Volpone/Paradise Lost Pack Flashcards
Ovid on the golden age
“This was the Golden Age that, without coercion, without laws, spontaneously nurtured the good and the true”
What does Ovid make clear about the Golden Age
a place that lacks things, seems as if nothing happened except nurture produces everything from herself, spring is eternal so nothing changes.
Silver age
A+E miss the silver age which sees the introduction of seasons so houses were made, crops planted and animals used to farm
Ovid on the Bronze Age
A+E descend to the a Bronze Age: “Immediately every kind of wickedness erupted into this age of baser natures: truth, shame and honour vanished; in their place were fraud, deceit, and trickery, violence and pernicious desires.”
“Husbands longed for the death of their wives, wives for the death of their husbands”
Montaigne’s On Cannibals similarity to the Golden Age
“They surpass all the pictures with which the poets have adorned the golden age”
How Montaigne
“No…..” Of ordinary social conventions. “The very words that signify lying, treachery, dissimulation, avarice, envy, retraction, pardon, never heard of”
Where were Montaignes cannibals from
What is now Brazil
Eve in Genesis is animalistic and simplistic:
“when the women saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also onto her husband with her; and he did eat” (animalistic, and not complex, the snake only says that she will be wise and know good and evil)
-Eve asks the servant how it got its voice, eve of the genesis is simply carried by its words.
Montaigne’s argument about man’s flaw and his comparison to animals
”..there is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something.” He argued that man is not in any way superior to the beasts”
As sops fables, what does the fox say to the crow
“that’s for me, as I am a Fox”
As sops fables
How does the fox convince the crow
Flatters her, uses knowledge that he is sure her voice, as dos her figure surpasses that of other birds (sycophantic oratory) asks to hear her so he may greet her as “Queen of Birds”
In exchange for the cheese the fox says
he will “give you a piece of advice for the future”
Constantly jumping to get grapes he expressed where just what he was searching for, he fails, what does he say
“I am sure they are sour” (Volpone’s later rejection of Celia)
William Caxton’s translation and printed version of Reynard the Fox
feigns death in order to lure carrion birds, he catches the crows wife, impersonates a doctor, commits a rape, put on trial, and escapes justice
What did many European travellers say about America
Their accounts drew on the Golden age
Medieval ‘vice’ from the morality plays-
Theatrical presentation of Christian teaching
A character called Everyman tempted by figures named lust, greed, Avarice
Two angels stand by him, the devil/vice and a good christian one
Stressed the struggle of the christian soul remaining true to the teachings of the church.
Popular instruction when most people were illiterate
The devil made things theatrically interesting, a figure of energy and fun, had a close rapport with the audience, letting them in on his plans, making jokes at their expense, scaring them etc
He was defeated at the end often saw his humiliation.
