William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness

William Blake’s Theory of Contrariness

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of short lyric poems accompanied by Blake's original illustrations. The two sections juxtapose the state of innocence and that of experience. Many of the poems in Blake's words they were meant to show "the two contrary states of the human soul"; the illustration of innocence and experience. The tone of the first series is admirably sounded by the introductory "Piping down the valleys wild" and that of second the dark picture of poor babes "fed with cold and usurous hand".

Blake is bitter against those who go "up to the Church to pray" while the misery of the innocent is around them. His theory of Contraries is summarized in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence." The essence of Blake's theory is that, in some paradoxical way, it is possible for the contraries of innocence and experience to co-exist within a human being. The crime of "religion" was its attempt "to destroy existence" by ignoring or minimizing the essential oppositions in human nature.  The word ‘contrary’ had a very specific and important meaning for Blake. Like almost all great poets, he was an enemy of dualism. Western thought has been intensely dualistic, seeing everything as composed of warring opposites, head and heart, body and spirit, male and female as though the split between the hemispheres of the human brain were projecting itself on everything perceived. A study of the poems in the two groups shows the emotional tensions between the two Contrary States. 

“Piping down the valleys wild”

In the "Songs of Innocence", Blake expresses the happiness of a child's first thoughts about life. To the child, the world is one of happiness, beauty, and love. At that stage of life, the sunshine of love is so radiant that human suffering appears only temporary and fleeting. In the Introduction to the first series, Blake represents a laughing child as his inspiration for his poems. And in the poems that follow in this series, Blake gives us his vision of the world as it appears to the child or as it affects the child. And this world is one of purity, joy, and security. The children are themselves pure, whether their skin is black or white.  They are compared to lambs "whose innocent call" they hear. Both "child" and "lamb" serve as symbols for Christ. Joy is everywhere—in the "Joy but two days old"; in the leaping and shouting of the little ones; in the sun, in the bells, in the voices of the birds; in the Laughing Song all Nature rejoices. But, above all, there issecurity. There is hardly a poem in which a symbol of protection, a guardian figure of some kind, does not occur. In The Echoing Green, the old folk are close by, while the children play. Elsewhere there is the shepherd watching over his sheep; there are the mother, the nurse, the lion', the angels, and, most important of all, God Himself. There is spontaneous happiness and delight in these groups of poems as “The Infant Boy” illustrates, ‘‘I happy am/ Joy is my name’.

“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”

In the first Holy Thursday, poor children sit "with radiance of their own"; while in the second Holy Thursday, the poet deplores the fact that there should be so many poor and hungry children depending on charity in a country which is otherwise rich and fruitful. The second poem is very moving, as it was intended to be. We thus have pictures of contrary states. In the "Songs of Innocence", the prevailing symbol is the Iamb, which is an innocent creature of God and which also symbolizes the child Christ. In the "Songs of Experience" the chief symbol is the tiger as expressed by the first stanza:

“Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forests of the night”

Where ‘forests of the night’ symbolize experience. The tiger burns metaphorically with rage and quickly becomes for some a symbol of anger and passion. The poet asks a crucial question here. Did God Who made the lamb also make the tiger? The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly, comprehensible Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood. The tiger represents the created universe in its violent and terrifying aspects. It also symbolizes violent and terrifying forces within the individual man, and these terrifying forces have to be faced and fully recognized. The two poems called The Lamb and The Tiger do, indeed, represent two contrary states of the human soul. No contrast could have been more vivid and more striking. Blake sees exploitation in the songs of experience as exemplified by the following lines from, ‘London’.

“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”

The poems in the second group record the wounds and cruelties of the civilized world. Some of them are bitter comments on the restraints forged by custom and law. Here Blake deplores the dominance of reason, religion, law, and morality, and he deplores the suppression of natural impulses, and more especially the suppression of the sexual impulse. Instead of innocence, joy, and security, Blake finds guilt, misery, and tyranny in the world. The protective guardians have disappeared and in their place are the tyrants. The rigors of sexual morality are depicted in A Little Girl Lost, The Sick Rose, The Angel, and Ah, Sunflower. The Sick Rose shows the destructive effects of sexual repression. In The Angel, the maiden realizes too late what she has missed. Ah, Sunflower shows the youth "pining away with desire", and the "pale virgin shrouded in snow", because both of them were denied sexual fulfillment.

The contrasts Blake sets forth in the Songs are echoes of English society's approach to the social and political issues of his era—a time characterized, on the one hand, by increasing desire for personal, political, and economic freedom, and on the other, by anxiety regarding the potential consequences of that freedom for social institutions. Several of the poems directly address contemporary social problems, for example, “The Chimney-Sweeper” deals with child labor and “Holy Thursday” describes the grim lives of charity children. The most fully-realized social protest poem in the Songs is “London,” a critique of urban poverty and misery. Thus contrariness are a must.  The language and vision not just of Blake but of poetry itself insists that the contraries are equally important and inseparable. ‘Without contraries is no progression’, wrote Blake. He sought to transform the energies generated by conflict into creative energies, moving towards mutual acceptance and harmony. Thus, by describing innocence and experience as ‘contrary states of the human soul’, Blake is warning us that we are not being invited to choose between them, that no such choice is possible. He is not going to assert that innocent joy is preferable to the sorrows of experience. 

William Blake’s poem ‘London’ is a devastating portrait of a society in which all souls and bodies were trapped, exploited and infected. Discuss!

William Blake’s poem ‘London’ is a devastating portrait of a society in which all souls and bodies were trapped, exploited and infected. Discuss!

The poem, ‘London’ is a devastating and concise political analysis, delivered with passionate anger, revealing the complex connections between patterns of ownership and the ruling ideology, the way all human relations are inescapably bound together within a single destructive society.  The poem’s opening shows the narrator wandering the “charter’d” streets of Londondown to the “charter’d Thames”. 

The loaded word “charter’d” – changed from the first draft’s politically empty “dirty” – is used in a critical sense, and Blake’s contemporary readers would no doubt have picked up on it.  The use of this loaded word – repeated to sharpen the ironic point that the streets, the very river itself, are privately owned – suggests the oppressive nature of early capitalism, in which the Whig alliance of merchants, rising finance capitalists and some of the most powerful landed aristocrats who did not need to lean on the crown for power, were busy accumulating capital via taxation and the establishment of a national debt, thus transferring wealth from the majority to the minority. As the narrator wanders, he marks, notices, the suffering population:

“And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe”

The repetition of “marks” is emphatic; the Londoners are branded with visible signs of sickness and misery. The subtle shift from “mark” used as a verb in line 3 to a noun in line 4 binds the narrator to those he sees, showing he is not a disinterested observer but one of the sufferers himself. No-one is immune.  This is a picture of a whole society in chains, and the tightness of the poem’s structure – especially in the formal second verse – emphasizes this feeling of entrapment.  The move from visual to aural description makes turning away, escape, impossible – ears cannot be shut.  In the second verse, this commonality of suffering is hammered home by the pounding rhythm, stressing the word “every”, five times: 

“In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forg’d manacles I hear”

The cumulative effect of this verse enacts the narrator’s helplessness.  The “I” figure doesn’t appear till the very end of the verse, as if he has been overwhelmed by the sounds of human torment. The sense of imprisonment is made absolutely plain in the phrase “mind-forg’d manacles” – literally, metal restraining cuffs, devised by the mind of man to subjugate people by physical force, such as the prisoners languishing in Newgate; but also, metaphorically, mental chains imprisoning through ideological acceptance of the status quo.  After the dirge of passivity in: “In every cry of every Man / In every Infant’s cry of fear”, we are jolted by the phrase into a sudden moment of analysis, of understanding. The tone of anger and condemnation rises, and in the third verse, the long list of accusatory examples has an unstoppable momentum.  The verse begins, as if in mid-sentence:

“How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every black’ning Church appalls;

And the hapless Soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down Palace walls”

From now on in this cinematic poem, we lose sight of the narrator altogether as he becomes subsumed within his furious indictment, leaving the general misery on scene to zoom in on three specific social types – the chimney sweep, the soldier and the harlot – all emblematic figures, a point made clear by the use of capitals, used also for the representative institutions.  The boy sweep blackens the church by literally making the churches sooty but also in the sense that the church’s reputation is increasingly tarnished by its whitewashing of the brutal, smoke-belching commercial system which exploits child-labour. The word “appalls” here means 'indicts' rather than the modern usage of 'disgusts'. The church is not appalled in a compassionate way, but is fearful of the menace the sweeps represent. The soldier whose sigh “Runs in blood down Palace walls” is a “hapless” victim, in spite of the fact that he is part of the armed state.  The soldier, sighing in death or fear, metaphorically stains the palace walls with his blood just as the sweep’s cry blackens the churches. Perhaps the soldier’s discontented “sigh” takes the tangible form of red-painted protest slogans on palace walls. The final verse, which Blake only added in a laterrevision, reveals how the system, constructed on the savage institutions of power – the law, church, monarchy and army – poisons personal relationships at the deepest level. This is the culmination of the narrator’s apocalyptic description: 

“But most thro’ midnight streets I hear 
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.”

