POETIC DRAMA

Side by side with the realistic plays of Shaw, Galsworthy and Grandville Barker, there arouse the type of drama that is called poetic drama by 1920. Tennyson and Browning attempted poetic drama but they were more poetic than dramatic. So, truely speaking was no tradition poetic drama before the beginning of 20th century and poetic drama may be regarded as a new literary creation. Verse was a natural medium of poetic drama but many dramatist wrote poetic drama in prose. J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea is a good example of poetic drama which is rich in imaginative qualities and metaphysical conception of life. W.B. Yeats, the ever lyric poet wrote poetic drama and mention may be made of The Shadowy Waters, Deride and The Golden Helmet. John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln is a good example of poetic drama. Masefield used prose with a poets vision in the Tragedy of Nan and The Tragedy of Pompey the Great. Stephen Phillips wrote a number of blank verse notably Nero and Ulysses. But these dramas had little dramatic quality.

MORALITY PLAY

After the success of Mystery Play, the next stage in the history of English drama is the morality play. This was didactic in purpose; but its characters, instead of being taken from the holy Bible of from the legends of the saints, were personified abstractions. All kind of mental and moral qualities appeared as characters in the play- perseverance, Free Will, the five senses, the Seven Deadly sins, good and bad angels, etc. Among such personifications, there was generally a place for the Devil who had held a prominent position in the mircle plays. A later introduction of much importance was the so-called Vice, who was a humorous personification of evil taken on the comic side. This was the recognized fun-maker of the piece. This character often scored a tremendous popular success by jumping on the devil's back, sticking thorns into him, beating him with a stick, and making him roar with pain.

KEW GARDENS

Kew Gardens is written by Virginia Woolf.. You can read the entire story by downloading the pdf file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzAMnd--KDJBUjlMZUdJekxWSnc/view?usp=sharing

Irony

Irony is derived from Latin 'ironia' which comes from Greek 'eironeia' meaning feigned ignorance. The greek comic character Eiron, a clever underdog who by his wit repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character Alazon. The Socratic irony of the Platonic dialogues derives from this comic origin. Feigning ignorance and humility, Socrates goes about asking silly and obvious questions of all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects only to expose their ignorance. There are two example of irony- verbal and dramatic. Verbal irony is the intentional irony in speech, the speaker saying one thing to mean its reverse using innocent language with an offensive motive. The classic example of this kind of irony is Antony's repeated assertion in Julius Caesar that 'Brutus is an honourable man'. Verbal irony arises from a sophisticated or resigned awareness of contrast between what is and what ought to be and expresses a controlled pathos without sentimentality.

Bede

Bede (673-735)

The Venerable Bede, as he is called, spent his life as a monk at Jarrow and is one of the really great scholars of England and of Europe. Bede is famous for his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ( Ecclesiastical History of the English People ). His writings also include grammatical and critical bandbooks like De Metrica Arte, scientific treatises like De Ratione Temporum, commentaries on various books of the Bible ( canonical and apocryphal), homilies, saint's lives and verse. Bede wrote Latin with the competence to be expected of a gifted man. He is not only the first among English historians in point of time, he is also first in importance.

John Mandeville

John Mandeville is best known by the work The Travels of John Mandeville. It is written in the Midland dialect which was then becoming the literary language of England. It is now established that Sir John Mandeville is a fictitious hero very much like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Mandeville is the imaginary English knight who narrates his journey to Palestine and China. The author confesses that he traveled through strange countries where men were fed on serpents and hissed like them. He also described dog-headed men and many such fantastic things. Fantasy is the soul of the narrative of Mandeville because truth and fiction are strongly mingled by its simple effortless and almost nursery style. The book had a happy effect on the development of English prose which in the Middle English period was very nascent. Mandeville's name is uttered with another name, that is of John Wycliffe. Although Wycliffe's prose was grave in tone, Mandeville's prose was imaginative and marked by a child like simplicity.

Caxton

The beginning of the revival of learning was one important feature of Renaissance of Europe and England. After the fall of Constantinople, the monks who possessed the manuscripts of Greek literature and philosophy, took shelter in Mylam, Venice and Florence. Quite naturally there was a need for printing new books on new literature. It was Caxton who bore the entire responsibility for publishing books for spreading the message of humanism. In 1476 Caxton established his printing press in England and promoted 'New Learning' by printing Lydgate's Temple of Glass. It is the first printed book in Europe. In 1485 Caxton published Malory's Morte d' Arthur which was a manifestation of the Renaissance spirit. Caxton himself translated some of the books from latin and printed them with the zeal of reformer. Caxton was more than a mere printer of books. He embodied Renaissance ideals through his publications.