Question 1. Answer the first question and any four of the remaining ones.

1 Explain the following

passages with reference to their contexts and supply brief critical comments where necessary:

a A lovely boy stolen from an Indian King;

She never had so sweet a changeling.
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild.

Ans.

Ref. – These lines are from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Context – This is part of Helena’s dialogue. She said Lysander to put his vow of love to her and the other
to Hermia on a scale to search out whether they weigh equally.

Comment- Lysander’s vows of love are quite empty and of no consequences. Helena considers them as
worthless as false remorse which has no resemblance of reality. She told this in the lines that he has fallen
in love with her under the impact of love-juice put in his eyes by puck through a fault in identifying him
as Demetrius.

 To be or not to be, that is the question:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take up arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing, end them.

Ans.
Ref. – These lines are from Shakespeare’s Hamlet in act 3 and scene 1.
Context – This is part of the lines of Hamlet when it appears in act 3, scene 1. He speaks a soliloquy that
has become a verbal emblem for Shakespearean tragedy and a measure of its thematic depth.
Comment – two of the play’s salient themes are interwoven here, human mortality or death and fortune or
chance. On the level of plot action, he is an exceedingly mortal work, virtually all of the main character
like hero Hamlet, Claudius, Gertude, Polonius, Ophelia and Laertes. They all die from unnatural causes in
the end of this play. The penultimate act takes place in a cemetery.

 Oh, that! Mere alliteration, Mrs Pearce, natural to a poet.

Ans.
Ref. – these lines are from George Bernard Shaw’s play “Pygmalion” in act II.
Context – This is part of the lines of the Higgins to Mrs. Pearce.
Comment – Higgins finds that the moment she let a girl make friend with her, they became jealous,
exacting, suspicious and a damned nuisance, she learns that the moment she let her make friends with a
girl, she became selfish and tyrannical. Girl upset everything. When she let them into her life, she found
that the girl is driving at one thing and she’s driving at another.

 They know and do not know, what it is to act or suffer

They know and do not know, that action is suffering
And suffering is action
Ans.
Ref. – These lines are from T.S. Eliot’s play “Murder in the Cathedral”.
Context – Here, the Chorus reveals their complicated feelings about the Church and Thomas.
Comment – While the church and Thomas lament his absence of 7 years, noting that he was good to
them, they worry about chorus return. What concern those most of all are the ideas that their lives, already
marred by suffering, will grow more complicated. Both do not consider themselves immersed in the
political world of kings and barons, and worry that any controversy Thomas stirs up by returning should
cause them troubles. This attitude is what should change for them through the ritual of Thomas’s
sacrifice.

 Have you not done tormenting me with your accursed time?

Ans .
Ref. – these lines are from Samuel Beckett’s play, Waiting for Godot. .
Context – This is part of the line of Estragon to Vladimir.
Comment – estragon and Vladimir are waiting for someone who never comes. In order to pass time they
indulge in irrelevant, meaningless act. The element of force fades away and miserable condition of man
looms large in our imagination. Their life may be compared with that of prisoner for who there is no
escape, even suicide is impossible. Every act is a mockery of human existence.

2. Comment on Marlowe’s use of irony in Doctor Faustus.

Ans.
Introduction – The irony is the use of word to convey the opposite their literal meaning a statement or
situation where the appearance or presentation of the thought is contradicting the meaning. Christopher
Marlowe is an affect produce dramatic irony. In which the audience learn more about present or future
circumstances than a character in the play. The ironic dimensions of Christopher Marlowe’s
representation of suffering an evil reveal the underlying reality beneath the fanciful aspirations of man.

Marlowe’s use of irony in Dr. Faustus –

1. Faustus has the stamp of Christopher Marlowe’s own personality upon it more itensely than the other
drama. It is his own anguish of soul that is portrayed in play. In this play very real sense.
2. Christopher Marlowe was the only dramatist of his period who raced the intellectual as well as actor
reformulation. Before his period there was not any established rorm or literary world. He believed in
the Christian faith in his period with a new zeal of leaning. He avoid all the sceptical and critical
attitude. Christopher Marlowe’s predecessors like Latinist Erasmus and more formulated the idea of
serio-ludere and sums up the ironic thought for the cultural experience of the period.
3. It does not take much view to see how intimate Christopher Marlowe’s sympathy for dr. Faustus. He
wishes all the things that Christopher Marlowe expresses his wish for throughout his dramas.
4. Christopher Marlowe presents in play Dr. Faustus 2 distinct concept of irony.
 Frist based on the theological concepts of Sin and damnation
 Second based on the self- limting concept of human possibilities.
5. Christopher Marlowe is the ironist. His work is based not on inciting opponents to violence or on
equally violent act of his own, but on debate that is as free as he may possibly make it.
6. He rejects theoretical constructs the dictate ethical behaviour as not possible to live up to or as
carefully constructed window dressing hiding the worst possible act. He is a man of acute flexibility,
one who may understand and be loyal to general stern wood, like , for the paradoxical character he is;
s man fully conscious of the paradoxical role he is, a man fully conscious of his less than laudable
character in raising 2 corrupt daughter yet also capable of great loyalty toward rusty Regan.
7. When the eng translation of the german faust-book – the damnable life and deserved death of
Dr.Faustus -came out early in 1502, Marlowe must have seized upon it with all the avidity of an actor
recognising a concept made for him, which he might make peculiarly his own, recognise his own idea
sources of inspiration with the play.
8. Faustus is an academic drama in the best sense. When the old German play of the Faust-book fell into
Christopher Marlowe’s hand asks una Ellis-fermor, it need have come with starting significance as the
symbol of the conflict in play in his own mind.

