English Literature

Hamlet�s delay has been an issue of endless controversy. Hamlet�s soliloquies lend first true insight his contemplative nature and illustrate the problem of his procrastination. John Holloway says: �Hamlet�s soliloquies are foremost in bringing the idea of his delay to our notice.� Throughout reading Shakespeare�s Hamlet, there is an underlying question at hand that has plagued the minds of many scholars that what took Hamlet so long to carry out the orders of his noble father who contacted him beyond the grave. Regarding this question a number of theories have been advanced. Of course there are the critics like T.S.Eliot which refuse to take any notice of it. According to them it is certainly an artistic flaw. If Hamlet would have killed Claudius the play would have ended somewhere in Act-II. So Shakespeare was forced to delay the revenge. Still there are some other critics that argue that there was no delay at all on Hamlet�s part and everything that he does is deliberate and calcula...

Shakespeare�s Hamlet is complex and multifaceted play bringing together many themes. It is evident that in writing Hamlet, Shakespeare, to some extent, adopted the dramatic conventions of revenge tragedy. Revenge proved to be popular theme for Elizabethan dramatists and the audience. Although it was a wild justice, Elizabethan audience considered vengeance to be a pious duty laid upon the next of kin. The old law claimed an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; vengeance demanded both the eyes, a jaw full of teeth, and above all the victim should go direct to hell there to live in everlasting torment. A perfect revenge therefore needed great artistry.     Hamlet is a play that very closely follows the dramatic conventions of revenge tragedy. All revenge tragedies originally stemmed from the Greeks, who wrote and performed the first plays. After the Greeks came Seneca who was particularly influential to all Elizabethan playwrights  including William Shakespeare. The tw...

Ghost or supernatural plays an important role in Shakespearean tragedies. Shakespeare has introduced ghosts and witches which have supernatural knowledge. According to Moulton;  �Supernatural agency has a place in the world of Shakespeare�. In Hamlet, the supernatural appears in the form of the ghost. The first act is the little play in itself, and the ghost is the hero of it; 550 out of the 850 lines are concerned with it. Dover Wilson says: � The ghost is the linchpin of Hamlet, remove it, and the whole play falls to pieces.�  The ghost in Hamlet has at least a three-fold dramatic significance; It contributes to the general tragic utterances of the play; it motives the entire action of the play; it shows up the character and drives home a certain moral effect. First, in the play, Shakespeare has introduced the supernatural element in order to create an atmosphere of mystery, horror and suspense . It diffuses an atmosphere of awe through which the tragedy becomes more impres...

Ernest Hemingway, one the greatest novelists of modern times, created such gems of English literature and produced such unforgettable and marvelous characters as can never be forsaken or overlooked. In A   Farewell to Arms , there are two important and extraordinary characters; one of them, undoubtedly, is Catherine Barkley. It seems to be worthwhile to mention that she is a flat character and she has pre-conceived notions about life, death, love and war. She is confident and excites sympathy and tender feelings by her gentle and exemplary behavior. She is beautiful and tall woman and has a comely figure. When Catherine sees Henry for the first time, the shadow of death hangs over their meeting--her fianc� has been blown   � all to bits �   in the war of Somme.   In her conversation with Henry, she laments that she didn�t marry her fianc� before he died. She says that they were engaged for   "eight years ," and that they   "grew up together." Upon her meeti...

Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular novels of Jane Austen due to its multi-dimensional versatility of themes. Andrew H. Wright remarks: � She (Jane Austen) develops themes of the broadest significance, the novels go beyond social record, beneath the didactic, to moral concern, perplexity and commitment� One of the most important themes of Pride and Prejudice,  love and marriage, is also the central theme of the novel. The oft-quoted opening sentence of the novel demonstrates this basic theme: �It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife� It is true that the chief preoccupation of Jane Austen�s heroines is getting married and life is a matrimonial ceremony for them. Pride and Prejudice dramatizes the economic inequality of women, showing how women had to marry undesirable mates in order to gain some financial security. Marriage was a significant social concern in Jane Austen�s time and she was fully co...

Jane Austen as a novelist has stringently set her limits which she seldom oversteps. She was amazingly aware of which side her genius lay and she exploited it accordingly without any false notions of her capabilities or limitations. As Lord David Cecil points out, she very wisely stayed "within the range of her imaginative inspiration." Her imaginative inspiration was as severely limited as, for example, Hardy's or Arnold Bennett's. Her themes, her characters, her background setting -everything has a well-etched range within which she works, and works exquisitely. Jane Austen herself referred to her work as �Two inches of ivory.� In a letter to her niece, Fanny Knight, Jane Austen wrote, �Three or four families in a country village is the very thing to work on.� Although she works on a very small canvas, yet she has widened the scope of fiction in almost all its directions. Her stories are mostly indoor actions where only family matters are discussed. However, her...

Hardy�s �femme fatale� , Eustacia Vye is perhaps one of the most alluring and fascinating characters in The Return of the Native . Hardy presents a complicated and enthralling character of Eustacia vye, a genuine woman as opposed to an idealised one. Although Hardy gives proud, selfish and egotistical potrait of Eustacia, yet he masterfully creates a scenario in which she appears a tragic figure. Whereas  Clym may be �the nicest� among Hardy�s characters, it is the eccentric Eustacia Vye which is the centre  of the novel. Even in the Hardy�s introduction of her, there is plenty to dwell upon. The first time her existence  is mentioned, it is through the idle gossip of the locals. She is described as �very strange in her ways� , some of them accuse her of being a witch. Unlike Clym, whom the heath folk can at least fathom in part, Eustacia is beyond their comprehension. Her whole personality has a sleepy, dreamy cast to it. Though she is beautiful in an exotic way, i...

Hardy�s The Return of the Native is a novel based on unpractical idealism and  incompatible relationship between two major characters � Clym Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. Both of them are poles apart in character: The former is a plodding idealist, whereas the later is a fiery sensualist. Where Eustacia�s vision is a projective dream of the world, Clym�s is an introspective dream. Where she is a �the raw material of a divinity� who wilfully creates the objects of her world, Clym, is the enslaved sovereign of the kingdom of his mind. The conflict between these two antithetical modes of perception is inevitable from the outset; both fail to see the other at the commencement of the relationship.  When the story begins, we are not introduced with Clym who has been in Paris at that time but returns soon to the heath and it is the return that drives the plot of novel. Clym Yeobright is the tragic hero of Hardy�s novel. He is young man of thirty three and he is attractive enough to ...

O ne of the most prominent figures in Hardy�s The  Return of the Native is not a human character, but the physical landmark- Egdon Heath. The heath's central role is obvious from the beginning. The novel opens with an extensive description of the heath at dusk. Hardy begins by saying: �A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time of twilight, and the vast tract of unenclosed wild known as Egdon Heath embrowned itself moment by moment� . Even though the main story focuses on the relationships between Eustacia Vye, Clym Yeobright, Wildeve and Thomasin, the Heath is the central figure. Many of the events occur on or around Egdon Heath, and equally as important- all of the characters have their own special relationship with the heath.It is  �A Face on which Time makes but little Impression� . The nature of human beings is fleeting and insignificance as compared to the permanence of the heath. Avrom Fleishman in "The Buried Giant of Egdon Heath" regards Egdo...