Bài tập lớn môn văn học Anh Mỹ

1.What three languages were spoken in England in the 11th 13th centuries, and whom were they spoken by? 2.What is a romance, a fabliaux, a bestiaria? In what language were they written? Part II. William Shakespeare: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark 1.Collect other researchers’ viewpoints and studies about the literary works. 1.Collect other researchers’ viewpoints and studies about the literary works. 2.Analyze the related historical background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas. 3.Analyze the related literary trends and background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas. 4.Identify the author’s message (intentions), his literary talents and give comments.

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MÔN: Văn Học Anh Mỹ – (Mã) EN 16

Mã đề: 02Part I

1. What three languages were spoken in England in the 11th - 13th centuries, and whom were they spoken by?

- Three main languages were in use in England in the later medieval period – MiddleEnglish, Anglo-Norman (or French) and Latin

- The Middle English was spoken in England, some parts of Wales, south east Scotlandand Scottish burghs, to some extent Ireland

- Anglo-Norman, also known as Anglo-Norman French (Norman: Anglo-Normaund)(French: anglo-normand), was a dialect of Old Norman French that was used inEngland and, to a lesser extent, elsewhere in Great Britain and Ireland during theAnglo-Norman period Anglo-Norman had emerged as a distinct dialect of Frenchafter the Norman Conquest in 1066 established a French-speaking aristocracy inEnglish It was still dominant in the mid-thirteenth century when Robert of Grethamwrote his advice on moral conduct, the Mirur

- The Catholic church used Latin in its services, so all liturgical books were written inthis language until the Reformation in the sixteenth century The theologian JohnWycliffe began to translate the Bible into English in the late fourteenth century

2. What is a romance, a fabliaux, a bestiaria? In what language were they written?

2.1. A romance

- In the strictest academic terms, a romance is a narrative genre in literature thatinvolves a mysterious, adventurous, or spiritual story line where the focus is on a

quest that involves bravery and strong values, not always a love interest However,modern definitions of romance also include stories that have a relationship issue asthe main focus

- In the 21st century the Romance languages are all written in the Latin alphabet,with certain modifications, though until the mid-19th century Romanian wasnormally written in Cyrillic (used in Moldova until 1989), and, in the MiddleAges, Arabic script was used for some Spanish dialects

2.2 A fabliau

- The fabliau is defined as a short narrative in (usually octosyllabic) verse, between

300 and 400 lines long, its content often comic or satiric Fabliau (plural fabliaux)

is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between

c 1150 and 1400 They are generally characterized by sexual and scatologicalobscenity, and by a set of contrary attitudes—contrary to the church and to thenobility Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for theDecameron and by Geoffrey Chaucer for his Canterbury Tales Some 150 Frenchfabliaux are extant, the number depending on how narrowly fabliau is defined.According to R Howard Bloch, fabliaux are the first expression of literary realism

to tear open its breast to bring its young to life with its own blood, was a livingrepresentation of Jesus

- The bestiary is also reference to the symbolic language of animals in WesternChristian art and literature Medieval bestiaries contained detailed descriptions andillustrations of species native to Western Europe, exotic animals and what inmodern times are considered to be imaginary animals Descriptions of the animalsincluded the physical characteristics associated with the creature, although thesewere often physiologically incorrect, along with the Christian morals that theanimal represented The description was then often accompanied by an artisticillustration of the animal as described in the bestiary.

