16th & 17th Century Literature

Answer: (a) the purging of pity and terror — Catharsis is Aristotle's word for the emotional cleansing a tragedy works in its audience. Watching the hero's fall, spectators feel pity for his suffering and terror at the powers destroying him; these feelings are then purged or discharged, leaving the mind calmed and clarified. In Macbeth our pity for the ruined hero and our terror at his crimes are released by the play's close, which is Aristotle's catharsis in action.

Answer: 1534 — In 1534 Parliament passed the Act of Supremacy, declaring Henry VIII Supreme Head of the Church of England and breaking with the Pope. This political-religious break started the English Reformation: monasteries were dissolved, the Bible was put into English, and a Protestant temper entered national life. That temper — moral earnestness, distrust of ritual, the authority of scripture — shapes this paper's Puritan literature: Herbert's devotion, Donne's holy sonnets, and Bunyan's allegory.

Answer: (b) 10 — “Death Be Not Proud” is the tenth of Donne's Holy Sonnets, the sequence of nineteen religious sonnets written about 1609–1610. Numbering matters because examiners often ask for “Holy Sonnet 10” instead of the title. In it Donne personifies Death and argues, through paradox and the sleep image, that Death has no real power: “One short sleep past, we wake eternally, / And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

Answer: twenty-four (24) — In Marlowe's Doctor Faustus the scholar signs away his soul to Lucifer in exchange for twenty-four years of unlimited power, knowledge, and pleasure, served by the spirit Mephistophilis. The fixed term is the tragedy's clock: as the final hour nears, Faustus's last soliloquy counts the minutes, and at midnight the devils claim him. The number makes the bargain brutally concrete — eternity traded away for twenty-four years.

Answer: (a) Giant Despair — Doubting Castle belongs to Giant Despair, who seizes Christian and Hopeful when they stray from the King's highway onto his grounds. He beats them, locks them in his dungeon, and urges them to end their misery. They escape only when Christian remembers the key called Promise, kept in his bosom. The allegory is plain: despair imprisons the doubting pilgrim, and only God's promise can unlock the cell.

Answer: 1597 — Francis Bacon's Essays appeared first in 1597 as a slim volume of ten essays; he kept enlarging the collection through the editions of 1612 and 1625, when it reached fifty-eight essays, including “Of Studies” and “Of Travel.” The book's growth mirrors Bacon's career from ambitious courtier to Lord Chancellor: each edition added the worldly wisdom of a man who had watched power at close quarters. The subtitle, “Counsels, Civil and Moral,” announces its purpose.

Answer: (a) Lady Macbeth — In Act 1, Scene 5, after reading Macbeth's letter about the witches' prophecy, Lady Macbeth calls on evil spirits to “unsex me here” and fill her with “direst cruelty,” so that no womanly pity can weaken her plan to murder Duncan. The line lays bare her strategy: she will trade her womanhood for ruthlessness. Its irony is tragic — the cruelty she borrows ends by destroying her, and she dies imagining blood upon her hands.

Answer: untimely — The third apparition's promise, “none of woman born shall harm Macbeth,” collapses when Macduff declares he was “from his mother's womb untimely ripped” — delivered by Caesarean birth, and therefore, in the witches' quibbling logic, not “of woman born.” Shakespeare plants the word early so that the climax feels both surprising and fair. Macbeth, who trusted the letter of the prophecy, learns its spirit too late.

Answer: (a) Tiruvalluvar — The Tirukkural, the Tamil classic of 1330 couplets on virtue, wealth, and love, is traditionally ascribed to the poet-sage Tiruvalluvar. Little is certainly known of his life — legend calls him a weaver — but the work belongs to the early centuries CE, the post-Sangam age. The Kural's tight two-line form carries universal ethics without sectarian mark, which is why it is set beside Kabir and Meera on this paper.

Answer: Merta — Meera (c. 1498–c. 1546) was born a Rathore princess of Merta in Rajasthan and married into the Sisodia royal house of Mewar as the wife of Prince Bhojraj. Widowed young, she rejected the palace code of widowhood and royal honour, choosing the life of a wandering devotee of Krishna. Her songs turn that defiance into devotion: she “buys” Govind in the open market of song, caring nothing for family shame.

Renaissance humanism was the revival of classical antiquity as a living ideal. Scholars like Erasmus and Colet recovered Greek and Latin texts, and the printing press carried them across Europe; education turned from church doctrine to the studia humanitatis — grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy — meant to form the complete citizen. The “new learning” taught that man, made in God's image, could master nature through reason: Pico's Oration calls man the measure of all things. In England this spirit produced More's Utopia, the grammar schools that trained Shakespeare, and Bacon's program for the advancement of learning. On this paper its stamp is everywhere: Spenser's classical epic machinery, Marlowe's Faustus hungering for infinite knowledge, and Bacon's calm faith that study perfects nature. Humanism freed the mind before Puritanism disciplined the soul.

