An Apology for Poetry - Sir Philip Sydney

 An Apology for Poetry (or, The Defence of Poesy) is a work of literary criticism by Elizabethan
poet Philip Sidney.
 It was written in approximately 1579, and first published in 1595, after his death.
 It is generally believed that he was at least partly motivated by Stephen Gosson, a former playwright
who dedicated his attack on the English stage, The School of Abuse, to Sidney in 1579, but Sidney
primarily addresses more general objections to poetry, such as those of Plato.
 To, Sidney, poetry is an art of imitation for specific purpose, it is imitated to teach and delight.
 According to him, poetry is simply a superior means of communication and its value depends on what is
communicated.
 So, even history when it is described in a lively and passionate expression becomes poetic.
 He prefers imaginative literature that teaches better than history and philosophy.
 Literature has the power to reproduce an ideal golden world not just the brazen world.

Stephen Gosson (1554 –1624) was an English satirist.

Stephen Gossen makes charges on poetry which Sidney answers.

The charges are:

1. Poetry is the waste of time.
2. Poetry is mother of lies.
3. It is nurse of abuse.
4. Plato had rightly banished the poets from his ideal world.

Against these charges, Sidney has answered them in the following ways:

 Poetry is the source of knowledge and a civilizing force, for Sidney.

 Gossoon attacks on poetry saying that it corrupts the people and it is the waste of time, but Sidney says
that no learning is so good as that which teaches and moves to virtue and that nothing can both teach and
amuse so much as poetry does.
 In essay societies, poetry was the main source of education.
 He remembers ancient Greek society that respected poets.
 The poets are always to be looked up.
 So, poetry is not wasted of time.

 To the second charge, Sidney answers that poet does not lie because he never affirms that his fiction is
true and can never lie.
 The poetic truths are ideal and universal.
 Therefore, poetry cannot be a mother of lies.

 Sidney rejects that poetry is the source of abuses.

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 To him, it is people who abuses poetry, not the vice- versa.
 Abuses are more nursed by philosophy and history than by poetry, by describing battles, bloodshed,
violence etc.
 On the contrary, poetry helps to maintain morality and peace by avoiding such violence and bloodsheds.
 Moreover it brings light to knowledge.

 Sidney views that Plato in his Republic wanted to banish the abuse of poetry not the poets.
 He himself was not free from poeticality, which we can find in his dialogues.
 Plato never says that all poets should be banished.
 He called for banishing only those poets who are inferior and unable to instruct the children.
 For Sidney, art is the imitation of nature but it is not slavish imitation as Plato views.
 Rather it is creative imitation.
 Nature is dull, incomplete and ugly.
 It is artists who turn dull nature in to golden color.
 He employs his creative faculty, imagination and style of presentation to decorate the raw materials of
nature.

 For Sidney, art is a speaking picture having spatiotemporal dimension.

 For Aristotle human action is more important but for Sidney nature is important.
 Artists are to create arts considering the level of readers.
 The only purpose of art is to teach and delight like the whole tendency of Renaissance.
 Sidney favors poetic justice that is possible in poet's world where good are rewarded and wicked people
are punished.

 Plato's philosophy on ' virtue' is worthless at the battlefield but poet teaches men how to behave under
all circumstances.
 Moral philosophy teaches virtues through abstract examples and history teaches virtues through concrete
examples but both are defective.
 Poetry teaches virtue by example as well as by percept (blend of abstract + concrete).
 The poet creates his own world where he gives only the inspiring things and thus poetry holds its
superior position to that of philosophy and history.
 In the poet's golden world, heroes are ideally presented and evils are corrupt.
 Didactic effect of a poem depends up on the poet's power to move.
 It depends up on the affective quality of poetry. Among the different forms of poetry like lyric, elegy,
satire, comedy etc. epic is the best form as it portrays heroic deeds and inspires heroic deeds and inspires
people to become courageous and patriotic.

 In this way, Sidney defines all the charges against poetry and stands for the sake of universal and
timeless quality of poetry making us know why the poets are universal genius.

Thomas Kyd
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 Born in 1558, Thomas Kyd was educated at the Merchant Taylors School in London.
 the details of Kyd's life are obscure
 it is known that he shared a room with another playwright, Christopher Marlowe.
 Not as poetic as Marlowe, Kyd's brilliance came from his understanding of the requirements of the stage
and his instinctive grasp of the tragic form.
 Ben Jonson called him the "sporting Kyd,"
 it is believed that by 1589 he had written a lost Hamlet--sometimes referred to as the Ur-Hamlet--which
was probably the model for Shakespeare's tragedy.
 Kyd's best known play, The Spanish Tragedy (1589), was nothing less than the most popular and
influential tragedy of Elizabethan times.
 It was Inspired by the tragedies of Seneca
 it tells the story of Horatio, the only son of the marshal of Spain, who falls in love with the beautiful
Belimperia but is murdered by the Prince of Portugal and by Belimperia's brother Lorenzo who wants
her to marry the Prince. Before she is whisked away by her brother, Belimperia manages to send
Horatio's grief-stricken father a letter using her own blood for ink, and the old man soon sets out to
avenge his son's death, feigning madness--like Hamlet--to avoid suspicion.
 The only other play which can be attributed to Kyd with certainty is Cornelia (1594) which he adapted
from a French play by Robert Garnier.
 Soliman and Perseda is usually attributed to him as well on the basis of style and the fact that it has the
same plot as the play produced by Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy.
 Another play which has sometimes been attributed to Kyd is Arden of Feversham, a dramatization of a
crime that had been reported in Holinshed's Chronicles.
 In this surprisingly modern drama, Alice, the wife of the respectable gentleman Arden, betrays her
husband with the lower-class Mosbie, then prevails upon the latter to rid her of the former. The realism
of this dark drama, a masterpiece of Elizabethan theatre, foreshadows the middle class drama of a much
later age.
 Kyd's authorship of this play has come into doubt, but if he is indeed the author, then Kyd is the
founder of middle-class tragedy as well the revenge play.
 In 1593, after falling under suspicion of heresy, he was arrested on the charge of atheism and tortured
into giving evidence against his roommate.
 Kyd denied the charge of atheism and attributed the offending manuscript to his roommate, Christopher
Marlowe: “shuffled with some of mine (unknown to me) by some occasion or writing in one chamber
two years since."
 The situation is rich with innuendos (suggestion) of treachery: that Marlowe set Kyd up, that Kyd
returned the Favor, that Marlowe's subsequent death was covertly arranged as a result.
 Current evidence suggests that Marlowe may actually have been an agent provocateur employed by the
Privy Council in its anti-Catholic activities. Kyd was eventually released from prison, but seems to have
been broken by the imprisonment, torture, and disgrace.
 He died in December of 1594, in poverty, not yet thirty-six years old.
The Spanish Tragedy
 The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo is Mad Again is an Elizabethan tragedy written by Thomas
Kyd between 1582 and 1592.
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 The Spanish Tragedy established a new genre in English theatre, the revenge play or revenge tragedy.
 Its plot contains several violent murders and includes as one of
its characters a personification of Revenge.
 The Spanish Tragedy was often referred to (or parodied) in works written by other Elizabethan
playwrights, including William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe.
 Many elements of The Spanish Tragedy, such as the play-within-a-play used to trap a murderer and a
ghost intent on vengeance, appear in Shakespeare's Hamlet.
 Thomas Kyd is frequently proposed as the author of the hypothetical Ur-Hamlet that may have been one
of Shakespeare's primary sources for Hamlet.
Plot Overview
 The Spanish Tragedy begins with the ghost of Don Andrea, a Spanish nobleman killed in a recent
battle with Portugal.
 Accompanied by the spirit of Revenge, he tells the story of his death; he was killed in hand-to-hand
combat with the Portuguese prince Balthazar, after falling in love with the beautiful Bel-Imperia and
having a secret affair with her.
 When he faces the judges who are supposed to assign him to his place in the underworld, they are unable
to reach a decision and instead send him to the palace of Pluto and Proserpine, King and Queen of
the Underworld.
 Proserpine decides that Revenge should accompany him back to the world of the living, and, after
passing through the gates of horn, this is where he finds himself.
 The spirit of Revenge promises that by the play's end, Don Andrea will see his revenge.
 Andrea returns to the scene of the battle where he died, to find that the Spanish have won.
 Balthazar was taken prisoner shortly after Andrea's death, by the Andrea's good friend Horatio, son
of Hieronimo, the Knight Marshal of Spain.
 But a dispute ensues between Horatio and Lorenzo, the son of the Duke of Castile and brother of Bel-
Imperia, as to who actually captured the prince.
 The King of Spain decides to compromise between the two, letting Horatio have the ransom money
to be paid for Balthazar and Lorenzo keep the captured prince at his home.
 Back in Portugal, the Viceroy (ruler) is mad with grief, for he believes his son to be dead, and is
tricked by Villuppo into arresting an innocent noble, Alexandro, for Balthazar's murder.
 Diplomatic negotiations then begin between the Portuguese ambassador and the Spanish King, to
ensure Balthazar's return and a lasting peace between Spain and Portugal.
 Upon being taken back to Spain, Balthazar soon falls in love with Bel-Imperia himself.
 But, as her servant Pedringano reveals to him, Bel-Imperia is in love with Horatio, who returns her
affections. The slight against him, which is somewhat intentional on Bel-Imperia's part, enrages
Balthazar.
 Horatio also incurs the hatred of Lorenzo, because of the fight over Balthazar's capture and the fact that
the lower-born Horatio (the son of a civil servant) now consorts with Lorenzo's sister. So the two nobles
decide to kill Horatio, which they successfully do with the aid of Pedringano and Balthazar's servant
Serberine, during an evening rende-vous between the two lovers.
 Bel-Imperia is then taken away before Hieronimo stumbles on to the scene to discover his dead son.
 He is soon joined in uncontrollable grief by his wife, Isabella.
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 In Portugal, Alexandro escapes death when the Portuguese ambassador returns from Spain with news
that Balthazar still lives; Villuppo is then sentenced to death.
 In Spain, Hieronimo is almost driven insane by his inability to find justice for his son.
 Hieronimo receives a bloody letter in Bel-Imperia's hand, identifying the murderers as Lorenzo
and Balthazar, but he is uncertain whether or not to believe it.
 While Hieronimo is racked with grief, Lorenzo grows worried by Hieronimo's erratic behavior and
acts in a Machiavellian manner to eliminate all evidence surrounding his crime.
 He tells Pedringano to kill Serberine for gold but arranges it so that Pedringano is immediately
arrested after the crime. He then leads Pedringano to believe that a pardon for his crime is hidden in a
box brought to the execution by a messenger boy, a belief that prevents Pedringano from exposing
Lorenzo before he is hanged.
 Negotiations continue between Spain and Portugal, now centering on a diplomatic marriage between
Balthazar and Bel-Imperia to unite the royal lines of the two countries.
 Ironically, a letter is found on Pedringano's body that confirms Hieronimo's suspicion over Lorenzo and
Balthazar, but Lorenzo is able to deny Hieronimo access to the king, thus making royal justice
unavailable to the distressed father.
 Hieronimo then vows to revenge himself privately on the two killers, using deception and a false
show of friendship to keep Lorenzo off his guard.
 The marriage between Bel-Imperia and Balthazar is set, and the Viceroy travels to Spain to attend
the ceremony.
 Hieronimo is given responsibility over the entertainment for the marriage ceremony, and he uses it
to exact his revenge.
 He devises a play, a tragedy, to be performed at the ceremonies, and convinces Lorenzo and
Balthazar to act in it.
 Bel-Imperia, by now a confederate in Hieronimo's plot for revenge, also acts in the play.
 To take revenge Hieronimo plans to perform a play based on an ancient story.
 According to the story,
o Soliman falls in love with Perseda who is married to Erastus whom Soliman orders “one of his bashaws”
to kill. After her husband is murdered, Perseda kills Soliman and then kills herself.
 Hieronimo casts
o Lorenzo as Erastus
o Bel-Imperia as Perseda
o Balthazar as Soliman and
o himself as the bashaw.
 The performance takes place, and both Lorenzo and Balthazar are killed with the real swords Hieronimo
prepared.
 Just before the play is acted, Isabella, insane with grief, kills herself.
 During the action of the play, Hieronimo's character stabs Lorenzo's character and Bel-Imperia's
character stabs Balthazar's character, before killing herself.
 But after the play is over, Hieronimo reveals to the horrified wedding guests (while standing over the
corpse of his own son) that all the stabbings in the play were done with real knives, and that
Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Bel-Imperia are now all dead.
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 He then tries to kill himself, but the King and Viceroy and Duke of Castile stop him.
 In order to keep himself from talking, he bites out his own tongue.
 Tricking the Duke into giving him a knife, he then stabs the Duke and himself and then dies.
 Revenge and Andrea then have the final words of the play.
 Andrea assigns each of the play's "good" characters (Hieronimo, Bel-Imperia, Horatio, and Isabella) to
happy eternities.
 The rest of the characters are assigned to the various tortures and punishments of Hell.

