 Hello and welcome back to NPTEL national program of Technology Enhanced Learning, a joint venture of Indian Institutes of Technology and Indian Institute of Science. As you are aware that this lectures are for students, engineering students in IITs and engineering colleges and the role of humanities and social sciences is quite a profound in the syllabus of engineering graduates. I am Krishna Bharva, I teach English literature at the department of humanities and social sciences at IIT Guwahati. It has been always a pleasure to teach students and coming from the technical branches mostly because literature is something very remote from the technical stream. At the same time it is so closely related to what we are going to face in life. So, the purpose of the electives in IITs mostly, he meant the electives in IITs mostly is to make students study and appreciate the text and take delight in the representation of the world as they say it. Well, so this is a part of the series lecture series on literature and language. We are in the beginning of the module 4 of module 3 of the series titled History of English Literature. First lecture has already been given and let us see how the first lecture was the age of saucer and now we are in the second lecture which is the age of Shakespeare. So, let us recap what we had done in the first lecture of this module. When we study literature, English literature for instance, we enjoy the literary journey as I had just said of poems, stories and plays which could be from any era or even as far back as saucer steps. So, this awareness of the canon or the delights of the history of the English literary tradition is necessary to know what is about the study of English literature. Nurturing this freedom of choice and independence of thought, we want you to be introduced to books and poems that generally reflects not only the author's life and thought, but also the spirit of the age, the environment, the history and the ideals of the nation's history. In this first lecture, we had done as a classification how we approach English literature, a specific period of culture not that the dividing line is very very strong. This lectures has attempted to look at the range of English literature quite flexible borders as a series of scenes divided by some basic historical markers of contradictions and sometimes contra distinctions. Over the centuries, we have seen English traditions and language have been reshaped by the small islands invaders and there will be naturally good deal in common between one scene and the next, between one age and the next age, but there will also be good deal that is different which is being more or less marked by the economic, by the social, by the political changes that have gone through. Sometimes therefore, informing a mental picture of a period in the past, people what do they do? They see whole of the new features and sometimes they forget that an overlap of the old. This should not be the way that we study English literature. We have to understand the connections which goes on from one age to the other. Maybe the connections are disrupted at one level, but somewhere or the other we find this connection forms a sort of a flow which allows one to appreciate a text or a movement in literature. As we have seen in the first lecture, how Great Britain has been invaded and settled many times by the Kels, by the Romans, by the Angles and the Saxons, by the Vikings, by the Normans each bringing their own distinctive features and their cultures, their words, their import words, the way of, the way they tell stories, the way they narrate things. So whatever we think of English today as such owes something to each of these invaders or what you call settlements in the island. So with beginning with Julius Caesar in 55 BC, the Britons were finally conquered by the legions of Rome during Roman rule. In the middle of the 5th century, we find the Angles sections from Germany, Jews from Denmark, cross the North Sea. So they bring the Norden flavor to the English language. They drove out the old Britons before them and eventually settled on the greater part of Britain. And when we had done that old English period, we have seen that the most significant work at that time was Anglo-Saxon literary work was Beolfe, a Germanic archetypal narrative. It consists of alliterative long lines and it was some way that it set the tradition of the Romans tradition in English literature. The features of this Anglo-Saxon period which we had done was that it had the love of freedom, it was responsive to nature, the strong religious conviction it had, then devotion to glory, to womanhood and most of it was alliterative and there was a lot of religious feelings and national flavor. When we come the change to the Norman conquest, we have seen that it has become mainstream European civilization. In the Norman conquest, therefore provided a convenient landmark for the history of England and the French influence and the European influence was very strong over there and when we look into this Middle English period as it was of lecture one, we find that courtly love, Arthurian religious themes were explored, William Langlin's biasplum and the most significant one of them is Sources, Canterbury tales and all his works and Sagoen and the Green Knight. The use of allegory, the use of style, the use of English as a medium of language was for the first time used practiced here and saucer from 1340 to 1400 that was the period that we had done in lecture one, regarded as the father of English literature rather with saucer the English language and English literature sort of grew up and just now I had mentioned allegory which is a sort of extended metaphor was the way the medieval mind characterously worked. Now, we come to the content of lecture two, the age of Shakespeare, so this is a