BEGC-104: British Poetry and Drama – 14th to 17th Century
Assignment July, 2021 & January, 2022 Sessions
(Based on Blocks 1 – 4)
Answer all questions.
Section A
Write short notes on the following in about 200 words each.
a. Courtly love sonnet
ANSWER: Courtly love sonnet is one of the predominant sonnet types used by the Elizabethan love poets. This is also a lyrical poem. For the readers of English literature the convention of courtly love is the best known by their occurrence in the medieval romance Sir Gawaine and The Green Knight, in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, and later in the Petrarchan conceit of the Elizabethans sonneteers Wyatt was the forerunner of the love sonnet that he introduced to the English court audience. The conventional courtly love sonnet taken from Italian poetry had, as its subject, the pining lover and the beautiful but pitiless beloved. The sonnet would provide the image of a man pleading with a girl to respond to his love. He would display his love-sick self, dwell on the charms of the girl, and plead with her to take pity on him. This expression of love was deployed by English poets as well, but they combined it with other literary traditions and attitudes. They picked up, for instance, the Chaucerian style and weaved it with the Italian. Wyatt’s sonnet “They Flee from Me” is a case in point. The sonnet offers an interpretation of love and the beloved and is not merely an outburst of the lover’s emotion.
B. The Elizabethan World
ANSWER: The Elizabethan world is the time associated with the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This time is considered to be a golden age in English history. The term “Elizabethan“ is often used loosely to refer to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, even after the death of Elizabeth. This was a time of rapid development in English commerce, maritime power, and nationalist feeling. It was a great age of English literature- the age of Sir Philip Sidney, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Shakespeare, Sir Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, Ben Jonson, and many other extraordinary writers of prose and of dramatic, lyric, and narrative poetry. In Elizabethan theater, William Shakespeare, among others, composed and staged plays in a variety of settings that broke away from England’s past style of plays. It was an age considered to be the height of the English Renaissance and there was a full flowering of English literature and English poetry as well. It was an age of expansion and exploration abroad, while at home the Protestant Reformation was established and successfully defended against the Catholic powers of the Continent.