Showing posts sorted by relevance for query chaucer. Sort by date Show all posts
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00180—How does Matthew Arnold evaluate Chaucer’s greatness?




Matthew Arnold is an admirer of Chaucer’s poetry.  He remarks that Chaucer’s power of fascination is enduring.  “He will be read far more generally than he is read now.”  The only problem that we come across is the difficulty of following his language.  Chaucer’s superiority lies in the fact that “we suddenly feel ourselves to be in another world”.  His superiority is both in the substance of his poetry and in the style of his poetry.  “His view of life is large, free, simple, clear and kindly.  He has shown the power to survey the world from a central, a human point of view.”  The best example is his Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.  Matthew Arnold quotes here the words of Dryden who remarked about it; “Here is God’s plenty”.  Arnold continues to remark that Chaucer is a perpetual fountain of good sense.  Chaucer’s poetry has truth of substance; “Chaucer is the father of our splendid English poetry.”   By the lovely charm of his diction, the lovely charm of his movement, he makes an epoch and founds a tradition.  We follow this tradition in Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton and Keats.  “In these poets we feel the virtue.”  And the virtue is irresistible.

In spite of all these merits, Arnold says that Chaucer is not one of greatest classics.  He has not their accent.  To strengthen his argument Arnold compares Chaucer with the Italian classic Dante.  Arnold says that Chaucer lacks not only the accent of Dante but also the high seriousness.  “Homer’s criticism of life has it, Shakespeare has it, Dante has it, and Shakespeare has it.”  Thus in his critical essay “The Study of Poetry” Matthew Arnold comments not only on the  merits of Chaucer’s poetry, but also on the short comings.  He glorifies Chaucer with the remark, “With him is born our real poetry.”




00045--Why did Dryden undertake the translation of the works of Chaucer and Boccaccio?


            Dryden translated some of Ovid's tales and found that there were many things common between Ovid and Chaucer.  Chaucer in his opinion is in no way inferior to Ovid.  Moreover, Chaucer was his countryman, and Dryden always honoured his native country.  So he translated some tales of the "Canterbury Tales" into modern English.
            Dryden asks his readers to judge for themselves by comparing the stories of Ovid and those of Chaucer and to be convinced of their equal merits.  He does not like to be adjudged as being partial to his countryman Chaucer.  Both Chaucer and Boccaccio refined their mother tongues.  But there is one difference: it was Dante who had already began the refinement of the Italian tongue and it was continued by Petrarch.  It was Boccaccio who was responsible for refining Italian prose.  Chaucer, on the other hand, was the first to adorn and amplify the English language from the provincial, which was then the most polished of all modern languages.  For these reasons Dryden resolved to include both these authors in his "Fables".  Dryden claims that he has studied these authors’ works thoroughly before translating them.  He also says that he had translated stories with instructive morals from ancient and modern poets. 

00189--UGC-NET, English Literature Objective Type Question Answers 51 to 60



51) Marlowe's tragedies are:
A. tragedies of noble men
B. love tragedies
C. one-man tragedies
D. revenge plays
Answer: …………………………….
52)  Who coined the phrase, "Marlowe's mighty line"?
A.  Ben Jonson
B.  Samuel Johnson
C.  R.L. Stevenson
D.  Richard Steele
Answer: ………………………………..
53)      Out of the four chief dialects that flourished in the pre-Chaucerian period, the one that became the standard English in Chaucer's time is:
A. the Northern
B. the East-Midland
C. the West-Midland
D. the Southern
Answer: ……………………..
54)      Which of the following statements is incor­rect regarding medieval literature?
A. Allegory was frequent and usual
B. The dream-vision convention was preva­lent
C. Chaucer exploited the dream-vision con­vention in The Canterbury Tales.
D. There was often an undercurrent of moral and dialectic strain.
Answer: …………………………………..
55) In Prologue and Canterbury Tales Chaucer employed the
A. Ottawa Rhyme
B. Rhyme Royal
C. Heroic Couplet
D. Both A and C
Answer: …………………………………………..
56) Chaucer has been criticized for presenting an incomplete picture of his times, because
A. he overemphasizes the rights of the lower class
B. he exaggerates the courtly benevolence
C. he writes for the court and cultivated clas­ses and neglects the suffering of the poor
D. he supports the Lolland and the Peas­ant Revolution too fervently
Answer: …………………………………………..
57) Which of the following are correctly matched?
a. Captain Singleton                1. a sailor
b. Moll Flanders                      2. a prostitute
c. Colonel Jack                           3. a valiant solider
d. Cavalier                              4. a prince
A. Only a-1 and b-2
B. Only b-2
C. Only c-3 and d-4
D. Only d-4
Answer: ………………….