very interesting and colorful period in English literature one of the most colorful we can say in the whole period of English literature because the Renasa was just over the century and a half following the death of saucer 1400 to 1550 is the most volcanic period of English history and the revival of learning therefore, we have to see in its broadest sense that gradual enlightenment of the human mind of the darkness of the middle ages. So, while we are doing the age of Shakespeare we have to understand what is the Renasa. The names Renasa in humanism which are often applied to the same movement have properly a narrow or significance it was a new humanism, it was a new exploration of the self, it was where mental boundaries were almost broken, where specific geographical physical and every form of area was explored and as it was it appeared in England two greatest books which was Erasmus's Praise of Folly and Thomas More's Utopia written in Latin of course, were specially translated into all European languages later. In this Utopia we find for the first time the three great words liberty fraternity equality. So, we come to the way that the mind worked. So, the entire meaning of literature from being just imitative in the middle ages has come to become somewhere that the national phabber and the national spirit of identity had come into significance. So, here we are doing Elizabethan English or the age of Elizabeth or Shakespeare's England from 1550 to 1620 this is the period which was as I said a very golden period of English literature after the religious economic unrest of the middle Tudor period followed the golden age of England there was religious tolerance there was calm, golden ages are not all of gold naturally and they never last long, but Shakespeare sounds upon the best time and country in which to live in order to exercise with least destruction and most encouragement the highest faculties of man and there is a saying that if there had been no renasa probably we would have had no Malo or probably we would have had no Shakespeare well. So, going back to the Elizabethan age is remembered as the time of a great wave of English nationalism which I had just referred to as a domain of new identity as well as the period in which the arts flourished every form of arts. The time of Shakespeare was also the time of Elizabeth, Elizabeth who saw the rise in the concept of nationalism in England and this can be seen in the increased interest that writers had in writing literary and dramatic words in the English language. So, it was side by side with all culture developed. So, English renasa in the realm of thought and art is epitomized by the official recognition that Elizabeth first gave to Oxford and Cambridge the first formal centres of learning and there were thriving centres where all the scholars went and lot of research and lot of creative explorations were there. The invention of the printing press also in 1476 which helped to make literature more widely available it became commercial it was not confined to a select few and therefore pamphlets and articles could be printed and there was dissemination of learning. Therefore, the arts flourished and Elizabeth one her personal love of poetry naturally the patron as many people say that it was because of Elizabeth first patronage of arts that ultimately led it to be the golden age of English. Literature and theatre such as the globe and the rose were built and the performances took place six days a week my new and place commenced at 2 p.m. in the daylight play rights were in high demand. So, people were writing plays they having it performed people went to the place for entertainment and there was a lot of cultural activity going on around the playhouses. So, the Elizabethan traveling talks about the social history of that time and when he says that the Elizabethan English were in love with life therefore, there was a vibrancy there was a gusto not with some theoretic, theoretic shadow of life. Such classes freed as never before from poverty felt the up spring of the spirit and expressed it in wheat music and song and there is a saying that they Elizabethans did not talk they sang it was a nest of singing birds. The English language had touched his moments of fullest beauty and power, beach and order at least prevailed in the land even during the sea war with Spain relatively calm relatively peaceful and therefore, it was the right climate for literature to strike. The renasa that had known a spring time long ago in its native Italy where brighting frost now nipped it came late to its glorious summer in this northern island. This is what traveling says in the days of Erasmus the renasa in England had been confined to scholars and to the king's court in Shakespeare's days it had in some part reached the people the bible the classic and the classical antiquity were no longer left to the early learned few, but agency of the grammar schools classicisms flittered through from the study into the theatre and the street stories were taken from the classics from the antics and you find Shakespeare's translation of Flutork's life into making historical place people came to know about history, they came to know about Scandinavian sagas, came to know about the classical herchews and all Hebrew and Grisha Roman ways of life raised from the grave of the remote past by the magic of scholarship were open to the general understanding of Englishman. So, it came to the masses to the very very even to the groundlings the people who were not literate in the whole sense, but they could enjoy theatre and it was almost as if whole literature was in the grasp of the people, but as the new spheres of imagination and spiritual power to be freely converted to modern use. While Shakespeare's transformed Flutork's life into his own Julius Caesar and Antoni others took