16th & 17th Century Literature

Answer: (a) an action.

In the Poetics, Aristotle defines tragedy as the imitation (mimesis) of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude — not the imitation of a character. Character, he insists, is secondary; it is included for the sake of the action. This is why plot (mythos) is for Aristotle the ‘soul’ of tragedy, more important than the people who act in it.

Answer: 1779.

Samuel Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, a series of biographical and critical sketches of English poets from Cowley to Gray, began publication in 1779. The first four volumes appeared in that year; the remaining six followed in 1781. Originally commissioned as prefaces to a collection of the poets’ works, the Lives became Johnson’s most influential critical work — and the source of the famous label ‘metaphysical poets’.

Answer: (a) Elizabeth Boyle.

Spenser’s Amoretti (1595), a sequence of 89 sonnets, celebrates his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle, the lady he married in 1594. Sonnet 75 (‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’) belongs to this sequence: the poet writes his beloved’s name on the sand, the waves wash it away, and the poem turns the failure into an emblem — mortal love made immortal by verse.

Answer: The Temple.

George Herbert’s poems were published posthumously in 1633 under the title The Temple: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. On his deathbed Herbert entrusted the manuscript to Nicholas Ferrar, asking him to publish it only if he judged it might benefit ‘any dejected poor soul’. The collection — including ‘The Pulley’, ‘The Collar’ and ‘Easter Wings’ — is the finest achievement of devotional metaphysical poetry.

Answer: (a) diary.

In ‘Of Travel’ (1625), Bacon advises the young traveller to keep a diary. He notes the paradox that men make diaries on sea voyages, ‘where there is nothing to be seen but sky and sea’, yet neglect them on land journeys, ‘wherein so much is to be observed’. The diary, Bacon argues, turns travel from mere sightseeing into education: observation recorded becomes knowledge kept.

Answer: Christiana (Christian’s wife) and her children.

Part II of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1684) follows Christiana, Christian’s wife — who had refused to join him in Part I — now setting out on the same pilgrimage with her four children and her neighbour Mercy. Guided by Mr Great-heart, they retrace Christian’s road through the Wicket Gate, the Interpreter’s House and Vanity Fair, proving that the way of salvation stands open to women and households as well.

Answer: (b) the witches.

‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’ is chanted by the three witches in the opening scene of Macbeth (Act 1, Scene 1), amid thunder and lightning. The line states the play’s ruling paradox: moral values are inverted, and nothing is what it seems. Macbeth unknowingly echoes it in his very first line — ‘So foul and fair a day I have not seen’ — showing that he is already tuned to their frequency.

Answer: ghost.

At the banquet in Act 3, Scene 4 of Macbeth, the newly crowned king sees the ghost of Banquo sitting in his own chair. Visible to Macbeth alone, the ghost shatters his attempt at kingly composure — he cries, ‘never shake thy gory locks at me,’ while the guests look on in confusion. The scene marks the moment when guilt begins to make Macbeth’s tyranny public.

Answer: (b) true knowledge.

Chapter 36 of the Tirukkural, titled mey unarvu, is on true knowledge — the perception of things as they really are. Valluvar teaches that only those who see truly are freed from the darkness of delusion; all else, however learned it appears, is ignorance. In the Kural’s scheme such true understanding is the foundation of right conduct and, at last, of liberation.

Answer: Giridhar (Giridhari).

Meera calls Krishna Giridhar — ‘the lifter of the mountain’ — recalling the legend in which Krishna held up Mount Govardhan on his fingertip to shelter the people of Braj from Indra’s storm. The name expresses Meera’s intimate, personal devotion: her God is not a distant abstraction but the strong, protective beloved who shields his devotees. For Meera, to sing ‘Giridhar’ is to claim Krishna’s protection as her own.

The epic and the ballad are both narrative poems, but they differ fundamentally in scale, style and origin.

The epic is a long narrative poem in an elevated style, dealing with the deeds of a national hero and the destiny of a people. It opens with an invocation to the Muse and begins in medias res. Its machinery includes extended (Homeric) similes, catalogues of warriors and divine intervention — as in the Iliad or Milton’s Paradise Lost.

The ballad, by contrast, is a short, song-like narrative of folk origin. It tells a single dramatic episode — a murder, a betrayal, a supernatural encounter — in simple language with refrains and repetition. It opens abruptly, favours dialogue over description, and its power lies in suggestion, as in ‘Chevy Chase’ or ‘Lord Randal’.

