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Explorations in Literature

Helen Palmer, Michael Bruce, Sean Elliott,

Barbara Goff, Carole Maddern and
Michael Simpson
EN1021
2019

This subject guide is for a Level 4, 30-credit course offered as part of the University of London’s
programmes in English: BA, Diploma of Higher Education and Certificate of Higher Education.
For further information please see: london.ac.uk.
This guide was prepared for the University of London by:
Helen Palmer
Michael Bruce
Sean Elliott
Barbara Goff
Carole Maddern
Michael Simpson
Goldsmiths, University of London.
This is one of a series of subject guides published by the University. We regret that
due to pressure of work the authors are unable to enter into any correspondence
relating to, or arising from, the guide. If you have any comments on this subject
guide, favourable or unfavourable, please use the form at the back of this guide.

University of London
Publications Office
Stewart House
32 Russell Square
London WC1B 5DN
United Kingdom
www.london.ac.uk

Published by: University of London

© University of London 2012. Reprinted with minor amends 2019
The University of London asserts copyright over all material in this subject guide
except where otherwise indicated. All rights reserved. No part of this work may
be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from
the publisher. We make every effort to respect copyright. If you think we have
inadvertently used your copyright material, please let us know.
Contents

Contents

Course learning outcomes and assessment criteria........................................ 1

Learning outcomes................................................................................................................. 1
Mode of assessment............................................................................................................... 1
Assessment criteria................................................................................................................ 1
Introduction.......................................................................................................... 3
Using this subject guide....................................................................................................... 3
General subject reading....................................................................................................... 4
Subject content......................................................................................................................... 5
Suggested study syllabus..................................................................................................... 6
Methods of assessment........................................................................................................ 7
Examination technique........................................................................................................ 8
General matters: essays........................................................................................................ 9
Online resources....................................................................................................................10
Chapter 1: Section A single-text study – Homer’s The Odyssey..................... 11
Recommended editions......................................................................................................11
Recommended secondary reading...............................................................................11
Other important secondary works...............................................................................11
Online resources....................................................................................................................12
Introduction.............................................................................................................................12
Learning outcomes...............................................................................................................17
Sample examination questions......................................................................................17
Chapter 2: Section A single-text study – Shakespeare’s Hamlet................... 19
Recommended editions......................................................................................................19
Recommended secondary reading...............................................................................19
Online resources....................................................................................................................20
Film versions............................................................................................................................21
Introduction.............................................................................................................................21
Approaching Hamlet...........................................................................................................22
Learning outcomes...............................................................................................................28
Sample examination questions......................................................................................28
Chapter 3: Section B single-text study – Coleridge’s The Rime of the
Ancient Mariner.................................................................................................. 29
Recommended editions......................................................................................................29
Recommended secondary reading...............................................................................29
Online resources ...................................................................................................................30
Introduction.............................................................................................................................30
Readings.....................................................................................................................................33
Learning outcomes...............................................................................................................37
Sample examination questions......................................................................................37
Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’s
Tale’ and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight...................................................... 39
Recommended editions......................................................................................................39
Recommended secondary reading...............................................................................40
The origins of medieval romance..................................................................................42

i
Explorations in Literature

Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet.........................................................................................44

Genre and gender in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight.............................................................................................................................46
Learning outcomes...............................................................................................................55
Sample examination questions on ‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’......55
Sample examination questions on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.........56
Sample examination questions using this material for Section C...............56
Chapter 5: Section C comparative study – Satire: Pope’s The Rape of
the Lock and Fielding’s Joseph Andrews........................................................... 57
Recommended editions......................................................................................................57
Recommended secondary reading...............................................................................57
Introduction.............................................................................................................................58
Learning outcomes...............................................................................................................66
Sample examination questions......................................................................................66
Chapter 6: Section C comparative study – The Bildungsroman: Hardy’s
Jude the Obscure and Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man........... 67
Recommended editions......................................................................................................67
Recommended secondary reading...............................................................................67
Online resources....................................................................................................................68
Introduction.............................................................................................................................68
The Bildungsroman...............................................................................................................68
Jude the Obscure and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
narrative style and the reader.........................................................................................69
Learning outcomes...............................................................................................................75
Sample examination questions......................................................................................75
Appendix 1: Other recommended texts and sample questions.................... 77
Sophocles, Antigone..............................................................................................................77
Ovid, Metamorphoses...........................................................................................................79
Dante, The Inferno.................................................................................................................80
The metaphysical poets......................................................................................................81
John Milton, Paradise Lost Books 1 and 2....................................................................82
Jane Austen, Emma...............................................................................................................83
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.............................................................................85
August Strindberg, Miss Julie...........................................................................................87
T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations................................................................88
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway..........................................................................................90
Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot...............................................................................91
Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet...............................................................92
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad................................................................................93
Appendix 2: Sample examination paper......................................................... 95
Section A.....................................................................................................................................95
Section B.....................................................................................................................................95
Section C.....................................................................................................................................96
Appendix 3: Sample Examiners’ report............................................................ 97
Advice to candidates on how Examiners calculate marks...............................97
Introduction.............................................................................................................................98
General remarks.....................................................................................................................98

ii
Course learning outcomes and assessment criteria

Course learning outcomes and

assessment criteria

This course introduces a wide range of works from the literary canon,
from ancient Greek texts in translation to the contemporary, covering
the major genres, and embodying significant interventions or influences
in literary history. The emphasis is on reading primary texts voraciously
and discovering – or rediscovering – diverse writers and cultures, so that
students can make informed choices from more specialized courses
later in their programme. Not being limited to a period, genre or single
approach, the course cultivates difference and chronological sweep; it
aims to challenge and surprise, as rewarding ‘exploration’ should.

Learning outcomes
By the end of the course you should:
•• have read a number of works that have been influential in the
literary ‘canon’
•• be aware of the cultural diversity that has informed and continues
to inform ‘English’ literature
•• understand how literary genres and forms yield experimentation as
well as continuities
•• recognize the historicity as well as continuing accessibility of texts
from diverse backgrounds
•• have improved your historical overview of literature by study of
primary texts in ways that will help orientate you in relation to other
more specialized courses in the programme
•• have improved basic skills in written expression and critical analysis
•• be able to reflect on ‘exploration’ of and within texts.

Mode of assessment
One three-hour unseen examination.

Assessment criteria
You will be assessed according to your ability to:
•• show why course texts have been deemed culturally significant
•• compare ways in which particular concepts are handled in texts
from different periods and cultural backgrounds
•• show responsiveness to genre as a factor in creation of meaning
•• show sensitivity to historical contexts and evolutions exemplified by
the texts
•• perform basic textual analysis and communicate ideas effectively in
the written exam
•• your awareness of ‘exploration’ as a literary device. 1
Explorations in Literature

Notes

2
Introduction

Introduction

Explorations in Literature is a 30-credit course. Each credit carries

10-hours notional study time; 30 credits thus indicates 300 notional
study hours, equivalent to 10 hours per week over 30 weeks.

Using this subject guide

This subject guide is not an exhaustive study of, nor a comprehensive
guide to, Explorations in Literature. How well you succeed in the
examination will depend on your knowledge of the individual primary
texts studied for the subject and secondary material, such as literary
criticism, history, biography and so on.
The guide is intended as an indication of how you might decide to
organise and develop your own programme of study. The texts we
consider here might not coincide with your own choices from the
prescribed syllabus of texts but the critical procedures indicated should
be applicable to your own choices.
It is in this sense that the guide acts as a model, but we would stress
that the model will have to be adapted by you in various ways (for
instance, you will certainly want to study more texts than we have
space to discuss here).
This guide does not explore every possible approach to the authors
and topics discussed, but is an example of how you could construct an
appropriate course of study and devise appropriate ways of studying
the material you choose. It also indicates the range of material that
is the minimum amount necessary to face the examination with
confidence. Simple regurgitation in the examination of the illustrative
material in this subject guide will be regarded as plagiarism and heavily
penalised. Examiners will always look unfavourably at examinations
that are composed of answers that draw solely on the illustrative
material provided in this subject guide.
There are six chapters in this guide:
•• Chapters 1 and 2 indicate ways of preparing for Section A questions
on individual texts from the period between Homer and Fielding.
•• Chapter 3 indicates ways of preparing for Section B questions on
individual texts from the period between Coleridge and Atwood.
•• Chapters 4 to 6 indicate ways of preparing for Section C questions
comparing different authors.
You may also want to develop lines of enquiry that are only alluded to
here; indeed, you may want to investigate issues that are not raised at
all in the guide. During the course of this subject guide we will indicate
directions that seem to us to be of particular interest and importance
and we will be suggesting ways in which you might investigate
them. Feel free to adapt the material we are offering here in any way
consistent with the learning outcomes of the subject. For example, you

3
Explorations in Literature

may want to use material from Chapters 5 and 6 to prepare individual

texts of the exam. Or you may want to use material from Chapters
1–4 to provide the basis for comparative work for Section C of the
examination in combination with other suitable texts of your own
choice from the syllabus of prescribed texts.
Each chapter starts with a suggested reading list for the topic(s)
covered in that chapter. It is divided into ‘recommended editions’ and
‘recommended secondary reading’. The former sets out the text(s)
discussed in the chapter. The latter list includes a number of books and
articles that will enhance your knowledge and understanding of the
topic.
In every chapter you will come across activities. These activities are
designed to help you reflect on what you have just read. You will make
most progress if you attempt to answer each of these questions as you
come across them in the text. You should refer back to the reading and
then write your answers down or discuss them with someone else.
We include a list of learning outcomes at the end of each chapter.
Learning outcomes tell you what you should have learned from that
chapter of the subject guide and the relevant reading. You should pay
close attention to the learning outcomes and use them to check that
you have fully understood the topic(s) under discussion.
In each chapter we will also be listing Sample examination questions
you might want to revise or plan responses to. This will give you
the opportunity to consolidate your ideas, and will be important
preparation for your written examination.
Appendix 1 provides you with a list of recommended editions and
secondary reading for each of the texts on the prescribed syllabus
of this course not covered in this subject guide. This appendix
also provides you with a list of questions, as well as some sample
examination questions which will help to direct your studies of these
texts.
Finally, you will find a Sample examination paper and an Examiners'
report.

General subject reading

There are no textbooks that adequately cover the whole content of
Explorations in Literature. You will find some general histories of
literature and generic studies in the Student handbook. These will help,
but they will need to be supplemented by more detailed criticism of
individual works and authors.
If you wish to extend your reading beyond the recommended texts
listed in the chapters of this guide or in Appendix 1, you will need to
compile your own reading lists with the help of the Student handbook
and bearing the following points in mind:
•• Most libraries have computerised indexing that will cross-reference.
So the entry ‘Homer’, for example, should produce lists of Homer’s
writings, but also biographies, critical readings etc.

4
Introduction

•• You will know from reading the Student handbook that the nature
of English studies has changed radically over the last 30 years. Bear
this in mind. If all the criticism you read on Homer, for example, was
written in the 1950s, you would have a very limited idea of the more
recent range of critical responses to this writer.
•• Go for collections of essays, such as ‘Twentieth-century
interpretations’, the ‘Casebook’ series and so on. Collections like these
often provide fast access to a range of critical views and approaches.
•• Remember that good critical editions of the prescribed texts, such
as the Penguin and Oxford Classics, contain bibliographies. These
will be useful to you in compiling your own reading lists.
•• If you have access to the internet, the catalogue listings for the
Online Library at Senate House can be found online (www.ull.ac.uk).
A collection search will give you a good indication of what has been
written on the writers or texts you are studying; it also gives ISBN
numbers for the majority of texts.
•• Online resources can be useful for secondary reading if used
carefully. Sites such as Wikipedia are not to be trusted implicitly,
and information such as dates, titles and explanations of theories,
movements and contexts should be checked using a more
reputable source. Sites which are based within academic institutions
or libraries (such as Senate House Library mentioned above) are
more reliable, and databases of academic journals such as JSTOR are
helpful for finding a huge variety of articles written about particular
texts. NB: you should exercise caution with printed books in the
same way as you do with online resources. Always make sure you
are aware of the date that the critical work you are consulting was
first published, to give you an idea of its context. Remember that
criticism on any text is always evolving.

Subject content
The prescribed texts, and recommended editions, for Explorations in
Literature are listed below.

Section A texts
Homer The Odyssey. Translated by W. Shewring. (Oxford: World’s Classics,
Oxford University Press, 2008 or later edition) [ISBN 9780199536788].
Sophocles Antigone in The Theban Plays. Translated by E.F. Watling
(Harmondsworth: Penguin 1973 or later edition) [ISBN 9780140440034].
Ovid Metamorphoses. Translated by A.D. Melville (Oxford: Oxford
World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008 or later edition)
[ISBN 9780199537372].
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy: Inferno. Translated by Mark
Musa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003 or later edition)
[ISBN 9780142437223].
Geoffrey Chaucer The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale (Selected Tales from
Chaucer) J. Winny (ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016
or later edition) [ISBN 9781316615607].

5
Explorations in Literature

Barron, W.R.J. (ed.) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1998) [ISBN 9780719055171].
Burrow, C. (ed.) Metaphysical Poetry. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics,
2006) [ISBN 9780140424447].
William Shakespeare Hamlet. Thompson, A. and N. Taylor (eds) (London:
Bloomsbury Arden, 2016) [ISBN 9781472518385].
John Milton Paradise Lost. S. Orgel and J. Goldberg (eds) (Oxford: World’s
Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199535743]. Note: we
study Books I and II.
Alexander Pope The Rape of the Lock. (London: Vintage, 2007)
[ISBN 9780099511526].
Henry Fielding Joseph Andrews and Shamela and Related Writings. (New
York: Norton, 1987) [ISBN 9780393955552].

Section B texts
Samuel Taylor Coleridge Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose. (New York: Norton,
2003) [ISBN 9780393979046].
Jane Austen Emma. (London: Penguin, revised edition, 2003 or later
edition) [ISBN 9780141439587].
Charles Dickens Great Expectations. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford
University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199219766].
August Strindberg Miss Julie in Miss Julie and Other Plays. Translated by
Michael Robinson. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford University
Press, 2008 or later edition) [ISBN 9780199538041].
Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure. (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford
University Press, 2008 or later edition) [ISBN 9780199537020].
T.S. Eliot Prufrock and Other Observations. (London: Faber & Faber, 2001)
[ISBN 9780571207206].
James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. (Oxford: World’s Classics,
Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199536443].
Virginia Woolf Mrs Dalloway. (London: Penguin, 2000)
[ISBN 9780141182490].
Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot. (London: Faber & Faber, 2010)
[ISBN 9780571244591].
Leonora Carrington The Hearing Trumpet. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2005)
[ISBN 9780141187990].
Margaret Atwood The Penelopiad. (London: Canongate Books, 2008)
[ISBN 9781841957043]. Note: this is the novel not the play.
In subsequent chapters of this guide, particular editions of certain
prescribed texts may be recommended. In choosing an edition of
other texts on the syllabus, do try to obtain one that has a good critical
introduction and reasonably comprehensive notes. The Penguin,
Oxford World’s Classics, Norton and New Everyman Classics series of
paperbacks fall into this category.

Suggested study syllabus

You will have some choice over which texts you choose to study from
the prescribed syllabus. Your choices will be determined partly by your
personal tastes and interests, partly by the objectives of this course
(which require you to study a historical and generic range of literature)
and partly by the methods through which you will be assessed (see
Methods of assessment below).
6
Introduction

In constructing your own syllabus of study for this course, you need
to prepare an adequate range of material to be able to face the
examination with confidence. You are advised to strike a balance
between work from the earlier and later parts of the subject and
between the various genres it includes.
You should study in detail at least 10 of the prescribed texts for this
course. This is the minimum necessary to give you sufficient choice in
the examination and to enable you to fulfil the objectives of the course.
Here, we offer a sample 22-week study syllabus, structured to cover an
appropriate range of material. You may, of course, wish to substitute
authors, topics or individual texts of your choice from the list above.

Weeks 1–3
Single-text study (Section A): Homer’s The Odyssey.

Weeks 4–6
Single-text study (Section A): Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Weeks 7–9
Single-text study (Section B): Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner.

Weeks 10–12
Single-text study (Section B): Beckett's Waiting for Godot.

Weeks 13–15
Comparative study (Section C): Chaucer’s ‘Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight.

Weeks 16–18
Comparative study (Section C): Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews.

Weeks 19–21
Comparative study (Section C): Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Joyce’s A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Weeks 21–22
Revision and practice examination questions.

Methods of assessment
Important: the information and advice given here are based on the
examination structure used at the time this guide was written. Please
note that subject guides may be used for several years. Because
of this we strongly advise you to always check both the current
Regulations for relevant information about the examination, and the
virtual learning environment (VLE) where you should be advised of
any forthcoming changes. You should also carefully check the rubric/
instructions on the paper you actually sit and follow those instructions.

7
Explorations in Literature

At the end of this course, you will be assessed by a three-hour unseen

examination paper. There will be three sections: Section A, Section B
and Section C. You must answer one question from each section.
•• In Section A, you will be asked questions about individual texts
covering the period from Homer to Fielding.
•• In Section B, you will be asked questions about individual texts
covering the period from Coleridge to Atwood.
•• In Section C, you will be asked to compare and contrast the work of
different authors.
Please note that the rubric for the examination contains the following
instruction: ‘Candidates may not discuss the same text in more than
one answer’. This means that you must not discuss the same text in
more than one answer in the examination, or in any other Level 4
examination (with one exception – see the next paragraph).
You can, however, use texts that you have answered on in the
Explorations in Literature examination to answer questions in the
Approaches to Text examination, provided your treatment of the
text(s) in question is significantly different.
Remember, it is important to check the VLE for:
•• up-to-date information on examination and assessment
arrangements for this course
•• where available, past examination papers and Examiners’ reports for
the course which give advice on how each question might best be
answered.

Examination technique
If you have followed the instructions offered in the subject guide,
read as much of the suggested syllabus as possible and engaged with
the topics under consideration, you should be well prepared for the
examination. However, in order to do justice to yourself and the subject
on the day of examination, it is useful to think about your examination
technique. The Student handbook provides good advice on how to
prepare for assessment, so as you study and prepare for examinations
you should read it carefully as well as bearing in mind the following
suggestions:
•• If possible, read a Sample examination paper from a previous year
so that you are familiar with the range and type of questions you
might expect to encounter (see the Sample examination paper at
the end of this guide).
•• Use the Sample examination paper to practise writing timed answers.
•• In the examination, read the rubric carefully, and at least twice, and
follow the instructions given.
•• Read the whole paper through before choosing which questions to
attempt.
•• Leave yourself sufficient time to answer all the questions you are
asked to complete. If you do run out of time, write down in note form
all the points you would have included. (You may be given credit for
an outline of an answer which you have not had time to write in full).
8
Introduction

•• Proofread it! At the end of the examination, read through what you
have written, correcting spelling, grammar, punctuation etc. and
checking titles and the names of authors for inaccuracies. Simple
errors or slips can detract from a good answer.
These rules may seem obvious but are essential for good examination
performance in any subject. To further develop and improve your
examination technique you should also read the annual Examiners’ reports
(a sample report is contained at the back of this guide) and consider the
following additional points.

Choosing the question

One of the most important examination techniques is the ability to
choose the type of question that you are well equipped to answer,
which will enable you to demonstrate the particular knowledge and
skills you have acquired during your course of study. For instance, if a
question asks you to discuss the use of Greek myth in any one text you
have studied, you will need a framework of historical and theoretical
knowledge to answer this question adequately. It is also important to
remember that conditions change, and what may have been true of
one period or place may not be true of another. What may have been
the case when Homer was writing The Odyssey may not have been
the case when Atwood was writing the The Penelopiad. Avoid making
generalisations and, if possible, link your comments to specific facts
about the period under discussion. (You may find the slogan ‘always
historicise’ a useful reminder of these points.)

Reading the question

In order to answer questions effectively, it is important to understand
what you are being asked to do, so look at the terms of the questions
(i.e. to ‘consider’, ‘compare’, ‘evaluate’, ‘discuss’ or ‘define’) and make sure
you do what the question asks you to do. If you are asked, for example,
to consider the use of satire in The Rape of the Lock it is not enough to
list examples of satire in the text. To describe or list is not to ‘consider’.
With this question you might start by considering the particular effects
of satire in a literary text. You could then extend your discussion to
show the ways in which satire might enable Pope to present the
argument of The Rape of the Lock in a particular way.
When writing your answer it is also useful to begin with a brief
definition of the key terms. If you are answering a question on the use
of allegory in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, for example, you could
start by stating what you understand by ‘allegory’.

General matters: essays

In selecting topics on which to write practice essays, remember that
your essays will be preparing you to answer examination questions,
and therefore you should select essay topics that relate to the three
sections of the final examination.

9
Explorations in Literature

Online resources
Please note that additional study resources may be available to you for
this course. A particularly important resource is the VLE for the English
programme, which you can access via the Student Portal – see the
Student handbook for details of how to log in.
If you are registered for Level 4 course(s) on the new programme (BA
English (New Regulations)/Diploma of Higher Education in English/
Certificate of Higher Education in English), then the VLE is the place
where you will interact with your assigned tutor group for that course.

10
Chapter 1: Section A single-text study – Homer’s The Odyssey

Chapter 1: Section A single-text study –

Homer’s The Odyssey

Recommended editions
Good modern English translations of The Odyssey include:
Fitzgerald, R. (trans.) The Odyssey. (New York: Vintage Classics, 2007)
[ISBN 9780099511687].
Shewring, W. (trans.) The Odyssey. (Oxford: World’s Classics, Oxford
University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199536788].

Other important secondary works

Clay, J.S. The Wrath of Athena: Gods and Men in The Odyssey. (Lanham:
Rowman & Littlefield, 1996) [ISBN 9780822630692].
Cohen, B. (ed.) The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s
Odyssey. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press USA, 1995)
[ISBN 9780195086836].
Doherty, L.E. Homer’s Odyssey. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)
[ISBN 9780199233335].
Graziosi, B. and E. Greenwood Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between
World Literature and the Western Canon. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780199591312].
Katz, M.A. Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in The Odyssey.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) [ISBN 9780691067964].
Peradotto, J. Man in the Middle Voice: Name and Narration in The Odyssey.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) [ISBN 9780691068305].
Reece, S. The Stranger’s Welcome: Oral Theory and the Aesthetics of the
Homeric Hospitality Scene. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,
1993) [ISBN 9780472103867].
Schein, S.L. (ed.) Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays.
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780691044392].