58) " Lunatics, lovers, and poets all are ruled by their overactive imaginations. " These words of Shakespeare are taken from:
A. Love's Labor Lost
B.  Hamlet
C. Henry IV
D. Midsummer Night's Dream
Answer:……………………………………
59)       An author sums up the human condition thus, "human life is everywhere a state, in which much is to be endured and little to be enjoyed." Who said this and where?
A. Alexander Pope - Essay on Man
B.  Oliver Goldsmith - The Vicar of Wakefield
C.  Albert Camus - The Stranger
D.  Dr. Johnson – Rasselas
Answer: …………………………..
60)       “Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ''tradition" should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lo.st in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. Ii cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labor.”


A.      T.S.Eliot
B.      Alexander Pope
C.      P.B.Shelley
D.     Matthew Arnold



Answer: …………………………………………

51- C
52- A
53- B
54- C
55- C
56- C
57-A
58-D
59-D
60-A

00044--How does Dryden Compare himself with a builder?



            Dryden begins his "Preface to the Fables” by comparing himself with a man who intends to construct a building.  The builder begins his work on the basis of precise calculations.  But as his work progresses, he finds that his calculations are insufficient to meet his requirements.  The builder has to change his mind and will have to add this or that convenience, which he had not thought of at the beginning.  This is what happened to Dryden when he began to translate the fables.  Though it began a humble way with the translation of Homer's First Book of "Iliad" it became necessary to widen the field and take up more translations.  He went on to the translation of the Twelfth Book of Ovoid's "Metamorphoses" because it contains among other things, the causes, the beginning, and ending of the Trojan war.  This led him to the translation of the former part of the fifteenth Book.  Then there were the "Hunting of the Board", "Gnyras and Myrrha" , "Baucis and Philemon" and translated them.  When Dryden translated Ovid, he found that there was much in common between Ovid and Chaucer.  So he took up the translation of some tales by Chaucer.  Chaucer took many of his tales from Boccaccio and so he undertook the translation of some of his tales.  Like this, Dryden had to widen the scope of the translation of "The Fables".

00177--What is Matthew Arnold’s estimate of Dryden and Pope? [Robert Burns/Thomas Gray/Chaucer]



“Dryden and Pope are not classics of our poetry; they are classics of our prose.”  This is how Arnold evaluates Dryden and Pope.  He gives Thomas Gray a greater position.  He says that Gray is our poetical classics of the 18th century.  Along with the names of Dryden and Pope, Matthew Arnold mentions the name of Robert Burns.  Burns’ English poems are simple to read.  But the real Burns is of course in his Scotch poems.  His poems deal with Scotch way of life, scotch drinks, scotch religion and Scotch manners.  A Scotch man may be familiar with such things, but for an outsider these may sound personal.  For supreme practical success more is required.  In the opinion of Arnold, Burns comes short of the high seriousness of the great classics, something is wanting in his poetry.    In his comparative study Arnold gives Chaucer a better position.  The world of Chaucer is fairer, richer and more significant than that of Burns.

00703--What is a Frame Story?




