The development of English theatre and drama in XVI c. Shakespeare’s predecessors - “University Wits”.
The University Wits is a phrase used to name a group of late 16th-century English playwrights and pamphleteers who were educated at the universities (Oxford or Cambridge) and who became popular secular writers. Prominent members of this group were Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe from Cambridge, and John Lyly, Thomas Lodge, and George Peele from Oxford. Thomas Kyd is also sometimes included in the group, though he is not believed to have studied at university.
This diverse and talented loose association of London writers and dramatists set the stage for the theatrical Renaissance of Elizabethan England. They are identified as among the earliest professional writers in English, and prepared the way for the writings of William Shakespeare
Regarding the lay element and the craving for amusement, we note that in the Middle Ages, the juggler, the tumbler and jester ministered to the needs of the time. They are found in the twelfth century, and Langland tells us how gaily and unblushingly they flourished in the fourteenth century, though the serious-minded, wished to restrain them to a modest hilarity. Much of it was very primitive fooling, but there were dialogues and repartees of which fragments only have survived. The Middle Ages solely needed a Pepys. Of these entertainers, the jester was the best. He lived by his wits in a very literal manner, disgrace and death following upon an unsuccessful sally, and he survived into Shakespeare’s day, though fallen then from his high state to play the fool between the acts of a play. What he had been at this zenith we may judge from the picture of Touchstone, of Feste, and the Fool in Lear. Such debates as The Owl and Nightingale influenced the development of the drama; for before Chaucer’s time some of these were turned into story.
The main periods of the creative activity of Ch. Dickens. The significance of his contribution to English Literature.
Charles Dickens – Famous Writer and Critic of the Victorian Era
Dickens was the novelist of his age. He wrote a tremendous number of works. He created a new type of novel - the social novel. Dickens considered that the great contrast between the rich und the poor was abnormal in a civilized society. Dickens showed a broad panorama of the 19th century English life. He portrayed people of all types seen in the streets of great cities in his time. While reading, we meet commercial agents parliamentarians, political adventurers, scoundrels of all sorts, lawyers, clerks, newspaper reporters, schoolmasters, factory workers, homeless children, priggish aristocrats, pickpockets and convicts. Dickens developed in his readers a love for man; he never lost his warmth and sympathy for this man. This impresses readers and they follow the writer in his pilgrimage along the roads of England. He described offices, factories, prisons and the slums of London.
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Dickens's creative work can be divided into 4 periods:
1. The works written in the 1830s:
"Sketches by Boz" (1833 -1836)
"The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" (1837)
"Oliver Twist" ( 1838)
"Nickolas Nickleby" (1839)
"The Old Curiosity Shop" (1841)
Dickens's heroes in the novels of the 1st period are willing to live in poverty and work hard. There is no sarcasm in his criticism yet. Humour and optimism are characteristics of the 1st period of Dickens's literary activity.
2. The following books written in the 1840s belong to the 2nd period of Dickens's creative work. They are: "American Notes" (1842)
"The Christmas Books" (1843-48)
"Dombey and Son" (1846-48)
In the works of the second period Dickens begins to describe the crimes that were the product of the bourgeois system.
3. The following works written in the 1850s are distinguished by the strongest social criticism expressed in them. He wrote:
"David Copperfield"(1850)
"Bleak House" (1853)
"Hard Times" (1854)
"Little Dorrit" (1857)
Dickens protested by writing his most realistic novels. He became a great democrat in literature.
4. The fourth period of Dicken’s creative work was the 1860s. He wrote only two novels:
"Great Expectations (1861)
"Our Mutual Friend" (1864-65)
Those works are written in the spirit of disillusionment. The writer feels that a better future is too far off and he only dreams of that future. His heroes show the moral strength and patience of the common people.
24. Science fiction literature. The main ideas in the novels The Invisible Man, The Time Machine: An Invention by Herbert Wells
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Science fiction is one of the most popular branches in the modern literature. At the same time, the origin of science fiction literature dates back to ancient times, when ancient writer attempted to represent their ideas in fictional forms and unite these fictional forms with their knowledge of the real life. In the course of time, the science fiction literature evolved consistently but it remained always focused on the representation of ideas, concepts and beliefs of writers, which were different from those that dominated in the real life but which were often closely intertwined with the real life or represented an alternative to various real life issues, problems and beliefs. As a result, the science fiction is an extremely rich genre of literature, which allows writers to develop new concepts and ideas and present them in the literary form as an alternative vision of the real life presented by the writers.
The Invisible Man
In the center of the novel - the genius of a scientist who crossed the line between permissible and inhuman.
In this light, "invisibility" has become the main leitmotif of the work — neither the scientist nor the results of his work no one noticed. Misunderstood and rejected by society, Griffin tried to win success by force, but he was able to fight back, thanks to the imperfection of his position. After all, being invisible means being alone. Since Griffin did not want to share his discovery with anyone, the result was left without support. When he was enraged, he had no choice but to die and take everything with him.
The whole problem with Griffin is his desire to benefit from a complete discovery, independent entirely. To put it simply-wells showed how much self-confidence can play against a man, even a man of smart and powerful
The Time Machine : An Invention
The "time machine" was a response to chauvinistic propaganda that tried to convince the working class that the British were a single nation opposed to all foreigners, and especially to colonial peoples.
In a society of the distant future, which wells paints, workers and exploiters are not even “two Nations”, but two different breeds of people. The workers, for millennia deprived of the benefits of culture, degenerated into bestial-looking Morlocks, and the “upper classes”, accustomed to live by the fruits of someone else's labor, turned into pampered, unviable Eloi. Modern society is divided into workers and idlers, and this inevitably leads to its degeneration, warns wells. The ruling classes face a historic retribution. The Morlocks of wells continue to feed the eloys, but only because they eat them.
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