In short, the epic narrates a nation’s story at ceremonial length, while the ballad sings one striking moment. One builds a world; the other strikes a single note.

In Holy Sonnet 10 (‘Death Be Not Proud’), Donne makes sleep the master image by which he disarms Death: ‘One short sleep past, we wake eternally.’ Dying becomes nothing more than falling asleep before a greater waking.

The argument is a witty paradox. Sleep gives rest and pleasure to the living — men even purchase it with opiates. If sleep, the mere ‘picture’ of death, is so sweet, then death itself, of which sleep is only the image, must be sweeter still. Why fear the copy when the original is better? Behind the conceit lies St Paul (1 Corinthians 15): death as sleep before the resurrection morning.

The image also serves Donne’s larger strategy of belittling Death. Death is no mighty conqueror but a short nap; it cannot kill the soul, and at the Last Day it will itself die — ‘Death, thou shalt die.’ Sleep thus becomes Donne’s proof, by analogy, by Scripture and by wit, that Death has no real power over the Christian.

Evangelist is the first guide Christian meets in The Pilgrim’s Progress, and he embodies the gospel ministry — the preaching voice that starts, corrects and encourages the pilgrimage.

He finds Christian weeping in the field under the burden of sin and points him toward the Wicket Gate and the Shining Light, giving him a parchment roll inscribed ‘Fly from the wrath to come’. When Christian is seduced by Mr Worldly Wiseman toward the village of Morality, Evangelist reappears, rebukes the false counsel with stern tenderness, and sets the pilgrim back on the true road. At Vanity Fair he comes once more to comfort Christian and Faithful, warning them of the trial ahead like a pastor preparing his flock for persecution.

Allegorically, Evangelist represents the faithful preacher: he does not walk the road for Christian but shows him the way and then steps aside. He is the voice of Scripture itself — directing, warning, consoling — without which no pilgrimage can begin.

Lady Macduff appears only in Act 4, Scene 2, yet her brief presence is the moral centre against which Macbeth’s tyranny is measured. Warm, witty and devoted, she scolds her absent husband and comforts her little son with tender mockery — the play’s most purely domestic scene, full of natural affection.

Her murder, ordered by Macbeth out of paranoid spite, is the play’s clearest image of tyranny: the killing of the innocent to frighten the guilty. The scene’s pathos — the child’s brave wordplay, the mother’s desperate flight — makes abstract evil concrete.

Dramatically, her death converts Macduff from a cautious thane into an avenger; hearing the news, he vows to meet Macbeth ‘front to front’. She also stands as the anti-type of Lady Macbeth: natural motherhood against unsexed ambition, innocence against guilt. Her death shows how far Macbeth has fallen — from warrior to murderer of women and children.

For Kabir, nam — the Name of God — is the very centre of devotion. As a nirgun saint who rejected idols, temples and priests, Kabir needed a form of worship without form, and he found it in sumiran: the constant, loving repetition of God’s name.

The Name is the accessible form of the Formless. God has no image and no temple, yet through the word on the tongue He becomes near — the name repeated purifies the mind. Kabir sets this inner practice against outer ritual: pilgrimages, fasts and ritual bathing are useless, he says, if the heart does not repeat the Name.

Crucially, the Name democratises devotion. It costs nothing, needs no priest and respects no caste; weaver and Brahmin alike can hold it. In Kabir’s teaching, therefore, nam is the bridge between the formless Absolute and the seeking heart — the one practice in which the poorest devotee stands equal to the most learned.

Aristotle’s Poetics remains the foundation of tragic theory. Tragedy, he says, is the imitation (mimesis) of an action that is serious, complete and of a certain magnitude, told in embellished language and achieving, through pity and terror, the catharsis of such emotions. Of the six formative elements — plot (mythos), character (ethos), thought (dianoia), diction (lexis), song (melos) and spectacle (opsis) — plot is the ‘soul’ of tragedy, for character exists for the sake of action, not action for character.

The tragic hero is neither wholly good nor wholly bad but falls through hamartia — an error of judgement, often born of a characteristic flaw. The plot turns on peripeteia, the reversal of fortune, and anagnorisis, the recognition of truth, ideally coinciding. The spectator, feeling pity for undeserved suffering and terror at how near such suffering is to himself, undergoes catharsis — a purging and clarifying of emotion. Aristotle further demands unity of action: every incident must be causally bound to the whole.

