The Tempest, Massolit

Elizabethan drama was not written for posterity 

Jacobean and Elizabethan drama is elusive, non – naturalistic and very often symbolic

We explore drama and art through myth, our deepest concerns and our deepest worries

His romances and late plays tackle huge issues

Important distinction between the Globe Theatre and the Blackfriars theatre is that the Globe theatre was an open theatre (e.g. open to the sky), it was a very big building, and it would have held approximately 3,000 people.  Therefore writing for this type of theatre is very different than writing for the Blackfriars theatre which was an indoor closed theatre (which meant that there was artificial light) while seating only 200 people. At the same time, it was close to the court and in a good residential area so writing for the Blackfriars meant that there was a much more select audience, much richer, paying for a seat (2 shillings) as opposed to a penny in the Globe Theatre. They were also familiar with the classics. Lighting could be directed through the use of mirrors in the BF Theatre, having the effect of a spotlight. Away from the noise of the South Bank, allowed for much more delicate effects and the use of more music. Since it was catered for a different audience there is much more use of masque, which is symbolic and allegorical which the Tempest is full of – (e.g. the masque of goddesses that Prospero puts on for Ferdinand) the storm is an anti-masque spectacle

The names are also symbolic, giving the audience an insight to their character.

Many of what people would read leisurely would be romances which descended from the medieval romances. The typical structure of a romance is that you start with an apparent stable situation. This situation however comes under stress where the hero is separated from the stable situation into a place of trial and testing. Change comes from this where they are returned to a more stable structure. 

Around the 1600’s there was a lot of debate about what makes the proper dramatic form for a Christian society - is it tragedy that descends from Greek ideas about tragedy that have a very nihilistic  view of the universe. Italian playwright and critic Giovanni Guarani said that Christianity does not stop with a genuine tragedy of Calvary but it offers reconciliation and redemption. Therefore he argued that tragicomedy was the higher form of tragedy and the appropriate form of Christian society.

Tragicomedy – reconciliations after storms literally and symbolically, redeeming of the fathers by the children through the symbol of marriage. Shakespeare therefore uses the three unities of place, time and action, getting over the time for Miranda to grow up by having a great flashback in order to prevent disrupting the time period, waiting for Miranda to grow up in order to marry Ferdinand to come to a resolution.

When we first meet Miranda she is being taught by her father about history. Ferdinand is being taught how to serve and how to restrain himself. Miranda tries to teach Caliban but she does not understand that the right type of education that works for someone might not work for another. Caliban eventually does learn – he learns that not everything is that is immediately attractive is valuable – he learns that Prospero is a lot more worthy than those who he chose for himself ‘I’ll seek for grace hereafter’. However there are those who refuse. Sebastian and Antonio have the freedom to refuse reconciliation and wisdom.

The storm at the start of the play is symbolic of storms in the court and the parallel between the storm Prospero raises and the storm in Alonso’s minds. One storm is disruptive and the other storms which are cleansing and purify.

Miranda, Caliban and Ferdinand all because they are young and have to go through the process of education raise the issue of nature and nurture. Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian respond to misfortune and the grace of Prospero’s forgiveness

Prospero and Gonzalo represent an uncorrupted moral judgement.

Prospero’s idea of right rule is as a result of study and nurture and its parallel to Gonzalo’s Utopian motif relying on nature.

The issue of appearances: three views of the storm, three views of the feast and they are all different.

The goddesses Prospero blesses Ferdinand with seem as though they are a holy blessing but are in a fact an illusion bringing up the issue of how we watch the play.

The storm is disruptive and an act of punishment and hurtful at the beginning of the play but it is also healing.

Women in Dracula

Stoker, Bronte and Keats use women as a literary device to create fear, creating female characters who transgress 19^th century society. Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra are examples of the idealised Victorian female to the improper, sexualised female. Even before Lucy becomes part of the ‘undead’, she is scandalous when proposed to three times, claiming ‘Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her, and save all this trouble?’. As an undead vampire, Dr. Seward describes how her ‘sweetness was turned to adamantine, heartless cruelty, and the purity to voluptuous wantonness’. Lucy as a living human being as to when she becomes a vampire are somewhat alienated in Dr. Seward’s description. She is not just described as being a ‘devil’ when she is a vampire but she is also ‘changed’ physically – her sweet and pure attraction is lost, to be replaced by a malevolent, sexualised character that repulses and yet entices the men in the book. It is important to note however that Lucy is the more vulnerable, weak character, who although is ‘sweet’ still defies the stereotypical Victorian woman, she is victimised by Dracula. Mina Harker on the other hand, who is ‘a woman’ is the one who helps to finally track down and defeat Dracula. Van Helsing even describes her as having a ‘man’s brain’ with a ‘woman’s heart’. Even when she is forced to drink Dracula’s blood she declares herself as ‘unclean!...my polluted flesh!’ she still returns to her natural, ‘pure’ and maternal state at the end of the novel ‘the curse has passed away!’. Maurice Hindle describes the fear of the characters and to some extent the Victorian reader as ‘the dread is that they themselves will be turned into bloodthirsty vampires’. Stoker presents these two contrasting female characters to symbolise the good and evil and the consequences of moral corruption. Where Lucy is the sexualised, ‘new woman’ she is punished by becoming the victim of Dracula and part of the undead. Mina on the other hand, who represents the Victorian ideal is rewarded, by defeating Dracula and living ‘happily ever after’.  

