C. The Tempest
The Tempest, an elaborate & fantastic story, is known as the best of his final romances. The characters are rather allegorical & the subject full of suggestion. The humanly impossible events can be seen occurring everywhere, in the play. The playwright resorts to the supernatural atmosphere & to the dreams to solve the conflict. To Shakespeare, the whole life is no more than a dream. Thus, The Tempest is a typical example of his pessimistic view towards human life & society in his late years.

2) Poems
A. Sonnets
The first 126 sonnets are apparently addressed to a handsome young nobleman, presumably the author's patron. The poems express the writer's selfless but not entirely uncritical devotion to the young man.
Twenty of the sonnets are about a young woman characterized as a " dark lady," whom the poet distrust but cannot resist. The poems addressed directly to her are perhaps the most remarkable in the sequence because their unsentimental tone is unlike that of traditional love sonnets.
A philosophical theme that appears in many of the sonnets is that of time as the destroyer of all mortal things. Also expressed in the poems is the author's disillusionment with the false ness of earthly life.
The form of the poems is the English Variation of the traditional Italian, or Petrarchan, sonnet, Shakespeare's sonnets have three quatrains, or groups of four lines, & a final couplet. Their rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg. A theme is developed & elaborated in the quatrains, & a concluding thought is presented in the couplet.
B. Other poems
Venus & Adonis, in which Shakespeare made his first bid for literary patronage & fame, is a conventional Elizabethan narrative poem. Its mythological story, taken from Ovids Metamorphoses, tells of the passionate love goddess who woos the reluctant youth Adonis.
The Rape of Lucrece, another narrative of passion, is based on the semi historical story of the rape of a chaste Roman matron by Tarquin, son of the king of Rome.

5. 领会His Major Theme
1) Shakespeare is against religious persecution & racial discrimination, against social inequality & the corrupting influence of gold & money.
2) He was a humanist of the time & accepted the Renaissance views on literature.

6. 领会His Literary Achievements
1) Characterization
His major characters are neither merely individual ones nor type ones; they are individuals representing certain types. Each character has his or her own personalities; meanwhile, they may share features with others. The soliloquies in his plays fully reveal the inner conflict of his characters. Shakespeare also portrays his characters in pairs. Contrasts are frequently used to bring vividness to his characters.
The women in the plays are vivid creations, each differing from the others. Shakespeare was fond of portraying "mocking wenches," such as Kate of the Taming of the Shrew, Rosaline of Love's Labor's Lost, & Beatrice of Much Ado About Nothing, but he was equally adept at creating gentle & innocent women, such as Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello, & Cordelia in King Lear. His female characters also include the treacherous Goneril & Regan, the iron-willed Lady Macbeth, the witty & resourceful Portia, the tender & loyal Juliet, & the alluring Cleopatra.
2) Plot Construction
Shakespeare's plays are well known for their adroit plot construction. He seldom invents his own plots; instead, he borrows them from some old plays or storybooks, or from ancient Greek & Roman sources. There are usually several threads running through the play, thus providing the story with suspense & apprehension.
3) Language
In Shakespeare's time, English grammar & spelling were not yet formalized, so Shakespeare could freely inter charge the various parts of speech, using nouns as adjectives or verbs, adjectives as adverbs, & pronouns as nouns. Such freedom gave his language an extraordinary flexibility, which enabled him to express his thoughts as easily in poetry as in prose.
Most of Shakespeare's dramatic poetry is in blank verse, or unrhymed iambic pentameter. His bland verse is especially beautiful & mighty. He has an amazing wealth of vocabulary & idiom. His coinage of new words & distortion of the meaning of the old ones also create striking effects on the reader.

7. 应用Selected Readings
1) Sonnet 18
Theme: a profound meditation on the destructive power of time & the eternal beauty brought forth by poetry to the one he loves.
Imagery: a summer's day-youth
the eye of heaven-the sun
2) The Merchant of Venice
Theme: To praise the friendship between Antonio & Bassanio, to idealize Portia as a heroine of great beauty, wit & loyalty, & to expose the insatiable greed and brutality of the Jew.
3) Hamlet
This is one part of Hamlet's most famous monologue. Hamlet, facing the dilemma of action & mind, is hesitating whether he should revenge for his father, which may bring him death, or he should suffer & hide his hatred for his uncle in his deep heart, which may secure his life.

 

IV. Francis Bacon

1. 一般识记Brief Introduction
　　English Renaissance philosopher, essayist, statesman, born in London, England, Jan 22,1561 and died in London, April 9 1626.
    One of the outstanding figures of the Renaissance, Bacon made important contributions to several fields. His chief interest were science philosophy, but he was also a distinguished man of letters & held several high governmental positions during the reign of king JamesⅠ. He was one of the earliest & most eloquent spokesmen for experimental science. He lays the foundation for modern science with his insistence on scientific way of thinking & fresh observation rather than authority as a basis for obtaining knowledge.