Character List
Hieronimo
 The protagonist of the story. Hieronimo starts out as a loyal servant to the King. He is the King's
Knight-Marshal and is in charge of organizing entertainments at royal events. At the beginning of the
play, he is a minor character, especially in relation to Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Bel-Imperia. It is not until
he discovers his son Horatio's murdered body in the second Act that he becomes the protagonist of the
play. His character undergoes a radical shift over the course of the play, from grieving father to
Machiavellian plotter. After his son's murder, he is constantly pushes the limits of sanity, as evidenced
by his erratic speech and behavior.
Bel-Imperia
 The main female character of the story. Bel-Imperia's role is prominent in the plot, especially toward the
end. The daugher of the Duke of Castile, she is headstrong, as evidenced by her decisions to love
Andrea and Horatio, both against her father's wishes. She is intelligent, beautiful, and, in moments of
love, tender. She also is bent on revenge, both for her slain lover Andrea and for Horatio. Her
transformation into a Machiavellian villain is not as dramatic as Hieronimo's, but only because she
shows signs of Machiavellian behavior beforehand—her decision to love Horatio, in part, may have
been calculated revenge, undertaken in order to spite Balthazar, Andrea's killer.
Lorenzo
 One of Horatio's murderers. Lorenzo's character remains fairly constant throughout the play. He is a
proud verbal manipulator and a Machiavellian plotter. A great deceiver and manipulator of others,
Horatio unsurprisingly has an enthusiasm for the theater. Lorenzo has a foil in Horatio; they are both
brave young men, but Horatio's directness, impulsiveness, and honesty, contrast and highlight Lorenzo's
guardedness, secretiveness, and deception.
Balthazar
 The prince of Portugal and son of the Portuguese Viceroy. Balthazar is characterized by his extreme
pride and his hot-headedness. This pride makes him kill Horatio along with Lorenzo, and it turns him
into a villain. He kills Andrea fairly, though with help, so it is unclear whether he is as "valiant" as the
King and others continuously describe him. But his love for Bel-Imperia is genuine, and it is this love
that primarily motivates his killing of Horatio.
Horatio
 The proud, promising son of Hieronimo. Horatio sense of duty and loyalty is shown in his actions
towards Andrea, and he gives Andrea the funeral rites that let the ghost cross the river Acheron in the
underworld. He also captures Andrea's killer, Balthazar, in battle, thus recovering Andrea's body. His

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 sense of pride is shown in his confrontation with Lorenzo; though Lorenzo greatly outranks him in
stature, he does not defer, but instead continues to argue his case in front of the King.
Ghost of Andrea
 Andrea's ghost is the first character we see in the play, and the first voice to cry out for revenge. His
quest for revenge can be seen both as a quest for justice, since it is sanctioned by Persephone, the Queen
of the Underworld, and as a quest for closure. Andrea is denied closure when he travels to the
underworld, because the three judges there cannot decide where to place him; ironically, at the end of
the play he becomes a judge himself, determining the places of the various characters in hell.
Revenge
 Andrea's companion throughout the play. Revenge is a spirit that symbolizes the forces of revenge that
dominate the play's action. He talks of the living characters as if they were performing a tragedy for his
entertainment.
Isabella
 Hieronimo's suffering wife, her inaction is a foil to his and Bel-Imperia's action. Her inaction, along
with her visions of a dead Horatio, torment her increasingly throughout the play, providing an extreme
version of Hieronimo's more subdued madness. Her death by her own hand foreshadows Hieronimo's
suicide.
The King
 The King of Spain is an ambivalent character. At times he appears noble and is definitely a friend to
Hieronimo, resisiting Lorenzo's attempts to have the Knight-Marshal dismissed. But he is also
complacent (a typical English stereotype about the Spanish), as demonstrated by his callous
conversation after the Spanish victory in Act I, his subsequent dialogue with the ambassador, and his
failure to know that Horatio has been murdered on his estate.
The Viceroy
 The King's counterpart in Portugal. The Viceroy is shown as both a loving father but also a weak king.
He is defeated in battle, wallows in self-pity when he believes his son Balthazar to be dead, is easily led
astray by Villuppo into condemning Alexandro to death, and then renounces his kingship in favor of his
son. All of these are signs of bad leadership, especially to an Elizabethan audience.
Pedringano
 Bel-Imperia's servant. Pedringano is easily bribed, and he betrays Bel-Imperia and is one of the gang of
four murderers who kill Horatio. In fact, Pedringano seems to have no moral considerations, only
following the person whom he thinks can help him most. Ironically, this leads him to trust Lorenzo, who
ends up betraying him.
Serberine
 Balthazar's manservant who, along with Lorenzo, Balthazar, and Pedringano, kills Horatio. Lorenzo
suspects Serberine of informing Hieronimo of the crime, and has him killed by Pedringano.
The Ambassador
 The Portuguese Ambassador is the agent of communication between the King and Viceroy. His
presence appears purely functional, exchanging information between the Portuguese and Spanish court.
Christophil
 A servant who attends on Bel-Imperia while she is kept prisoner by Lorenzo.
The Hangman
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 The hangman is witty and jovial, and he exchanges verbal retorts with Pedringano before hanging him.
Later, the hangman discovers the letter on Pedringano's body that confirms Hieronimo's suspicions of
Lorenzo and Balthazar's guilt.
The Page
 The page is a messenger boy who brings Lorenzo's empty box to the execution, which is believed to
hold a pardon for Pedringano. After the page looks inside, he does not tell anyone that it is empty, out of
fear for his own life. This has a distinct impact on the play, since Pedringano's belief that he will be
pardoned stops him from exposing Lorenzo as one of Horatio's murderers before it is too late.
Soliman and Perseda
Soliman and Perseda is a rarely-performed play, attributed to Thomas Kyd because it appears as
Hieronimo’s revenging metadrama in Act 4 of The Spanish Tragedy. As blood–soaked tragedy, it is
certainly worthy of so great a writer, though ultimately Kyd’s authorship can never be proved.
Perseda is a beautiful Rhodes islander who is besotted with her young knight, Erastus. Erastus proves
himself a victor in a tournament staged by the island’s Governor, having exchanged jewelled favours
with his beloved.
Unfortunately, Erastus loses Perseda’s gift, a precious carcanet or necklace, and the resulting confusion
leads to the death of the knight Ferdinando, and Erastus’s enforced exile to escape punishment. Landing
among the invading troops of Soliman the Magnificent, Erastus proves his valour and honour and is
befriended by the hot-tempered emperor.
Soliman elects to invade Rhodes, in the process capturing Perseda, with whom he, too, falls hopelessly
in love. Perseda and Erastus are reunited and Soliman is forced to view the two young infidels not as
friend and consort, but as embarrassing enemies. Plotting the death of Erastus, Soliman sets his own
eventual downfall in motion.
Although initially allowing the young lovers to live safely in Rhodes, Soliman cannot overcome his
jealousy, for which Erastus is murdered. Perseda swears revenge and Soliman, unaware that he is
fighting the disguised Perseda, mortally wounds the young woman, claiming a loving kiss before she
dies.
Perseda’s lips are, of course, poisoned. As Soliman writhes in agony on the ground, we see the
destruction of a magnificently flawed warrior, brought to his painful end by a love that accentuates the
divide between nations and races, but most especially between religious creeds.
William Congreve
 William Congreve (24 January 1670 – 19 January 1729) was an English playwright and poet.
 Congreve assumed the pseudonym Cleophil and went on to publish a work he had written at the
approximate age of 17 called Incognita: or, Love and Duty reconcil'd in 1692.
 He became a disciple of John Dryden whom he met through the gatherings of literary circles held at
Will's Coffeehouse in the Covent Garden District of London.
 John Dryden continued to be a massive supporter of the works of Congreve throughout his life.
 William Congreve is seen as the man who shaped the English comedy of manners through his use of
satire and well-written dialogue.
 Congreve achieved fame in 1693 when he wrote some of the most popular English plays of the
Restoration period.

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 The Old Bachelor is the first play written by W.C. ( produced in 1693)
 The Double Dealer is a comic play written by W.C. ( first produced in 1693)
 Love for Love is a Restoration comedy written by W.C. It premiered on 30 April 1695 at Betterton's
Co., Lincoln's Inn Fields.
 The Way of the World is a play written by the English playwright William Congreve. It was premiered
in early March 1700 in the theatre in Lincoln's Inn Fields in London. It is widely regarded as one of the
best Restoration comedies.
 The Mourning Bride is a tragedy written by W.C.. It premiered in 1697 at Betterton's Co., Lincoln's Inn
Fields.
 He reportedly was particularly stung by a critique written by Jeremy Collier (A Short View of the
Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage), to the point that he wrote a long reply, "Amendments
of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations."
 He died in London in January 1729, and was buried in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

The Way of the World

Character List
Mirabell

A young man-about-town, in love with Millamant.

Millamant
 A young, very charming lady, in love with, and loved by, Mirabell.
 She is the ward of Lady Wishfort because she is the niece of Lady Wishfort's long-dead husband.
 She is a first cousin of Mrs. Fainall.
Fainall
 A man-about-town.
 He and Mirabell know each other well, as people do, who move in the same circles.
 However, they do not really like each other.
 Fainall married his wife for her money.
Mrs. Fainall
 Wife of Fainall and daughter of Lady Wishfort.
 She was a wealthy young widow when she married Fainall.
 She is Millamant's cousin and was Mirabell's mistress, presumably after her first husband died.
Mrs. Marwood
 Fainall's mistress.
 She is in love with Mirabell.
 Her love is not returned.
Young Witwoud
 A fop.

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 He came to London from the country to study law but apparently found the life of the fashionable man-
about-town more pleasant.
 He has pretensions to being a wit.
 He courts Millamant, but not seriously; she is merely the fashionable belle of the moment.
Petulant (irritable)
 A young fop, a friend of Witwoud's.
 His name is indicative of his character.
Lady Wishfort
 A vain woman, fifty-five years old, who still has pretensions to beauty.
 She is the mother of Mrs. Fainall and the guardian of Millamant.
 She is herself in love with Mirabell, although she is now spiteful because he offended her vanity.
Sir Wilfull Witwoud
 The elder brother of Young Witwoud, he is forty years old and is planning the grand tour of Europe that
was usually made by young men to complete their education.
 He is Lady Wishfort's nephew, a distant, non-blood relative of Millamant's, and Lady Wishfort's choice
as a suitor for Millamant's hand.
Waitwell
 Mirabell's valet.
 At the beginning of the play, he has just been married to Foible, Lady Wishfort's maid.
 He masquerades as Sir Rowland, Mirabell's nonexistent uncle, and woos Lady Wishfort.
Foible
Lady Wishfort's maid, married to Waitwell.
Mincing
Millamant's maid.
Peg
A maid in Lady Wishfort's house.
Summary
Before the action of the play begins, the following events are assumed to have taken place.
 Mirabell, a young man-about-town, apparently not a man of great wealth, has had an affair with Mrs.
Fainall, the widowed daughter of Lady Wishfort.
 To protect her from scandal in the event of pregnancy, he has helped engineer her marriage to Mr.
Fainall, a man whom he feels to be of sufficiently good reputation to constitute a respectable match, but
not a man of such virtue that tricking him would be unfair.
 Fainall, for his part, married the young widow because he coveted her fortune to support his amour with
Mrs. Marwood.
 In time, the connection between Mirabell and Mrs. Fainall ended, and Mirabell found himself in love
with Millamant, the niece and ward of Lady Wish-fort, and the cousin of his former mistress.
 There are financial complications.
 Half of Millamant's fortune was under her own control, but the other half, 6,000 pounds, was
controlled by Lady Wishfort, to be turned over to Millamant if she married a suitor approved by
her aunt.
 Unfortunately, Mirabell had earlier offended Lady Wishfort; she had misinterpreted his flattery as love.
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 Mirabell, therefore, has contrived an elaborate scheme.
 He has arranged for a pretended uncle (his valet, Waitwell) to woo and win Lady Wishfort. Then
Mirabell intends to reveal the actual status of the successful wooer and obtain her consent to his
marriage to Millamant by rescuing her from this misalliance.
 Waitwell was to marry Foible, Lady Wishfort's maid, before the masquerade so that he might not decide
to hold Lady Wishfort to her contract;
 Mirabell is too much a man of his time to trust anyone in matters of money or love.
 Millamant is aware of the plot, probably through Foible.
 When the play opens, Mirabell is impatiently waiting to hear that Waitwell is married to Foible.
 During Mirabell's card game with Fainall, it becomes clear that the relations between the two men are
strained.
 There are hints at the fact that Fainall has been twice duped by Mirabell:
o Mrs. Fainall is Mirabell's former mistress, and
o Mrs. Marwood, Fainall's mistress, is in love with Mirabell.
 In the meantime, although Millamant quite clearly intends to have Mirabell, she enjoys teasing him
in his state of uncertainty.
 Mirabell bids fair to succeed until, unfortunately, Mrs. Marwood overhears Mrs. Fainall and Foible
discussing the scheme, as well as Mirabell and Mrs. Fainall's earlier love affair.
 Since Mrs. Marwood also overhears insulting comments about herself, she is vengeful and informs
Fainall of the plot and the fact, which he suspected before, that his wife was once Mirabell's mistress.
 The two conspirators now have both motive and means for revenge.
 In the same afternoon, Millamant accepts Mirabell's proposal and rejects Sir Wilfull Witwoud, Lady
Wishfort's candidate for her hand.
 Fainall now dominates the action.
 He unmasks Sir Rowland, the false uncle, and blackmails Lady Wishfort with the threat of her
daughter's disgrace.
 He demands that the balance of Millamant's fortune, now forfeit, be turned over to his sole control, as
well as the unspent balance of Mrs. Fainall's fortune.
 In addition, he wants assurance that Lady Wishfort will not marry so that Mrs. Fainall is certain to be the
heir.
 This move of Fainall's is now countered
 Millamant says that she will marry Sir Wilfull to save her own fortune.
 Fainall insists that he wants control of the rest of his wife's money and immediate management of Lady
Wishfort's fortune.
 When Mirabell brings two servants to prove that Fainall and Mrs. Marwood were themselves
guilty of adultery, Fainall ignores the accusation and points out that he will still create a scandal which
would blacken the name of Mrs. Fainall unless he gets the money.
 At this point, Mirabell triumphantly reveals his most successful trick.
 Before Mrs. Fainall married Fainall, she and Mirabell had suspected the man's character, and she
had appointed her lover trustee of her fortune.
 Fainall is left with no claim to make because Mrs. Fainall does not control her own money.
 He and Mrs. Marwood leave in great anger.
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 Sir Wilfull steps aside as Millamant's suitor
 Lady Wishfort forgives the servants and consents to the match of Mirabell and Millamant.
The Alchemist

 The Alchemist is one of Ben Jonson's four great comedies.

