Room 272

Reminder: test two will be on Wednesday, 21 March.  The format will be similar to that of test one.  It will cover:

–Chaucer, beginning with the Friar’s portrait in the General Prologue and including The Miller’s Tale and The Pardoner’s Tale

–Malory

–The poems we covered by Wyatt, Sidney, Marlowe, Ralegh, and Shakespeare (through sonnet 116)

Dear Malorians:

After the break we will begin discussing Chrétien’s Yvain.  It actually makes pretty good beach reading.

In this section leading up to the Arthurian moment, we might begin marking differences between Geoffrey’s and Malory’s treatments of the narrative.

Here is one more Wyatt poem that I accidentally left off the list: Ballad 80.

In order to catch up to our reading schedule, we will be skipping Doctor Faustus. Therefore, next week we will be reading a selection of short poems from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Here is the selection of poems (the page numbers are in parentheses and refer to volume two of your anthology):

Sir Thomas Wyatt: Sonnets 10 and 11 (108) and Ballad 123 (112)

Sir Philip Sidney: Selections from Astrophil and Stella (256-259)

Christopher Marlowe: “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (415)

Sir Walter Ralegh: “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” (336) and “The Lie” (336-337)

Shakespeare: Sonnets 1, 18, 19, 55, 116, 127, 130, 135, and 147 (beginning on 456)

Ben Jonson: “To Penshurst” (574-75)

John Donne: “The Sun Rising” (652), “The Flea” (656), “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (657-658), Holy Sonnet 14 (673), “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward” (673-674)

George Herbert: “Easter Wings” (763), “The Collar” (768-769)

Andrew Marvell: “To His Coy Mistress” (777-78), “The Garden” (781-782)

These poems are short, but they are dense and require careful reading. Make sure to look up any words that you do not know, and read the head notes on the authors.  I would like you to choose one poem in particular to which you will pay special attention.  Make detailed notes on this particular poem and be prepared to discuss it in class.

Dear Malorians,

Since we have fallen a bit behind schedule, we will not get a third round of annotations in before the break. We will make up for it by squeezing in another round after the break. But I want to give you plenty of time to work on your papers—speaking of which:

Paper #2

Due 9 March, 7-ish pages

You are an Arthurian scholar, and you have just discovered some missing pages from the Winchester Manuscript. Your task is twofold:

1. Write a scholarly introduction in which you may, for example, describe the state of the manuscript pages (and possibly the circumstances of their discovery), speculate concerning possible sources, speculate about authorship (is it Malory or a scribal addition?), or suggest where and how the section fits into the existing narrative.  Remember, you must provide grounds for your speculations. (What tips you off, for example, that this is a scribal addition rather than Malory’s original? What evidence in Malory’s existing text do you find for your scholarly conclusions?)

2. Provide your edited text of the newly discovered section (annotated if necessary).