11
Explorations in Literature

Online resources
These need to be used with the customary care, but you can be
confident of the resources hosted on the Perseus site:
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/
You might like to consult Robin Mitchell-Boyask’s site at Temple
University:
www.temple.edu/classics/odysseyho/index.html
There are lots of translations available online: see, for example, the
Perseus version,
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.01.0136
The Samuel Butler version,
http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/odyssey.html
The George Chapman version,
www.bartleby.com/111/
The Perseus site also has a useful overview of archaic Greek history, by
Thomas R. Martin:
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=TRM+OV&redirect=true

Introduction
The Odyssey is an epic poem in 24 books of verse, attributed to
Homer, which probably took the form in which we read it circa 750
bce. It appeared prior to the classics of Greek tragedy, philosophy and

history, and before many books of the Old Testament. It is a partner

to the other Homeric epic, The Iliad, and together these poems were
the founding texts of ancient Greek civilisation, as the Bible later was
for Christian cultures. Because of the recurring importance of ancient
Greece to subsequent cultures, The Odyssey has become one of the
most influential texts in world literature. It continues to reverberate in
contemporary culture: not only subsequent epics like Vergil’s Aeneid,
James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Derek Walcott’s Omeros, but also films such
as the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou, and novels such as
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad, acknowledge The Odyssey as part of
their cultural inheritance.
As an epic, The Odyssey operates on a grand scale, addressing the
most resonant themes, such as love, death and the place of humanity
within a cosmos directed by unfathomable, hostile or competing
deities. It sets the bar for subsequent epics which also encompass
motifs such as the quest, the journey over water, and the descent into
the Underworld. It does not deal directly with war, unlike many other
epics, because it is set in the aftermath of the Trojan War, tracing the
journey home of the Greek hero Odysseus. It thus combines a thrilling
tale of survival against the odds – against cannibals, scheming females
and dangerous deities – with a story that is essentially domestic, and
which longs chiefly to reunite the hero with his wife Penelope and son
Telemachus. The reunion is threatened, however, by the fact that the
palace on Ithaca is overrun by wild young nobles who seek Penelope’s

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Chapter 1: Section A single-text study – Homer’s The Odyssey

hand in marriage, in order to take over Odysseus’s royal property, and

who, at the beginning of the epic, are also plotting to murder his son.
Since the poem thus combines so many different elements within
the structure of the journey home, interpretations of it have often
approached the cosmic level, and it has been understood as everything
from a blueprint for ancient Greek colonisation to a meditation
on human identity. This introduction will first discuss some formal
elements, and then offer some thematic guidance, centred on the
issues of heroism and of gender.
The poem’s appeal has been transhistorical, but there are also some
formal aspects that present obstacles to its enjoyment. In particular,
certain phrases recur very insistently: ‘dawn’ is almost always ‘rosy-
fingered’, the sea is regularly ‘wine-dark’, and whenever there is a feast,
those present invariably ‘put forth their hands towards the good things
that lay before them’. Even larger blocks of verse, and whole scenes,
which describe repeated actions, such as feasting, can be iterated
word for word. It was this feature of The Odyssey, which it shares
with the The Iliad, which prompted perhaps the most remarkable
discovery about the poem in modern times. This discovery, made by
the scholar Milman Parry in the 1930s, explains numerous features of
the poem, particularly why it is characterised by so much repetition
in terms of phrasing and plotting, and explains The Iliad in the same
terms. While doing fieldwork in what was then Yugoslavia, Parry
recorded oral poems sung in Serbo-Croat by folk bards. What Parry
observed was that individual bards often sang the same very long
poem but with innumerable minor variations. Extrapolating from these
findings, he hypothesised that The Odyssey, and The Iliad, were highly
collective productions, which had developed over time and been
widely circulated and revised, but that they were also, in the process,
the productions of individual bards and their innumerable small acts
of improvisation, each of these singers varying the expression of a
known plot. Parry’s investigation concentrated on the metre of the
two Homeric poems, and plausibly explained how these singing poets
could complete the metre of an improvised line of verse by drawing
on a whole repertoire of stock words or phrases. Since the repeated
elements in the poem are of different lengths, such as the single word
‘brave’ attached to Odysseus or the much longer phrase ‘rosy-fingered’
attached to ‘dawn’, they could be used quickly and readily to fill gaps of
just the right size, as the poet, in his singing, groped to complete the
metre of a given line.
Parry’s conclusions about the ‘oral transmission’ of the poems have
become established as the best overall explanation not only of how The
Odyssey, and The Iliad, came into existence, but also why the poem’s
texture is studded with these many repetitions. Subsequent analysis
has shown how certain lines and even whole scenes are also repeated
because they offered convenient building blocks to the oral poet
who had to extemporise. Earlier debates had struggled to explain this
texture either by the hypothesis of a particular individual genius (the
unitarian argument) or by the notion that the poem was the product
of some sort of committee (the ‘analytic’). Oral transmission reconciles
these ideas by the successive contributions of a series of talented poets

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over time. If the figure of Homer existed at all, it is likely that he was
the scribe who first committed a version of the shifting oral Odyssey to
written script.
Activity
Find examples of repeated scenes, such as putting on armour, single combat,
sacrifice, feasting, visiting etc. Find three adjectives used with the name ‘Achilles’
and three with the name ‘Agamemnon’. How meaningful do you find these
adjectives? Try the same exercise with ‘Odysseus’ and ‘Penelope’.

Another feature of The Odyssey that readers often remark on is the

somewhat convoluted plot. While this is structured by the motif of the
quest, in other respects it is complex, and again part of its appeal can
be understood in the balance and combination of the domestic and
the distant. The epic begins with its focus not on the questing hero
but rather on his son, who is confined in the toxic atmosphere of the
palace at Ithaca. Only at the end of Book II does Telemachus succeed in
departing, and there then follow two additional books before Odysseus
actually appears in the text, during which Telemachus journeys to visit
old friends of his father in order to seek news of him. The action of this
‘Telemachy’ is suspended, as the narrative focus suddenly switches to his
father who, like his son at the beginning, is confined, in this case in the
palace of the nymph Calypso.
Odysseus too is trying to escape and four books, from V through
VIII, narrate his trajectory from Calypso’s island to the court of the
Phaeacians and his reception there. There is then an even more
noticeable shift in the narrative structure, when the story of Odysseus
at the court of Alcinous changes to Odysseus’s first-person narrative
about himself. This first-person account runs from Book IX through
to XII, and concludes there as Odysseus finishes his story, at the half-
way point of the epic, having recounted his adventures up to this
very moment of their telling. After the next two books, XIII and XIV,
Odysseus’s final return to Ithaca, the narrative at the beginning of
Book XV swings back to resume the account of Telemachus’s effort to
return home, which was left uncompleted at Book XIV, and to get him
home in Book XV. Two separate narratives, focused on son and father
in sequence, converge and finally intersect. Hereafter, until the poem
ends at Book XXIV, there is a single storyline, which drives forward
into the future, rather than looping back into the past. This multilinear,
intertwining narrative is not merely an engaging formal feature of the
poem, however. It also produces effects, such as suspense and intrigue,
and, beyond that, it is pertinent to some of the themes of the poem.

Activity
Draw a linear chart of the narrative, grouping the books of the epic together
according to the character on which they focus, and according to whether they
feature third-person or first-person narratives (e.g. Books I–IV, Telemachus, third-
person narrative).

One such theme is that of heroism, which obviously features largely in

the epic. The poem begins with a focus on Telemachus, the boy who is
becoming a man, and who therefore needs heroic models. But these

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Chapter 1: Section A single-text study – Homer’s The Odyssey

are in very short supply, since the male environment surrounding him
consists almost entirely of the dissolute suitors. He thus faces not only
the debilitation of his family, house and the kingdom, but also the loss
and absence of his father, which makes the suitors’ behaviour possible.
Telemachus’s response is to try to fill in the vacuum of the absent father
by reconstructing that father from the stories about him provided by
Nestor, Menelaus and Helen. In this activity and the associated forays
into the heroic world of his father’s friends, Telemachus already begins
to act like the very role model that he is building.
No matter how much Telemachus approximates his father in himself,
however, he cannot replace his father until his father, ironically, returns.
As is indicated by the narrative sequencing their returns, Telemachus
cannot get back to Ithaca until Odysseus does. Given that Telemachus
has gone as far as he possibly can in finding, and making, his father,
the narrative switches to Odysseus himself, at the start of Book V, as
we finally encounter the great ‘sacker of cities’, the hero of the Trojan
Horse, even more fearsome in the lethal power of his mind than in his
formidable prowess as a warrior. But how does he first appear in The
Odyssey? He is weeping ‘like a woman’, as the patriarchal stereotype
of ancient Greek culture has it, and on Calypso’s island he is indeed
losing his heroic masculinity because he is captive to a female whom
he does not even desire any more. He makes good his escape, but
then Poseidon, Greek god of the sea, intervenes, smashing the raft and
reducing Odysseus to the status of a castaway. When he meets the
beautiful Nausicaa on the Phaeacian beach, he has been reduced to the
literal bare minimum of humanity.
How does Odysseus reacquire heroic status after this dramatic fall? In
the first instance, Odysseus excels in the competitive games that the
Phaeacians stage in Book VIII. More important than this physical prowess,
however, is his accomplishment at the ensuing feast, when his host
Alcinous asks him who he is. Alcinous is prompted by the tears Odysseus
sheds at hearing the story of the Trojan War sung by the court bard, but
when Odysseus takes over the storytelling, to recount his own history,
he rebuilds his heroic identity, reliving, reinventing and recognising
himself in the autobiographical narrative. Frustrated though he is in
his quest to return home, he now knows fully who he once was, as well
as who he now is, and he can link both these versions of himself in a
devastating but ultimately enabling chain of narration. As important as
this self-rediscovery is, there is another consequence of Odysseus’s story
of himself which is just as important as this one. The Phaeacians are so
moved that they bestow on Odysseus not merely as much treasure as
he took from Troy, and then lost on the way, but more such treasure. Not
only his heroism but also his art is amply compensated.
Odysseus’s first-person narrative arguably also develops a new, post-
war version of heroism. It shows him engaging with the various hazards
that thronged his route home, such as the cannibal Laestrygonians,
the soporific Lotus-Eaters, the sorceress Circe who turns men into pigs,
and the monster Cyclops. On the way back from the Trojan War he puts
his famous intelligence to the service of guile, deception and disguise,
as he develops an identity characterised less by traditional military
heroism and more by the flexibility, indeed opportunism, of a survivor.

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Explorations in Literature

Two moments sum up this development. In the cave of the Cyclops he

escapes by using the trick of calling himself ‘Nobody’, but when he then
announces to the wounded monster his real heroic name and lineage,
he accidentally enables the Cyclops to curse him with Poseidon’s wrath.
In the Underworld, the shade of Achilles counsels him in the necessity
of survival at any cost by showing that it is preferable to be a poor man
alive than a great hero among the dead. Alone, having lost all his men,
and in the disguise of a beggar, Odysseus will be that poor man when
he successfully takes on the suitors.
Activity
Discuss the ways in which The Odyssey represents heroism. To what extent is
Odysseus a conventional warlike hero, and to what extent is he engaged in a
redefinition of heroism?

The inset first-person narrative brings Odysseus into contact with a

range of figures, and although the focus is on Odysseus’s adventures,
commentators remark on the wide sympathies of the poem. When
Odysseus gets to Ithaca, several low-status characters still make claims
on our attention, such as the shepherd Eumaeus and other ‘faithful
retainers’, and Odysseus’s neglected dog. Even the hostile characters
like Melanthius and the maids perhaps evoke some pity. More striking
still is the prominence of Penelope as the epic nears its end, and
the questions that arise about her perception of Odysseus’s identity
beneath the beggarly disguise: what does she know and when does
she know it? Throughout the poem Odysseus encounters a series of
formidable females, such as Circe, Calypso and Nausicaa; interest in the
female is such that Samuel Butler conjectured the poem’s author to be
a young woman. The female figures, which present various difficulties
to Odysseus, including metamorphosis, death and marriage, are
ranged between Helen, the faithless wife of Menelaus, who was one
cause of the Trojan War, and Penelope, herself under siege on Ithaca.
Lurking in the background is the nightmare figure of Clytemnestra,
wife of Agamemnon, supreme commander of the Greek host at Troy. In
the Underworld, the ghost of Agamemnon tells Odysseus how he was
murdered by Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus, on his triumphant
return from Troy. How Penelope will receive Odysseus thus becomes a
crucial question.
In the event, her recognition of him comes via two tests, which are
to distinguish him from the frauds who have plagued her during the
last 10 years. First there is the archery contest, which Odysseus passes
with flying colours, after which he massacres the suitors. The second
test occurs when Penelope implies that his great bed has been moved
from its original place. At this, he remonstrates with Penelope, insisting
that no man could move it, because it is constructed out of a tree
that is still rooted in the ground. This detail about the bed is a secret
shared between husband and wife, and since only Odysseus could
know it, Penelope accepts him as the authentic article. The additional
significance of this secret is that Penelope has tested Odysseus by
tricking him, in particular by suggesting her own infidelity, which
matches his liaisons with Circe and Calypso. Finally, the trickster has
himself been tricked, into revealing himself not on his terms, but on
hers.
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Chapter 1: Section A single-text study – Homer’s The Odyssey

Activity
Compare and contrast the female figures of The Odyssey with each other and with
Odysseus.

The rooted bed is a sign of Odysseus’s organic connection to his

wife, house and kingdom, and it is no surprise that he and Penelope
retreat to it, in order to share stories as well as to renew their marital
acquaintance. But Odysseus also brings danger to his community
because he has killed off the young nobles, and their families seek
revenge. To prevent this threat of a whole new war, Athena, backed
by Zeus, intervenes, and the potentially warring parties are reconciled
under a wider settlement. Many readers have found this ending
obscurely unsatisfactory – perhaps we crave the romantic fade on
the reunited couple rather than protracted negotiations with the
entire community. If so, The Odyssey is wiser than such readers in its
awareness that the adjustment between war and peace is a constant
necessity, and that the stories do not end.

Learning outcomes
Having read The Odyssey, this introduction and the associated
secondary literature, you should be able to:
•• give an account of the significance that The Odyssey has had for
subsequent epic and related literature
•• give an account of what is meant by ‘oral transmission’ and its
importance for understanding The Odyssey
•• analyse the ways in which the different strands of The Odyssey’s plot
contribute to an overall understanding of the epic
•• discuss the relationship between Odysseus and Telemachus
•• give an account of the varieties of heroic identity that can be read in
The Odyssey
•• give an account of Odysseus’s interactions with female characters.

Sample examination questions

1. How important is the idea of cunning intelligence for an
understanding of The Odyssey?
2. Is The Odyssey more interested in the individual hero, or in the
various communities that he encounters?
3. Why is part of The Odyssey told in the first person?

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Notes

18
Chapter 2: Section A single-text study – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Chapter 2: Section A single-text study –

Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Recommended editions
Shakespeare, William Hamlet. Edited by Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor.
(London: Arden Shakespeare Third Series, 2005) [ISBN 9781904271338].
Extremely well annotated (over annotated to some tastes), a lengthy
introduction with an emphasis on the critical and theatrical history of
the play.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet. Edited by G.R. Hibbard. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199535811]. A well annotated edition
with a helpful, wide ranging introduction and useful illustrations.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet. Introduction by Alan Sinfield. (London:
Penguin, 1980, 2005) [ISBN 9780141013077]. Accessible, thought-
provoking introduction and straightforward notes.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet: Shakespeare in Production. Edited by Robert
Hapgood. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
[ISBN 9780521646352]. Not recommended for a first reading of the text
but compelling for its insights into how different actors and directors
have staged the play.
Shakespeare, William Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623. Edited by Ann
Thompson and Neil Taylor. (London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007)
[ISBN 9781904271802]. Not recommended for a first reading of the play but
valuable for a comparison between the two most influential texts of the play.
The 1603 version is longer than the 1623 version, this edition explores the
differences between the two texts and their possible significance.

Jardine, Lisa Reading Shakespeare Historically. (London: Routledge, 1996)

[ISBN 9780415134903].
Kiséry, András. Hamlet’s Moment: Drama and Political Knowledge in
Early Modern England. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018)
[ISBN 9780198822264].
Kyd, Thomas Spanish Tragedy. (London: New Mermaids, 2009)
[ISBN 9781408114216].
Lavender, Andy Hamlet in Pieces. (London: Nick Hern, 2001)
[ISBN 9781854596185].
Maher, Mary Z Modern Hamlets and their Soliloquies. (Iowa City: University
of Iowa Press, 2003) [ISBN 9780877458265].
McDonald, Russ Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780198711711].
McEvoy, S. William Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Sourcebook. (London: Routledge,
2006) [ISBN 9780415314336].
McEachern, C. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Tragedy,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) second edition
[ISBN 9781107643321].
Pennington, Michael Hamlet: A User’s Guide. (London: Nick Hern, 2008)
[ISBN 9781854595461] (Out of print).
Rutter, Carol Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s
Stage. (London: Routledge, 2001) [ISBN 9780415141642].
Shakespeare, William Titus Andronicus. (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008) [ISBN 9780199536108].
Shapiro, James 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. (London:
Faber, 2006) [ISBN 9780571214815].
Thompson, Ann and Neil Taylor William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (Horndon:
Northcote House, 2005) second revised edition [ISBN 9780746311417].
Thompson, A. and N. Taylor (eds) Hamlet: A Critical Reader. (London:
Bloomsbury, 2016) [ISBN 9781472571373].
Wilson, J. Dover What Happens in Hamlet. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2010) [ISBN 9780521091091].
Wofford, Suzanne L. (ed.) Hamlet: Case Studies in Contemporary
Criticism. (London: Macmillan, 2011, 2019) 2nd revised edition
[ISBN 9780333973516].

Online resources
www.hamletworks.org offers exhaustive line-by-line interpretations as well
as longer essays and critical insights.
www.hamletguide.com offers a good selection of critical texts.
www.shakespeare-online.com offers some good insights, especially on the
influence of Seneca on Hamlet.
http://shea.mit.edu/ramparts/ Hamlet on the Ramparts concentrates on
Hamlet’s encounters with the ghost.
www.bbc.co.uk/hamlet a useful BBC link to clips of film versions.
www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jqtfs a BBC Radio 4 In Our Time
documentary on Hamlet. Melvyn Bragg and leading academics
Jonathan Bate, Carol Rutter and Sonia Massai discuss Shakespeare's
best known, most quoted and longest play, written c1599–1602 and
rewritten throughout his lifetime.
www.rsc.org.uk/explore/hamlet a link to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s
prominent productions of the play.

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Chapter 2: Section A single-text study – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Film versions
When approaching the examination paper, you should remember that
this is a text-based course and therefore you should not discuss film
versions in detail. Films of Hamlet do, however, offer an insight into
the importance of directorial interpretation and indicate how each era
produces its own version of the text (in Tony Richardson’s 1969 version,
for instance, Ophelia is played by Marianne Faithful and offers a wry
commentary on Flower Power, while Michael Almereyda’s film of 2000
relocates the play to contemporary New York against a background of
warring business corporations rather than kingdoms).
•• Hamlet directed by Laurence Olivier, 1948.
•• Hamlet directed by Grigori Kozintsev, 1964.
•• Hamlet directed by Tony Richardson, 1969.
•• Hamlet directed by Kenneth Branagh, 1996.
•• Hamlet directed by Michael Almereyda, 2000.
•• Hamlet directed by Gregory Doran, 2009.
•• Hamlet directed by Sarah Frankcom and Margaret Williams, 2015.

Introduction
Hamlet was first performed around 1600, three years before Queen
Elizabeth I’s death. Although it was based on an episode in the Danish
History of Saxo Grammaticus and on a lost play (sometimes called
the Ur-Hamlet), Shakespeare’s version perhaps reflects worries about
who would succeed the ageing Queen. It has often been argued that
Hamlet begins the period of Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies (it was
followed by Othello, King Lear and Macbeth); A.C. Bradley’s influential
Shakespearean Tragedy (1904) for instance focuses on these four plays,
even though several of Shakespeare’s previous tragedies, including
Titus Andronicus, Richard III and Romeo and Juliet, had enjoyed
great popularity. Bradley claimed that the later tragedies embody
philosophical ideas and a psychological realism of a greater depth than
that found elsewhere in Elizabethan literature. These claims have since
been questioned but for many critics Hamlet remains an important
expression of the disparity between human potential and the limiting
(and sometimes fatal) circumstances which constrain us.

Hamlet and the Elizabethan theatre

The sixteenth century saw the population of London expand
dramatically (it probably more than tripled). The first permanent theatre,
simply called The Theatre, was built in Shoreditch in 1576 to exploit this
potential large audience. It was financially successful and a number of
other theatres soon appeared around the outskirts of London. Plays were
written quickly (during his professional life Shakespeare averaged more
than two plays per year) for an audience hungry for new stories. The plot
inconsistencies in several of Shakespeare’s plays, including Hamlet, may
in part be due to this necessity to produce work rapidly.
Unlike Hamlet, Shakespeare was never a university student, and the
first published reference to him, by the playwright Robert Greene in

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Greenes Groats – Worth of Wit (1592), derides him for his relative lack of
education. Shakespeare was a professional author, writing for the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men; as a shareholder in their acting company he became
relatively rich. By 1599, the company was wealthy enough to build its
own theatre, The Globe, where Hamlet was probably first staged with the
overweight actor Richard Burbage, who was in his mid-30s, in the title
role. The Globe was an open air theatre and performances took place in
the afternoon, offering a contrast to the darkness surrounding many of
the play’s episodes, beginning with the first scene which occurs around
midnight. Much of the immediate cultural, biographical and historical
background to Hamlet is depicted in James Shapiro’s accessible and
enjoyable 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (2005).

Approaching Hamlet
Hamlet is Shakespeare’s longest play with a running time of over four
and a half hours and often excites controversy over which passages
might be cut in performance. Despite its length, this is an elusive
play which leaves many important questions unanswered. We do not
know why a ghost in a Catholic purgatory appears in a play written
for a Protestant audience or why he urges his son to commit a murder
which will put the son’s soul in peril. We are not told whether Gertrude
conspired with Claudius in the murder of her husband, why Claudius
decided to kill his brother or why Claudius has been elected King
instead of the popular Prince Hamlet. The extent of Hamlet’s previous
relationship with Ophelia is also uncertain. Horatio’s character changes
according to the demands of a particular scene: he is able to explain the
political situation to the guards during the first scene, for instance, but
seems ignorant of the same situation almost immediately afterwards
when he meets Hamlet.
Activity
1. Does our lack of knowledge about important elements in the plot of Hamlet
frustrate our enjoyment of the play or increase it?
2. Why do you think a playwright might deliberately withhold such information?

The play contains other confusions: Hamlet seems to be around 20

years old at the beginning of the play but the gravedigger later tells us
that he is over 30; the weather is freezing but King Hamlet has recently
been sleeping in the garden; and although he was murdered while
asleep at home he appears as a ghost in full armour rather than in the
garments in which he died.
The unanswered questions about the play seem less noticeable
during its performance. In many ways this is a play about the theatre.
It explores the relationship between truth, play-acting and deceit, so
inconsistent details may even seem appropriate. The purpose of The
Murder of Gonzago, a play within a play, is a paradoxical one: Hamlet is
using a fiction (a play) to reveal the true state of the King’s conscience.
The arrival of the players allows for a long extract from a third play about
the fall of Troy in a very different theatrical style from either the rhymed
couplets of The Murder of Gonzago or the general tone of Hamlet; like
Hamlet, this third play also concerns the murder of a king (Hamlet’s ‘true’
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Chapter 2: Section A single-text study – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

intent). Hamlet presumptuously lectures the actors on what constitutes

good acting (they are to ‘hold a mirror up to nature’) and he is amazed
that the Player King can cry ‘real’ tears for a mythological queen.
Repeatedly these passages reflect on the interplay between theatrical
illusion and reality. Hamlet also becomes an actor, pretending to be mad
so that he can escape suspicion. But it is possible to question whether
he altogether keeps his sanity (is his murder of Polonius a sane action?),
while his pretend madness seems to lead to Ophelia’s genuine insanity.
Given the multiple ways in which Hamlet reminds us of its theatricality,
it might be classified as Metatheatre: a work which deliberately draws
attention to its use of theatrical conventions.
Activity
1. What is the effect on an audience of a play which so frequently discusses the
theatre and questions of ‘good’ acting?
2. What different kinds of madness are depicted in this play?

Questions of genre: Hamlet and revenge tragedy

As a revenge tragedy, Hamlet is a genre piece and this both emphasises
its theatricality and leads to certain audience expectations. In a
revenge tragedy, someone close to the hero (usually a family member)
is murdered; the hero would normally demand justice of the king or
ruler but that person has either committed the murder or is closely
related to the murderer. Since the hero cannot expect justice from the
State, he determines on a personal revenge. By becoming a revenger,
he refuses to let God (or Providence – an important word in Hamlet)
ensure that justice is done; consequently the hero’s own moral status
becomes dubious. In the pursuit of his revenge, the hero may cause the
death of relatively innocent characters and this casts further doubt on
his morality. In some revenge plays the hero’s character deteriorates
as he comes closer to success and perhaps Hamlet’s rant on top of
Ophelia’s coffin suggests such a deterioration. The revenger is ultimately
successful but since this means that he too has become a murderer, he
is killed by the Providence that he denied.
Activity
1. Can you think of other stories you know, including plays, films and novels,
which approximate this description of revenge tragedy?
2. Why do you think revenge tragedies might have such a strong popular appeal?

Over the last 200 years, there has been a tradition of criticism,
expressed by such critics as S.T. Coleridge, A.C. Bradley and Harold
Bloom, that Hamlet is greater than the role of revenger which is
imposed on him. According to this view, part of Hamlet’s tragedy is
that he is too profound a thinker to fulfil a task which would better suit
a simpler man. Bloom’s Hamlet: Poem Unlimited (2003) in particular
credits Hamlet with an almost superhuman profundity: ‘Hamlet himself
is a frontier of consciousness yet to be passed’. Certainly, Hamlet is
the most complex of three characters in the play who seek to avenge
the death of their fathers. Of the other two, Laertes becomes utterly
ruthless and declares that if he met Polonius’s murderer he would be
prepared to ‘cut his throat I’th’church’, while Fortinbras (whose name

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Explorations in Literature

means ‘strong in arms’) is the embodiment of military strength and

unwavering resolution.
As background reading, you might want to look at Titus Andronicus
(circa 1592), a revenge tragedy partially written by Shakespeare. There
is also a remarkable film version (1999) by Julie Taymor of this very gory
play. How do the two plays resemble each other and how do they differ?
Activity
By murdering King Hamlet, Claudius has committed both fratricide (killing his
brother) and regicide (killing the king). Also, according to Renaissance thinking,
his marriage to his brother’s wife is incestuous. Imagine you are Claudius; using
the information revealed about King Hamlet, Gertrude and Claudius in the text,
write a page-long statement in which you justify your actions.

