Write 500 words answering each question below :
- What are the implications for our understanding of Beowulf of Wiglaf’s judgment of his leader in the following passage?“Often must many men, for the will of one,
endure exile, as it has happened to us;
we could not convince the beloved prince,
the keeper of the kingdom, by any counsel,
that he not greet the gold-ward,
let him lie, where he long had been,
inhabiting his abodes until the world’s end;
he held to his noble destiny.” (3077-3084a)
Note Hygelac’s similar attempt to dissuade Beowulf from going to Denmark to fight Grendel reported in lines 1992b-1998.
- How would you argue that Brutus, not Julius Caesar, is the most important character in Shakespeare’s play and that the play should rightly be called Marcus Brutus and not Julius Caesar?
- How does the marriage of Adam and Eve as presented in Books 9 and 12 of Paradise Lost resemble the marriages of the Wife of Bath and Jankyn, Margery and John Kempe, Portia and Brutus, and Calpurnia and Caesar?
- In the battle of raunchy poems, who wins, the men or the women, by creating the more devastating poems about the other sex, Aphra Behn (“The Disappointment”) and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (“The Reasons that Induced Dr. S. to write a Poem called ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room'”) or John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (“The Imperfect Enjoyment”) and Jonathan Swift (“The Lady’s Dressing Room”)?
