Sibaprasad Dutta

Abstract: Modern English drama is marked by certain distinctive features. With Shakespeare behind and before, the drama movement in English is marching ahead, not only in Great Britain, Ireland and USA, but also in different countries including India. The study attempts to portray the characteristics of the movement.

“Riders to the Sea,” says A.C Ward, “a one-act tragedy must be ranked as Synge’s greatest achievement and perhaps as the only true tragedy in modern literature for it truly cleanses by pity and terror.” A writer in the Manchester Guardian shortly after Synge’s death phrased it rightly when he wrote that it is the ‘tragic masterpiece of our language in our time’ While accolades of such kind are galore, it is left to us to determine whether and how Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge (1871-1909) can be called a truly great tragedy.

The thirty-seven Shakespearean plays consist of the greatest, the most varied and the perfect work ever done by any man in literature. Any work, however, beautiful, seems monotonous after Shakespeare. He was free from every theory. He accepted all of life, rejected nothing. He united the real and the ideal. He appealed to the most varied men to a rude worker as well as to a wit. Shakespeare's drama is a great river of life and beauty. All who thirst for art or truth, comic or serious, ecstasy or satire, light or shade, can stoop to drink from its waters, and in their changing moods they will find a drop to quench their thirst.

The twentieth century witnessed two devastating wars which made the earlier style of living upside down. Men became wild, and sadness gripped human psyche. Against this backdrop, T.S. Eliot discovered 'hollow men'. However, the earth is not going to perish tomorrow, so we must live. It is an eternal paradox that despite misfortunes which come not as single flies but in battalions men rise up and strive to start life afresh - enjoying the morning sun, listening to the cuckoos and the nightingales, having sunbath on the sea beach, singing songs, being in love, writing poems, growing crops and breeding children. This attitude of man has generated a new kind of Romantic mood in English poetry in the 21st century. I believe Romanticism shapes the earth more beautifully than any other creed.

(1757-1827) was not a lyrical poet but a great visionary. As a visionary, he always for looks for things beyond what is immediate and palpable. His search for the glories and the terrors of the world of spirit is innate, and unlike Wordsworth who discovers pantheistic entity that is both immanent in and transcendent from the universe, manifest in the gracious spirit of nature, Blake feels with the eye of one who cannot help dreaming dreams and seeing visions. The visionary in him may and will overpower the artist, and a wild confusion of imagery often blurs his work whether as a draughtsman and a singer. But if at times it drowns his clarity and simplicity, it gives a phantom touch of extraordinary subtlety, and to much of his poetry an extraordinary beauty, that lifts his lyric faculty into an insurmountable height. He drew like Burns, the peasant of Scotland, inspiration from nature, but with a mystical rapture alien to the Scots singer. Blake cares for the splendour of human love, or the rapture of the sun and the sky, only so far as it carries him to experience the state of some inner illumination. While the Industrial revolution disgusted him, he saw in the simple joys and cheeriness of ordinary life a Paradise regained. And In the Songs of Innocence, he entered an Eden from which man had long been alienated. No poet, not even Wordsworth, drew charm from simpler sources than Blake; and none revelled with such gay and exquisite feelings of discovery. If he had the naturalness and the spontaneity of a child, he had also his wild luxurious fancy; and a quaint, delicious fantasy binds by threads of shimmering gossamer all living things, uniting them in a spirit of joyous abandon and tender sympathy. But the rapture of Blake is not altogether unreflective; while he loves Eden, he is not deaf to the ugly clamour of the world outside. If he wrote the Songs of Innocence, he also wrote Songs of Experience. Side by side with the rapturous joy he felt the bitterness of hate and the miseries and complexities that afflict the soul of an adult man. Both the naturalism and mysticism of the Romantic Revival found expression in Blake. On this point, he differs from pioneers like Burns, who is simply naturalistic, or Cowper, who is only slightly touched by mysticism. On the naturalistic side, he deals with the simplest phases of life; with the love of flowers, hills and streams, the blue sky, the brooding clouds. But the mystical vision of the poet is always transforming these familiar things, unearthing their obscure aspects and spiritualising the commonplace into something strange and wonderful.