Questions of genre: is Hamlet a tragedy?

It is worth considering to what extent Hamlet can be classified as a
tragedy. The medieval view, which Shakespeare inherited, saw a tragedy
as an account of an individual’s fall from great status and prosperity
to unhappiness and a violent death. By this standard, Hamlet is a
tragedy but it is also a play which embraces a considerable amount
of comedy. Hamlet makes jokes and ridicules a series of characters
(Polonius, Rosencrantz, Guildenstern, Claudius and Osrick). His mockery
of Ophelia and Gertrude is equally trenchant but more painful; as an
audience we are less sure that they are deserving victims. By contrast,
classical tragic figures, such as Oedipus and Antigone as well as many of
Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes, such as King Lear and Othello, seem
relatively humourless; if there is any joking in their respective plays, it is
either harshly ironic or it is done by people other than the protagonist.
According to Aristotelian criteria, this introduction of comic elements
into Hamlet might prevent it from being a tragedy. John Milton in his
preface to his play Samson Agonistes (1671), ‘Of that sort of dramatic
poem called tragedy’, remained faithful to Aristotle’s view and protested
against ‘the poet’s error of intermixing comic stuff with tragic sadness
and gravity, or introducing trivial and vulgar persons’; the appearance of
the comic and ‘vulgar’ gravediggers in Act 5, Scene 1, would disqualify
Hamlet according to both of Milton’s Aristotelian principles.
By contrast, it has often been argued that Hamlet is a tragic character
because he displays hamartia, Aristotle’s ‘tragic flaw’, which negates
his exceptional and heroic qualities. According to Coleridge and other
Romantic critics, Hamlet’s fatal flaw is hesitation, an inability to act
brought on by his profundity and his soliloquy about action in Act 2,
Scene 2 (‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!’) is often cited as
both evidence of his philosophical outlook and his indecision.
Activity
1. Consider the difference between the popular view of tragedy as a downfall
from a position of great social status, represented by Hamlet, and Aristotle’s
more rigorous criteria, represented by Sophocles’s King Oedipus. What do you
believe to be the strengths and weaknesses of the two views?
2. How does the introduction of comic material into a tragedy affect the tragic
action? Do you agree with Milton’s view that the use of comic episodes in a
tragedy is an ‘error’?

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Chapter 2: Section A single-text study – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Approaching Hamlet as a domestic tragedy

In the twentieth century, Freudian critics, such as Ernest Jones,
reinforced the view that Hamlet’s fatal weakness is hesitation. They
argued that Hamlet had an Oedipus complex (he subconsciously
wished to kill his father and marry his mother) which caused him to
identify with Claudius (who has killed Hamlet’s father and married
Hamlet’s mother); consequently killing Claudius would be much
like killing himself. Laurence Olivier’s film version of Hamlet (1948)
was strongly influenced by Jones’s argument; in a voiceover at the
beginning of the film Olivier tells us that ‘This is the tragedy of a man
who could not make up his mind,’ and Hamlet’s confrontation with
Gertrude (played by Eileen Herlie, who was 12 years younger than
Olivier) in Act 3, Scene 4 was heavily sexualised and took place on the
Queen’s bed.
The extent and meaning of Hamlet’s indecision, however, remains
controversial. Hieronimo in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (circa
1589), the play which gave revenge tragedies their phenomenal
popularity, is so slow to avenge his son’s death that his despairing wife
commits suicide, but he does not possess a philosophical depth which
precludes action. Perhaps a revenger has to hesitate (it is required by
the genre) before finding a suitable opportunity to act. The Freudian
perspective does, however, add weight to the idea that Hamlet is a
domestic tragedy in which the majority of the deaths occur within
two families. According to this view Hamlet’s status as a prince and the
political upheavals caused by Fortinbras are less important than the
fatal interaction between the ruling family and Polonius and his two
children, an interaction which destroys both families. The director John
Caird’s National Theatre production of Hamlet in 2000, took this view
to an extreme by editing out almost all references to Fortinbras and
Denmark’s threatened state in order to concentrate on events within
Elsinore and to create a claustrophobic family drama.

Hamlet and women

Domestic issues lead to a consideration of the two women in this
male-dominated play. Although in theory the Queen possesses
political power, neither she nor Ophelia possess much authority. Both
women are lectured about their sexuality by their male relatives and
are told to abstain from sexual activity. Both women are also spied on
by men during their private talks with Hamlet. Neither of them seems
aware of the issues that lead to their deaths or of the possibility that
King Hamlet may have been murdered. Olivier’s film version allows
Gertrude a belated moment of realisation in which she saves her son’s
life by knowingly drinking the poisoned wine, but this is a matter of
directorial interpretation. The text suggests that these women are
victims of a situation which they never understand. This is in contrast to
many revenge plays from the period (such as Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy
or Thomas Middleton’s Women Beware Women) in which women
take an active and often murderous part. Some of the most important
unanswered questions about the play concern these two characters.
Why does Gertrude marry Claudius and why does she accept him so
soon after her first husband’s death? Equally, although Hamlet has
written Ophelia love letters, the extent of their relationship is unknown.
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Explorations in Literature

In Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation (1996), a flashback shows us the

couple making love but the flippant tone of the extract from a love
letter quoted in the play could suggest only a teasing friendship. If
Ophelia and Hamlet have previously been lovers, his treatment of her
is particularly cruel; if the letters were light-hearted jokes then Polonius
seems more foolish for taking them seriously. It might, however,
be worth considering why Shakespeare puts his women in such
powerless and ambiguous positions in this play. Linda Bamber’s Comic
Women, Tragic Men (1982) offers a provocative feminist reading of the
misogynistic aspects of Hamlet.
Activity
Imagine that Ophelia had been a resourceful and determined woman who did
not become insane after her father’s death. Write a plot outline for an alternative
version of Hamlet from the death of Polonius onwards in which she takes a
significant part. In your view, how important is Ophelia’s passivity to this tragedy?

Approaching Hamlet as political drama

Despite its domestic themes, Hamlet’s claim that there is ‘something
rotten in the state of Denmark’ can be taken as an introduction to
a story of political corruption. Edward Gordon Craig, for his stage
production at the Moscow Art Theatre in 1911 to 1912, chose to
enmesh the entire court in a single golden robe descending from
Claudius at the beginning of Act 1, Scene 2, with only Hamlet excluded,
to emphasise the guilty complicity of his subjects in Claudius’s rule.
As Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1965), noted, political
interpretations of the play with an emphasis on Fortinbras’s threat of
invasion were extremely popular in the Soviet Union. Their influence
is perhaps present in Branagh’s film version in which Fortinbras’s army
stealthily invades Elsinore while Hamlet duels with Laertes. Marcellus’s
depiction in the first scene of the play of Denmark as a country on
the brink of war, in which the shipwrights work even on Sunday and
weapons are being bought from foreign markets, sets the mood for a
play of paranoia. Hamlet’s pursuit of vengeance destabilises an already
dangerous political situation.
The court is a place of unceasing surveillance in which Polonius gathers
intelligence for the King. At the beginning of Act 2, Scene 1, Polonius
even decides to spy on his own son and sends Reynaldo to make
enquiries. When Hamlet presumably becomes aware that Polonius
is secretly listening to the Prince’s conversation with Ophelia in Act 3,
Scene 1, he urges her to go to a nunnery. This advice may have a satirical
element but considering the danger of court life at Elsinore, perhaps
it should be taken at face value. King Hamlet’s death by having poison
poured into his ear has a symbolic aspect in a play in which overheard
conversations can have a dangerous consequence.

Activity
1. How does the threat of invasion contribute to the plot of Hamlet? In your
view, are Fortinbras’s actions relevant to the tragedy?
2. Consider the culture of surveillance in this play; since the audience also watch
the events unfold, do we enter into a kind of complicity with Polonius?

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Chapter 2: Section A single-text study – Shakespeare’s Hamlet

Hamlet and words

Words are important in Hamlet and the play involves numerous acts
of understanding and misunderstanding of their significance. On
approaching Hamlet, who has a book in Act 2, Scene 2, Polonius asks
him what he is reading and Hamlet replies ‘Words, words, words’.
Hamlet divorces the words from their potential meaning. Later in the
same scene the two men question whether the phrase ‘Mobled Queen’
is ‘good’ in the First Player’s speech. Hamlet willingly plays on the
meaning of individual words with the gravedigger and only minutes
before his fatal duel with Laertes, he parodies Osrick’s pretentious
choice of phrase until all of the courtier’s ‘golden words are spent’.
Hamlet’s own status as a writer is puzzling. He complains in his letter
to Ophelia that he is ‘ill at these numbers’ (cannot write poetry) but he
quickly adds rhyming passages to The Murder of Gonzago to create
The Mousetrap which will reveal Claudius’s guilt.
In Hamlet, the lengthy monologues often seem to be self-contained
set pieces. Polonius exhorts his son how to behave abroad in a series of
stately aphorisms, Gertrude turns her description of Ophelia’s death into
a poignant elegy and Hamlet famously considers whether to commit
suicide in a meditation which transcends his personal circumstances to
question the value of human existence. These monologues often do not
contribute much to the plot; instead the speaker becomes lost in trying
scrupulously to say what they need to express. In an environment in
which words are frequently used to deceive, there is a pervasive anxiety
to render a full and truthful account.
Hamlet with its digressions and lengthy speeches may seem a puzzling
work after the brevity of Greek tragedy. In his version of Antigone
(1942), Jean Anouilh reflected on the ‘restful’ quality of tragedy:
once the machinery of the plot has been put into motion by a single
fateful action by the protagonist, their death is inevitable. Hamlet, by
contrast, is a play in which many of the events that create the tragedy
are mysterious and in which the outcome might seem accidental
rather than necessary. Hamlet has no master plan for killing Claudius
and only achieves this end because Claudius’s own plot to kill Hamlet
backfires. Many of the characters seem aware of alternative futures of
great happiness. Ophelia laments that Hamlet’s madness has destroyed
‘Th’expectancy and rose of the fair state’; at Ophelia’s graveside,
Gertrude recalls her hope that Hamlet would marry Ophelia and even
Fortinbras, in the last lines of the play, reflects on how Hamlet would
have ‘proved most royal’ if he had lived.

Activity
Hamlet is often viewed with extreme sympathy by critics. Write a list of what
might be considered his negative qualities, with at least five points. Study your
list. Does it change your perspective on his behaviour?

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Explorations in Literature

Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter, and having read the essential text and any
associated recommended reading, you should be able to:
•• explain some of the ways in which Elizabethan tragedies differ from
Ancient Greek tragedies
•• define the genre of the revenge tragedy
•• discuss some of the reasons why Hamlet has been regarded as a
play which transcends its genre
•• identify some of the ways in which this play has been staged and
have some knowledge of Elizabethan theatrical conventions
•• discuss several of the traditional and ongoing critical debates about
the play
•• critique issues concerning the variety of literary and theatrical styles
found in the text
•• discuss how Hamlet makes us aware of its own theatricality and how
this theatricality is important to the issues it embodies. (What does
this text communicate as a play and what would not be evoked if
the same story were told in a novel?)

Sample examination questions

1. Discuss the theme of fatherhood in Hamlet.
2. Discuss the significance of the use of plays within a play in Hamlet.
3. In a play so strongly concerned with surveillance, are the women
watched in a different way from the men?

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Chapter 3: Section B single-text study – Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Chapter 3: Section B single-text study

– Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner

Recommended editions
Halmi, N., P. Magnuson and R. Modiano (eds) Coleridge’s Poetry and Prose.
(New York: Norton, 2003) [ISBN 9780393979046]. This edition contains
both the 1798 and 1834 versions of the poem, relevant chapters from
the Biographia Literaria, together with nineteenth- and twentieth-
century critical responses, including Robert Penn Warren’s seminal,
although often challenged essay, ‘A Poem of Pure Imagination: an
Experiment in Reading’.
Jackson, H.J. (ed.) Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works. (Oxford:
World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199537914].
Keach, W. (ed.) The Complete Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2004) [ISBN 9780140423532].
We would also suggest that it might be worthwhile looking at parts of
Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria in order to get some idea of his theories
of the poetic imagination and the intent that lay behind the original
publication of the Lyrical Ballads. These issues are discussed mainly in
Chapters 4, 13 and 14.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria. (London: Everyman
Paperback Classics, 1997) [ISBN 9780460873321].
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Biographia Literaria in Jackson, H.J. (ed.) Samuel
Taylor Coleridge: The Major Works. (Oxford: World's Classics, Oxford
University Press, 2008), pp.155-482. [ISBN 9780199537914].

Lamb seems unconcerned to attempt any sort of interpretation, but

this sense of possession, of being drawn along by what he describes
as ‘Tom Piper’s magic whistle’, surely invokes the figure of the Wedding
Guest, charmed, mesmerised by exotic but sometimes disturbing
images, and uncertain of the true significance of the Mariner’s narrative.
A frequent response at the time was to talk of the poem as a creation of
the ‘pure imagination’, a term of curiously faint praise in that it appeared
to suggest a work born of the poet’s macabre dream-world, which
enjoyed no meaningful connection with reality. So, in a sympathetic
essay in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (October 1819), J.G. Lockhart
describes The Rime as a poem to be ‘felt’ and ‘cherished’, but not one
capable of being analysed or criticised, it is something sung ‘to the
sleeping ear’, its images have ‘the beauty, the grandeur, the incoherence
of some mighty vision'.
Of course, the idea that a poem might be incoherently unavailable to
analysis proved to be an irresistible challenge to twentieth-century
academic criticism. The spectrum of conflicting readings is remarkable,
and in some ways their multiplicity relives the uncertainties of earlier
readers, and celebrates Coleridge’s original declaration. A detailed and
orthodox Christian allegory is confronted by a nightmare universe of
irrational and unpredictable forces; ideas of atonement and mercy are
put to the question by the rigour of Old Testament justice; repressed
biographical information is measured against the broader implications
of symbolic patterning; and there is space for discussions of genre,
Freud, Unitarianism, gender, imperialism and other ‘issues’. The best we
can hope to do in this chapter is to sketch a general map of the terrain,
to supply some signposts, and to encourage the idea that journeys are
not necessarily about reaching a fixed point.

Origins and lyrical ballads

The impetus for the writing of The Rime was not, in the common
sense of the word, romantic. In 1797, while on a walking tour in the
Quantock Hills, Wordsworth and Coleridge agreed to collaborate
in the composition of a popular Gothic ballad, in order to defray
the costs of their expedition. Destined for the Monthly Magazine, it
would exploit a contemporary vogue for the macabre, and would put
money in their purses. However, it was an idea that quickly became
associated with other plans for collaboration, and with other recurrent,
sometimes obsessional, preoccupations which they shared. Both were
exploring the ballad form with its folkloric background as a vehicle
for narrative verse, and both had been flirting with two archetypes of
guilt-laden alienation, Cain and The Wandering Jew. The former never
achieved more than fragmentary existence in ‘The Wanderings of
Cain’ by Coleridge, Wordsworth having quickly withdrawn from joint
authorship. The latter appears as a jotting in Coleridge’s notebooks as
‘Wandering Jew, a romance’, while Wordsworth composed ‘Song for
the Wandering Jew’ in 1800. Their interest was not, perhaps, especially
original, as these figures have a common currency in the writing of the
period. The Jew, for instance, is among the ancient ballads collected
in Percy’s Reliques (1765), a copy of which Coleridge owned, and he
features in Lewis’s Gothic novel The Monk (1796), which Coleridge
reviewed a year after its publication.
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Explorations in Literature

The suggestion, here, is not that the mariner is a dramatisation of

either of these figures, but that the two poets had found a resonance
in the moral and emotional landscapes inhabited by these legendary
outcasts. In the event, apart from a neighbour’s dream of a skeletal
ship, it was Wordsworth who supplied much of the narrative material
and direction. His recent reading of Captain George Shelvocke’s Voyage
Round the World by the Way of the Great South Sea (1726), turned
up a story of a sailor who had shot an albatross: to this he added the
suggestion of revenge pursued by guardian spirits, and the project
was launched. It was, however, rapidly subsumed by a new and more
ambitious undertaking, which would become the consciously radical
collection, Lyrical Ballads.

Activity
Read what Coleridge has to say about this enterprise in the Biographia Literaria.
In Chapter 4 he speaks of ‘the fine balance of truth in observing with the
imaginative faculty in modifying the objects observed’, and in Chapter 14,
describing the ‘occasion’ of Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge identifies their shared belief
in what constitutes the power of poetry – ‘a faithful adherence to the truth of
nature’ and ‘the modifying colours of imagination’. It is this transfiguring power
of the imagination that is the hallmark of so much Romantic poetry and theory.
You need to test these ideas against your reading of The Rime. Could Coleridge
justifiably claim that his poem ‘strips the veil of familiarity from the world’ (Shelley,
Defence of Poetry), and, if so, how does he achieve it?

The plan which Coleridge records involved a division of labour.

Wordsworth was to choose his subjects from ‘ordinary life’, but
illuminate them in such a way that they became, magically, more than
‘ordinary’. Coleridge, on the other hand, elected for the ‘supernatural’,
his task being to endow it with a human truth which the readers could
recognise in themselves, even if the figures and incidents were beyond
all experience. Upon his imaginative power would depend the reader’s
‘willing suspension of disbelief’.

Publication
As work on the joint collection progressed in the early months of 1798,
Wordsworth’s interest in being co-author of The Rime evaporated
and he pursued his talent for scenes of rural life. Coleridge now had
singular control over his ‘supernatural’ world, and the poem moves
from its original ambition of being a piece of populist Gothic to a more
disturbing exploration of the imagination’s darker places. Furthermore,
it was considerably revised and doubled in length. In September
1798, Lyrical Ballads was published anonymously. Only a few lyrics by
Coleridge were included, but The Rime was a dominating presence,
having been set at the head of the collection. What was immediately
apparent to contemporary readers was how different this poem
appeared to be from the bulk of the rural ballads which followed in its
wake. The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere was marked by its obsolete
words, its inversions and crabbed syntax, and its archaic spellings (most
obviously in the title). Coleridge’s attempt to manufacture a mediaeval
linguistic context for his mediaeval mariner did not meet with
approval. Wordsworth was concerned to dissociate himself from the
poem’s ‘strangeness’, and by the time of the publication of the second
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Chapter 3: Section B single-text study – Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

edition, the mariner’s tale had been relegated to the end of the first of
two volumes. The collection also now had an acknowledged author,
William Wordsworth. Coleridge’s poem had undergone some heavy
revision, and most noticeably he had been at pains to purge the diction
of some of its archaisms and to modernise the spelling.
The issue of what language was appropriate to poetry was much
discussed as the Romantics turned their backs on the artifice of
eighteenth-century diction. Wordsworth’s thesis concerning ‘the
real language of men’, which he outlines in the preface attached to
the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, undoubtedly carries a political
agenda, and it would be instructive to read what he has to say. More
immediately, you might consider whether Coleridge has improved
his poem by removing the pastiche antiquity of words like ‘eldritch’
(ghostly), ‘pheere’ (mate) or ‘eftsoons’ (anew). Do anachronisms of this
sort create a divorce between ‘poetic diction’ and the ‘living’ language?
The Norton edition’s side-by-side printing of the 1798 and 1834
versions allows you to make a detailed comparison should you so wish.
The changes also have an effect upon the narrative voice. The original
speaker who was given to saying ‘Gramercy’ and ‘Wel-a-day’ was cast in
the role of mediaeval bard. Do you think that the revisions have given
the narrator (Coleridge?) a greater freedom by assuming a more
neutral tone?
Finally, in 1817, Coleridge published The Rime under his own name in
his collection, Sibylline Leaves. It had been restored to pride of place as
the opening poem, it contained more reworkings, and perhaps most
importantly it carried an extensive commentary in the form of prose
marginal glosses, which will be discussed below.

Readings
As was suggested in the Introduction, early responses to Coleridge’s
narrative ballad ran the gamut from hostile to admiringly bemused.
In some degree it was damned by association. Against a backdrop of
popular Gothic horror, readers could be forgiven for being captured, at
a fairly visceral level, by the pictorial power of the poet’s imagination,
while at the same time consigning the poem to the realms of opium-
fuelled fantasy – beautiful but inconsequential. However, as the
nineteenth turned into the twentieth century, the hunt for some sort of
coherent ‘meaning’ accelerated.
In 1927, J.L. Lowes published The Road to Xanadu, a monumental
piece of literary detection which trawled Coleridge’s reading in order
to discover the sources of those clusters of images that give life to the
mariner’s tale. However, Lowes is no mere cataloguer – he is concerned
to investigate and celebrate the way in which the imagination works
upon its material. So, as a starting point for your own reading of The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner, we offer you his concluding, if somewhat
florid words, to see whether they match your own experience. In his
opinion, ‘the imagination voyaging through chaos and reducing it to
clarity and order is the symbol of all the quests which lend glory to
our dust’.

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Explorations in Literature

Not unexpectedly, some of the earliest attempts to codify a coherent

‘meaning’ were of a religious cast, specifically Christian. It is not difficult
to discover in the mariner’s otherworldly voyage, a variant on the
traditional progress of the soul. Readers who pursued this path were
justified by a dense fabric of religious iconography. In general terms,
sea-storms, extremes of fire and ice, thirst and aloneness have provided
a setting for the journeys of any number of tortured spirits. There are,
however, more specific allusions which seem to provide a conscious
focus. Perhaps the most visually startling image is the cruciform shape
of the albatross when it is first silhouetted against the sky, and Coleridge
underscores the perception with his choice of verb: ‘At length did cross
an Albatross’. When the dead bird is later draped around the mariner’s
shoulders, its drooping, broken wings will even more dramatically recall
a crucifixion: ‘Instead of the cross, the Albatross/About my neck was
hung’. The cross and the bird are forced into conjunction by internal
rhyme, and it surely can be no accident that the weapon of choice is
a ‘cross-bow’. Even the departing souls of the sailors ‘whizz’ (almost
comically) past with the sound of a cross-bow bolt.

Activity
It would be worth documenting all those details in the poem which might
suggest a Christian ethos. We will touch upon broader themes below, but the
poem is permeated with images, figures and a diction that carry religious,
even doctrinal, echoes. For instance, is there a significance in the fact that the
expedition begins at the ‘kirk’, and ends at the ‘kirk’, if indeed it does?

Many critics have been happy to accept, in whole or in part, an orthodox

structure of a sacramental progress, initiated by sin (the killing), through
recognition of sin, repentance, punishment and eventual redemption. At
the time of writing, Coleridge recorded his interest in an epic poem on
‘The Origin of Evil’, and the wanton destruction of the albatross may be
emblematic of some form of Original Sin, but are we then comfortable
when told that the mariner’s act is a dramatisation of The Fall, that
the sun is an image of God, and the hermit represents the established
Church? This is just one example of the way in which an allegorical
method can encourage a too precise search for correspondences.
Perhaps the most contentious discussions surrounding doctrinal
orthodoxy have worried away at the blithe recommendation which the
mariner offers to the wedding guest (and, one assumes, to an infinite
number of mesmerised listeners through time).
He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

These final words of the mariner have the benign, and some say banal
simplicity of a Sunday school hymn; and they are arguably matched by
the banality of the rhythm. It is true that they recall the mariner’s blessing
of the water-snakes which freed him from the albatross, but do they
adequately reconcile us to the nightmare of terror, remorse, physical
suffering, aloneness that he, and we have experienced? In response
to a claim by Mrs Barbauld that the poem had no moral, Coleridge

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Chapter 3: Section B single-text study – Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

famously replied that, in his opinion, it had ‘too much’; and the lines
quoted do hint at an obtrusive piety. Yet the additional glosses of 1817
had, arguably, enhanced a Christian reading. As the ship speeds home,
crewed by angelic spirits, the marginal comment claims, ‘The curse is
finally expiated’ – but is it? At the end of the poem, unshriven by the
hermit, the mariner feels the wrenching agony of his penance, an eternal
telling, and hence reliving, of his dreadful odyssey. To all whom he meets,
he says, ‘My tale I teach’, and the guest, no longer a wedding celebrant,
leaves ‘a sadder and a wiser man’. Whether or not the mariner is a wiser
man, however, is a moot point. His pious summary of the events that
brought him to this place are, perhaps, his way of dealing with the
unknowable nature of his terrifying experiences.