Wuthering Heights, Keats and Dracula - Passion

The emotion of passion in the three texts creates a doomed fatality. This fatality not only destroys the characters who let passion control their actions but it destroys others thus propelling the narrative into a dark, twisted realm that we as readers know will end disastrously for certain characters.

In the poem Lamia, Lamia’s passionate love for Lycius is the central point of the narrative of the poem but it destroys  characters along the way, turning them into victims of passion. Their love for each other ultimately leads to their deaths, but the emotion of love itself also creates a sense of pain and anguish. At the wedding party, when Lamia disappears as her true identity is revealed she is described as being ‘deadly white’ and being ‘withered at their potency’ and ‘empty of delight’. Lycius’ death is described in blunt, harsh language ‘no pulse, or breath they found/ And in its marriage robe, the heavy body wound’. The words ‘found’ and ‘wound’  are full – rhymes and symbolises a sense of destruction and terrible fate. It contrasts with the use of the light, half rhymes used when describing Lamia such as ‘white’ and ‘delight’ and so seems much more delicate than the contrasting full rhymes used. It adds to the mystical image Lamia is portrayed as, making her passion seem alluring to the other characters in the poem. Nevertheless, it is not just in death that Lamia and Lycius’ love is somewhat painful - In line 289, Lycius is described as being ‘swoon’d, murmuring of love, and pale with pain’. However, Lycius and Lamia are not the only characters who die or feel pain as a result of their passionate love. Hermes is described as being ‘smitten’ and ‘breathing upon the flowers his passion’ when he is on a conquest to find his love. His passion to find love and Lamia’s desire and passion to be with Lycius lead to their negotiation where Lamia reveals the invisible nymph to Hermes. As an invisible nymph, free from the passions of love, she is described as being ‘free as the air’  and  ‘nimble’. When she loses her invisibility to Hermes she is described as having ‘languid arm’, ‘fearful sobs’ and ‘self-folding like a flower’. The fricatives used when Keats is describing the nymph makes her sound gentle – she lives a free and happy life but when passion overrules both Lamia and Hermes, she loses this sense of freedom and so harsh – sounding adjectives are used to describe her transformation. The simile of ‘self – folding like a flower’ makes us think that she is delicate and fragile. We feel pathos for her character to be destroyed by such a powerful force of emotion, that in some way we see Lamia’s and Hermes passion as being selfish.  Similarly, Keats in his own life had suggested the pains of passionate love in a letter to Fanny Brawne when he tells her ‘if the remembrance of you did not weight so upon me’. Lamia, in this sense, could be reflecting the fact that Keats’ passionate love causes pain, essentially causing some fear in the reader.

Wuthering Heights also shows how passion can destroy others however passionate love is not the only fatal emotion to the characters in Wuthering Heights. Passionate jealousy is a result of the passions of love and so it is inevitable that as Heathcliff fights for his love for Catherine with his rival Edgar Linton, revenge is soon to follow. It is also important to note that even Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s love for each other is so passionate that it makes them feel some type of resentment towards each other. Catherine for example says to Ellen ‘I gave him my heart…since he has destroyed mine, I have not the power to feel for him’.  It is significant that both the words ‘destroy’ and ‘passion’ are used - Dracula’s ‘devilish passion’ in Stoker’s Dracula is described in a similar way. The ‘devilish passion’ in this case reflects the power of Dracula. As readers we are more inclined to feel fear at a monster that is described as being ‘devilish’, which connotes evil. Essentially the combined characteristics of passion, evil and power will only inevitably fatality for the characters – however in this case, Stoker chooses for the feeling of passion to destroy the villain, unlike Bronte and Keats who uses passion to destroy an innocent character (for example the nymph) or for every character in Wuthering Heights.