 The earliest recorded performance of the play occurred in Oxford in 1610.
 It was also entered into the Stationers' Register in this year, though it might have been written and
performed earlier than this date.
 Critics talk of the play as being written and performed in 1610.
 It was first printed in quarto in 1612, and it was included in the folio of Jonson's works in 1616.
 A second folio edition of Jonson's works came out in 1640. This version included some emendations,
many of which had to do with the tightening of regulations about uttering religious material on the stage.
 "God's will" (1612), for example, became "Death on me" (1640).
 To Jonson's audiences, The Alchemist would have been a modern play, set in Blackfriars in his own
day—a town where there also was a famous theatre in which Shakespeare's late plays were performed.
 As Jonson has risen to greater prominence, The Alchemist has shaken its reputation as being densely
Elizabethan and unfunny, and critics have bolstered its rise into being known as one of the key texts of
the Renaissance.
 Coleridge thought it, along with Oedipus Rex / Oedipus the King and Tom Jones, one of the three "most
perfect plots ever planned." Note, though, that the play's plot is linear, with the stories of the seven gulls
cleverly intersected to keep tension at the maximum.
 Kenneth Tynan thought it a "good episodic play ... bead after bead, the episodes click together upon the
connecting string, which is chicanery and chiselry."
 F. H. Mares led many modern commentators by beginning his essay with the observation that "All
through the play there is a disparity between what people are and what they say they are."
 Anne Barton's in an excellent chapter in Ben Jonson: Dramatist, states that it is "a play about
transformation, as it affects not metals, but human beings."
 The Alchemist has been restored to prominence since Victorian times.
The Alchemist by Ben Jonson
 Lovewit has left for his hop-yards in London, and he has left Jeremy, his butler, in charge of his house
in Blackfriars.
 Jeremy, whose name in the play is Face, lives in the house with Subtle, a supposed alchemist,
and Dol Common, a prostitute. The three run a major con operation.
 The play opens with an argument that continues throughout the play between Subtle and Face.
 It concerns which of them is the most essential to the business of the con, each claiming his own
supremacy.
 Dol quells this argument and forces the conmen to shake hands.
 The bell rings, and Dapper, a legal clerk, enters, the first gull of the day.
 Face takes on the role of “Captain Face”, and Subtle plays the “Doctor.”
 Dapper wants a spirit that will allow him to win at gambling.
 Subtle promises one and then tells him he is related to the Queen of the Fairies.

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 Dispatched to get a clean shirt and wash himself, Dapper leaves, immediately replaced by Drugger, a
young tobacconist who wants to know how he should arrange his shop.
 Subtle tells him, and Face gets him to return later with tobacco and a damask.
 Their argument looks set to resume when Dol returns to warn them that Sir Epicure Mammon is
approaching.
 Sir Epicure Mammon and his cynical sidekick, Sir Pertinax Surly, are next through the door.
 Mammon is terrifically excited because Subtle has promised to make him the Philosopher’s Stone,
about which Mammon is already fantasizing.
 Face changes character into “Lungs” or “Ulen Spiegel,” the Doctor’s laboratory assistant, and the
two conmen impress Mammon and irritate Surly with a whirl of scientific language.
 Face arranges for “Captain Face” to meet Surly in half an hour at the Temple Church, and a
sudden entrance from Dol provokes Mammon, instantly besotted, into begging Face for a meeting with
her.
 Ananias, an Anabaptist, enters and is greeted with fury by Subtle.
 Ananias then returns with his pastor, Tribulation.
 The Anabaptists want the Philosopher’s Stone in order to make money in order to win more people to
their religion.
 Subtle, adopting a slightly different persona, plays along.
 Kastrill is the next new gull, brought by Drugger, who has come to learn how to quarrel—and to case
the joint to see if it is fit for his rich, widowed sister, Dame Pliant.
 Face immediately impresses young Kastrill, and he exits with Drugger to fetch his sister.
 Dapper, in the meantime, is treated to a fairy rite in which Subtle and Face (accompanied by Dol on
cithern) steal most of his possessions.
 When Mammon arrives at the door, they gag him and bundle him into the privy.
 Mammon and Dol (pretending to be a “great lady”) have a conversation which ends with them being
bundled together into the garden or upstairs—Face is pretending that Subtle cannot know about
Mammon’s attraction to Dol.
 The widow is brought into the play, as is a Spanish Don who Face met when Surly did not turn up.
 This Spaniard is in fact Surly in disguise, and the two conmen flicker between arguing about who will
marry the widow and mocking the Spaniard by speaking loudly in English of how they will “cozen” or
deceive him.
 Because Dol is occupied with Mammon, the conmen agree to have the Spaniard marry the widow,
and the widow is carried out by Surly.
 In the meantime, Dol has gone into a fit of talking, being caught with a panicked Mammon by a furious
“Father” Subtle.
 Because there has been lust in the house, a huge explosion happens offstage, which Face comes in to
report has destroyed the furnace and all the alchemical apparatus.
 Mammon is quickly packed out the door, completely destroyed by the loss his entire investment.
 Things start to spiral out of control, and the gulls turn up without warning. At one point, nearly all the
gulls, including an unmasked Surly, are in the room, and Face only just manages to improvise his way
out of it.

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 Dol then reports that Lovewit has arrived, and suddenly Face has to make a final change into “Jeremy
the Butler.”
 Lovewit is mobbed by the neighbors and the gulls at the door, and Face admits to Lovewit, when forced
to do so by Dapper’s voice emerging from the privy, that all is not as it seems—and has him marry the
widow.
 After Dapper’s quick dispatch, Face undercuts Dol and Subtle and, as the gulls return with officers and a
search warrant, Dol and Subtle are forced to escape, penniless, over the back wall.
 The gulls storm the house, find nothing themselves, and are forced to leave empty-handed.
 Lovewit leaves with Kastrill and his new wife, Dame Pliant.
 Face is left alone on stage with a financial reward, delivering the epilogue.
Character List

Subtle
 The "Alchemist" of the play's title.
 We never learn whether "Subtle" is a forename or a surname (or the only name).
 Meaning "crafty" or "clever" in Elizabethan English, it is an appropriate choice.
 Subtle is grumpy, constantly at odds with Face (he is often played as considerably older), and is very
learned, being the one with alchemical expertise.
 He disguises himself as "the Doctor" to carry out his con.

Face
 Face seems, to some extent, faceless; we get very little idea of a personality or an impetus behind his
character.
 He is constantly switching roles.
 Some commentators think that his real name is "Jeremy," but this idea--particularly because it is not
supported by Jonson's dramatis personae--could just be one more in a series of disguises Face
undertakes.
 He plays "Ulen Spiegel" or "Lungs" for the Mammon-con, and more usually he is the wiseboy "Captain
Face" for everyone else.
 He is essential in finding the gulls in the pubs of London and bringing them to the Blackfriars house.

Dol
 Also "Dol Common," Dol is short for Dorothy, and her second name, "Common," is in itself a pun,
meaning "everyone's"--because Dol is a prostitute.
 The play implies she is in casual sexual relationships with both Face and Subtle.
 Her role is not as important as Face's or Subtle's, yet her one transformation, into a "royal lady," is
essential in maneuvering Mammon into the right place at the right time.
 She escapes with Subtle "over the back wall" at the end--without a share of the goods.

Dapper
 A legal clerk and a social climber who comes to the conmen in order to get a "gambling fly" (a spirit
who will allow him to cheat and win at gambling).
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 Dapper has met Face in a pub and has been tempted to the house.
 Extremely greedy and extremely gullible, Subtle tells him he is a relative of the Faery-Queen.
 Upon his return, he is locked in the privy for most of the play.

Abel ("Nab") Drugger

 An honest, good soul.
 He is a young tobacconist who has just bought a new shop on the corner of a street.
 He wants the Doctor (having met Face in a pub) to advise him on (effectively) the feng shui of the
building.
 He is tricked into handing over a lot of expensive tobacco and into bringing Kastrill and Dame Pliant
(Drugger's shyly admitted crush) into the Blackfriars house.
 At the end of the play, he loses everything and is dispatched with a punch from Lovewit.
Lovewit
 The master of the house and the employer of "Jeremy the Butler," his housekeeper (alias Face).
 Away for the majority of the play, Lovewit doesn't return until Act 5--unexpectedly, though Face
lies and claims to have sent for him.
 At this point he punishes Face, but without uncovering the plot itself, or caring to.
 He marries Dame Pliant and leaves the stage halfway through the epilogue in order to smoke
tobacco.

Sir Epicure Mammon

 Epicure Mammon's name means a person who is devoted to sensory enjoyment and material wealth,
and he is perhaps the play's biggest con.
 He is also the greediest gull of the lot.
 Constantly comparing himself and the alchemist's work with classical or antique riches, he is obsessed
with food, sex, and the idea of getting his riches turned into gold by the Philosopher's Stone.
 His lust is the reason given by the conmen for the explosion that destroys the (non-existent)
furnace and vanquishes his hopes of getting rich.

Sir Pertinax Surly

 The sidekick of Epicure Mammon
 He spends the first part of his time in the play bitterly mocking and criticizing Mammon but also calling
into question the actions of the conmen.
 Surly then decides to try to catch them out, and--in his successful disguise as a Spaniard--he falls in
love with Dame Pliant.
 In the end he is attacked by Kastrill and loses the girl.

Tribulation Wholesome, a Pastor of Amsterdam

 The leader of the local group of Anabaptists
 Tribulation is rather more measured and logical than Ananias, but, as the representative of his group,
he is hungry for money, membership, and power.

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 Ananias, a Deacon of Amsterdam
 Ananias is an Anabaptist
 He is greedy for power, land, and membership for his order.
 He is also incredibly angry and quick to condemn anything that may not be, as he sees it, Christian, and
on numerous occasions he blurts out furiously that, for example, "Christ-tide" is the right, Christian
name for Christmas.
 Ananias is also the name of a New Testament character who is stricken dead because of his greed.
Kastrill
 An "Angry Boy," he wants to learn the skill of quarrelling: formal, rhetorical argument.
 He has come to Subtle to learn it.
 Clearly young and impressionable, he is very protective over his sister, Dame Pliant, and he goes to
huge lengths to seem "one of the guys" in several of the group scenes.
 His "quarrelling" is rather unimpressive.
 Comically, he seems to know only a handful of (immature) insults, including "you lie" and "you are a
pimp."

Dame Pliant
 Often called "Widow" in the play
 She is the recently-widowed sister of Kastrill.
 Dame Pliant's name means bendy, supple, or flexible; true to her name, she seems one of the stupidest
characters in literature.
 When she does speak, very rarely, she has the same speech mannerisms (e.g., "suster") as her brother.
 Subtle steals several kisses from her (4.2) while she seems not to notice, and the two conmen fight over
which of them will wed her (and inherit the considerable fortune she has inherited from her husband).
 In the end, it is Lovewit who gets the girl with no wits.

