ENG3- Steph Boucher

So, this week we were working on The History of the English, the class seperated into four groups, each covering an era. They were Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Late Modern English. My group consisted of Jess S., jess B., Melissa, Anthony, Kim, Jenn and myself, we covered the Early Modern English.

I worked on defenitions for a Shakesperian Tragedie, Comedie and History:

Shakespeare is known for writing three types of famous plays; tragedies, comedies and histories.

The Tragedy:·        

• Has a protagonist character, that is capable of good and evil, and in which the audience can understand and sympathize with.·        
•  The play also always insists on the operation of the doctrine of free will, where the anti-hero is always able to back out, to redeem himself, but the author dictates, they must move unheedingly to their doom.·        
• Some tragedies that Shakespeare has written include:
• o   Macbeth
• o   Romeo and Juliet
• o   King Lear
• o   Hamlet
• o   Othello
•  And many others.

 The Comedy:·        

•  Always has a happy ending, and usually involves marriage for all the unmarried characters.·        
• Is generally more light-hearted, compared to Shakespeare’s other plays.·        
•  Usually consist of
• o   Mistaken identities
• o   A clever servant
• o   Multiple intertwining plots
• o   Heightened tensions, often within a family
• o   Separation and unification
• o   Frequent use of puns·        
•  Some comedies include:
• o   The Taming of the Shrew
• o   The Tempest
• o   Twelfth Night
• o   A Midsummer’s Night Dream
• o   Measure for Measure
• o   Cardenio
• o   The Two Gentlemen of Verona
• o   The Winter’s Tale
•  And many others.

   The History:·        

• The histories are usually based on the lives if English kings.·        
•  His history plays are often regarded as Tudor propaganda because they show the dangers of civil war and celebrate the founders of the Tudor dynasty.·        
•  Some histories include:
• o   King John
• o   Richard II
• o   Richard III
• o   Henry VIIIAnd many others.

A few quick facts on William Caxton (although little is known about his life):

William Claxton 

• There is little known about the life of William Caxton.
• His date of birth is somewhere ranging from 1415-1425.
• By 1446, he was successful in business and became governor of the Merchant Adventures.
• It was when he travelled to Cologne, when he observed the new printing industry, and was significantly influenced by German printing.
• Once returned, he began immediately in setting up a printing press in bruges in collaboration with Colard Mansion, on which the first book in English was to be published in 1473.
• During the course of his life he wrote romances, classical-authored works and English and Roman histories.
• The most important works printed by him were “le Morte d’Arthur”,  Geoffrey Chauser’s Canterbury Tales.
• It is unknown the exact date of his death, but it is estimated that he dies in March of 1492

And the litterary figure Jonathon Swift (where I literally wrote his entire life story):

Literary Figure:

                -Jonathon Swift

·         Born November 30^th 1667 in Dublin.

·         His father was Irish, and his mother English. He was born 7 months just after his father’s death.

·         Most of Jonathon Swift’s early life facts are obscure, confused and sometimes contradictory.

·         It’s believed that at a very young age, his mother left him to be raised by his father’s family, so she could return to England.

·         His uncle Godwin took primary responsibility for him, sending him to Kilkenny College.

·         He attended Dublin University in 1682 and received his B.A. in 1686.

·         He was studying for his Master’s Degree in 1688, when troubles in Ireland came up, so he left for England, where his mother helped him get a job as a secretary and personal assistant to Sir William Temple at Moor Park.

·         While growing confidence with his employer he “was often trusted with matters of great importance”.

·         Temple had introduced him to William III, and sent him to London to try and persuade the king to consent to a bill for triennial Parliament.

·         He met 8 year old Esther Johnson, when he moved to Moor Park. She was the fatherless daughter of one of the servants, Swift was her tutor and mentor, he also gave her the nickname “Stella”.

·         In 1690, he returned to Ireland, due to his health but a year later went back to Moor Park. His illness was what is now known as Ménière’s disease.

o   Some symptoms of the disease include dizziness, spinning, hearing loss, ringing ears. It happens it attacks, so he could act completely normal with no syndromes between them.

·         In 1692, Swift received his M.A. from Hertford College.

·         He then left Moor Park to become an ordained priest in the Established Church of Ireland.

·         In 1694 he was appointed to be the prebend of Kilroot in the Diocese of Connor.

·         It appears that he was not happy with his new position, being isolated in a small time, but while there he did become romantically involved with Jane Waring. In Swift’s remains a letter had been found, in which he had written to her, saying that if she married him, he would stay, and if she refused he would leave Ireland. It seems as though, she refused, because in 1696, he returned to Moor Park, and to Temple’s service. Where he stayed until Temple died.