the bible fashioned out of it new way of life and taught for religious England. So, it has been said that the age of Shakespeare Elizabethan age it was an age of dreams of adventure of unbounded enthusiasm speaking from the new lands of fabulous reaches revealed by English explorers and the young philosopher Bacon was saying confidently. He was one of the foremost prose writers of the age and he could say I have taken all knowledge from my province. The mind must search farther than the eye with new rich lands open to the sight the imagination must create new forms to people the new world. So, new worlds have to be discovered and new language have to be invented. So, the literate spirit this was the literate spirit and this is what we want to emphasize here that the Elizabethan age or the age of Shakespeare was so vibrant it was so all pervasive and the authors were men not yet women of almost every class from distinguished courtiers like Rayleigh and Sidney to the company of heck writers there were heck writers who were prevalent maybe not very of high standard but who starved in garrets and hung about the outskirts of the bustling taverns the taverns also became the centers of exchange between the high and the low and during this reign in the late 16 and early 17th century a London centered culture therefore, rose up and it became almost the cultural capital and that was both courtly and popular produced great poetry and drama. We can even say that the beginnings of popular literature beginning of popular culture originated in this age. So, behind the new literature was the training in classical. So, this is where we find it was a very very concerted attempt that classical literature has to be transferred to the masses and there was this training almost subdued you can say in classical limitation of a long line of humanist scholars and translators reaching back to the time of Erasmus at the beginning of the century. The first tangible sign of it for Elizabethan was the poetry of White and Sari. Effective progress from songs and sonnet was delayed however, until 1579 the beginnings of the poetic vibrancy which may have been imported from Italy but we find that the sonnet form was being practiced as a courtly form and then again going into the other spheres. Spencer showed how the pastoral convention could be adopted to a variety of subject. Edmund Spencer the leading poet of this early Elizabethan age we find him taking the form of the pastoral going back to rural retreats then experimenting with allegory experimenting with different types of moral heroic couplets recalling both saucer and virgin and he showed how the rules of decorum of fitness of style to subject could be applied to variation in the diction and metrical scheme. So, there was great experimentation in the technique of writing and he was one of the initiators you can say who in the stanza form which was later called as the Spencerian stanza. Therefore, if we look first in the first phase of the Elizabethan period or the age of Shakespeare what do we see that Elizabethan poetry is neither classical nor romantic in the sense it lacks the restraint and the economy the mental repose of the finest classical art not so much applying it to the norms and the rules of the classical rules, but equally he joins labour and learning to enthusiasm this marriage between imagination and decorum. This marriage between classicism and romanticism was one of the main important contributions to English literature following the main tradition of antiquity and the middle ages it is addressed to reason as a universal moral guide. It is composed on the assumption that the function of poetry is to teach by delighting. So, delight is the main occupation to interpret nature and to influence man's action this connection between nature between man's morals and to man's the purpose of man's action. Though the age produced some excellent prose work we just mentioned Francis Bacon it is essentially an age of poetry has said that it was this nest of singing birds and the poetry is remarkable for its variety it is not in one line it is a different different experiments that were going on. His freshness is youthful and romantic filling both the poetry in the drama were permitted by Italian influence no doubt. So, this influences we cannot do away and we find that which was dominant in English literature from saucer to the restoration. So, the Italian influence which was there the European influence had a very significant part in the making of poetry of the time. The literature of this age is often called a literature of the Renasa too though as we have seen the Renasa itself began much earlier for a century and a half before. So, now let us look at this flowering of lyric poetry in the reign of Elizabeth. We have just mentioned Sir Thomas White greatly influenced by the Italian Petrarch introduces the sonnet and a range of short lyrics to English the sonnet form a line poem in 14 lines with four quadrenes and followed by a couplet you find was a new form that was introduced then all of Saray develops unripe pen pentameters or blank verse thus inventing the verse form which will be of great use to contemporary remedies. Now, now so in order to appreciate exactly what this importance is we must remember in what state Wharton Saray found the art which they practiced in and which they made a new start in early to the lyric poetry yes and that is why their place in the early flowering of lyric poetry is almost it is something so strong that it has gone into the making of many of the other later poets. We have Sir Philip Sidney with his astrophil and Steyler and Edmunds Spencer which we we had just referred to one of the leading poets of the time and especially his methamo opus Fairy Queen and Allegory then we have Sir Walter really the courtiers they were courtiers