It is no longer daytime, but midnight.  The harlot is a young victim, like the boy sweep. She has been robbed of the chance to love her baby, because it is the result of commerce, not love, and because its existence only brings her increased poverty.  She passes her own misery onto her child, and that child, like her, will pass its misery onto further generations.  Her curse, like the sweep’s cry and the soldier’s sigh, has actual effects.  Like “mind-forg’d manacles”, “Marriagehearse” is a fantastically potent phrase, reverberating with meanings: the two words are linked oxymoronically, with the notion of joyous, fruitful marriage undermined by its grim apotheosis, death by venereal disease.  The phrase also fillets bourgeois marriage in all its hypocrisy, the husband routinely unfaithful to his wife, and suggests the sterile death-in-life of the wedded state. Marriage has become the funeral of love, the death of freedom. By striking at the family, the poem attacks the reproductive system of society itself.  The harlot’s curse does more than make the baby cry; it destroys bourgeois complacency.  It’s a fitting end; the poem’s final line has the incantatory power of a curse itself, with the rhyme shutting the lid on the poem once the build-up of hard alliterative sounds (black’ning, blood, Blasts, blights and plagues) has reached its crescendo.

London begins with the economic system, couched in that abstract, legalistic word “charter’d”, protected by its “bans” (laws), and moves to its consequences – the selling of bodies and souls within a sealed system of commercial exploitation.  Yet, though the poem describes claustrophobic trappedness, paradoxically it does not feel defeatist. This is an anti-vision poem, but it implies that a vision is needed, and this lifts it out of despair.  Its rising anger, reaching its height in the Shakespearean last line, is like a battle cry, or at least the precursor to one.  It doesn’t just catalogue the woes, but by ordering the encounters, reveals their cause and their inter-connection.  It shows the power of articulation both in the victims’ utterances – the sweep, soldier and harlot marking the city, by black’ning, splashing their blood, infecting it – and in the poem's own rhetorical eloquence.

William Blake’s Romanticism

William Blake’s Romanticism

William Blake is a romantic poet. The sparks of romanticism are vividly marked on his poetry. The question arises what is Romanticism? The answer is that it is a phenomenon characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.

It was Schelling who first defined romanticism as ‘liberalism in literature’. Though romanticism officially started by the Lyrical Ballads jointly penned by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1830, poets like William Blake made cracks to classicism towards the end of the18th century. In Romanticism, a piece of work could become, as Blake described, “an embodiment of the poet’s imagination and vision.” Many of the writers of the Romantic period were highly influenced by the war between England and France and the French Revolution. In the midst of all these changes, Blake too was inspired to write against these ancient ideas. ‘All Religions Are One’, and ‘There is No Natural Religion’ were composed in hopes of bringing change to the public’s spiritual life. Blake felt that, unlike most people, his spiritual life was varied, free and dramatic. Blake’s poetry features many characteristics of the romantic spirit. The romanticism of Blake consists in the importance he attached to imagination, in his mysticism and symbolism, in his love of liberty, in his humanitarian sympathies, in his idealization of childhood, in the pastoral setting of many of his poems, and in his lyricism. 

“Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire”

The above lines from, ‘Jerusalem’ amply justifies the point. "Poetry fettered", said Blake, "fetters the human race". In theory as well as practice, the Romantic Movement began with the smashing of fetters. In his enthusiastic rage, Blake condemned the verse-forms which had become traditional. He poured scorn upon all that he associated with classicism in art and in criticism. "We do not want either Greek or Roman models if we are but just and true to our own imaginations", he said. The whole critical vocabulary of neo-classical criticism had evidently disgusted him. He could not endure it. The visions that Blake started seeing in his childhood and which he kept seeing throughout his life were doubtless a product of his ardent imagination. His visions profoundly controlled both his poetry and his painting. Of many of his poems he said that they were dictated to him by spirits. In this most literal sense he held that, inspiration could come to the aid of a poet. In a state of inspiration, the poet made use of his imagination. "Human imagination is the Divine Vision and Fruition", he said. Energy and delight accompany this expression of the Divine Vision. All these views on the subject of poetry spring from the intensely romantic nature of Blake. It is not merely the revolutionary spirit that permeates his poetry. The subject of child is more crucial to his art. We see in Holy Thursday I:

“These flowers of London town!
Seated in companies they sit
with radiance all their own”

The child is here the symbol of the most delicate and courageous intuitions in the human mind. The elements of Romanticism are present in these poems, some of them in the highest degree, such as the sense of wonder, the contemplation of Nature through fresh eyes, an intimate sympathy with the varieties of existence. Other elements of Romanticism are found in a much less degree, such as the obsession with the past, or the absorbing sense of self. Everything that the eyes of the child see is bathed in a halo of mystery and beauty. The words in these poems are perfectly adapted to the thought because they are as simple as possible, and the thought itself is simple. Blake's first style is in a way a juvenile form of Romanticism.  The "Songs of Innocence" most completely fulfil the definition of Romanticism as "the renascence of wonder". The world of Nature and man is the world of love and beauty and innocence enjoyed by a happy child, or rather by a poet who miraculously retains an unspoiled and inspired vision. Despite his strong emotions and his unfamiliar ideas, Blake keeps his form wonderfully limpid and melodious. Besides love for children, imagination plays a key role in his poetry as Tyger embodies:

                     

“When the stars threw down their spears,
And watered heaven with their tears;
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he Who made the Lamb make thee?”

Symbolically, this poem is an impassioned defense of energy and imagination which occupy a commanding position in Blake's thinking. The tiger is Blake's symbol for the "abundant life", and for regeneration. The poem effectively conveys to us the splendid though terrifying qualities of the tiger. The climax of the poem's lyricism is reached in the lines which, though somewhat cryptic, effectively produce and effect of wonder and amazement. Blake was a great champion of liberty and had strong humanitarian sympathies. This is another aspect of his Romanticism. Blake's humanitarian sympathies are seen in such poems of Experience as Holy Thursday, A Little Boy Lost, The Chimney Sweeper, and above all London as in the following lines:

“In every voice, in every ban.
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear”

In London, Blake attacks social injustice in its various forms, as it shows itself in the chimney sweeper's cry, the hapless soldier's sigh, and the youthful harlot's curse. He appears here as an enemy of what he calls "the-mind-forged manacles". Nor does, Blake show any mercy to the Church. The boy in Blake’s poetry finds the church an inhospitable place, while the ale-house is warm and friendly because the church imposes religious discipline like fasting and prayer. Pastoralism, too is feature of poetry.  The little pastoral poem ‘The Shepherd’ has a delicate simplicity. It celebrates the happiness of rural responsibility and trust. Noteworthy also is ‘The Echoing Green’ with its picturesqueness in a warmer hue, its delightful domesticity, and its expressive melody.

Finally, it is established that Blake is a romantic poet. Blake is one of the major Romantic poets, whose verse and artwork became part of the wider movement of Romanticism in late Eighteenth and early Nineteenth century European Culture. His writing combines a variety of styles: he is at once an artist, a lyric poet, a mystic and a visionary, and his work has fascinated, intrigued and sometimes bewildered readers ever since. For the nineteenth century reader Blake’s work posed a single question: was he sane or mad? The poet Wordsworth, for example, commented that there “is no doubt that this poor man was mad, but there is something in his madness which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron and Walter Scott”. Blake’s use of images, symbols, metaphors and revolutionary spirit combined with simple diction and spontaneous expression of thoughts and emotions make him a typical romantic poet.  

William Blake’s Symbolism

William Blake’s Symbolism

Blake is a highly symbolic poet and his poetry is rich in symbols and allusions. Almost each and every other word in his poems is symbolic. A symbol is an object which stands for something else as dove symbolizes peace. Similarly, Blake’s tiger symbolizes creative energy; Shelley’s wind symbolizes inspiration; Ted Hughes’s Hawk symbolizes terrible destructiveness at the heart of nature. Blake’s symbols usually have a wide range of meaning and more obvious. Few critics would now wish to call Blake a symbolist poet, since his handling of symbols is markedly different from that of the French symbolistes’, but the world inhabited by his mythical figures is defined through quasi-allegorical images of complex significance, and such images are no less important in his lyrical poetry.  The use of symbols is one of the most striking features of Blake's poetry.

There is hardly any poem in the "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" which does not possess a symbolic or allegorical meaning, besides its apparent or surface meaning. If these poems are written in the simplest possible language, that fact does not deprive them of a depth of meaning. The language of these poems is like that of the Bible—at once simple and profound as the following lines read:

“O Rose, thou art sick!”