What is a Frame Story?
The frame story is a literary device that joinstogether one or more stories within a larger story, or frame. Frame stories have been used throughout the world and date back to antiquity. The Panchatantra, a collection ofSanskrit fables gathered around 200 b.c., is an ancient Indian example of a frame story.

Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron is a well-known Italian frame story in which a collection of stories are told by different characters.

The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous examples of the frame story. In his innovative use of the device, Chaucer interwove the frame with the tales. The plot of the frame involves pilgrims on a pilgrimage who are challenged to compete in telling the best tale. Chaucer reveals the pilgrims’ personalities not only through their interactions between tales but also by the tales they tell. As a result, the frame itself

acts as a long and engaging narrative whole.

00178--Matthew Arnold on the Early Poetry of France


Matthew Arnold is of the view that England is much obliged to France in the field of poetry.  The early poetry of England is ‘indissolubly connected’ to the early French poetry.  In his opinion the 12th and the 13th centuries were the seed-time of all modern language and literature.  At that time the poetry of France had a clear predominance in Europe.  The romance-poetry of Europe is French.  It is the pride of French literature.  The romance-poetry was at its height in the middle age.  In the fourteenth century there came an English man who nourished on this poetry.  He got his words, rhyme and metre from this poetry.  Matthew Arnold names this person as Chaucer.  In fact Chaucer received the elements of the romantic poetry immediately, from the Italians, especially from Dante.  But the Italians got this stuff from the French.

00165--Comment on "Preface to the Fables" by John Dryden.

Historically, the Age of Dryden is called the Restoration Age.  Charles Ι was executed by Cromwell in 1649.  From 1649 to 1660 there was the domination of the parliament.  During this period, Prince Charles ΙΙ remained in exile in France.  However the English people wanted monarchy back in power.  So in 1660 the monarchy was restored.  Charles ΙΙ was installed on the throne.  This age is therefore called the age of Restoration.  Dryden lived and wrote in this age.  The Restoration age was an age of sweeping reactions against Puritanism and the Glorious Revolution [1688]. 




Fable:  A fable is a brief tale conveying a moral.  Usually, in fables beast and birds are made to act and speak like human beings.  But Dryden’s Fables are in no sense fables, but rather tales in verse.  They are verse paraphrases of tales by Chaucer, Boccaccio and Ovid.
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The Background:  In the Preface to the Fables, Dryden explains the background and project of the Fables.  He explains how the project was taken up on a very modest scale which however expanded to the full size of a book.  Metaphorically, Dryden says that he had only planned to build a lodge, but ended up with a house.  
Dryden began with a translation of the first book of Homer’s Iliad. This was done as an experiment.  However it was a great success.  The success gave him confidence and he soon turned to another writer, Ovid.  He translated into simple English Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’.  These experiments and the success he got, encouraged him to choose five tales from Chaucer’s famous work “Canterbury Tales”.  Later he translated three of Boccaccio’s Tales.  At the end of the preface Dryden says that he makes no claims as to the merits of his translation.  He leaves it to the readers to decide.








00035--What is a Tragedy? What are the characteristics of a good tragedy? Historical formation of Tragedy. What are the elements of a Tragedy? How does Aristotle define aTragedy?

                        

The term is broadly applied to literary, and especially to dramatic, representations of serious actions which eventuate in a disastrous conclusion for the protagonist (the chief character).

More precise and detailed discussions of the tragic form properly begin—although they should not end—with Aristotle's classic analysis in the Poetics (fourth century B.C.). Aristotle based his theory on induction from the only examples available to him, the tragedies of Greek dramatists such as Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.

In the subsequent two thousand years and more, many new and artistically effective types of serious plots ending in a catastrophe have been developed—types that Aristotle had no way of foreseeing. The many attempts to stretch Aristotle's analysis to apply to later tragic forms serve merely to blur his critical categories and to obscure important differences among diverse types of plays, all of which have proved to be dramatically effective. When flexibly managed, however, Aristotle's discussions apply in some part to many tragic plots, and his analytic concepts serve as a suggestive starting point for identifying the differentiae of various non-Aristotelian modes of tragic construction.
 