Marlowe has transformed the historical figure of King Edward II into a tragic hero of no mean stature. Although a historian like Stubbs in his Constitutional History (ii.314.) says that ‘his reign is a tragedy, but one that lacks in its true form the element of pity ; for there is nothing in Edward, miserable as his fate is, that invites or deserves sympathy’, Lamb speaks differently of the king of Marlowe. ‘The death scene’, says Lamb, ‘of Marlowe’s king moves pity and terror beyond any scene, ancient or modern, with which I am acquainted.’ Similar accolades are in plenty about the play as a great tragedy, and Lamb points to the core element of a tragic hero according to the Aristotelian doctrine. Tragedy, according to Aristotle, is the spectacle of the fall of a great man that arouses the emotions of pity and fear. Although the fall is caused primarily by hamartia or a fatal flaw, the ultimate impression overshadows the weakness of the fallen hero reflected in his error of judgment and wrests our sympathy as well as admiration. The emotion of terror is roused in us as we feel that although by virtue of his position the man is unlike us, his actions and nature are akin to ours, and as we view the play we feel that some such tragic eventuality may overtake us, making ingress through a human error committed by us in a moment of natural indiscretion or weakness. This sense arouses fear or terror in us.

The translations of the Bible, from those of Tyndale and Coverdale in the early sixteenth century to the Authorized Version of 1611 have contributed to the formation of Modern English. While the chief of these translations was, of course, Tyndale’s published in 1526, the most important Authorized Version was the one made under the direction of James I in 1611. F. T. Wood says that ‘this version became some kind of a standard, for throughout the next three centuries it remained the people’s book, which they heard and read Sunday by Sunday and became familiar with as with no other version of the Holy Scripture.’ The Authorized Version remained a dominant influence on the literary language, and through it it has even influenced, at times, the language of ordinary conversation. That is why Jespersen rightly says that ‘religion has had no small influence on the English language.’

The Forest of Arden in Shakespeare’s As You Like It does not only provide a simple idyllic atmosphere, far from the madding crowd, where all issues of ‘ignoble strife’ of the courtly life dissolve automatically under the influence of its magic spell, but it plays a role, an effective role, by contrast and distinctiveness. It would be incorrect to stress that the forest is just a foil to the court of Frederick or of Oliver. It is a foil to the palaces no doubt, lacking in avaricious intrigues, but it is a character which has its own distinction. Love is there and there is vanity. Shakespeare has not made his forest unbelievable by making it a Utopia as opposed to the Dystopia which the courtly life is. The Forest of Arden is firmly based on earth, the very place which shelters courts and palaces, and at the same time, of necessity, does not keep itself from the human contact. Shakespeare leads a whole troop, who were born and who grew in the city, to the Forest of Arden. As a matter of fact, this transit from the court to Arden links up the forest with the human society and this concept is strengthened by the fact that the exiles do not go to live there forever. The only difference is that whereas  the city is dominated by man and therefore by the virtues and vices (vices more than virtues) that men cultivate, the forest, except for its winter and rough weather, has no other enemy as it is, despite its being a place of human habitation, a place dominated by the pristine glory of nature. This is a place which nurtures shepherds and sheep, both remarkable for their innocence, hosts holy men who value peace in preference to power and pelf, has beasts who live true to their nature. Arden’s lions are natural lions, not tame and timid like mewing cats, and a lioness would not spare a chance of feast on Oliver. While maintaining its essential idyllic nature, the forest has all the naturalness that reality demands it should have. Even the court is well aware of its existence, and so when Frederick is told that the Senior Duke along with his retinue has fled to the Forest of Arden, it does not become difficult for him to recognize where the senior Duke has been to. In fact, As You Like It is a palace-to-forest-to-palace story in which Arden acts as the purgatorio or reformatory, to use a term of modern criminology. It is not a paradiso because Shakespeare does not want it to be so and because in that case the journey to the dreamland would have been impossible. The very characters that make the palace an inferno turn back to the city to make it a saner and more healthy place to live in.

