Pastoral and Country House Poetry
What is the golden age?
This play features four mismatched lovers, a troupe of actors, and mischievous fairies.
What is A Midsummer Night's Dream?
This poet’s unfinished epic The Faerie Queene aimed to “fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous discipline."
Who is Edmund Spenser?
"Why this is hell, nor am I out of it. Think’st thou that I who saw the face of God And tasted the eternal joys of heaven Am not tormented with ten thousand hells In being deprived of everlasting bliss?"
Mephistopheles in Doctor Faustus
This term refers to a play written to be read rather than performed on stage—a genre often used by early women writers like Margaret Cavendish.
What is a closet drama?
Aemilia Lanyer celebrates an all-female space centered on her patron, the Countess of Cumberland, in this poem.
What is "The Description of Cookham"?
In The Tempest, Prospero’s use of magic can be read as a metaphor for this art form.
What is theater or artistic creation?
In Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight allegorically represents this Christian virtue.
What is holiness?
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
Prospero in Shakespeare’s The Tempest
This term describes a central character whose downfall results from a fatal flaw or error in judgment, as seen in Doctor Faustus.
What is a tragic hero?
This roman poet's Eclogues heavily influenced early modern English pastorals
Who is Virgil?
These characters in The Tempest are often interpreted as symbolizing colonized peoples.
Who are Ariel and Caliban?
In Paradise Lost, this fallen angel declares “Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”
Who is satan?
“Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, / Old Time is still a-flying.”
Robert Herrick, “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time”
A complex and surprising metaphor characteristic of metaphysical poetry.
What is a conceit?
As the speaker in Marvell's "The Garden" transcends his mind and body as he becomes entangled with nature, he describes the experience as "Annihilating all that's made / To a green thought in __________".
What is "a green shade"?
Shakespeare's sonnets are comprised of three of these and a final couplet.
What are quatrains?
Both Spenser and Milton use this traditional epic device to begin their poems with an appeal to divine inspiration.
What is the invocation of the muse?
Luxurious man, to bring his vice in use, / Did after him the world seduce, / And from the fields the flowers and plants allure, / Where nature was most plain and pure.
What is Marvell's "The Mower Against Gardens"?
In a sonnet, this term refers to the “turn” or shift in tone, argument, or perspective—often signaling a change in emotion or logic.
What is a volta?
In “To Penshurst,” Ben Jonson praises the modest estate and concludes the poem comparing it to more opulent country homes with "Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else,/ May say their lords have built, but thy lord ____."
What is "dwells"?
Sonnet 130's description of his lover paling in comparison to the beauty of nature subverts this traditional literary convention.
What is blazon?
In Book 9 of Paradise Lost, Eve’s decision to eat the fruit raises questions about free will and this theological concept central to Reformation thought.
What is predestination or original sin?
Of all Gods workes, which do this world adorne,
There is no one more faire and excellent,
Then is mans body both for powre and forme,
Whiles it is kept in sober gouernment;
But none then it, more fowle and indecent,
Distempred through misrule and passions bace:
It growes a Monster, and incontinent
Doth loose his dignitie and natiue grace.
Behold, who list, both one and other in this place.
What is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, Book II?
The theological movement that emphasized salvation by faith and scriptural authority, influencing writers like Spenser and Milton.
What is the Protestant Reformation?