Part II William Shakespeare: Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedywritten by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601 It is Shakespeare'slongest play, with 29,551 words Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and hisrevenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seizehis throne and marry Hamlet's mother

Hamlet is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature,with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".[1] It wasone of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime[2] and still ranks among hismost performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and itspredecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879.[3] It has inspired many other writers—from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and IrisMurdoch—and has been described as "the world's most filmed story after Cinderella"

1. Collect other researchers’ viewpoints and studies about the literary works.

Hamlet was a very real success in its own day An unauthorized quarto, Q1, waspublished in 1603, so corrupt and abbreviated that it prompted the publication in 1604 of

a quarto (Q2) that was, according to its title page, "Newly imprinted and enlarged toalmost as much again as it was, according to the true and perfect copy." Other quartosfollowed in 1611 and some time before 1623, suggesting a strong demand by the readingpublic The classical scholar Gabriel Harvey lauded the play as having the capacity "to

please the wisest sort." Anthony Scoloker, in 1604, described true literary excellence assomething that "should please all, like Prince Hamlet." Ben Jonson, though he faultedShakespeare for having "small Latin, and less Greek," and for too often ignoring theclassical unities, generously allowed, in his commendatory tribute in the ShakespeareFolio edition of 1623, that Shakespeare was worthy of comparison as a tragic writer withAeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and without a rival as a comic dramatist even in

"insolent Greece or haughty Rome." During the Restoration in 1660 and afterwards,Hamlet was accorded the unusual respect of being performed without extensiveadaptation, though it was substantially shortened Samuel Pepys, in his Diary, greatlyadmired the play, as performed repeatedly by Thomas Betterton from 1661 until 1709; in

1688 he praised the role of Hamlet as "the best part, I believe, that ever man acted."

The Earl of Shaftesbury appears to have spoken on behalf of other eighteenth-centuryobservers when, in his Characteristic Advice to an Author (1710), he praised Hamlet as

"almost one continued moral, a series of deep reflections, drawn from the mouth upon thesubject of one single accident and calamity, naturally fitted to move horror andcompassion." Hamlet "appears to have most affected English hearts, and has perhapsbeen oftenest acted of any which have come upon the stage." Thomas Hanmer, in SomeRemarks on the Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (1736) similarly found aninstructive universality in the play that demonstrated brilliantly how it conforms with thedemands of poetic justice Samuel Johnson commended Shakespeare for his "justrepresentation of general nature." These comments are notably consistent in their view ofthe play as morally instructive and universal

Romantic criticism of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries turned in quite anew direction, toward a study of character and emotion Goethe was perhaps the first tofocus on Hamlet's hesitation to act "Amazement and sorrow overwhelm the solitaryyoung man," wrote Goethe in his Wilhelm Meister, 1778 and 1795 Many critics havewondered if Goethe was not talking at least partly about the brooding melancholic

protagonist of his own autobiographical meditation, The Sorrows of Young Werther(1774) The same suspicion lingers in an appraisal of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Notesand Lectures upon Shakespeare, 1808, where the author frankly admitted that tounderstand Hamlet fully "it is essential that we should reflect on the constitution of ourown minds." "I have a smack of Hamlet in myself," Coleridge wrote The writer who wasaddicted to laudanum and who, according to legend at least, composed his "Kubla Kahn"following an opium-induced dream and then left it unfinished, might be expected to seeHamlet as one who "vacillates from sensibility, and procrastinates from thought, andloses the power of action in the energy of resolve." The critical sentiment is all the morepowerful in that it reflects Romantic sensibility in many other writers Charles Lambwrote (On the Tragedies of Shakespeare, 1811) of his desire "to know the internalworkings and movements of a great mind, of an Othello or a Hamlet for instance, thewhen and the why and the how far they should be moved." William Hazlitt declared, in

1817, that "It is we who are Hamlet," most of all in the way in which his "powers havebeen eaten up by thought." For August W von Schlegel, in 1809, the burden that Hamletfaces "cripples the power of thought."