Macbeth fits this frame with remarkable closeness. Its plot is a model of unity: from the witches’ prophecy to Dunsinane, every murder breeds the next, and nothing is episodic. Macbeth’s hamartia is his ‘vaulting ambition’, as he himself names it — ambition that ‘o’erleaps itself’. He is no villain from the start but a honoured warrior whose single flaw, worked on by prophecy and by Lady Macbeth, becomes a fatal error.

Peripeteia and anagnorisis arrive together. The reversal — from crowned king to hunted tyrant — is sealed by Banquo’s ghost and the march of Birnam Wood; the recognition comes in the ‘Tomorrow’ speech, where Macbeth sees life as ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’. He understands, too late, what his ambition has purchased. Catharsis follows in full: pity for the waste of a great nature, terror at how thin the partition is between honour and murder. In diction and spectacle — the dagger soliloquy, the sleepwalking scene — Shakespeare supplies Aristotle’s lesser elements while keeping plot supreme.

One reservation may be noted: Aristotle’s hero typically errs unknowingly, while Macbeth chooses evil with open eyes. Yet this only deepens the tragedy. Macbeth is Aristotle’s theory realised in Renaissance dress — ambition as hamartia, imagination as the engine of reversal, and recognition arriving exactly when nothing can be saved.

Spenser and Donne stand at opposite poles of Renaissance love poetry: one refines love upward into heavenly marriage, the other drives it inward into the speaking, desiring self.

Spenser’s attitude, embodied in the Amoretti (1595) and the Epithalamion, is Neoplatonic and idealising. His lady — Elizabeth Boyle, whom he courted and married — is praised as earthly beauty reflecting heavenly virtue. The sonnets follow the Petrarchan pattern of worship at a distance, but Spenser disciplines desire toward a chaste end: the sequence closes not in frustration but in the Epithalamion, the great marriage hymn, where love is consummated in wedded joy and blessed by heaven. His tone is reverent, patient and public; love is a moral education, refining the lover even as it celebrates the beloved. Even the famous Sonnet 75 (‘One day I wrote her name upon the strand’) turns a lover’s game into an emblem of verse immortalising mortal love.

Donne breaks this mould entirely. In the Songs and Sonets he rejects Petrarchan distance for dramatic immediacy: his lovers are awake, arguing, undressing, parting at dawn. Love for Donne is a paradox to be experienced, not an ideal to be worshipped. In ‘The Good-Morrow’ he fuses body and soul — ‘let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one’ — making the lovers’ private world larger than the public one of explorers and courts. In ‘The Canonization’ he turns the world’s contempt into sainthood: lovers are canonised by love itself. His wit — the flea, the compass, the ‘death’ of ‘The Canonization’ — yokes the physical and the spiritual by violence, as Johnson complained; yet the fusion is the point, for Donne will not split what lovers join.

The contrast is thus complete. Spenser loves at a reverent distance and resolves love in marriage; Donne loves at close quarters and resolves it in the moment’s intensity. Spenser is public and ceremonial, Donne private and dramatic. Spenser inherits the courtly tradition and purifies it; Donne assaults it with colloquial speech and metaphysical conceits.

Yet both are serious about love’s dignity. Spenser proves that love can be holy; Donne proves that it can be whole — mind and body together. Between the patient worshipper of the Amoretti and the urgent arguer of the Songs and Sonets lies the full range of Renaissance love: idealised above, incarnate below.

Vanity Fair is the greatest set-piece of The Pilgrim’s Progress — Bunyan’s panorama of the world as a market: glittering, busy, and murderous toward saints.

The fair is held in the town of Vanity, founded long ago by Beelzebub, Apollyon and Legion, and ‘kept all the year long’. Its goods are everything the world values: honours, titles, kingdoms, lusts, pleasures — and, in Bunyan’s devastating catalogue, ‘wives, husbands, children, masters, servants, lives, blood, bodies, souls, silver, gold, pearls, precious stones’. Nothing is too sacred to be priced; commerce becomes the very image of corruption, for the world sells what cannot be bought and buys what should not be sold.

Christian and Faithful enter the fair as conspicuous aliens. Their clothes are strange, their speech is the language of Canaan, and they ‘set very light by all their wares’ — they will buy only truth. The fair-goers first mock, then rage: the pilgrim’s refusal to trade is itself an accusation. Here Bunyan dramatises the saint’s necessary estrangement from society; to be in the world but not of it is to be unintelligible to it.