Activity
You could, at some stage, draw up a forensic review of the processes of crime and
punishment. Do we need to ascertain motive? Was it an act of will? Was it something
done because it could be done? Was it a cruel or evil demonstration of power? Was it
a capricious destruction for the intensity of the moment? Does the mariner deserve
to be sentenced to what looks like an eternal reparation? Do the crew deserve to die
for their weakness of complicity? Of course, these questions may appear mundane
in a universe beyond human normalcy, but they have implications if we wish to
evaluate the legitimacy of reading Christian allegory into the mariner’s narrative. In
the light of a theology that speaks of mercy and redemption, there is something
savagely Old Testament about the suffering, the vengeful spirit, the collateral
damage of the crew’s deaths and the never-ending penance.

One of the more radical interrogations of a traditional Christian reading

focuses upon the encounter with the spectral ship crewed by Death,
and his mate, Life-in-Death. As a Unitarian Christian, Coleridge would
have every reason to confirm a belief in a benevolent world order:
even to echo the moral of the mariner’s last words. Yet the whimsical
destruction of the albatross has conjured a lurid and draconian
universe, better suited to the Furies of Greek tragedy. However, the
moment that demolishes any sense of logic or coherence is when
we witness the rolling of the dice. The arbitrariness of the bow-shot
is matched by a game of hazard. The mariner’s (eternal) fate is sealed
by chance. Is it too much of a paradox to suggest that, despite his
nightmare experiences, and despite his wracking sense of guilt, the
mariner’s blithe hope of prayer and love is his way of coping with forces
whose significance he will never understand?
After the murder of innocence, the mariner’s ship ‘bursts’ into an
unfathomable and contradictory universe. Under a copper sky,
beneath a bloody sun, in irons on a slimy sea, shadowed by a vengeful
(possibly pagan) spirit, the images that surround the outcast speak
of deprivation, physical and psychological suffering and horror.
Once free of the demands of a doctrinal allegory, a counterpoint of
different readings is more easily accommodated. While the poem’s
rich vein of Christian symbolism pushes it towards a closure which
may be captured in the mariner’s final words, another experience
of the voyage remembers only fierce punishments, anxieties, fear
and an overwhelmingly unexpiated guilt. Could it be that this
contradictoriness, this mystery and unknowableness are a part of what

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Explorations in Literature

the verses are intended to express? In 1817, Coleridge replaced his

‘Argument’ with an epigraph from the seventeenth-century divine,
Thomas Burnet. The cleric affirms his belief in the many invisible forces
in the world, but then contemplates them nonplussed. Uncertain of
their hierarchies, their functions, their habitations, he concludes: ‘The
human mind has always desired the knowledge of these things, but
never attained it’. It is just such a world that the mariner inhabits both
externally and internally.
Activity
In that edition of Sibylline Leaves in 1817, Coleridge appended his prose marginal
glosses. You should study them closely, and assess what, if anything, they add to
the poem. Some can be pedantic (at ll.131–4), others piously orthodox (at ll.297–
300), such that one wonders whether the late-mediaeval narrator who had been
banished by the modernisations has been reinvented. On another occasion, as
the moving moon intensifies the exquisite loneliness of the mariner, the images in
the gloss are as poetic as the verse they illuminate. Do such devices have a place,
and are they reliable or consistent in the way they comment upon the mariner’s
progress?

At some point in our reading, the temptation to turn to the life will
prove irresistible, and as the Romantic poets made themselves so much
the subject of their writing, there seems to be some justification. Such a
proposal comes hedged around with a host of caveats. The poem is not
an autobiography, allegorical or otherwise. So, if you see it suggested
(as it has been) that the wedding guest is Coleridge, that the hermit is
Wordsworth, and that Life-in-Death is Mrs Coleridge, our advice would
be rapidly to retreat. From the date of the poem’s first composition
(1797/8), through sometimes heavy and always continuing revisions,
to its appearance as his work in 1817, there is ample evidence of
an accelerating sense of alienation engulfing Coleridge. A failing
marriage, the death of a son, an illicit love, ill-health, estrangement
from friends and a growing dependency upon opium were sufficient
ingredients to generate intense feelings of neurotic self-recrimination.
The guilt carried by Cain, the Wandering Jew, and the Ancient Mariner
have kinship in Coleridge’s imagination. In fact, it was the life of
the imagination, above all, that caused the deepest anxieties and
remorse. Coleridge was plagued by a growing conviction that he was
squandering his talent (a by-product of his addiction), and worse, that
the inspirational power had left him.
Activity
To get some idea of the terrors of failing vision, read Coleridge’s ‘Dejection: an Ode’
(especially Stanza II), and for a very similar disquiet in his fellow-poet Wordsworth,
see his ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’ (Stanzas I–IV).

Such biographical information is ‘background’, and to be used

obliquely, and with caution. The death of the albatross might (or might
not) represent the dying of Coleridge’s imagination. However, the more
general reading is sometimes the more plausible. The idea that the
mariner might be an alter ego for the Poet carries some conviction.
Driven by visionary winds, he sails to unvisited seas, witnesses
terrifying events, suffers spiritual and emotional extremes, and returns
36
Chapter 3: Section B single-text study – Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

with a compulsion to tell his tale to those who do not wish to listen. To
make things worse, it is a story fraught with contradiction, irresolution,
perplexity and fearful nightmares. Perhaps it is the equivocal nature
of this unknowable universe that has provoked such a rich variety
of interpretations. Would Coleridge have concurred with Keats’s
description of what he calls ‘Negative Capability’? – ‘that is when a
man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mystery, doubts, without any
irritable reaching after fact and reason.’

Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and having read the essential text and any
associated recommended reading, you should be able to:
•• discuss the use of symbol and allegory in attempting to achieve a
coherent reading of the poem
•• discuss some of the literary contexts of the period which might give
an insight into the narrative
•• discuss aspects of the ballad genre: its use of language, rhyme and
rhythm
•• analyse what you consider to be the central themes of the poem.

Sample examination questions

1. ‘[Poetry] gives most pleasure when only generally and not perfectly
understood’ (Coleridge). To what extent would you consider The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner to be proof of this claim?
2. Write an essay that analyses the relationship between the external
and internal worlds of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
3. ‘Everything has a life of its own, and we are all one life’ (Coleridge).
What insights might these words of Coleridge bring to a reading of
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner?

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Explorations in Literature

Notes

38
Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

Chapter 4: Section C comparative study

– Chaucer’s ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Recommended editions
You are expected to read the original Middle English texts, although
modern translations may be found helpful initially, in order to gain
familiarity with the general outline of the plot and so on. Modern versions
are no substitute for the original, as all translation involves refashioning
and alteration. If you are intending to take the Literature of the Later
Middle Ages paper you should use The Riverside Chaucer for its detailed
further coverage of Chaucer’s life and background, for the excellence
of its editorial material and for its detailed information as to the dialect
of the fourteenth-century English Chaucer spoke and wrote. Chaucer’s
language is the language of the south-east of England in the latter half
of the fourteenth century, and is easier for modern readers than other
fourteenth-century English dialects because it is the ancestor of modern
English. Nevertheless, considerable effort is required by someone
unfamiliar with Chaucer’s English before they can become a fluent reader,
and you are strongly advised to study the language notes in the Riverside
edition:
Benson, Larry D. (ed.) The Riverside Chaucer. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199552092].
There are many modernised versions, including:
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Translated by Nevill Coghill. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1958) [ISBN 9780140424386].
For Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a modern English version is
recommended as a starting point for your studies, as it is written in a
rather obscure north-west Midlands dialect.
Simon Armitage’s modern English translation provides an accessible
introduction to the poem:
Armitage, S., Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (London: Faber and Faber,
2009) [ISBN 9780571223282].
The original text with facing-page full translation will be found in:
James, Winny (ed.) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Peterborough, ON:
Broadview, 1995) [ISBN 9780921149927].
This edition gives the text in the original language, but provides
considerable help with translation by means of regular same-page
glosses:
Anderson. J.J. (ed.), Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl, Cleanness,
Patience (London: Everyman edition, 1996) [ISBN 9780460875103].
There is also a good Norton critical edition of Marie Borroff’s modern
translation, containing a selection of scholarly essays:

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Explorations in Literature

Borroff, M. and L.L. Howes (eds) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (London:
Norton, 2010) [ISBN 9780393930252].
However, if you are intending to take the Literature of the Later
Middle Ages course, we strongly recommend that you use:
Andrew, M. and R. Waldron (eds) The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript:
Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Exeter:
University of Exeter Press, 2007) [ISBN 9780859897914].

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Critical studies
*Barron, W.R.J. Trawthe and Treason: the Sin of Gawain Reconsidered
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980) [ISBN 9780719012945].
Benson, L.D. Art and Tradition in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1975) [ISBN 9780813505015].
Blanch, R.J. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (Troy, NY: Whitston, 2001)
[ISBN 9780878752447]. A reference guide.
*Brewer, D. and J. Gibson (eds) A Companion to the Gawain-Poet.
(Cambridge: Brewer, 2007) [ISBN 9780859915298].
*Burrow, J. A Reading of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977) [ISBN 9780710086952] (out of print).
*Davenport, W.A. The Art of the Gawain-Poet. (London: Athlone Press, 2001)
[ISBN 9780485120509].
Hill, Ordelle G. Looking Westward: Poetry, Landscape, and Politics in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight. (Newark: University of Delaware Press,
2009) [ISBN 9781611491111].
Howard, D.R. and C.K. Zacher (eds) Critical Studies of Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1970)
[ISBN 9780268003289] (out of print).
*Johnson, L. Staley The Voice of the Gawain-Poet. (Madison, WI: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1984) [ISBN 9780299095406].
*Putter, A. An Introduction to the Gawain-Poet. (London: Longman, 1996)
[ISBN 9780582225749].
*Putter, A. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the French Arthurian
Romance. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997) [ISBN 9780198182535].
*Spearing, A.C. The Gawain-Poet: A Critical Study. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1970, 2010) [ISBN 9780521291194].
* Especially recommended

Articles in periodicals
Delony, M. ‘Gendering Morgan le Fay’s Magical Spaces in Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight’, Medieval Perspectives 20 (2005), pp.20–56.
Hardman, P. ‘Gawain’s practice of piety in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’,
Medium Ævum 68:2 (1999), pp.247–67.
Lowe, J. ‘The Cinematic Consciousness of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’,
Exemplaria 13:1 (2001), pp.67–98.
McCarthy, C. ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the sign of trawþe’,
Neophilologus 85:2 (2001) pp.297–308.
‘Luf-talkyng in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’ Neophilologus 92:1 (2008)
pp.155–62.

Online resources
These websites are excellent for Arthurian literature and legend:
www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/
www.netsurf.org/Arthuriana
This is excellent for both Chaucer and Arthuriana:
www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth
A fine site for Chaucer studies is Harvard University’s Chaucer pages:
www.courses.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer

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Explorations in Literature

For help with Middle English, try the Medieval English Dictionary Online:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/med
For editions of the two Gawain analogues, The Marriage of Sir Gawain
and The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnell:
www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/teams/tmsmenu.htm

The origins of medieval romance

To begin with, it is essential to explore several key terms associated
with medieval romance, a genre that is notoriously difficult to define.
Activity
Begin by looking up the term ‘romance’ in a good reference book of literary terms,
or use an online resource.

From the twelfth century onwards, the term ‘roman’ was applied to a
text written not in Latin (the language of the scholarly elite) but in a
vernacular language (originally mainly French). It is very important to
distinguish between the medieval connotations of the term and later
usage. The texts in question here are in no way to be read as ‘romantic’
(involving love) or ‘Romantic’ (sharing the emotional sensibility of the
early nineteenth century). Make sure that you understand these terms
thoroughly. The literary genre, medieval romance, typically focuses
on exemplary aristocratic figures undertaking heroic quests. The key
central focus is often upon the knight-errant who journeys in search
of ‘adventure’. This is another slippery term, not to be automatically
associated with modern notions of exciting challenges.
Activity
Look up ‘adventure’ and clarify its original meaning.

‘Adventure’ primarily designates ‘chance encounter’, derived as it is from

the Latin, ad ventum, ‘what is to come’. So the knight who sets out in
search of adventure is exposing himself to whatever might happen.
Random events which befall are not necessarily arbitrary, indeed they
often appear more providential, or matters of ‘fate’. The concept of
‘adventure’ is inherently mysterious, signifying the unknown.
As a literary genre, medieval romance originated in twelfth-century
France. The earliest poetic narratives treating chivalric conquests are those
written by Chrétien de Troyes (c. 1160–90). In a series of poems, Chrétien
establishes the Arthurian court as a centre of excellence and chivalric virtue.
His stories focus on individual knights of the Round Table, following the
wandering adventures of Erec, Cligès, Yvain, Perceval and Lancelot.1 The 1
A good translation
new fashion for fictitious stories of Arthur and his knights coincides with of Chrétien’s works is:
the invention of ‘courtly love’ (a term which always requires scare quotes). Arthurian Romances.
Translated by W.W.
Activity Kibler and C.W. Caroll
Look up this term in a good dictionary of literary terms, or use an online resource. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1991)
Be sure to grasp the fact that this is a relatively recent invention. The [ISBN 014044218].
expression was coined in the nineteenth century by Gaston Paris, to
formalise a set of conventions surrounding the treatment of secular

42
Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

love. The later Middle Ages did promote a concept of ‘fin’amors’

(refined love) developed from the lyric poetry of the troubadours of
Provence and the more northerly trouvères. Various texts from the
twelfth century onwards propagated certain conduct in love in which
it was deemed ennobling for a knight to serve and worship a beloved
lady. Texts such as Andreas Capellanus’s, De Amore (‘On Love’, c.1186)
elaborated upon this ‘courtly love’ ethos, in a playful and ironic way,
constituting what the historian Georges Duby dubbed ‘a man’s game’.2 2
Georges Duby develops
Two female patrons in particular are associated with the cultivation a searching analysis
of this literary phenomenon, Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter, of ‘courtly love’ in The
Marie de Champagne. It was under Marie’s patronage that Chrétien de Knight, the Lady, and
Troyes produced his French courtly romances. the Priest: The Making
of Modern Marriage
Such romances specifically linked knightly prowess and achievement in in Medieval France.
arms with devotion to a beloved woman who inspired such feats, but Translated by Barbara
their courtly audience comprised a tiny elite. When romances became Bray (London: Penguin,
fashionable in England, in imitation of French romance, this was not the 1983)
case: late thirteenth-century and early fourteenth-century romances in [ISBN 9780713915839].
English were not aimed at the courtly class, since that class still spoke,
read and listened to romances in French. Such English romances were
much less interested in love as an inspiration for knightly achievement
than in martial and heroic exploits for their own sakes, and indeed
never endorsed adultery. Instead, English romances dealing with
Arthurian themes tended to focus, not unnaturally, on Arthur and his
knights as great national heroes (not a perspective likely to appeal to
the French), with the love interest usually a very minor optional extra.
Such romances were not ‘courtly’ in content, themes or audience (so far
as we can tell): although some may well have been read or listened to
at court, they do not inherently belong to such a milieu in the way that
Chrétien’s romances, for example, obviously did.
English romance, therefore, initially appealed to a lower social stratum
than the class that was, at the same time, still reading and listening to
French romances at court. By the late fourteenth century, with the work
of Chaucer and the Gawain-poet, this had changed: French was ceasing
to be the language of the court and educated circles when these poets
wrote, and they produced romances in English as sophisticated as
anything produced in France in the previous 200 years, and as clearly
aimed at a sophisticated and hence presumably ‘courtly’ audience.

Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur

3
The Winchester
Activity
manuscript version
If you wish to gain familiarity with the general nature of Arthurian romance, you is recommended, as
are advised to read some of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur (c. 1469–70).3 In Caxton considerably
particular, classic romance material is found in Books 3, 7 and 8. alters the text. Good
recent editions are
This is perhaps the most well-known and influential Arthurian romance. those by Helen Moore
It is a fairly late synthesis of Arthurian tales in circulation throughout (London: Wordsworth,
the Middle Ages. William Caxton selected it as one of his earliest 1996) [ISBN
printed texts in 1485 and it remained continuously in print until the 1853264636], and
seventeenth century. In his Preface, Caxton sets out clearly the nature Helen Cooper (Oxford:
of the work’s edifying and entertaining appeal: Oxford University
Press, 2008) [ISBN
9780199537341].
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Explorations in Literature

To th’entente that noble men may see and lerne the noble
acts of chyvalrye, the jentyl and virtuous dedes that somme
knyghtes used in tho dayes [ ... ] Doo after the good and leve
the evyl and it shal brynge you to good fame and renommee
[reputation]. And for to pass the tyme thys book shal be
plesaunte to rede in.

Even in this archetypal Arthurian romance, many elements intrude

among the perfection. The virtuous deeds are everywhere moderated
by less than virtuous behaviour. The central virtues of ideal knighthood
are embodied in Lancelot. Yet, at the same time as he represents the
highest aspirations of chivalry, Lancelot is fundamentally and fatally
flawed. Lancelot’s love for Arthur’s queen, Guenever, constitutes a triple
betrayal, of his King, lord and friend. The famous love triangle results in
the destruction of the fellowship of the Round Table.

Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet

For the rest of this chapter, we shall be comparing closely Arthurian
romances by two of the finest poets of the later fourteenth century.
They were writing at a time of linguistic diversity, with a trilingual
court fluent in Latin, French and English. We shall see how these very
different writers handle the material of Arthurian legend, drawing
attention to various tensions undercutting ideals. Both Chaucer and
the anonymous Gawain-Poet exploit the genre of Arthurian romance in
order to explore the complexities of love, honour and virtue.

Geoffrey Chaucer (c.1343–1400)

Activity
Find out something of the background to Chaucer’s work by researching his life.
Especially useful is the Introduction to the Riverside Chaucer pp.xi–xxii.

Chaucer was primarily a diplomat and civil servant. Poetry was not his
main occupation, although it appears from images such as the famous
frontispiece to a manuscript of his poem, Troilus and Criseyde, that he
read his works aloud at court. Chaucer lived through successive regimes,
experiencing such tumultuous events as the Peasants’ Revolt and the
deposition and murder of Richard II. Chaucer found himself well placed
under the Lancastrians, as King Henry IV’s father, John of Gaunt, had been
a patron of his during his early career. Chaucer had composed The Book
of the Duchess for him. Although Chaucer’s background was that of a city
merchant family, he moved in court circles all his life: as a youth he served
as page to the Countess of Ulster, wife of Prince Lionel, son of Edward III,
and he followed Prince Lionel to war in France in 1359, the first of several
journeys to France and Italy undertaken on royal business of various
kinds. By 1366 Chaucer had married Philippa Roet, daughter of a Hainault
knight in the service of Queen Philippa, wife of Edward III. The Canterbury
Tales, of which ‘ The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale’ forms part, was
Chaucer’s last great work, and was left unfinished at his death.
Activity
Have a look at the form of the verse in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’.

44
Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

This rhyming verse was newly fashionable at court, and Chaucer wrote
most of The Canterbury Tales in this form, iambic pentameter rhyming
couplets. He also experimented with a variety of stanzaic forms, most
notably the ‘Chaucerian Stanza’ (also known as Rhyme Royale) in which
he wrote some of The Canterbury Tales (e.g. ‘The Clerk’s Tale’) and
Troilus and Criseyde.

The Gawain-Poet
Much less is known about this poet than is known about Chaucer.
Generally assumed to be male in the absence of any definite
identification, the poet is referred to as either the Gawain-Poet or the
Pearl-Poet, after his two most famous poems, Pearl and Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight. Two other poems are usually credited to this poet,
Patience and Cleanness/Purity. All these titles are modern editorial
attributions. Pearl, Patience and Cleanness/Purity all deal with Christian
doctrine and with moral themes. Unlike the other three poems, Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight is a romance, but it also has a strong moral
theme.
The settings and vocabulary of the poet’s works show that he was
familiar with courtly life in all its aspects, and that, like Chaucer, he was
familiar with French romances as well as with English ones. However,
the dialect in which the Gawain-Poet wrote is that of the north-west of
England rather than the south-eastern dialect that Chaucer used and,
since this northern dialect is not the ancestor of modern English, it is
exceptionally difficult even for native English speakers to learn.
Whereas Chaucer chose to use French-influenced verse forms, the
Gawain-Poet wrote all his works in the traditional native form, alliterative
verse. This employs alliteration, not in the modern sense of initial letters
being repeated for occasional ornament, but as its fundamental shaping
principle. Each line has three or four strong stressed syllables that alliterate.
Activity
Have a look at the opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and identify
the alliterating syllables.

The poet uses this traditional form in a highly innovative and flexible
way. While the body of each stanza is written in long alliterative lines,
there is also a two-syllable ‘bob’ and a four-line rhyming conclusion,
called the ‘wheel’. This complex form is unique.
Activity
Examine every stanza in Fitt One of the poem, to spot the bobs and wheels.
Notice the variety they impart to the rhythm.

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Explorations in Literature

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight explicitly aligns itself with the native
poetic tradition very early on in the poem, describing itself as:
With lel letters loken [loyal/true, locked together]
In londe so hatz ben longe. (35–36) [land]
The alliterative style can achieve vividly felt passages, such as Gawain’s
severe suffering in freezing weather:
Ner slayn with þe slete he sleped in his yrnes [nearly, irons i.e. armour]
Mo nyghtez then innoghe, in naked rokkez [too many nights, rocks]
Theras claterande fro the crest the colde borne rennez [hilltop; river; runs]
And henged heghe over his hede in hard iisseikkles. (729–32)

One of the challenges of this text is its rich lexis. Alliterative poetry
naturally requires an extensive vocabulary, in order to express ideas
using a variety of initial letters. Alliterative poets consequently tend
to use large vocabularies, with many synonymous terms. The Gawain-
Poet, for example, uses numerous different words for horse: blonk,
caple, fole, horse, stede; and for man: mon, knight, lord, prynce, burn,
freke, gome, hathel, lede, renk, schalk, segge, tulk, wye, mayster. The
poet commands a large range of linguistic resources, using archaic
English, loan-words from French and words derived from his local
northern dialect, which was heavily influenced by Scandinavian
settlers. Some of these words were not current in fourteenth-century
spoken English, and some of them derive from Old English, that is, pre-
Norman Conquest, poetic vocabulary. For these reasons, the modern
student of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight must expect to encounter
a challenging text. With the help of a good modern translation, used
alongside one of the recommended editions listed above, you should
be able to engage with the rich and sophisticated poetry of the
original. The effort will be well rewarded.

‘The Wife of Bath’s Prologue’

This chapter focuses primarily on the Tale rather than the Prologue,
but you are expected to study both in relation to each other. It will
be especially useful to consider how Chaucer uses the extended
monologue of the Prologue to introduce and develop many themes
which recur in the Tale.
Activity
Assess the issues of gender and power which are treated in the Prologue
(carefully examining the Wife’s struggle for ‘maistrie’, and antagonism towards the
Bible, scholars and Jankyn’s Book of Wicked Wives).

Genre and gender in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ and

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The two texts discussed here form an interesting contrast. Both are
ostensibly similar in genre, yet each offers a distinctive variation on the
norm, and treats complex issues. We shall compare their treatment and
deployment of a variety of typical romance elements to see how these
two poets adapt and experiment with the genre. The following features
will be compared in detail:
46
Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

•• the Arthurian setting

•• the ideal knight
•• the quest
•• romance structure
•• female authority.

The Arthurian setting

Activity
Read the opening stanza of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and consider what
expectations it arouses about the kind of story that is to follow.

Key details to note are the reference to the Trojan War (‘sege’ and
‘assaut’), the panoramic account of the descendants of Æneas as they
found cities across Europe, culminating in the foundation of Britain
by Brutus. (It is not the historical accuracy of this which concerns us,
although this mistaken version of history was current at the time).
The opening stanza announces grand themes of conquest and nation
building in what could easily be regarded as an epic mode.
Activity
Now read the second stanza carefully, analysing how it effects a transition from
the epic to the romance mode.