While revealing the diverse features of Satan’s character, his speeches also bring out the conflict that torments his soul. Inherently, Satan is an angel with all the memories of Heaven. His fall is so sudden and shocking that he cannot reconcile himself with his present degradation. The turmoil of his soul finds expression in his words of hope and despair, and in his speculation on good and evil. This conflict, as a matter of fact, makes Satan’s character so dramatic and his personality so tragic. The conflict in his soul is not over what to do or not to do, for he has already decided that ‘to do  aught good will never be our task, but to do ill will be our sole delight as being the contrary to him whom we resist.’ The conflict in a sense is very much outwardly in Paradise Lost between the forces of good and evil, man being at the center of action. The so-called conflict in Satan’s soul is the agony that he feels when he thinks retrospectively about the lost glory and prospectively about the lasting pain. So far as Book I is concerned, this is what afflicts Satan’s soul.

The volume contains some poems in the genre of Neo-Romanticism, a term coined by me to define the kind of poetry that fascinates the readers. The poems. in the language of Wordsworth, are 'spontaneous effusions of powerful feelings, taking their origin in emotions recollected in tranquillity'.

Prashna Upanishad is one of 108 (till estimated) Upanishads. It consists of six questions asked by spiritual aspirants seeking knowledge about Reality and answered by their teacher. It reveals scientific research about ultimate Reality by the ancient sages of India.

The Upanishads which together form Vedanta have always been an interesting study, particularly by those who cherish spirituality. Although commonly called Hindu scriptures, they never ever deal with Hinduism. They deal with the universal themes : what is Truth or Reality; what is the relation between the creation and its creator; what is the nature of the creator; how man can overcome existential problems; how man can lead a happy life without fear of death, the greatest fear. The Upanishads teach that men can be happy once they realize the Truth and their inner essence. Happiness results from Knowledge - the Knowledge of Reality. This Knowledge is different from sensory knowledge but can be attained through steadfast pursuit - through discrimination and contemplation.

Growth of English Drama was a later event than English poetry. Christian themes were the subject matter, and at the initial stage there three models - The Miracle Plays, The Mystery Plays and The Interludes. It is really an interesting study.

The English Language is enormously indebted to Latin. Latin words and terms have been absorbed by the English Language since early times. To identify the influx of Latin words in the English Language over centuries is a fascinating study. English has not stopped borrowing from Latin; it is continuing.

Dream Children by Charles Lamb is a personal essay featuring Romantic traits. This essay contains elements of  Lamb's own life and ends with pathos as his dream children vanish. Lamb could not marry and have children as he had to take care of his sister, but in the deep alcove of his heart remained a person who wanted to be a father and spend hours with children.

This is a phrase borrowed from Shakespeare's Macbeth to express a situation of treachery and conspiracy. It tells how near and dear ones can throw a simple man into the gutter for the sake of monetary gain and for fulfilment of an envious motive.

Elegy is one of the primary poetic exercises. The Anglo-Saxon literature contains a number of elegies. While the latest experiment in a big volume is Tennyson's In Memoriam, Englis poetry is interspersed with remarkable elegies. Gray's Elegy dwells not on the loss of any person but on 'the sad lot of humanity'. How touching are the following lines!
Full many a gem of purest ray serene, the dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear;
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen to waste their sweetness in the desert air.

The Rape of the Lock by Alexander Pope is a social satire of rare kind. It is devoid of sting, and Mrs Arabella Fermor is delineated with geniality and courteousness. It's not like John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe or Absalom and Achitophel because Pope is angry enough with the subject of his treatment. He is like a grandpa teasing his granddaughter for her folly. Marvellous lines of Pope are:
      No louder shrieks to pitying heavens were cast;
      When husbands or lapdogs had breathed their last.

Romanticism swayed English poetry from 1798 to 1832. It is considered to begin with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 and terminate formally in 1832 when the Reforms Bill was passed. It is new movement in English literature, especially in the field of poetry, but it defies specific definition. Walter Pater's definition that Romantic style means 'addition of strangeness to beauty' is generally acceptable in respect of the poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, but Shelley and Byron added new features to Romantic movement in English poetry. Romanticism is not featured in poetry only; it is also traceable in essays like those of Hazlitt and De Quincey. Though a late poet, Walter de la Mare follows Coleridge whose use of the supernatural in Christabel, Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are marvellous poems of the Romantic period.

