Survey of British Literature I your name: Mid-term Exam

Survey of British Literature I

Your name:

Mid-term Exam

Part I. [Passage Identification, 20 points in total] Choose four out of seven passages below, identify the full name of the author and the full title of the work from which each passage comes. Briefly identify each passage’s context and its significance.
1. There may your Muse display her fluttering wing,

And stretch herself at large from East to West:

Where you choose in fairy Elisa rest,

Or if you please in bigger notes to sing,

Extol the worthy whom she loves best,

That first the white bear to the stake did bring

2. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May morning:

If these delights thy mind may move.

Then live with me and be my love.

3. It also unleashed new ideas and new social, political, and economic forces that gradually displaced the spiritual and communal values of the Middle Ages.

4. Most things they saw with us, as mathematical instruments, sea compasses, the virtue of the lodestone in drawing iron, a perspective glass whereby was showed many strange sights, burning glasses, wildfire works, guns, books, writing and reading, spring-clocks that seem to go of themselves, and many other things that we had, were so strange unto them, and so far exceeded their capacities to comprehend the reason[.]

5. Her mind was oftime like the gentle air that cometh from the westerly point in a summer’s morn; ‘twas sweet and refreshing to all around her. Her speech did win all affections, and her subjects did try to show all love to her commands; for she would say, “her state did require her to command what she knew her people would willingly do from their own love to her[.]

6. Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses,

Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies

Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten –

In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

7. Severe and terrible punishments are enacted against theft, when it would be much better to enable every man to earn his own living, instead of being driven to the awful necessity of stealing and then dying for it.

Part II. [Short Answer, 40 points in total] Choose two out of four terms below and identify its meanings within historical contexts.

1. Renaissance

2. Elizabethan Court

3. Elizabethan Colonization

4. Shepherd and Pastoral Poem

Part III. [Essay question, 40 points in total] Note that your answer should be in essay format; introductory paragraph, body paragraph with supporting details, and conclusion.]
During the periods of King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I, Thomas More, Edmund Spencer, Christopher Marlowe, and Sir Walter Raleigh have been great literary figures with their own complications and have pursued their own literary goal and style. Among the four figures,

1. 
   Select three authors or poets
   
2. 
   Analyze both how the selected figures have something in common and how they are different in their literary theme, style, goal, or etc
   
3. 
   For each author, use direct quotations from the original text as supporting details of your analysis