History: the Neoclassical Era

 Thinking Activity:- 

 The Neoclassical age: English literature 

Neoclassical literature was written between 1660 and 1798. This time period is broken down into three parts: the Restoration period, the Augustan period, and the Age of Johnson.

Writers of the Neoclassical period tried to imitate the style of the Romans and Greeks. Thus the combination of the terms 'neo,' which means 'new,' and 'classical,' as in the day of the Roman and Greek classics. This was also the era of The Enlightenment, which emphasized logic and reason. It was preceded by The Renaissance and followed by the Romantic era. In fact, the Neoclassical period ended in 1798 when Wordsworth published the Romantic 'Lyrical Ballads'. 

The Neoclassical age

1. Compare the general characteristics of the Elizabethan age and Neoclassical age: 

 Elizabethan age: 

• 

• The Elizabethan age began during the year  1558 to 1603, during the reign of Queen Elizabeth l. 
• The age is also known as the age of the Renaissance in England.
• This age is The Golden age in England history.
• Elizabeth's succession brought two important features of the period which is settlement and Development. 

Neoclassical age: 

• The Neoclassical age began during the year 1660 to 1798.
• The 18th century is also known as the neo-classical age during this period great poets like Alexander Pope had translated great works of Homer, Vergil and Ovid and also followed the rules and regulations of the classical era that's why this age is known to age neo-classical age.
• This age is also known as The Augustan age. 

Characteristics of Elizabethan age and Neoclassical age: 

• The Elizabethan age: 
•  
• The Elizabethan Age was characterized by a renewed spirit of adventure and discovery and a renewed attention to older sources of knowledge. In literature, the Petrarchan sonnet was imported and modified by Shakespeare (creating what is now called the Elizabethan sonnet), and the genre of tragicomedy was born.
• Religious tolerance
• Social content 
•  unbounded enthusiasm
•  National spirit and profound patriotism 
•  Exploration of the new world  

The Neoclassical age: 

Neoclassical literature is characterized by order, accuracy, and structure. In direct opposition to Renaissance attitudes, where a man was seen as basically good, the Neoclassical writers portrayed man as inherently flawed. They emphasized restraint, self-control, and common sense. This was a time when conservatism flourished in both politics and literature.

Some popular types of literature included:

• Parody
• Essays
• Satire
• Letters
• Fables
• Melodrama, and
• Rhyming with couplets

The writing style of Neoclassical age and Elizabethan age: 

Elizabethan age:

   in the age of Elizabethan, all doubts about religion vanished and people were free from every religion as well as political bondages Queen Elizabethan's reign brought great sunrise that period. The accession of a queen was the sunrise after a long night. 

In Milton's words, we suddenly see England 

" a noble and puissant nation, rousing herself, like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her invincible locks".

At the age of seventeen Elizabethan became the Queen of England. At that time the character of Elizabethan was mingling of frivolity and strength which reminds one of that ironic image with feet of clay, we have nothing whatever to do. As the student of literature we can find out two facts about this era: that t Elizabeth, with all her vanity and inconsistency, steadily loved England and England’s greatness; and that she inspired all her people with the unbounded patriotism which exults in Shakespeare, and with the personal devotion which finds a voice in the Faery Queen. Under her administration, the English national life progressed by gigantic leaps rather than by a slow historical process, and English literature reached the very highest point of its development.

Neo-classical age: 

We can divide this particular age into two groups 

1. Augustan age (1700-1750)

2. The age of sensibility (1750-1798)

so many authors believe that the 18th century consist the fundament of the romantic age. in the year 1685 king Charles II was banished and his own daughter and son-in-law marry and William of orange to be the throne, which marks the end of the long struggle for political freedom in England. in the year 1694 marry was died and William of orange also died in1702 and the second daughter of James II, Anne became the queen. In the reign of Charles II, the two great political parties that came out and will become well known among the whole of England is the 'Whig' and 'Tory'; by the year1700 they were in everybody's mouth. 