Neighbors
 Several neighbors appear in the street upon Lovewit's return in 5.1.
 They describe to Lovewit what they have seen happen while he has been away at his hop-yards.
 They have a tiny role to play within the play itself, though on a couple of occasions.
 Dol is seen shooing women away from the door.
 Their descriptions of "oyster-women" and "Sailor's wives" (5.1.3-4) give us the sense that the conmen
have performed several more cons than the play showcases.
Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774)
 He was an Irish novelist, playwright and poet
 he was born on 10 November 1728.
 He settled in London in 1756, where he briefly held various jobs, including an apothecary's assistant
(doctor’s) and an usher (escort) of a school.
 Perennially in debt and addicted to gambling.
 The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the
epithet "inspired idiot".
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 His few painstaking works earned him the company of Samuel Johnson, with whom he was a founding
member of "The Club".
 During this period he used the pseudonym "James Willington" (the name of a fellow student at Trinity)
to publish his 1758 translation of the autobiography of the Huguenot Jean Marteilhe.
 Goldsmith was described by contemporaries as prone to envy, a congenial but impetuous and
disorganised personality who once planned to emigrate to America but failed because he missed his
ship.
 At some point around this time he worked at Thornhill Grammar School, later basing Squire Thornhill
(in The Vicar of Wakefield) on his benefactor Sir George Savile and certainly spending time with
eminent scientist Rev. John Mitchell, whom he probably knew from London.
 Thomas De Quincey wrote of him "All the motion of Goldsmith's nature moved in the direction of the
true, the natural, the sweet, the gentle".
 His premature death in 1774 may have been partly due to his own misdiagnosis of his kidney infection.
Goldsmith was buried in Temple Church in London.
 He is best known for his
o novel The Vicar of Wakefield (1766),
o pastoral poem The Deserted Village (1770), and
o plays The Good-Natur'd Man (1768) and She Stoops to Conquer (1771, first performed in 1773).
o He is thought to have written the classic children's tale The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes (1765).
She Stoops to Conquer Or, the Mistakes of an Evening
Type of Play
She Stoops to Conquer is a stage play in the form of a comedy of manners, which ridicules the
manners (way of life, social customs, etc.) of a certain segment of society, in this case the upper class.
 The play is also sometimes termed a drawing-room comedy.
 The play uses farce (including many mix-ups) and satire to poke fun at the class-consciousness of
eighteenth-century Englishmen and to satirize what Goldsmith called the "weeping sentimental
comedy so much in fashion at present."
Setting
Most of the action takes place in the Hardcastle mansion in the English countryside, about sixty
miles from London.
 The mansion is an old but comfortable dwelling that resembles an inn.
 A brief episode takes place at a nearby tavern, The Three Pigeons Alehouse.
 The time is the eighteenth century.
 The story revolves around the family of Hardcastle and their friends. Goldsmith brings out the comic
effect in depicting this character, their foibles and schemes and in which lend them in more troubles .in
the very beginning of play in the first scene speech by Mr.Hardcastle….

“I love everything that is old ; Old friends, old times, old manners Old books, old wine, and I believe,
Dorothy , you‘ll own I have been Pretty fond of an old wife ”
Characters
Mr. Hardcastle:
Middle-aged gentleman who lives in an old mansion in the countryside about sixty miles from London.

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 He prefers to the simple rural life and its old-fashioned manners and customs to the trendy and
pretentious ways of upper-crust London.

Mrs. Dorothy Hardcastle:

Wife of Mr. Hardcastle.
Unlike her husband, she yearns to sample life in high society.
She also values material possessions and hopes to match her son (by her first husband) with her
niece, Constance Neville, in order to keep her niece's inheritance in the family.
Charles Marlow:
 Promising young man who comes to the country to woo the Hardcastles' pretty daughter, Kate.
 His only drawback is that he is extremely shy around refined young ladies, although he is completely at
ease—and even forward—with women of humble birth and working-class status.
 He is a pivotal character in the play, used by author Goldsmith to satirize England's preoccupation with,
and overemphasis on, class distinctions.
 However, Marlow's redeeming qualities make him a likeable character, and the audience tends to root
for him when he becomes the victim of a practical joke resulting in mix-ups and mistaken identities.
Kate Hardcastle:
 Pretty daughter of the Hardcastles who is wooed by Charles Marlow.
 When he mistakes her for a woman of the lower class, she allows him to continue to mistake her
identity, thus freeing his captive tongue so she can discover what he really thinks about her.
Tony Lumpkin:
 Son of Mrs. Hardcastle by her first husband.
 He is a fat, ale-drinking young man who has little ambition except to play practical jokes and visit the
local tavern whenever he has a mind.
 When Tony comes of age, he will receive 1,500 pounds a year.
 His mother hopes to marry him to her niece, Constance Neville, who is in line to inherit a casket of
jewels from her uncle.
 Tony and Miss Neville despise each other.
George Hastings:
 Friend of Marlow who loves Constance Neville.
 While Marlow is busy with Kate, Hastings is busy with Constance.
 Hastings hatches a plan to elope with Constance and receives the help of Tony, who wants to erase
Constance from his life—and his mother's constant efforts to match him with Constance.
Constance Neville:
 Comely young lady who loves Hastings
 Troubled by Mrs. Hardcastle's schemes to match her with Tony.
 Constance, an orphan, is the niece and ward of Mrs. Hardcastle (who holds Miss Neville's
inheritance in her possession until she becomes legally qualified to take possession of it) and the cousin
of Kate.
Sir Charles Marlow: Father of young Charles.
Servants in the Hardcastle Household
Maid in the Hardcastle Household
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 Landlord of the Three Pigeons Alehouse
First Fellow, Second Fellow, Third Fellow, Fourth Fellow: Drinking companions of Tony Lumpkin.

Summary
 In a downstairs room of their old mansion, Dorothy Hardcastle tells her husband that they need a little
diversion—namely, a trip to London, a city she has never visited.
 Their neighbors, the Hoggs sisters and Mrs. Grigsby, spend a month in London every winter. It is the
place to see and be seen.
 But old Hardcastle, content with his humdrum rural existence, says people who visit the great city
only bring back its silly fashions and vanities.
 Once upon a time, he says, London’s affectations and fopperies took a long time to reach the country;
now they come swiftly and regularly by the coach-load.
 Mrs. Hardcastle, eager for fresh faces and conversations, says their only visitors are Mrs. Oddfish,
the wife of the local minister, and Mr. Cripplegate, the lame dancing teacher.
 What’s more, their only entertainment is Mr. Hardcastle’s old stories about sieges and battles.
 But Hardcastle says he likes everything old—friends, times, manners, books, wine, and, of course, his
wife.
 Living in their home with them is their daughter, Kate, a pretty miss of marriageable age, and Tony,
Mrs. Hardcastle’s son by her first husband, Mr. Lumpkin.
 As a boy, Tony bedeviled his stepfather, Mr. Hardcastle, with every variety of mischief, burning a
servant’s shoes, scaring the maids, and vexing the kittens.
 And, Hardcastle says, “It was but yesterday he fastened my wig to the back of my chair, and when I
went to make a bow, I popt my bald head in Mrs. Frizzle’s face.”
 Now as a young man, Tony has become a fat slob who spends most of his time at the local alehouse.
 Soon he will come of age, making him eligible for an inheritance of 1500 pounds a year with which
to feed his fancies.
 Mrs. Hardcastle wants to match Tony with her niece and ward, Constance Neville, who has
inherited a casket of jewels from her uncle.
 As Miss Neville’s guardian, Mrs. Hardcastle holds the jewels under lock and key against the day when
Constance can take legal possession of them.
 While Mr. and Mrs. Hardcastle discuss the London trip that is not to take place, Tony passes between
them and sets off for the alehouse, The Three Pigeons.
 Mrs. Hardcastle chases out the door after him, saying he should find something better to do than
associate with riffraff.
 Alone, Mr. Hardcastle laments the follies of the age.
 Even his darling Kate is becoming infected, for now she has become fond of “French frippery.”
 When she enters the room, he tells her he has arranged for her to meet an eligible young man, Mr.
Charles Marlow, a scholar with many good qualities who “is designed for employment in the
service of the country.”
 Marlow is to arrive for a visit that very evening with a friend, Mr. George Hastings.
 Young Marlow is the son of Hardcastle’s friend, Sir Charles Marlow.

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 Kate welcomes the opportunity to meet the young man, although she is wary about her father’s
description of him as extremely shy around young ladies.
 By and by, Constance Neville comes in for a visit. When Kate tells her about young Mr. Marlow,
Constance tells her that her own admirer, Mr. Hastings, a friend of the Marlow family.
 Miss Neville welcomes the attentions of Hastings but laments Mrs. Hardcastle’s attempts to pair her
with her “pretty monster,” Tony, in an effort to keep Miss Neville’s jewels in the family.
 Tony and Constance despise each other.
Tony Plays Trick
 Meanwhile, at the alehouse, Tony is having a ripping good time singing and drinking when Hastings
and young Marlow come in asking for directions to the Hardcastle home.
 Having just arrived in the area from London after a wearisome trip, they have lost their way.
 Tony, who resents Mr. Hardcastle’s treatment of him lately, sees a way to get even:
 He tells Marlow and Hastings that Hardcastle is an ugly, cantankerous fellow and that his
daughter is a “tall, trapesing, trolloping, talkative maypole.”
 But, he says, Hardcastle’s son (meaning himself) is a “pretty, well-bred youth that everybody is fond
of.”
 Marlow says he has been told otherwise, namely, that the daughter is “well-bred and beautiful; the son,
an awkward booby, reared up and spoiled at his mother’s apron-string.”
 Taken aback, Tony is angered.
 Then, deciding to work a mischief, he tells them the Hardcastle home is too far to reach by nightfall
but that there is a nice inn just up the road.
 The “inn” is, of course, the Hardcastle home.
 When Marlow and Hastings arrive there, they note that the inn is old but commendable in its own
way.
 Hastings comments that Marlow has traveled widely, staying at many inns, but wonders why such
a man of the world is so shy around young women.
 Marlow reminds him that he is shy only around young ladies of culture and bearing. Around women
of the lower classes, he is a nonstop talker, a wag completely at ease.
 Hastings replies: “But in the company of women of reputation I never saw such an idiot, such a
trembler; you look for all the world as if you wanted an opportunity of stealing out of the room.”

 When Mr. Hardcastle enters, he welcomes them as the expected guests—the Marlow fellow who is to
meet his daughter and Marlow’s friend Hastings.
 However, the young men—believing that they are at the inn described by Tony—think Mr. Hardcastle
is the innkeeper, and treat him like one, giving him orders to prepare their supper and asking to see the
accommodations. Hardcastle is much offended by their behavior, thinking them the rudest of
visitors, for he remains unaware that they think they are at an inn.
 He keeps his feelings to himself.
 When Hardcastle goes upstairs with Marlow to show him his room, Hastings runs into Constance
Neville and, through his conversation with her, realizes that he is at the Hardcastle home, not an inn.
 Hastings decides to keep the information a secret from Marlow, fearing that Marlow would react to
the mix-up by immediately leaving.
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 Thus, he allows Marlow to believe that Constance and Kate are also guests at the “inn.”
 When Marlow finally meets Kate, his shyness all but tongue-ties him.
 Almost every time he starts a sentence, Kate has to finish it.
 But she compliments him on being so clever as to bring up interesting topics of conversation.
 All the while that they talk, Marlow lacks the courage even to look at her face.
 He does not even know what she looks like.
 In another room, Tony, who has returned from the pub, and Constance are insulting each other, as
usual, to the dismay of Mrs. Hardcastle.
 After Hastings observes their spitfire give-and-take, he tells Tony he will take the young lady off
his hands if Tony will help him win her.
“I’ll engage to whip her off to France, and you shall never hear more of her,” Hastings says.
Tony replies: “Ecod, I will [help] to the last drop of my blood.”

Hardcastle Annoyed
 Mr. Hardcastle, meanwhile, is becoming more and more annoyed with Marlow for treating him like a
assistant.
 Alone on the stage, Hardcastle laments, “He has taken possession of the easy-chair by the fire-side
already. He took off his boots in the parlour, and desired me to see them taken care of. I’m desirous to
know how his impudence affects my daughter.”
 Kate has been upstairs changing into casual clothes.
 When she comes down and talks with her father, she complaints Marlow’s incredible shyness while
Hardcastle, in turn, complains about Marlow’s rudeness.
 They wonder whether they are talking about the same person.
 While they converse, Tony, who knows where his mother keeps everything, gets the casket of jewels
Mrs. Hardcastle is holding for Constance and gives it to Hastings as an inducement for Hastings to
run off with Constance.
 Later, Mrs. Hardcastle discovers it missing and thinks a robber is about.
 Meanwhile, a maid tells Kate that Marlow believes he is at an inn.
 The maid also tells her that Marlow mistook Kate for a barmaid after she changed into her casual
attire.
 Kate decides to keep up the pretense, changing her voice and manner in Marlow’s presence.
 When he strikes up a conversation with her, he says she is “vastly handsome.” Growing bold, he adds,
“Suppose I should call for a taste, just by way of a trial, of the nectar of your lips.” (To audiences
attending the play, Marlow’s bold behavior is not at all surprising, for they are aware that
Marlow is a different man when in the presence of women of the servant class.)
 When old Hardcastle observes Kate and Marlow together, he sees Marlow seize Kate’s hand and
treat her like a milkmaid.
 He’s thinking of turning Marlow out.
 When he makes his feelings known to Kate, she asks for an hour to convince her father that Marlow
is not so bold and rude as her father believes he is.
 He agrees to her proposal.