This fascination with character as the central concern of drama spilled over into othercharacters in Hamlet as well, most of all with Ophelia "Poor Ophelia!" wrote AnnaJameson "Oh, far too soft, too good, too fair to be cast among the briers of this working-day world, and fall and bleed upon the thorns of life!" (Characteristics of Women, 1832).Critics like Thomas Campbell lambasted Hamlet for his insensitivity in his dealings withOphelia A new interest in women was to be seen everywhere Her drowning, asdescribed by Gertrude, became the subject for many paintings by John Everett Millais(1852), Henry Tresham, Richard Westell, and others Mary Cowden Clarke imaginedwhat the girlhood of Ophelia might have been like in her The Girlhood of Shakespeare'sHeroines(1851-2) Helen Faucit similarly wondered about the afterlife of Ophelia in OnSome of Shakespeare's Female Characters, 1885 George Eliot, in Mill on the Floss,

1860, proposed that "we can conceive of Hamlet's having married Ophelia" and then

managing to get through life "with a reputation for sanity." The characters of Hamlet, aswith Falstaff and Cleopatra and other legendary figures, took on lives of their own.Critics delighted in wondering what it would have been like to know these characters and

to pursue their destinies outside the bounds of the plays as Shakespeare had written them.The interweaving of author, character, reader, and viewer was seen as a fundamentalquality of dramatic creation through which Shakespeare had become so intenselypersonal Shakespeare had become England's great national poet through whom thenation could celebrate its cultural and political greatness in the nineteenth century.Hamlet stood as his quintessential play at the center of this cultural triumph

A landmark of literary criticism of Hamlet in the early twentieth century is A C.Bradley's Shakespearean Tragedy, 1904 Hamlet is, for Bradley, one of the four "great"Shakespearean tragedies, along with Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth Hamlet is, like theothers, "great" in its embrace of universal issues: good and evil, temptation and sin, self-knowledge and betrayal Hamlet stands revealed in this broad moral context as anidealist, deeply sensitive, vulnerable to the shocks of a father's murder and a mother'shasty remarriage He generalizes philosophically in ways that resonate with our longing

to understand ourselves and the universe in which we find ourselves Bradley deftlyincorporates the resources of "character" criticism that the nineteenth century had found

so compatible and enlightening Character criticism continued to pursue its aims,especially in Ernest Jones's Hamlet and Oedipus (1910 and 1959), where this disciple ofSigmund Freud enlarged upon the psychoanalytical thesis that Freud had himselfpropounded in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), namely, that Hamlet is drivensubconsciously by an incestuous desire for his mother which complicates his task ofavenging the murder of his father; how can he kill the hated uncle for having taken sexualpossession of the mother whom Hamlet himself yearns for? Gilbert Murray, in Hamletand Orestes (1914), pursued a parallel method of psychological and anthropologicalanalysis by studying Hamlet as a kind of ritual drama that is profoundly related to ancienttribal customs and ceremonies This approach owed much to the work of Carl Jung

Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (1957) and other studies proposed that drama can

be seen as a response to mythic patterns that include the seasonal changes of the year:Hamlet, in these terms, is autumnal, wintry, melancholic Maynard Mack's "The World ofHamlet" (Yale Review, 1952), sees the play as dominated by the interrogative mood, byquestions, riddles, enigmas, and mysteries

At the same time, critical responses to "character" criticism were emerging One of themost insistent was that of historical criticism Practiced in good part by academic scholarsmotivated by a new professionalism in their ranks, the method insisted, as did Sir WalterRaleigh (a Professor of English Literature at Oxford, not related to the courtier namedRaleigh or Ralegh who served Queen Elizabeth and James I), that "A play is not acollection of the biographies of those who appear in it," nor is it a moral play(Shakespeare, 1907) Instead, a play is a kind artifice arising out of a particular historicalmilieu E E Stoll's Art and Artifice in Shakespeare (1933) adroitly captures this criticalpoint of view Hamlet, for Stoll, is not a study of psychological types; it is a revenge play,the resources for which are provided by the conventions of a dramatic type Hamlet'sdelay is, in these terms, necessary in order that Hamlet may test whether Claudius isindeed the murderer that the Ghost has declared him to Be Lily Bess Campbell'sShakespeare's Tragic Heroes: Slaves of Passion (1952) declares by its title itscommitment to historical circumstances, and especially to Elizabethan understanding ofmelancholy John Dover Wilson, in What Happens in Hamlet (1935) locates the play inthe Elizabethan playhouse as a way of asking, among other matters, whether Hamletperceives that he is being overheard by the King and Polonius during his painfulinterview with Ophelia Theodore Spencer, a Professor at Harvard, looks closely atShakespeare's indebtedness to innovative and heterodox thinkers in the Renaissance likeCopernicus, Montaigne, Mirandola, and Machiavelli (Shakespeare and the Nature ofMan, 1942) Historical criticism continues to this day

