine. Then try writing not just one sonnet, but a series yourself.

I say this mainly because the best way to write one decent sonnet is to write a lot of them. One Lent I chose sonnet-writing as a discipline: I wrote a sonnet a day for the entire forty days. Most of these sonnets were . . . well, bad. One, I recall, was about a cowhide-patterned dress my daughter was wearing; I was really scraping bottom that day. Nobody would want to read that poem, ever. I mean, fourteen lines of “well, that’s really, like, black-and-white.” But writing a sonnet a day for forty days meant that I got pretty good at coming up with fourteen rhyming lines about whatever my eye fell on. I started seeing the world in terms of fourteen rhyming lines. Those lines didn’t always make sense, and they weren’t always about much of anything. But the exercise meant that occasionally I surprised myself by writing a good poem, a better poem than I had thought I was capable of writing in that form. So don’t stop at one sonnet. Write sonnets for a week, for two weeks, for a month, for forty days. Make a discipline of laying down your will to that strict little poetic form, and it will take you places.

Sonnets and More (Thomas More, That Is, Plus Additional Poets, Monarchs, and Saints of the Tudor Era)

Here's a selection of sonnets, in more or less chronological order:

Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542):
Translation of Petrarch's Rima, Sonnet 134

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586):
Choose one from the Astrophil and Stella sequence

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599):
Sonnet 75, from the Amoretti (note that he uses a rhyme scheme all his own -- there is such a thing as a Spenserian sonnet, as well as a Petrarchan or a Shakespearean)

William Shakespeare (1564-1616):
Sonnet 130: My Mistress' Eyes Are Nothing Like the Sun
Sonnet 60: Like As the Waves Make Towards the Pebbled Shore
Sonnet 55: Not Marble Nor the Gilded Monuments

You will notice that virtually all the sonnets listed here have numbers in their titles: that's because most of the time their authors didn't title them at all. Later printers arranged them and numbered them for easier referencing. Otherwise they're known by their first lines.

Because poets who wrote sonnets generally wrote a lot of them (kind of like Lay's Potato Chips. You can't write just one), it's important to read through a number of a given writer's sonnets if you want to get a feel for that writer's mind. Therefore I am strongly suggesting that in addition to the sonnets listed here, you choose one of the above poets and read more of that poet's sonnets. It is easy to find sonnets by Wyatt, Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare: they're all really famous, they've all been dead a long time, and their texts are readily available in libraries and online. So read ALL of Wyatt's translations of Petrarch (or as many as you can find); or read ALL of Astrophil and Stella, or all of Shakespeare's sonnets. You don't have to read them all in great depth, and of course sonnets are short.


More resources:
Sir Thomas Wyatt
Sir Philip Sidney
Edmund Spenser
All-Purpose William Shakespeare Site, with timelines, texts, and more!

English history links (transitions from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance):
Wars of the Roses.com
Wars of the Roses timeline
Timeline of the Tudor Monarchy
Time-Traveller's Guide to Tudor England
Henry VIII
Edward VI
Mary I
Elizabeth I
James I
Saint Thomas More
A Little More More
Saint John Fisher
Saint Edmund Campion
English Martyrs 1535-1681

Additional resources:
Good film to watch at this time: A Man for All Seasons, starring Paul Scofield
Good novel to read at this time: Edmund Campion, by Evelyn Waugh