Quick Revision for NTA UGC NET ENGLISH June 2020

1590-1 Two Gentlemen of Verona 1590-1 The Taming of the Shrew 1591 2 Henry VI 1592 3 Henry VI 1592 1 Henry VI 1592 Titus Andronicus 1592-3 Richard III 1592-3 Venus and Adonis 1593-4 The Rape of Lucrece 1594 The Comedy of Errors 1594-5 Love's Labour's Lost 1595 Richard III 1595 Romeo and Juliet 1595 A Midsummer Night's Dream 1596 King John 1596-7 The Merchant of Venice 1596-7 1 Henry IV 1597-8 The Merry Wives of Windsor 1597-8 2 Henry IV 1598 Much Ado About Nothing 1598-9 Henry V 1599 Julius Caesar 1599-1600 As You Like It 1600-1 Hamlet 1601 Twelfth Night 1602 Troilus and Cressida 1593-1603 The Sonnets 1603 Measure for Measure 1603-4 Othello 1604-5 All’s Well That Ends Well 1605 Timon of Athens 1605-6 King Lear 1606 Macbeth 1606 Antony and Cleopatra 1607 Pericles 1608 Coriolanus 1609 The Winter’s Tale 1610 Cymbeline 1611 The Tempest 1613 Henry VIII 1613-14 Two Noble Kinsmen

o    \ William Shakespeare was born in 1564 at Stratford, a market town on the river Avon in Warwickshire. Little known about his life in between 1579 and 1592. Died in 1616. o    The Catalogue of ‘ the First Folio’ of Shakespeare’s plays, published by his fellow actors Heminges and Condell in 1623 , in which eighteen of the plays were printed for the first time. Cymbeline is listed as a tragedy rather than a comedy. o    Folio-Leaf of paper. A printer’s term for a largeformat book made of leaves of 14" by 20", folded once to make 2 leaves (4 pages ). In a quarto book each leaf is folded twice, making 4 leaves (8 pages). o    The Folio is prefaced by a poem by Ben Jonson (1572-16), who in 1616 had published his own Works as if he were a classical author. In To the memory of my beloved, the author Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us. o    First purpose based permanent public theatre was built by James Burbag...

o    Edmund Spenser dedicated his work The Shepherds’ Calendar (1579) to Sir Philip Sidney. o    The Arcadia draws on Greek, Italian, Spanish and French romances; its story is in five prose acts divided by verses. o    In his Defense of Poesy, Sidney commended Spenser’s Shepherds Calendar but added, ‘The same framing of his style to an old rustic language I cannot allow.’ o    The Defense of Poesy is a first classic of English Literary Criticism. It defense poetry against Stephen Gosson’s The School of abuse (1579). The Defense augmented that poetry imitated the golden Idea, what should be rather than the brazen actuality, what it delights and moves us to virtue, unlike tedious philosophy and unedifying history. o    Edmund Spenser had translated sonnets by Petrarch and Du Balley. o    Spenser was a colonist in Ireland ad he wrote Faerie Queen from 1580. Spenser dedicated his heroic romance to the Queen. o ...

o    1525 – William Tyndale – New Testament o    1551- Ralph Robinson – More’s Utopia o    1561 – Sir Thomas Hoby – Castiglione’s Boke of the Courtier o    1565- Aurthur Golding – Ovid’s Metamorphosis o    1567 – George Cascoigne – Ariosto’s Supposes o    1582 – Richard Stanyhurst – The 4 books of Virgil, Aenied o    1592 – Sir John Alarington – Arioto’s Orlando Furioso o    1595 – Sir Thomas North – Plutarch’s Life of The Noble Gracious and Romans o    1598 – John Chapman – Homer’s Iliad o    1600 – Christian Marlowe – Hero and Leander, All Ovid Elegy

o    The first English Translation of the Bible we know of is by Bede , who finished his version of Gospels in 735. o    Alfreic translated Genesis and parts of the Old Testament. o    The first English translation from Greek rather than Latin was gifted by William Tyndale. o    First completed printed English Bible was published in 1553 by Miles Coverdale in Zurich. o    In 1960 The Geneva Bible by Protestant refugees. o    Under chairmanship of Lancelot Andrews , teams of scholars produced in 1611 the Authorized Version of King James Version.

Old English Literature to 1100 Middle English Literature Tudor Literature: 1500-1603