they were also practitioner poets Christopher Marlow and also William Shakespeare and specially Shakespeare's early poetry as well as his sonnets. The Fairy Queen if we look into Edmunds Spencer's Fairy Queen it is a great work upon which the poet's fame chiefly rest and this is the original original plan of the poem included 24 books each of which was to recount the adventure and triumph of a knight who represented a moral virtue, allegorical representation of eyes of virtue. Where Sorfa looks about him and described life as he says it we had Sid incantable, cantable retrails. Here Spencer always looks backward for his inspiration he goes back to the medieval age he lives sorry he lives grimly in the past in the realm of purely imaginary emotions and adventures we can even call it an alternate reality. He goes into the realm of creates a different atmosphere a different ambience and his first quality therefore is imagination. If we look at Spencer and you compare it with Saucer you find the contrast which is there Saucer was so realistic in detail almost to the point of miniature figures in your presentation. Here we find that it is imagination and he is the first of a poets to create a world of dreams fancies illusions. We can almost align him to the world of magic realism which are the modern forms of narratives. For the fairy queens Spencer invented a new verse form which has been called since this day the Spenserian stanza. Because of its reliability it has been much used by nearly all the poets of English literature. New stanza was an improved form of Aristotle's Ottawa Rima and bears a close resemble to one of Saucer's most musical first forms in the monk state. So, this is where I want to show this is Edmund Spencer. I want to show you how the age that goes before or the influences which come in and this is what T. S. Eliot in his as a tradition and individual talent had emphasized that you have to have the historical sense to understand the flow of literature and to appreciate a text in its full form. And this is where the exchanges and the influences which have gone before or maybe which have may have been concurrent with the times is very important in understanding a text or a movement. So, the greatness of Shakespeare's assignment if we look into him as one of the poets who had been the very great prominence in the early part of the Tudor age was largely made possible by the work of his immediate predecessors by Spencer Sidney in the mastery of us. For example, by Marlow and the university which in the theatrical management of character and situation when he goes to drama. So, he was fortunate that almost the initial work had been done for him. Therefore, Shakespeare began his literary career as a poet and he never ceased to be fascinated by the poetic possibilities of image and conceit, metaphor and symbol. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model and his use of prose for comic ironic, mad or simplified forms. When we look at a review of Shakespeare's poems, we will be doing his dramas later when we are doing that phase of Elizabethan drama. Here we are studying Shakespeare's place in his contribution to the poetry. Excluding the sonnets, we find that he had written Venus and Adonis, Long Poems, Rape of Lucris and a few and uncertain, but exquisite scripts in the Lovers' Complaint, The Passionate Pilgrim and so forth. All these are likely to have been the work of early youth, maybe immature, but even then we have extreme sweetness and abundant. Now, when we come to the 154 sonnets of Shakespeare's whole over, then we find that it is a class apart. Elizabethan English or you can say Elizabethan poetry in the age of Shakespeare we find is mostly the way that the whole sonnet form was experimented upon and when we study Shakespeare's sonnets, it is one of the luminaries of the period and they are the only direct expression of the poets own feelings that we possess. For its exquisite beauty, for its exquisite thematic expression, I do not think there will be any sonnets which can equal his own line from here sonnet. Let me not to the marriage of true minds, admits abediments, love is not love which alters when it alteration finds or bends with the remover to remove. He even modified the sonnet structure and made it into his own and not the way that Wight and Surrey had written out of a truck and model, his own model and there we find that it had from then on it came to be known as the Six Parents Sonnet. Well, when we look into the phase of prose writing in this period, it was an inevitable result of discovery of printing that the cultivation of the vernacular for purposes of all work that is to say for prose should be largely increased. The most interesting monuments of this crusade as it may almost be called in England are concerned with the school of Cambridge scholars who flourished at the time such as Assam, Wilson and others. So, the history of earlier Elizabethan prose is to a great extent the history of curiosities of literature right of tentative and imperfect efforts scarcely resulting in any real vernacular style at all. It was not as colorful as we can say about the earlier term set poetry, but at the same time very significant. It is however, emphatically the period of origins of modern English prose. If we study modern English prose, we find the initial steps back during this period and a search cannot but be interesting noticing the schools of historians, translators, controversialists and specially critics who illustrated the middle period of the reign and singling out Sidney and Lillie. So, when we refer to Roger Assam, his talks of Lillie was written and printed as early as 1545. Let me quote from this text what he had written which is quite interesting. I have written this English matter in the English tongue for Englishmen. This is what he