ENGLISH CRITICS BY CHARACTER AND THEME

Question 1

CALIBAN

Tempest

Answer 1

“Has all the discontents and malice of a witch, and of a devil” - John Dryden (1679)
“Is certainly not a nice person. - A.D. Nuttall
“Is in some ways a noble being. The poet has raised him far above contempt” - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
“It was Caliban’s childish innocence that first attracted Prospero and now it is his childish lawlessness that enrages him” - Ana Skura
“Caliban proves himself continually more intelligent than Trinculo and Stephano. It is significantly when he learns the ways of men and takes to the bottle that he seems diminished” - Anna Larson (made up name)
“Caliban’s receptiveness to the island expresses a spirituality which raises him above base humanity” - Diana Devlin
“Caliban is demoralised, detribalised, dispossessed” - Jonathan Miller

Question 2

Miranda:

Tempest

Answer 2

“Does Miranda represent a traditional guileless innocent or a more aggressive girl?” - Stephen Orgel
“Miranda is inexperienced, but not naive, educated but more candid than another young might be […] she emphasises her chastity as her father would wish, but declares her love” - Frank Kermode

Question 3

Prospero:

Tempest

Answer 3

“Is a Godlike being - Keith Sagar

“We feel that Prospero, too, has been forgiven; has served his span of time in limbo” - Matt Simpson

“The most complex change within the play takes place within Prospero himself” - Ian Johnston
Madeleine Doran maintains that the play is about
“Prospero’s discovery of his own ethic of forgiveness, and renunciation of his magical powers”

“Prospero’s takeover is both racial plunder and a transfer to patriarchy” - Ania Loomba

“Prospero’s arts are not only a beneficent magic in contrast to an evil one […] it is the means of Grace” - Frank Kermode

Pask argues that a number of Prospero’s actions in The Tempest are incongruous with the values of the pastoral genre

Question 4

Antonio and sebastian

Tempest

Answer 4

“Antonio and Sebastian reveal themselves as darker and more wicked than Gonzalo recognises, using their verbal wit to hide their greedier and more sinister desires” - John Michaels

“The absurdly aggressive behaviour of Antonio and Sebastian makes Prospero’s exercise of power seem necessary” - Saunders

Question 5

Gonzalo:

Tempest

Answer 5

“Gonzalo dream exists in contrast to the power obsessed ideas of the other characters” - John Michaels

Question 6

Utopias:

Tempest

Answer 6

“The perfect island does exist in contrast to the machiavellians of the real world” - Thomas McFarland

a golden world; a place of social harmony where evil is defeated” - Thomas McFarland

“The Tempest is an affirmation of pastoral values that combines Christian and pastoral perspectives” - Thomas McFarland

Question 7

Colonialism:

Tempest

Answer 7

“Renaissance Europeans saw natives as the medieval ‘Wildman’ onto which the play’s colonisers can project their darkest yet most compelling fantasies” - Irving Wardle

“The presentation of Caliban as a monster; as “the threatening ‘Other’ is used by colonial power to display its own godliness and to justify the colonial project morally” - Deborah Willis

“In Caliban, Shakespeare depicts, with almost prophetic insight, the white man’s attitude to indigenous populations: the change from kindness to oppression” - Diana Devlin

“It has been virtually impossible to dissociate the drama from the discovery of the New World and the colonisation of the Americas” - Diana Devlin

Question 8

Magic:

Tempest

Answer 8

“Prospero’s magical practises are in the final acts as damnable as the blackest witchcraft. - Matt Simpson

“Prospero is a renaissance magus; in contrast to the dark magic of Sycorax” - Frank Kermode

“Through magic and the control of characters, Prospero takes on an almost sadistic quality”- Andrew Green

“The widely varied nature of these sounds and music reflects the changeable and often contradictory nature of Prospero, the ruler of the island, and his domain” - Andrew Green

Question 9

Romance Genre:

Tempest) (Tempest

Answer 9

“Presentation of time as regenerative as well as destructive is vital to the play’s progression beyond tragedy” - Sam Brunner

“The play is a romance in that the unhappy events of the early acts mark only the beginning rather than the beginning of the end” - Sam Brunner

the clear ideal of reconciliation grows cloudy as the play concludes” - Stephen Orgel

Matt Simpson questions whether the love between Ferdinand and Miranda is true love:
“their love is of course being made available to us through art, which teasingly requires us to wonder whether it is possible in real life.”

Question 10

Comedy Genre:

Tempest

Answer 10

Ian Johnston - ‘The Comic Resolution’: “The one great success of the play is the marriage of Ferdinand and Miranda.