When Blake talks of the sick rose, he is really telling us how mysterious evil attacks the soul.  Flower-symbolism is of particular importance in Songs of Innocence and Experience, beingconnected with the Fall by the motif of the garden; and its traditional links with sexuality inform the text of ‘The Blossom’ and the design for ‘Infant Joy’, which are taken up in Experience by the plate for ‘The Sick Rose’. ‘Ah! Sun-Flower’ is a more symbolic text, and has evoked a greater variety of responses. Declaring this to be one of ‘Blake’s supreme poems’, we can interpret the flower as a man who ‘is bound to the flesh’ but ‘yearns after the liberty of Eternity”. Harper claims that it describes the aspiration of all ‘natural things’ to ‘the sun’s eternality’. Identifying the speaker as ‘Blake himself. Blake travels from flower-symbolism to animal symbols as in the ‘Tyger’:

“Did he smile his work to see

Did he who made the Lamb make thee!”

If the lamb symbolizes innocence and gentleness, the tiger is to Blake a symbol of the violent and terrifying forces within the individual man. The lamb, innocent and pretty, seems the work of a kindly Creator. The splendid but terrifying tiger makes us realize that God's purposes are not so easily understood, and that is why the question arises "Did he who made the Lamb make thee?" At the same time, the tiger is symbolic of the Creator's masterly skill which enabled Him to frame the "fearful symmetry" of the tiger. But the lion described in the poem Night (in the "Songs of Innocence") offers an interesting contrary to the tiger of the "Songs of Experience". Both the beasts seem dreadful, but the lion, like the beast of the fairy tale, can be magically transformed into a good and gentle creature: the tiger cannot. In the world of Experience the violent and destructive elements in Creation must be faced and accepted, and even admired. The tiger is also symbolic of the Energy and the Imagination of man, as opposed to the Reason.  Blake was a great believer in natural impulses and hated all restraints. Consequently he condemns all those who exercise restraints upon others. He states in Holy Thursday II:

“And their ways are fill’d with thorns

It is eternal winter there”

The eternal winter are symbolic of total destruction of the country and the perpetual devastation and ‘Grey-headed beadles’ in ‘Holy Thursday I’ are symbolic of authority and it is they exploit children for their own material interests. In the poem London, oppression and tyranny are symbolised by the king (who is responsible for the soldier's blood being shed), social institutions like (loveless) marriage, and '"he mind-forged manacles". Even further, personal and social relationships have been symbolised as:

“In the morning glad I see

My foe outstretched beneath the tree”

A Poison Tree is another allegory. The tree here represents repressed wrath; the water represents fear; the apple is symbolic of the fruit of the deceit which results from repression. This deceit gives rise to the speaker's action in laying a death-trap for his enemy. The deeper meaning of the poem is that aggressive feelings, if suppressed, almost certainly destroy personal relationships. On the surface, however, the poem is a simple, ordinary story. Thus symbolism is crucial to understanding Blake as poet of earlier romanticism. What can be more symbolic than the following lines from, ‘Auguries of Innocence’?

“To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour”

Thus, Blake’s poetry is charged with symbols. He has depicted nature and human nature; animals and plants as simple but profound symbols of powerful forces; "contrary states of the human soul" - for example, good and evil, or innocence and experience throughout his poetry. What is different in Blake is that he is not modeling after any symbols but his own. The symbols always have an inner relatedness that leads us from the outer world to the inner man. The symbols live in the ordered existence of his vision; the vision itself is entirely personal, in theme and in the logic that sustains it. Blake is difficult not because he invented symbols of his own; he created his symbols to show that the existence of any natural object and the value man’s mind places on it were one and the same. He was fighting the acceptance of reality in the light of science as much as he was fighting the suppression of human nature by ethical dogmas. He fought on two fronts, and shifted his arms from one to the other without letting us know—more exactly, he did not let himself know. He created for himself a personality, in life and in art, that was the image of the thing he sought.

In short, it is established that William Blake is a highly symbolic and even allegorical poet. His use of symbolism is unique and cinematic. It paints a lively and pulsating picture of dynamic life before us. Especially, the symbolic use of

‘Sun-flower’ gets so much stamped on the mind of the reader that it is difficult to forget it. He mentions a tiger it becomes a symbol of God's power in creation, his lamb turns out to be a symbol of suffering innocence and Jesus Christ and his tree is symbolic of anger and desire to triumph over enemies; the dark side of human nature.  Symbolism is the main trait of William Blake as a dramatist as a poet and this has been well-crystallized in his legendary work, ‘The Songs of Innocence and Experience’.

William Blake’s Religion and Vision

William Blake’s Religion and Vision

William Blake was a Christian, although he did not conform to any denomination within theChristian faith. He was born and brought up a Baptist. When he was married, he took on board some ideas of the Swedish scientist philosopher and theologian, Swedenbourg, who believed in the idea of God as man. This idea is illustrated in Blake's poem, within the "Songs of Innocence", "The Divine Image" where he asserts that "Where mercy love and pity dwell, there God is dwelling too".

He also says that love is "the human form divine". However, Blake also believes that there are two contrary states to the human soul, that a person makes their own condition, although children are born "naturally good". This runs against religious thought at the time, which suggested that children were "naturally bad" due to Original Sin. The contraries are apparent throughout the "Songs", in Innocence versus Experience. The contrary poem to "The Divine Image" is "A Divine Image" in which Blake claims:

“Cruelty has a human heart,
And Jealousy a human face”

"A Divine Image" is much shorter than "The Divine Image" as it is only two stanzas long; perhaps because "secrecy" is the "human dress" according to "A Divine Image", this may also be a suggestion of sexual restriction. It also emphasizes the contrast more starkly. Children appear alongside religion in the "Holy Thursday" poems (one in Innocence and one of the same name in Experience). In Experience, the reader is asked "Is this a holy thing to see / In a rich and fruitful land, / Babes reduced to misery". In Innocence we meet the old men who are the "wise guardians of the poor", although this is probably an ironic description of these people by Blake, as they benefit from the poverty. Blake was very concerned with the social condition of the Britain that came with the Industrialism. Blake's "Songs", especially "Holy Thursday" (Innocence) show how religion was used to keep the poor "in their place" and to prevent revolution; although ironically, the majority of the poverty-stricken in Blake's day were "children of the Industrial Revolution". He was a revolutionary and asked:

“And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?”

William Blake was a visionary (but not a dreamer), aware of the realities and complexities of experience, particularly the poverty and oppression of the urban world where he spent most of his life. He had an amazing insight into contemporary economics, politics and culture, and was able to discern the effects of the authoritarianism of church and state as well as what he considered the arid philosophy of a rationalist view of the world which left little scope for the imagination. He abhorred the way in which Christians looked up to a God enthroned in heaven, a view which offered a model for a hierarchical human politics, which subordinated the majority to a (supposedly) superior elite. He also criticised the dominant philosophy of his day which believed that a narrow view of sense experience could help us to understand everything that there was to be known, including God. Blake's own visionary experiences showed him that rationalism ignored important dimensions of human life which would enable people to hope, to look for change, and to rely on more than that which their senses told them. He religious values are more profound than a priest actually practicing religion as he endorses:

“Then cherish pity, lest you drive
an angel from your door”

In the two Holy Thursday poems Blake offers contrasting perspectives on the social situation inEngland. On the one hand, the poet describes a festive event in St Paul's cathedral, in which children who are recipients of charity come to thank God. On the other, there is a hard-hitting critique of what it's actually like for most children, in "this green and pleasant land", with "Babes reduc'd to misery. Fed with cold and usurous hand". The Holy Thursday poems offer readers the opportunity to meditate upon late 18th-century England through the lens of a particularsocial event. Here is an example of the focus on the "minute particular", when one event opens up a different perspective on the reality of a wider context. Blake's vision was holistic. He criticised the way in which people (especially those of a religious bent) separated sacred and profane, instead of seeing each person as the place where these massive emotional and political forces were in tension. He insisted in his most outspoken work, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, that "everything that lives is holy". So, he challenged that view that there was anything special about the Bible, or a religious building, as compared with other literature, or other places, which could equally manifest the divine. His lifework was dedicated to exposing the extent to which infatuation with habits of thought, which sunder and demonize, prevent human flourishing.

“And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy”

The Sick Rose illustrates, again, the horror of repressed sexuality. The rose may be regarded as a symbol for a beautiful girl. In fact it represents a girl restricted by excessive modesty. This quality was to Blake a vice, and a vice which leads to the kind of frustration emphatically illustrated in this poem. The canker-worm destroying the beauty of a rose-bud here symbolizes the repression which eats into the vitals of the girl. The worm here may also refer to the priest as an exponent of the morality that encourages formal, loveless marriages. In any case, a girl who does not give a free scope to her senses is like a sick rose. The main theme of ‘Ah, Sunflower’ is, once again, the need for an uninhibited expression of sexual love. Both the young man and the virgin have been denied a fulfillment of their sexual desires. To all intents and purposes they are dead and buried. To allow one's desire to remain unfulfilled was the worst of crimes in Blake's eyes.