I have experimented with Neo-Romanticism in The Shadow of Light: An Album of Poems as I believe, after much of dejection, chaos and dismay, a new breeze begun to blow in the field of English poetry.

The twentieth century witnessed two devastating wars which made the earlier style of living upside down. Men became wild, and sadness gripped human psyche. Against this backdrop, T.S. Eliot discovered 'hollow men'. However, the earth is not going to perish tomorrow, so we must live. It is an eternal paradox that despite misfortunes which come not as single flies but in battalions men rise up and strive to start life afresh - enjoying the morning sun, listening to the cuckoos and the nightingales, having sunbath on the sea beach, singing songs, being in love, writing poems, growing crops and breeding children. This attitude of man has generated a new kind of Romantic mood in English poetry in the 21st century. I believe Romanticism shapes the earth more beautifully than any other creed.

The plot of Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen is contrived skilfully by accommodating into a harmonious whole strands that are apparently loose. Actually, Austen employs a clever device to establish that both pride and prejudice which are mutually coextensive should be blasted for the purpose of a sane and happy life.

We have innate impressions at the time of our birth. They are invisible and not identifiable. Still they shape our character and behavioural pattern. Added to them, we acquire a lot of impressions as we grow. These impressions originate owing to the cultural conditions in our family and in our society in which we live. We should be careful not to acquire bad impressions (sanskaras) and try to efface those already acquired. This is necessary in order to live a healthy and peaceful life with a sound mind. A competent spiritual teacher can help us in this respect, and if one is not fortunate enough to come in contact with such a character, good books may help. The Bible and Bhagavadgita (The Gita) are two such important books.

Abstract:

Modern English drama is marked by certain distinctive features. With Shakespeare behind and before, the drama movement in English is marching ahead, not only in Great Britain, Ireland and USA, but also in different countries including India. The study attempts to portray the characteristics of the movement.

who complain of Austen's 'thin plot, unfashionably cut, and by turning, relining and trimming made to do duty for five or six novels ; a dozen or so stock characters-these are Miss Austen's materials…. It is true that she cannot tell a story, but it is equally true that she does not want to. Her interest is not in the happenings, but in humours." True that Austen has a plan to expose the humours of pride and prejudice and then effect a catharsis of the same through the two central characters of her novel; still, she has done this through a well-organised course of events which ultimately have no loose end dangling. It is often said that the plot of Pride and Prejudice is too neat to be plausible. While not disputing the argument entirely, we would simply revise it and say that it is both neat and plausible. This is because Austen has told her story without sacrificing causality, the most important ingredient of a good plot. A good plot, says Aristotle, must have a good beginning, a good middle, not muddle, and a good end. The plot of Austen's Pride and Prejudice conforms to the Aristotelian doctrine.

Lamb’s essay The Superannuated Man is a personal essay included his in the author’s volume Essays of Elia. In this essay the writer gives vent to his feelings after he gave up the job prematurely. The essay begins with an address to the reader wherein he painfully utters that he has wasted the golden years of his life – the shining youth – in the irksome confinement of an office. He calls the office a prison where he spent his life from the ‘shining youth’ through the middle age till decrepitude (old age, decay) and silver hairs, without any hope of release or respite. He lived to forget that there were such things as holidays, and with a note of pathos he remarks that these were the prerogatives of childhood. The essayist remarks that if there are such men, only then they will be able to appreciate ‘his deliverance’.