Arthur is pronounced the greatest king of all, but the superlative adjective
applied to him, ‘hendest’ (most noble), is not one concerned with
military prowess, but with courtliness. The tone shifts from authoritative
declaration to opinion (‘I wot’, ‘as I haf herde telle’). Key words associated
with the particular milieu of romance are casually slipped in, such as
‘ferlyes’, ‘aunter’, ‘selly’, ‘awenture’. By the third stanza, we are not surprised
to be in Camelot, where the Arthurian court is depicted as splendid and
youthful (‘in her first age’). It is Christmas and a time for merry-making.
Activity
Observe the lavish descriptions of the banquet and the enthusiastic appraisal of
the narrator in stanzas 3–6.

This is an appropriate setting for Gawain to demonstrate his loyalty

and bravery, by stepping forward to take up the challenge presented
by the Green Knight, namely an exchange of axe blows to behead one
another. But note that, as the story progresses, there are suggestions
of an immature king and cowardly courtiers, which modify the general
impressions and expectations of exemplary knighthood.
Activity
Make a list of these suggestive details (e.g. lines 224–25, 241–49, 280–82, 309–18,
427–28).

Clearly, the Green Knight comes to test and to challenge the reputation
of the Round Table, and it is far from certain that his cynical view will be
disproved. Gawain’s humility (‘I am the wakkest [...] and of wyt feblest’)
also raises questions about his ability to succeed in his task. This is part
of the tension set up by the poet to create suspense and some anxiety
about the outcome. 47
Explorations in Literature

Activity
Now compare the scene-setting at the beginning of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ (lines
1–28).

The beginning of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ initially announces itself as a

typical Arthurian romance, set long ago (‘In th’olde dayes of the King
Arthour’). But the tone soon shifts to one of irony, as the Wife describes
the friars as having supplanted the elves of yore. Given the reputation
of friars as lustful rogues (compare the portrait of the Friar in ‘The
General Prologue’) Alison’s remarks on how safe women are under their
protection can only be taken as satirical.4 This is an altogether different
4
Biedler, Peter G.
Chaucer’s Wife of
mode to romance. ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ may be formally set in a
Bath’s Prologue and
fairytale past, when ‘Al was this land fulfild of fayerye’ but it clearly has a
Tale: An Annotated
subtext rich in topical satire. Although the story superficially resembles Bibliography 1900–
Arthurian romance, it is in fact deeply subversive of generic expectation. 1996. (Basingstoke:
Alison has already demonstrated in her Prologue her sharp critique of Macmillan, 1996)
male-dominated literature. She may well be continuing her attack on the [ISBN 9870333657065]
existing cultural order. Her romance is soon deviating from the norm and contains useful
introducing key notes of antagonism. summaries of
two contrasting
The ideal knight interpretations of the
Consider these lines in which the Lady tries to instruct Gawain in his opening section of the
expected role as a romance hero (1512–15): Tale, pp.171–88 and
pp.205–20.
And of alle cheualry to chose, the chif thing alosed [chivalrous exploits, praised]
Is the lel layk of luf, the lettrure of armes. [loyal sport of love, lore]
For to telle of this tevelyng of this trwe knyghtez, [deeds]
Hit is þe tytelet token and tyxt of her werkkez. [title, text, their, works]

Here she prescribes the chief characteristics of a knight: to be famous

for chivalrous deeds, and to be an expert in love. She is deliberately
teasing the reluctant Gawain, who is repudiating her advances. The
comedy does not detract from the essential accuracy of her description
5
A dozen or so
of the ideal knight. Part of the joke, for the contemporary audience, romances survive
featuring Gawain,
was the fact that Gawain was a well-known figure who was far from
testifying to his
chaste.5 Facing the Lady’s seductive advances, Gawain is confronted by
popularity. Most present
the conflicting demands of moral virtue and courtesy. Far from being
him as an active wooer
harmonious, as she asserts, the demands prove incompatible. of ladies, far from the
Although the story begins as a typical challenge and quest, in that a portrait in Sir Gawain
stranger arrives at court with a challenge, its real interests lie elsewhere. and the Green Knight.
Deeds of daring are relegated to passing reference, a mere five lines Chaucer is likely to have
dealing with the heroic feats Gawain achieves on his journey: read his friend Gower’s
version of this story,
the ‘Tale of Florent’ in
Confessio Amantis. Two
other close analogues
of the tale exist, the
anonymous Arthurian
romances, The Marriage
of Sir Gawain and The
Wedding of Sir Gawain
and Dame Ragnell.
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Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

Sumwhyle wyth wormes he werres, and with wolves als, [sometimes]

Sumwhyle wyth wodwos that woned in the knarres, [wild men of the
woods, lived, crags]
Bothe wyth bulles and beres, and bores otherqhyle, [boars]
And etayns […] (720–23). [giants]

The studied casualness of this description dismisses the usual fare

of adventuring heroes in a perfunctory manner. Overall, the poem
develops a new concept of heroism, involving more subtle and
internal trials of personal integrity. Gawain here embodies chastity and
devotion to the Virgin Mary, hardly his usual guise. His knightly device
is the mystical symbol of the Pentangle, ‘a syngne […] In bytoknyng of
trawthe’ whose fivefold significance is elaborated as comprising five
interdependent virtues, ‘fraunchyse’ (generosity), fellowship, cleanness
(chastity), courtesy and piety (625–65). Gawain’s flaw, as he accepts
the lady’s protective talisman, and keeps it secret, may appear minor,
but it destroys the emblem of perfect ‘truth’. Gawain is presented as
an unusually self-conscious hero, finally beset by shame at his failure
rather than sharing the rest of the court’s celebration of his success.
Gawain’s moral virtue, like Galahad’s, serves to critique secular chivalry.
The poem exploits the romance genre, but moves beyond its moral
compass, ultimately elevating piety over prowess.
The ideals of chivalric conduct were later formulated by Malory, in the
annual oath sworn by all Arthur’s knights:
Than the kynge stablysshed all the knyghts […] and charged
them […] allwayes to do ladyes, damesels, and jantilwomen and
wydowes sucour [help]: strengthe hem in hir ryghtes, and never
to enforce them, uppon payne of dethe.

Activity
Consider the hero of ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’. How far is he from Malory’s ideal?

Whereas the ideal knight is sworn to defend women, this one is a

rapist. Clearly, the conventions are being turned upside down from the
outset. The sheer casualness of the violence is shocking, ‘on a day […] it
happed that […] he saugh a mayde walking hym biforn’:
Of which mayde anon, maugree hir heed, [against her will]
By verray force, he rafte hire maydenhed. [strong, seized]

Intensifiers (anon, verray), the harsh tone and import of the verb
(‘rafte’) all combine with the unsubtle punning rhyme to convey a
brutal act of ‘oppressioun’. Around this act of violence the Tale presents
a restorative process of educating the knight, which involves him being
forced to experience what the Wife’s Prologue presented as a female
hardship, ‘the wo that is in mariage’. In this nightmare vision of romance
a knight’s sighs betoken despair over female domination:
Wo was this knight, and sorwefully he siketh; [sighs]
But what! He may nat do al as hym liketh.

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Explorations in Literature

Chaucer’s version of a widely-known folktale about the

disenchantment of a ‘Loathly Lady’ transforms the story in many
significant ways. Personal names are largely erased, giving the tale a
distanced, generalised quality. The catalyst for the knight’s quest to
find out ‘What thyng it is that wommen moost desire’ (1007) is not an
accidental killing of a knight, but an altogether more directly relevant
crime: the violent rape of a young girl. This transforms the story into
one of poetic justice, as all expectations of gender are inverted. No
chivalrous hero, but ‘a lusty bacheler’, this knight’s ‘success’ rests on
submission to female authority as he is forced to occupy a subject
position. Constrained to sexual intercourse against his will, the
unheroic knight is mocked by the hag in a way which is reminiscent of
the Green Knight’s mockery of the Arthurian court in Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight:
Is this the lawe of kyng Arthures hous?
Is every knyght of his so dangerous? [grudging]

Everything about this tale is contrary to the generic norm. In place of a

heroic quest, this knight undertakes a search to save his own life. He is
thoroughly humiliated as he travels for a year and a day asking women
what they most desire. This lack of admirable motive, coupled with
enforced subjugation to the will of women, essentially demeans him
twice over.

The quest
Typically the Arthurian knight travels in search of adventure,
facing and overcoming a variety of challenges, often in the form of
aggressive enemies, beasts and monsters such as giants and dragons.
Supernatural forces frequently assail him, but his physical might
prevails. It can be seen that this model is notably absent from the two
poems in question.
In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the dangerous ‘Other’ proves elusive,
difficult even to identify and recognise. Again, first impressions seem
to match expectations: the challenger is a gigantic green man with
miraculous powers of restoration. But the task he presents to Gawain is
far from the usual type of armed combat. The Beheading Game is one
of several elements incorporated within the romance from folklore and
a contest which Gawain cannot possibly win. The narrative includes a
number of familiar motifs from romance, which are reconfigured. One
such motif is the elaborate arming of the knight in Fitt 2, the logic of
which is dubious in this context, where a man is not going to fight but to
submit to having his head cut off. The quest to find the Green Knight is a
traditional one in certain respects but not in others. The Green Knight’s
identity remains mysterious, his abode an unprepossessing mound and
he surprisingly transforms into the figure of the genial host, Sir Bercilak.
The Beheading Game, therefore, turns out to have been a distraction
from the real danger presented by the Lady. Heroism in this world proves
a more difficult task than usual. Danger presents itself in unexpected
forms, as a subtle and deceptive presence. Further, when the long quest
for the Green Knight is finally achieved, it proves anti-climactic. The
Green Knight reveals the whole plot to have been a trick. The real villain

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Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

is suddenly exposed as Morgan le Fay, Gawain’s aunt, and the deception

a vindictive ploy aimed against Guenever. This revelation strikes many as
belated and inadequate. Strangely, Gawain’s real test happens without
the reader even knowing it.
Similarly, in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’, the hero is given an apparently
futile quest. He is set the task of discovering what women want. This
deceptively simple question proves arduous and impossible, as all the
women he asks offer different responses.
Activity
Consider the variety of responses the knight receives, and the awkwardness of the
final ‘correct’ answer, in the light of the Wife’s previous efforts to defend women
from misogynistic attitudes.

Once again, we have an odd quest, configured in perplexing ways.

While, on the one hand, it is an appropriate punishment, forcing the
knight to consider female desire, on the other hand, the representation
of women is hardly favourable. The idea of a whole sex being easily
categorised would appear to be as absurd as the monovocal literary
tradition deploring women which the Wife contested in the Prologue.
Yet, a single solution is proposed: that woman desire dominance. This
raises more questions than it answers. Creating debate, provoking
disparate responses, is a key element in both texts. Using the
storytelling device of a quest, both poets construct thought-provoking
scenarios which deliberately offer contradictory perspectives, engaging
the reader in consideration of important issues. In place of mere
entertainment, these romances present moral cruxes and conundrums.

Romance structure
Medieval romance is generally characterised by a circular narrative
structure. This tends to relate to the knight errant’s departure from and
return to the court. Both Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and ‘The Wife
of Bath’s Tale’ conform to this essential shape. Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight enacts a double departure within a larger circular structure, as
Gawain leaves Arthur’s and Bercilak’s courts, finally returning to Camelot.
The poem is an elaborately patterned piece, whose conclusion at line
2525 harks deliberately back to the beginning, ‘After the segge and the
asaute was sesed at Troye’.6 Among the most celebrated passages in the 6
Another of this poet’s
poem is the triple sequence of hunts and wooing scenes in Fitt Three. works, Pearl, is even
These cleverly present simultaneous events which mirror one another, more carefully designed,
as Gawain is the ‘prey’ of the Lady while her husband pursues deer, boar with exactly 101
and fox. stanzas and numerous
echoic patterns
The Gawain-Poet resists the typical romance climax by ending with a throughout.
distinct lack of resolution.
Activity
Read the final two stanzas of the poem, considering the variety of perspectives it
presents regarding Gawain’s achievement.

The knight's homecoming is usually a straightforwardly victorious return.

This is the manner in which Arthur and the court respond, laughing
loudly and adopting a green sash as a sign of unity and honour:

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Explorations in Literature

That lordes and ladis that longed to the Table, [belonged]

Uche burne of the brotherhede, a bauderyk schulde have. (2515–16) [each man, baldric]

Gawain, however, is conspicuously chastened and bitter, castigating

himself for ‘untrawthe’:
This is the bende of my blame I bere on my nek, [sign]
This is the lathe and the losse that I laught have [injury, suffered]
Of couardise and covetyse that I haf caght thare. (2506–08) [fell prey to]

The narrator remains resolutely silent on the matter, leaving such

irreconcilable perspectives, so that the meaning of the tale remains
elusive, an ‘endeless knot’ indeed. It seems as if Gawain’s experiences
leave him at odds with the frivolities, indicating a development of
insight on his part. The self-recrimination marks a major alteration
in his self-image. From attempting to be the perfect knight, he
becomes keenly aware of his failings. His is an interior journey towards
enlightenment.
‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ is a much shorter text, although it shares the
folklore timescale of a year and a day for the knight’s quest. Here too,
the journey symbolically enacts an internal process of understanding
and the resolution proves problematic.
Activity
What unresolved issues remain at the end of the Tale?

Many readers doubt whether the knight has received just punishment.
Uniquely in this version of the story, he appears to be rewarded with
a wife who is both virtuous and beautiful. Like Gawain, this knight
concludes his adventure in despair. The magical transformation of the
hag provides a fantasy, ‘happy ever after’ conclusion, in which they live
together ‘in parfit joye’. The final accord mirrors the end of the Prologue,
where the Wife and Jankyn kissed after their quarrel and established a
happy union. Yet, the hag’s ambivalent promise is less reassuring than
it seems:
I prey to God that I moote sterven wood, [die insane]
But I to yow be also good and trewe
As evere was wyf, sin that the world was newe.

A critical eye might detect here an ominous, if oblique, reference to

Original Sin, a hollowness in her hyperbolic intention to be as virtuous
as ‘any woman ever’, and an unpromising relativity (‘as good as…’).
These hints are slight and easily missed, but the final shattering of the
romance frame is brutally clear, as the Wife prays for bad husbands to
die:
And olde and angry nigardes of dispence, [misers in spending]
God sende hem verray pestilence!

The hag’s prayer may be no less impious. It is worth noting that the
‘verray pestilence’ the Wife calls down upon miserly husbands was
no empty metaphor then, when memories of the devastating effects

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Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

of the Great Plague were fresh. This strikes a discordant note which
destroys any reconciliatory mood at the climax of the Tale. We could
hardly be further removed from the world of refined chivalry associated
with the Arthurian romance. Chaucer’s only Arthurian romance is
constituted as a highly irregular, parodic piece which may suggest
reservations towards the genre, or a sophisticated reshaping of it.

Female authority
Both texts feature Queen Guenever but in significantly contrasting
ways.
Activity
Make notes comparing the representation and function of Guenever in each
poem.

In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight she barely features, appearing only in
Fitt One. The initial description of her presents her as a beautiful, static icon
(lines 74–84). Apart from a brief reference to her at line 346, she attracts
no attention at all, until the end of the Fitt when Arthur reassures her that
there is nothing to worry about. When, towards the end, it is revealed
that scaring her to death was Morgan’s aim in contriving the whole plot,
it seems to accord her an altogether undeserved importance. In ‘The Wife
of Bath’s Tale’, by contrast, Guenever is posited as the highest authority,
given the power to grant life or death, ‘To chese wheither she wolde him
save or spille’. Later, when the knight submits his findings, she is ‘sittinge
as a justise’. But this power is a special favour granted to her by Arthur,
following her supplication appealing for clemency. When the knight in
completion of his task declares that all women want ‘sovereynetee’ over
men, it has a peculiar application to the Queen whom he addresses. When,
just a few lines later, the hag claims the knight as her prize, appealing to
Guenever as ‘My soverein lady queene’ the term resonates with additional
implications of irony. Acknowledging the Queen’s authority in such a
personal way suggests a close bond among women.
Women figure in romance primarily as objects of desire. This has its
own ‘authority’ as a quintessential role accorded to women. They
inspire and reward knights. In these poems, women fulfil this role in
highly unusual ways. The Lady pinions Gawain in his bed, flirtatiously
disputing his credentials as a courteous lover, literally reversing the
expected roles of wooer and wooed. Gawain faces a testing battle of
wits as she tries to seduce him, managing to extract nothing but kisses.
His dilemma lies in the need to maintain a courteous willingness to
serve her at the same time as defending his chastity. There is plenty
of comic potential during the scenes of attempted seduction, where
Gawain cowers in bed as she enters his bedchamber:
A corner of the cortyn he caght up a lyttel, [lifted]
And waytes warly thiderwarde quat hit be myght. [looks warily]
Hit was the ladi [ ... ]. (1185–87)

Activity
Read and analyse closely the three successive scenes of temptation.

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Explorations in Literature

Gawain’s apparent success in resisting the lady proves illusory, as

she persuades him to accept the ‘luf-lace’, thereby compromising his
integrity. When he discovers that he has been outwitted, Gawain’s fury
makes him forget that he is the exemplar of chivalry. His furious tirade
against women’s perennial evil would not be out of place in Jankyn’s
Book of Wicked Wives (2413–28). This anti-feminist rant may be a
momentary aberration, juvenile pique, or comic release, depending on
one’s point of view. The ambivalence is typical of much of the poem.
Ultimate power is ascribed to Morgan le Fay, the instigator of the
whole contrivance, relegating both Bercilak and his Lady to the role of
puppets. Yet the belated nature of this revelation weakens its impact,
while the transparent failure of her magic to achieve its aim reduces
her stature. She is a shadowy presence whose role is rather playfully
implausible.
The magical hag in ‘The Wife of Bath’s Tale’ similarly possesses
disturbing power. In many ways she occupies a position of authority.
She inverts the usual roles by coming to the rescue of the knight. She
enforces the conditions of their contract by insisting that he marry her.
Her physical demands place him in the position of compliant sexual
object, with obvious poetic justice. Her power resides not only in magic
but also in intelligence and persuasive rhetoric. Where unquestioned
male ‘authority’ was the Wife’s main bone of contention in her Prologue,
the Tale devotes a hundred lines (a quarter of its total length) to the
hag’s pillow lecture, in which she instructs her new husband as to his
erroneous judgment, dealing with each of his objections to her:

Thou art so loothly, and so oold also, [hideous]

And therto comen of so lough a kynde. (1100–01) [lowborn origin]

Activity
Read and analyse closely the ‘pillow lecture’.

Tellingly, she rearranges the order of the topics for her own purposes,
prioritising ‘gentillesse’, dismissing any idea of inherited nobility as ‘nat
worth a hen’ (1112). Essentially she elaborates upon the proverb, ‘Noble
is as noble does’, but delays making this explicit until line 1070, ‘He is
gentil that dooth gentil dedes’. Her speech is forceful, as she declares
that nobility is a gift to all from Christ not something bequeathed by
‘oure elders for hire olde richesse’ (1118). References to Dante and
Classical authors soften the radical implications of her disdain for
possessions and property, ‘temporel thyng, that man may hurte and
mayme’ (1132). The most explicit social criticism comes towards the
end of the section on nobility:
For, God it woot, men may wel often fynde
A lordes sone do shame and vileyne. (1150–51)

A short but pointed discussion of poverty (thirty lines long) is followed

by a mere six lines on old age, comprising a few vague platitudes. The
assured tone slips (‘as I gesse’) as her supportive authorities dwindle,
to an imprecise ‘ye gentils of honour’ (1208). She strategically elides
the topics of old age and ugliness, ‘foul and old’ chiming through this

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Chapter 4: Section C comparative study – Chaucer

section. Her weak defence perversely endorses the knight’s repulsion,

by praising old age and ugliness as guarantees of chastity. Overall, the
lecture seems to diminish in force as it progresses. Her arguments are
generally conservative as she urges the rich to behave nobly and the
poor to be content with their lot. She appears to be a reformer rather
than a rebel, much like the Wife, who seeks to invert gender power
relations, not attain mutuality. Nevertheless, her discourse dominates
the Tale and is fundamentally disruptive of patriarchal norms. A sermon
delivered by a woman automatically opposes prevailing ideas about
gender, which considered it inappropriate for a woman to speak of
philosophy or to preach.7 Allegorically, as in Chaucer’s ‘Tale of Melibee’, 7
St Paul’s doctrine
this Tale shows Reason (embodied in a woman) winning over (male) forbad women to speak
brute force. in church (I Corinthians
14:34). The exclusion
The intersections of genre and gender in these two Arthurian romances
of women from the
are manifold. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and ‘The Wife of Bath’s priesthood remains a
Tale’ masculine and feminine roles are reconfigured, as are many key contentious issue today.
motifs and designs. Both poets extend the boundaries of the genre,
in particular through their interrogation of gender roles. They deploy
the traditional features of the genre in new ways, demonstrating the
versatility and the malleability of romance. Both Chaucer and the
Gawain-Poet are typically medieval in their ingenious reinterpretation
of traditional materials to produce innovative, sophisticated works.

Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and having read the essential texts and any
associated recommended reading, you should be able to:
•• read Chaucer and the Gawain-Poet in the original language. Such
original language work should have enabled you to appreciate the
distinct poetic effects that can be achieved by the use of different
fourteenth-century metres and styles, and to discriminate between
the characteristic effects of Chaucer’s use of the decasyllabic
rhyming couplet and the Gawain-poet’s use of alliterative metre
•• demonstrate a close knowledge of the content of these works
•• demonstrate your understanding of some of the varieties of
medieval romance, and be able to put the individual romances you
have studied in the broad context of medieval romance as a genre
•• show how conventional views of the roles of men and women are
sustained or subverted within the individual texts you have studied
•• discuss several key themes and concerns of the poems.

Sample examination questions on ‘The Wife of

Bath’s Prologue and Tale’
1. ‘The Tale is as subversive as its Prologue.’ Discuss.
2. How far is the Tale an appropriate one for the Wife of Bath to tell?

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Explorations in Literature

Sample examination questions on Sir Gawain and

the Green Knight
1. Consider the role of the narrator in shaping the audience’s
expectations and responses.
2. How far can Gawain be seen to embody a new concept of heroism?

Sample examination questions using this material

for Section C
1. ‘Women may be seen as sexual objects, or as agents of temptation,
or even as bringers of enlightenment.’ Discuss, with reference to two
texts.
2. Compare and contrast the treatment of either self-awareness or
inequalities in any two texts.
3. With reference to any two texts of your choice, attempt a definition
of the main characteristics of romance as a genre.
4. How far would you agree that the most sophisticated medieval
romances often contain a didactic element?

56
Chapter 5: Section C comparative study – Satire: Pope and Fielding

Chapter 5: Section C comparative study

– Satire: Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and
Fielding’s Joseph Andrews

Recommended editions
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Edited by J. Hawley.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1999) [ISBN 9780140433869].
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews and Shamela. Edited by T. Keymer. (Oxford:
World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199536986].
Fielding, Henry Joseph Andrews and Shamela and Related Writings. Edited
by H. Goldberg. (New York: Norton, 1987) [ISBN 9780393955552].
Contains selections from writers targeted by Fielding’s satire, some
contemporary responses, and a collection of modern critical essays.
Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock. Edited by C. Wall. (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 9780333690970]. Contains a broad
selection of contemporary texts which supply social, cultural and
political backgrounds, together with the two-canto version of The Rape
of 1712.
Pope, Alexander Selected Poetry. Edited by P. Rogers. (Oxford: World’s
Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199537600].
Pope, Alexander The Rape of the Lock and Other Major Writings. Edited by
L. Damrosch. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 2011)
[ISBN 9780140423501].

Rogers, P. An Introduction to Pope. (London: Methuen, 1975)

[ISBN 9780416784503].
Rousseau, G.S. and P. Rogers (eds.) The Enduring Legacy: Alexander Pope
Tercentenary Essays. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 201106)
[ISBN 9780521180856].

Fielding
Battestin, M.C. The Moral Basis of Fielding’s Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews.
(Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 1959)
[ISBN 9780819560384].
Mace, N.A. Henry Fielding: Novels and the Classic Tradition. (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 1996) [ISBN 9780874135855].
Nokes, D. Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
revised 1990) [ISBN 9780140772449].
Pagliaro, H. Henry Fielding: A Literary Life. (Basingstoke: Palgrave
Macmillan, 1998) [ISBN 9780333633236].
Paulson, R. Fielding: Twentieth Century Views. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1962) [ISBN 9780133144925].
Paulson, R. The Life of Henry Fielding. (Oxford: Blackwell Critical
Biographies, 2000) [ISBN 9780631191469].
Rawson, C. (ed.) Henry Fielding (1707–1754): Novelist, Playwright,
Journalist, Magistrate: A Double Anniversary Tribute. (Newark:
University of Delaware Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780874139310].
Rivero, A.J. (ed.) Critical Essays on Henry Fielding. (New York: Twayne, 1998)
[ISBN 9780783800592].
Varey, S. ‘Joseph Andrews’: a Satire of Modern Times. (New York: Twayne,
1990) [ISBN 9780805781373].
Watt, I. The Rise of the Novel. (London: Pimlico, 2015) [ISBN 9781847923851].
Wright, A. Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1965) [ISBN 9780520013674].