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 The plot thickens at this point, for another visitor will shortly arrive—Marlow’s father, Sir Charles
Marlow.
 It seems Miss Neville happened on a letter to old Hardcastle in which Sir Charles announced that he
would arrive at the Hardcastle home a few hours after his son made his appearance.
 When she tells George Hastings of Sir Charles’s expected arrival at any minute, George worries
that Sir Charles—who is aware of George’s fondness for Constance—will somehow upset their plans to
run off together.
 Constance asks whether the jewels are safe. George assures her they are, for he has sent the jewels, via
a servant, to Marlow for safekeeping.
 Unfortunately, unknown to Hastings, Marlow has told the servant to give the casket of jewels to the
“landlady” for safekeeping.
 So the jewels are back where they were originally, in Mrs. Hardcastle’s possession (as Miss Neville’s
guardian).
 Tony tells his mother a servant was responsible for misplacing them.
 Satisfied, she returns to the task of promoting a romance between Tony and Constance, unaware that
Hastings and the young lady are plotting to abscond.
 Marlow is by now captivated by the barmaid and says to himself, “She’s mine, she must be mine.”
 Meanwhile, old Hardcastle has had enough of impudent Marlow and orders him to leave.
 Marlow protests.
 Hardcastle in anger exits in a huff.
 When Kate enters, she realizes Marlow now knows something strange is going on, so she reveals that
the inn is Hardcastle’s house.
 However, she describes herself as a “relative”—a “poor relation” who helps out.
 As such, she knows, Marlow will continue to talk to her freely, since a “poor relation” is the same in
standing as a barmaid.
 Marlow, shaken and deeply embarrassed, says, “To mistake this house of all others for an inn, and
my father's old friend for an innkeeper! What a swaggering puppy must he take me for! What a silly
puppy do I find myself!
 Marlow tells the “poor relation” that he will be leaving, in view of the circumstances, but notes that she
has been the only positive thing that happened to him during the confusing and disconcerting ordeal.
 His words help to identify the feeling she felt for him when they met: love.
 Her scheme of posing as a barmaid/poor relation to find out his real feelings—a scheme in which
she stooped to conquer—has proved wise.
 Further mix-ups develop involving Miss Neville’s jewels and Mr. Hastings’ planned elopement with
Constance.
 Tony is implicated as the trickster who set in motion the comedy of errors by telling Marlow and
Hastings that the Hardcastle home was an inn.
 When Sir Charles arrives, he and old Hardcastle have a laugh about the mix-ups, but Hardcastle
tells Kate that he is still unconvinced that Marlow is anything but rude and insulting.
 To prove that Marlow is a worthy man, Kate enacts one final scene as the poor relative while Marlow
converses with her and Sir Charles and Hardcastle listen behind a screen.

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 In the end, Kate reveals her identity to Marlow, and everyone understands the mistakes of the
evening.
 But there is a further development: Old Hardcastle reveals that Tony is “of age”—and has been for
three months, meaning he has a right now to make up his own mind about his future.
 Immediately, as his first act as his own man, Tony goes against his mother’s wishes and refuses to
marry Constance Neville, freeing her to marry Hastings—and qualifying her to receive the jewels.
 In the end, the young lovers—Kate and Marlow, Constance and Hastings—are betrothed.
 Mrs. Hardcastle comments, “This is all but the whining (buzzing) end of a modern novel.”
Style and Structure

 Goldsmith's style is wry, witty, and simple but graceful.

 From beginning to end, the play is both entertaining and easy to understand, presenting few words and
idioms that modern audiences would not understand.
 It is also well constructed and moves along rapidly, the events of the first act—in particular, references
to Tony Lumpkin's childhood propensity for working mischief and playing playing practical jokes—
foreshadowing the events of the following acts.
 There are frequent scene changes, punctuated by an occasional appearance of a character alone on
the stage (solus in the stage directions) reciting a brief account of his feelings.
 In modern terms, the play is a page-turner for readers.
 Goldsmith observed the classical unities of time and place, for the action of the play takes place in
single locale (the English countryside) on a single day.
 Goldsmith completed the play in 1773.
 It was first performed at Covent Garden Theatre in London on March 15 of that year.

The Vicar of Wakefield

The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale, Supposed to be written by Himself
A novel by Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith (1728–1774)
Dr Samuel Johnson, one of Goldsmith's closest friends, told how The Vicar of Wakefield came to be sold
for publication:
I received one morning a message from poor Goldsmith that he was in great distress, and, as it
was not in his power to come to me, begging that I would come to him as soon as possible. I sent
him a guinea, and promised to come to him directly. I accordingly went as soon as I was dressed,
and found that his landlady had arrested him for his rent, at which he was in a violent passion: I
perceived that he had already changed my guinea, and had a bottle of Madeira and a glass before
him. I put the cork into the bottle, desired he would be calm, and began to talk to him of the
means by which he might be extricated. He then told me he had a novel ready for the press, which
he produced to me. I looked into it and saw its merit; told the landlady I should soon return; and,
having gone to a bookseller, sold it for sixty pounds. I brought Goldsmith the money, and he
discharged his rent, not without rating his landlady in a high tone for having used him so ill.
The novel was The Vicar of Wakefield, and Johnson had sold it to Francis Newbery, a nephew of John.
Newbery "kept it by him for nearly two years unpublished".
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 Synopsis
 The Vicar – Dr Charles Primrose – lives an idyllic life in a country parish with his wife Deborah, son
George, daughters Olivia and Sophia, and three other children.
 He is wealthy due to investing an inheritance he received from a deceased relative, and he donates the
£35 that his job pays annually to local orphans and war veterans.
 On the evening of George's wedding to wealthy Arabella Wilmot, the Vicar loses all his money
through the bankruptcy of his merchant investor who has left town abruptly.
 The wedding is called off by Arabella's father, who is known for his prudence with money.
 George, who was educated at Oxford and is old enough to be considered an adult, is sent away to
town.
 The rest of the family move to a new and more humble parish on the land of Squire Thornhill, who
is known to be a womanizer.
 On the way, they hear about the dubious reputation of their new landlord.
 Also, references are made to the squire's uncle Sir William Thornhill, who is known throughout the
country for his worthiness and generosity.
 A poor and eccentric friend, Mr. Burchell, whom they meet at an inn, rescues Sophia from drowning.
 She is instantly attracted to him, but her ambitious mother does not encourage her feelings.
 Then follows a period of happy family life, interrupted only by regular visits of the dashing Squire
Thornhill and Mr. Burchell.
 Olivia is captivated by Thornhill's hollow charm, but he also encourages the social ambitions of Mrs.
Primrose and her daughters to a ludicrous degree.
 Finally, Olivia is reported to have fled.
 First Burchell is suspected, but after a long pursuit Dr. Primrose finds his daughter, who was in reality
deceived by Squire Thornhill.
 He planned to marry her in a mock ceremony and leave her then shortly after, as he had done with
several women before.
 When Olivia and her father return home, they find their house in flames.
 Although the family has lost almost all their belongings, the evil Squire Thornhill insists on the
payment of the rent.
 As the vicar cannot pay, he is brought to prison.
 Afterwards is a chain of dreadful occurrences.
 The vicar's daughter, Olivia, is reported dead, Sophia is abducted, and George too is sent to prison
in chains and covered with blood, as he had challenged Thornhill to a duel when he had heard about his
wickedness.
 But then Mr. Burchell arrives and solves all problems.
 He rescues Sophia, Olivia is not dead, and it emerges that Mr. Burchell is in reality the worthy Sir
William Thornhill, who travels through the country in disguise.
 In the end, there is a double wedding: George marries Arabella, as he originally intended, and Sir
William Thornhill marries Sophia.
 Squire Thornhill's servant turns out to have tricked him, and thus the sham marriage of the Squire and
Olivia is real.
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 Finally, even the wealth of the vicar is restored, as the bankrupt merchant is reported to be found.

Structure and Narrative Technique

The book consists of 32 chapters which fall into three parts:
 chapter 1 – 3: beginning
 chapter 4 – 29: main part
 chapter 30 – 32: ending
Chapter 17, when Olivia is reported to be fled, can be regarded as the climax as well as an essential
turning point of the novel.
From chapter 17 onwards it changes from a comical account of 18th-century country life into a pathetic
melodrama with didactic traits.
There are quite a few interpolations of different literary genres, such as poems, histories or sermons,
which widen the restricted view of the first person narrator and serve as didactic fables.
The novel can be regarded as a fictitious memoir, as it is told by the vicar himself by retrospection.
Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)

Aristotle’s The Poetics

The Poetics is in part Aristotle's response to his teacher, Plato, who argues in The Republic that poetry is
representation of mere appearances and is thus misleading and morally suspect.
Aristotle approaches literary texts as a natural scientist, carefully accounting for the features of each
"species" of text.
Rather than concluding that poets should be banished from the perfect society, as does Plato, Aristotle
attempts to describe the social function, and the ethical utility, of art.

One of the most difficult concepts introduced in the Poetics is catharsis, a word which has come into
everyday language even though scholars are still debating its actual meaning in Aristotle's text.

Catharsis is most often defined as the "purging" of the emotions of pity and fear that occurs when we
watch a tragedy.

German Philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer's attempt to describe catharsis in his study Truth and
Method can serve both as a working definition and an introduction into the problem of establishing any
determinate definition of this elusive concept:
What is experienced in such an excess of tragic suffering is something truly common. The spectator
recognizes himself [or herself] and his [or her] finiteness in the face of the power of fate. What happens
to the great ones of the earth has exemplary significance. . . .To see that "this is how it is" is a kind of
self-knowledge for the spectator, who emerges with new insight from the illusions in which he [or she],
like everyone else, lives. (132)

Criticism, according to Aristotle, should not be simply the application of unexamined aesthetic
principles, but should pay careful attention to the overall function of a any feature of a work of art in its
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 context within the work, and should never lose sight of the function of the work of art in its social
context.

Poetry
In Aristotle, poetry refers to literary works in general and extends even to include some kinds of
musical performances.

The word "poetry" is derived from the Greek verb poiesis, "making." For Aristotle, all poetry is
mimetic; its goal is to represent reality. As poetry is the product of human making, human experience is
the ultimate object of poetic representation.

The essential feature of all forms of poetry is they are all modes of imitation or mimesis.
Mimesis
All poetry, Aristotle argues, is imitation or mimesis.
Aristotle imagines that poetry springs from a basic human delight in mimicry. Humans learn through
imitating and take pleasure in looking at imitations of the perceived world.
The mimetic dimension of the poetic arts is, in Aristotle, always representational; he does not seem to
recognize anything like the twentieth-century concept of "abstract" art.

Genre
Genres are categories into which kinds of literary material are organized.
The genres Aristotle discusses include the epic, the tragedy, the comedy, dithyrambic poetry, and phallic
songs. Genres are often divided into complex sub-categories.

Epic
Exemplified throughout the Poetics by the works of Homer, the epic is a poetic genre that
uses narrative to convey its plot to the audience. T
he meter proper to the epic is the hexameter. The epic poet, Aristotle observes, can either speak in his or
her own words, or take on the voices of characters in order to advance the unfolding of the plot.

Tragedy
Aristotle defines tragedy in Book VI as "an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a
certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being
found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting
the proper purgation of these emotions" (51).
This definition crystallizes much of Aristotle's arguments throughout the Poetics:
 a tragedy is first and foremost the representation of human action;
 the actions represented have serious, often dire consequences and the characters represented are of
elevated social status;
 the plot is a complete, coherent whole, lasting long enough to represent adequately the reversal of the
hero's fortune;

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 the language in which a tragedy is composed employs tropes and other heightened or unusual uses of
speech and a mixture of different poetic meters;
 the mode of imitation in a tragedy is drama as opposed to narrative;
 the tragedy arouses pity and fear in the viewer and brings about catharsis.

Comedy
For Aristotle, comedy represents human beings as "worse than they are," but he notes that comic
characters are not necessarily evil, just ridiculous and laughable.
He contrasts comedy with tragedy, which represents humans as "better than they are."
Many scholars speculate that Aristotle treated comedy in a lost section of the Poetics or in another lost
treatise.

Dithyrambic poetry
Performed at festivals honoring the god Dionysus, dithyrambic poetry incorporated choral song and
dance.
One theory of the origin of Greek tragedy argues that dithyrambic poetry was eventually coupled with a
performance by a single actor playing the role of a legendary hero, giving rise to the basic structure of
the tragedy.

Phallic songs
Phallic songs are similar to both dithyrambic and nomic poetry in that they were performed at religious
festivals, especially fertility rituals.
Aristotle suggests that phallic songs developed into early forms of the comedy.

Book I
Aristotle identifies three aspects in which poetic genres can be distinguished from each other:
the medium through which they present their imitation, the objects of imitation, and
the mode or manner of the imitation.
The remainder of Book I is devoted to a discussion of the different media of imitation;

The Medium of Imitation

The three basic media which Aristotle recognizes are rhythm, language, and harmony.

Book I concludes with a brief mention of those genres which use a combination of the three media.
These include dithyrambic poetry (lyric poetry performed in song and dance as a tribute to the god
Dionysus), nomic poetry (also choral lyrics, performed in praise of Apollo and other gods), and the
dramatic genres of tragedy and comedy, in which the chorus conveys the elements of the play's text in
song and dance.

Book II
The Objects of Imitation
poetry is the representation of the actions of human beings.
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Aristotle views poetry in distinctly moral terms: as a human product, poetry must fundamentally be
"about" the activities and qualities that shape human experience.
Representations of human beings in poetry can be sorted into three categories:
1) depictions of humans as better than they really are,
2) depictions of humans as they are in reality, and
3) depictions of humans as worse than they really are.

Aristotle seems to recognize here that particular poets may represent humans differently in the same
genre, as in the example of Timotheus and Philoxenus, who represent the Cyclopes differently in their
works.
Some general generic distinctions, however, can be made, especially between comedy, which tends to
represent its characters in negative terms, and tragedy, which portrays humans as more noble than they
are in actuality.

