STUDYING & WATCHING NORTH AND SOUTH BY ELIZABETH GASKELL (1855)

 THE STORY

When Margaret Hale arrives in Milton - in the industrial northern district of England - she is so disappointed by the bleak, smoky, noisy, grey atmosphere of the place. Her father has left the Church and decided to uproot his family from Helstone , in the beautiful countryside of the South of England. Margaret is greatly prejudiced against the people from the North and their rather direct, almost wild manners. So she starts idealizing the South

Mr Bell, one of Mr Hale’s former university mates, suggested them to settle in Milton where he owns a cotton mill run by his tenant, Mr John Thornton. Mr Thornton helps the Hales to find accomodation and becomes Mr Hale’s friend and pupil. He is handsome and smart, self-confident and successful in his job, greatly appreciated in Milton both as an entepreneur and a magistrate.

COLERIDGE'S PERCEPTION OF NATURE & MODERN ECOLOGICAL STUDIES

The modern environmental view of nature holds that nature is a dynamic balance stemmed from a long period of geological and natural evolution between animals and plants, organic substance and inorganic matter, the earth and other planets. It is a physical existence and a vigorous organic substance as well (Xun, 1994, pp.218-219).

Despite of humans’ superior competence and specialties to other species, it does not mean that they have the exclusive privilege to willfully manipulate, enslave, abuse, invade, or deprive the rights of other species to live free.

SHAKESPEARE, SONNET 116: LET ME NOT TO THE MARRIAGE OF TRUE MINDS

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

THE ARTHURIAN LEGEND IN DANTE: PAOLO AND FRANCESCA

Dante’s use of the Arthurian legend

By the late 13^th century the Arthurian legend and its stories were so well-known throughout Europe that Dante could use them for one of the most famous episodes of his Divina Commedia: that of the tragic love and death of Paolo and Francesca (Inferno, Canto V). Dante placed the two lovers from Rimini in the ring (girone) of the lustful (lussuriosi). Virgil, who is Dante’s guide through Hell and Purgatory, first points out to Dante some of the famous figures in the ground of the lustful: some of them come from classical history and literature  - Helen of Troy, Dido, Cleopatra; others – such as Tristan – come straight from the Arthurian legend.

Tristan, one of the bravest knights of the Round Table, is there because of his adulterous love for Isolde, wife to King Mark of Cornwall – who was Tristan’s uncle and who finally killed him.

MODULE 3. DRUMS OF WAR

MODULE 3.  DRUMS OF WAR 

FROM THE SATIRICAL NOVEL TO SATIRICAL PAINTING - WILLIAM HOGARTH, MARRIAGE A LA MODE

Hogarth was the inventor of the narrative sequence of paintings. Each sequence followed a theme such as the failure of combined marriages or the corruption of political elections, for examples. Hogarth's oil paintings were then engraved and sold as sets of prints, which made them much cheaper and very popular. Hogarth is at once a realistic and comic artist, a satirist.

Let's give a close look at his Marriage à la Mode (fashionable marriage in French) sequence (1743 - 45) .

1. The Marriage Settlement

This is the first scene in this series of paintings on the misfortunes of a marriage between people of fashion. The marriage is being arranged in the Earl of Squander's house. The Earl suffers from gout and rests his bandaged foot on a stool. He is receiving the dowry for his son's marriage to a rich merchant's daughter: her money for his old ancestry - he points to the genealogical tree, on the right. The Earl is in debt because of the expenses for the still unfinished Palladian villa seen through the window. The groom, on the left, is dressed as a perfecto fop and has a black patch on his neck (the sign of a venereal disease) . The bride sits with her back to him and looks sad; she's listening to the lawyer Silvertongue, her secret lover.