Online resources
You may also wish to explore the following websites:
http://amor.cms.hu-berlin.de/~kellerwo/Bibliographies/SwiftandPope.pdf
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/c18/biblio/pope/html (an extensive
reading list compiled by Frans De Bruyn)
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_se/personal/pvm/Lock.html (a short
article on Pope which has interesting things to say on the use of the
couplet and satirical device)
For a broad-based bibliography of eighteenth-century resources, you
might like to access the following website:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/18th/index.html

Introduction
The following chapter has two purposes in view. The first is an
exploration of the topic, with a review of some of the definitions and
justifications that have been offered in the name of satire. The second
is a critical commentary on The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews
that is designed, in part, to test some of these general principles.
We have provided a brief catalogue of eighteenth-century
pronouncements on the subject of satire by way of establishing
a context, and have encouraged you to read other works by the
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Chapter 5: Section C comparative study – Satire: Pope and Fielding

contemporaries of Pope and Fielding. We have also cited some modern

observations on satire, and summarised questions that have been
asked about the legitimacy and effectiveness of this literary mode.
The second section of the chapter deals with specific matters of
authorial ‘attitude’, narrative technique, distinctions of tone and various
satiric devices.
We hope that this discussion will help you to see The Rape of the
Lock and Joseph Andrews in their literary historical context, and also
that it will encourage you to consider the ways in which their ironic
commentaries on human frailty allow them to transcend the time and
place of their creation.
While the business of satire is central to the two texts cited, it is
worth remembering that other subjects for debate might arise in the
examination. For our purposes, however, the questions listed at the
end of this section have been chosen in order to highlight some of the
problems generated by satirical writing, and it might be profitable at
this stage to read them through quickly before embarking upon the
following discussion.

Satire: the nature of the beast

The writing of satire is not confined to any particular time or literary
environment. In tone it can vary from almost prophetic denunciation,
through the ribald and grotesque, to the gentlest nudging irony.
Furthermore, many texts will contain an element of satire, although
we might be chary of denominating the whole work ‘a satire’. Above
all, satire is the most protean of topics, constantly shifting its form and
techniques. There are satirical novels, poems, plays, prose narratives;
hence it is not really, in itself, a ‘genre’. The calibre of its weaponry is
multitudinous, so it cannot be limited by being described as a ‘device’.
And, as suggested above, its tonal range is considerable. For these
reasons of variety, we would recommend the use of the term ‘mode’,
if one is needed when discussing satire; a word that, we confess, is
marked by its indeterminacy.
Activity
We suggest that you select from your wider reading some examples of the
satirical mode that could be set in contrast to or in comparison with The Rape of
the Lock and Joseph Andrews. These could come from any source, but this course
might include the ebullient sexual innuendo which marks the Wife of Bath’s
onslaught on patriarchal tyranny, or the narrator’s sly ironies on a theme of money
and class in Austen’s Emma.

Having drawn attention to the ubiquitous nature of the satirical impulse,

we now need to identify the particular cultural contexts in which Pope
and Fielding were working. The period from 1660 to approximately 1750
was characterised by its satire. It was the world of Dryden, Rochester,
Congreve, Swift, Gay and Johnson. And always in the background stand
the Roman models of Juvenal and Horace to whom these neo-classical
authors pay constant deference: one writing in tones of almost tragic
invective, the other adopting an attitude of smiling irony. To use the
critical vocabulary current in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
England, they were perfect examples of ‘railing’ and ‘raillery’.

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Contemporary positions
At the end of the seventeenth century, in his essay A Discourse
Concerning Satire (1693), John Dryden had warned satirists against
character assassination. The ‘lampoon’, he says, ‘is a dangerous sort of
weapon, and for the most part unlawful’. His concern is for ‘the reputation
of other men’, and he is also at pains to discriminate between crude
abuse and a technique which employs more subtle ironies:
There is still a vast difference betwixt the slovenly butchering of
a man, and the fineness of a stroke that separates the head from
the body, and leaves it standing in its place.

Activity
You should read The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews with these distinctions
in mind, assessing the ‘tone’ of the satire, both in terms of differences between
the texts, and in terms of contrasting modulations within each work. Is it possible
to gauge the type of laughter being invited? How does ridicule affect our
perspective of the apparent target?

Half a century after the Discourse, Dryden’s words are echoed by Dr

Johnson in his Dictionary where he describes satire as a species of
writing:
[…] in which wickedness and folly are censured. Proper satire
is distinguished by the generality of the reflections, from a
lampoon which is aimed against a particular person; but they
are too frequently confounded.

There is clearly some anxiety over the legitimacy of personal vendetta

masquerading beneath the cloak of public welfare. Some years earlier,
in Dialogue II of the Epilogue to the Satires (1738), Pope had also felt
the need to offer the world a satirist’s manifesto:
Ask you what provocation I have had?
The strong Antipathy of Good to Bad.
When Truth or Virtue an Affront endures,
The Affront is mine, my friend, and should be yours.
A little further on, he describes satire as a ‘sacred weapon’, and in a
slightly sanctimonious tone declares:
Rev’rent I touch thee! but with honest zeal,
To rouse the Watchmen of the public weal.
This brief survey has been designed to highlight the eighteenth
century’s serious evaluation of the satirist’s art. In the context of mass
media, satire can often appear ephemeral and gratuitous, but, even
if the public pronouncements of eighteenth-century writers can
occasionally sound a little unctuous, the satirists’ commitment to the
rehabilitating power of laughter is worthy consideration.

Assessments of Pope and Fielding

When Pope was approached to write a poem to reconcile two warring
Catholic families, he found himself in a position ideally suited to create
and sustain that detachment he claimed to be so necessary to satire.
Although he was doubtless aware of the characters involved (Arabella
Fermour and Lord Petre), he was not intimate with their world of
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youthful socialites, and so had no personal axe to grind. What he had

to hand was a fable of callow indiscretion and foolishness rather than
a narrative of vicious or corrupt behaviour. From these ingredients
he would construct an intricately wrought fiction, buoyed up by the
delicacy of its irony and the richness of its ambiguities.
This is the epitome of Horatian ‘raillery’, and rarely does it strike a
discordant note. Only when the submerged image of Belinda’s sexuality
moves close to the surface, do we sense a reality that threatens the
fragile bounds of ‘fancy’s maze’ (Epistle to Arbuthnot, 340). Yet even the
heavily Freudian symbolism of the Cave of Spleen (Canto IV, 49–54) and
the overt puns upon ‘dying’/orgasm (Canto V, 78) are happily contained
within this miniature universe of Ovidian transformations. Whatever
insignificant part Arabella and Lord Petre had to play in history, their
alter egos, Belinda and the Baron, are translated to mythic status in
Pope’s ‘heroi-comical’ poem. We will return to the subject of Pope’s
‘gentle’ irony and his treatment of his heroine.
Activity
By way of contrast, we recommend that you read one or two of Swift’s burlesque
poems on urban nymphs: for instance, ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’ or ‘A Beautiful
Young Nymph Going to Bed’. The corrosive tone of these poems will provide an
excellent foil to Pope’s treatment of his own parodic pastoral world in The Rape of
the Lock.

Pope’s furore in a teacup is topical, but the personalities are

metamorphosed by the satirist’s art into ‘types’. The narrator looks on with
wry good humour: he is familiar with the social rituals, but stands apart.
Fielding’s position in Joseph Andrews is similar, but there are shifts of
emphasis. His narrator, it could be claimed, is a fictional version of himself,
and he is at pains in the author’s Preface to disclaim any particularity of
target. He has, he says, been careful to ‘obscure’ those models that he has
taken from life, and his personal motives are blameless:
And here I solemnly protest I have no intention to vilify or
asperse anyone.
Later in the novel (Book III, Chapter I) he will affirm this generalising
tendency:
To prevent, therefore, any such malicious applications (i.e. the
recognising of certain ‘characters’), I declare here, once for all, I
describe not men but manners; not an individual but a species.
This seems to be a justified claim, as Fielding’s satirical cameos are aimed
at representatives rather than historical figures. Nevertheless, there are
exceptions and, even in the first chapter, he happily pillories Colly Cibber
by name and sets out to ridicule the novelist Samuel Richardson through
his heroine Pamela, as he had already attempted in his parody Shamela.
The exact nature of the relationship between you, the reader, and the
teller of Fielding’s tale is worth considering. His early address to ‘my
good-natured reader’ is disarming and suggests that cordial relations
are being established. He has much to say through his prefatory essays
and his commentaries on diverse subjects. In fact, as a ‘character’, we
probably know much more about the narrator than any other figure in
the novel. It is the discourse of the coffee-house; informed, witty, perhaps
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even ironic at our expense, but always amiable. He will ‘teach’ us, but
always delightfully, and the laughter is, as he says, always a ‘wholesome
physic for the mind’ to ‘purge away spleen, melancholy, and ill affections’.
Activity
Extract material from those sections where the narrator engages in direct
discourse with the reader. Make an attempt to ‘characterise’ the way in which he
presents himself, and assess the methods he uses to ‘educate’ us in terms of the
moral landscapes that he paints.

The activity described above is fairly straightforward: this would be

less so were it attempted in The Rape of the Lock. Here, the narrator
convinces us of the authority of his opinions, primarily by the masterly
control of irony and its capacity to expose the frailties of his ‘actors’. We
are at once aware of his controlling intelligence, but also of the absence
of any specific personality.
Like Pope, Fielding is dealing with the world of the ridiculous. In Joseph
Andrews he does not concern himself with ‘the blackest villainies’, with
corruption or human misery, because such distressing topics are too
serious to be mocked. However, the vanities and hypocrisies that lead to
affectation surely are the legitimate targets of a comic novelist’s irony:
Great vices are the proper objects of our detestation, smaller
faults, of our pity; but affectation appears to me the only true
source of the Ridiculous.
(Author’s Preface)

Comedy has always been a little fastidious in dealing with vicious

behaviour, preferring to ‘sport with human follies, not with crimes’ (Ben
Jonson, Prologue to Everyman in His Humour). Joseph Andrews might
be described as a comic novel with a decidedly satirical flavour, and
although not a very precise definition, it is intended that it should draw
attention to the reconciliatory nature of the humour. Human frailty is
ridiculed, but it is a laughter that aims to rehabilitate, even celebrate.
Activity
Study the final chapters of Joseph Andrews, assessing the ways in which various
comic scenes drive the narrative towards the conventional closure of comedy’s
happy ending.

The Rape of the Lock shares many of these ambitions: it is an amiable and
forgiving satire. But it is worth pointing out that satire will often explore
darker landscapes, articulating an indignation at varieties of depravity
and perversity that lie outside the experience of the two works under
consideration. Examples can be had in the four voyages of Swift’s Gulliver’s
Travels, or in the poems of the seventeenth-century satirist, Lord Rochester.

Satirical methods
Both authors leave their readers in no doubt as to what to expect. Pope’s
‘sub-title’ is An Heroi-Comical Poem, while Fielding’s ‘Author’s Preface’ gives
a lengthy description of what he calls ‘a comic epic poem in prose’. The
mock-heroic manner was already well established in the poetry of the
late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, although it was new to
the novel. Better still, it was a satirical technique that had a sound classical

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pedigree. The essence of this device is incongruity: it involves an ironic

conjunction of entirely antithetical worlds. Thus, in the title of Pope’s poem,
the pattern is established: on the one hand a rape, on the other a lock of
hair. It is tempting to suggest that just such a contradictory marriage exists
in Joseph Andrews: the given name, after all, has its provenance in a fable
of religious analogy (Joseph and Abraham Adams), while the surname
burlesques Richardson’s popular heroine Pamela Andrews. In each case the
serious and the trivial are yoked together with ironic inappropriateness.
Activity
Read the first sentence of The Rape of the Lock and the first chapter of Joseph
Andrews and put them to the test regarding this idea of contrast and incongruity.
Even the grammatical structure of Pope’s couplet parodies a convention – the
clue to this can be found by reading the opening of Virgil’s Aeneid.

As the reference to the Aeneid suggests, classical epic literature is one

of the primary sources of parodic material – although it was by no
means limited to works from Greece and Rome.
In Joseph Andrews the texture of epic allusions is much less organised
than it is in The Rape of the Lock. It may be that part of Fielding’s
intention in coining the phrase ‘comic epic poem in prose’ was to give
this new foundling genre a respectable paternity, something he felt it
singularly lacked in the hands of Defoe and Richardson. The narrative is
punctuated with references to classical culture that provide an ironic foil
for the knockabout comedy of Joseph’s and Adams’s odyssey through
the inns and bedrooms of eighteenth-century England. From time to
time, an heroic echo is developed at greater length, as for instance the
‘epic simile’ applied to the slatternly, sexually rapacious Mrs Slipslop:
As when a hungry tigress, who long has traversed the woods in
fruitless search, sees within the reach of her claws a lamb, she
prepares to leap on her prey; or as a voracious pike, of immense
size, surveys through the liquid element a roach or gudgeon,
which cannot escape her jaws, opens them wide to swallow the
little fish; so did Mrs. Slipslop prepare to lay her violent amorous
hands on poor Joseph…
(I, vi)

In the author’s Preface, Fielding insists that it is not his plan to ‘exhibit
monsters’, but his concession to the burlesque will lie in the diction, for,
as he says:
many instances will occur in this work, as in the description of
the battles, and some other places, not necessary to be pointed
out to the classical reader, for whose entertainment those
parodies or burlesque imitations are chiefly calculated.
Fielding has laid out his stall and targeted his audience.
Activity
Have a look at the ‘surprising and bloody adventures’ of Book III, Chapter ix:
especially the closing paragraphs. Put together an analysis of how the mock-
heroic appears to be working, and then collect other examples from the narrative
that exhibit similar ironic strategies.

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Fielding’s reference to ‘battles’ also reminds us that violence is a common

ingredient of epic literature. Yet once translated into a comic context,
such violence loses its destructive power. In Fielding’s satirical episodes,
it takes on an altogether different tenor. In the famous ‘good Samaritan’
incident, Joseph has a gun held to his head with a threat to ‘blow [his]
brains to the devil’, he is pistol-whipped, beaten with cudgels, stripped
naked and left for dead in a ditch. Yet it is rather like watching a cartoon.
We do not fear for Joseph, he being our hero, and the physical effects
of his battering quickly fade from sight. The scene is an exemplum, set
up to satirise the heartless self-interest among the passengers on the
coach, and to recommend, by contrast, the true Christian charity of the
poor postillion. Parson Adams is also much associated with an ebullient
violence. For a Christian pastor, he is remarkably ready to engage in
fist-fights, yet in a paradoxical way his unwillingness to turn the other
cheek becomes a sign of approval. Here is a man of spontaneous,
sincere feelings who will not compromise in the name of prudence.
Furthermore, his battles are usually couched in those mock-heroic or
slightly farcical terms that draw the sting of his bruising encounters.
Violence also forms part of the fabric of The Rape of the Lock, as
the title might suggest. But in this work it has been even further
sublimated into symbolic patterns of engagement. The world of
Homeric epic is grandiose, masculine and martial: men, tribes and
nations fight for honour and survival, variously aided and frustrated by
cohorts of whimsical if not actively malicious deities. In the salons of
Whitehall and Hampton Court all has been miniaturised and ‘feminised’.
Powerful gods and goddesses have metamorphosed into delicate,
beautiful, but largely ineffectual sylphs. The terrifying vistas of the
Underworld have diminished to phantasmagoric images of Belinda’s
unconscious sexuality (Canto IV). A call to arms is not echoed by the
neighing of horses and the screams of dying men, but:
Fans clap, silks rustle, and tough whalebones crack.
(Canto V, 40)

Activity
Preparations for battle and mock conflicts abound. You should collect these
episodes and analyse the ways in which Pope exploits the ironic distance that exists
between the event and the diction and imagery used to describe it. Remembering
what was said about classical literature not being the only source of epic material,
read and research Ariel’s address to his troops and the threatened punishments for
those derelict in their duty (Canto II, 73–136) – and try to identify the model.

We would like to deal with two episodes: first because they represent
conventional motifs from heroic contexts, and second because they
raise the question of Pope’s attitude both to his heroine/victim and to
the social environment she inhabits.
At the end of Canto I and the beginning of Canto II, we see Belinda
preparing to launch herself upon the world. As she sits before the
dressing table she ‘arms’ herself for the fight: cosmetics are her
weaponry, and men are the ‘enemy’. But already the term ‘enemy’ is
loaded with ambiguity, as will be demonstrated later when, in the midst
of a symbolic battle, we come upon the Baron, ‘who sought no more
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Chapter 5: Section C comparative study – Satire: Pope and Fielding

than on his foe to die’ (Canto V, 78). A strange ambition for a soldier we
might think, until we recall that ‘dying’ is a euphemism for orgasm.
In Belinda’s case, the traditional arming of the hero(ine) is undermined
with irony, most of it aimed at the extraordinary vanity of the woman
as she worships her own image in the mirror. And this frailty is given
an extra complexity by its being linked to an implied moral confusion
– note how ‘Bibles’ (ornate and decorative?) are alliteratively tied to
‘billet-doux’ (love-letters). And yet Pope’s irony is never corrosive
– it certainly makes no attempt to exploit female cosmetics as a
camouflage for inner corruption in the way that Swift does in the
poems we cited above. If anything, their application is seen as an
art that enhances a very real beauty. A similar duality of response is
being encouraged as Canto II opens. The images seem designed to
call up memories of Cleopatra as she sailed down the river Cydnus and
captured Antony’s heart (see Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra,
II.ii.190–204). And yet the scene, again, is fraught with irony. Her self-
obsession is being gently mocked by Pope, yet at the same time he is
forced to acknowledge the powerful charm of that feminine mystique.
Her charm is celebrated in the richness of the poetry: her vanity is
ridiculed by some subtle ironic manoeuvring.

Activity
Read this passage carefully and try to ascertain the ways in which Pope
manipulates our responses. Pay particular attention to the sensuousness of the
imagery associated with Belinda (‘India’s glowing gems’, ivory and tortoiseshell,
etc.). What effect does it create?

Our last example is taken from Canto III, 101–124, where Pope paints a
luxurious scene of coffee drinking. In the heroic scheme of things we
are invited to remember all those sacramental feasts that preceded the
impending military onslaught. They were serious rituals of masculine
bonding and honourable commitment to the sacrifice to come. Images
of this sort hover in the background, while in the foreground the idle
rich of London’s polite society engage in a trivial pastime. Every detail
highlights an existence of self-indulgence and conspicuous wealth: the
expensive coffee, the fine china, the fashionably lacquered Japanese
furniture. Pope ironises this somnambulant gathering with a few
delicate barbs.
However, as was the case with Belinda’s toilette, there is a richness
in his description that prompts a different response. All these finely-
wrought artefacts are beautiful, sensuous and enhancing. They are the
products of a sophisticated society, and Pope seems concerned that we
should be able to enjoy what they offer.

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Activity
Read through the poem attempting to identify scenes where you feel that similar
ambivalences exist and where it is possible to experience both the satirist’s irony
and his willingness to celebrate.

Twentieth-century views
We will close with two statements from academic critics that, in a way,
are re-statements of old orthodoxies:
•• The central preoccupation of the satirist is how to achieve order in a
world that is essentially disorderly.
•• When a man gets out of proportion, the satirist must correct him.
He restores us to sanity by making us laugh, sometimes generously,
sometimes grimly. His correction may involve a compensating
disproportion, but, provided that this is not extreme, we see its
purpose and appreciate its effect.
You should test these observations against your experience of reading
The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews.

Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and having read both the essential texts and
the associated recommended critical reading, you should be able to:
•• discuss the nature of mock-heroic and other parodic techniques
used in satire
•• discuss the differences and similarities in the social contexts found
in The Rape of the Lock and Joseph Andrews
•• provide an analysis of the various formal structures of the two texts:
cantos, epic similes, heroic couplets, chapter headings and prefatory
essays, narrative voice
•• identify the relationship that the satirist intends to provoke between
the reader and the various targets of the satire.

Sample examination questions

1. Swift claimed that satire was written ‘to mend the world’. Consider
the ways in which such a claim could be made for any two texts that
you have read on this course.
2. ‘Satire relies upon the invocation of social values and public
responsibilities as the basis for its censure’. With this quotation in
mind, discuss the distinctive qualities of any two texts that you have
read on this course.
3. ‘For any author writing in the satirical mode, the first problem to be
solved, is how to entrap the reader.’ How is this problem addressed
in any two texts that you have read on this course?
4. ‘Satire is not a single weapon but a whole battery.’ By reference to
two satirical texts written after 1600, explore the range and effect of
devices employed by their authors.

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Chapter 6: Section C comparative study – The Bildungsroman: Hardy and Joyce

Chapter 6: Section C comparative study

– The Bildungsroman: Hardy’s Jude the
Obscure and Joyce’s A Portrait of the
Artist as a Young Man

Recommended editions
It is advisable to have good annotated editions of the primary texts. All
the following editions have good introductions and notes.
Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure. Edited by Patricia Ingham. (Oxford: World’s
Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199537020]. Contains
explanatory notes.
Hardy, Thomas Jude the Obscure (New York: Norton, 2016)
[ISBN 9780393937527]. Contains criticism and notes.
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by John Paul
Riquelme. (New York: Norton, 2006) [ISBN 9780393926798]. Contains
criticism and notes.
Joyce, James A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Edited by Jeri Johnson.
(Oxford: Worlds Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008)
[ISBN 9780199536443]. Contains explanatory notes.

Jude the Obscure and A Portrait of the Artist as a

Young Man: narrative style and the reader
The way in which the protagonists are introduced in these novels is
significant, both in terms of the fictional location and the language
used. At the very beginning of Jude the Obscure the reader first
encounters 11-year-old Jude lamenting the departure of his
schoolmaster Mr Phillotson, who is leaving the village. Jude’s tears are
referred to at several points, which sets the melancholic tone which
is to pervade Jude’s life at every stage the reader encounters him. In
comparison, the tone at the beginning of A Portrait is significantly
more playful, in which the infant Stephen is introduced in appropriately
infantile language: ‘Once upon a time and a very good time it was there
was a moocow coming down a long the road and this moocow that
was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named baby
tuckoo…’. It is not immediately clear to the reader who is speaking;
whether this is the narrator beginning the story in a particular style, or
whether a character is speaking to an infant. This ambiguity is repeated
a numerous points throughout the novel as Stephen grows up, and as
his character develops, the style develops alongside him.
Activity
Think about the narrative tone and style of Jude the Obscure. How does it differ
from A Portrait?

It appears that the tone in Jude the Obscure remains quite similar
throughout; it is that of a seemingly detached narrator, telling
Jude’s story from a third-person perspective. In A Portrait, however,
the language shifts and develops according to Stephen’s character
development; it mirrors the language he uses at each stage of his
development from infancy, through childhood and adolescence to
early adulthood. The narrative voice also shifts without warning or
announcement in A Portrait so that we are presented with different
narrative perspectives, which shift and blend into one another quite
rapidly. Speech marks are omitted in dialogue, which forces the reader
to pay close attention in order to detect who is speaking, and also
makes the narrative seem more like a composite of voices rather than
rigidly separated lines. Despite these differences, however, the tone of
Jude the Obscure is emotive throughout the book, whereas A Portrait
employs irony when depicting Stephen’s thoughts and feelings. In
terms of the Bildungroman, a more traditional nineteenth-century
perspective of the protagonist would be a sympathetic one, whereas a
‘modern’ one would problematise this by adding layers of irony.
Activity
How much are these distinctions upheld in these two novels? How much are they
challenged?

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The distance between the narrator’s perspective and the protagonist’s

is very different if we compare the two novels: in Jude the Obscure, the
narrator maintains a seemingly objective distance from which to tell
the story. An extreme example of this distance comes at the beginning
of the last chapter, in which the narrator addresses the reader directly
with instruction on how to read the last chapter: ‘The last pages to
which the chronicler of these lives would ask the reader’s attention are
concerned with the scene in and out of Jude’s bedroom when leafy
summer came round again’. There are no such examples of this direct
address to the reader in A Portrait.
Activity
Why does Hardy choose to add this detail of metanarrative? What effect does it
have on the reader?