Book III
The Mode of Imitation
Aristotle's third means of distinguishing among different poetic genres, the mode of representation, can
be divided into two categories: narrative and drama.
In narrative, Aristotle tells us, the poet represents a course of events as a story, either assuming the
perspective of another person or speaking directly to the audience in his or her own person.
Dramatists place a course of events before us by means of actors who represent the events by taking on
the roles of different persons involved.
The interrelationships between Aristotle's different distinctions becomes clear in the next passage, in
which Aristotle notes that in terms of object, Sophocles and Homer are comparable, since both tend to
make their characters more noble than people in real life, but that in terms of
mode Sophocles and Aristophanes (a comic dramatist) are the same kind of poet.
In the closing passages of this chapter, Aristotle explores the rival claims to the invention of tragedy and
comedy by the Dorians and the Megarians.
This debate may strike us as hidden, but the etymological evidence for the origin of the word
"comedy" is worth our attention, as it might give hints about the social status of this genre in its early
history.
The Dorians claim that word is derived from their word for "village," implying that the troupes of comic
actors were driven from urban centers and wandered from village to village as itinerant players.
Today, the more accepted etymology derives "comedy" from the word komoidia, which describes the
singing and dancing associated with festivals of Dionysus.

Book IV
The Origins of Poetry
This chapter introduces the speculative dimension of the Poetics, raising the question of the origins of
poetry and the role of poetry in human life.
The impulse to produce poetry, and the pleasure we take in experiencing poetry, derive from two basic
characteristics of human consciousness: the instinct to imitate and the instinct for harmony and rhythm.
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Aristotle observes that humans learn through imitation–think of how children learn to speak their native
languages, for example, or how they learn to equate certain gestures with certain meanings–and that the
pleasure we take in looking at imitations in art is rooted in the pleasure we take in learning. Even
something that in real life would be repugnant, a centipede, for example, can be the source of pleasure if
we see an especially precise (or, for a more modern consciousness, an especially imaginative) rendering
of it in art.
Aristotle imagines that early humans acted upon these impulses, creating imitations of what they
observed and coupling them with rhythmic and musical patterns. The results were the earliest
manifestations of poetry.
The divisions Aristotle established in his discussion of the object of poetic imitation return here.
High-minded persons imitated noble deeds and heroes, while "ignoble" or "trivial" persons chose to
compose parodies lampooning the foolish behavior of their fellow humans.
Aristotle gives the works of Homer credit for establishing the main lines of both the "serious" and the
"low" forms of poetry, attributing to Homer a lost epic called Margites which depicts comic episodes in
the life of Margites, a buffoon.

The History of Tragedy and Comedy

Continuing his history of the development of tragedy and comedy, Aristotle argues that both genres
began as improvisations based on earlier forms, tragedy slowly emerging from dithyrambic poetry and
comedy developing out of the phallic songs performed at festivals of Dionysus. Aristotle seems to
recognize that the genres continue to develop and may not have reached their final form.
A more detailed history of the formal development of tragedy follows.
The dramatist Aeschylus (author of Agamemnon and several other tragedies) introduced a second
actor, moving much of the representative function of the play in the dialogue between actors and
reducing the role of the chorus in the narration.
Sophocles (author of Oedipus the King and several other tragedies) added a third actor and developed
the use of painted backdrops–the beginnings of what we now consider "stagecraft."
Aristotle concludes this chapter with remarks about the changes in the meter used for composing
tragedies, which shifted from trochaic tetrameter, a meter better suited to delivery coupled with dance
movements to one closer to the cadences of conversational speech, the iambic.

Book V
Comedy
Aristotle cautions his readers to understand the characters presented in comedy as more ridiculous than
evil; the defects of these characters do not necessarily lead to pain or destruction.
Epic and Tragedy
After a brief discussion of the scarcity of historical information about the development of comedy,
Aristotle turns to a comparison of the epic and the tragedy.
Epic poetry is limited to one kind of meter (hexameter) and is narrative in form.
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The events depicted in an epic can also span a long period of time, while the tragedy treats events that
take place in a time not much longer than a full day, "one revolution of the sun."
This last distinction of the tragedy is a component of the famous unities which later aestheticians
and poets took as absolute rules in the writing of tragedies.
All elements of epic poetry, Aristotle concludes, including the idealization of the characters, are
found in tragedy, but tragedy does not share all of its formal elements with the epic.

Book VI
The Definition of Tragedy

This chapter opens with Aristotle's famous definition of tragedy:

Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in
language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in
separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting
the proper purgation of these emotions. (51)
Following his definition, Aristotle begins to introduce the six constitutive components of a tragedy.

The first in the discussion is spectacle, which includes the costuming of the actors, the scenery, and all
other aspects that contribute to the visual experience of the play.
Next come song and diction. Song obviously refers to the vocal compositions incorporated into the
performance, and diction refers to the metrical composition of the spoken lines.
Aristotle moves on to elements relating to the humans represented in tragedy, thought and character.
Character includes all qualities we associate with individuals represented in the play; the meaning
of thought is more elusive, but it seems to indicate the processes of reasoning that lead characters to
behave as they do.
The final component is plot, which Aristotle defines as "the arrangement of the incidents" (51).

These six elements can be organized, as Aristotle shows, under the major categories of medium, object,
and mode:
Medium object Mode
Diction plot Spectacle
Song character
thought

The Elements of Tragedy

Aristotle presents these components in order of importance, expanding a little on the significance of
each to the tragedy as a whole.

Objects
Plot
Emphasizing that tragedy is first and foremost the representation of actions, and not of characters,

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Aristotle makes the remark that many contemporary tragedies do not succeed in their characterizations,
but are still tragedies. The tragic effect comes from the plot, and especially from the peripeteia–the
reversal of the situation in which the characters find themselves– as well as from scenes of recognition.
Character
Character is second in importance after plot; tragedies depict characters as they relate to the action
which is the main object of representation. Characters represent their moral qualities throught the
speeches assigned to them by the dramatist.
Thought Thought comprises both the rational processes through which characters come to decisions, as
represented in the drama, as well as the values put forward in the form of maxims and proverbs.
Media
Diction
Diction has already been defined as the metrical composition of the play, the way language is used to
convey the representation.
Song
Music is described as an embellishment of language. The lines assigned to the chorus in a tragedy are
usually conveyed in song accompanied by rhythmical movement.

Mode
Spectacle
Aristotle lists spectacle last in order of importance, pointing out that the power of tragedy is not fully
dependent upon its performance (we can read a tragedy and still appreciate its message), and that the art
of the spectacle really belongs to the set designer and not to the poet.

Book VII
The Plot

The precision with which Aristotle conducts his analysis of tragic drama is at times almost amusing. In
this chapter, he repeats part of his definition of tragedy, that it is "an imitation of an action that is
complete, and whole, and of a certain magnitude" (52), and goes on to define exactly what he means by
"whole."
A whole has a beginning, a middle, and an end.
A beginning is something that is not caused by something else and from which something follows.
A middle follows something and is followed by something.
An end follows something and is not followed by anything.
By "magnitude" Aristotle means something like "proportionality."
The rule that the duration of the events represented in a tragedy should encompass not much more than a
single day–a rule that became hard and fast for some later theorists of tragedy such as the French Neo-
Classicists–appears in Aristotle as more of a suggestion, a "rule of thumb."

A play should last, he tells us, as long as it needs to in order to represent a reversal of fortune: a change
from good to bad or from bad to good.

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Book VIII
The Unity of the Plot

In Book VIII, Aristotle again emphasizes the importance of a coherent plot, observing that some poets
assume that if they write about the exploits of one character–Hercules,
Life is not a plot, Aristotle argues.
The events of a life, even the life of an imaginary character, must be sorted and organized.
Homer, for example, does not include all of the details known about Odysseus's life in the Odyssey, but
selects a series of events (the hero's homecoming) and assembles them into a consistent and unified
whole.
A successful plot relies on the discernment of the poet, who must identify that set and sequence of
events that can be presented to the audience as a whole.
The test of the unity of a plot is that no part can be removed without changing and distorting the
meaning of the whole.
This interrelationship between part and whole remains fundamental to the field of literary hermeneutics,
which maintains that each part of a work must be understood in relation to the whole, while the whole
can only be grasped by understanding each of its parts.

Book IX
Poetry and History

Since life is not a plot, it is not sufficient for a poet simply to record events as they happen. Such a
chronicle is history, but not poetry.
Even if history were cast into the same kind of meter as is used in tragedy, Aristotle argues, it would
only be history in verse.
A poet "should the maker of plots rather than verses" (54), for plots, more than merely organizing
events into a coherent structure, serve to represent the universal laws of probability.

The true difference between historians and poets, Aristotle states, is that the former records what
has happened, while the latter represents what may happen.

Poetry is more "philosophical" than history, according to Aristotle, because in order to unfold a plot in a
manner that is convincing to the audience, the poet must grasp and represent the internal logic, the
necessity, of the outcome of those events.

Aristotle condemns poets that simply string episodes together, and reminds his readers that tragic plots
must not only be coherent but also inspire "fear or pity" in the audience.

He concludes this chapter with a suggestive analysis of surprise in drama: a surprising development in a
tragedy is most effective when it does not merely produce shock at an unexpected occurance, but rather
has an "air of design" (54) and seems to be the necessary, inevitable (but still frightening) outcome of a
chain of actions.
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Book X
Simple and Complex Plots

Aristotle, always concerned to establish categories to assist him in his analysis, offers in this brief
chapter a distinction between the simple plot and the complex plot.
The simple plot represents a change of fortune which does not come about through a reversal of the
situation and does not involve recognition on the part of the hero.
In the complex plot, the change of fortune emerges of necessity from the events preceding it. It is
brought about through a reversal of the situation or recognition, or both.

In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster makes a distinction between "story" and "plot" that
corresponds quite closely to Aristotle's distinction between simple and complex plots.

"'The king died and then the queen died' is a story," Forster writes.
"The king died, and then the queen died of grief' is a plot" (86).

The significant difference, Aristotle concludes, lies in whether the final outcome of the plot is
simply post hoc ("after") or, as in the case of complex plots, propter hoc ("because of").

Book XI

Peripeteia

One of the components of the complex plot, the reversal of the situation, is an event that occurs contrary
to our expectations and that is therefore surprising, but that nonetheless appears as a necessary outcome.
The Greek term for this reversal is peripeteia.

Anagnorisis

Anagnorisis is the Greek term for "recognition," another component of the complex plot, and describes
the often sudden revelation (such as Oedipus's discovery that he has, despite his efforts to avoid it,
fulfilled the prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother) that propels a tragedy to its
conclusion.
The presence of either peripeteia or anagnorisis makes a plot complex, but Aristotle indicates that in
the most successful plots both are not only present but also simultaneous.
Aristotle remarks again that tragic heroes (and the audiences of tragedies) experience peripeteia (or
"peripety") and anagnorisis as surprises.

Pathos

At the end of this chapter, Aristotle acknowledges the "scene of suffering" which arouses strong
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emotions–pathos–from the audience as a third component of the tragic plot. Examples of this scene of
suffering include the slaying of Agamemnon or the blinding of Oedipus.

Book XII

The Parts of the Tragedy

The formal parts of the tragedy's performance are given here in a brief outline.

Prologue
Extends from the opening of the play to the first full performance by the chorus.

Episode
Those scenes of the tragedy which take place between choric performances.

Exode Extends from the final choric performance to the end of the play.

Chorus
The choric performances are divided into two parts: the parode, the first full performance of the chorus
while it is processing into the stage area, and the stasima, the choric performances that alternate with the
episodes of dialogue by the actors.

Commos
A performance within the tragedy in which both actors and chorus take part.

Book XIII
Appropriate Plots for the Tragedy
Given that Aristotle views all poetry in moral terms, it is not surprising that his determinations about the
proper subject matter for tragedy focus on questions of justice and the "moral sense" of the audience.

The tragic plot centers on a change of fortune, but Aristotle is careful to identify what kind of reversal of
fortune is truly "tragic."
Aristotle defends the work of Euripides against other critics on this point, because in the tragedies of

Euripides, the fall from good fortune arises out of the circumstances of the plot and the nature of the
characters.
Fundamental to Aristotle's opinion about the right kind of tragic plot is the famous pity and fear that the
audience must experience.

The downfall of a purely virtuous character is not tragic, only shocking.

The triumph of a villain is likewise not tragic because it inspires neither pity nor fear.

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No more tragic is the downfall of a completely despicable character, satisfying though it may be,
because we fail to identify with the character.

Identification seems to be key to Aristotle's theory: "for pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune, fear
by the misfortune of a [person] like ourselves" (55).

For Aristotle, the tragic hero must be a person of high stature who is neither faultless nor
depraved, whose misfortune arises through a terrible mistake.

Hamartia

Aristotle's word for mistake, hamartia, deserves some attention. The popular idea about the tragic hero
beset by some "fatal flaw" is not a completely accurate representation of Aristotle's concept of the error
that brings about a tragic outcome. Hamartia conveys the sense of "overshooting the mark," or
"overreaching," and does not indicate some predisposition to a particular crime. In order for a character's
fate to fill us with pity and fear, we must recognize that we ourselves might commit a similar error in
judgment were we in a similar situation.

