SHORT QUESTIONS EEG 2

EEG- II

(SHORT QUESTIONS)

·        Write a short note on the drama of the English Renaissance.

English Renaissance drama is sometimes called Elizabethan drama, since its most important developments started when Elizabeth I was Queen of England from 1558 to 1603. But this name is not very accurate; the drama continued after Elizabeth's death, into the reigns of King James I (1603–1625) and his son King Charles I (1625–1649). Shakespeare, for example, started writing plays in the later years of Elizabeth's reign, but continued into the reign of James. When writing about plays from James's reign, scholars and critics sometimes use the term Jacobean drama; plays from Charles I's reign are called Caroline drama. (These names come from the Latin forms of the two kings' names, "Jacobus" for James and "Carolus" for Charles.) But for the subject as a whole, terms like English Renaissance drama or theatre are more accurate.

The year 1576 was a key date in this subject, since that is when the first permanent theatre building was built in London. It was called simply The Theatre, because it was the only place of its kind in England at the time. Before 1576, plays were acted in public halls and large houses, and in inns and public squares and courtyards and other open spaces, by troops of actors that mostly travelled around the countryside between cities and towns. Once the actors had a permanent place to act plays, they could develop their art without the constant need to travel. The Theatre was followed by other theatres in the London area; there were the Curtain, The Rose, the Swan, the Globe, and others too. More plays were written by more playwrights to fill these theatres.

Playwrights worked in both the classic types of drama, tragedy and comedy. They also began their own type of history play, mainly about earlier English kings and the events of their reigns. Richard Thayer Roberts the third and Shakespeare's Richard III and Marlowe's Edward II are two examples of this type of English history play. Plays were often written in poetry; early plays were mainly in rhymed verse, though as time passed playwrights came to prefer unrhymed blank verse. Prose was also used in some plays, mostly for comedy.

English Renaissance drama grew and developed until 1642, when it suddenly stopped. In the early years of the English Civil War, the Puritans who were fighting King Charles gained control of London and the region around it. The Puritans were against play-acting; they thought it was sinful and immoral. On September 2, 1642, the Puritans forced the London theatres to close, and to stay closed for most of the time until 1660. Then the English Restoration brought a new king, Charles II, who let the theatres re-open. In the 18-year gap between 1642 and 1660, English society had changed a good deal, and a new style of drama rose up in the Restoration era; it is usually called Restoration drama or Restoration theatre.

·        How may the Reformation be said to have contributed to the creation of new social system?

Although the Reformation is styled as a religious reaction against corruption and abuse within the Catholic Church, it reflected profound changes within European society itself. As the Reformation progressed, changes in power occurred. While the clergy began to lose authority, the local rulers and nobles collected it for themselves. Peasants became resentful and revolted, but their actions were condemned by Luther. Their attempts to gain freedom from oppression ended in stricter oppression and even death for some. The Reformation seemed to lessen the opportunity for peasants to challenge their place in the class structure.

Middle class members were more able to challenge the authority of the church; they took Luther's ideas of free-thinking and grasped the opportunity to have more control over their religious practices. Women also gained the ability to divorce and remarry.

·        Show your familiarity with any one: i) The Faerie Queene ii) Paradise Lost iii) The Authorized Version of the Bible

The Faerie Queene is an incomplete English epic poem by Edmund Spenser. Books I to III were first published in 1590, and then republished in 1596 together with books IV to VI. The Faerie Queene is notable for its form: it is one of the longest poems in the English language and the origin of a verse form that came to be known as Spenserian stanza. On a literal level, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues, though it is primarily an allegorical work, and can be read on several levels of allegory, including as praise (or, later, criticism) of Queen Elizabeth I.

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton (1608–1674). The first version, published in 1667, consisted of ten books with over ten thousand lines of verse. A second edition followed in 1674, arranged into twelve books (in the manner of Virgil's Aeneid) with minor revisions throughout and a note on the versification. It is considered by critics to be Milton's major work, and it helped solidify his reputation as one of the greatest English poets of his time.^[3]

The poem concerns the Biblical story of the Fall of Man: the temptation of Adam and Eve by the fallen angel Satan and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Milton's purpose, stated in Book I, is to "justify the ways of God to men".