However, Heathcliff is not the only character to feel jealousy. Hindley also expresses jealousy at Heathcliff’s attention of his father, saying that ‘he swears he will reduce him to his right place’.  Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s uncontrollable, passionate love for each other leads to destruction for the Linton’s and the Earnshaw’s.  Their love destroys the next generation in the novel, however it is also the one emotion that lasts the longest in the entire novel, even surpassing Heathcliff’s need for revenge ‘I don’t care for striking. I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand!’, which is the other emotion that also propels the narrative forward. However, how Bronte wants us to perceive their passionate emotion is different to that of Keats. Bronte, living in a Victorian society wants us to be shocked at the transgression of what is Catherine’s and Heathcliff’s love for each other. It breaks society’s rules and is unrestrained and so for the Victorian reader, we can see how this may have created fear.  In Keats’s Lamia however, he is more concerned with how such a powerful emotion can destroy beauty, which he portrays in a negative fashion.  

Lamia, Keats

·         ‘Lamia’ tells the story of the god Hermes who ears of a nymph who is more beautiful than all. On his way to find the nymph he comes across a Lamia (who is trapped in the form of a serpent). Hermes transforms the Lamia into her human form after she reveals that the previously invisible nymph to him. Lamia goes to the Greek city of Corinth where she falls in love with a man called Lycius. At their bridal feast, Apollonius, one of Lycius’s friends, recognises Lamia as an evil sorceress and calls her by her name. As a result of this Lamia vanishes and heartbroken, Lycius falls dead.

Pluto Roman god of the underworld and judge of the dead.	Plato (ic) Ancient Greek philosopher known for his ‘theory of forms’ - everything on earth, whether an object or an idea, is actually an imperfect copy of an ideal and permanent “form” that exists somewhere, beyond our universe.  Plato believed that the ideal version of love is a meeting of the minds and doesn’t entail a physical aspect― “platonic relationship.”
Hermes An Olympian god in Ancient Greek mythology and religion. He was the messenger of the Gods as well as being the god of transitions and boundaries. He is also the protector of literature and poetry.	Lethe Lethe was also the name of the Greek spirit of forgetfulness and oblivion
Jove God of sky and thunder in Ancient Roman mythology.	Circe (an) The goddess of magic (or sometimes a nymph, witch, enchantress or sorceress).
Nymph A mythological spirit of nature imagined as a beautiful maiden who inhabits rivers, woods or other locations.	Crete Greek Island
Satyrs Creatures who looked like men but had the hooves and feet as well as the tails of goats. Pastimes – chase after wood nymphs and play nasty tricks on men.	Corinth The Greek capital city of Corinthia.
Proserpine Roman goddess of the underworld	Elysium A ‘paradise’ or the ‘Elysian Fields’ is a  conception of the afterlife, the final resting places of the souls of the heroic and the virtuous.
Olympus Mount Olympus – home of the Greek Olympian gods.	Nereids Sea nymphs in Greek mythology who helped sailors on their voyage when face with severe storms.
Apollo Greek god of music; god of healing; god of light; god of truth

·         ‘The sound of characters’ voices are just as important as the words they speak’

·         Before the serpent begins to even speak in the poem, her voice is described as being ‘a mournful voice/such as once heard, in a gentle voice, destroys/All pain but pity’.

·         The use of recurring sibilants capture the serpent’s hissing snakelike voice however the use of the words ‘pain’ and ‘pity’ portray the vulnerability of the serpent and creates pathos for the reader. Nevertheless, the negative ‘satanic’ connotations of a serpent make us cautious of the snake supposedly because of her ability to charm.

·         ‘Her throat was serpent but the words she spake/ Came, as through bubbling honey’ – captures the seductive power and sweetness of her voice – Keats could be trying to almost warn us of the way in which we as readers should consider the words used in the poem by characters.

·         Keats also wants us to know how Hermes sounds and so his voice is compared by the other vocal tones of the other gods. For example the voice of Muses is described as being ‘soft, lute-finger’d...chanting clear’. The fact that his voice is being compared to the other gods makes him more complex –

·         ‘It is Lamia who must go in pursuit of her man, apparently reversing the conventions of traditional romance narrative’

·         Narrative rhyme of 708 lines of rhymed couplets.

·         The opening words ‘once upon a time’ echo a fairy tale, an appropriate opening for a narrative that involves mythological creatures such as nymphs, satyrs and gods.

·         A lamia – reputed to feast on the blood of children.

