English Literature Notes

The Bears-and-Squirrels Game, a Symbolic Device The bears-and-squirrels game in Look Back in Anger occupies a special place. It is a symbolic device which serves an important dramatic purpose. According to a critic, this game is a brave attempt by Jimmy and Alison to compensate themselves for the failure of their marriage.  As such, the game is a kind of “extended metaphor”. As we witness this game developing in the play, it is not in the least embarrassing, but strangely moving. As a form of conventionalized sexual play, it has an undoubted dignity of its own for, as Osborne himself has suggested, such a mutual perpetuation of a fantasy-level of experience can be a sophisticated form of sexual communication. However, this fantasy is compensatory rather than complementary to the sexual relationship. The play explores, within a formally perfect framework, a particular kind of sexual relationship, the incidental frustrations which are expressed in Jimmy’s outbursts. In this way, the ...

Physical Description The stage direction describes Helena as being of the same age as Alison, of medium height, and carefully dressed. When she is first introduced to us, she is busy preparing tea for the inmates of the house where she is staying as a guest. She is feeling perfectly at home and is assisting Alison in household work. She has a rather judicial expression of alertness on her face, but when this expression softens, she looks very attractive. She possesses a sense of matriarchal authority and she behaves as if she were a gracious representative of some visiting monarch. Actually, she belongs to the middle class which feels perfectly secure in its basic rights. Most men would be anxious to please and to impress a woman of this kind. Even from other young women, like Alison, she receives her due respect and admiration Jimmy is, however, absolutely impervious to both her strength and dignity. Helena’s Prolonged Stay at the Porters’ Flat Helena had come to stay with the Porters...

Physical Description Alison is described by the author as “the most elusive personality”, that is, one who is difficult to understand. She looks quite elegant in the red shirt which she is wearing (when she is ironing the clothes) and which actually is Jimmy’s. She is approximately the same age as Jimmy and Cliff. (In other words, she is about twenty-five.) By contrast with the men, her beauty appears to be more striking than it really is. She is tall, slim, and dark. The bones of her face are long and delicate. She has eyes which are large and deep. The Difference between her  Outlook upon Life and Jimmy’s Outlook In almost every respect, Alison offers a contrast to Jimmy. She comes from the middle-class, while Jimmy belongs to the working class. As a believer in the middle-class morality she kept herself a virgin till the time of her marriage, but the discovery of her virginity by Jimmy, when he married her, proved to be not only surprising to him but actually annoying. As Alison...

Jimmy is the “ angry young man ” of the play, usually found spouting tirades against the complacency of the British upper classes, and especially against his wife Alison and then his lover Helena. Born working class but highly educated, like his friend and roommate Cliff, but has an ambivalent relationship with his educated status, seeing himself mostly as a working class man and yet frustrated that his education can do nothing to affect his class status. “He is a disconcerting mixture of sincerity and cheerful malice, of tenderness and freebooting cruelty.” Jimmy “alienates the sensitive and insensitive alike,” and his “blistering honesty, or apparent honesty…makes few friends.” Jimmy is a frustrated character, railing against his feelings of alienation and uselessness in post-war England. Physical Appearance and Habits Jimmy Porter, who may be regarded as the hero of the play, has been described by the author as a tall, thin young man about twenty-five. He is a disturbing mixture of ...

Undoubtedly Sheridan’s purpose in writing “The Rivals” was to entertain the audience by making them laugh and not by making them shed tears. “The Rivals” was written as a comedy pure and simple. Though there are certainly a few sentimental scenes in this play yet they are regarded as a parody of sentimentality. The scenes between Falkland and Julia are satire on the sentimental comedy which was in fashion in those days and against which Sheridan revolted.  A brief examination of these sentimental scenes would clearly reveal that Sheridan’s intention was to poke fun at the sentimental comedy of the time. We find both Faulkland and Julia absurd. The true character of Faulkland is indicated to us by Absolute’s description of him as the “most teasing, captious, incorrigible lover”. Faulkland’s own description of his state of mind about his beloved Julia also makes him appear absurd. He says that every hour is an occasion for him to feel alarmed on Julia’s account. If it rains, he feels...

Melaprop. Lydia Languish’s aunt and guardian, Mrs. Malaprop is a self-important and pretentious woman of around fifty, and the comedic heroine of the play. Her speech is garbled by malapropisms (ridiculous misuses of words), as she tries to use sophisticated language, the meaning of which she does not understand, making for some of the play’s funniest moments. She lectures Lydia on obedience and proper behavior for a young lady, claiming that it is Lydia’s duty to marry someone her elders choose for her. Meanwhile, Mrs. Malaprop herself has fallen in love with Sir Lucius O’Trigger, with whom she is corresponding under the pen name Delia. Unfortunately, Sir Lucius actually has no interest in Mrs. Malaprop, but has been led by the wily maid Lucy to believe that Delia is Lydia’s pen name. The "Malaprop" is an infrequent but important character type within this collection of plays. The figures that fall into this group are characterized by their consistent misuse of vocabulary: t...