Wordsworth’s poem, Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, popularly called Tintern Abbey, besides being an ‘elevated’ poem contains a perceptible philosophical note. Wordsworth (born in 1770),  as he himself says, composed the poem on 13th July 1798 under powerful inspiration produced in his mind by his second  visit to the place : “I began it upon leaving Tintern, after crossing the Wye and concluded it just as I was leaving Bristol in the evening after a ramble of four or five days with my sister. Not a line of it was, not any  part of it, written down till I reached Bristol”. The Tintern Abbey, a monastery, founded in 12th century but now in ruins, stands ten miles above the confluence of the Wye and the Severn. The place Wordsworth visited was a few miles above the confluence, which he visited first in 1793, five years earlier. As the poet himself announces, the poem is the spontaneous expression of  a powerful feeling, though it did not take its origin in emotions recollected in tranquillity. While every line of the poem bears the insignia of high poetry, the conspicuous  philosophical note contained in it, sublimates the poetry and makes it a grand poem far  superior to  an ordinary lyric or a descriptive, or a narrative poem, autobiographical or not.

The School for Scandal stands out to be an anti-sentimental comedy, being a trend-setter in play-writing. It brings back laughter and amusement on the stage, and conscious moralizing is avoided. What is portrayed in the play is the picture of a society that is neither thoroughly indecent nor thoroughly puritanical. The world is a natural world where follies and frailties grow but are not allowed to dominate. The remarkable thing about the play is that while it follows the comedy of manners and aims at denouncing sentimental comedy, it is not an altogether break from the tradition. While individual talent is active, tradition is also conspicuously present. This is a landmark of English literary history whose flow is constant.

Romantic Comedy is a class different from other types of comedy – Satirical Comedy, Comedy of Humours, Comedy of Manners, Sentimental Comedy and finally Anti-sentimental Comedy. Satirical comedy, as the very name signifies, has for its object something to laugh at, and its purpose is corrective. Comedy of Humours  and Comedy of Manners too are satirical, but while the Comedy of Humours is harsh, the Comedy of Manners is mellow in its attitude to the follies and foibles of the society. Ben Jonson’s Volpone is sharply critical of the avaricious and acquisitive tendency of man, but Congreve’s  The Way of World is milder in its criticism of the affectations of the day. Wit forms the comic element in Comedy of Manners. Soon in reaction to the crude satire of Restoration Comedy and Comedy of Manners, developed a short-lived school which was founded by Colley Cibber and Steele. They came to see on stage some their problems resolved, though not at the cost of decorum. Important works of this genre are Steele’s Tender Husband (1705) Hugh Kelley’s False Delicacy, Richard Cumberland’s The Fashionable Lover (1172) and Edward Moore’s The Foundling (1748)  Goldsmith came up with plays like She Stoops to Conquer as a protest against Sentimental Comedy which produces more tears than hearty laughter. Goldsmith had by his side Sheridan whose  The Rivals and  A School for Scandal are still read with avid enthusiasm. As against these, Romantic Comedy is a different genre altogether. Shakespeare is probably the first and last dramatist who introduced and gave perfect shape to this type of Comedy. Romantic Comedy owes its origin to Thomas Lodges’ Rosalynde (1590) which provided Shakespeare with the source for As You Like It. Such comedy deals with a love-affair that involves a beautiful and engaging heroine, often disguised as a man, and the course of love passing through odds and obstacles which are finally overcome ends in a happy union. The embellishments include witty dialogues, fools, songs and music. Often, the locale  is a wood as in As You Like It and A Mid-summer Night’s Dream. “The two major writers of comedy between c.1590 and the 1630s in England were Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Ben Jonson (1573-1637). In their conception and treatment of comedy, they were very different. Shakespeare wrote almost every kind except satirical comedy; Jonson hardly wrote any that was not satirical.”- Cuddon. Linda Bamber rightly says that in Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, the women are often superior to the men, while in his tragedies he “creates such nightmare female figures as Goneril, Regan, Lady Macbeth , and Volumina.”

“Riders to the Sea,” says A.C Ward, “a one-act tragedy must be ranked as Synge’s greatest achievement and perhaps as the only true tragedy in modern literature for it truly cleanses by pity and terror.” A writer in the Manchester Guardian shortly after Synge’s death phrased it rightly when he wrote that it is the ‘tragic masterpiece of our language in our time’ While accolades of such kind are galore, it is left to us to determine whether and how Riders to the Sea by J. M. Synge (1871-1909) can be called a truly great tragedy.