·         In 1699, after Temple’s death, swift stayed on briefly to complete the editing in Temple’s Memoirs, perhaps in the hope of earning a post in England. However, the Memoir’s left him with enemies in Temple’s family.

·         After a while, he finally settled in Laracor, where he ministered to a congregation of about fifteen.

·         In 1701, he anonymously published a political pamphlet “A Discourse On The Contests and Dissentions in Athens and Rome”.

·         In 1702, he received his Doctor of Divinity from Trinity College in Dublin.

·         That spring he travelled to England, and in October returned with Esther Johnson, also nicknamed “Stella”. Many believe that they were married in 1716, however there is no actual proof.

·         He began visited England quite often, and during these trips, he published “A Tale of a Tub” and “The Battle of the Books” in 1704, and slowly began to earn a reputation as a writer.

·         During the next few years, Swift began very politically involved, and in 1710 when the opposition Tory came to power, he was recruited as the editor of Examiner.

·         In 1711, he published another political pamphlet, “The Conduct of the Allies”.

·         Swift was in the inner circle of the Tory government, and often acted as mediator between Henry St. John and Robert Harley.

·         He recorded all these events and more, in his long letters to Esther Johnson, which were all later published in “The Journal to Stella”.

·         During these years in London, Swift meant another fatherless girl, Esther, who he nicknamed “Vanessa”. She is featured in his poem “Candenus and Vanessa”.

·         In 1720, he published “Proposal for Universal Use of Irish Manufacture”.

o   The Drapier’s Letters in 1724

o   A Modest Proposal in 1729

o   Which all earned him the status as Irish patriot.

o   During these years he began to work in his masterpiece “Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, in Four Parts” by Lemuel Gulliver “first a surgeon, and then a captain of several ships”. Also known as Gulliver’s Travels. It was first published in November 1726.

o   It is known as a classic of English literature.

o   It is his most enduring satire. Swift adopts an old satirical device: the imaginary voyage.

o   The main character Lemuel Gulliver, and is also the narrator of the story.

o   He goes on four voyages, which are all disastrous among “several remote nations of the world”.

  

o   In 1742, he suffered a stroke, and lost the ability to speak.

o   And on October 19^th 1745 he died, he was buried by Esther Johnson’s side.

Next up, acting out a scene from Macbeth….or for Jess and I it was using barbies to act out our scene. First we had to translate the scene into modern english today, then record it. With the debate, the research paper and now this, we found ourselves short for time. So we decided to go with a more creative approach, and that’s where the barbies came into play. It was surprisingly quite fun to record the scene, although a little painful for my throat….I didn’t know my voice could go so high…

Here’s our final results!:

(Hopefully this will finally upload…fingers crossed!)

For the debate, my group consisted of Jess S. Anthony and I. We were on the Negative Side, arguing that Shakespeare did infact write Shakespeare. Overall I believe our debate went well, we had costumes and well….we won!

I think this has to be the first time I actually enjoyed particapating in a debate…even though it was only my second one. The Affirmative Side did reaklly well, it was a close debate, and overall really intense. 

So, this is what my argument looked like (sorry for all the different size fonts and everything, but copying and pasting doesn’t seem to be working so well):

Over the years, there have been many different candidates for who really wrote Shakespeare, the most popular ones being Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, Edward de Vere (17^th Earl of Oxford) and his son-in-law William Stanley (6^th Earl of Oxford).

• Christopher Marlowe (and the Marlovian Theory): ·        
• English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan protagonists.·       
•   Died May 30^th 1593, from either being stabbed to death by a rival of his, or in a drunken bar fight. ·     
•     Homosexual.·         Faked death.
• o   To runaway and hide out with his lover and keep writing, just under the name Shakespeare.
• o   Basically he was a good poet, had the right education, and “disappeared” or died around the right time to have been the author of Shakespeare’s work.
• o   There were also some works, directly written by him, published after his “death”, so why wouldn’t he have just put Shakespeare work under his name as well if he wrote them. 
• Francis Bacon:·        
• English philosopher, statesman and essayist. Is also known as a proponent of the scientific revolution.·       
•   Has been credited as the creator of the English essay.·        
•  It is said that not only did he write the works of Shakespeare but of Montaigne and Marlowe as well.
• o   Where would he have found the time to write 37 plays and 154 sonnets under the name Shakespeare, as well as under the names Montaigne and Marlowe, while all at once living a double life? 
• Edward de Vere (17^th Earl of Oxford):·      
•    Elizabethan courtier, playwright, poet, sportsman, patron of numerous writers, and a sponsor of at least two acting companies.· 
•         In 1920, J. Thomas Looney stated that it was him that wrote Shakespeare, due to his advanced education and aristocratic life.
• o   Died in 1604, which prevents him from having witnessed such events as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the wreck of the Sea Venture in Bermuda in 1609, which are thought to be alluded in such dramas by Shakespeare such as Macbeth and The Tempest
• .o   Died before a third of the plays were written. 
• William Stanley (6^th Earl of Oxford):·        
•  Married Edward de Vere’s daughter.·        
• The only proof behind this was that , there had been a letter found that said  he was “busy penning plays for the common players.”
• o   Which could mean anything!
• o   He lived on till 1526, way too far past the publishing date to have been Shakespeare.