Aristotle defined tragedy as "the imitation of an action that is serious and also, as having magnitude, complete in itself," in the medium of poetic language and in the manner of dramatic rather than of narrative presentation, involving "incidents arousing pity and fear, wherewith to accomplish the catharsis of such emotions." Precisely how to interpret Aristotle's catharsis—which in Greek signifies "purgation," or "purification," or both—is much disputed. On two matters, however, a number of commentators agree. Aristotle in the first place sets out to account for the undeniable, though remarkable, fact that many tragic representations of suffering and defeat leave an audience feeling not depressed, but relieved, or even exalted. In the second place, Aristotle uses this distinctive effect on the reader, which he calls "the pleasure of pity and fear," as the basic way to distinguish the tragic from comic or other forms, and he regards the dramatist's aim to produce this effect in the highest degree as the principle that determines the choice and moral qualities of a tragic protagonist and the organization of the tragic plot.


Accordingly, Aristotle says that the tragic hero will most effectively evoke both our pity and terror if he is neither thoroughly good nor thoroughly bad but a mixture of both; and also that this tragic effect will be stronger if the hero is "better than we are," in the sense that he is of higher than ordinary moral worth. Such a man is exhibited as suffering a change in fortune from happiness to misery because of his mistaken choice of an action, to which he is led by his hamartia—his "error of judgment" or, as it is often though less literally translated, his tragic flaw. (One common form of hamartia in Greek tragedies was hubris, that "pride" or overweening self-confidence which leads a protagonist to disregard a divine warning or to violate an important moral law.) The tragic hero, like Oedipus in Sophocles' Oedipus the King, moves us to pity because, since he is not an evil man, his misfortune is greater than he deserves; but he moves us also to fear, because we recognize similar possibilities of error in our own lesser and fallible selves. Aristotle grounds his analysis of "the very structure and incidents of the play" on the same principle; the plot, he says, which will most effectively evoke "tragic pity and fear" is one in which the events develop through complication to a catastrophe in which there occurs (often by an anagnorisis, or discovery of facts hitherto unknown to the hero) a sudden peripeteia, or reversal in his fortune from happiness to disaster.


Authors in the Middle Ages lacked direct knowledge either of classical tragedies or of Aristotle's Poetics. Medieval tragedies are simply the story of a person of high status who, whether deservedly or not, is brought from prosperity to wretchedness by an unpredictable turn of the wheel of fortune. The short narratives in "The Monk's Tale" of The Canterbury Tales (late fourteenth century) are all, in Chaucer's own term, "tragedies" of this kind. With the Elizabethan era came both the beginning and the acme of dramatic tragedy in England. The tragedies of this period owed much to the native religious drama, the miracle and morality plays, which had developed independently of classical influence, but with a crucial contribution from the Roman writer Seneca (first century), whose dramas got to be widely known earlier than those of the Greek tragedians.


Senecan tragedy was written to be recited rather than acted; but to English playwrights, who thought that these tragedies had been intended for the stage, they provided the model for an organized five-act play with a complex plot and an elaborately formal style of dialogue. Senecan drama, in the Elizabethan Age, had two main lines of development. One of these consisted of academic tragedies written in close imitation of the Senecan model, including the use of a chorus, and usually constructed according to the rules of the three unities, which had been elaborated by Italian critics of the sixteenth century; the earliest English example was Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton's Gorboduc (1562). The other and much more important development was written for the popular stage, and is called the revenge tragedy, or (in its most sensational form) the tragedy of blood. This type of play derived from Seneca's favorite materials of murder, revenge, ghosts, mutilation, and carnage, but while Seneca had relegated such matters to long reports of offstage actions by messengers, the Elizabethan writers usually represented them on stage to satisfy the appetite of the contemporary audience for violence and horror. Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy (1586) established this popular form; its subject is a murder and the quest for vengeance, and it includes a ghost, insanity, suicide, a play-within-a-play, sensational incidents, and a gruesomely bloody ending. Christopher Marlowe's The Jew of Malta (c. 1592) and Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus (c. 1590) are in this mode; and from this lively but unlikely prototype came one of the greatest of tragedies, Hamlet, as well as John Webster's fine horror plays of 1612-13, The Duchess of Malfi and The White Devil.