Book XIV
Plot Structures
In this chapter, Aristotle accounts for the four kinds of actions that can be represented in tragic plots
and evaluates each of them.
The common feature is that the destructive actions must be take place among people who are on friendly
or familiar terms with one another.
The perpetrator of the destructive action can act consciously, aware of the identities of those he or she is
harming.
The murder of Agamemnon by Clytemnestra is an example of this kind of action.
The perpetrator can act without awareness of the close ties between him- or herself and the victims, as in
the case of Oedipus.
The hero can be about to commit a conscious, destructive act against known persons but then fail to
follow through with the action.
Finally, a person can be about to act against those close to him in ignorance, and then be rescued from
the deed by learning of their identities in time.
Aristotle dismisses the third kind of action as being completely outside the domain of the tragic,
for there is no disaster.
The first kind is much better, because at least something happens, but even better is the second, in which
the disaster is compounded by a revelation of the close ties between perpetrator and victim.
Somewhat surprisingly, Aristotle views the fourth kind as the best, when a destructive action is avoided
just in time.
Aristotle concludes by observing that it is not unsual that poets should look to certain unlucky families,
such as those of Agamemnon and Oedipus, for material for tragedies.

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Book XV
Character
Poets should pursue four goals in constructing their characters, according to Aristotle.
Goodness
For Aristotle, the most important aspect of a character is goodness, which seems to be linked to some
sense of the character's intentionality. The sharp hierarchization of ancient Greek culture is evident in
Aristotle's remarks about the possibility of a woman or a slave to exhibit goodness. Even though he
concedes that this is possible, the statement betrays the subaltern status of both.
Propriety
The behavior of characters must be suitable for their social rank. Here again, the stratification of the
society of Aristotle's time is quite clear.
Verisimilitude
Characters must be believable. Attributes assigned to characters must conform to what would be
expected from the same kinds of persons in real life.
Consistency
The kinds of behaviors assigned to a character must not change suddenly and inexplicably; if a character
is meant to be represented as indecisive, erratic, or otherwise inconsistent, this inconsistency must be
consistently portrayed.
Deus ex machina
Aristotle is concerned with preserving the identification of the audience with the actions depicted in the
tragedy. Any of us who have read novels or seen plays or films in which something doesn't "ring true"
can understand how flaws in plotting and characterization can interfere with our capacity to get caught
up in the story. Both character and plot must be consistent and develop in ways that conform to the laws
of probability, Aristotle argues. He restricts the famous theatrical device of the deus ex machina, the
"god from the machine," from taking part in the plot itself. The gods should not intervene to resolve an
impossibly complicated plot. They can, however, appear to cast judgment on the characters once the plot
has come to its necessary conclusion.

Book XVI
Anagnorisis
Aristotle lists the ways in which recognition can take place in a tragic plot.
Signs
The least imaginative method for bringing about a recognition, according to Aristotle, is through some
identifying mark or sign. An example of this kind of anagnorisis is Euryklea's recognition of Odysseus
by the scar on his thigh.
Contrived Revelations
Aristotle also criticizes strained devices that require that characters reveal their identities simply because
a recognition must take place to advance the plot.
Memory
Events in the plot may awaken memories in one of the characters, as the songs of the harper in the
Phaiakian court arose Odysseus's memories and bring about the revelation of his identity.
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Reasoning
Sometimes characters figure out another's identity through logical analysis. Aristotle approves of this
kind of anagnorisis; only anagnorisis arising naturally from the unfolding of the plot is superior to that
brought about by reasoning.
Natural Outcomes of the Plot
The best kind of recognition scene is completely integrated into the action of the plot. The messenger
arriving to tell Oedipus to stop worrying about the prophecy, for example, unwittingly brings about the
revelation of Oedipus's real identity.

Book XVII
Advice to Poets
In Book XVII Aristotle gives poets some pointers on how to construct a tragedy. The poet should
attempt to visualize the scenes before composing the text, and should even take on the different
characters in an effort to understand them more fully.
The poet should work from an outline which encapsulates the plot, Aristotle suggests, and should clarify
which elements of the story contribute to a coherent, complex plot and which are extraneous. He
observes that the number of discrete episodes is limited in a tragedy, but can be quite numerous in an
epic. Nevertheless, the even plot of an epic as rich with incident as the Odyssey can be summarized in a
few sentences, as Aristotle demonstrates. The plot embodies the telos of the drama or the epic; to grasp
the plot is to understand both the unity and the purpose of the actions that are represented.

Book XVIII
The Trajectory of the Plot
In terms of the progression of the plot, Aristotle divides the tragedy in to two parts, the complication and
the denouement or "unraveling." The complication extends from the beginning of the play to the
moment of peripeteia and/or anagnorisis–the turning point of the plot. The denouement includes this
turning point and extends to the conclusion of the play.
Aristotle seems to refine his categories of plot in this chapter, listing the complex plot which turns on
peripeteia and anagnorisis, the pathetic plot in which characters are motivated by passion, the ethical
plot in which an ethical sense propels the action, and the simple plot, which does not contain peripeteia
or anagnorisis. Aristotle clearly favors complex plots which combine all the poetic elements to good
effect.
This chapter concludes with an elaboration of earlier remarks on the unity of the tragic plot. Aristotle
again asserts that poets should not confuse the epic, which can contain a number of plots and subplots,
and the tragedy, which must consist of one focused plot. He also remarks on the role of the chorus,
recommending that choral performances be integrated closely into the action of the plot, rather than
serving as mere interludes between episodes.

Book XIX
Thought
All mental activities portrayed by the speeches of characters in the drama fall into the category
of thought. Aristotle lists the logical and rhetorical exercises of proof and refutation, expressions of
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emotional states, and judgments as types of thought represented in tragedy. Aristotle cautions that
speeches must not be used merely for exposition, to explain the plot to the audeince, but that the
episodes should appear to unfold naturally, requiring no explanation from the actors. Here again,
Aristotle stresses the integration of the different components of the tragic drama.
Diction
Aristotle's discussion of diction is brief and suggests that this component lies outside of the poet's art.
Diction describes the way characters deliver their speeches. Experts in the art of oratory (or, in our own
time, the director and dialogue coach) are more responsible for the success of this dimension of tragedy
than the poet.

Book XX
Language
Many scholars agree that this detailed description of the phenomenon of language is an interpolation
into Aristotle's text. Words–"significant sounds"–are built up, this chapter argues, of letters and syllables
and their corresponding sounds. Some of the comments here apply to particular features of the Greek
language. We can, however, understand his distinction between nouns and verbs, the latter having a
temporal dimension insofar as they describe actions that take place in time. If we want to try to situate
this microscopic analysis of language into the overall discussion of tragedy, we should observe that
meaningful sentences, like the tragedies for which they supply the building blocks, are composed of
linked parts, all of which are necessary to preserve their unity and meaning.

Book XXI
Uses of Words Aristotle identifies several categories into which the words used in tragedies can be
separated: current words, strange words, metaphors, ornamental words, and altered words. Current
words are those spoken by persons living in the region in which the tragedy is composed and performed;
strange words are foreign terms and loan-words. The meanings of most of these designations are
obvious.
Aristotle's discussion of metaphor is characteristically precise. The following diagrams might help to
understand the different types of metaphor he describes. The examples are correspond to the ones
Aristotle provides.

Book XXII
Style
Successful style must be clear but not commonplace, Aristotle argues. As always, he stresses balance:
style must use elements of metaphor and the occasional unusual word, or it will never achieve the effects
the poet desires. Too much metaphorical or unfamiliar language, however, will only serve to confuse the
audience.
Aristotle provides a number of examples of the use of figures of speech or tropes, many of which
depend on plays on words in the original Greek. His conclusion, though, is worth our attention, because
he argues that the greatest talent a poet can possess is a command of the use of metaphor. This ability
requires "an eye for resemblances" (62). Most of us recognize our own use of metaphorical language
when we try to express ourselves; even the most common expressions make use of tropes. When we are
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sick or tired, for example, we might say "I feel like death warmed over." We turn to metaphors, too,
when we attempt to explain or understand something, as when we describe the processor in our
computer as being like a brain.

Book XXIII
The Epic
In Book XXIII, Aristotle turns to the subject of the epic. He views the epic in terms of the tragedy,
stating that the epic should be constructed with an eye to the drama (we assume he means such factors as
pacing and dialogue should be given careful attention) and that, like the tragedy, it should concern a
single, unified action. Aristotle himself uses metaphor to emphasize the need for coherence in a plot: the
epic (and the tragedy as well) should be like a living organism in which all parts have their special and
indispensable function.
Homer is Aristotle's favored example in his discussion of the epic. Rather than trying to represent the
entire complex phenomenon of the Trojan War, Homer focuses on a single event in each of his epics,
bringing in other events as episodes to add drama and diversity without distracting from the central
story. Homer's epics are for this reason most like tragedies: their stories are focused and unified wholes,
not simply sequences of episodes.

Book XXIV
The Components of the Epic
The epic shares all of the basic components of the tragedy except song and spectacle. Like the tragedy,
the plot of the successful epic depicts a change in fortune for the hero and requires reversals and/or
recognitions. Here again, Homer provides "our earliest and sufficient model" (63).
Aristotle goes on to enumerate the differences between epic and tragedy. The epic is composed in a
different meter–the hexameter–and does not allow for mixed meters, as does the tragedy. The epic is not
as restricted in terms of magnitude as the tragedy; epics enjoy the capacity to include many more
episodes than a tragedy could accommodate. Furthermore, the narrative medium of the epic allows for
the depiction of events that occur simultaneously, an impossibility for tragedy within the conventions of
ancient Greek stagecraft.
Homer is Aristotle's favored example in his discussion of the epic. Rather than trying to represent the
entire complex phenomenon of the Trojan War, Homer focuses on a single event in each of his epics,
bringing in other events as episodes to add drama and diversity without distracting from the central
story. Homer's epics are for this reason most like tragedies: their stories are focused and unified wholes,
not simply sequences of episodes.
Homer gets high praise here for knowing his place as regards his role as a narrator. Unlike many epic
poets, he speaks comparatively little in his own voice, allowing his characters to advance the story
through dialogue and speeches.
In a famous passage, Aristotle admires Homer's capacity to lie and offers a sophisticated theory of
fiction, arguing that poets should strive for "probable impossibilities" rather than "improbable
possibilities" (63). One of Aristotle's examples of a probable impossibility is Odysseus's arrival in Ithaca
while asleep. The suggestion seems to be that if a poet can successful establish a fabulous or uncanny

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series of events, we as readers will be more willing to suspend our disbelief than if the poet represented
ordinary actions in a strained, unconvincing manner.

Book XXV
Criticism
Aristotle lays out the terms in which poetry can be evaluated. From the outset, he recognizes that the
standards of correctness and effectiveness that we apply to the language of poetry are not the same as
those we use to evaluate other arts or even other uses of language–political speeches, for example. His
approach to criticism is corresponds to his basic assumption that all art is mimetic; many of his remarks
address the success of a work in representing perceived reality.
Faults in poetic works can be organized into two general categories: essential faults that impair the work
as a while and accidental faults, such as factual errors, that may be irritating, distracting, and
disappointing, but do not indicate a failure of artistic skill. Book XXV goes on to cover five sub-
categories of faulty representation: impossibility, irrationality, moral harmfulness, contradiction,
and failure to conform to artistic rules.
All errors should be avoided, Aristotle asserts, but he seems interested in establishing fair conditions for
criticism. Throughout this chapter, he reflects on ways each of the five criticisms might be refuted,
stressing that critics must always bear in mind the self-consistency and purpose of the work as a whole.
Aristotle does not appear to address these errors in any particular order, and does not directly address the
issue of moral harm. His remarks on the remaining categories are as follows:
Impossibility
Aristotle argues that poets should not, in general, depict impossible events, but that if the impossible
event serves the artistic purpose, there is no fault in it (magical realist fiction might be a contemporary
example of this kind of work). Aristotle reminds us that the "probable" is only "probable," and that in
reality improbable events really do occur sometimes. Minor factual errors–representing a female deer as
having antlers, for example–should not be grounds for dismissing the whole work.
Irrationality
Irrational behavior in a character can be justified in the same way as the impossible event: if it is
necessary to the plot to have a character behave erratically or irrationally, such a representation is
justified. Gratuitous badness in characters, however, should be condemned.
Contradiction When we meet with apparent contradictions in a work of art, we must apply careful
methods of analysis to determine whether the word or phrase that seems to contradict an earlier
expression in fact has the meaning we are assigning it. Aristotle suggests that we credit the author with
enough intelligence to avoid blatant contradiction until we are convinced that the inconsistency is in fact
a mistake and not an artistic strategy.
Failure to Conform to Artistic Rules
Before we conclude that a passage is poorly written or that a speech is unconvincing, we must examine
the context of the passage in question to determine if this apparent fault serves some particular purpose
in the work. A clumsy, unconvincing speech may perfectly suit the character who delivers it.

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Careful attention to the way a poet is using language may reveal that an phrase or passage that appears
confusing or nonsensical is in fact metaphorical, or intentionally ambiguous, or has some other function
in supporting the representation.