The King James Version (KJV), also known as Authorized Version (AV) or simply King James Bible (KJB), is an English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England begun in 1604 and completed in 1611.The books of the King James Version include the 39 books of the Old Testament, an intertestamental section containing 14 books of the Apocrypha, and the 27 books of the New Testament. By the first half of the 18th century, the Authorized Version had become effectively unchallenged as the English translation used in Anglican and English Protestant churches, except for the Psalms and some short passages in the Book of Common Prayer of the Church of England. Over the course of the 18th century, the Authorized Version supplanted the Latin Vulgate as the standard version of scripture for English-speaking scholars. With the development of stereotype printing at the beginning of the 19th century, this version of the Bible became the most widely printed book in history, almost all such printings presenting the standard text of 1769 extensively re-edited by Benjamin Blayney at Oxford, and nearly always omitting the books of the Apocrypha. Today the unqualified title "King James Version" usually indicates that this Oxford standard text is meant.

·        Discuss the impact of the introduction of printing technologies and movable type in the fifteenth century.

By the middle of the 15th century several print masters were on the verge of perfecting the techniques of printing with movable metal type. The first man to demonstrate the practicability of movable type was Johannes Gutenberg (c.1398-1468), the son of a noble family of Mainz, Germany. A former stonecutter and goldsmith, Gutenberg devised an alloy of lead, tin and antimony that would melt at low temperature, cast well in the die, and be durable in the press. It was then possible to use and reuse the separate pieces of type, as long as the metal in which they were cast did not wear down, simply by arranging them in the desired order. The mirror image of each letter (rather than entire words or phrases), was carved in relief on a small block. Individual letters, easily movable, were put together to form words; words separated by blank spaces formed lines of type; and lines of type were brought together to make up a page. Since letters could be arranged into any format, an infinite variety of texts could be printed by reusing and resetting the type.

By 1452, with the aid of borrowed money, Gutenberg began his famous Bible project. Two hundred copies of the two-volume Gutenberg Bible were printed, a small number of which were printed on vellum. The expensive and beautiful Bibles were completed and sold at the 1455 Frankfurt Book Fair, and cost the equivalent of three years' pay for the average clerk. Roughly fifty of all Gutenberg Bibles survive today.

In spite of Gutenberg's efforts to keep his technique a secret, the printing press spread rapidly. Before 1500 some 2500 European cities had acquired presses. German masters held an early leadership, but the Italians soon challenged their preeminence. The Venetian printer Aldus Manutius published works, notably editions of the classics.

The immediate effect of the printing press was to multiply the output and cut the costs of books. It thus made information available to a much larger segment of the population who were, of course, eager for information of any variety. Libraries could now store greater quantities of information at much lower cost. Printing also facilitated the dissemination and preservation of knowledge in standardized form -- this was most important in the advance of science, technology and scholarship. The printing press certainly initiated an "information revolution" on par with the Internet today. Printing could and did spread new ideas quickly and with greater impact.

Printing stimulated the literacy of lay people and eventually came to have a deep and lasting impact on their private lives. Although most of the earliest books dealt with religious subjects, students, businessmen, and upper and middle class people bought books on all subjects. Printers responded with moralizing, medical, practical and travel manuals. Printing provided a superior basis for scholarship and prevented the further corruption of texts through hand copying. By giving all scholars the same text to work from, it made progress in critical scholarship and science faster and more reliable.

·        Write a short note on Humanism.

Humanism, term freely applied to a variety of beliefs, methods, and philosophies that place central emphasis on the human realm. Most frequently, however, the term is used with reference to a system of education and mode of inquiry that developed in northern Italy during the 13th and 14th centuries and later spread through continental Europe and England. Alternately known as Renaissance humanism, this program was so broadly and profoundly influential that it is one of the chief reasons why the Renaissance is viewed as a distinct historical period. Indeed, though the word Renaissance is of more recent coinage, the fundamental idea of that period as one of renewal and reawakening is humanistic in origin. But humanism sought its own philosophical bases in far earlier times and, moreover, continued to exert some of its power long after the end of the Renaissance...........................................................

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