HAMLET

  

Imagine you are a young university student ... Imagine you love Philosophy and Poetry ... You've got friends as well as  a beautiful girl you start fancying about...But your happy ordinary world is suddenly turned upside down by the news of your father's death. You grieve and mourn but you can cope with it...What you really can't stand is ... your mother's behaviour...After just few weeks,  she gets married again, with your uncle, your father's brother...You find it unbearable but nobody else seems to notice that unacceptable exhibition of joy and love. Then something even worse happens: your father's ghost comes back from hell, reveals you the tragic truth of his death and orders you to avenge him! Your uncle Claudius has murdered him and now he is your mother's new husband!

What would you do? Would you respect your father's will? 

This is what happens in the first act of Shakespeare's "Hamlet", one of  the most popular tragedies of all times.

SHAKESPEARE'S RICHARD III IN MOVIES - VIDEO COMPARISON

While historians and historical fiction writers have re-discovered and re-written what people for centuries have thought of Richard III, the only image we have on stage and in films is the one we inherited from Shakespeare.

"The history of the world, like letters without poetry, flowers without perfume, or thought without imagination, would be a dry matter indeed without its legends, and many of these, though scorned by proof a hundred times, seem worth preserving for their own familiar sakes". (from the preamble of Richard III 1955)

On Imdb you can find a detailed list of all the filmed works dedicated to or  focusing on Richard III,  and including even those movies just featuring him as a minor character. But, except for The Black Arrow (adaptation of R. L. Stevenson's historical novel in which young Richard of Gloucester helps the protagonist Richard - Dick - Shelton), in all of them we have him portrayed as the wicked villain. 

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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LINKS & CONNECTIONS

  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 

Lyrics  

ULYSSES BY ALFRED TENNYSON

Lord Alfred Tennyson (1809-1892)

Ulysses by Alfred Tennyson (1833) is a dramatic monologue, a kind of narrative poem in which a single character may address one or more listeners. It is related to the soliloquy used in the Elizabethan plays.
It is usually written in blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameters).

In a dramatic monologue the character is different from the poet himself and is caught in a crucial moment of crisis. 

It little profits that an idle king, 
By this still hearth, among these barren crags, 
Match’d with an aged wife, I mete and dole 
Unequal laws unto a savage race, 
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me. 

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink 
Life to the lees: All times I have enjoy’d 
Greatly, have suffer’d greatly, both with those 
That loved me, and alone, on shore, and when 
Thro’ scudding drifts the rainy Hyades 
Vext the dim sea: I am become a name; 
For always roaming with a hungry heart 

THE THEME OF THE DOUBLE: CALVINO AND STEVENSON

To find links and connections between different literatures can be interesting as well as useful while preparing the interdisciplinary Esame di Stato.

The double is one of those themes which have aroused the interest of all literatures in all ages : Hoffmann, Dostoevskij, Gogol, Gautier, Maupassant, Poe, Calvino, Conrad and Kafka, to name only a few, have all, like Stevenson, probed the notion of duality.

The double, or doppelganger, is a second self, or alter ego, which appears as a distinct and separate being perceived by the physical senses, but existing in a dependent relation to the original. "Dependent" does not mean "subordinate"; in fact often the double comes to dominate, control and usurp the functions of the subject. It became also a device of psychological penetration for many writers.

Calvino's humorous short story "Il visconte dimezzato" deals with the same

MASTERS & WORKERS : MR THORNTON AND NICHOLAS HIGGINS, THE IDEAL RELATIONSHIP ACCORDING TO MRS GASKELL

In  Mary Barton  (1848), Elizabeth Gaskell  started to draw her own tragic picture of the “eternal subject for agitation in the manufacturing districts”: “the differences between the employers and the employees”.  John Barton, after witnessing  the painful death of his only little son helplessly, had tried to fight for better living and better working conditions for himself and his fellow workers as chairman of a Trade Union  . He had also joined a political movement asking for universal male suffrage and the possibility for a man of no property to become member of Parliament:  Chartism . All his attempts resulted  as failures and that made his rage against factory-owners explode into murder.

Desperate workers attack the mill - From BBC North and South (2004)