“Both the neglectful Duke and the machiavellian King have virtuous children who will redeem them. Shakespeare, in his final play, seems to inscribe hope for the future” - Matt Simpson

Question 11

Fantasy Genre:

Tempest

Answer 11

“The play is unrealistic, demanding our imaginative projection into a world free from the constraints of reality” - Sam Brunner

Question 12

Satanist:

Paradise Lost

Answer 12

“Satan is superior in character to Milton’s God” - John Carey

Question 13

Theology:

Paradise Lost

Answer 13

“God has already foretold the fall. Adam and Eve merely appear free and responsible agents of their own affairs” - Sandra McColley

“She [Eve] who thought it beneath her to worship either Adam or God came to worship a vegetable” - C.S. Lewis

Question 14

Eve:

Paradise Lost

Answer 14

“Eve wakes in an independent mood, feels her power, gets her way” - Waldock

‘her passions, as a result of her flattery, are ruling her reason’

“Milton has provided Eve with responsible motives for her independent movements” - Diane McColley

“Eve decided that if she is to die, Adam must die with her. I am not sure that critics always notice the precise sin that Eve is now committing yet there is no mystery about it. It’s English name is murder.” - C.S. Lewis

Question 15

Adam:

Paradise Lost

Answer 15

“Adam fails because he refuses to divorce Eve; because he wants solace at any price” - Fowler

…like all postlapsarian actions, [our view] is infected by its sinful ground. The love it [Adam’s fall] affirms is not free, for Eve has demanded it by dilemma.

“When Adam really does abandon heaven and his knowledge of God, Milton denounces his act. Yet it was, afterall, Milton who imagines his passion so intensely as to make us almost wish it could be approved” - Williams

“Adam fails in becoming Eve’s accomplice” - C.S. Lewis

Question 16

Gender Roles:

Paradise Lost

Answer 16

“Traditional manly virtues, and womanly ones, are not strictly divided between them” - Diane McColley

“The story that Milton most notably tells to women is the story of her secondness, her otherness and how that otherness leads inexorably to her demonic anger, her sin, her fall, and her exclusion from the garden of the gods” - Sandra Gilbert

“There appears something of a Turkish contempt of women in Milton’s works, as subordinate and inferior beings” - Dr Johnson 1779

Question 17

Love:

Paradise Lost

Answer 17

“Milton presents two quite different models on the politics of love. One is drawn from the experience of being in love with an equal and the mutual surrender of due benevolence. The other from the hierarchical arrangement of the universe and the craving for male supremacy” - Turner

Question 18

Freedom:

Paradise Lost

Answer 18

“Eve refuses to let the existence of evil destroy the processes of a free community” - Diane McColley

Question 19

Realism:

Volpone

Answer 19

“Jonson presents characters who are typical so that the interaction of characters will be typical of human society” - A.P. Hinchliffe
“The play’s action occurs in a single day because Jonson needed this compression to give events speed and inevitability” - A.P. Hinchliffe

Question 20

Unrealism:

Volpone

Answer 20

“The characters of Jonson were incapable of existing outside the world of the play” - Alexander Leggat
“When we read the last act of Volpone, we know we are not seeing life as it is but as it ought to be” - Eric Bentley

Question 21

Theatricality:

Volpone

Answer 21

“The audience find the characters of Celia and Bonario boring and uninteresting on stage as they use language in an honest and truthful way, rather than as an actor should: to hide themselves, to deceive” - Alexander Leggat

“Volpone’s real perversion is that he treats life as a play where he can write the script for his own amusement. - Alexander Leggat

“The play within the play presents the point of view from which Jonson is about to launch his satirical attack” - Henry Levin

Question 22

Freedom:

Volpone

Answer 22

“Celia is an unwilling prisoner, whereas Volpone is a prisoner by choice” - Frances Teague

Question 23

Satire:

Volpone

Answer 23

“The first half of the play revolves around the bed, the second around the court. The true function of both has been perverted” - Edward B. Partridge

“Jonson attempts to generate moral impulses in his audience by satirising a world that has lost all emotional capabilities” - Andrew Hiscock

Question 24

Morality:

Volpone

Answer 24

“Their deceptions are a symbol of their moral delusions” - S.L. Goldberg

Question 25

Masculinity:

Volpone

Answer 25

“Most of the males in Volpone associate manliness with domination but by the end of the play, Volpone begins to feel his own masculinity threatened” - Huebert

Question 26

Celia:

Volpone

Answer 26

“Celia is a strong-minded character who plays not only an pivotal role in the plot but an important thematic one as well” - Maus

Question 27

Bonario:

Volpone

Answer 27

“Even Bonario’s apparently noble rescue of Celia is part of a plan to save his inheritance; to ensure his future finances” - Huebert

Question 28

Vice Character:

Volpone

Answer 28

“Volpone is a satanic challenger to God’s order and hierarchy” - Knapp
“Mosca acts as a conventional kind of a vice figure” - Wickham