The 1930s saw another critical revolution, this time vested as a critique of historicalcriticism The so-called "New" critics, such as G Wilson Knight, Derek Traversi, and L.

C Knights, insisted that historical criticism was too often dry and philological in its questfor factual information about writers' biographies an other historical concerns Surely,criticism should turn its attention instead to close reading of texts, to image patterns, tothe sounds of poetry Caroline Spurgeon's Shakespeare's Imagery and What It Tells Us(1935) catalogued Shakespeare's images in related clusters: diseases, poison, ulcers,blisters, and the like Maurice Charney's Style in "Hamlet" (1971) turned the new interest

in imagery to the theater, where stage picture, gesture, props, and all that is scenic could

be seen as creating a language of theatrical gesture Historical critics quickly realized thatthey could contribute to such theatrical insights rather than simply allowing themselves to

be pilloried as academic pedants Andrew Gurr (Playgoing in Shakespeare's London,1987) and Ann Jennalie Cook (The Privileged Playgoers of Shakespeare's London, 1576-

1642 (1981) provided a wealth of new information and insight about those who came tosee the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries

In the cultural upheaval brought about by protests against the Vietnam War, racialconflict, social unrest, the assassinations of John and Bobby Kennedy and Martin LutherKing Jr., and so much more in the 1960s and afterwards, literary criticism of Hamletfound several new forms of expression One was the so-called "New Historicism,"championed by Stephen Greenblatt, Louis Montrose, Jonathan Goldberg, and others likeStephen Orgel and Richard Helgerson who were more or less loosely allied to themovement The new historicists owed much in theoretical terms to Clifford Geertz'sNegara, 1980, and to Lawrence Stone's The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (1965),where critics could find eloquent models of how public ceremonials of statecraft offeredthemselves as myths about the creation and manipulation of political power Prompted bytheir resistance to the governorship of California and then the U.S presidency of RonaldReagan, the new New Historicists formed a close relationship with the CulturalMaterialism of English and continental critics that included Raymond Williams, Jonathan

Dollimore, Alan Sinfield, Terry Eagleton, and others Together, they devoted theirenergies to politically radical interpretations of texts as expressive of rapid political andsocial change They took sustenance from the galvanizing new insights offered by JanKott, a Polish political activist who viewed Hamlet and other Shakespearean playsagainst the apocalyptic background of a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain after WorldWar II Hamlet was for Kott "a drama of political crime." Its protagonist was one whowas "deeply involved in politics, sarcastic, passionate and brutal"; like James Dean hewas a young rebel intent on "action, not reflection" (Shakespeare Our Contemporary,1964) Kott was visibly indebted to the absurdist drama and existential philosophy ofAntonin Artaud, Jerzy Grotowski, Eugène Ionesco, Jean Paul Sartre, and Albert Camus.Hamlet was thus a bleak comedy of the absurd through which "we ought to get at ourmodern experience, anxiety and sensibility."

