General - 17th C Epic

What does Tasso warn poets away from? When?

1594 - warns poets away from theological questions

Give some examples of unfinished epics

Pope failed attempts to write an epic on Brutus

William Davenant writes Gondibert in Interregnum - unfinished

WW’s Prelude - self sustaining - intended to preface Recluse.

What metre was associated with english epic

rhymed iambic pentameter - Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey in 17thC was in rhymed iambic penatemeter and this was used by Dryden and Pope in their Virgil and Homer translations

Date of William Davenant’s Gondibert

1651

What is the form of William Davenant’s Gondibert

Combines 5 act structure of english renaissance drama with Homeric and Vergilian epic literary tradition.

What is the plot of Gondibert

early medieval Lombard Duke called Gondibert and his love for beautiful Birtha – means he cannot return affections of princess Rhodalind, kings daughter. Rhodalind loved by Oswald – conflicts of desire and devotion, philosophical reflections on love, duty, loyalty. Story never resolved. Allegory power struggles English Civil War – Davenant as prominent royalist. Gondibert as Charles II and Rhodalind as Henreitta Maria. Chivalric ideal of love represents sublimation of desire to duty – this personal model fo devoted love stands for political ideal of aristocratic govt by finest and beat education in society – sensoibilities refined by courtly life and culture. Love and duty as legacies from medieval poems.

What was Gondibert prefaced by

prefaces by Davenant and Thomas Hobbes, and commendatory poems by Edmund Waller and Abraham Cowley

How does Davenant describe heroic poetry in his preface

‘Flow’s but in few, and even those streames descended but from one Grecian spring’

What does Davenant suggest about difference between historians and poets

‘truth, narrative, and past, is the idoll of historians (who worship a dead thing)’

Davenant and epic class

‘nor is it needfull that heroique poesy should be levell’d to the reach of Common men’

Bakhtin - Modern Epic 2008

‘We come upon it when it is already finished, a congealed and half moribund genre’

CS Lewis 1942 stages of epic

changing the terminology from primitive and artificial to primary and secondary

Fowler 1971 adding to CS Lewis divisions

tertiary - epic striking out radical difference like PL