Major writers of the period: 

Elizabethan age: 

1. William Shakespeare
2. Edmund Spenser
3. Christopher Marlowe
4. Francis Bacon
5. Browne

Neoclassical age: 

1. Thomas Gray
2. Alexander pope
3. John Dryden
4. William Blake
5. Robert Burns

2, write in brief about your favourite major writer of the age: 

English Poets from 1660 A.D. to 1798 A.D. are generally known as Neoclassical poet's. They are so-called because they had great respect for the classical writer and imitated much from them. For them, poetry was an imitation of human life.

John Dryden: 

John Dryden (19 August to 12 May 1700)was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who was appointed England's first Poet Laureate in 1668. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the period came to be known in literary circles as the Age of Dryden. Romanticist writer Sir Walter Scott called him "Glorious John".

Dryden’s longest poem to date, Annus Mirabilis (1667), was a celebration of two victories by the English fleet over the Dutch and the Londoners’ survival of the Great Fire of 1666. In this work, Dryden was once again gilding the royal image and reinforcing the concept of a loyal nation united under the best of kings. It was hardly surprising that when the poet laureate, Sir William Davenant, died in 1668, Dryden was appointed poet laureate in his place and two years later was appointed royal historiographer.

His Famous work: 

• The Hind and the panther
• The wild Gallant
• All for love
• Oedipus
• King Arthur
• The secular Masque
• The Madal

Writing for the stage:

Soon after his restoration to the throne in 1660, Charles II granted two patents for theatres, which had been closed by the Puritans in 1642. Dryden soon joined the little band of dramatists who were writing new plays for the revived English theatre. His first play, The Wild Gallant, a farcical comedy with some strokes of humour and a good deal of licentious dialogue, was produced in 1663. It was a comparative failure, but in January 1664 he had some share in the success of The Indian Queen, a heroic tragedy in rhymed couplets in which he had collaborated with Sir Robert Howard, his brother-in-law. Dryden was soon to successfully exploit this new and popular genre, with its conflicts between love and honour and its lovely heroines before whose charms the blustering heroes sank down in awed submission. In the spring of 1665, Dryden had his own first outstanding success with The Indian Emperour, a play that was a sequel to The Indian Queen. November 1675, Dryden staged his last and most intelligent example of the genre, Aureng-Zebe. In this play, he abandoned the use of rhymed couplets for that of blank verse.

Later life and career:  

After the Restoration, as Dryden quickly established himself as the leading poet and literary critic of his day, he transferred his allegiances to the new government. With the reopening of the theatres in 1660 after the Puritan ban, Dryden began writing plays. His first play The Wild Gallant appeared in 1663, and was not successful, but was still promising, and from 1668 on he was contracted to produce three plays a year for the King's Company in which he became a shareholder. During the 1660s and 1670s, theatrical writing was his main source of income. He led the way in Restoration comedy, his best-known work being Marriage à la Mode (1673), as well as heroic tragedy and regular tragedy, in which his greatest success was All for Love (1678). Dryden was never satisfied with his theatrical writings and frequently suggested that his talents were wasted on unworthy audiences. He thus was making a bid for poetic fame off-stage. In 1667, around the same time his dramatic career began, he published Annus Mirabilis, a lengthy historical poem that described the English defeat of the Dutch naval fleet and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It was a modern epic in pentameter quatrains that established him as the preeminent poet of his generation and was crucial in his attaining the posts of Poet Laureate (1668) and historiographer royal (1670). He felt strongly about the relation of the poet to tradition and the creative process, and his best heroic play Aureng-zebe (1675) has a prologue that denounces the use of rhyme in serious drama. His play All for Love (1678) was written in blank verse, and was to immediately follow Aureng-Zebe. 

