www.ifyayinlari.com www.ifdeo.com facebook.com/ifyayinlari
www.ifyayinlari.com www.ifdeo.com facebook.com/ifyayinlari
Genel Yayın Koordinatörü Fatih KİRAZ Tch. Dinçer AYDİÇ İletişim E-mail: iletisim@ifyayinlari.com Tel: +90 506 912 17 29
www.ifyayinlari.com facebook.com/ifyayinlari twitter.com/ifyayinlari
PROSE ON ELIZABETHAN ERA: • • •
Literature types fiction and chronicles, accounts of travels and historical events. The pastoral is the most artificial literary form in modern fiction. Roman and Greek elements and lifestyle effects
WRITERS: » PHILIP SIDNEY THE COUNTESS OF PENBROKE'S ARCADIA Philip Sidney was in his early twenties when he wrote his 'Old' Arcadia for the amusement of his younger sister, the Countess of Pembroke. The book, which he called 'a trifle, and that triflingly handled', reflects their youthful vitality. The 'Old' Arcadia tells a romantic story in a manner comparable to that of Shakespeare's early comedies. It is divided into five 'Acts', and abounds in lively speeches, dialogues, and quasi-dramatic tableaux. Two young princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, disguise themselves as an Amazon and a shepherd to gain access to the Arcadian Princesses, who have been taken into semi-imprisonment by their father to avoid the dangers foretold by an oracle. As a vehicle for Sidney's prophetic ideas about English versification, the 'Old' Arcadia also includes over seventy poems in a wide variety of metres and genres. In clarity, symmetry, and coherence the 'Old' version is greatly superior both to the ambitious but unfinished 'New' Arcadia and the amalgamated, 'composite' version, a hybrid monster which Sidney himself never envisaged.
THE DEFENCE OF POESY Sidney defends the writing of imaginative literature against the Puritan charge that it is an enemy of virtue. Sidney argues that poetry has the function of both teaching and delighting. The great end of learning, Sidney wrote, is the living of a virtuous life, and the inspired poet can lead readers to the highest truths.
1
» WALTER RALEIGH A REPORT OF THE TRUTH OF THE FIGHT ABOUT THE ISLES OF ACORES; is a prose epic about the naval battle between Sir Richard Greville's ships against an overwhelming Spanish fleet. Tennyson derived his poem "The Revenge" from Raleigh's account.
THE DISCOVERY OF THE LARGE, RICH, AND BEWTIFUL EMPIRE OF GUIANA; concerns the quest for gold in a lush, virgin jungle, with graphic accounts of hand-to-hand combat. THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD; written in prison in the Tower of London, contains valuable history written in magnificent prose style. » THOMAS MORE A close friend of Erasmus, More is best known for his prose work Utopia written first in Latin in 1516.
UTOPIA Book II. which tells of an ideal state with a truly representative government. is the most widely read. It describes a land where robust health is exalted, work-days are only six hours long, both women and men are educated, all houses are equally comfortable, all religions are tolerated, war is detested, and the welfare of the whole is paramount.
2
OTHER PROSE WORKS AND WRITERS :
John Lyly: Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit
Euphues, a young gentleman of Athens, is graced by nature with great personal beauty and by fortune with a large patrimony, but he uses his brilliant wit to enjoy the pleasures of wickedness rather than the honors of virtue. In his search for new experiences, the young man goes to Naples, a city famed for loose living. There he finds many people eager to encourage a waste of time and talent, but he is cautious, trusting no one and taking none for a friend. Thus, he escapes real harm from the company of idle youths with whom he associates.
One day, Eubulus, an elderly gentleman of Naples, approaches Euphues and admonishes the young man for his easy ways, warning him of the evil results that are sure to follow and urging him to be merry with modesty and reserve. In a witty reply, Euphues rebuffs the old man’s counsel and tells him that his pious urgings only result from his withered old age. In spite of the sage warning, Euphues remains in Naples, and after two months there he meets a pleasing young man named Philautus, whom he determines to make his only and eternal friend. Impressed by the charm of Euphues, Philautus readily agrees to be his firm friend forever. Their friendship grows, and the two young men soon become inseparable.
Philautus long before earned the affection and trust of Don Ferardo, a prominent official of Naples, and he fell in love with his beautiful daughter Lucilla. While Don Ferardo is on a trip to Naples, Philautus takes his friend with him to visit Lucilla and a group of her friends. After dinner, Euphues is given the task of entertaining the company with an extemporaneous discourse on love. He declares that one should love another for his mind, not for his appearance. When the conversation turns to a discussion of constancy, Lucilla asserts that her sex is wholly fickle. Euphues begins to dispute her, but, suddenly struck by Lucilla’s beauty and confused by his feelings, he breaks off his speech and quickly leaves. Lucilla discovers that she is attracted to the young Athenian. After weighing the respective claims of Euphues and Philautus on her affections, she convinces herself that it will not be wrong to abandon Philautus for Euphues; however, she decides to pretend to each that he is her only love. Euphues, meanwhile, persuades himself that Lucilla must be his in spite of Philautus: Friendship must give way before love. In order to deceive his friend, Euphues pretends to be in love with...