Those are the most likely to have written Shakespeare and if it wasn’t him himself, and well obviously it wasn’t any of them. There isn’t any facts or proof behind any of them, there’s no reason, other than some person randomly decided to go “hey, you know what I think, I don’t think Shakespeare really wrote Shakespeare, so it must be Francis Bacon because he was educated enough to have written it, or William Stanley because he was “busy penning plays for the common players”. Just because someone all of a sudden thinks that it wasn’t really Shakespeare doesn’t make it true, you need proof and facts and the authorship question of who really wrote Shakespeare has been going on long enough, if you haven’t been able to prove it in the last couple of centuries you never will.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 or the Powder Treason, as it was known at the time, was an unsuccessful attempt in the assassination of King James I, as well as his family and government, by a group of English Catholic Plotters. Their plan was to blow up the House of Parliament, on November 5^th, 1605, during the State Opening. They had hidden thirty six barrels of gunpowder, along with Guy Fawkes posing as Mr. John Johnson, underneath parliament. But at midnight, the night before, their plot was killed when their hiding spot was discovered along with Mr. John Johnson. They tried to stage this plot, as a way of starting a Catholic monarch. In which, the new head of state would be catholic and there would be some sort of Catholic Relief Act. The plotters; Robert Catesby, Thomas Winter, Robert Winter, Christopher Wright, Thomas Percy, John Bright, Ambrose Rokewood, Robert Keyes, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, Thomas Percy and Guy Fawkes, were all stupid to think that any of that would happen, none the less that their plan would ever actually be successful.

If the first part of their plan had been successful there’s no way that the second would have. Their plan was to have King James’ 9 year old catholic daughter, Princess Elizabeth, at head of state, and of course to have all Catholics be free and unafraid of being punished for their religion, seeing as how King James had banished all Catholics priests from the country. If the gunpowder had not been discovered and had gone off on that now memorable day, it would have caused a major backlash towards the Catholics. “Greater freedom for Catholics to worship as they chose seemed unlikely in 1604 but after the plot in 1605 changing the law to afford Catholics leniency became unthinkable; Catholic Emancipation took another 200 years.”

“The violence of the act would have instead resulted in a more severe backlash towards suspected Catholics. Without the involvement of some form of foreign aid, success would have been unlikely, as most Englishmen were loyal to the institution of the monarchy despite differing religious convictions. England could very well have become a more Puritan absolute monarchy, as existed in Sweden, Demmark,Saxony, and Prussia in the seventeenth century, rather than the path of parliamentary and civil reform that occurred.”           

 Nothing good would have come out of blowing up the King and his Parliament; the Protestants thought that the Catholics were bad, and if the catholic plotters were to blow up the King, the plotters would just be proving them right. Violence never solves anything, not even attempted violence in this case. All they did was push back Catholic Emancipation, maybe if they had tried to “fight” back in another way, a non-violent way, they would have gotten some where, and quicker. Fighting fire with fire never ends in a good way.

The plotters were not well prepared, they didn’t plan it well enough or thorough enough for the type of catastrophic event they were trying to create. Their time line was way off, if they even had created one, which maybe they should have. Considering they had put all the gunpowder in a cellar under the House of Lords really early and just left it there all winter, waiting for November 5^th and almost just waiting for someone to find it; they had only hidden it underneath some coal and wooden sticks. The waiting is probably what got to them and what drove Francis Thresham to write a letter to his brother-in-law Lord Monteagle, 10 days before the plot was to be put to test. Lord Monteagle was going to be attending the State Opening, so in the letter Francis Thresham warned him of the danger, and told him to stay home. He then immediately showed the letter to Robert Cecil, the Earl of Salisbury and secretary of state. They then searched the vaults below, and by midnight Guy Fawkes, along with the barrels of gunpowder, were found.