The clock strikes eleven, and Faustus has one hour left of his twenty-four years. “O lente, lente currite noctis equi” — O slowly, slowly run, you horses of the night — he begs time itself to stand still, but time, the one power his magic never bought, runs on. He wishes to dissolve like mist, to be changed into air, recalls Christ's blood streaming in the firmament, and cries for one drop to save him; then the stars that reigned at his birth draw him upward, and he damns the heavens. At the half hour he bargains wildly — let him live a thousand years, be damned at last — and at midnight cries, “I'll burn my books. Ah, Mephistophilis!” The soliloquy is Marlowe's mighty line at full stretch: terror, poetry, and theology in one dying hour.

Straying from the King's highway onto the grounds of Doubting Castle, Christian and Hopeful are seized by Giant Despair, who beats them and locks them in his dungeon. Despair's wife, Diffidence, urges him to persuade the prisoners to kill themselves — the allegory of depression whispering suicide to the doubting believer. For days they suffer, until Christian suddenly remembers: “What a fool I am! I have a key in my bosom called Promise.” The key opens every lock in the castle, and they escape. Bunyan's point is pastoral, not decorative: despair is a real prison for real pilgrims, and the only picklock is God's promise — scripture remembered in the dark. Hopeful's steady company shows that fellowship itself resists despair. Bunyan, who knew Bedford gaol from the inside, writes imprisonment without romance — the dungeon is depression made literal. Hopeful, caught for company rather than sin, models how believers carry one another. And the key lay in Christian's bosom all along: grace is nearer than despair admits.

Macduff begins as the loyal thane who discovers Duncan's body and first voices suspicion — “O horror, horror, horror!” Refusing the tyrant's coronation feast, he flees to England to join Malcolm, proving loyalty by exile. In Act 4, Scene 3, Malcolm tests him with a catalogue of invented vices; Macduff's grief — “O Scotland, Scotland!” — proves his patriotism genuine, and Malcolm accepts him. Then comes Ross's news: Macbeth has murdered his wife and children. Macduff's cry, “All my pretty ones? / Did you say all?”, turns loyalty into vengeance. He kills Macbeth in single combat, crying “Tyrant, show thy face,” and hails Malcolm king. Where Macbeth murders for a crown, Macduff kills to restore one: the play's true man of action. Both are brave warriors, but Macduff's courage serves Scotland while Macbeth's serves himself. If Macbeth is ambition without conscience, Macduff is conscience with a sword.

Viraha — the ache of separation from the beloved — is the ruling mood of Meera's songs. Krishna, her Giridhar, is near in memory and far in body; every song turns on that distance. She counts sleepless nights, reproaches the absent lover, and finds the whole world empty without him, yet the longing itself becomes worship: to miss Krishna is to hold him. This is the classic bhakti paradox — union through separation — which Meera, as a woman devotee, voices with unusual daring, turning the Radha-tradition of viraha into autobiography. Her defiance of palace and family is viraha's social form: she will not be kept from the beloved by any wall. In song 6 the longing turns to prayer — “Hari, remove thy servant's pain” — and memory of his past rescues (Draupadi, Prahlad) steadies her faith. For Meera, viraha is not despair but the proof of love.