Feminist criticism took on new energy in these late twentieth-century years of experimentand rebellion Juliet Dusinberre's Shakespeare and the Nature of Women, 1975, was aninspirational study that brought the feminist concerns of the nineteenth century into a newpolitical context Lisa Jardine's Still Harping on Daughters, 1983, with its title derivedfrom Polonius's response to Hamlet's "mad" discourse about daughters who should not bepermitted to "walk I' th' sun," turned the focus of feminist criticism in Hamlet toanimadversions against patriarchal interference in the lives of young women ClaudeLévi-Strauss, in his The Elementary Structures of Criticism, 1949, offered a bracingmodel of new ways of thinking about family relationships, in which men are so often thecontrolling force, making use of daughters as resources to be pawned and traded incommercial and political negotiations among men Arnold Van Gennep (The Rites ofPassage, 1960) and Victor Turner (The Ritual Process, 1969) offered furtheranthropological models for exploring the transitional moments in human life—birth,puberty, marriage, death—that made for such compelling and threatening conflicts in thelives especially of women Both Ophelia and Gertrude provided splendid materials foranalyses by Coppélia Kahn, Lynda Boose, Marjorie Garber, Madelon Sprengnether, Jean

Howard, Gail Paster, Phyllis Rackin, Dympna Callaghan, Jyotsna Singa, Marianne Novy,Carol Neely, Valerie Traub, and many others Some feminist critics like Ania Loombabrought to this lively discourse the perspective of third world experience Still others, likeKim Hall and Margo Hendricks, looked at gender in terms of race relations Same-sexrelationships became the concern of Bruce Smith, Laurie Shannon, Jonathan Goldberg,Mario DiGangi, and still others Hamlet was a central text in all these explorations.

Post-structural criticism, or deconstruction, arrived on the scene at more or less the sametime in the late twentieth century It owed its philosophical and critical origins especially

to the linguistic and semiotic work on the Continent, notably in France, of Ferdinand deSaussure, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida For such thinkers, "meaning" and

"authorial intent" were protean and indeterminate concepts, best understood as arbitrarysignifiers in a complex system of difference Patricia Parker and Geoffrey Hartman, inShakespeare and the Question of Theory (1985), showed how infinitely suppleShakespeare's poetic language could be, with its incessant play of words and its delight inpunning Hamlet, viewed in this light, could be seen as superb practitioner in the art ofverbal play Deconstruction has led to new and challenging insights in editing, as well, byinsisting, in Foucaultian fashion, that texts are multiple and evolving, especially in thetheater Hamlet, with its extensive differences between the second quarto and the 1623Folio, and then even more remarkably by the variations embodied in the unauthorizedquarto of 1601, continues to be a battleground for rival textual theories as to how thisgreat work came into being and then evolved

2. Analyze the related historical background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas.

The story of Shakespeare's Hamlet was derived from the legend of Amleth, preserved by 13th-century chronicler Saxo Grammaticus in his Gesta Danorum,

as subsequently retold by the 16th-century scholar François de Belleforest Shakespeare may also have drawn on an earlier Elizabethan play known today

as the Hamlet, though some scholars believe Shakespeare wrote the Hamlet, later revising it to create the version of Hamlet that exists today He almost certainly wrote his version of the title role for his fellow actor, Richard Burbage, the leading tragedian of Shakespeare's time In the 400 years since its inception, the role has been performed by numerous highly acclaimed actors in each successive century

Ur-The 15th-century Renaissance brought with it a new interest in the study of humanexperience and awareness Hamlet was written in the early 17th century around 1600

or 1601 and first performed in 1602 By this time, the Renaissance had spread to otherEuropean countries, and ideas about our ability to fully understand the humanexperience became more skeptical Scholars and artists purported that the humanunderstanding of the world was based on appearance, and that it was only with greatdifficulty (if at all) that humans could see beyond these appearances in order to see the

“real.” Shakespeare’s Hamlet explores this struggle Characters constantly facedifficulty in finding the truth about others, whether it be their intentions, their truecharacters, or even their sanity

he main action of Hamlet takes place in Denmark, a largely Protestant nation at thetime of the play’s composition Though Roman Catholics believe in a state ofpurgatory—where souls go after death to atone for wrongdoings—the Protestantsbroke with a number of Catholic teachings, including the existence of purgatory, inthe Protestant Reformation This may explain why Hamlet is hesitant to accept theghost’s claims that he is tormented until his life’s crimes are “purged” away