The reader in effect gets further away from the perspective of Jude
himself. Jude dies in this chapter, which leaves the end of the story
to be told by the narrator and the story to brought to an end by the
thoughts and words of Arabella. The difference between the end of
Jude the Obscure and A Portrait in terms of narrative distancing is that
we get closer to the thoughts and words of Stephen whereas we get
further away from the thoughts and words of Jude. Towards the end of
A Portrait the narrative becomes composed of extracts from Stephen’s
notebook, which brings the reader so close to his own perspective that
any exterior narration is unnecessary.

Activity
Which character do you feel most sympathetic towards? Does this change as
the narratives progesses? Does this correspond in any way with the contrasting
narrative distances?

Education and language

There is a vast difference between the familial support offered to Jude
and that which is provided for Stephen. Jude’s parents are dead and
his aunt brings him up rather reluctantly. Among other things, this
difference is reflected in the levels of education to which they are
entitled. Both characters display a great desire for learning, although
the young Jude cannot go to school in the daytime and can only
attend the village night school. Despite this fact, he is so upset that Mr
Phillotson the village schoolteacher is leaving that he is crying. The fact
that Jude displays more enthusiasm and conscientiousness than some
of the more privileged students who are granted a proper university
education is referred to at several points in the book. Stephen, on the
other hand, is well provided for and is able to attend school, although
he appears extremely sensitive and much affected by his intense
physical and mental experiences there.

Activity
How much happiness or satisfaction do Stephen and Jude get from their
educational endeavours? What do both characters hope to achieve from their
education, and do they achieve it?

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Chapter 6: Section C comparative study – The Bildungsroman: Hardy and Joyce

Jude teaches himself Latin and Greek in order to go to university in

Christminster, but it soon becomes apparent that the acquisition of
these ancient languages is not sufficient in its own right to grant him
entry into a college. There are financial issues which hold him back, and
he is discouraged from applying by the dean of Christminster college.

Activity
Look at the scene in which Jude is drunk in a pub in Christminster, and is
challenged to recite some Latin verses in exchange for whisky.

He knows the Latin and can recite it correctly, whereas the

undergraduates also in the pub do not know themselves whether the
words are correct or not. Jude is aware of this, and voices his bitter
anger and frustration.
Activity
Compare this with the scene in which Stephen uses the word ‘tundish’ when
talking to his dean of studies.

When Stephen uses this word to describe the funnel for pouring gas
into a lamp, the dean, a ‘poor Englishman in Ireland’, does not know
the word. Stephen feels he is being laughed at because of this word,
and becomes defensive and offended. We learn from a diary entry later
on that he looks up the word, only to find that it is ‘English and good
old blunt English too’. Both characters are defensive and defiant when
challenged; they wish to be proved right despite the fact that it matters
little to anyone else.
Activity
These linguistic insecurities display Jude and Stephen’s insecurities, but are they
insecure for the same reasons?

Isolation and self-exile

Both Jude and Stephen suffer from feelings of isolation, and both
characters do things which set them apart from their peers as being
unconventional. Jude is an idealistic and impractical dreamer; as a
child when sowing seeds in the fields he is so struck by feelings of
solidarity with the hungry birds that he does not carry out his task of
scaring them off, and allows them to eat the seeds. He is beaten by the
farmer for this action, and loses his job. Both characters spend a lot of
time acting and reflecting alone. Jude does not appear to have any
close relationships with others apart from his romantic relationships
with Arabella and Sue; friendship is something he lacks. Even his
relationships with Arabella and Sue demonstrate his inability to fit
into one ‘category’ of human society. Arabella is selfish, pragmatic and
sensual; she is a working-class woman of the village unconcerned by
matters beyond financial survival and life enjoyment. Sue is extremely
sensitive, neurotic and spiritual; she cannot bring herself to enjoy the
pleasures of the flesh, and tortures herself over her feelings for Jude.
While being closer to the characteristics of Sue, Jude cannot manage to
exist happily with either woman while struggling helplessly under the
power of both.

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Stephen seems at times to be disdainful of almost everyone and

everything; he shrinks from human warmth and prefers his own
internal speculations to any dealings with other human beings. His
friend Cranly asks him towards the end of the book if he has ever
felt love for another person, and he cannot name any person that
he has felt a deep love for: he cannot even say truthfully that he
loves his mother. Jude also seems to prefer his own company to any
comradeship, but does not display the same sense of haughtiness as
Stephen. Jude’s love for Sue is also so deep that he will do anything for
her, and travels across the country when he is seriously ill in order to
see her.
Stephen is also a sensitive character who appears to feel things
more deeply than the other boys around him, and due to feelings of
being different does not make friends easily. He does garner some
acquaintances and friendships at university, and much of the latter
part of the book is taken up with the intense philosophical and
religious debates they engage in. Stephen’s interactions with others
are, however, almost always serious debates rather than friendly
camaraderie. There are a few moments when Stephen is struck by the
warmth of a simple gesture of friendship, for example his friend Davin
affectionately calling him ‘Stevie’. However, these moments are soon
subsumed by Stephen’s more lofty and abstract thoughts. Stephen
positions himself above his peers, making internal judgements and
pronouncements and isolating himself in the process. Both characters
share a general unease in their surroundings wherever they go, and
aspire to transport themselves into alternative environments.
Activity
To what extent is Jude’s and/or Stephen’s isolation self-made?

Both characters leave their original locations out of choice, but

does their deliberate self-exile make them happier? Jude longs to
go to Christminster so that he can attend university; to him, the city
symbolises everything he aspires to but cannot achieve because of his
social class. He begins life in the village in Wessex, goes to Christminster
and then returns to the village to die there. These two locations
coincide with the two women in his life, local girl Arabella Donn and
his cousin Sue Bridehead. He marries Arabella in the village, then when
he moves to Chistminster he meets and falls in love with Sue, and
once things go wrong with Sue and he is back in the village Arabella
convinces him to come back to her. This movement is almost cyclical
for Jude; he ends up where he started, and his spirit is crushed by the
significance of this because he feels he has failed in his endeavour to
better himself.
Activity
Where do you think Jude seems to be the happiest? Which woman does he seem
the happiest with?

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Chapter 6: Section C comparative study – The Bildungsroman: Hardy and Joyce

Religion and art

Activity
Compare and contrast the significance of religion for Jude in Jude the Obscure and
for Stephen in A Portrait.

Religion plays an important part in the development of both Jude and

Stephen. For Jude, his Christian faith is what he clings to and is tied
up with his aspirations to better himself. For Stephen, the Catholic
education he is born into represents an institution he begins to want to
rebel against. Both Jude and Stephen consider the clergy, but Stephen
turns away from this idea because he does not want to deny himself
sensory or aesthetic pleasures. The middle part of A Portrait is taken up
with Stephen’s religious awakening and subsequent dismissal. Stephen
has what he thinks is a religious epiphany, in which he faces up to his
sins, confesses them and then becomes supremely holy in all of his
thoughts and actions. Again, the language reflects this development
in his character; as he experiences what he identifies as a calling into
priesthood, the narrative is punctuated by excerpts from the Latin
mass and the narrative itself sounds like part of a sermon. ‘He knelt
there sinless and timid; and he would hold upon his tongue the host
and God would enter his purified body’. Like Jude, Stephen does not
seem to be able to do things in moderation; once he has decided to
deny himself any sensual pleasures, he goes too far and subjects his
body to every single small deprivation or abstention he can think of.
Ultimately, though, he realises that his approach is not wholly religious
or pure; pride rather than piety motivates him, and eventually he
turns away from the church towards more artistic and sensual matters.
He considers priesthood only to reject it, knowing that he was not
moved enough by his Jesuit teacher’s suggestion that he might enter
priesthood. Instead, Stephen decides that artistic and philosophical
speculation is where his strength lies.
Activity
Compare these religious and artistic ‘epiphanies’ with Jude’s musings. Does he
gain a similar understanding of the importance of the senses?

Both Jude and Sue display elements of superstition. Sue dreads divine
authority and retribution, and her neurotic nature eventually turns
against her. Both Jude and Sue are worried about what they have been
told regarding their family’s tendency to end in tragedy, and through
the death of their children it is as if this superstition is proved right.
Jude’s aunt warns him to stay away from Sue when he first goes to
Christminster; not only is there a superstition about their side of the
family coming to a tragic end, but Mrs Fawley also dislikes the fact that
Sue lives in a ‘seed-bed of idolatry’ and may even be a ‘Papist’.
Activity
How is the Catholic Church represented in both novels?

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Explorations in Literature

Both Jude and Stephen develop a keen sense of self-symbolism, although

Jude draws his from religion by calling himself a ‘poor Christ’ while
Stephen’s is mythological; he ponders the implications of his surname and
aligns himself with Daedalus, the ‘fabulous artificer’ from Greek mythology.
The mythological figure of Daedalus brings a sense of artistic or writerly
‘craft’ very different from the occupation or ‘craft’ of stonemasonry which
Jude sees as a necessary drudgery to fund his attempts at self-education.
As an aside, the narrator comments that Jude’s particular trade would have
been viewed as a more artistic or specialised craft in London – another sign
that he is not quite in the right place and time to achieve all he wants.

Politics and class

Both Jude and Stephen problematise the political status quo in the
trajectory of their stories, although the focus is somewhat different.
Stephen Dedalus describes Ireland in A Portrait as ‘the old sow that eats
her farrow’. Stephen’s relationship with his country is a complex one.
He has a difficult time when he is questioned about his nationalism; his
friend Davin says ‘In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is
too powerful’. Eventually he turns away from his home, his church and
his fatherland, and his voice at the very end of the book seems to be
defiant and jubilant, addressing again his mythological namesake: ‘Old
father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead’.
Activity
In terms of the Bildungsroman, how important a role do you think his country
plays in shaping Stephen’s identity? What other factors are at play?

The main difference between Jude and Stephen in terms of their

social class is that Stephen is from a background that allows him an
education, whereas Jude does not have this and has to work to support
himself is his endeavours. He is ostracised by everyone for his attempts
to become an intellectual; he is not accepted by the social class he is
trying to escape from or by the class he is trying to join. Jude idolises
Christminster and the world of knowledge that it represents to him, but
he does not find out the particularities of how to actually apply to study
at the university. Right at the end of his life Jude hears that ‘there are
schemes afoot for making the University less exclusive’, which would help
others in the same situation as him in the future. Rather than allow this
fact to comfort him, however, he laments over how it is ‘too late, too late
for me! Ah – and for how many worthier ones before me!’
Activity
How much does the reader sympathise with Jude’s lack of success in entering the
university?

In comparison, despite the fact that the young Stephen is well provided
for, in going to university he relinquishes financial support from his
family. The end of the novel sees him struggling to support himself:
in his own words, he is ‘ill clad, ill fed, louse eaten’. The fact remains,
however, that due to his background he gets the education he craves
for and subsequently is freed from the constraints of his upbringing
and given the intellectual tools required to think philosophically for
himself. Jude is not given this opportunity.
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Chapter 6: Section C comparative study – The Bildungsroman: Hardy and Joyce

Jude says of himself and Sue: ‘Our ideas were fifty years too soon to
be of any good to us’. While both Jude and Stephen seem to think that
they are more advanced in their thinking than other people of their
time, this is expressed in very different ways. The two characters have
varying levels of success when they attempt to put their progressive
thinking into action. Ultimately, Stephen is more successful than Jude
in breaking away from convention, because he is given more support
from early on in his life. Jude’s social and financial standing leads to
the book’s tragic conclusion; his son, who has inherited the same
deep-thinking sensitivity as Jude, has murdered his younger siblings
and killed himself, leaving a note which says ‘Done because we are too
menny’. The boy, who represents the combination of Jude and Sue’s
neuroses and is named Little Father Time because of the prematurely
old and wise look in his eyes, is so acutely aware of how he sees his
position in society as a superfluous and unwanted human being that
he ends his life and those of his siblings.
Activity
Do you think the reader is meant to pity Jude? Do you think his life decisions are
presented as the wrong ones? What is the effect of ending the book on so sad a
note?

Learning outcomes
By the end of this chapter and having read both the novels and the
associated recommended critical reading, you should be able to:
•• recognise the structure and the characteristics of the
Bildungsroman
•• highlight the ways in which Thomas Hardy and James Joyce use the
genre, and discuss the analogies and differences between the two
novels in this respect
•• analyse other Bildungsromane in this subject, such as Great
Expectations, on your own
•• comment on the form, structure, themes, use of symbolism and
imagery in Jude the Obscure and A Portrait
•• relate the development of the individual, typical of the
Bildungsroman, to the larger social, historical and political issues
raised by the texts.

Sample examination questions

1. Analyse the respective endings of two texts that you have studied,
looking specifically at the closure or open-endedness of the
narrative. How do these strategies affect our reading of the novels?
2. Compare the experience of isolation in two texts you have studied.
3. Compare the representations of education and religion in two texts
you have studied.
4. Examine the different techniques of character representation in two
texts you have studied.

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Explorations in Literature

Notes

76
Appendix 1: Other recommended texts and sample questions

Appendix 1: Other recommended texts

and sample questions

This section provides you with a list of recommended editions

and recommended secondary reading for each of the texts on the
prescribed syllabus of Explorations in Literature that are not covered
in the sample chapters of this subject guide. It also gives you a list of
questions to consider, as well some sample examination questions that
will help you to direct your studies of these texts.
All the editions recommended below have good introductions and
notes that will assist you in your studies, they are also editions, which
are generally available. Lists of secondary readings have also been
compiled with availability in mind; however, you may not be able to
find all these books in a bookshop, so we would recommend that
you also visit a good academic library. Lists of secondary reading
are by no means comprehensive; they are meant to give you an
indication of some of the best work available. You may, therefore, want
to supplement them by compiling your own reading list following
the advice given in the Student handbook and in the section in the
introduction to this subject guide entitled ‘General subject reading’.
You will notice in the lists below that there are two kinds of sample
questions provided: ‘questions to consider’ and ‘sample examination
questions’. The ‘questions to consider’ are informal, and are designed to
indicate important areas of study. The ‘sample examination questions’
are more formal and indicate the kind of questions you are likely to see
in the examination. You may not be able to answer all of the questions
from a single reading of the text, but do not be discouraged. You are
not expected to have answers to these questions before you have
conducted a close reading of the text or before you have investigated
some of the recommended secondary reading. The questions are
designed to indicate areas you should direct your studies towards.

Sophocles, Antigone
Recommended edition
Sophocles, Antigone in Sophocles The Theban Plays. Translated by E.F.
Watling (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003) [ISBN 9780140440034].

Tyrrell, B. and L. Bennett Recapturing Sophocles’ Antigone. (New York:

Rowman & Littlefield, 1998) [ISBN 9780847692170].
Wilmer, S.E and A. Zukauskaite Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern
Philosophy and Criticism. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010)
[ISBN 9780199559213].
Winnington-Ingram, R.P. Sophocles: An Interpretation. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1980) [ISBN 9780521296847].
Zajko, V and Leonard, M. ‘Part II: Myth and Politics’ in Laughing with Medusa.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199237944] pp.121–88.

Questions to consider
1. As the story of an act of defiance by a woman, can Antigone be
regarded as an early feminist text, or is the rebellion of Antigone
one that ultimately reinforces a patriarchal social order?
2. With whom is the audience encouraged to identify in Antigone
– with Antigone herself, with Creon or with the chorus? Or does
dramatic tension develop as a result of diverse demands upon the
audience’s sympathies?
3. To what extent is it necessary to understand the conventions of
Greek staging, and the conditions in which Greek tragedy develops,
to appreciate the drama of Antigone in full?
4. To what extent can we call the characters of Antigone psychologically
realistic? Do they have distinctive personality traits or do they remain
two-dimensional vehicles for the poet’s argument?
5. What are the recurrent symbols and images in Antigone and what
can these recurrent symbols and images tell us about the themes of
the drama?
6. If we assume that, in ancient Greece, audiences of Antigone knew
very well what happens in the end, the importance of ‘suspense’
must have been minimal. What other kinds of enjoyment might this
tragedy appeal to?

Sample examination questions

1. Aristotle suggested in his Poetics that central to the experience of
tragic drama was a ‘purging’ of the emotions of pity and fear. What
light does this throw upon your reading of one play on this course?
2. ‘[Tragedy instils] a lofty sense of the mastery of the human spirit
over its own stormiest agitations; and this […] conducts us to a state
of feeling which it is the highest aim of tragedy to produce, to a
sentiment of sublime acquiescence in the course of fate.’ (Matthew
Arnold). Consider Antigone in the light of this comment.
3. ‘If we are to understand Sophoclean tragedy, then we need to take
account of the role of the polis (the city) just as much as the roles of
the dramatic characters.’ Discuss.

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Appendix 1: Other recommended texts and sample questions

Ovid, Metamorphoses
Recommended edition
Ovid Metamorphoses. Translated by Mary Innes. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1955, 2000) [ISBN 9780140440584].

Sample examination questions

1. ‘In the Metamorphoses, Ovid blends a witty cynicism with
a sympathetic insight into human emotions.’ Discuss the
Metamorphoses in the light of this comment.
2. Consider the ways in which pictorial effects are employed in the
Metamorphoses.
3. Consider the ways in which the idea of transformation is employed
by an author to provide a sympathetic insight into human emotions.

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Explorations in Literature

Dante, The Inferno

Recommended editions
There are many translations of the Inferno, either in prose or in verse.
An edition with good notes is essential. The following are annotated
editions:
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy Volume I: The Inferno. Translated
with an introduction, notes and commentary by Mark Musa.
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984) [ISBN 9780954113285]. All references
in this section are to this translation.
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy Volume I: The Inferno. With translation
and comment by John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press,
1961) [ISBN 9780195004120].
Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy. Translated by C.H. Sisson. With an
introduction and notes by David H. Higgins. (Oxford: World’s Classics,
Oxford University Press, 2008) [ISBN 9780199535644]. This edition
contains the whole of the Divine Comedy.

Sample examination questions

1. ‘Dante’s pilgrimage is a journey of learning – and, primarily, this
means learning how to write poetry.’ Discuss.
2. ‘Style is an essential aspect of characterisation in the Divine
Comedy.’ Examine either Dante’s variety of styles and their functions
in the Inferno, or Dante’s method of characterisation, referring in
particular to his use of language.
3. ‘It could be claimed that the Inferno is set not in Hell, but in
contemporary Italy.’ Is such a claim justified in your opinion?
4. ‘The poetry of the Inferno – at times lyrical, at times epical – is, most
of all, dramatic.’ Discuss.

The metaphysical poets

Recommended anthology
Helen Gardner (ed.) The Metaphysical Poets. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1959, 2003) [ISBN 9780140420388]. You should feel free to browse
through this anthology, reading whichever poems appeal to you.
However, for the purposes of study, it is important that you select 10 to
15 poems to pay close critical attention to. It will also benefit your study
if you concentrate on two or three poets.

3. What are the common themes or situations described in

metaphysical poems? What do these common themes and
situations tell you about the nature of the poetry?
4. Johnson suggests that metaphysical poetry consists of
‘heterogeneous ideas…yoked by violence together.’ What does he
mean by this description and how appropriate is it?
5. Choose two metaphysical poems and conduct close textual
analyses of them. You should look at both the form and the themes
of the poems, and you should also aim to show how the form relates
to theme. What are the similarities and differences between the two
poems you have chosen?

Sample examination questions

1. How would you characterise ‘metaphysical’ poetry? Illustrate your
answer by making close reference to a range of work by any one
poet of your choice.
2. ‘The metaphysical style heightens and liberates personality. It is
essentially a style in which individuality is expressed.’ Discuss the
poetry of one metaphysical poet in the light of this statement.
3. To what extent is a wealth of learning and allusion a strength or a
weakness in the poetry of either T.S. Eliot or any one metaphysical
poet.

John Milton, Paradise Lost Books 1 and 2

Recommended editions
Milton, John Paradise Lost. Edited with an introduction by John
Leonard. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, Penguin Classics, 2003)
[ISBN 9780140424393].
Milton, John Paradise Lost. Edited by Scott Elledge. (New York:
Norton, Norton Critical Edition, 2005) third revised edition
[ISBN 9780393924282]. Includes critical essays.
Milton, John Paradise Lost. Edited by A. Fowler. (Harlow: Longman, 1971,
2006) [ISBN 9781405832786].

Sample examination questions

1. How does Paradise Lost engage the reader’s interest in Milton’s
religious themes?
2. Discuss the work of any one poet since Shakespeare, which
seems to you either to fit the description ‘the poetry of passionate
colloquial speech’ or for which that description is inappropriate.

Jane Austen, Emma

Recommended editions
Austen, Jane Emma. Edited with an introduction by Fiona Stafford.
(London: Penguin, 1996, 2003) [ISBN 9780141439587].
Austen, Jane Emma. Edited by James Kinsley with an introduction by Terry
Castle. (Oxford: World's Classics, Oxford University Press, 1995, 2008)
[ISBN 9780199535521].
Austen, Jane Emma. Edited by G. Justice. (New York: Norton, 2011) or later
edition [ISBN 9780393927641]. Includes critical essays.

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Explorations in Literature

Sample examination questions

1. Discuss Austen’s presentation of her protagonist’s growth in self-
knowledge.
2. ‘Wherever women have used prose fiction forms they have adapted
them to represent the power women can take for themselves.’
Discuss this proposition by reference to work of Austen.
3. The poet W.H. Auden found Jane Austen’s novels illuminating
because he saw in them:
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of ‘brass’,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety
The economic basis of society.
(‘Letter to Lord Byron’)
In the light of this quotation, discuss Austen’s interest in and
treatment of marriage and money.

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

Recommended editions
Any edition will do, but the Oxford World’s Classics and Penguin
Classics editions are recommended for their introductory, editorial
matter and notes:
Dickens, Charles Great Expectations. Edited by Margaret Cardwell, with
an introduction by Kate Flint. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[ISBN 9780199219766].
Dickens, Charles Great Expectations. Edited with notes by Charlotte
Mitchell, with an introduction by David Trotter. (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 2004) [ISBN 9780141439563].

Sample examination questions

1. To what extent does Dickens seek to demonstrate truth through
non-realist and symbolic strategies of representation as well as
through realism?
2. Discuss the view that the real subject of Great Expectations ‘is not
a specific social abuse or series of related abuses but nothing less
than civilisation itself’ (Gilmour).
3. Great Expectations was published in book form (in three volumes)
shortly after completion in serial form in weekly magazines. What
does this serial mode of production imply in terms of the author’s
relationship with his readers and with the characters and plots of his
novels?

August Strindberg, Miss Julie

Recommended edition
Strindberg, August Miss Julie and Other Plays. Translated by Michael
Robinson. (Oxford: World’s Classics, Oxford University Press, 2008 or later
edition) [ISBN9780199538041].

Sample examination questions

1. Investigate the significance of gender for the power-struggle of
assertive minds in Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
2. What conception of tragedy do you find in Strindberg’s Miss Julie?
3. Analyse the struggle for authority presented in Strindberg’s Miss
Julie, and suggest what the play as a whole might have to say about
authority.

T.S. Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations

Recommended editions
You can use either of the following editions:
Eliot, T.S. The Complete Poems and Plays. (London: Faber, 2004)
[ISBN 9780571225163].
Eliot, T.S. Selected Poems. (London: Faber, 2002) [ISBN 9780571057061].
The notes in B.C. Southam’s A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of
T.S. Eliot (listed below) refer to this edition.

Sample examination questions

1. To what extent can Eliot’s poetry be seen as centred on self-
deception?
2. ‘Epic is a poem including history.’ (Ezra Pound) In what ways can this
definition of the epic be applied to Eliot’s poetry?
3. Discuss the ways in which Eliot’s poetry provides a critique of
modern life and civilisation.
4. Examine the nature of the humour to be found in T.S. Eliot’s poetry.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Recommended editions
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. (London: Penguin, 2000)
[ISBN 9780141182490].
Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. Edited with an introduction by David
Bradshaw (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)
[ISBN 9780199536009].

Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Recommended edition
Beckett, Samuel The Complete Dramatic Works. (London: Faber, 2006)
[ISBN 9780571229154].
Beckett, Samuel. Waiting for Godot. (London: Faber, 2006)
[ISBN 9780571229116].