The English Reformation — Henry VIII's break with Rome in 1534, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the putting of the Bible into English — remade the nation's imagination, and its fingerprints are on every text of this paper. Protestant England learned to distrust priest, image, and ritual, and to trust scripture, conscience, and the plain individual soul; that temper flows straight into literature. Spenser, the Reformation's epic poet, builds The Faerie Queene as a Protestant allegory: his Redcrosse Knight is English holiness itself, and Duessa, the false enchantress, wears the scarlet of Rome. Donne's whole career rides the religious settlement — born into a Catholic family, he converts to Anglicanism, becomes Dean of St Paul's in 1621, and his Holy Sonnets dramatize a Protestant soul arguing with Death and God in the plain, urgent language of the English pulpit. Herbert, the country parson of Bemerton, makes The Temple a handbook of Anglican devotion: “The Pulley” shows a God who withholds rest so that man will turn to him, the very doctrine of grace the Reformers preached against mere works. And Bunyan is the Reformation's child most purely — a dissenting tinker jailed for unlicensed preaching, who turns his cell into the Slough of Despond and writes the pilgrim's way as every believer's direct road to God, needing no priest at all. Even the King James Bible of 1611, the Reformation's great English monument, gives all four writers their rhythms and their phrases. The Renaissance freed the mind; the Reformation, as this paper shows, gave that freed mind a conscience — anxious, inward, and certain that the soul stands alone before God. The English Bible is this paper's hidden textbook. Tyndale's New Testament (1526) and the Geneva Bible (1560) put scripture into the ploughboy's hands, and their plain, strong English became the period's prose ideal. Herbert's Temple lyrics breathe its cadences; Bunyan's allegory is stitched from its parables; even Donne's sermons — the age's greatest prose — are biblical argument in English dress. The Reformers' “scripture alone” made every reader his own priest, and every writer, in a sense, his own preacher. A second Reformation gift was suspicion of ornament. Puritan plainness — the clear word over the gilded phrase — runs from Tyndale through Bunyan's “I have not played the orator” to Herbert's wish for honest speech. Against Renaissance copiousness, the godly cultivated sincerity as an aesthetic. That is why this paper's two halves belong together: Spenser and Marlowe show what the liberated Renaissance mind could imagine, while Donne, Herbert, and Bunyan show what the Reformed conscience did with that imagination — chastened it, examined it, and set it on the narrow way.

Doctor Faustus (c. 1592) is the Renaissance tragedy in its purest English form, because its hero is the Renaissance man himself. Faustus has mastered logic, medicine, law, and divinity, and finds them all barren — “after I have studied them, I know nothing.” What he wants is infinite: “infinite riches in a little room,” all knowledge, all pleasure, power over spirits. That limitless appetite is Renaissance humanism with the brakes off, and it drives the bargain: twenty-four years of Mephistophilis's service for his soul. Marlowe keeps the medieval morality structure — Good Angel and Evil Angel, the devils waiting — but fills it with a modern mind that chooses damnation freely, again and again. Every time Faustus wavers — at the sight of Christ's blood, hearing the old man's counsel — he talks himself back into hell; his tragedy is that he will not repent when repentance is offered. The middle scenes of clowning and court tricks show the bargain's hollowness: infinite power spent on grapes and pranks. Then Helen — “was this the face that launched a thousand ships?” — beauty itself becomes the last temptation, and Faustus kisses damnation. The final soliloquy is the reckoning: time, the one thing magic cannot buy, runs out, and the scholar who would command all nature cannot command one more minute. “I'll burn my books” is the Renaissance dream confessing its price. Faustus is damned not by the devil's strength but by his own will — which is Aristotle's hamartia wearing Renaissance dress, and why the play still terrifies. Mephistophilis is the play's secret moralist. Asked about hell, he answers with the terrible honesty Faustus lacks: “Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.” The devil, unlike the scholar, knows exactly what damnation is — and Faustus, who wanted all knowledge, refuses this one piece of it. The Good and Evil Angels externalize a conscience still functioning: the Good Angel's “Faustus, repent; yet God will pity thee” is grace knocking to the very end, which makes the damnation chosen, not fated. Even the mocked middle scenes serve the tragedy: the horse-courser, the pope, the emperor's court show omnipotence frittered on vanity, so that when Helen appears the waste is complete — eternity's price paid for a kiss. And the final irony is structural: the play that begins with Faustus rejecting divinity ends with divinity's sentence executed on schedule. The Renaissance promised man everything; Marlowe presents the invoice.

Part II of The Pilgrim's Progress (1684) retells the same road with a new company, and the differences are the meaning. Where Part I sent one solitary man, Christian, fleeing the City of Destruction, Part II sends a household: Christiana, his widow, with her four children and her neighbour Mercy, guided this time not by lonely struggle but by Mr Great-heart, the King's champion. The stations repeat — the Slough of Despond, the Wicket Gate, the Interpreter's house, the Hill Difficulty, Vanity Fair, Doubting Castle, the Delectable Mountains, the river of death — but each is softened and socialized. Christiana is helped over the Slough where Christian sank; at Vanity Fair there is no martyrdom now, only honest trade and the founding of a godly household; even Doubting Castle falls, its giant slain by Great-heart, and Feeble-mind is carried. Bunyan varies the allegory's key because his pilgrims vary: women, children, the aged (Mr Fearing), and the lame all prove that grace is not only for strong solitary heroes. The river crossing at the end becomes a pageant of peaceful deaths, each pilgrim answering the King's postman in turn. If Part I is the Puritan's private conversion, Part II is the Puritan's church — the same gospel, now walked by a family, showing that the way to the Celestial City is wide enough for the weakest walker who will not turn back. Mercy, the neighbour who follows weeping, earns her own subplot: too timid to knock boldly at the Wicket Gate, she is welcomed precisely for her trembling — Bunyan's tender doctrine that Christ receives the fearful. Mr Fearing, terrified at every stile, yet crosses the river most peacefully of all, “not much above the ankles” — comfort for Bunyan's own anxious readers. Feeble-mind, carried by Great-heart, proves weakness no bar. These figures are Part II's real innovation: where Part I tested strength, Part II shelters frailty. The river crossing becomes a roll-call of holy deaths, each pilgrim answering the King's postman in turn. If Part I asks how a man is saved, Part II asks how the saved walk together — guided, guarded, and at last gathered.