wrote a memorable sentence none the worse for jingle and reputation which are well in place. Until scholars like Assam who with the rarest exception where the only person likely or able to write at all get to write English matters in English tongue for Englishmen the formation of the English prose style was impossible. So, they took this risk of writing in the English tongue and that it requires some courage to do so. A quote here I am of this opinion that our own tongue should be written clean and pure unmixed and unmingled with borrowing of other tongues. Wherein if we take not hit by time ever borrowing and never paying she shall be fined to keep our house as bankrupt. Beautiful metaphor that is used. We come to Francis Bacon. His safe philosophical world is the Institutory of Magna which was left incomplete which includes the advancement of learning and the Novam Organum. But mostly for students of literature his interest as a pioneer is in his famous essays called the pioneer of modern science and the inductive method of learning. Minor prose writers at that time are Richard Hooker, Travel Logs etcetera, John Fox, the historians Camden and Knox, the editors Huckloot and Butchers who gave the stirring records of exploration and Thomas Snod the translator of Blue Dark Slime. John Lally has to be mentioned here not only as a dramatist but as a prose writer especially his Euphiess which was divided into two parts. Euphiess the anatomy of it and Euphiess and his England is a kind of love story yes but yet the action however being next to nothing it infinite amount of moral and courtly discourse has been given here. Now two schools of English prose showed itself on one side in Lally and the university weeks of his time. The university weeks were this group of scholars who were also writers who were in the universities of Cambridge and Oxford on the other in extremely vernacular and sometimes extremely vulgar manner of the pamphletes. So, we have prose of different types one which were the scholarly or more conscious prose of the university weeks and also of the pamphletes who were a closer maybe to the way the colloquial English and the vulgar manner of the pamphletes. We have to mention Philip Sidney yet again because his prose work are the famous pastoral romances of the Arcadia written to please his sister is full of generous order it has a different style altogether and we find there are in this full of poetic expressions. So, the borderline between prose and poetry is somewhere mingled together. So, the Apology for Poetry is one of the first critical essays in English how to write a poem what is this discourse in the poetic. The Arcadia is interspersed with the colloquies in which sufferers and sufferers sing of the delights of rural life. Now the transition in the mid 15th century after we come to the drama now after doing the poets in a very general manner the phase of poetry as well as a prose let us come to the at me of representation in the Elizabethan age and go back to how did drama take place. After the mystery and the miracle plays which had its bearings in the late 14th century we find a new type of drama immerse called the morality plays of the English drama from miracles to the moral this was however quite spontaneous it began in the search as we had done in the first lecture and we have seen that how it went into the suburbs and the transition from the scriptural figures of the former from the mystery and the miracle to the abstractions of the later where we had rise to the Coventry cycles because the search found that the theme of this of the dramas which were enacted somehow could not be put into the confines of the search. So, it came into the cycles in the evolution of British drama this transition from the mystery to the morality forms the third stage of all the moral plays of medieval England the most celebrated and recognized one is every man the mention must be made of every man before the 16th century English drama. Therefore, men their mature performances of Bible stories by craft gills on public holidays well. So, to trace the earliest beginnings of the English theatre in the range of the four first tutors the mystery and morality passed into the interlude as we have seen even the two famous comedies Ralph Royster doister and gamma gardens needle stand as if it were only at the threshold of a period not so much of experimentation going on and somewhere it was in the in between lines between one period and the other on the other hand we can take on to our province the whole rise flourishing and decadence of the extraordinary product known somewhat loosely as the Elizabethan drama. So, first English tragedy Gorbuda was written by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton and was acted in 1562 this is a very important date in Elizabethan drama only two years before the birth of Shakespeare it is remarkable not only as England's first tragedy, but as the first play to be written in blank words. So, the blank words of Shakespeare the later being most significant since it started the drama into the style of verse best suited to the genius of English playwrights blank verse became almost the the the most representative tool for drama writing. So, it was the influence of the continent that there are now second to English theatre the English drama like other literary branches had the enlivening influence from Italy you had seen the Italian influence in the sonnets now we see that Italian influence was equally strong in the way drama was written and the way the plays were performed from the medieval mystery and morality plays there was a sweeping advancement now to the division into into genres like comedies tragedies and history plays. So, now we find this variety of genres that are being opened up the main source of inspiration of the English tragedy was