Sample examination questions

1. ‘Nothing to be done’ (Waiting for Godot). How far do you agree with
the view that Beckett’s drama is chiefly marked by exhaustion and
tedium?
2. ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ Discuss either Eliot’s
poetry or Beckett’s drama in the light of this quotation.
3. ‘He has a better sense of language than of theatre.’ Is this a just
criticism of Beckett?

Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

Recommended edition
Carrington, Leonora The Hearing Trumpet. (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
2005) [ISBN: 9780141187990].

Sample examination questions

1. In what ways does Carrington subvert traditional ideas about
femininity in The Hearing Trumpet?
2. Discuss the interplay between fantasy and reality in Carrington’s The
Hearing Trumpet.
3. How does Carrington’s portrayal of heroism in The Hearing Trumpet
differ from existing literary models/representations?

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Recommended edition
Atwood Margaret The Penelopiad. (London: Canongate Books, 2008)
[ISBN 9781841957043].

Recommended Feminist Criticsm

Eagleton, Mary ‘Finding a Female Tradition’, Chapter 1 in her
Feminist Literary Theory: A Reader. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010)
[ISBN 9781405183130].
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan (eds) Literary Theory: An Anthology. (Oxford:
Blackwell, 2017) [ISBN 9781118707852].
This anthology contains many recommended essays including:
Butler, Judith, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Constitution’.
Kahn, Coppélia ‘The Hand That Rocks the Cradle’.
Irigaray, Luce ‘Feminist Paradigms’ and ‘The Power of Discourse and the
Subordination of the Feminine’ and ‘Women on the Market’.
Foucault, Michel ‘Contingencies of Gender’ from his The History of Sexuality.

Questions to consider
1. What does Atwood suggest about the relationship between gender,
history and mythology?
2. What roles does violence play in the text? Consider particularly the
image of the twelve hanged maids.
3. Consider how the oppositions between masculinity/activity and
femininity/passivity are represented in the text. What does Atwood
suggest about these oppositions?
4. How is humour and irony used to tell Penelope’s story?
5. What are the wider symbolic functions of weaving in the text?
6. Consider the ways in which the myth of Odysseus is adapted in The
Penelopiad.
7. What literary devices does Atwood employ to adapt this myth for
Penelope’s voice?

Sample examination questions

1. How well might The Penelopiad serve as an archetypal feminine
myth?
2. Does Atwood’s The Penelopiad demonstrate that myth works, or
does not work, in the twenty-first century?
3. Discuss the claim that Atwood’s The Penelopiad is a negative work
which creates no positive new myth in response to The Odyssey.

94
Appendix 2: Sample examination paper

Appendix 2: Sample examination paper

Time allowed: THREE hours.
Answer THREE questions, ONE from each section. Candidates may not
discuss the same text in more than one answer.

Section A
Answers in this section should refer to one text only.
1. To what extent is Homer’s Odyssey characterised by a
preoccupation with recurrence and return?
2. ‘Classical epic seems to be both fascinated and repulsed by physical
violence.’
Discuss in relation to any one text of your choice.
3. Discuss the role of fate in Sophocles’ Antigone.
4. Why are fame and notoriety such prominent concepts in the
Inferno, and how creatively does Dante incorporate them in the
narrative?
5. Explore some of the ways in which Chaucer exploits the relationship
between his teller and their tale.
6. Consider the ways in which pictorial effects are employed in the
Metamorphoses.
7. How important is ‘the boisterous world of simple folk’ to medieval
literature’s expression of Christian feeling? Discuss with reference to
any one text of your choice.
8. What effects are achieved by the poetic patterning of Gawain and
the Green Knight?
9. ‘Love links the everyday to the transcendent world.’ Discuss in
relation to any one text of your choice.
10. How do Books I and II of Paradise Lost engage the reader’s interest
in Milton’s religious themes?
11. Would you agree that the satire of The Rape of the Lock is directed
more at poetic than social convention?
12. ‘Merely a string of loosely connected adventures.’ Is this a fair
description of Joseph Andrews.

Section B
Answers in this section should refer to one text only.
13. Discuss Austen’s presentation in Emma of her protagonist’s growth
in self-knowledge.
14. To what extent is Dickens a ‘sentimentalist’?
15. In what ways can A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man be
described as ‘self-conscious’ in its narrative technique?
16. Investigate the significance of gender for the power-struggle of
assertive minds in Strindberg’s Miss Julie.
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Explorations in Literature

17. How successfully does any one text that you have read engage with
philosophical questions?
18. To what extent does Eliot’s poetry represent a successful marriage of
thought and feeling?
19. ‘A tale told by an idiot…signifying nothing.’ How applicable is this
comment to Beckett’s drama?
20. Does Woolf's preoccupation with the subjective conscioussness
of individuals in Mrs Dalloway undermine, or support, the book's
cohesion?

Section C
Answers in this section should refer to two texts, each by a different
author.
21. Discuss the part played by one of the following in two works, each
by a different author: female sexuality; humour; chivalric or heroic
codes.
22. Examine the representation and function of the underworld and/or
hell in any two texts studied on the course.
23. Discuss the treatment of one of the following in two works, each by
a different author:
•• the supernatural
•• the passage of time
•• resentment.
24. Explore the themes of sin and reconciliation in two works, each by a
different author.
25. ‘Realism is not a literary term applicable to writing up to
Shakespeare’s time.’
Discuss in relation to two works, each by a different author.
26. Compare and contrast the portrayal of resourceful female characters
in any two texts studied on the course.
27. Discuss the use made of one of the following in two works, each by
a different author: disguise; soliloquy; magic.
28. Compare two course texts in which you have found the imagination
to be pushed to its limits.

96
Appendix 3: Sample Examiners' report

Appendix 3: Sample Examiners’ report

Advice to candidates on how Examiners calculate

marks
It is important that candidates recognise that in all papers, three
questions should be answered in order to get the best possible mark
(ensuring that the rubric for the paper has been followed accordingly).
Examiners follow a simple mathematical formula when awarding a
final overall mark: they give each answer a mark out of 100 (up to
three answers only, as required by the exam paper); they then total all
available marks; and finally they divide the total by three, thus giving
an average overall mark.
So, if your first answer is given 57%, your second answer is given 56%,
and your third answer 50%, then the calculation will look like this:
57 + 56 + 50 = 163
163 ÷ 3 = 54.3
Overall mark: 54%
Two good essays and no third essay will always bring the mark
down. So, if in the example above a third answer was not given, the
calculation would look like this:
57 + 56 = 113
113 ÷ 3 = 37.6
Overall mark: 38%
In this case, even if the candidate had written a ‘poor’ third answer
getting a mark of 40% their overall mark would be higher than not
attempting an answer at all:
57 + 56 + 40 = 153
153 ÷ 3 = 51
Overall mark: 51%
Note in the example above how the 40% mark, while low, still enables
the candidate to achieve an overall mark in the Lower Second category,
which is in keeping with their first two marks of 57% and 56%. Not
answering a third question would see the candidate lose considerable
marks and drop two whole classes. It could also mean the difference
between a pass and a fail.
Candidates are thus strongly advised to give equal attention across
the paper, plan their time accordingly, and attempt to provide three
answers of roughly the same length and as full as possible. Candidates
are also reminded that it is totally unnecessary to copy out the
question again into the answer book; a question number in the margin
is sufficient enough, and this will also save valuable minutes.

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Explorations in Literature

Introduction
A key feature of the English programme is that every subject guide
contains a Sample examination paper from a recent year, as an example
to students new to the course, and a copy of the corresponding
Examiners’ report. Additionally, students can access an archive of past
papers and Examiners’ reports on the VLE.
Since Explorations in Literature is a new course launching in the
2012–2013 academic year, there are neither any past papers nor
past Examiners’ reports. However, as this guide includes a Sample
examination paper so that students can familiarise themselves with
the format and types of questions likely to be asked, it seems only fair
to offer some sample comments regarding some of the ways in which
the questions might be approached. Please note: there are no ‘model
answers’ to these, or any other questions, on the English programme –
English is not an information-based subject, but rather a subject which
invites debate, argument and exploration based on research both
into text and context. Thus, what follows here are some pointers and
suggestions regarding how you might tackle the kinds of questions
asked here in order to help you prepare for assessment. Of course,
there might be other approaches not mentioned here that you think of
as you continue with your studies – such approaches will help you in
future examinations, where you are invited to apply your knowledge.

General remarks
Strong answers in the field tend to do the following things:
•• they are planned, in note form, on a separate sheet that is crossed
through afterwards
•• they answer the question directly, often making frequent use
of the words, phrases and literary terms used in the question to
demonstrate engagement with that question
•• the first paragraph of the answer sets out a brief summary
of the argument to come, which is then re-emphasised in the
conclusion (e.g. ‘In almost all cases of Dickens’ presentation of ‘the
real’ we can find elements of fantasy...’); (note: the first paragraph
is not a place to give any substantial plot description/author
biography as a means of warming yourself up – this is ‘answer
avoidance,’ and the time spent doing this is better spent gaining
marks by writing something relevant in relation to the question)
•• each paragraph begins with a clear critical point or position
(e.g. ‘This dual focus of realism/fantasy is sustained over the entire
course of the novel), which was then backed up with illustrative
examples (‘for example, the opening scene in the graveyard
presents a landscape in gritty, exacting detail – of nettles, scattered
cattle, the intersection of gates, mounds and dykes – whilst also
casting a fantastical air over it through the image of a menacing
darkness approaching’), which is then evaluated for their impact
(‘this suggests X/means Y/adds the effect of Z’, e.g. ‘this foreshadows
both the hard, ‘gritty’ life that Pip endures as a young boy, but
also the mystery that is wrought upon him through the arrival of
98
Appendix 3: Sample Examiners' report

an anonymous benefactor), and then analysed for their literary

qualities (‘this “dual focus” of realism and fantasy creates suspense in
the novel, as well as creates a subtle piece of social criticism... ’)
•• each paragraph follows on from the next, making links between
the material discussed, either further developing a point, or
presenting a counter-argument (counter-arguments tend to arise in
the very strongest of answers, where a candidate applies rigour to
their own thinking)
•• they make reference to secondary reading, either through
paraphrase or direct quotation (‘many critics have considered this
issue, particularly X and Y, whose arguments draw attention to the
idea that...’)
•• they make competent use of the relevant critical terms, e.g
‘realism’, ‘narrative technique’, ‘omniscient narration’
•• overall, they show an in-depth knowledge of the literary
texts at hand, studied over a period of time, and demonstrate an
enthusiasm for discussing them; very high marks tend to go to
candidates who not only answer the question knowledgeably and
analytically, but also creatively and imaginatively, looking for fresh
but compelling interpretations, and speculating about possible
interpretations, within the limits of the question.
Weaker answers tend to do the following:
•• they are not planned – a brief plan will enable you to organise your
thoughts and brainstorm some ideas, as well as keep you focussed
as you write. A few minutes doing this before each answer could
substantially increase the number of marks awarded if it leads to a
fuller, more organised, and illustrative answer
•• they regurgitate material from the subject guide, with little
additional commentary from themselves
•• they describe the contents of a work – the plot, what a character
does, what a poem discusses – far more than they analysed it; as
has been repeated over and over in these reports, Examiners have
read the texts – you do not need to flesh out the details, provide a
synopsis, or any summary of the plot or any sketch of a character.
Of course, there are times when candidates may need to draw
attention to an aspect of plot, or character quality – this is fine, if it is
being used as an example to support a critical point
•• they describe far too much of the author’s life and biography,
rather than analysing their work itself – there are times where this
might be relevant, but candidates must always make the literary
text the primary focus of the answer
•• they give few or no illustrative examples from the literary text
•• they show limited knowledge of the literary text (in some
cases, once again, Examiners wondered whether some of the texts
discussed had been read all the way to the end)
•• they show limited reading of the prescribed syllabus
•• they show limited knowledge of the relevant critical terms used
in the course

99
Explorations in Literature

•• they show little or no knowledge of secondary reading, thus

producing answers which were wholly aware of the critical contexts
and reception of the texts studied.
In short, strong answers are those where a candidate applies their
knowledge of a text to answer a given question; weaker answers
are usually those where a candidate supplies and exhausts all their
knowledge in the hope that some of it will be relevant to the question.
Examiners look for application of knowledge through a constructed
argument, and not for evidence that the text has, at least, been read.
Examiners want to know what you think about the text and the
possibilities of interpreting it.

Section A
Question 1
Answers which deal with the theme of recurrence and return on a
multiplicity of levels would do well: both the literal homecoming of
Odysseus as well as the figurative return of themes. Strong answers
would present an argument either supporting the statement that The
Odyssey is preoccupied with recurrence and return, perhaps containing
an element of critique, or presenting an argument to the contrary with
evidence from the text. A thorough knowledge of the episodic nature
of the narrative, demonstrating an awareness of the ways in which this
story would have originally been told, would do well.

Question 2
This question asks for a discussion of the ways in which violence is
presented ambivalently in a text from this section. Answers which
detail the violent scenes in texts such as The Odyssey, Metamorphoses,
or The Inferno would do well here, especially those which attempt a
typology of the different types of violence presented or enacted and
their functions within the narrative. Strong answers would explore
historical/contextual reasons why there would have been a fascination
with violence, as well as providing an account for the linguistic
representation of this violence through close textual analysis.

Question 3
A discussion of fate in Antigone would present and analyse the places
in the text where fate is thematically suggested, and construct an
argument either for the significance of its role or the lack thereof.
Strong answers would state outright either that fate has an important
role or that it does not and, in both cases, would present other
alternative themes which might have a prevalent role such as kinship,
pride or revenge.

Question 4
This question is asking for a discussion of Dante’s presentation himself
as Dante the poet, and his interaction with the famous poets and
others who he encounters in Hell. The placing of himself within his
own text is an interesting trope worth discussion, and could lead to a
discussion of his self-consciousness as a poet and even his potential
attempt to insert himself within a literary canon.
100
Appendix 3: Sample Examiners' report

Question 5
The interrelation between Chaucer’s pilgrims and the tales they tell is a
topic ripe for in-depth analysis, especially of the language they choose
to use and its level of appropriateness. A strong answer to this question
would select a few of the characters and discuss to what extent their
tales are emblematic of their personalities. Pilgrims with characters
suggestive of licentiousness or bawdiness may reflect these in their
tales, or those associated with piety and correctness may demonstrate
these aspects in theirs. Strong answers would analyse these traits in
detail, suggesting subtleties and complexities in the relationships
between the teller and their tale, or perhaps present an example where
a teller and a tale do not seem to fit so well. Candidates could also
suggest reasons why Chaucer chose to structure his teller and tale in
this way.

Question 6
This question requires detailed description of the linguistic and
rhetorical methods employed by Ovid; imagery and figurative
language used and the effects this has on the reader. Consideration
of the historical context in terms of the way the stories would have
been disseminated would strengthen answers, as would a discussion
of the narrative traditions which Ovid was building upon. Strong
answers would suggest ways in which Ovid was subverting tradition,
and perhaps discuss the concept of ‘metamorphosis’ and how this is
linguistically rendered.

Question 7
This question is asking for a discussion and critical analysis of the
presentation of ‘the boisterous world of simple folk’ in one of the
chosen texts. The quote in this question is ripe for critical engagement,
which would require some knowledge of medieval social structuring.
Candidates could comment upon the ways in which medieval society
was divided, and perhaps the interesting points in the texts where
people of vastly different social standings had the opportunity to
interact. Exemplary texts for this question would therefore be those
displaying characters across a broad range of social classes, for example
Dante’s Inferno or Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

Question 8
Some technical and contextual knowledge of the alliterative poetic
style is essential for this question, both in its historical position as
the ‘Alliterative Revival’ and in its particular use in Sir Gawain and the
Green Knight. A strong answer would present a range of examples
from the text to illuminate a detailed discussion of the alliterative style,
as distinguished from other poetic structures. These examples would
be compared and contrasted against one another, with the candidate
relating the poetic structure to the narrative events and demonstrating
the ways in which these interact with one another.

101
Explorations in Literature

Question 9
This question offers the candidate the opportunity to discuss the
Metaphysical poets’ various explorations of love within their work.
This would include the figurative tropes and conceits used; the world
perspectives presented within the poems; the presentations of the
object of desire, and the different characterisations of love itself. The
collection Metaphysical Poetry counts as one text, and students are
free to analyse either the work of one or more poets from this text.

Question 10
This question is deliberately open and broad, and could be approached
in a number of ways. Milton’s religious themes are clearly omnipresent,
and so candidates could choose from many approaches to the texts
as their focus. The personification of the main characters, particularly
the ‘dramatic hero’ of Satan, is an area ripe for discussion and asks
for an awareness of the subtleties of Milton’s portrayal. This would
involve some analysis of the types of language used to describe the
various characters and settings, and the tone and effect of the reported
dialogue between characters. Strong answers might demonstrate
some historical/contextual awareness of the religious situation at the
time, and Milton’s difficult position therein.

Question 11
This question requires a clear differentiation between the differing types
of ‘poetic’ and ‘social’ convention which Pope may be satirising in the text.
This requires an account of the conventions themselves, both textual and
contextual: strong answers may draw parallels between conventions of
text and context. A thorough knowledge of the heroic epic form Pope is
mocking in the poem, as well as the superficiality of the characters and
the mythological figures they represent. Strong answers may comment
critically upon Pope’s position as satirist and poet.

Question 12
A question which pertains to the narrative form of Joseph Andrews
requires some knowledge of the history of the novel; candidates
should be aware of Fielding’s inspiration in the form of Cervantes, and
the fact that the novel as a genre was only in its infancy at this stage.
Strong answers could engage critically with the terms of the question,
contending the pejorative nature of the ‘merely’ and arguing that the
‘loose connection’ between adventures is of a more subtle, thematic or
philosophical nature than a chronological one.

Section B
Question 13
This question requires a detailed knowledge of the plot progression of
Emma; the maturation of Emma’s character and the effects this has on
the plot. Strong answers might incorporate other significant themes
into their essay which interrelate with Emma’s characterisation, such as
social standing, etiquette or love, as well as perhaps questioning the
concept of self-knowledge in general and questioning whether Emma
ever actually possesses this.
102
Appendix 3: Sample Examiners' report

Question 14
A question phrased in this way asks for evidence from Great Expectations
which either supports or undermines it. Candidates could attempt a
definition or explanation of ‘sentimentality’ within literature; strong
answers might relate this trope to Victorian society and explain why it
was prevalent at this time. Answers which discuss various points in the
text in detail, and debate as to whether they are sentimental or not and
reach a conclusion backed up by textual evidence would do well.

Question 15
Again, this question requires some explanation/definition of a ‘self-
conscious’ narrative technique. Strong answers would contextualise
this form and relate it to Modernist writing in general. Examples
from Joyce’s writing would support the answer; particularly strong
answers would demonstrate, with examples, the metamorphosis
of the language throughout the text and perhaps link this to the
development of Stephen’s own self-consciousness or self-knowledge.

Question 16
Candidates approaching this question would do well firstly to explain
the nature of the power struggle between Jean and Julie, and then
ascertain to what extent this is due to gender. Strong and discursive
answers would explore other potential sources for this power struggle
as well as gender, the most obvious being social class. Candidates
would give evidence of the ways that the language of the text is
directed towards asserting or relinquishing power at various points,
and perhaps exploring the points at which the power balance shifts
and suggesting reasons why.

Question 17
This question could be applied to a large number of texts in a
variety of ways. Specificity as to the types of philosophical questions
being approached by any particular text would be helpful, such
as metaphysics in Donne’s love poetry, fate in Antigone, the broad
spectrum of philosophical enquiry covered in Joyce’s A Portrait,
existentialism or nihilism in Beckett. Strong answers would explore
the ways in which these themes are explored, as well as describing the
philosophy and giving evidence of its presence within the text.

Question 18
An answer to this question might present evidence from Prufrock
which deals with ‘thought’, and then some evidence which deals with
‘feeling’. Strong answers would problematise the distinction between
‘thought’ and ‘feeling’, perhaps using both textual and contextual
evidence to support an argument that these two cannot be separated
in Eliot’s work and suggesting reasons why.

Question 19
This question asks for evidence of a lack of sensible meaning in Waiting
for Godot. Candidates would be expected to pick out extracts from the
text and analyse their potential for ‘meaning’, relating these extracts to
the statement in the questions and assessing them accordingly. Strong
103
Explorations in Literature

answers could explore the potential for Beckett’s work to be read

affirmatively; the figure of the ‘idiot’ and the signification of ‘nothing’
need not be seen in a negative light.

Question 20
This complex question asks whether Woolf’s narrative style in terms of
individual subjective consciousness either supports or undermines the
cohesion of the text. This answer would require some evidence from
the text to demonstrate the candidate’s awareness of this narrative
preoccupation within Mrs Dalloway, and then an assessment of this
style’s function within the general structure of the novel. Strong
answers could state that ‘cohesion’ is not Woolf’s aim, perhaps referring
back to the general theme of fragmentation within modernism.

Section C
Question 21
Each of these themes works well with particular texts. The earlier texts
such as Homer’s The Odyssey or Sophocles’ Antigone contain lots of
material pertaining to chivalric or heroic codes, whereas later texts
are less applicable to this theme. Themes such as humour or female
sexuality are more widely applicable, although there is generally
more to say about a theme such as female sexuality in texts with a
female protagonist such as Atwood’s The Penelopiad (although not
exclusively). A text such as Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet contains
material to discuss about humour, but female sexuality could also be
discussed within this text.

Question 22
This question is asking for a description of both the representation
and the function of the underworld and/or hell in two texts. The two
most obvious texts which contain much material for this question
are Dante’s Inferno and Milton’s Paradise Lost. Strong answers would
compare and contrast between these representations, perhaps in both
their aesthetic rendering of the underworld and any explicit or implicit
moralising. Answers which demonstrate historical or contextual
knowledge would also do well.

Question 23
These very different themes – the supernatural, the passage of time,
and resentment – are prevalent in different texts. There are elements
of the supernatural, for example, in any of the texts which deal
with Greco-Roman mythology and gods; some may argue equally
that Milton’s Paradise Lost contains elements of the supernatural.
Shakespeare’s Hamlet is ripe for a discussion of both resentment
and the supernatural. The passage of time is a broader theme; for
example, this is dealt with in very different ways in Austen’s Emma and
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway. Resentment occurs in Strindberg’s Miss Julie in
a different way to a text such Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The key is to
compare and contrast the way each theme is explored in the two texts
chosen, and describe the effects of this.

104
Appendix 3: Sample Examiners' report

Question 24
Sin and reconciliation are clearly prevalent themes in the texts which
deal with religious topics such as Dante’s Inferno, Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales and Milton’s Paradise Lost, but strong answers could also be written
drawing from texts which explore the topic more subtly, such as Homer’s
The Odyssey, Sophocles’ Antigone or Atwood’s The Penelopiad.

Question 25
This question would need some explanation of the form and function
of literary ‘realism’, and would explore the potential ‘realism’ in two
texts before Shakespeare’s time. Commentary on the relation between
realism and various literary forms, and the times at which these forms
became popular, would strengthen an answer. Strong answers might
select two texts which either support or undermine the claim, and
provide textual and contextual evidence to demonstrate this.

Question 26
There are many resourceful female characters in the texts on this
syllabus, in both earlier and later texts. Antigone is resourceful in a
different way to Atwood’s Penelope; Carrington’s Marian is resourceful
again in a different way to Austen’s Emma. Again, strong answers
would differentiate between texts, demonstrating the different ways in
which their female characters display resourcefulness.

Question 27
Disguise, soliloquy and magic are all relatively marginal themes
which call for varying types of answers. The term ‘soliloquy’ relates
most obviously to dramatic texts, with the most obvious choice
being Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Candidates may find that there is less to
discuss in the non-dramatic texts, although they should not be put off
unconventional choices of texts in any question as long as they can
back up their choices with evidence from them. Disguise and magic call
for texts which incorporate these concepts, so texts such as Homer’s
Odyssey and/or Atwood’s Penelopiad might be considered for disguise,
whereas Homer’s Odyssey and/or Ovid’s Metamorphoses might be
considered for magic.

Question 28
This is a very open question, which could be applied to a large number
of texts on the syllabus. It depends very much on the evidence
presented by the candidate for their particular text. For example,
metaphysical love poetry pushes the imagination to its limits in terms
of the extravagant conceits employed, which is very different from
the imaginative leaps required when reading Milton’s Paradise Lost
or Dante’s Inferno. Again, the ability of the candidate to differentiate
between texts and provide some contextual commentary would
strengthen answers.

105
Explorations in Literature

Notes

106

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