Blake's vision was very different from those who appealed to the past. He was concerned with human beings. The Bible was not to be a kind of holy rule-book, therefore, according to which priests and rulers could police people, but a collection of "sentiments and examples" which engaged the imagination. There was to be no contracting out of responsibility for biblical interpretation to priests and scholars. All people, inside and outside the churches, according to Blake, have the responsibility to attend to the energetic activity of the divine spirit in creation, in history, and in human experience. He wouldn't have wanted his words to become a sacred text, any more than the words of the Bible, but an ongoing stimulus to politics and religion in the struggle to realize man can exist but by brotherhood. Blake does not believe that salvation is possible through priests or through the morality preached by organized religion. The life of the senses should be free, he says. To hinder or to chain to fetter the senses is like murdering the human personality. 

Marlowe’s Contribution to English Drama

                Marlowe’s Contribution to English Drama

Tragedy before Marlow: Swinburne’s remarks, “Before him there was neither genuine blank verse nor a genuine tragedy in our language. After his arrival the way was paved for Shakespeare.” With the advent of Marlowe, Miracle and Morality plays vanished. He brought Drama out of the old rut of street presentation and made it a perfect art and a thing of beauty. After the Reformation, the Mystery and Morality plays were disliked by the public at large until the advent of University Wits the greatest of whom was Marlowe.

It was in the fifteenth century that tragedy came to English dramatic field. This was due to the Revival of Learning in Europe commonly referred to as the Renaissance and the translation of great Italian tragedies. Italian Renaissance exercised a vital influence on the development of English Drama. The first English tragedy was Gorboduc (1565) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville. In style and treatment of theme Seneca was very much their model. Although this tragedy showed some innovation, yet most of the Senecan qualities such as long speeches, ghosts, gruesome murders and talks and talks were very much there. The tragedies that followed Seneca had the same qualities and properties. It required the mighty efforts of a genius to free the Elizabethan Drama from the worst features of the Senecan tragedies and it was Christopher Marlowe who has achieved this foundation for the realm of English Dramatic Literature. There are umpteen characteristic of Marlovian tragedies. In discussing Marlowe, we can point out how he formulated the English Drama and especially Tragedy which was improved upon and perfected by a genius like Shakespeare who owes Marlowe for all his greatness and grandeur. Because had there been no Marlowe, there would have been no Shakespeare. It is also due to Marlowe that English Drama for the first time was bestirred with the vigorous poetry and passion. He has rightly been called the Morning Star of English Drama.

Marlow’s Great Tragic Heroes: The first great thing done by Marlowe was to break away from the medieval conception of Tragedy. The Medieval Drama was a game of the princes and imperial classes – the kings and Queens and their rise an fall. But it was left to Marlowe to evolve and create the real tragic hero. All of his tragic heroes are of humble parentage, Tamburlaine, Barabas in the Jew of Malta and Faustus, but they are endowed with great tragic and heroic qualities. His tragedy is a tragedy of one man – his rise and fall, his fate and actions and finally his death for his own failings and incapacities. All the other characters fade into insignificance besides the towering personality and the glory and grandeur of the tragic hero. Even various incidents revolve round the hero. His heroes are men fired with indomitable passion and inordinate ambition. His Tamburlaine is in full-flooded pursuit of military and political power, his Faustus sells his soul to the Devil to attain ultimate power through knowledge and gain the deity and His Jew of Malta discards all sense of human values with his blind aspirations. What Marlowe depicts and dramatizes is that all his mighty and towering heroes with all their sky-high designs and aspirations ultimately fall into failure and doom exhibiting their tragic and doomed end. Herein lies the greatness of Marlowe.

Working of a passion: We have previously studied that Marlowe’s heroes are dominated by the inordinate desires and passions. These passions take the form of wealth, spirit of learning, high power. Through these, Marlowe imparts vehemence, fire and force in the drama. But in this way, we may trace the distinct influence of Machiavelli on Marlowe. Marlowe must have read his famous book, The Prince and derived this idea of ambition and spirit from him. Marlowe discarded the old concept of tragedy as decent from greatness to misery and supplanted it greatness by the greatness of individual worth. His heroes truly reflect the new Spirit of Learning because he himself was the product of Renaissance.

The Inner Conflict: Another great achievement of Marlowe was to introduce the element of conflict in the tragic hero especially in Dr. Faustus and Edward II. The conflict may be on the physical or spiritual plane. The spiritual and moral conflict takes place in the heart of man and this is of much greater significance and much more poignant than the former. And a great tragedy most powerfully reveals the emotional conflict or moral agony of the mighty hero.  In the realm of England’s dramatic literature, Dr. Faustus may be reckoned the first spiritual tragedy or the tragedy of the soul. In this epoch-making drama, true and deep moral agonies and painful spiritual conflict has been superbly laid bare before us by Marlowe. Like the old Greek heroes, Marlovian Heroes are not helpless puppets in the hands of Fate and they are never destined by gods. They have free thinking of religion and carve their way themselves. The tragic end they meet is caused by the tragic flaw in their personalities and they achieve this end through their actions. This is the greatest contribution of Marlowe to the English Drama.

Moral Conception: It was Marlowe who first discarded the medieval conception of tragedy as it was distinctly a moral one. In old Morality Plays, the purpose was to simply inculcate a moral lesson by showing the fall of the hero. There is no such thing in Marlovian plays. The main interest centers on the sky-touching personality of the heroes with their tremendous efforts to attain the limit and their rise and fall in their struggle.

Blank Verse: Another great achievement of Marlowe was to introduce a new type of blank verse in his tragedies.  A new spirit of poetry was breathed into the artificial and monotonous verse of the old days. In fact, the whole of Elizabethan Drama was enliven by a new poetic grandeur.

Seriousness and Concentration: Another notable characteristic of Marlowe’s work is seriousness and concentration on the theme and there is complete lack of humor.  According to many critics, the clownish scenes and the other absurdities were interpolated by the later authors. There are also no women characters in Marlowe’s works, this is also a typical quality of his. The episodes of Helen in Dr. Faustus and other female figures in other plays are only shadows or figure-heads. Most of these features may also be regarded as the drawbacks, however; it was Marlowe’s distinct way of writing which is typical of him. Or perhaps, for these reasons, he couldn’t reach the towering high plane of fame as did Shakespeare. But we must remember that he was a pioneer and path-finder. He was the Columbus of a new literary World in England. It is due to Marlowe that we have Shakespeare whom we know and read, but had Marlowe not written such these works, there would have been Shakespeare, but no the one we know today. Shakespeare, without him, would have been only another writer.

Autobiographical note in Faustus

Autobiographical note in Faustus

Introduction: A study of Marlowe’s great tragedies cannot but convince us that Marlowe possessed the power in its fullest degree of projecting himself into his chief characters. The most important quality of his works is the subjective or autobiography note. Here lies the greatest difference between Shakespeare and Marlowe as dramatists. There is a complete effacement of Shakespeare’s personality in his plays. We cannot say that this or that passage reveals Shakespeare’s personality or mind. But Marlowe couldn’t but project his personality into the chief characters of his plays – especially in his four great tragedies: Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus, The Jew of Malta and Edward II.

Marlowe’s Life and the Spirit of Renaissance Before discussing the subjective note in his plays any further, we should have a fair idea of Marlowe’s life, his career, the influence of the Renaissance on him, and his ambitions.Marlowe came of parents ‘ base of stock’. He was the son of a shoe maker. But he was fortunate enough to get school education and had a chance to go toCambridge to specialize in theology and got Doctorate in Divinity.  But his abandoned his career in theology and joined the theatrical companies in London to become a dramatist. But seeing a difference between himself as poor and his companions as rich, though they were much inferior to him in intellect, Marlowe rebelled against the established norms. This was also perhaps the main cause of his rebellion against religion and its normal orders. He was much criticized and branded as the Atheist. He also possessed a dual personality. He was a dramatist and poet inLondon, but also had relations with the underworld. However, Marlowe was a man of the Renaissance and an embodiment of the spirit of his age. He was a saturated with the spirit of learning, exploring and experimenting with its hankering after sensual pleasure of life and with its inordinate ambition and supreme lust for power and pelf. He was profoundly influenced by Machiavelli, the famous Italian social and political writer, who discarded all conventional moral principles to achieve the end by any means, fair or foul.