therefore, if we look at tragedy of the time it was Seneca a Latin dramatist of the age of narrow. The first English tragedy go with the Koffarex and Porex written by Thomas Norton was of the Seneca type what was this Seneca influence right. So, it was characterized by themes of revenge brought some melodrama, bombastic melodrama chorus would be there who would moralize, but do not participate it would open with a chorus may be a group or a single person and the five act structure has come in ghost would come in seeking revenge supernatural elements are there the stock characters would be there different ways that they will be representing the types they will be introspective moralizing hero who would be talking about his own dilemma or his turmoil and therefore, there will be a lot of soliloquies which will come soliloquies like interior monologue and you will find that this is how it went the Seneca influence more or less somewhere or the other influence Shakespeare too and a style which was characterized by bombast rant descriptions soliloquies a villain who is possessed and a lot of melodrama and a lot of pageantry would be there on the stage which the people liked a lot ok. Thomas gets the Spanish tragedy it sets of a wave of limitations that set the standard for Elizabethan tragedy it was the most popular play of the era. So, the underlying theme of the great part of Elizabethan literature if we look into this aspect is a conflict between the demonstrative individualism and the traditional sense of a moral order there was not a negating of the traditional sense, but at the same time the exploring of the what is new humanism alone was not the source of vitality in Shakespeare's theatre its vitality was due now the most important part in understanding Elizabethan theatre was contact with popular entertainment. I think I refer to you that it may have been during this age that the origins of popular culture had come in and by popular culture you mean that the literature becomes the possession of each one of us every one of us it is not of a elite alright and therefore popular entertainment and popular thinking. So, it was not just humanism it was not tradition it was this concern with the people or concern of disseminating ideas to the people that it was one of the most significant factors in understanding Elizabethan drama. Quickened by the reformation grammar schools universities had trained as students in Raderick with the aid of Seneca Terence or modern Latin imitation among the university with now we had talked about this group of of stars which had been the midst of so much of controversy in the universities we have Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe's work and many people say that as a dramatist and as a poet I think there was if there is a parallel with Shakespeare only Marlowe's name can be somehow referred to that to not as close to what people would like to make the comparison apply. Philosophical depth in the classic play the so called dramatic unity is what had happened in the classic plays of that time the dramatic unit is of time plays an action where strictly observed it has to be in a single day the time also has to be of a particular time and the action has to be without any subplots without any parallel plots. The English drama on the other hand strove to represent the whole sweep of life in a single play the university to school or university wits as when of learning were called generally of drama upheld a classical ideal yes and ridiculed the crudeness of the new English plays in the end the native drama prevailed aided by the popular taste which had been trained by four centuries of miracles the English first play especially the romantic type who extremely crude and often led to ridiculously extravagant scenes. So, this two rival schools of the university wits and the actor play writes one who experimented more with popular taste and one who had more with the classical norms of representation and that the first in Malo the second in Shakespeare we have two leading ok we have Shakespeare and Malo a second phase will show us the triumph of the untremeled English play in tragedy and comedy furnished by Malo with the mighty line his blank verse but free to a great extent from the bombast and the unreal scheme which he did not shake off side by side if we study Shakespeare we will find we have to deal with a learned place of Johnson again who comes as a contemporary as also one of his later dramatist the proudful style of Chapman we have Marston and Decker. Therefore, Renosa drama if we have seen in the early stages or the Elizabethan stage the first great English dramatist is Christopher Malo forget about Thomas King he was he had based his Spanish tragedy of course on second model most popular yes but in the full form of national theatre the first great English dramatist is Malo. Malo's plays Tamboulane, Dr. Fosters Edward second you are Malta used the five x structure and the medium of blank verse which Shakespeare finds so productive. So, he was a learner in the way that he used the techniques of the manic dramatic representation and of course if Malo's Dr. Fosters if you read Drs. Fosters tragedy of Drs. Fosters even the lines will always will be mesmerizing in the use of the complete declimatory style of the blank verse and it is said to be the first great tragedy of humanism and the story of Fosters was taken from a popular pamphlet which was reproduced in ballet form as well it retraces the allegorical struggle between good and evil of early moralities though with the highly important difference that the central figure is no longer mankind but an individual hero. Therefore, we find that it is almost a representation of individual humanism or individual tragedy not like a type in morality plays though it takes on the themes of the morality plays