In 1848, the year more famous as the year of publication of Communist Manifesto by Marx and Angels, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt founded a brotherhood – called the “Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood”. As the name suggests , the brotherhood felt a kinship with the painters before Raphael, the early Florentines – e.g. Gitto, Bellini, Fra Angelico – for they found in these artists an individuality and sincerity alien to the art of Raphael’s successors. “Even the faults of this earlier school had for the brotherhood a special charm, and the crude drawing and faulty perspective enchanted them just as the naiveté and roughness of the old ballads enchant the scholar.” The occasion of the founding of the brotherhood was a book of engravings which Hunt and Rossetti saw at Millais’ house, of certain Italian frescoes – the same frescoes as had impressed Keats and Leigh Hunt. The initials ‘P.R.B.’ first appeared on their work in RA exhibition of 1849.The brotherhood dissolved in 1850s, but its influence was enduring, and the term ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ has come to denote a distinctive style of appearance, décor, design etc. The movement was also a protest against Sir Joshua Reynolds and the tradition of ‘grand style’. “There is a certain naiveté, not without much affectation, in their early poems and paintings; in both arts there is painstaking representationalism; in both there is religiosity rather than deep religious feeling; in both there is a love of romantic subject-matter, and the use of colour words in their poems corresponds to the brilliant coloring of their canvases.” Baugh P.1423.

" Riders to the Sea, " says A.C Ward, " a one-act tragedy must be ranked as Synge's greatest achievement and perhaps as the only true tragedy in modern literature for it truly cleanses by pity and terror. " A writer in the Manchester Guardian shortly after Synge's death phrased it rightly when he wrote that it is the 'tragic masterpiece of our language in our time' While accolades of such kind are galore, it is left to us to determine whether and how Riders to the Sea can be called a truly great tragedy. The Aristotelian view of a tragedy is that a tragedy is the spectacle of exceptional calamity leading to the fall of a man in high state. It must be serious in nature and written in an embellished language, arousing the emotions of pity and fear finally effecting a catharsis of the same. In that sense, Riders to Sea cannot be called a great tragedy, because it has neither a hero of great stature nor does the central character, Maurya, pass through an exceptional calamity owing to hamartia (error of judgment) committed by her that creates peripetia or reversal of the situation, from happiness to misfortune. Nor do we feel pity and terror because Maurya is not a character that arouses pity which is a combination of sympathy and admiration. We may sympathise with Maurya, an ill-fated woman all her life, but not being a person far above us, she cannot draw our admiration for any extraordinary trait of her character that Oedipus Rex or Macbeth has. Moreover, her whole life is a tale of woe, one of unhappiness without respite and she does not fall from a high state. Terror we are struck with if we belong to the land like Aran Islands where peasants and fishermen constitute the populace. Otherwise, we feel distant from these people and their miseries hardly awe us. If that be the case, there is no question of catharsis. Moreover, it is a one act-play written in simple and colloquial language, and there is hardly any speech made with high emotion. Does it then stand that the play is not a great tragedy or not even a tragedy? This is the crux of the question that we have to explore and solve. Actually, Riders to the Sea is a ploretarian tragedy where the characters, even the tragic heroine, belong not the monarchy, nor to the aristocracy ,not even to the bourgeoisie or the middle class. Even the stature of Maurya is lower than that of Falder, Galsworthy's tragic hero in Justice. It is probably the first real tragedy of low life in English literature, breaking the tradition of Greek and Elizabethan tragic plays which implicitly assume that a tragedy can be written only when the theme is the suffering of those who are highly placed in society. In Greek tragedy, the people of lower classes like the watchman in Aeschulus's Agamemnon or the herdsman in Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannus are marginal characters without any tragic dimension about them. The case is similar with Shakespeare's gravedigger or porter. George Steiner observes in The Death of Tragedy that the eighteenth century German dramatist George Buchner 'was the first who brought to bear on the lowest order of men the solemnity and compassion of tragedy. He has had successors: Tolstoy, Gorky, Synge, and Brecht. "