Reflection of Marlowe in his tragic Heroes A close and critical study of works of Marlowe convinces us that all his tragic heroes clearly reveal the chief characteristics and temperament of the great dramatist. All his tragic heroes are absolutely dominated by some uncontrollable passion. To achieve their end, they throw overboard all established moral scruples or religious sanctions and never avoid using horrible means, for example, his cruel and tyrant Tamburlaine with his craze for limitless power defies all authorities on earth and in the heaven. His stone-heated Barabas is dominated by a senseless craze for gold and doesn’t shirk from committing the worst type of crimes to achieve his end, thus he seems to be an embodiment of Machiavellism. To gain super human powers through knowledge, his Doctor Faustus sells his soul to the Devil in pursuit of his passion. His heroes have a scant regard for religion as Faustus says, “ I count religion but a childish toy” another significant point is that all tragic heroes of Marlowe are poets and convey their feelings and emotions to the audience in the superb poetic language, but of all Faustus is a poet par excellence just like Marlowe himself. His utterance about Helen is magical and fascinating: Was this the face …. Towers of Illium? And Marlowe himself was a great poet of passion.

Marlowe and Faustus-A Striking Parallelism: Of all the tragic heroes of Marlowe, Faustus bears the most striking reflection of Marlowe’s own self. We know that Marlowe was the second child of a Canterbury shoe-maker and in the very beginning of the play, we are told of Faustus’ parentage as: Now is he born, his parents base of stock. Harold Osborne has pointed out that Marlowe like Faustus came of parents ‘base of stock’ and was destined for the church but turned elsewhere.  We should not press the analogies too far, but we cannot ignore them as the parallelism is too obvious.

Personal Tragedy: Spiritual Suffering: Doctor Faustus very powerfully expresses Marlowe’s innermost thoughts and authentic experiences. So it can be regarded the spiritualhistory of Marlowe himself. Marlowe’s inordinate ambition led him to revolt against religion and society, to defy the laws of man and laws of God and such defiance is bound to bring up acute mental conflict resulting in deep despair and certain defeat. So, both Marlowe and Faustus experience terrible mental pangs and agonies. Osborne has rightly observed:

The descriptions of Faustus’ repentance, despair and mental anguish are among the most vivid and poignant parts of the play. It is, of course, possible to suppose that Marlowe had passed through a stage of youthful skepticism in religion and that with a sounder and deeper faith he had come to the knowledge of repentance.

Conclusion Doctor Faustus’ tragic death also has resemblance. After living twenty four years in sensual activities, Faustus had to surrender his soul to the Devil. Marlowe’s Bohemian and boisterous life, too came to a tragic sudden end in tavern brawl at the hands of a shady character of the London Underworld at the age of twenty nine. Marlowe lost himself into his works.

Doctor Faustus is strewn with unmistakably autobiographical suggestions. Reading the play we cannot refrain from concluding that it is the spontaneous expression of its writer’s innermost thoughts and authentic experiences.

Doctor Faustus – a Psychological tragedy

Doctor Faustus – a Psychological tragedy

Spiritual Combat: Tragedy is regarded as the highest aspect of the dramatic art as in it our emotions are more profoundly stirred than in comedy thereby rendering it more universal in it appeal. And conflict is the essence of or soul of tragedy. All previous dramas includingTamburlaine had dealt with single-minded individuals. If a struggle in the heart of the hero was introduced, it was like that of Morality plays.

It was external as in the Jew of Malta because it was between the hero and his adversaries. Doctor Faustus attempted something different. It is a drama of spiritual combat within the soul of man. This struggle is certainly somewhat primitive in its expression but it is a foretaste of those inner characteristics towards which a drama in its development inevitably trends.   Faustus in this respect is unquestionably the greatest tragic figure in sixteenth century outside the work of Shakespeare. It is also a modern tragedy because Marlowe broke away from the old Aristotelian concept of tragic hero as  being a royal figure of some very lofty stature. He introduced Faustus who is not a prince or a king but a common learned man whose parents are base of stock. 

Tragic Flaw – cause of his tragedy According to Aristotle, the tragic hero must have some inherent weakness – a tragic flaw which he referred to as Hamartia. He should be neither totally vicious nor good. As per Doctor Faustus, he is puffed with pride and his wisdom. He has studied all branches of knowledge and wants to get infinite knowledge. The boundless mastery of all sciences. So, he acquires necromancy in order to gain the ultimate. He says,

A sound magician is a mighty god:

Here, Faustus, tire thy brains to gain a deity.

Despite all his scholarly personality and his learning, we witness how he surrenders his soul to the Devil for a span of twenty four years and instead of gaining the deity and mastering and commandeering all the elements, he stands doomed and cursed.

Internal Tragic Conflict: Marlowe’s contribution to the English or Elizabethan drama was great and many fold. One of his contributions was the introduction of internal tragic conflict in the mind of the tragic hero. Nicoll has rightly observed: “All previous dramas including Tamburlaine had dealt with single-minded individuals. If a struggle in the heart of the hero was introduced, it was like that of Morality plays. In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe attempted something new – the delineation of struggle in the mind of the hero. This struggle is certainly somewhat primitive in its expression but it is a foretaste of those inner characteristics towards which a drama in its development inevitably trends.   Faustus in this respect is unquestionably the greatest tragic figure in sixteenth century outside the work of Shakespeare.”

So in Doctor Faustus, we find the conflict or the psychological struggle raging in the heart and soul of the hero. In fact, there’s hardly any external action. The delineation of a psychological struggle or spiritual conflict in the mind of the hero is the chief thing. Then why is this struggle and to what is it due?  Generally, the inner conflict takes places when man is faced with two alternatives, one  of which he must have to choose, but he finds himself pulled in opposite directions. Now Faustus is inspired by the spirit of the Renaissance, by dreams of gaining limitless knowledge and super-human powers. These he can attain only by resorting to necromancy, discarding religious dogmas and abjuring the Trinity and denouncing the established religious norms. Doctor Faustus may reject all these intellectually, but he is very much emotionally attached to them. He may be acting like an atheist, but his flesh and blood is saturated with Christianity.  Here the conflict starts between will and conscience externalized by the Good and Bad Angel. We can follow this conflict in the play at three stages:  The First Stage: we see how pride and ambition lead Faustus into the vicious bargain with the Devil. He convinces himself that: A sound magician is a mighty god. He also says with perfect faith in Mephistopheles, “Had I as many souls as there are stars, I would give them all for Mephistopheles, By him I will great emperor of the world” Nicholas Brooke says: Faustus wants to satisfy the demands of his nature as God has made him. He wants to be the Deity. For this, he must deny Christianity as did Lucifer, but Faustus’ attachment to religion is too deep to be rooted out. Throughout the play we find Faustus pricked by his conscience, we find him in tussle between will and conscience in the form of Good and Bad Angel.  The Second Stage: At this stage, we see Faustus struggling hard to break away from the impeding doom and he turns to repentance.

When I behold the heavens, then I repent

And curse thee, wicked Mephistophilis,

Because thou hast depriv’d me of those joys

The two angles appear again. One advises him to return to repentance and the other tells him that he is a spirit and God will not help him now and that he will tear his body to pieces if he repents. He has to submit to the will of Lucifer and refresh his bond with him. The show of Seven Deadly Sins and the best of all the apparition of Helen temporarily soothe his damned soul.The Third and Final Scene: In the closing scene, we find the climax culminating into a horrible catastrophe. Faustus knows that he is eternally doomed; but his poignant soliloquy and appeal for redemption is pathetic and pitiable. His last minute frantic appeal, to the ever moving spheres of heaven to stand still or to the sun to rise again to make perpetual day, stirs the readers’ soul and refresh in him the spirit of religious faith. Later, his soul is taken away by the devils leaving a short visual scene repeating itself in the reader’s mind.  The show of Seven Deadly Sins is presented to please Doctor Faustus and remove his internal conflict between the good and the bad. So the seven sins – Pride, Covetousness, Wrath, Envy, Gluttony, Sloth and Lechery. Some critics are of the view that the show is meant for comic relief for the audience. But this is hardly to accept. In fact the show is not meant for a comic relief, but is really meant for bringing back Faustus to the path to hell when he was much irritated by Mephistopheles for not telling him the right answers. In fact, the sins already abide in Doctor Faustus’ soul; the show merely symbolizes or externalizes them.

Disintegration: Doctor Faustus is thus the tragedy of a man who in striving boundlessly, misdirects great gifts of mind and spirit and hence progressively loses his soul by disintegration. Progressive disintegration in Faustus brings low comedy into the tragedy. In the last act, Faustus repents, then despairs and is about to commit suicide. But his distressed soul is comforted by the Old Man. The feeling cannot exist, however, without the support of the Old Man’s presence; as soon as he goes Faustus exclaims: I do repent; and yet I do despair.Mephistophilis forces him to sign another bond to strengthen the contract.