this conflict between good and evil. This is a quote from Dr. Fosters. Fosters asks how comes it then that doubt out of hell to Mephistophilus the devil Mephistophilus says why this is hell nor am I out of it. This will be almost a prelude to the depiction of hell when we have in Milton's Paradise Lost. In the powerful view of Malta we have the same sort of presiding spirit of Machiavelli Machiavelli hero who stoops to no ends to achieve his goal and of course, there is a change in the individual destiny and so that violence takes on a coloring of grotesque satire. Robert Green was one of the first men of letters to make his profession another compatriot and a broad reading public. The best of his plays Friar Bacon and Friar Bungae and James Fort and Romantic Maddlies in which he seems to have been experimenting with the possibilities of varieties in a double or multiple plots. We cannot but mention Johnson's Everyman in his humor the drama of humors which was performed in 1598 and here specially important remarkable is Shakespeare was also in the cast. He became celebrity because of his humor's comedy and every man out of his humor was satirical comedies displaying Johnson's classical learning and his interest in formal experiment. Perhaps the most famous play right in the world we come to William Shakespeare from straight foot up on even road plays that are still performed in theaters across the world to this day. He was himself an actor we have named the age the age of Shakespeare and how he was deeply involved in the running of the theatrical company. He had no formal training like the Shakespeare plays. His 38 plays include tragedies such as Hamlet Othello, King Lear, comedies such as Midsommar's Nightdream, Twelfth Night and History plays such as Henry Fort part 1 and 4. He has been called the central son. It was in this world that William Shakespeare wrote and acted in his plays in the late 16th and early 17th centuries and Shakespeare's earliest identified plays his apprentice work shows his interest in a variety of Elizabethan dramatic tradition as I told you the history plays as well as Thomas Gates, Seneca influence. He was therefore, a very much a man of his time a man of the Elizabethan theater who learned to exploit brilliantly the stage craft the acting the public taste of his day. So, he was a consummate dramatist who could fill the space of the nation of the people. It happens very rarely in the history of literature that a craftsman who has a quite perfect control of his medium and his masterly ease in handling the techniques and convention of his day is also a universal genius of the highest order one who was so localized one who wanted to keep the pulse of the nation of the people at the same time used universal teams and unique ability to render experience in poetic language and an uncanny intuitive understanding of human psychology. So, Elizabethan tragedy we find there was a there was character which makes a man not fate is destiny, but character is destiny and it is less concerned with genre mixing of comedy and tragedy often character centered rather than plot centered. The history plays we have how he had made popular morality satirizing abuses and then he comes into writing about historical figures which comes close to the people. So, now when we look into the overview of the drama of the age there was the overview of drama for his originality volume, generic resemblance of character individual independence of trade, exuberance of inventive thought the Elizabethan drama stands alone in the history of the world and Shakespeare is supposed to be the only commenter on Shakespeare this is what one critic has said he is unequal as life is and this is the extraordinary and almost inexplicable difference not merely between him and all his contemporaries, but between him and all other writers every writer that you will be doing in this course or maybe you will be accounting in the ages that will follow you will find that he is always at the height of the particular situation and this inequality is uniquely illustrated in his plays. He was not of an age, but for all time his successors were Ben Johnson Bumont and Fletcher, Wester, Middleton, Haywood, Decker. So, we had done with the non-dramatic poets like Edmund Spenser Spenser the Thomas Seck, Seckville Michael Drayton and Philip Sidney. We had overview of the rise of the drama in England, the Miracle Place we had an overview of Shakespeare's predecessors, Lyley Kate, Nashville, Green Marlowe, the University of AIDS, the types of drama with which they experimented we had an overview of the prose writers in which Francis Bacon dominated and such an age of thought and feeling as we have seen and this section finds its best expression in the drama and at the center of the drama was Shakespeare and Shakespeare's successors and therefore, in concluding we say Shakespeare's period is generally regarded as the greatest in the history of English literature. Historically therefore, we note in this age the tremendous impetus received from the renasa, from the reformation and from the exploration of the new world. It was marked by strong national spirit, by patriotism, by religious tolerance, by social content, by intellectual progress and by unbounded enthusiasm. So, the discussion of the stories when you look into it, we can look into the significance of Wight and Surrey in the poetical representation and how the age was mainly dominated by the spirit of romance and how the age of Shakespeare was in part the spirit of experimentation and the rise and concept of nationalism. These are some of the refer texts GM Traveling English Social History which is very important for understanding the social conditions of any age and Cambridge history of English literature and David Dioces and some of the other books which are mentioned here.