SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE & THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER

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S.T.COLERIDGE AND THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER  

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  If you like heavy metal, IRON MAIDEN made a rock version of Coleridge's ballad

Video: IRON MAIDEN THE RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER PART 

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WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

• Preface to "Lyrical Ballads" - The Manifesto of English Romanticism (1800)
• everyday situations as the subject of poetry
• use of the language of common people purified by the poet
• recollection in tranquillity
• the poet is a man speaking to men but with a greater sensitivity
  

WAS RICHARD III REALLY THE VILLAIN SHAKESPEARE PORTRAYS?

Was Richard III really the scheming, villanous tyrant Shakespeare so powerfully  depicted in his tragedy? 

The Richard III Society, believes it untrue. They state: 

 "… the purpose and indeed the strength of the Richard III Society derive from the belief that the truth is more powerful than lies - a faith that even after all these centuries the truth is important. It is proof of our sense of civilised values that something as esoteric and as fragile as reputation is worth campaigning for." 

What they reject is the portrait Shakespeare drew from Sir Thomas More's biography of the last Plantagenet kings, Edward IV first, his younger brother Richard III then.

What was the full Thomas More treatment, that still seems to be current in some quarters?  Let us look at the dossier that has been built up against Richard III:

THEMES & TOPICS - WAR IN SCOTT'S NOVELS

Just some reflections on how war and fighting are seen in Sir Walter Scott’s novels.

Scott has a Romantic idea of war: he presents it as heroic, shaped by the code of romances. According to him the battlefield is a place where every man can practise and show his bravery, his loyalty, his desire to sacrifice himself for other human beings or for a cause. War is the field of the hero and the rebel dissatisfied with society and its unjust rules. War is considered an idealized moment, men fight for some right reasons and for their ideals. 

Scott doesn’t describe the atrocities of killing, he distances the violence of a conflict transforming war into a source of imaginative pleasure, he undercovers the horrors of war with the idea of  future glory. Connected to this conception of war there is the cult of the individual, typical of the Romantic age: a rebel, a hero who fights to defend people unjustly accused, who fights to restore the just lists, against society .

WAVERLEY & IVANHOE: TWO ROMANTIC HEROES

WAVERLEY (1814)

PLOT

•       Edward Waverley is educated in an English Jacobite aristocratic family.

•       He is sent to Scotland to join the Hanoverian army of king George II.

•       He visits a Jacobite family friend, whose daughter, Rose, falls in love with him.

•       He , instead, is attracted by Flora Mac Ivor, the sister of the chief of the      rebels, Fergus.

•       Edward betrays his mates and joins the rebels.

•       He is finally forgiven by the king and marries Rose.

•       Fergus is killed and Flora retires into a convent.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Waverley is set during the period of the Jacobite uprisings: it starts in the late summer of 1744 and ends many months after the battle of Culloden (1746) when the Jacobites were defeated and their cause was virtually destroyed.