G Cards Flashcards
She Stoops to Conquer
Oliver Goldsmith, (1728-1774)
Dedicated to Samuel Johnson (dictionary)
The hero is Charles Marlow, a wealthy young man who is being forced by his family to consider a potential bride whom he has never met. He is anxious about meeting her, because he suffers from shyness and can only behave naturally with women of a lower class. He sets out with a friend to travel to the home of his prospective in-laws, the Hardcastles, but they become lost on the road.
While the bride-to-be is awaiting his arrival, her half-brother, Tony Lumpkin (one of literature’s great comic characters), while out riding, comes across the two strangers, and, realising their identity, plays a practical joke by telling them that they are a long way from their destination and will have to stay overnight at an inn. The “inn” he directs them to is in fact the home of his parents. When they arrive, their hosts, who have been expecting them, go out of their way to make them welcome. However, the two men, believing themselves in a hostelry, behave rudely.
Meanwhile, Tony’s sister, Kate, learning of the error and also acquainted with her suitor’s shyness, masquerades as a serving-maid in order to get to know him. He falls in love with her and plans to elope with her. Needless to say, all misunderstandings are sorted out in the end, and Charles and Kate live happily ever after.
Thomas Gray
Gray was the 5th and only surviving child of 12 children. Escaped an unhappy childhood (abusive father) when his uncle took him to Eton. Friends with Horace Walpole (wrote the first Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto ) and Richard West. Let us not forgot the amazing poem, “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes”. Alfred Lord Tennyson, a century later, spoke of Elegy’s “divine truisms that make us weep.” It went through four editions in two months, and eleven in a short time, besides being imitated, satirized, translated into many languages, and constantly pirated.
(4line stanzas abab)
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.
The Epitaph (to the poet Richard West)
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth
A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown.
Fair Science frown’d not on his humble birth,
And Melancholy mark’d him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere,
Heav’n did a recompense as largely send:
He gave to Mis’ry all he had, a tear,
He gain’d from Heav’n (‘twas all he wish’d) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose,
Or draw his frailties from their dread abode,
(There they alike in trembling hope repose)
The bosom of his Father and his God.
John Gower
It’s unlikely that Gower will appear on your exam. If he does, it will be in relation to Chaucer and Troilus and Criseyde. Here’s a short bio in the event that he appears on your exam:
John Gower, poet and friend of Chaucer, was born around 1330, into a prominent Yorkshire family which held properties in Kent, Yorkshire, Norfolk and Suffolk. Gower’s coat of arms is identical to those of Sir Robert Gower of Brabourne. Nothing is known of his education, though it has been speculated that he was trained in law. Gower himself held properties in Suffolk and Kent, where he seems to have resided until taking up residence in the priory of St. Mary Overies in Southwark, London, around 1377.
In 1385, Gower’s good friend, Geoffrey Chaucer, dedicated Troilus and Criseyde to him, giving him the epithet “moral Gower.”
In 1386, Gower began work on his most acclaimed work, Confessio Amantis (i.e. Lover’s Confession). Unlike his previous works, Gower wrote the Confessio in English at the request of Richard II who was concerned that so little was being written in English. It is a collection of tales and exempla treating of courtly love. The framework is that of a lover complaining first to Venus, and later in the work, confessing to her priest, Genius. The Confessio , completed around 1390, is an important contribution to courtly love literature in English. Some of the stories have their counterparts in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales , and one of the stories later served as the source for Shakespeare’s Pericles , in which Shakespeare had Gower appear in the Chorus.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a good candidate for the GRE, but it is not a guarantee, either. Know the plot, but focus more on the style.The poem is written in verse stanzas that end with the “bob and the wheel.” The “bob” is a very short line, and the wheel is a trimeter quatrain. The five lines together rhyme ABABA. This is an obscure poetic device, but if you see it on the GRE, you’ll know that you’re looking at Gawain.
Example: ill-sped Hounds hasten by the score To maul him, hide and head; Men drag him in to shore And dogs pronounce him dead.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a late 14th century alliterative romance recorded in a single manuscript, which also contains three other pieces of an altogether more Christian orientation. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is written in the style that linguists have termed the Alliterative Revival of the fourteenth century. Instead of focusing on a metrical syllabic count and rhyme, the alliterative form relied on the agreement of (usually a pair of) stressed syllables at the beginning of the line with (usually) a third and fourth at the end of the line. The line always finds a “breath-point” at some point after the first two stresses, dividing the line into two half-lines, separated by the pause called a caesura.
She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
Oliver Goldsmith
She Stoops to Conquer (1773)
In essence, the play is a farce, full of misunderstandings.
The hero is Charles Marlow, a wealthy young man who is being forced by his family to consider a potential bride whom he has never met. He is anxious about meeting her, because he suffers from shyness and can only behave naturally with women of a lower class. He sets out with a friend to travel to the home of his prospective in-laws, the Hardcastles, but they become lost on the road.
While the bride-to-be is awaiting his arrival, her half-brother, Tony Lumpkin (one of literature’s great comic characters), while out riding, comes across the two strangers, and, realising their identity, plays a practical joke by telling them that they are a long way from their destination and will have to stay overnight at an inn. The “inn” he directs them to is in fact the home of his parents. When they arrive, their hosts, who have been expecting them, go out of their way to make them welcome. However, the two men, believing themselves in a hostelry, behave rudely.
Meanwhile, Tony’s sister, Kate, learning of the error and also acquainted with her suitor’s shyness, masquerades as a serving-maid in order to get to know him. He falls in love with her and plans to elope with her. Needless to say, all misunderstandings are sorted out in the end, and Charles and Kate live happily ever after.
Nadine Gordimer
Nadine Gordimer (b. 1923) is a South African (Jewish) novelist and writer, winner of the 1991 Nobel Prize in literature and 1974 Booker Prize.
Nadine Gordimer’s subject matter in the past has been the effect of apartheid on the lives of South Africans and the moral and psychological tensions of life in a racially-divided country, which she often wrote about by focusing on oppressed non-white characters. She was an ardent opponent of apartheid and refused to accommodate the system, despite growing up in a community in which it was accepted as normal. Her work has therefore served to chart, over a number of years, the changing response to apartheid in South Africa. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), was based largely on her own life and set in her home town. Her next three novels, A World of Strangers (1958); Occasion for Loving (1963), which focuses on an illicit love affair between a black man and a white woman; and The Late Bourgeois World (1966) deal with master-servant relations in South African life. In 1974, her novel The Conservationist, was joint winner of the Booker Prize for Fiction.
