Western Literature week 11
Tragedy
Tragedy is a form of drama based on human suffering that invokes an accompanying catharsis or pleasure in audiences. While many cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, the term tragedy often refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and
important role historically in the self-definition of Western
civilisation. That tradition has been multiple and
discontinuous, yet the term has often been used to invoke a powerful effect of cultural identity and historical continuity—"the Greeks and the Elizabethans, in one cultural form; Hellenes and Christians, in a common activity," as Raymond Williams puts it.
Shakespeare's
Sonnets
Shakespeare's Sonnets is the title of a
collection of 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare, which covers themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. The
first 126 sonnets are addressed to a young man; the last 28 to a woman.
The sonnets were first
published in a 1609 quarto with the full stylized title: SHAKE-SPEARES
SONNETS. Never before Imprinted. (although
sonnets 138 and 144 had previously been
published in the 1599 miscellany The Passionate Pilgrim). The quarto ends with "A
Lover's Complaint", a narrative poem of 47
seven-line stanzas written in rhyme royal – though some
scholars have argued convincingly against Shakespeare's authorship of the poem.
Drama was the chief literary glory of
the Elizabethan age. In
the beginning, these dramas were not so well- written, though the comedies were
better than the tragedies. Ralph
Roister Doister is taken as the first regular English comedy. It was a
kind of farce in rough verse
written by Nicholas Udall.
Another comedy was Gammer Gurton’s Needle acted at Cambridge University in 1566.
Lyly improved the comedy in his prose comedy Compaspe and Edimion.
Clytemnestra
Clytemnestra was the wife of Agamemnon and
queen of Mycenae (or
sometimes Argos) in ancient Greek legend. In the Oresteia by Aeschylus, she murdered Agamemnon – said by Euripides to be her second husband – and the Trojan princess Cassandra, whom he had taken as war prize following the
sack of Troy; however, in Homer's Odyssey, her role in Agamemnon's death is unclear and her
character is significantly more subdued.
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