3
Robert Greene Pandosto: The Triumph of Time Samuel Purchas
The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of the English Nation
Pandosto, King of Bohemia, accuses his wife Bellaria of adultery committed with his childhood friend, the King of Sicilia. His pursuit of this unfounded charge leads him to send his infant daughter out to sea to die and causes the death of his son and his wife. His daughter drifts to Sicilia and is saved and raised by a shepherd. Dorastus, the Prince of Sicilia, falls in love with Fawnia, unaware that she is a Princess, and they run away to marry. They land in Bohemia, where Pandosto unwittingly falls in love with his daughter Fawnia. At the end of the story, after Fawnia's identity is revealed, Pandosto commits suicide out of grief for the troubles he caused his family. Shakespeare reversed the two kingdoms of Sicilia and Bohemia and added side characters like Paulina and Antigonus. Also he introduced Autolycus and the Clown. He also removed the suicide and added a resurrection scene, bringing the queen back to life using either magic or a death trick, depending on perception. The Principall Navigations, Voiages, and Discoveries of the English Nation: Made by Sea or Over Land to the Most Remote and Farthest Distant Quarters of the Earth at Any Time within the Compasse of These 1500 Years: Divided into Three Several Parts According to the Positions of the Regions Whereunto They Were Directed; the First Containing the Personall Travels of the English unto IndĂŚa, Syria, Arabia ... the Second, Comprehending the Worthy Discoveries of the English Towards the North and Northeast by Sea, as of Lapland ... the Third and Last, Including the English Valiant Attempts in Searching Almost all the Corners of the Vaste and New World of America Purchas His Pilgrims
4
Robert Burton: The Anatomy of Mlelancoly John Selden: Table Talks
Burton defined his subject as follows: Melancholy, the subject of our present discourse, is either in disposition or in habit. In disposition, is that transitory Melancholy which goes and comes upon every small occasion of sorrow, need, sickness, trouble, fear, grief, passion, or perturbation of the mind, any manner of care, discontent, or thought, which causes anguish, dulness, heaviness and vexation of spirit, any ways opposite to pleasure, mirth, joy, delight, causing forwardness in us, or a dislike. In which equivocal and improper sense, we call him melancholy, that is dull, sad, sour, lumpish, ill-disposed, solitary, any way moved, or displeased. And from these melancholy dispositions no man living is free, no Stoick, none so wise, none so happy, none so patient, so generous, so godly, so divine, that can vindicate himself; so well-composed, but more or less, some time or other, he feels the smart of it. Melancholy in this sense is the character of Mortality... This Melancholy of which we are to treat, is a habit, a serious ailment, a settled humour, as Aurelianus and others call it, not errant, but fixed: and as it was long increasing, so, now being (pleasant or painful) grown to a habit, it will hardly be removed. Selden is best known today for a work published thirty years after his death: Table-Talk: Being the Discourses of John Selden, Esq. The work is a collection of Selden’s pronouncements on a variety of topics in a conversational style, as recorded by his secretary, Richard Milward. First published as a political pamphlet quickly outpaced by events, it did not meet with immediate success. Re-titled and recast as the learned sayings of a great man to be read at leisure, it suddenly took off as part of a new genre of literature. Table-Talk showcased Selden’s sardonic wit, something difficult to discern in the rest of his writings.
Because most of Selden’s prose is both erudite and dense, generations of readers have gravitated to this more accessible work. Among its most famous admirers was Dr. Johnson, whose own Life of Samuel Johnson a century later owes something to Selden’s example. It is primarily through Table-Talk that most readers have become acquainted with Selden. And since, as a poet once wrote Selden, it is “an ignorance beyond barbarism not to know you,” it is fortunate that Table-Talk provides an opportunity to do so.
5
Izaak Walton: The Compleat Angler John Selden
The Compleat Angler was first published in 1653, but Walton continued to add to it for a quarter of a century. It is a celebration of the art and spirit of fishing in prose and verse; 6 verses were quoted from John Dennys's 1613 work The Secrets of Angling. It was dedicated to John Offley, his most honoured friend. There was a second edition in 1655, a third in 1661 (identical with that of 1664), a fourth in 1668 and a fifth in 1676. In this last edition the thirteen chapters of the original had grown to twenty-one, and a second part was added by his friend and brother angler Charles Cotton, who took up Venator where Walton had left him and completed his instruction in fly fishing and the making of flies.
Walton did not profess to be an expert with a fishing fly; the fly fishing in his first edition was contributed by Thomas Barker, a retired cook and humorist, who produced a treatise of his own in 1659; but in the use of the live worm, the grasshopper and the frog "Piscator" himself could speak as a master. The famous passage about the frog, often misquoted as being about the worm—"use him as though you loved him, that is, harm him as little as you may possibly, that he may live the longer"—appears in the original edition. The additions made as the work grew did not affect the technical part alone; quotations, new turns of phrase, songs, poems and anecdotes were introduced as if the author, who wrote it as a recreation, had kept it constantly in his mind and talked it over point by point with his many friends. There were originally only two interlocutors in the opening scene, "Piscator" and "Viator"; but in the second edition, as if in answer to an objection that "Piscator" had it too much in his own way in praise of angling, he introduced the falconer, "Auceps," changed "Viator" into "Venator" and made the new companions each dilate on the joys of his favourite sport. (1584-1654): One of the first great critical scholars of modern England. he is now chietly known for Tah/e Talk (1689) a book of his sayings that were collected and edited by his secretary. Richard Milward. The book shows Selden to be a witty conversationalist with a mind capable of shrewd analysis. The subject matter deals with a wide range of human activities in a balanced. common sense way.
6