·         “There are instances when the women of his poetry are also literally cruel, the two most obvious examples being Lamia, a 'cruel lady' (I. 290) and the mysterious La Belle Dame Sans Merci who seduces and then abandons the knight, leaving him anguished, 'haggard' and 'woe-begone'. In both of these examples, there is an inextricable link between sex and cruelty. The women use sex to assert their supremacy over men - ultimately obtaining power and control rather than love.”

·         “Lamia's seduction of Lycius is wholly dishonest, she is a serpent, a 'gordian shape of dazzling hue' who bribes the love-struck Hermes to turn her into a woman so that she can enact her seduction of Lycius (her ruthlessness even extends so far that she perpetuates female subordination as a way to meet her own needs: she reveals the nymph to Hermes hence treating her as nothing more than a bargaining tool). He is duly dumbstruck by her beauty, so much so he believes her to be a Goddess. Her incredible sexuality dims Lycius's common sense.”

·         However we still feel sympathetic towards Lamia towards the end of the poem. Appollonius and his ‘cold philosophy’ destroy Lamia from her human form – ultimately it is males that either transform her into her female form and she depends on males to prolong her female form as well.

·         “In some ways Lamia is cruel but Keats resists the temptation to make her only that, making her a multi-faceted character rather than a simple, one dimensional villain. She is a Romantic 'pin-up', if you will; rationality and reason being what ultimately crushes both hers and Lycius's happiness.”

·         However, the fact that she is a female in a time where females were seen as inferior as men, the fact that she has the ability to be ‘cruel’ makes her powerful. On the other hand, we may also feel sympathy for her because despite her power and ability she is still destroyed both physically and emotionally – she ‘vanishes’ and her love with Lycius at her own dinner party is destroyed. She is in a worst state than what she was at the beginning of the poem when she took the form of a serpent as opposed to her ceasing to exist at the end of the poem.

·         “Throughout his poetry, the feminine presence is an intricate one. He is puzzled and enchanted by women.”

Heroic couplets ­ reflect characters/story
Iambic pentameter ­ typical of Greek Mythology
Couplets run over rhyme scheme to progress to end/sense of continuous motion.

·         Since Hermes in Greek Mythology is known as being cunning, our suspicions arise when he appears in the beginning of  the poem. 

La Belle Dame Sans Merci (essay improvement)

Explore the ways in which Keats depicts power in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’

Jess Cornelius

Keats represents power in an ambiguous way in ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’. Although Keats uses a traditional ballad form, used to depict the story in the most archaic way possible, the way he depicts powerful people are not commonplace of those who were powerful in his time – for example, the Knight is portrayed as being weak and lonely while the kings, princes and warriors are ‘deathly pale’. The fact that the beautiful woman the narrator describes who ‘shows no mercy’ is interesting because although she is the supposedly most powerful in the poem, she is a mysterious character who cannot be translated easily in the poem – we are unaware of who she truly is and why she has such a powerful effect on the hapless knights, kings, princes and warriors. At the time, Keats was experiencing his own conflicts that perhaps created the foundation of the poem. For example, Keats was said to have been ‘on fire poetically, in love, growing ill and suffering from depression’.  Keats had begun to show symptoms of tuberculosis after nursing his brother, which could have possibly influenced the weak portrayal of the knight and of the dying, bleak and ‘withering’ scene that is portrayed in the first stanza.

Keats begins ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ with a question and response form in order to structure the narrative. In this question and response ‘interrogation’, we begin to get an idea of where this narrative is set and captivate the supposedly difficult situation the knight has found himself in. Because the narrator’s questions to the knight ‘oh what can ail the, knight – at – arms’, are repeated in the first two stanzas, we are constantly reminded of the dire situation the knight is in and how hopeless and powerless he is. The question also becomes pitying the second time it is used, because we as the reader are aware of how at odds this knight is within society and how unlike a knight he is due to the adjectives and nouns used such as ‘alone and palely loitering’, ‘so haggard and so woe-begone’.

The repetition of the words and phrases used in the first two stanzas are also used in the last stanza, such as ‘alone and palely loitering’ and ‘the sedge has withered from the lake’ not only creates a cyclical structure in the poem but it suggests the incapability of the powerless to move forward or to escape anything. Those who are powerful, which in this case is ‘a lady’ who is ‘fully beautiful’ entraps ‘pale kings … pale princes…and pale warriors’ on a ‘cold hill side’.  From this, we can infer that only those who possess beauty, who are ‘full beautiful’ are the most dominant, while those who lack this sense of beauty and majestic power only become powerless like those ‘on the cold hill side’, who are ‘death – pale…starved lips in the gloam’.

