Dr. Vijayalayan's Literature Notes

      She-tragedy denotes a tragic subgenre that rose to prominence in England in the mid-1690s. The playwright and laureate Nicholas Rowe who coined the term in 1714 is widely regarded as its finest exponent. His plays The Fair Penitent (1703) and The Tragedy of Jane Shore (1714) are considered as some of the best representative pieces in the cannon. Other noteworthy instances include Thomas Southerne’s The Fatal Marriage or The Innocent Adultery (1694) and Mary Pix’s Ibrahim, the Thirteenth Emperor of the Turks (1696). Though she-tragedy formally sufficed as a distinct dramatic form only by the close of the 18 th century, its antecedence could be traced back to the early 1680s and the so called pathetic plays that enjoyed brief popularity at the time. Of noteworthy significance in this regard are the plays The Orphan (1680) by Thomas Otway and Virtue Betray or Anna Bullen (1682) by John Banks, both of which are invariably recognized as forerunners of she-traged...

       Domestic tragedy also called bourgeois tragedy, refers to a type of tragic play that rose to prominence in England during the 1720s. Touted to be the most talented tragedian of the Georgian era, the dramatist Aaron Hill’s play The Fatal Extravagance (1721) is invariably marked as signaling its formal unveiling. The jeweler turned playwright George Lillo is commonly recognized as the leading exponent of this tragic subgenre, which apparently experienced its heyday of popularity during the 1730s when his notable works The London Merchant (1731) and Fatal Curiosity (1736) were originally produced. Other instances worth noting include Charles Johnson’s Caelia or The Perjur’d Lover (1732) , John Hewitt’s Fatal Falsehood (1734) , Thomas Cook’s The Mournful Nuptials or Love the Cure of all Woes (1739) and Edward Moore’s The Gamester (1753) . Though as a distinct form of drama domestic tragedy only arose in the 18 th century, its pedigree is often retrospective...

  Originally printed as a three part article in the periodical The Egoist in 1919, Tradition and the Individual Talent was published in its entirety the following year in the collection The Sacred Wood . Though disclaimed by Eliot himself in the latter part of his career as one of his most juvenile pronouncements, the work continues to remain ever popular, and contains one of his most important postulations namely the impersonal theory of poetry. This theory which has come to be identified as the cornerstone of Eliot’s critical corpus has two aspects to it, tradition and individual talent, both of which reinforce the conception of poetry as an autonomous objective phenomenon.   Tradition     According to Eliot, prior to taking up the endeavor of writing poetry, one must seek to acquire a sense or knowledge of two factors, poems by the past generations of poets and poems by those of the present. Obtaining this knowledge of poems by both past and present p...

            Heroic play or heroic tragedy, also referred to as restoration tragedy, exemplifies a tragic subgenre that rose to prominence in the immediate aftermath of the English restoration. Acknowledged to be the finest author of the era, John Dryden is its propounder and principal exponent. His play The Indian Queen first performed in 1664 is commonly regarded as initiating the trend for heroic plays on the English stage. Some of his other notable productions in the heroic vein are The Indian Emperor (1665) , The Maiden Queen (1667) , The Conquest of Granada (1672) , Aureng-zeb (1676) , and All for Love (1678) . Beside Dryden, other important figures in the domain of heroic plays include Nathaniel Lee, whose important works are Sophonisba (1675) and The Rival Queens (1677) , and Thomas Otway, whose most well-known is Venice Preserv’d (1682) . Though heroic plays continued to be written and produced till at least the late 1680s, the performance of...