Many major tragedies in the brief flowering time between 1585 and 1625, by Marlowe, Shakespeare, George Chapman, Webster, Sir Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, and Philip Massinger, deviate radically from the Aristotelian norm. Shakespeare's Othello is one of the few plays which accords closely with Aristotle's basic concepts of the tragic hero and plot. The hero of Macbeth, however, is not a good man who commits a tragic error, but an ambitious man who knowingly turns great gifts to evil purposes and therefore, although he retains something of our sympathy by his courage and selfinsight, deserves his destruction at the hands of his morally superior antagonists.


Shakespeare's Richard III presents first the success, then the ruin, of a protagonist who is thoroughly malign, yet arouses in us a reluctant admiration by his intelligence and imaginative power and by the shameless candor with which he glories in his ambition and malice. Most Shakespearean tragedies, like Elizabethan tragedies generally, also depart from Aristotle's paradigm by introducing humorous characters, incidents, or scenes, called comic relief which were in various ways and degrees made relevant to the tragic plot. There developed also in this age the mixed mode called tragicomedy, a popular non-Aristotelian form which produced a number of artistic successes. And later in the seventeenth century the Restoration Period produced the curious genre, a cross between epic and tragedy, called heroic tragedy.


Until the close of the seventeenth century almost all tragedies were written in verse and had as protagonists men of high rank whose fate affected the fortunes of a state. A few minor Elizabethan tragedies, such as A Yorkshire Tragedy (of uncertain authorship), had as the chief character a man of the lower class, but it remained for eighteenth-century writers to popularize the bourgeois or domestic tragedy, which was written in prose and presented a protagonist from the middle or lower social ranks who suffers a commonplace or domestic disaster. George Lillo's The London Merchant: or, The History of George Barnwell (1731), about a merchant's apprentice who succumbs to a heartless courtesan and comes to a bad end by robbing his employer and murdering his uncle, is still read, at least in college courses.


Since that time most successful tragedies have been in prose and represent middle-class, or occasionally even working-class, heroes and heroines. The great and highly influential Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen, wrote in the latter nineteenth century tragedies in prose, many of which (such as A Dolls House, Ghosts, An Enemy of the People) revolve around an issue of general social or political significance. One of the more notable modern tragedies, Arthur Miller's The Death of a Salesman (1949), relies for its tragic seriousness on the degree to which Willy Loman, in his bewildered defeat by life, is representative of the ordinary man whose aspirations reflect the false values of a commercial society; the effect on the audience is one of compassionate understanding rather than of tragic pity and terror. The protagonists of some recent tragedies are not heroic but antiheroic, in that they manifest a character that is at an extreme from the dignity and courage of the protagonists in traditional dramas while in some recent works, tragic effects involve elements that were once specific to the genre of farce.


Tragedy since World War I has also been innovative in other ways, including experimentation with new versions of ancient types. Eugene O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra (1931), for example, is an adaptation of Aeschylus' Oresteia, with the locale shifted from Greece to New England, the poetry altered to rather flat prose, and the tragedy of fate converted into a tragedy of the psychological compulsions of a family trapped in a tangle of Freudian complexes . T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935) is tragic drama which, like Greek tragedy, is written in verse and has a chorus, but also incorporates elements of two early Christian forms, the medieval miracle play (dealing with the martyrdom of a saint) and the medieval morality play. A recent tendency, especially in the critics associated with the new historicism, has been to interpret traditional tragedies primarily in political terms, as incorporating in the problems and catastrophe of the tragic individual an indirect representation of contemporary social or ideological dilemmas and crises.

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