Being a typical comedy of intrigue in the Restoration era, Sheridan’s play, The Rival is entitled on that light.  The crux of the entire plot surrounds the rivalry of various characters for winning their prizes. Although a casual look on the title throws a comic colour, but in essence the title is purely satirical. On the part of husbands in general who doubt their mistresses of unknown rivals and the girls who found pleasure in surrounding themselves in contending rivals, the title creates an inherent satire. There are a few critics who argue that the title Rival does not carry a very preciserelevance. It is often suggested that by this to title Sheridan was referring to the pseudo-rivalry of Captain Jack Absolute and Ensign Beverley. Captain Absolute has to assume the personality of a poor sub-lieutenant to tickle the humour of Lydia Lnguish, the romantic heroine, who is a lady of peculiar taste of eloping someone poor like Ensign, deserting all her fortune. But her aunt Mrs. Mal...

I n the Restoration period England witnessed the emergence of ‘comedies of manners’ showing the confused and sanctimonious lifestyles of the rising middle class and upper class then “during the 18thcentury, ‘sentimental comedies’ encouraged audiences to uphold virtue and avoid vice, chiefly by stirring their emotions.” Next Goldsmith and Sheridan, in the form of sentimental comedy, attempted a revival of the Restoration comedy of manners without its coarseness and immorality, and satirize sentimental tradition. In short, we say that “sentimental drama growing out of an assumption of the essential goodness of man, incorporated moral lessons by both precept and example, portrayed easy reformation of wrongdoers, and placed great emphasis on pity and self-sacrifice.” Sheridan’s ‘The Rivals’ is regarded as an anti-sentimental comedy. Because it is a comedy packed with wit, laughter, and mirth provoking scenes, while the sentimental comedies move the audience to tears not to laughter. Sherid...

English poetic drama in the twentieth century arose as a reaction to the deteriorating naturalistic prose plays of Ibsen, Shaw and Galsworthy. Its photographic realism failed to convey the tension and complexity of contemporary life. Stephen Phillips perhaps initiated the revival of poetic drama with Herod (1901), with great Irish writers like Yeats, Synge and O'Casey later reinforcing the movement. Eliot took to writing plays late while already enjoying colossal poetic fame. Also a mature critic, he was well acquainted with the nature of poetic drama, its failure in the nineteenth century, and the problems, technical or otherwise, that a verse dramatist might face in his time. Through his criticisms, he frequently advocated for the poetic drama and crossed the misconceptions about it. In Matthew Arnold's words, he created "a current of fresh ideas" to help it flourish. "The craving for poetic drama is permanent in human nature", Eliot once remarked. He knew...

Eliot’s play foregrounds the theme of Christian martyrdom as Becket realizes that by being killed within the premises of the Canterbury cathedral at the hands of the Knights, he is going to become the champion of God, to vindicate the preordained glory of a martyr to his faith. In this play we have an element of ritual which combines both the Greek and the medieval Christian notion of sin. In the theme of Becket’s martyrdom we have both the sense of sin and fate modified by the Christian idea of sainthood and crucifixion. After his joining the Anglo-Catholic church, T.S.Eliot was commissioned to write a play to be enacted at the Canterbury festival in 1935. Eliot chose the chronicle material of the murder of Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of Canterbury, by King Henry the Second’s men in the Canterbury cathedral in 1170. Eliot transformed the historical conflict between the King and the Archbishop, between the secular head of England and her ecclesiastical head, into a Christian martyrdo...

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Becket was exiled from England by King Henry II due to political conflicts which occurred between them seven years before the beginning of the play. Having spent those years in France, Becket has decided to return to England and take up his old position in the Church. Symbolically hinted at by the fact that he’s the only character given a proper name in the play (even Henry II is just referred to as “the king”), Becket is the central pivot point of Murder in the Cathedral, meaning that every other character can be defined in terms of how they relate to Becket’s character and outlook. Becket’s staunch devotion to God and fate over anything that occurs in the everyday world of human social and political affairs makes him into something of a black hole around which the otherwise ordinary humans surrounding him revolve. The priests, while religious, have an idea of fate that conflicts with Becket’s decision to become a martyr, though they eventually ado...