Ques4. Examine The Alchemist as a satire.

Ans.
Introduction – comedy hold the mirror up to reflect and nature things as they are, to the end that city can
identify the extant of its short comings and the folly of its way and set about its establish. Ben jonson’s
wonderful play like volpone ( published in the 1606), epicoene (published in the 1609), the alchemist
(published in the 1610), Bartholomew fair (published in the 1614), to offer a richly information
contemporary account of the vices and follies that are always with us.

The alchemist as a satire –

1. The conduct of Jonsonian comic area is in the hand of a clever manipulator. The manipulator is out to
made reality conform to his own wishes. Sometimes he succeeds, as in the matter of the clever young
man. Young man gains his uncle’s inheritance in epicene. Or the other who gains the rich Puritan
widow for his life partner in Bartholomew fair.
2. In the alchemist, the play eventually weak, but this is mistake of the manipulators. The manipulators
should never break when they are ahead, and not at all due to any insight on the act of the victims.
3. The satirist in play alchemist is chiefly concerned with detailing the artful dodges the woman and man
employ to satisfy nature and to remain within the pale of social decorum.
4. It is generally conceded that ben jonson was not succeeded as a tragic dramatist. It is uaually agreed
that jon was not succeed because his intelligent was for satiric comedy. That’s why the weight of
pedantic knowing with which he burdened his 2 tragic unsuccessful. The 2 point mark an obvious
wrong of information: the one is too crude a point to be accepted, to ask that he unsuccessful, because
his intelligence was not suited to plan is to tell us nothing at all.
5. Ben jonson did not write a well situation, but we may see no point why he would not have written one.
If 2 play so different type as the silent woman and the tempest are both comedies, usually the section
of situation and comedy, while it can be sufficient to mark distinction in dramatic literature.
6. Person of all type of social category are title to jonson’s ruthless, satirical wit. Jonson mocks man
gullibility and weakness to advertising and to miracle cures with the role of sir epicure mammon. He
dreams of drinking the elixir of youth in order to enjoy dreams sexual conquests.
7. The play alchemist aim on what happens when one person seeks profit over another.
8. The play alchemist is a social satire which transcends the Jacobean London time to our age. It
represents a kind of all practitioners of fraud. The main charter and his confederates physical image
the scientific charlatan and solemn knave with his indispensable accomplice.
9. The drama thus presents familiar kind of situation. It is also the pic of a society changed upside down.
The folly and greed are motivate the world. There is an array of role representing almost every degree
of gullibility and
Ques5. What according to you is the theme of The Playboy of the Western World?

Ans-
Introduction – J.M. Synge is the most popular playwright of the Irish literary. The 1st performance of the
playboy of the western worked on 26 Jan 1907 at Abbey theatre. The play is best known for its use of
poetic devices. The play ‘The Playboy of the Western World’ is a 3 act drama and is a dark
comedy drama. The theme of this play is about a self-confessed patricide, glorified as a main character
and encouraged as a love partner by a whole community in Mayo.

Theme of the playboy of the western world–

An obvious theme of this play is patricide. The patricide theme is based on the place incident in which
Mr. Christy mason thought that the father has been killed by him. It is this belief that the father has been
killed by him that gives Christy the self-confidence coupled with respect for people in the village that
enables him to become the playboy of the title. The playboy of the western world is a comedy with tragic
and satiric both elements. Synge wished his audience to lot of laugh at his role, but he also wishes the
audience to notice their humanity.
The theme of the play is nearly associated to those of myth imagination and making. J.M. Synge asks in
the preface to have a best imagination that is magnificent and fiery. In this play the imagination of
contemporary myth around Christy explodes as the villagers, creation fill in the missing information of
the play, then change the skeleton of his confession in an epic with Christy as the main character cast in
Byronic kind. When Mahon storms onto the act to hurt down his son, reality clashes forcefully with the
myth built from creation.

Christy is a playboy in this play. He responds to other experiments and perceptions with new behaviours.
His talkative and boastful nature does make him completely untruth. His imaginations are the sign of his
growing self-esteem. He as a s talkative from the starting and just before the finish of the play. During
this he is only one person of words not man of act. But at the finishing point exactly the end moment of
the play he proves to be a man of act.

The entrance offers Christy with main role playing chance and J.M. Synge with the 1st festive to release
the play’s title. Once the other role have seen Christy and know that he’s not what they were hoping, they
decided his identity. Despite from him the shocking exploration that he has been murdered his father and
is on the run.