Psychological tragedy: Thus we find that in Doctor Faustus, Marlowe reveals for the first time in English drama the full possibilities of psychological tragedy, the anguish of a mind at war with itself. The play depicts the tragedy of the human soul, and in the closing scene it achieves end  with a strength and intensity as yet unknown in English drama. We conclude with the words of Una Ellis Fermor: In Marlowe’s great tragic fragment the conflict is not between man and man for the domination of one character over another or in the interaction of a group of characters. Thus and in such terms is staged the greatest conflict that drama has ever undertaken to the present.

Doctor Faustus – a great work, also a flawed one

Doctor Faustus – a great work, also a flawed one

Introduction: Critics and scholars are one in their opinions that Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of the masterpieces of British Drama.  It was Marlowe who brought the medieval concept of a magician, who sold his soul to the Devil and caused his destruction himself, into a magnificent and superb masterpiece. Even Goethe was inspired by its grandeur and he used the concept of Doctor Faustus in his play. Despite the excellence of the play, it falls short of meeting a regularestablished play like any one of those of Shakespeare. It looks more like a novel of detached scenes instead of a regular play.

Merits of the play: One of the most superb things about Doctor Faustus is the delineation of the tragic hero revealing the intense spiritual struggle and inner conflict in his soul. …short summary… Another chief quality of his play is the tragic conflict which dives deep into the depth of human heart. … short synopsis of conflict… Some of its outstanding scenes are of magnificent quality which reveals the genius of Marlowe: the summoning of Mephistopheles, the sighing of the contract and the second episode of Helen are the soul-stirring events of the playwhich rank Marlowe as a Dramatist next to Shakespeare. Doubtless, He was the greatest playwright before Shakespeare.  His surpassing poetry is another merit of the play. His ravishing descriptions, the emotional utterances from Faustus for Helen have eternal significance and will only die with the English language as complimented by Edward Thomas.

Structural Weaknesses: Despite his stupendous achievements in the realm of Dramatic Literature, Marlowe had some limitations and drawbacks. His first drawback being the one-man show. His character, Faustus has towered higher above the other characters rendering them pale into insignificance. The second drawback being: One of the greatest drawbacks is that the plot is not well-knit. It has only two parts: the first being the presence of Faustus and his desires to gain the deity and signing the contract with the Devil to attain his voluptuous desires. The second part being: his gradual travel onto the path of damnation and final doom. Goethe might have been impressed by the beginning and the end because the play has no middle. R.S. Knox has remarked: “The play is a series of scenes, some splendid, some petty, loosely related in a time-sequence; and rounded off by the foreseen catastrophe.” Anti-climax: the new world in which Faustus finds himself is nothing but a world of illusions and buffoonery. He forgets his aim and becomes a play-toy in the hands of his self-imposed doom. He is no more the same Faustus who was aspirant of knowledge; he falls into buffoonery and becomes a magic entertainer.  Comic scenes irrelevantly exist in the play. Though critics believe that they are later interpolations, however as long as they exist in the play, cause a drawback in the structure and plot of the play. Most of these scenes are crude and meaningless. There is hardly any female character in the play. The lack of female character is another drawback. Though we have a glimpse of the peerless dame of Greece, but she is nothing but a visual apparition and a dream seen with eyes wide open. The Duchess, too, falls short of being a female character. She doesn’t play any role.

Catastrophe: --- The last scene of catastrophe---

Conclusion: To conclude with the words of Ronald M., Frye: “The rejection of humanity which constituted the character of Faustus is complete and the plot closes, as it had opened, with this. It is in these terms that Marlowe achieves aesthetically powerful an understanding of the human condition which has never been more central to the plight of man than it is in our own time.” J.A. Symonds on Marlowe observes: “About him, there is nothing small or trivial. His verse is mighty, his passion is intense; the outlines of his plot are large, his characters are Titanic, his fancy is extravagant in richness, insolence and pomp.” 

The Last Scene: Helen of Troy and the Old man in "Dr. Faustus"

The Last Scene: Helen of Troy and the Old man in "Dr. Faustus"

Introduction: Faustus’s great final soliloquy consummates the play. The last scene of the play is the most poignant  The last scene, be it in the form of Helen’s presence or the final beseeching of  Doctor Faustus, makes Marlowe reach the flights imagination.  We may divide last scene of the play into three parts: First the Helen Episode, Second the Old Man and the Last soliloquy of Doctor Faustus. The three parts of the play make up the whole last scene to abide in our thoughts.

The Helen Episode: When ‘music sounds’ and Helen passes across the stage, her sanctity is mirrored in the awed calm of the scholars. Her “heavenly beauty passeth all compare” She isthe pride of the nature’s work. Here outburst the eternal words of praise for Helen from Doctor Faustus who, in the most ravishing way, loses himself in the arms of Helen to avoid his imminent doom.

Was this the face that launce’d a thousand ships,

And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? -

Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.

Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!

Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again,

Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,

And all is dross that is not Helena.

I will be Paris, and for love of thee.

Instead of Troy , shall Wittenberg be sack’d:

And I will combat with weak Menelaus,

And wear thy colors on my plumed crest;

Yes, I will wound Achilles in the heel,

And then return to Helen for a kiss.

O, thou art fairer than the evening air,

Clad in the beauty of a thousands starts;

Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter

Faustus’s poetry for Helen shows his ultimate desperate condition and his futile effort to evade the eternal doom.

The Old man: Doctor Faustus is ‘But a man condemned to die.’ Soon after the appearance of Helen, the old man approaches Doctor Faustus to reconcile him. The Old Man’s compassionate advice to Faustus adds a new dimension to our senses of the human predicament.

Yet, yet, thou hast an amiable soul if sin by custom grows not into nature.

The Old Man is, rather the last man trying to      pull Faustus from the snaps of death. But           Faustus, as he is eternally doomed, must   reach his self-imposed torments of hell.

The Last hour: As Faustus’s fascination for Helen, ‘The only paragon of excellence’ reveals the Renaissance characteristics of love and adoration of classical art and beauty, Helen epitomizes the charms of classical art, learning and beauty. And her shade of apparition may also be the symbol of sensual pleasures of life which is but transient, and leads to despair and damnation. If it is so, the old man represents Christian faith with its obedience to the laws of God and its needs for prayer and penitence that can assure eternal joys and bliss.  Doctor Faustus knows that his end is approaching. The proud and puffed scholar of Wittenberg, who once dreamed of becoming a Jove on the earth, ironically craves to be transformed into some mean creature so as to escape his doom. And when the last hour strikes, we find the anguished cry of a terror-stricken man who is facing his damnation.

O, it strikes: No body turn to air,

Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell,

O, soul, be changed into little water drops.

And fall into the ocean, never be found!

Critics and scholars of one opinion that the last scene of the play is highly consummate and grim.

Medieval elements and the spirit of Renaissance in Dr. Faustus

Medieval elements and the spirit of Renaissance in Dr. Faustus

Introduction: Doctor Faustus is the only one of Marlowe’s plays in which the pivotal issue is strictly religious and the whole design rests upon protestant doctrines. This issue, stated simply, is whether Doctor Faustus shall choose God or the evil delights of witchcraft and we witness his bargain with the witchcraft. Thus the drama is not primarily one of external action but of spiritual combat within the soul of man, waged according to the laws of Christian world order. Here Marlowe, through Faustus, utters strictures on prayer, hell and the Christian religion, but he never lets these iconoclastic sallies overthrow the Christian dogma.

Depiction of the Devil in the Moralities: Miracle and Moralities offered two versions of the devil. One heroic – the definite Lucifer contesting the throne of God or claiming over the world. ; the other unheroic and comic – Satan down on his luck and trying to get his own back somehow.

Marlowe’s Audacity: Marlowe himself enjoyed a reputation as ‘Atheist and Epicure’ condemner and mocker of religions. Thomas Kyd and Richard Bains under pressure of authorities brought against him many charges of blasphemy, heresy and atheism. He was accused for instance, of saying that the first beginning of Religions was only to keep man in awe and that Moses as a juggler and Aaron a cosoner the one for his miracles to Pharaoh to prove there was a god, and the other for taking the earrings of the children of Israel to make a golden calf. It seems that Marlowe even delivered a lecture on atheism. We admit these charges against him as true because he had no serious reverence for Christianity.

Christian Context: According to Irvin Ribner: “ The only one of Marlowe’s plays which is cast in a deliberately Christian context is Doctor Faustus.” Kocher has argued that much of his dramatic activity may be explained as a struggle the theological training of his youth: “ However desperate his desire to be free, he was bound to Christianity by the surest of chains – hatred mingled with reluctant longing and fascination much akin to fear.”

