Page 51 - DENG402_HISTORY_OF_ENGLISH_LITERATURE

History of English Literature

Notes Nationalism

The natural consequence of dwelling on creative folk genius was a good deal of nationalism.
French Romantic painting is full of themes relating to the tumultuous political events of the
period and later Romantic music often draws its inspiration from national folk musics. Goethe
deliberately places German folkloric themes and images on a par with Classical ones in Faust.

Shakespeare
But one of the early effects of this interest in the folk arts seems particularly strange to us moderns:
the rise and spread of the reputation of William Shakespeare. Although he is regarded today as the
epitome of the great writer, his reputation was at first very different. Shakespeare was a popular
playwright who wrote for the commercial theater in London. He was not college-educated, and
although his company had the sponsorship of King James, his work was not entirely “respectable.”
Academic critics at first scorned his indiscipline, his rejection of their concepts of drama which
were derived in part from ancient Roman and Greek patterns. A good play should not mix comedy
with tragedy, not proliferate plots and subplots, not ramble through a wide variety of settings or
drag out its story over months or years of dramatic time; but Shakespeare’s plays did all these
things. A proper serious drama should always be divided neatly into five acts, but Shakespeare’s
plays simply flowed from one scene to the next, with no attention paid to the academic rules of
dramatic architecture (the act divisions we are familiar with today were imposed on his plays by
editors after his death).
If the English romantics exalted Shakespeare’s works as the greatest of their classics, his effect on
the Germans was positively explosive. French classical theater had been the preeminent model for
drama in much of Europe; but when the German Romantics began to explore and translate his
works, they were overwhelmed. His disregard for the classical rules which they found so confining
inspired them. Writers like Friedrich von Schiller and Goethe created their own dramas inspired
by Shakespeare. Faust contains many Shakespearian allusions as well as imitating all of the
nonclassical qualities enumerated above.
Because Shakespeare was a popular rather than a courtly writer, the Romantics exaggerated his
simple origins. In fact he had received an excellent education which, although it fell short of what
a university could offer, went far beyond what the typical college student learns today about the
classics. In an age drunk on the printing and reading of books he had access to the Greek myths,
Roman and English history, tales by Italian humanists and a wide variety of other materials. True,
he used translations, digests, and popularizations; but he was no ignoramus.
To the Romantics, however, he was the essence of folk poetry, the ultimate vindication of their
faith in spontaneous creativity. Much of the drama of the European 19th century is influenced by
him, painters illustrated scenes from his plays, and composers based orchestral tone poems and
operas on his narratives.

Task: Write a short note on William shakespear.

Nature
The subject of the relationship of Romanticism to nature is a vast one which can only be touched on
here. There has hardly been a time since the earliest antiquity that Europeans did not celebrate
nature in some form or other, but the attitudes toward nature common in the Western world today
emerged mostly during the Romantic period. The Enlightenment had talked of “natural law” as
the source of truth, but such law was manifest in human society and related principally to civic
behavior. Unlike the Chinese and Japanese, Europeans had traditionally had little interest in
natural landscapes for their own sake. Paintings of rural settings were usually extremely idealized:
either well-tended gardens or tidy versions of the Arcadian myth of ancient Greece and Rome.
44 LOVELY PROFESSIONAL UNIVERSITY