Dryden's greatest achievements were in satiric verse: the mock-heroic Mac Flecknoe, a more personal product of his laureate years, was a lampoon circulated in manuscript and an attack on the playwright Thomas Shadwell. Dryden's main goal in the work is to "satirize Shadwell, ostensibly for his offences against literature but more immediately we may suppose for his habitual badgering of him on the stage and in print." It is not a belittling form of satire, but rather one which makes his object great in ways that are unexpected, transferring the ridiculous into poetry. This line of satire continued with Absalom and Achitophel (1681) and The Medal (1682). His other major works from this period are the religious poems Religio Laici (1682), written from the position of a member of the Church of England; his 1683 edition of Plutarch's Lives Translated From the Greek by Several Hands in which he introduced the word 'biography' to English readers; and The Hind and the Panther, (1687) which celebrates his conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Poetic style Edit: 

What Dryden achieved in his poetry was neither the emotional excitement of the early nineteenth-century romantics nor the intellectual complexities of the metaphysical. His subject matter was often factual, and he aimed at expressing his thoughts in the most precise and concentrated manner. Although he uses formal structures such as heroic couplets, he tried to recreate the natural rhythm of speech, and he knew that different subjects need different kinds of verse. In his preface to Religio Laici, he says that "the expressions of a poem designed purely for instruction ought to be plain and natural, yet majestic... The florid, elevated and figurative way is for the passions; for (these) are begotten in the soul by showing the objects out of their true proportion... A man is to be cheated into passion, but to be reasoned into truth."

Translation style Edit: 

While Dryden had many admirers, he also had his share of critics, Mark Van Doren among them. Van Doren complained that in translating Virgil's Aeneid, Dryden had added "a fund of phrases with which he could expand any passage that seemed to him curt." Dryden did not feel such expansion was a fault, arguing that as Latin is a naturally concise language it cannot be duly represented by a comparable number of words in English. "He...recognized that Virgil 'had the advantage of a language wherein much may be comprehended in a little space' (5:329–30). The 'way to please the best Judges...is not to Translate a Poet literally; and Virgil least of any other' (5:329)."

For example, take lines 789–795 of Book 2 when Aeneas sees and receives a message from the ghost of his wife, Creusa.

iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem.'

haec ubi dicta dedit, lacrimantem et multa volentem

dicere deseruit, tenuisque recessit in auras.

ter conatus ibi collo dare bracchia circum;

ter frustra comprensa manus effugit imago,

par levibus ventis volucrique simillima somno.

sic demum socios consumpta nocte reviso

Dryden translates it like this:

I trust our common issue to your care.'

She said, and gliding pass'd unseen in air.

I strove to speak: but horror tied my tongue;

And thrice about her neck my arms I flung,

And, thrice deceiv'd, on vain embraces hung.

Light as an empty dream at break of day,

Or as a blast of wind, she rush'd away.

Thus having pass'd the night in fruitless pain,

I to my longing friends return again

Dryden's translation is based on presumed authorial intent and smooth English. In line 790 the literal translation of Haec ubi dicta dedit is "when she gave these words." But "she said" gets the point across, uses half the words, and makes for better English. A few lines later, with ter conatus ibi collo dare brachia circum; ter frustra compensate manus effugit imago, he alters the literal translation "Thrice trying to give arms around her neck; thrice the image grasped in vain fled the hands," in order to fit it into the metre and the emotion of the scene.

In his own words,

The way I have taken is not so straight as Metaphrase, nor so loose as Paraphrase: Some things to I have omitted, and sometimes added of my own. Yet the omissions I hope, are but of Circumstances, and such as would have no grace in English; and the Addition, I also hope, are easily deduced from Virgil's Sense. They will seem (at least I have the Vanity to think so), not stuck into him, but growing out of him. (5:529)

In a similar vein, Dryden writes in his Preface to the translation anthology Sylvae:

Where I have taken away some of [the original authors'] Expressions and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarged them, I desire the false Criticks would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the Poet, or maybe fairly deduced from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have written.

Besides being the greatest English poet of the later 17th century, Dryden wrote almost 30 tragedies, comedies, and dramatic operas. He also made a valuable contribution in his commentaries on poetry and drama, which are sufficiently extensive and original to entitle him to be considered, in the words of Dr Samuel Johnson, as “the father of English criticism.”

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