Doctor Faustus  and Christianity: Marlowe’s may well have known Nathaniel Woods’s morality play, The Conflict of Conscience. But Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is not Christian morality play, for it contains no affirmation of the goodness or justice of the religious system it depicts with such accuracy of detail. It is rather a protest against this system, which it reveals as imposing a limitation upon the aspiration of man, holding him in subjection and bondage, denying him at last even the comfort of Christ’s blood, and dooming him to the most terrible destruction. The religion of the play is Christianity from which, as Michael Poirier has pointed out, Christ is strangely missing. 

Faustus’s Spiritual Condition: Faustus’s state of mind in the early scenes is that of a man apt for reprobation. Most dangerously is he “swollen with cunning, of self-conceit” to use the authoritative words of the Prologue.  His search for knowledge knows no boundaries. He wants to gain the deity and rule the whole universe.

Failure in repentance: In becoming a witch, Faustus formally renounces God and gives himself over to the ownership of the devil.  Short story …. The trouble with Faustus is not that God withhold from him the grace necessary to repentance but that he himself refuses to take a real effort to accept it when it is offered. He lets himself be lured away by the embraces of Helen and by the threats of physical torments from the demons. Therefore, he earns the rebuke of the old man.

Conclusion: There is a terrible warning for humanity in the final chorus:

Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall,

Whose friendful fortune may exhort the wise,

Only to wonder at unlawful things

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits

To praise more than heavenly powers permit

The price of aspiration, of seeking to probe beyond the ordinary limits of man, is death in its most terrible form. If the progress of Faustus is, as Miss Garner has written “From a proud philosopher, master of all human knowledge, to a slave of phantoms, this is not to say that the order of things which decrees such as human deterioration as the price of aspiration.” In this play Marlowe is using a Christian view of Heaven and Hell in a vehicle of protest which is essentially anti-Christian.

In so far as Marlowe’s anti-Christian is concerned the play allows us to draw some further conclusions of great interest.  The powerful speeches about Christianity from Mephistopheles and Lucifer show that however, scornfully Marlowe rejected the system intellectually; it still has a powerful impact on his imagination and emotions.

Pride and Prejudice - Theme of the Novel and Title

Pride and Prejudice - Theme of the Novel and Title

Introduction: First written in 1797 under the title First Impressions. It was later revised and published under Pride and Prejudice in 1813. Jane Austen took the title and theme from Fanny Burney, who wrote of her novel, Cecelia, ‘the whole business was the result of Pride and Prejudice’. First impressions do play an important role in the novel.

First impressions do play an important role in the novel. Elizabeth is misled in her judgment of both Darcy and Wickham. Her attitude towards both the characters is only a result of the First Impression. But if we study the novel deeply, we find that P&P is an apt title. The first Impressions only last for the first few chapters of the novel while P&P permeates the soul of the novel. The novel is about the pride of Darcy and the prejudice of Elizabeth and the change andcorrection of their attitude caused by first impressions. 

Theme of Pride and Prejudice: Darcy embodies family pride. Wickham tells Elizabeth that he has a ‘filial pride’. Darcy himself says that his pride consists in being selfish and overbearing, caring for none beyond his own family circle, thinking meanly of all the rest of the world. No doubt, he is a proud man. Nothing can excuse his remark about Elizabeth …tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me. And other remarks such as …my good opinion once lost is lost forever. His first appearance is appalling insolent. The climax of Darcy’s pride and Elizabeth’s prejudice is most prominent when Darcy proposes to her but his proposal is based on pride and rests on the sense of inferiority of Elizabeth. He remains blind to the faults of Lady Catherine and Miss Bingley and is prepared to think meanly of those beneath him in social standing. Darcy’s pride stubs Elizabeth and her prejudice stems from her feeling that he is all pride. Being rejected by him at the ball, her prejudice mounts up and from the start; she willfully misinterprets all his utterances and actions. Her prejudice clouds her clear judgment and foresight and she believes the poor account of Darcy as related by Wickham and blinded by prejudice, she rejects his proposal. It is at Rosings that hteir process of self-discovery andeducations starts. At Netherfield Park, Elizabeth’s family had seemed vulgar and ill-bred, but at Rosings, Darcy is embarrassed by the vulgarity of his aunt, Lady Catherine and realizes that the refinement of manners is no monopoly of the elite. His lesson is complete when he is totally humbled by Elizabeth’s rejection of his proposal and realizes his misplaced pride in the woman whom he loves. This excessive love for Elizabeth cures Darcy’s pride and humbling himself, he writes a letter of explanation to her. Elizabeth’s prejudice is neutralized by the revelation of Darcy’s character. She receives the letter and learning the truth about Wickham’s character, she realizes her own blindness and prejudice in having judged Darcy and Wickham mere on first impressions. She is also able to see some of the validity of some of his objections to Jane-Bingleymarriage. The Lydia-Wickham episode brings the final reconciliation. Darcy overcomes his pride and completely gets involved in the solution of the Lydia-Wickham elopement and this softens Elizabeth and also cures her of her initial pride.

Other themes: However, to say that Darcy is proud and Elizabeth is prejudice is to tell but the half story. The fact is that both Darcy and Elizabeth are proud and prejudiced. The novel makes clear the fact the Darcy’s pride lead to prejudice and Elizabeth’s prejudice stems from a pride in her own perceptions. Darcy is proud of his refinement and superiority of social standing. This lead him to a general prejudice for all those below his social status and Elizabeth’s prejudice stems from her pride when she is offended by Darcy’s refusal to dance with her and this lead her to be prejudiced with him. In the proposal scene, there is an ironic reversal. Both suffer from the faults of pride and prejudice, but they are also the necessary defects of desirable merits: self-respect and intelligence. It is true that Jane and Bingley are not a part of this theme but their love is an important link in the novel without which the story cannot be complete. Jane is a specimen of faultless beauty and she is free of all the vices of Elizabeth’s temperament. She is neither proud nor prejudiced and is always willing to see good in every one. It is the intricate characters of Darcy and Elizabeth that hold our interest and exemplify the theme and title of the novel.

Appearance and reality: Distinguishing appearance from reality is yet another theme in the novel. The theme of fully knowing one’s mate before marriage is closely linked to the theme of A&R. A&R has been exemplified in Elizabeth. She is a good judge but is not able to see though reality and merely falls into appearances of Darcy and Wickham. Thus the theme of appearance and reality has been knitted into the theme of marriage.

The aptness of the title: Lady Katherine is a also an example of P&P. She has the family and status pride. Mrs. Bennet is proud of her daughter and in her stupidity she is also prejudiced against Darcy. So there is a theme of P&P in minor characters too. The title, P&P aptly points to the theme of the novel. The novel goes beyond a mere statement of first impressions and explores in depth the abstract qualities of pride and prejudice – how they grow and can be overcome.

Why is Pride and Prejudice rated among the 10 best novels of the world?

Why is Pride and Prejudice rated among the 10 best novels of the world?

Introduction: In contrast to the simplicity of style, Jane Austen’s plots are extremely complex. She doesn’t draw two or three characters in isolation. She prefers a family with manyfriends and relatives and tries to make things as difficult as possible. There is enough material in any one of her six novels to serve the modern novelist in writing two or three good-sized stories. 

The Plot of Pride & Prejudice: has perfect symmetry, precision and simplicity.  There are no obtrusive characters, no digressive episodes. Language is simple and the relationship of characters is perfectly drawn. There are main and sub-plots, but the interdependence is maintained and the interplay between the characters and events are in perfect organic unity. The main plot is about Elizabeth-Darcy courtship – state synopsis with analysis… the sub-plots are the novel are: Jane-Bingley, Lydia-Wickham and Charlotte-Collins, but are closely and tightly linked to the main plot.

Thematic unity of the play: the main and the sub-plots are logically and thematically unified. The theme of love and marriage is exemplified through the main and the sub-plot. The Charlotte-Collins sub-plot exemplifies a marriage based on economics plainly lacking in love and devotion. The Lydia-Wickham marriage like that of the Bennets is based on physical charm and will soon sink into indifference. All these serve by contrast to highlight the propriety of Darcy-Elizabeth marriage based on emotional compatibility and intellectual understanding.

Symmetry of the plot: is evident in the series of balancing incidents. The novel is divided into three parts. The first and the last balanced against each other. Part I occurs largely in Longbourn and Netherfield Park, Part II is at Rosings and Part III is at Pemberley and then return to Longbourn. The events between these places revolve so symmetrically that by fine precision, Jane Austen makes her plot unique.  There is a perfect correspondence between characters and actions leading to the organic unity of the plot.