2. 识记His works
As an author, Bacon is most famous for his Essays, which deal with such subjects as honor, friendship, love, & riches. Written in a terse, polished style, with many learned allusions & metaphors, the essays rank with the finest in English literature.
Bacon's other important literary works include The New Atlantis, an account of an ideal society & an imaginary voyage, & The History of the Reign of King Henry Ⅶ, a perceptive psychological study of Henry's mind & characters.
His works can be divided into three groups：
First group: The Advancement of Learning (1605)
Novum Organum (1620) (Latin version)
Second group: Essays
Apophthagmes New & Old (1605)
The History of the Reign of Henry Ⅶ (1622)
The New Atlantis (unfinished)
Third group: Maxims of Law
The Learned Reading upon the
Stature of Uses (1642)

3. 领会 His Major Works
Essays
The term "essay" was borrowed from Montaigne's Essais, which appeared from 1580 to 1588. Bacon learned from Montaigne, the first great modern essayist, the economic & flexible way of writing. However, as a practical & prudential man, he intends to write for the ambitious Elizabethan & Jacobean youth of his class & tell them how to be efficient & make their way in public life.
Bacon's essays are famous for their brevity, compactness & powerfulness. The essays are well arranged & enriched by Biblical allusions, Metaphors & cadence.

　　4. 领会His achievements
As a literary man, Bacon is the first English essayist, whose Essays won him a high place in the history of English literature.
As a philosopher, he is the founder of English materialistic philosophy. He advocates the inductive method of reasoning. In his famous plea for progress, Bacon demands three things: 1) the free investigation of nature, 2) the discovery of facts instead of the blind belief in theories 3) the verification of results by experiment rather than by argument. In our day, these are the ABC of science, but in Bacon's time they were revolutionary, Marx called him "the real father of English materialism & experimental science of modern times in general."

5. 应用 Of Studies
Of Studies is the most popular of Bacon's 58 essays. It analyzes what studies chiefly serve for, the different ways adopted by different people to pursue studies, & how studies exert influence over human character. Forceful & persuasive, compact & precise, Of Studies reveals to us Bacon's mature attitude towards learning. Bacon's language is neat, priest, & weighty. It is some what affected, like the water in the reservoir, restricted & confined.

 

V. John Donne

1.一般识记 Donne & the Metaphysical Poetry
John Donne: English poet & Clergyman, born in London, England, 1572, and died in London, Mar. 31 1631. Donne is the leading figure of the 17th-century "metaphysical school." His poems give a more inherently theatrical impression by exhibiting a seemingly unfocused diversity of experiences & attitudes, & a free range of feelings & attitudes, & a free range of feelings & moods. The mode is dynamic rather than static, with ingenuity of speech, vividness of imagery & vitality of rhythms, which show a notable contrast to the other Elizabethan lyric poems, which are pure, serene, tuneful, & smooth running. The most striking feature of Donne's poetry is precisely its tang of reality, in the sense that it seems to reflect life in a real rather than a poetical world. "Metaphysical Poetry" is commonly used to name the work of the 17th-century writers who wrote under the influence of John Donne. With a rebellions spirit, the metaphysical poets tried to break away from the conventional fashion of the Elizabethan Love poetry. The diction is simple as compared with echoes the words & cadences of common speech. The imagery is drawn from the actual life. The form is frequently that of an argument with the poet's beloved, with God, or with himself. George Herbert, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, & Thomas Traherne are also considered to be metaphysical poets. They wrote on a variety of religious & secular themes, & to express their ideas, they used startling, highly imaginative comparisons known as conceits. A conceit is a combination of thoughts or images that are not usually associated with one another.
The finest works of the metaphysical poets combine intellectual subtlety with great emotional power. The poems reflect a broad knowledge of science, art, & other branches of learning. At the same time, metaphysical poems express an intense awareness of common human feelings & experiences, such as jealousy, the loss of religious faith, the complexities of love & the fear of death. Although the imagery of metaphysical poetry is frequently strained, the language is often as natural & direct as ordinary speech.