Keats also represents power and control by the way he structures the poem and the rhyme scheme he uses. For example, although Keats uses a traditional ballad with the traditional quatrain to appropriate the form to its medieval  story, Keats controls the way in which the sentences are structured to move the narrative forward. He alternates between tetrameters & trimeters which creates an almost ‘sing – song’ pace, however Keats compresses the lines by using three tetrameters followed by a final short line of 5 or 4 syllables therefore hastening the poem’s rhythm. He does this to cause disruption in this natural ‘sing song’ flow of the poem, reflecting the disruption that is experienced by the knight.  As a result of this, stanzas 1, 2 and 13 sound more abrupt such as ‘no birds sing’, ‘and the harvest’s done’, gives us a sense of the knight’s fate. We get an vivid image of desolation and we as the readers feel as though we can almost ‘see through the eyes’ of the knight – we feel a sense of loneliness, helplessness and vulnerability as the setting gives us the sense of the predicament of the knight.  By controlling the rhythm, Keats highlights the disruptions the Knight faces in this poem which subsequently makes him less powerful – for example the fact that he is ‘alone and palely loitering’ and ‘so haggard and woe-begone’ gives us the image that he is lost and lacks control in a unknown place suggesting that he is a weak knight.

It also important to note that when the mysterious lady appears, rhyme appears to become more constant, evolving into more of a full rhyme than some of the half rhymes that are used such as ‘loitering’ and ‘sing’ and ‘begone’ and ‘done’ when the knight is the main focus in the narrative. When the lady is the main focus of the narrative in stanza 4 appears, rhyme seems to become more constant and Keats begins to use full rhymes more frequently, such as ‘child’ and ‘wild’, ‘dew’ and ‘true’ and ‘all’ and ‘thrall’. This highlights the power this mysterious lady has over the knight who is ‘alone and palely loitering’, a deliberate technique Keats uses in order to make the lady seem like an enchantress and something of the supernatural – for example she is described as being a ‘faery’s child’ and living in an ‘elfin grot’ as well as being able to ‘lull’ the knight to sleep- this portrayal of the lady makes her seem subhuman – she lacks human characteristics but she possesses magical or supernatural powers that makes her powerful.

However, the way in which Keats chooses certain characters to depict them as being powerful is not stereotypical and is unusual for his time. From the very beginning to the very end of the poem we are almost disappointed by the knight because he does not show any heroic actions which we would expect from a knight – even when he does appear to show a little more power in stanza 5 by making ‘a garland for her head’, and therefore essentially objectifying her, she is still more powerful not just to the knight when he is ‘lulled to sleep’ but also to the atmosphere of the poem – we as readers almost forget the miserable bleak scene, as ‘no birds sing’ and the ‘sedge has withered from the lake’ which is being described at the start of the poem because in her presence things seem to be ‘fragrant’ and ‘floral’. Not only that, but the fact that this lady has the ability to entice the most powerful and the most elite who are all terrified of the lady when they cry ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci/Hath the in thrall!’ makes her seem not only the most powerful but it intimidates us as the readers. 

The poem demonstrates a parallel between the Knight’s situation and Keats’ conflicts with the pains of love. It could therefore be said that the lady is symbolic for this love and subsequent pain Keats had felt  - Keats is the knight who ‘meets’ the lady (or in his own life, has fallen in love) and as a result comes into conflict with the pains of love (paralleling with the knight’s own difficult situation when he is left on ‘a cold hill side’ and is ‘alone and palely loitering’).  This is demonstrated in an extract of a letter from Keats to Fanny Brawne, his fiancée, when he was living in the Isle of Wight – he says  ‘if the remembrance of you did not weigh so upon me I have never known any unalloy’d  Happiness for many days together: the death or sickness of someone has always  spoilt my hours’. Keats had experienced much grief and sadness in his turbulent life – for example, his father’s sudden death and his mother’s subsequent marriage two months later, followed by both his mother’s and brother’s death from tuberculosis meant that ‘death or sickness of someone’ had ‘always spoilt’ his life. If this is the case, and if the lady is supposed to be symbolic of love, then Keats is trying to tell us that love is much more dangerous than grief. It has captivated and destroyed the ‘pale kings…princes … and warriors’ and had left the knight, weak and vulnerable therefore somewhat unheroic as he himself is destroyed by ‘love’ or the lady. As a result, we can infer that Keats’ experience with love in his life is more destroying than the griefs of sickness and death in his life, therefore making love a more powerful, more stronger emotion, something that Keats in his own life was experiencing himself.