Another piece of stupidity on their part was trying to dig an underground tunnel, from a house they had rented just beside the House of Lords, all the way to under it. It was hard labour for them and was taking a while, so eventually they came up with a better idea. One that maybe should have been their original plan. Thomas Percy used his connections with the Royal Court to rent a cellar right under the House of Lords, where they could put the gunpowder. They could have made it a lot easier for them if they had had just rented the room to begin with.

The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 has a lot income with Shakespeare’s Macbeth, one of those being equivocation. Equivocation was a way for the plotters to stay truthful to God, while on stand. They did not want to give themselves up, but they couldn’t lie on stand, so they would use equivocation. Here is speech from Act 2 Scene 3 of Macbeth where they are referring to equivocation in the Gunpowder Plot: “Faith, here’s an equivocator, that could swear in both the scales against either scale; Who committed treason enough for God’s sake, Yet could not equivocate to heaven”. Throughout the play Shakespeare makes a lot of references to equivocation.

You could also relate the attempted killing of King James to the murder of Duncan. The whole reasoning behind the unsuccessful assassination of King James was to have a Catholic at Head of State. They truly believed in that killing King James, along with his government, they would get what they wanted. There would be a Catholic at head of State, no one would be punished for being catholic, and everything would go along just as they wanted. It is the same, in the case of Duncan and Macbeth. Macbeth saw killing Duncan as a detour on the way to being King. He killed Duncan so he could become king; the plotters wanted to kill the King to have “one of their own” in power. They both saw murder as a way of getting what they wanted, but did they? No, they didn’t, not at all. Macbeth ends up being killed and the same for all the plotters; they were all killed, most of them by being hung.

The fact that the plotters got quite close to blowing up parliament is quite frightening, although there wasn’t much security back then so it would have been a lot easier compared to now. The fact that they actually tried to dig a tunnel was quite stupid and uneducated on their part. It was very hard labour; they didn’t really have any tools and they ended up running into water. They had a much better alternative and should have gone with it from the start. Even just to think that if you blow up parliament, you will get what you want is just confusing, and a very unreal prospective on how the country would comprehend their actions. All they created was a more severe and more violent backlash towards the Catholics.

It’s the same as in the case of Macbeth, in thinking that he could just keep murdering people until he gets what he wants and where he wants to be, in this case king. But what isn’t understood is that by the time he would have gotten there, all the enemies he had made would have just torn him down. The realization of it all is that it’s just not worth it. Not only did he break his wife down but him as well. It’s the same story for the plotters in the gunpowder plot, not only did what they want to happen not happen, there plan was not successful, but they managed to push the freedom of Catholics in England  further back and they all got themselves killed. They gave the Catholics a worse reputation in England and drew some bad attention towards them. So in the end, not only were the plotters stupid in trying to plot a plan to kill King James and have a catholic as his replacement, but Macbeth as well in killing Duncan to become king.

 o Focus:

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In this class this semester I am trying to accomplish:

• Enjoying learning about English, and in general just enjoying the class.
• Learning to express myself in a more creative way, while writing.
• Being able to understand Shakespeare better and being able to analyse poems better. 

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o Contributions:                                                        

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  The contributions that I will make to this class are:

• I will update my blog regularly.
• I will show up to class on time and prepared. 

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o Accountabilities:

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I will be held responsible for the following behaviours:

• Attending class, and being ready on time.
• Making sure that I actually update my blog.
• Not procrastinating.
• Being openly involved in class discussions, giving my opinions and views.
• Completing all my work on time.
• Being a hard worker.

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o Supports:

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 These are the supports that I will need in order to achieve my accountabilities:

• My teacher, to keep the class interesting so that I want to always be there, and be enjoying the class.
• My dad, not letting me procrastinate but also not nagging me so that I can actually do my work, without being completely annoyed at him.
• My mom, giving me the time to actually do my work.
• My sister, leaving me alone and not bothering me when I’m supposed to be getting something done. 

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o Measurements:

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This is how I will know when I am successful:

• When I enjoy the class.
• When I accomplish my goals that I have for this class, this semester.
• When I’m happy with my mark and the work that I have been handing in.
• When I am proud of all the things I have accomplished in this class.  

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o Consequences:

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This is how I should be rewarded if I succeed and also how I should be punished:

• If I succeed I will be happy, and feel accomplished, however if I don’t and I don’t meet my goals or expectations that I will be disappointed and unhappy.