tig’s student site

 

                                         By Thomas Hardy

                                           (1840-1928).

 

Thomas Hardy set his novels in  Dorset (fictionalised as “Wessex”) using identifiable locations. Casterbridge is Dorchester.

 

Hardy’s novels first appeared in Victorian periodicals, necessitating restraint in the strength of characters, language and situations.  The more outspoken book versions raised more Victorian eyebrows.  Tess of the D'urbervilles (1891), which deals adultery and murder, came into conflict with Victorian morality. Jude the Obscure (1895), dramatizing the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, aroused even  more heated debate.

Influences on Hardy include Charles Darwin, - whose Origin of Species shaped his idea on the cruelty of nature and the suffering of the individual.—, John Stuart Mill, who argued that social and legal restrictions on the liberty of women hindered human improvement, with marriage the equivalent of slavery, and the agnostic Thomas Huxley, who doubted all things not open to logical analysis and scientific verification.

 

He had an eye for the incongruity of fate (‘satires of circumstance’)   read “The Convergence of the Twain” on the sinking of the Titanic– and would have appreciated what happened to him after death. Whereas his body was buried in Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey, his heart lies buried in Stinsford, Dorset, inside a cat—so they say.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heaney reading poetry at MIT

BBC4: 4 interviews

Speaks and reads at University of Bologna start at 7.35 (Bogland), 11.32/14.13 (Grauballe Man), and watch whatever else takes your fancy.

 

Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet. “Digging”, opening his first Anthology, Death of a Naturalist (1966), establishes some of Heaney’s major themes: his own personal history, that of his country, and reverence for skill and dedication. A translator as well as a poet, he published a re-telling of Beowulf, the audio fragments on this site well worth listening to, and an interview (click on the tiny audio thingy in the grey top bar) His most recent translation is The Burial at Thebes, a translation of Sophocles’ Antigone.

 

We will read poems by Heaney, including many of the following:

 

english a1

   kiss of the spider woman

SYLLABUS AND ASSESSMENT

ASSESSMENT CRITERA

The Mayor of Casterbridge

  

                       For general sites on Shakespeare, go to this page.

                    Read it online.

 

This introductory lecture discusses the play as an exploration of art, traces Prospero’s experiment and its outcome(s), and supports the widespread assumption that The Tempest is Shakespeare’s farewell to the stage.

 

This site offers the same material in PDF and speculates on Prospero’s island being Pantalaría, halfway between Sicily and Tunis. Others say Shakespeare modeled Prospero’s island on accounts of a shipwreck off Bermuda in 1609. 

 

Read a useful discussion of themes, motifs, and symbols.

Research the ‘masque’ as an art form and Shakespeare's use of it.  Read about the Great Chain of Being (can take long to load, though)

 

Interpretations of The Tempest:

· a blueprint for colonisation, with Caliban as an American Indian. This and much else can be found on The Empire Writes Back, and here.

· a study in illusion and reality

· a discourse on governance

· A model of the theatre as the world itself

 

In 1991 Peter Greenaway adapted The Tempest; Prospero’s Books, a feast of fascinating images, creates an image of Renaissance learning in Milan, through the books for which Prospero forsook his kingdom.

 

Book tickets for the RSC performance. Watch it animated (in 4 parts)

 

 

 

The Royal Shakespeare Company offer video clips of scenes, and video comments by RSC actors, designers and directors. Rich material on key ideas, staging choices, language and themes, characters and relationships— all approach the play as text to be performed.

 

The wealth of other material on the web makes choices difficult. These recommendations represent a small selection on diverse questions:

 

· Who Knows Who Knows Who’s There? looks at the inconclusive aftermath of the “mousetrap”- The Murder of Gonzago.

· The section “Why the delay” on this site is an accessible and useful discussion, including an evaluation of Ernest Jones’s theory of Hamlet’s presumed Oedipus complex.

· Is Hamlet 16 or 30?

· Frank Kermode evaluates the Zeffirelli film (Mel Gibson as Hamlet)

· If you’ve read Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, you will enjoy Shakespeare in the Bush.

· Different ideas on the ghost

· Trevor Nunn, director, talks about changing ideas on how Shakespeare should be played.

· One page from a very extensive site on melancholy– the ‘Elizabethan malady’.

· Hamlet—Freudian and Feminist angles

 

Ophelia as innocence sacrificed has inspired many paintings (Waterhouse 1 and 2, Redon, Hughes), and Millais. The Tate Museum discusses the Millais in detail. Follow some of the links, especially the ones in the “subject and meaning” section.  Millais used flowers as symbolic massages, and so did Ophelia.

 

Watch the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s performance of Hamlet in four pieces:  Hamlet1,    Hamlet 2      Hamlet 3     Hamlet 4

 

Or the animated version in various parts: Part 1

 

 

"All poetry is a reproduction of the tones of actual speech”

 

 

   PART 2 WORKS

the tempest

need writing help?

essay writing checklist

Argument structure

Paragraph checklist

Link to Part 1 works

 

Link to Part 4 works

 

Link to

Paper 1

 

Link to Part 3 works

 

Link to

Paper 2

 

 

Seamus heaney

hamlet

Library resources