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• Beowulf is the national epic of the Anglo-Saxon and English people. It was written in the 10th century reflecting the features of the tribal society of ancient times. The story contains two parts and an interpolation: fight and kill monster Grendel; fight and kill mother monster; fight and kill fire dragon.
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• Ballad is a story told in song, usually in 4-line stanzas, with the second and fourth lines rhymed. The ballads are in various English and Scottish dialects and handed down from mouth to mouth. There are various kinds of ballads: historical, legendary, fantastical, lyrical and humorous.
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• Puritanism: Puritanism was the religious doctrine of the revolutionary bourgeoisie during the English Revolution. It preached thrift, sobriety, hard work and unceasing labor in whatever calling one happened to be, but with no extravagant enjoyment of the fruits of labor. So the English revolution can be also called Puritan revolution
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• reaction paper to metaphorMetaphysical Poem: a kind of poetry often ironic and witty verse combining intellectual ingenuity and psychological insight written partly in reaction to the conventions of Elizabethan love poetry. One of its hallmark is the metaphysical conceit, a particularly arresting type of metaphor, generally speaking, characterized by mysticism in content and fantasticality in form.
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• “To be” here means fight against his uncle in whom all the evil things of the time can be seen while “not to be” means give up revenge and live as a crowd. “to be or n
ot to be ”reflects a large contradiction appears suddenly in Hamlet’s life not permitted to avoid but a little difficult for a young man to solve. This hesitation resembles humanist’s ponder on values between God and human in the early Renaissance.
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• Romance was a long composition, sometimes in verse, sometimes in prose, describing the life and adventures of a noble hero. The theme of loyalty to the king and lord was repeatedly emphasized in romances.
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• Milton is a great revolutionary poet of the 17th century. He is also an outstanding political pamphleteer of the Revolution period. He dedicated himself of the revolutionary cause. He exerted a strong influence on the later English poetry. Every
progressive English poet since Milton has drawn inspiration from him.
• Milton is a great stylist. His poetry has a grand style. That is because he made a life-long study of classical and Biblical literature. His poetry is noted for sublimity of thought and majesty of expression.
• Milton is a great master of blank verse. He is the glorious pioneer to introduce blank verse into non-dramatic poetry, he has used it as the main tool in his masterpiece Paradise Lost. His blank verse is rich in every poetic quality and never monotonous.
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• Bacon is the first English essayist. Bacon's essays cover a wide variety of subjects, such as love, truth, friendship, parents and children, beauty, studies, riches, youth and age, garden, death and many others. Bacon's essays have won popularity for their clearness brevity and force of expression.
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• Shakespeare is a master of the English language, with a large vocabulary of 16000 English words. His dramatic language is built and developed in the basis of his predecessors.
• Shakespeare is not only a genius for language that expresses human experience, but also one for form that organizes words and experience into an imaginative while. This imaginative unity of his art co-exists with a greater variety of styles than in any other major dramatist.
• He uses the English language with the greatest freedom and ease, and forms very new and striking expressions out of rather common words, so that almost all the speeches fit all the characters who speak them. He can write poetry well in different styles and even in different poetic forms, such as sonnets, blank verse, rhymed couplets and lyrical songs.
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• The Pilgrim's Progress is a religious allegory written by John Bunyan. It tells of the spiritual pilgrim-age of Christian, who flies from the City of Destruction, meets with the perils and temptations of the Slough of Despond, Vanity Fair, and Doubting Castle, faces and overcomes the demon Appollyon, and finally comes to the Delectable Mountains and the Celestial City.
• Though an allegory, its characters impress the rider like real person. The places that Bunyan paints in words are English scenes, and conversation which enliven his narratives vividly repeat the language of his time. In reality, the Celestial City in The Pilgrim's Progress is the vision of an ideal happy society dreamed by a poor tinker in the 17th century, through a veil of religious mist.
• One of the remarkable passages is the one in which Vanity Fair and the persecution of Christian and his friend Faithful are described. Here Bunyan intends to satirize the state trials in the reactionary reigns of Charles II and James I, which are merely forms preliminary to hanging, drawing and quartering. This imagery trial of Faithful b
efore a jury of personified vices was, in all probability, drawn from the real bloody trials.

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