The plot as a Five-act Drama: All of Jane Austen’s plots are structurally so dramatic that it can be stated with confidence that she would have been a highly successful dramatist. Cross compares the workmanship of Pride and Prejudice to that of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing and A.C. Bradley, the great critic of drama thinks that the entanglement of errors, misunderstandings, cross-purposes and view-point of comedy all seem to point a good deal to the influence of drama. Bake points out that she has greater affinities with dramatists like Congreve than with novelists. The plot can be divided into the five acts of drama. Act I – exposition or Introduction, Act II brings in the complication, Act III presents the climax inElizabeth’s rejection of Darcy’s offer of marriage and later her realization of her mistake about Darcy and Wickham, Act IV shows the resolution of the conflict. At this, there is a meeting between the two at Pemberley which clarifies many misunderstandings and Act V is the final stage of the novel where all events roll towards a resolution.

Dramatic Irony: is the prominent feature of the novel and the different between appearance and reality is emphasized at every stage.  The plot of P&P is dramatic, coherent and well-integrated. Give here examples of Appearance and Reality. The narrative mode is also dramatic with action and character being developed though dialogues effectively. Some of the scenes have great dramatic vividness and intensity. Darcy-Elizabeth repartees at Netherfield, the two proposal scenes and the clash between Lady Catherine and Elizabeth. In these scenes, Jane Austen reveals herself as a master dramatist with a perfect ear and sense of timing, instinct for climax and anticlimax.

Why among the ten best novels of the world? The above qualities of her novel are the basic reason for P&P to be one of the 10 best novels of the world.

Conclusion: Jane Austen’s incidents are natural, he characters have an independent reality and yet they fall into a neat logical scheme. The characters of P&P and indeed of her other novels give us a sense of spontaneous life we get from a play of Chekov. 

Jane Austen’s Art of Characterization

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Jane Austen’s Art of Characterization

Introduction: Jane Austen’s real talent is revealed much through her wonderful capacity for characterization. Like Shakespeare, she presents her characters truthfully and realistically. She is sensitive to every small nuance of manner and behavior and any deviation from the standard. The range of her characters is narrow and she confines herself to the landed gentry in the country-side. Servants, laborers and yeomanry rarely appear and even aristocracy is hardly touched upon. When she deals with aristocracy, she satirizes them such as Lady Catherine in P&P.

Her Characters are never repeated: despite such a narrow range. Not a single character has been repeated in any of her six books. The snobbishness of the Vicar, Mr. Collins in P&P is unlike that of Mr. Elton, the Vicar in Emma. Similarly, there is a great difference between the vulgarity of Mrs. Bennet and that of Mrs. Jennings. Macaulay declares that her characters are commonplace, ‘Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.’

State different psychological habits and emotions of Darcy, Elizabeth, Jane, Mrs. Bennet.

Her characters - individualized yet universal: Jane Austen has so comprehensive and searching a view of human nature that she invests them with a universal character. Her characters are universal types. Thus, when Mr. Darcy says, ‘I have been selfish all my life in practice but not in principle’ he confesses the weakness of high minded dominating males in every age and climate. Wickham represents all pleasant-looking but selfish, unprincipled and hypocritical flirts. Mr. Bennet is a typical cynical father. These qualities of Austen’s characters make them universal and individualized.

Realistic portrayal of her characters: Her characters impress us as real men and women since they are drawn to perfection. They are never idealized. Even her most virtuous characters have faults. Jane Bennet, being a virtuous and sweet-nature girl, never thinks ill of others. This makes her lack proper judgment. Elizabeth, herself is a conventional heroine. She has faults of vanity and prejudice. Her mother, at a such a high level of responsibility as a mother, exhibits vulgarity and indecorous manners. Darcy and Lady Catherine’s manners reflect aristocracy so realistically. The impartiality with which Jane Austen depicts her characters imparts a touch of  realism and volume to them.

Her characters are three-dimensional: Her world of reality is never disturbed for all its romances, elopements and dejection because of the convincing reality of her characters. Her characters are three-dimensional portraying various human traits.  Collins doesn’t commit suicide when her proposal is rejected by Elizabeth, but settles down with Charlotte. Darcy shows his unexpected trait after his proposal is rejected. The psychological and realistic portrayal of her characters is what makes them according to David Ceil, ‘Three-dimensional’. The characters come alive in flesh and blood as it were because of their realistic portrayal. Jane Austen reveals her characters dramatically through their conversations, their actions, and their letters or gradually through a variety of point of view and this adds to their three-dimensional effects.

Characters revealed through conversations: She makes very careful use of conversations. Thus, the dialogue between Elizabeth not only reveals effectively the antagonism between the two of them, but also the intelligence of the both. Collins and Lydia are revealed through their letters. And we learn of Elizabeth Bennet, the most striking of Jane Austen’s heroines through her speech and actions and the remarks of such people as Mr. Darcy, her father and Miss Bingley.  Thus, in the first chapter of P&P the vulgarity and stupidity of Mrs. Bennet and the sarcastic humour of Mr. Bennet have already been revealed in their dialogues. The characters of Austen frequently gossip with one another about other characters. This makes the plot even more gripping, realistic and touching.

Revealed through comparison and contrast: Lady Catharine balances with Mrs. Bennet. Wickham serves a contrast while Bingley a foil to Darcy. Elizabeth with Jane. In P&P, Elizabethechoes Austen’s own sense of humor and ironic wit and the ability to laugh at whims and inconsistencies, but it is preposterous to assume that Jane Austen herself suffered from such prides and prejudices. The sympathy and partial identification help Jane Austen in delineating the character faithfully.

Elizabeth: Jane Austen said of her heroine, “I must confess that I think her as delightful a creature as ever appeared in print”. To create a charming heroine is one of the rarest achievements in fiction. Jane Austen’s liking is borne out by the countless other readers who have fallen in love with her for more than a hundred and thirty years. A.C. Bradley wrote, “I am meant to fall in love with her and I do”. Her charm arises to a great extent from her intricacy, her intellectual complexity. She is profound and perceptive with the ability to discern people and situations extraordinarily well. She comprehends the merits and demerits of the Bingleys almost at once; she knows Mr. Collins to be an affected fool and judges Lady Catherine at the first meeting.  She understands her family is conscious of the vulgarity of her mother. She has the ready gift of repartee and a perfect command of epigrammatic expression. She is not intimidated by Lady Catherine to her enquiry whether Darcy had made a proposal to Elizabethand she answers, “Your ladyship has declared it to be impossible”. Despite all these characteristics, Elizabeth is not an idealized or perfect heroine of a romantic novel. She is prone to errors and mistakes of every day life. However, she learns from her mistakes and tends to correct them. It is true that Elizabeth blinds herself absurdly because of prejudice. Thus, her intelligence, high spirit and courage, wit and readiness, her artistic temperament and her ability to laugh good-humouredly at herself is the specialty of Elizabeth. Indeed, the popularity of the novel rests on the brilliant portrayal of its charming and captivating heroine.

Darcy: to many readers and critics, the great blot on the book is the author’s portrayal of Darcy. To all appearances, there are two Darcys that we meet in P&P, the Darcy in the first half of the play – proud, cold, haughty and unfriendly and the Darcy of the second half – warm, loving and considerate, kind, hospitable and eager to please. These seeming incorrigible aspects of Darcy’s character are taken to be a failure on part of Jane Austen’s art of characterization. Jane Austen was in her early twenties when she wrote P&P, so this failure is as a result of her immaturity. However, critics believe that Darcy is a credible character and has these incorrigible aspects as a result of our misread Darcy’s character along with Elizabeth.  Darcy is proud in the beginning. He acknowledges his own. At Netherfield, he tells Elizabeth, “My opinion once lost is lost forever”. And finally his proposal to Elizabeth at Hunsford parsonage is more eloquent on the subject of pride than of tenderness, but he is sensitive, intelligent and complex. He is not morally blind either and recognizes the vulgarity of ill-manners of the Bingley sisters and is as much embarrassed by Lady Catherine’s behavior as he had been by Mrs. Bennet’s vulgarity.

Jane & Bingley: At first glance, it is Bingley and Jane that capture our attention as the main characters and become the center of attraction for every one. Elizabeth says of Jane, “You are too good. Your sweetness and disinterestedness are really angelic.” Jane is a foil to Elizabeth. She, however, enjoys the admiration of both Elizabeth and Darcy and highlights their pride and prejudice. Similarly, Bingley is only a foil to the more forceful personality of Darcy despite all his cheerfulness. The Jane-Bingley romance also presents a contrast to the turbulent relationship of Darcy and Elizabeth. Their relationship is based upon harmony arising out of a similarity of natures.  Jane and Bingley are both characters, not intricate or complex.

Conclusion: Jane Austen’s major characters are intricate; however, there are some failings. Darcy is real and convincing, but appears only in scenes with Elizabeth. The minor characters are usually flat but they also develop when we meet them. Thus each of these wide range of characters are multi-dimensional with a mix of the good and bad qualities, exhibiting strong individual idiosyncrasies and traits, at the same time typical of universal human nature.