Book XXVI
Tragedy and Epic
Aristotle concludes the Poetics by reflecting on the question "which is better, tragedy or epic?" It is
important to understand the nature of this question within the context of Aristotle's concerns about the
morality of art and about art's social function.
He first presents us with a possible answer: epic is a higher art form than tragedy, because epic does not
rely on spectacle–visually appealing sets, dance, the antics of the actors–to convey its message to its
audience. In a sense, this argument accuses tragedy of "dumbing-down" its message to reach a wider,
"popular" audience.
Aristotle refutes this argument on several points. First, it does not really address the artistic work itself,
but only the mode of its presentation, in this case spectacle. Second, this argument places too much
emphasis on the quality of individual performances. Not all actors pander to the lowest common
denominator. Moreover, as Aristotle argues in the conclusion of Book VI, tragedy can be read as a text
and does not rely on performance to convey its message.
Tragedy, Aristotle now argues, is superior to epic. Tragedy contains all the elements of the epic, but
manages to present its story in a much shorter span of time and with a greater degree of unity. The
concentration of the tragic plot heightens its impact on the audience. Aristotle's emphasis on unity
returns here in his conclusion: the best epics, the Illiad and the Odyssey, although composed of many
episodes, tell essentially a single, coherent story.
Aristotle concludes by suggesting that different genres produce different kinds of pleasure. The pleasure
of the epic lies in its episodic, diverting story, while the more intense–and "higher" in terms of social
value–pleasure produced by the epic is catharsis, the mysterious "purging" of our emotions of pity and
fear when we witness the unfolding of a tragedy.

The comedy of humours

Comedy of humours, a dramatic genre most closely associated with the English playwright Ben
Jonson from the late 16th century.
The term derives from the Latin humor (more properly umor), meaning “liquid,” and its use in
the medieval and Renaissance medical theory that the human bodyheld a balance of four liquids, or
humours: blood, phlegm, yellow bile (choler), and black bile (melancholy).
When properly balanced, these humours were thought to give the individual a healthy mind in a healthy
body.
Temperament theory has its roots in the ancient four humors theory. It may have origins in ancient
Egypt or Mesopotamia, but it was the Greek physician Hippocrates (460–370 BC) who developed it into
a medical theory.
He believed certain human moods, emotions and behaviors were caused by an excess or lack of body
fluids (called "humors"): blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

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The comedy of humours is a genre of dramatic comedy that focuses on a character or range of
characters, each of whom exhibits two or more overriding traits or 'humours' that dominates their
personality, desires and conduct.
This comic technique may be found in Aristophanes, but the English playwrights Ben
Jonson and George Chapman popularized the genre in the closing years of the sixteenth century.
In the later half of the seventeenth century, it was combined with the comedy of manners in Restoration
comedy.
In Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (acted 1598), which made this type of play popular, all the words
and acts of Kitely are controlled by an overpowering suspicion that his wife is unfaithful; George
Downright, a country squire, must be "frank" above all things; the country gull in town determines his
every decision by his desire to "catch on" to the manners of the city gallant.
In his Induction to Every Man out of His Humour (1599) Jonson explains his character-formula thus:
Some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluctions, all to run one way.
The comedy of humours owes something to earlier vernacular comedy but more to a desire to imitate the
classical comedy of Plautus and Terence and to combat the vogue of romantic comedy, as developed
by William Shakespeare.
The satiric purpose of the comedy of humours and its realistic method lead to more serious character
studies with Jonson’s The Alchemist. The humours each had been associated with physical and mental
characteristics; the result was a system that was quite subtle in its capacity for describing types of
personality.

Sentimental comedy

Sentimental comedy, a dramatic genre of the 18th century, denoting plays in which middle-class
protagonists triumphantly overcomes a series of moral trials.

Such comedy aimed at producing tears rather than laughter.

Sentimental comedies reflected contemporary philosophical conceptions of humans as inherently good

but capable of being led astray through bad example.
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By an appeal to his noble sentiments, a man could be reformed and set back on the path of virtue.

Although the plays contained characters whose natures seemed overly virtuous, and whose trials were
too easily resolved, they were nonetheless accepted by audiences as truthful representations of the
human predicament.

Sentimental comedy had its roots in early 18th century tragedy, which had a vein of morality similar to
that of sentimental comedy but had loftier characters and subject matter than sentimental comedy.

Elements of Sentimental Comedy

The characters in sentimental comedy are either strictly good or bad. Heroes have no faults or bad
habits, villains are thoroughly evil or morally degraded.
The authors' purpose was to show the audience the innate goodness of people and that through morality
people who have been led astray can find the path of righteousness.
The plot usually centered on the domestic trials of middle-class couples and included romantic love
scenes. Their private woes are exhibited with much emotional stress intended to arouse the spectator’s
pity and suspense in advance of the approaching happy ending. Lovers are often shown separated from
each other by socioeconomic factors at the beginning, but brought together in the end by a discovery
about the identity of the lower class lover.
Plots also contained an element of mystery to be solved.
Verse was not used in order to create a closer illusion of reality. It was thought that rhyme would
obscure the true meaning of the words and make the truth disappear.
The playwrights of this genre aimed to bring the audience to tears, not laughter, as the name sentimental
comedy might suggest.
They believed that noisy laughter inhibited the silent sympathy and thought of the audience.
Playwrights strove to touch the feelings of the spectators so that they could learn from the play and
relate the events they witnessed on stage to their own lives, causing them to live more virtuously.

Writers of sentimental comedy included Colley Cibber and George Farquhar, with their respective
plays Love’s Last Shift (1696) and The Constant Couple (1699).

The best-known sentimental comedy is Sir Richard Steele’s The Conscious Lovers (1722), which deals
with the trials and tribulations of its penniless heroine Indiana.

The discovery that she is an heiress affords the necessary happy resolution. Steele, in describing the
affect he wished the play to have, said he would like to arouse “a pleasure too exquisite for laughter.”

Sentimental comedies continued to coexist with such conventional comedies as Oliver Goldsmith’s She
Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s The Rivals (1775) until the
sentimental genre waned in the early 19th century.

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Sentimental comedies

 Love's Last Shift by Colley Cibber (1696)

 The Constant Couple by George Farquhar (1699)
 The Lying Lover by Richard Steele (1703)
 The Tender Husband by Richard Steele (1705)
 The Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele (1722)
 The Foundling by Edward Moore (1748)
 The School for Lovers by William Whitehead (1762)
 Le Préjugé à la mode by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée (1735) – a good example of the
French genre similar to sentimental comedy, comédie larmoyante

Comedy of Manners (Anti-sentimental Comedy)

The comedy of manners is a form of comedy that satirizes the manners and affectations of
contemporary society and questions societal standards.

Social class stereotypes are often represented through stock characters such as the miles
gloriosus ("boastful soldier") in ancient Greek comedy or the fop and rake of English Restoration
comedy, which is sometimes used as a synonym for "comedy of manners".

A comedy of manners often sacrifices the plot, which usually centers on some scandal, to witty dialogue
and sharp social commentary.

Oscar Wilde's play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), which satirized the Victorian morality of
the time, is one of the best-known plays of this genre.
44 S. Jerald Sagaya Nathan, Assistant Professor of English, SJC, Tiruchirappalli – 620002.
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 The comedy of manners was first developed in the New Comedy period of ancient Greek comedy and is
known today primarily from fragments of writings by the Greek playwright Menander.

Menander's style, elaborate plots, and stock characters were imitated by the ancient Roman playwrights,
such as Plautus and Terence, whose comedies were in turn widely known and reproduced during
the Renaissance.
Some of the best-known comedies of manners are those by the 17th century French playwright Molière,
who satirized the hypocrisy and pretension of the ancien régime in plays such as L'École des
femmes ([The School for Wives], 1662), Tartuffe ([The Imposter], 1664), and Le Misanthrope ([The
Misanthrope], 1666).
The comedy of manners has been employed by Roman satirists since as early as the first century BC.
Horace's Satire 1.9 is a prominent example, in which the persona is unable to express his wish for his
companion to leave, but instead subtly implies so through wit.

William Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing might be considered the first comedy of manners
In England, but the genre really flourished during the Restoration period.

Restoration comedy, which was influenced by Ben Jonson's comedy of humours, made fun of affected
wit and acquired follies of the time.

The masterpieces of the genre were the plays of William Wycherley (The Country Wife, 1675)
and William Congreve (The Way of the World, 1700).

In the late 18th century Oliver Goldsmith (She Stoops to Conquer, 1773) and Richard Brinsley
Sheridan (The Rivals, 1775; The School for Scandal, 1777) revived the form.

The tradition of elaborate, artificial plotting and epigrammatic dialogue was carried on by the Irish
playwright Oscar Wilde in Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895).

In the 20th century, the comedy of manners reappeared in the plays of the British dramatists Noël
Coward (Hay Fever, 1925) and Somerset Maugham and the novels of P. G. Wodehouse, as well as
various British sitcoms. The Carry On films are a direct descendant of the comedy of manners style.

The Rivals by Sheridan

The play is set in Bath, Somerset England in the mid-century and revolved around two reach
young lovers, Lydia and Jack, who reads a lot of popular novels of the time, wants a purely romantic
love affair. Lydia is enthralled with the idea of eloping with poor soldier in spite of her guardian. Mrs.
Malaprop is the chief comic figure of the play.

In the end of the play Jack is presented to Lydia by Mrs. Malaprop as son to sir Antony and heir
to his wealth, where he secretly assures Lydia that he is only masquerading as sir Antony’s son so that
45 S. Jerald Sagaya Nathan, Assistant Professor of English, SJC, Tiruchirappalli – 620002.
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he may marry her after that he meet up with Lucius and gets in a quarrel with him and they agree to
meet Beverly. At the end, all secrets are found out at the duel because Mrs.Malaprop rushes to the duel
in fear for their lovers’ lives trying to stop it before it starts. Lucius discovers that Mrs.Malaprop has
been disguises herself as Delia and both infuriated and embarrassed and leaves. Lydia admits her love
for Jack and Julia makes up with her lover Falkland. In the end acres invites everyone to a party and
they all go to celebrate.

The school for scandal

The School for Scandal is a play written by Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

It was first performed in London at Drury Lane Theatre on 8 May 1777.

Genre: Comedy of manners

Setting: London

Lady Sneerwell, who in her youth was the target of slander, has set her life upon a course to
reduce the reputations of other women to the level of her own. Aided by her intimate, Snake, she
intrigues to involve the Teazles in scandal, to bring Joseph Surface’s true character to light, to wreck the
love between Charles and Maria, and to gain Charles for herself along with Sir Oliver’s fortune. To her
the world consists of nothing but scandal and scandalous intrigues, and she does her best to make her
vision a reality. She is not successful, however, when she abuses Charles Surface to Sir Peter Teazle’s
ward Maria, who refuses to listen to her.

Instead, Maria trustingly confides in Lady Candour, whose defense of a reputation ensures its
complete annihilation. Sometimes Sir Peter Teazle ponders the wisdom of his marriage to Lady Teazle,
doubting the judgment of an old bachelor in marrying a young wife. Lady Teazle is a countrybred girl
who is enjoying London life extravagantly and to the full. Sir Oliver Surface is concerned about his two
nephews, his problem being the disposal of his great fortune. Sir Oliver has been abroad for the past
fifteen years and feels that he does not know his nephews’ real natures; he hopes by some stratagem to
catch them unawares and thus be able to test their characters.

One day, Sir Peter and Lady Teazle quarrel because Sir Peter violently objects to her attendance
at the home of Lady Sneerwell. Lady Teazle accuses Sir Peter of wishing to deprive her of all freedom
and reminds him that he has promised to go to Lady Sneerwell’s with her. He retorts that he will do so
for only one reason, to look after his own character. When they arrive, Lady Sneerwell’s rooms are full
of people uttering libelous remarks about their enemies and saying even worse things about their friends.
Sir Peter escapes as soon as possible. When the rest of Lady Sneerwell’s guests retire to the card room,
leaving Maria and Joseph alone, Joseph once more presses his suit.

He insinuates that Maria is in love with Charles and is thus running counter to Sir Peter’s
wishes. Lady Teazle walks in just as Joseph is on his knees avowing his honest love. Surprised, Lady
Teazle tells Maria that she is wanted in the next room. After Maria leaves, Lady Teazle asks Joseph for
an explanation of what she has seen, and he tells her that he was pleading with Maria not to tell Sir Peter

46 S. Jerald Sagaya Nathan, Assistant Professor of English, SJC, Tiruchirappalli – 620002.

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of his tender concern for Lady Teazle. Sir Oliver consults Rowley, Sir Peter’s shrewd and observing
servant, in an attempt to learn more about his nephews’ characters. Rowley himself believes that Joseph
does not have as good a character as his reputation seems to indicate and that Charles has a better one.
Sir Oliver also consults Sir Peter, who declares that he is ready to stake his life on Joseph’s honor. He is
much put out, therefore, when Maria once more refuses to marry Joseph. Sir Peter, Sir Oliver, and
Rowley plan to test the worthiness of the nephews. Charles is, as usual, in dire need of money, and Sir
Oliver arranges to accompany a moneylender who is going to see Charles;
Sir Oliver goes again to see Joseph. Still believing that his uncle is Mr. Stanley, Joseph is
showing him out just as Charles enters. Charles, surprised to see the man he knows as Mr. Premium in
his brother’s apartment, also insists that he leave, but at that moment Sir Peter Teazle arrives and
addresses Sir Oliver by his right name. Both Sir Oliver and Sir sPeter are now aware of Joseph’s real
character. Charles, promising to try to reform, gets Maria and his uncle’s inheritance as well. Lady
Sneerwell is exposed by Snake, who is paid double to speak the truth, and Lady Teazle returns her
diploma to the School for Scandal, of which Lady Sneerwell is president. Everyone is happy except
Lady Sneerwell and Joseph Surface.

47 S. Jerald Sagaya Nathan, Assistant Professor of English, SJC, Tiruchirappalli – 620002.

Cell: 9843287913/ 9629287913