ENG 4150 DMWA Berggren
PAPER ASSIGNMENT
Character Types and Idiosyncratic Personalities in Jacobean Tragedy
DUE: Friday, 10 May
LENGTH: 4-5 double-spaced word-processed pages (approximately 1000-1250 words)
TOPIC: Compare and contrast similar characters in The Duchess of Malfi and The Changeling
THINKING ABOUT THE TOPIC: Certain kinds of characters recur in different dramatic eras. Jacobean tragedy often focuses on female protagonists, as opposed to Elizabethan tragedy, which tends to revolve around men. Similarly, Jacobean tragedy puts “New Men”—ambitious, upwardly mobile bourgeois types of uncertain morality—in the center alongside these strong women. Your essay should be a detailed and well supported comparison of Webster’s and Middleton’s heroines (the Duchess and Beatrice Joanna) or of the aspiring men (Bosola and De Flores) with whom their fates are intertwined, or, if you prefer, a comparison of the relationship between heroine and New Man in the two plays.
PLANNING THE ESSAY: Re-read the two plays, making notes on all the significant actions and speeches made by the characters of your choice. You will first need to evaluate each character within the world of the play in which he/she appears:
- What are their strengths and weaknesses?
- Are they appealing or do they make you uneasy?
- How do they speak? With what kinds of verbal images are they linked?
Taking all these factors into account, explain your ultimate opinion of them as human beings and as created fictional types. Then you will need to set the two of them against each other in order to evaluate the uses to which the playwrights put them so that you can show how the treatment of these typical figures helps us understand each writer’s view of the world.
Revisions will be possible, but only for papers that are submitted on time.
NO RESEARCH IS REQUIRED OR EXPECTED. Document any use of the textbook’s headnotes or footnotes with parenthetic references in your text and cite the text itself as demonstrated in the Check List for Essays.