　　2识记His major works
In his life, Donne wrote a large number of poems & prose works, His poems are especially admired for their unique combination of passionate feeling & intellectual wit. Many of his poems rank with the finest in the English language. Among his most famous works are the poems Death Be Not Proud, "Go & Catch a Falling Star," The Ecstacy, & A Valediction Forbidding Mourning.
Most of The Elegies & Satires & a good many of The Songs & Sonnets were written in the early period. He wrote prose works mainly in the later period. His sermons, which are very famous, reveal his spiritual devotion to God as a passionate preacher.
His works are classified as songs & sonnets, epistles, elegies, & satires. When read in chronological order, the poems reveal his development from "Gay Jack Donne," a reckless & cynical youth, to Dean John Donne, a man devoted to God.
Donne's great prose works are his sermons, which are both rich & imaginative, exhibiting the same kind of physical vigor & scholastic complexity as his poetry. For example, the well-known Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions (1623-1624). Written when he was seriously ill, they contain the famous passage: "No Man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main… Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, & therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

3. 领会 Characteristics of His Poems
Donne's poetry is subtle, complex, & often startling. He made expert use of such poetic techniques as the paradox, a statement that seems contradictory but actually contains truth, & the conceit, a pertinent comparison between 2 apparently dissimilar things.
His early Lyrics most exist in The Songs & Sonnets. Love is the basic theme. Donne holds that the nature of love is the union of soul & body. The operations of the soul depend on the body. Idealism & cynicism about love coexist in Donne's love poetry.
As a religious poet, his chief power is shown in the Holy Sonnets & the last hymns.
In his poems, Donne frequently applies conceits, i.e. extended metaphors involving dramatic contrasts. His poetry involves a certain kind of argument, sometimes in rigid syllogistic form. With the brief, simple language, the argument is continuous throughout the poem.

4. 应用Selected Readings
1) Death Be Not Proud, one of Donne's Holy Sonnets, is an almost Startling put-down of poor death. Staunchly Christian in its pare expectation of the resurrection, Donne's poem personifies death as an adversary swollen with false pride & unworthy of being called "mighty & dreadful." Donne gives various reasons in accusing death of being little more than a slave bossed about by fate, chance, kings & desperate men-a craven thing that keeps bad company, such as poison, was & sickness. Finally, Donne taunts death with a paradox: "death, thou shalt die."
The sonnet is written in the strict Petrarchan pattern. It reveals the poet's belief in life after death: death is eternal.
2) The Sun Rising
The persona apostrophizes the sun as " unruly" because the sun enters the lovers' secret room without their approval. The speaker criticizes the sun pays too much attention to such things as sex & that he should not be behaving so tediously as to stick to his rule & enter without thinking twice into such a place as lovers dwell.

Ⅵ. John Milton

1.一般识记 Brief Introduction
John Milton, English poet & prose writer, born in London, England, Dec. 9, 1608, and died in London, Nov 8, 1674.
Milton was one of the greatest poets in the English language & one of the towering figures in all literature. His masterpiece, Paradise Lost, is considered the unsurpassed English epic poem. It is a powerfully imaginative & dramatic work, based in part on the Biblical story of the temptation & fall of Adam & Eve in the Garden of Eden. Milton, a deeply religious man, wrote the epic " to justify the ways of God to men." He is also famous for his graceful lyric poems, such as Lycidas, L'Allegro, & for his intensely moving sonnets.　
Milton was a great master of language, & his poetry, both epic & lyric, is admired for its sublime eloquence & rich musical quality.

2. 识记His literary achievements
Milton's literary achievements can be divided into three groups: the early poetic works, the middle prose pamphlets & the last great poems.
1) Education & Early Poetry
Milton's education would ordinarily have led him to a post in the Church of England. He was a Puritan, however, & his religious vies conflicted with those of the Church. After his 7 years at Cambridge, therefore, he retired in 1632 to his father's estate at Horton. His famous poems L'Allegro & IL Penseroso were probably written in 1631, before his withdrawal from Cambridge. These are companion pieces that contrast the temperaments of the cheerful, active man & the melancholy, reflective man. In his early works, Milton appears as the inheritor of all that was best in Elizabethan literature. Lycidas (1637) is a typical example. All of Milton's early works reflect his interest in Greek & Latin poetry, which greatly influenced his style. His poems contain a wealth of classical references, figures of speech, & other poetic devices, all masterfully blended into his rich verse.
2) Middle Period & Prose Pamphlets
In 1638, Milton began a 15-month tour of the Continent, where he met the Italian scientist Galileo Galilei. Upon his return to England he became deeply involved in the political & religious struggle between Parliament, which was then dominated by the Presbyterians, & the followers of king CharlesⅠ, who supported the Church of England. Milton sided with Parliament & began to write a series of pamphlets attacking the power of the bishops & the rituals of the Church. In 1652 he suffered great personal tragedy with the total loss of his eyesight & the death of his wife & infant son In spite of his blindness, Milton continued his official duties until 1655. During these tragic years of his life he wrote some of his most poignant & beautiful sonnets. They include On His Blindness, which reveals the consolation he found in religious faith, &