The episode rises to the trial and martyrdom of Faithful — the book’s most dramatic scene. Hauled before Lord Hate-good, Faithful answers the charges with fearless courtesy, is condemned, and is burned at the stake, only to be carried up to the Celestial City in a chariot — the same chariot that will later bear Christian. The world’s fair answers truth with violence, and violence is answered by glory.

Beneath the allegory runs sharp satire of Restoration England: its courts, markets and even churches, where preferment is bought and conscience sold. Bunyan, the imprisoned tinker-preacher, knew this world from below. Vanity Fair endures because it is both theology and sociology — as theology it teaches contempt of the world (the pilgrim must pass through without buying), as social criticism it exposes how societies commodify everything, including souls. The pilgrim’s answer remains Bunyan’s own: buy the truth, and sell it not.

The best criticism of Macbeth has always circled one insight: this is a tragedy not merely of ambition but of imagination. Macbeth does not simply do evil; he imagines it first, and his imagination then does the rest.

The dagger soliloquy (Act 2, Scene 1) is the proof. Before the murder, Macbeth sees ‘a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain’. The weapon exists in imagination before the hand holds it; indeed, imagination half-does the murder for him. This is the pattern of the whole play: every crime is previewed in the mind’s eye — the witches’ prophecy, the ‘horrid image’ of Duncan’s murder that ‘unfixes his hair’, Banquo’s ghost at the feast.

After the crown, imagination turns torturer. ‘O, full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife!’ The usurper cannot enjoy what he has stolen, because his mind peoples the darkness with avengers: Banquo rises at the banquet, the ‘seeds of Banquo’ become kings, Birnam Wood marches. Sleep — ‘the death of each day’s life’ — deserts him, for imagination never sleeps.

Lady Macbeth is the tragic counterpart. She begins by commanding imagination to serve ambition: ‘unsex me here’, ‘take my milk for gall’. She suppresses the imaginative faculty — and it returns as madness. In the sleepwalking scene the suppressed imagination floods back as hallucinated blood: ‘Out, damned spot!’ What she willed not to feel, she now cannot stop seeing.

The play’s imagery is the landscape of this imagination: darkness that hides and reveals, blood that will not wash, sleeplessness, unnatural deeds. Against it stands Banquo, who also hears prophecy but sleeps cleanly — imagination disciplined by conscience. The same imagination that promised him the crown also shows him its price: ‘Methought I heard a voice cry “sleep no more”’ — having murdered sleep itself, he can never rest. Hence the thesis holds: Macbeth’s fall is plotted in his mind before it is enacted on stage, and his punishment is that the same faculty which painted the crown now paints the ruin. He is destroyed not by fate but by the images he could not stop making.

Kabir and Meera are the two greatest voices of north Indian bhakti, and their Gods could hardly be more different — yet both spring from the same rebellion against empty ritual.

Kabir’s God is nirgun: without qualities, without form, beyond image and temple. For the weaver-saint of Banaras, God cannot be carved, painted or housed; He is the Formless Absolute, found not in stone but within, through constant remembrance of the Name (nam-sumiran). Kabir’s verses argue and mock: he ridicules the qazi and the pandit alike, demolishes pilgrimage and fasting, and speaks in ulatbansi — upside-down paradoxes — to shock the mind out of convention. His God is reached by inner discipline, and His worship needs no priest, no shrine and no Sanskrit.

Meera’s God is sagun: Krishna as a living, personal beloved. Where Kabir dissolves form, Meera embraces it — Giridhar, the lifter of Govardhan, the flute-player of Braj. Her devotion speaks the language of human love: viraha, the anguish of separation, and surrender, the joy of union. Her poems are songs, not arguments; she does not refute the priests, she simply leaves the palace, the husband’s house and the conventions of widowhood to dance before her Lord. If Kabir’s God is known by the Name, Meera’s is known by love.

The contrast extends to their rebellion. Kabir, the low-caste weaver, attacks caste and ritual with the weapons of reason and paradox; Meera, the Rathore princess, defies them with the weapon of devotion itself — a woman claiming direct access to God scandalised her royal in-laws more than any argument could.

Yet their common ground is deep. Both reject intermediaries: no priest stands between the soul and God. Both reject caste pride: devotion, not birth, is the measure. Both make bhakti democratic — open to weaver and princess, man and woman alike. In the end, Kabir gives us the Formless known by the Name, Meera the Beloved known by love — two faces of the one bhakti revolution that taught India God could be found without permission.