MB UNIUD

  I CLASSTEST CORRECTION

Last year we studied a lot of works. They belonged to Middle Ages and to the Anglo-Saxon period.

In the works there were different kinds of men: heroes, lords and knights.

At first, we studied Beowulf. He is an hero. He is powerful, brave, high-born and strong. He is only characterizated by abstract values, there isn't a physical description of the character.

The Beowulf's writer was an anonymous person and the work was written in Anglo-Saxon.

After that, we studied the ballads.

Studying ballads and the Canterbury Tales, we discovered new kind of men: lords and knights.

I will give an example: Lord Randal. He is a lord. He is young, beautiful, rich and noble. In this ballad Chaucer says that lord Randal is beautiful and young so he gives us a physical description of the character.

Lord Randal was in love with a dangerous lady, who poisoned him. As a matter of fact, in the ballads he speaks about lords or noble men, say that they are always in love with dangerous women.

The knight is a man who fought in the Crusades, he is brave, strong, devoted, loyal and now he is a pilgrim with the others.

Chaucer wrote for the common people, so he used a language that all people could understand.

Now we're studying Renaissance. In this period there is the new birth of the classics and the human being.

We are studying sonnets. They are a lyrical form of poetry written by sonneteers.

The sonneteers are men who write for unreachable women they love.

They suffer for their love, because the ladies don't accept their love.

The sonneteers are Courtly poets, so they belong to aristocracy. They use many high registers to write their sonnets.

But there is another kind of sonneteer: Shakespeare.

He doesn't speak about an impossible, in-human love; he speaks about earthly loves. As a matter of fact he dedicates his works to a fair youth and a dark lady.

Probably he want to parodize the other sonneteers and their lovers, because he describes the dark lady as if she were a real woman, who as got dark hair and dark eyes, who smell bad, who works and makes noise when she walks. So his lover is just the opposite of the other ladies, because they are like angels.

Shakespeare dedicates his sonnets to a fair youth too. He is fair (beautiful), anonymous, young and probably he has an homosexual relationship with Shakespeare.

So now I can say there are a lot of men in the literature and they are all different, in their aspects and in their values.