3 Analyze the related literary trends and background affecting the author’s writing art and ideas

Shakespeare borrowed for his plays ideas and stories from earlier literary works Hecould have taken the story of Hamlet from several possible sources, including a

twelfth-century Latin history of Denmark compiled by Saxo Grammaticus and a prosework by the French writer François de Belleforest, entitled Histoires Tragiques.

The raw material that Shakespeare appropriated in writing Hamlet is the story of aDanish prince whose uncle murders the prince’s father, marries his mother, andclaims the throne The prince pretends to be feeble-minded to throw his uncle offguard, then manages to kill his uncle in revenge Shakespeare changed the emphasis

of this story entirely, making his Hamlet a philosophically minded prince who delaystaking action because his knowledge of his uncle’s crime is so uncertain Shakespearewent far beyond making uncertainty a personal quirk of Hamlet’s, introducing anumber of important ambiguities into the play that even the audience cannot resolvewith certainty For instance, whether Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, shares in Claudius’sguilt; whether Hamlet continues to love Ophelia even as he spurns her, in Act III;whether Ophelia’s death is suicide or accident; whether the ghost offers reliableknowledge, or seeks to deceive and tempt Hamlet; and, perhaps most importantly,whether Hamlet would be morally justified in taking revenge on his uncle.Shakespeare makes it clear that the stakes riding on some of these questions areenormous—the actions of these characters bring disaster upon an entire kingdom Atthe play’s end it is not even clear whether justice has been achieved

By modifying his source materials in this way, Shakespeare was able to take anunremarkable revenge story and make it resonate with the most fundamental themesand problems of the Renaissance The Renaissance is a vast cultural phenomenon thatbegan in fifteenth-century Italy with the recovery of classical Greek and Latin textsthat had been lost to the Middle Ages The scholars who enthusiastically rediscoveredthese classical texts were motivated by an educational and political ideal called (inLatin) humanitas—the idea that all of the capabilities and virtues peculiar to humanbeings should be studied and developed to their furthest extent Renaissancehumanism, as this movement is now called, generated a new interest in human

experience, and also an enormous optimism about the potential scope of humanunderstanding Hamlet’s famous speech in Act II, “What a piece of work is a man!How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, in form and moving how express andadmirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god—the beauty ofthe world, the paragon of animals!” (II.ii.293–297) is directly based upon one of themajor texts of the Italian humanists, Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity ofMan For the humanists, the purpose of cultivating reason was to lead to a betterunderstanding of how to act, and their fondest hope was that the coordination ofaction and understanding would lead to great benefits for society as a whole.

As the Renaissance spread to other countries in the sixteenth and seventeenthcenturies, however, a more skeptical strain of humanism developed, stressing thelimitations of human understanding For example, the sixteenth-century Frenchhumanist, Michel de Montaigne, was no less interested in studying humanexperiences than the earlier humanists were, but he maintained that the world ofexperience was a world of appearances, and that human beings could never hope tosee past those appearances into the “realities” that lie behind them This is the world

in which Shakespeare places his characters Hamlet is faced with the difficult task ofcorrecting an injustice that he can never have sufficient knowledge of—a dilemmathat is by no means unique, or even uncommon And while Hamlet is fond of pointingout questions that cannot be answered because they concern supernatural andmetaphysical matters, the play as a whole chiefly demonstrates the difficulty ofknowing the truth about other people—their guilt or innocence, their motivations,their feelings, their relative states of sanity or insanity The world of other people is aworld of appearances, and Hamlet is, fundamentally, a play about the difficulty ofliving in that world

4. Identify the author’s message (intentions), his literary talents and give comments

4.1. Author’s message