Blood and darkness are the two weathers of Macbeth's soul, and Shakespeare weaves them from the first act to the last. Darkness is the play's chosen element: “Stars, hide your fires; / Let not light see my black and deep desires,” Macbeth prays before Duncan's murder, and Lady Macbeth calls on “thick night” to hide the deed. The murder itself happens in a darkness so unnatural that, as Lennox reports, the heavens seem troubled — nature protesting a crime against kingship. Into this night flows blood. After the murder Macbeth stares at his hands: “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand?” — guilt imagined as a stain no sea can rinse. Then the image reverses and multiplies: “blood will have blood,” he says at the banquet, as Banquo's ghost sits in his chair; “I am in blood / Stepp'd in so far,” he confesses, that turning back is as tedious as going on. Blood, first the mark of the murderer, becomes the element he wades in — tyranny as a rising tide. Lady Macbeth inherits the image in madness: the sleepwalking “out, damned spot” tries to wash hands that only dream of washing, and her taper — she must have light beside her continually — is darkness's last defeat: she who summoned thick night now fears it. The play ends with Malcolm's daylight restoration, but the imagery has done its work: we have watched guilt paint the world first black, then red, until “out, out, brief candle” gutters in a darkness the hero made himself. The darkness is moral before it is visual. When Duncan is murdered, Lennox reports an unruly night — the obscure bird clamouring, horses eating each other — nature protesting, as if the heavens wore mourning. “Light thickens, and the crow / Makes wing to th' rooky wood”: Macbeth now summons the dark he needs, and by Act 3 he belongs to it. Lady Macbeth's end inverts the pattern with terrible neatness: the woman who cried “Come, thick night” must have light beside her continually, yet the candle only lights the blood she cannot wash. Shakespeare even stages the contrast — Duncan's court all daylight frankness, Dunsinane all torch-lit paranoia — until Malcolm's soldiers march in under Birnam's boughs. Blood made Macbeth; darkness hid him; daylight at last exposes and ends him. The imagery is the plot in miniature: a bright world deliberately darkened, then painfully re-lit.

Kabir's teaching needed a language that could break ordinary thinking, and he forged it at the loom. The ulatbansi — “upside-down speech” — is his signature device: lines in which the ocean catches fire, the fish climbs the tree, the hunter becomes the hunted, and rain falls upward. These are not riddles for cleverness' sake; they are shocks meant to snap the mind out of its habits, the way a Zen koan works. For a nirgun saint this violence to language was necessary: how do you speak of a God without form, without image, without temple? Only by paradox — saying what cannot be said by unsaying what is said. So Kabir fills his padas with the workshop of his trade: the thread, the shuttle, the market, the ghat where the pitcher fills. The weaver's metaphors democratize mysticism; the highest truth is spoken in the lowest, most familiar words, which is why pandits and qazis alike are mocked for needing books. Tagore's translations keep this tang — “O servant, where dost thou seek Me? Lo! I am beside thee” — the direct address, the sudden turn. Even the wave of II.56, which is water and yet not separate from the sea, is an ulatbansi in miniature: the soul's non-duality stated as a homely paradox. Kabir's language proves his doctrine: truth is not in scriptures but in the overturned, awakened mind. The set poems are themselves ulatbansi in action. In I.13 (“O servant, where dost thou seek Me?”) Kabir overturns pilgrimage — God is “beside thee,” not at the shrine; the seeker's journey is exposed as running away from home. I.16 overturns caste — “it is needless to ask a saint's caste” — the social ladder laid flat by a single line. I.101's ghat, where the pitcher fills without reaching the river, overturns ritual bathing: purity is inward. And II.56's wave, water yet not separate from the sea, states non-duality as a village paradox anyone can hold. Each poem takes a familiar thing — travel, birth, washing, water — and flips it until the familiar teaches the infinite. This is why the establishment found Kabir intolerable: his language left no institution standing, yet offered the poorest listener the highest truth in words he already owned. To read Kabir aright is to be turned upside down oneself; that dizziness is the beginning of his wisdom.