5. Title: THE AGE OF REASON Type of work: Theological study Author: Thomas Paine (1737-1809) First published: Part I, 1794; Part II, 1796./ Thomas Paine earned lasting fame as one of history´s most powerful and persuasive writers. Born in England, he wrote robust, plain, emotionally intense English that crystalized thought and galvanized into action the common people of America, Great Britain, and France. Paine, a young English immigrant sponsored by Benjamin Franklin, became bloved in his adopted country after he wrote Common Sense (1776), an impelling force in persuading Americans to break their remaining ties with England./ Paine placed before the common people the Enlightenment ideas of intellectual circles. He possessed an uncanny ability to translate the abstractions of the well-educated elite into living ideas that moved the masses. He beliefec that just as Sir Isaac newton revealed the natural laws governing the universe, he and others could use reason to uncover the natural rights of individuals, republican principles in politics, or the laws of the marketplace./ While millions of people responded positively to Paine´s early writings calling for independence and individual liberty, The Age of Reason made him a hated and reviled figured. The once-beloved advocate of humane and gentle treatment of all God´s creatures ws now presented as a drunkard and moral degenerate -a "filthy little atheist," in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, almost a century after Paine´s death./ Although thousands of ministers denounced Paine as an atheist, he clearly stated on the first page of The Age of Reason that "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.", "I belive in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties conisit in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." / Paine wrote The Age of Reason in 1793 in Paris during the French Revolution, which he had promoted and defended. He had seen reason overthrown and monarchy replaced with new despots. Similarly, in religion he saw the spread of atheism as a by-product of attacks on the established church. The Age of Reasonwas a blow against institutionalized religion on the one hand and an antidote to what Paine regarded as th poison of atheism on the other./ As his fellow revolutionaries executed the French king and abolished the established church, Paine cautioned them not to dethrone reason, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the theology that is true." / Paine outraged many former admirers not because he rejected God, which he did not do, but because he attacked the Christian church: "I do not believe in the creed professed... by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Anticipating Karl Marx, Paine wrote: "All national institutions of churches... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." Government officials propped up the church for the benefit of greedy priests, and in return the church lent legitimacy to government, Paine said. He understood the dangers of excess as the church-state edifice toppled, but he believed that reason would free humanity from the despotism of the clerics and protect it from the abyss of amoral anarchism./ Before Paine could present a theology appropriate to an age of reason, he had to strip away the false doctrine of Christianity. All existing religions claimed to be based on revelations from gods, but Paine argued that revelations could only occur between God and those to whom he directly revealed himself. After that, revelations, in the unlikely event that they had occurred, became mere hearsay and had been distorted to protect the position of the clerics./ The Bible was composed of hearsay, not revelation, Paine argued: using what would later be called biblical criticism, he found that many of the Old Testament stories were mere reworkings of ancient pagan tales. God´s victory over Satan and the latter´s confinement in the pit of fire reminded him of the tale of Jupiter´s defeaing a giant and confining him under Mount Etna, where he still belches fire, Christian mythologists did not settle the Satan problem so easily, Paine asserted: ... they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet into the bargain./ Christian mythologists deified Satan, Paine charged, even forcing God to capitulate to him by surrendering His Son on the cross./ The Old Testament degraded God by having HIm order His people to engage in treachery, murder, and genocide, Paine wrote. It was full of confused chronology and fragments of non-Jewish writing. The books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and others could not have been written by them. That which was not absurd was an obscene history of wickedness. The Book of Job was interesting but was not Hebrew in origin; some of the Psalms properly exalted God but were not superior to other such writings before or since; the bits of wisdom in the Proverbs were not any wiser than those of Ben Franklin./ Paine then turned to the New Testament. It was not as full of brutality and blood as the Old Testament, but it was even more absurd, he believed. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not revelations but anecdotal hearsay written by unknown figures long after the events they described. The biblical story of Jesus, a modest and humane man whose message was distorted by church mythologists, was an absurdity. The story of his birth was an obscene tale of the violation of a virgin by a ghost. Jesus´ death, God dying on a cross, was even more ridiculous: "His historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground." / Jesus was a good man, a reformer and revolutionist, who was killed because he posed a threat to greedy priests and power-hungry Romans. Subsequently, the church built myths about him to support and justify a priestly religion of pomp and revenue. It created a false concept of redemption to obscure the fact that all humans at all times occupy the same relation to God, needing no mediation by churches or ministers. The doctrine of redemption served the clerics by turning humans into outcasts living in a dunghill and needing the chruch to regain the kingdom. The Bible, books of hearsay written centuries after the events they described, was shaped to fit the needs of the church. Church leaders settled by majority vote what would make up the Bible. If the vote had been different, Paine said, then Christian belief would be different./ Reason taught a very clear lesson to Paine. All human languages were ambiguous, early miscopied, or even forged. The word of God would never have been revealed in a human language, a changeable and varying vehicle. The word of God would be revealed in a way that could never be changed or distorted or misunderstood, and it would be revealed to all people in every generation./ "The Word of God IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." In God´s creation of the earth and all the universe, we see His wisdom, power, munificence, and mercy, Paine said. The absurdities and creations of the Bible paled beside the workings of the universe in which God placed humanity. The Bible was so inferior to the glory and power of God revealed in His creation that the church had to suppress philosophy and science that would reveal the true theology revealed in the creation. Christianity so offended reason that in order to survive the church had to suppress freedom of thought./ There was a religion creed suitable for an age of reason, Paine believed, the deistic creed of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as well as Voltaire and other European Enlightenment leaders. Paine made his deistic beliefs clear: The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And incomprehensible and difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it./ People did not need the church and ministers to have access to the mind of God: "It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God." The Bible served only to diminish God and make Him appear cruel and angry./ So Paine ended the first part of The Age of Reason. He did not have the leisure to worry about its reception. Maximilien Robespierre and his radical comrades imprisoned Paine and kept him locked up through most of 1794. They probably did not intend to execute him but wanted to keep his pen from being turned against their excesses. He nearly died of illness before James Monroe helped free him. As Paine recovered, he read attacks on the first part of The Age of Reason. He had not had access to a Bible in anticlerical France when he wrote the first part. Now he had a Bible at hand and, he wrote, found that it was worse than he remembered./ Paine did not develop new themes in part 2 of The Age of Reason but provided more details of biblical criticism to support his argument that Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and others could not have written the books ascribed to them, thus removing any authority that they had as revelation. Paine again hammered at the theme that the Bible reduced God and His holy disciples to barbaric evildoers. Only the Book of Job could be read without indignation and disgust, he said. The New Testament began with the debauchery of Mary and ended with the absurdity of men placing God on the cross. The heart of the New Testament was the often-conflicting Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each of whom seemed to have known a different Jesus./ Paine reiterated his central message. God´s glory and benevolence were not found in the Bible or in churches or in ministers´ sermons. Humans did not need mediating instituions to reach God. All people could find God´s revelation by looking at his creation, using reason./ Although The Age of Reason was a book of profound morality and ethics and a paean to the glories of God, it gained for Paine undying hatred throughout the Christian world. His message was derived form the thought of Isaac Newton and René Descartes. He did not add anything to the deistic thought of Voltaire, Franklin, and Jefferson. Paine´s unforgivable sin was to take deistic theology out of the gentlefolk´s drawing rooms and to place it in the plain language of the people. His book horrified many of the common people by its seeming blasphemy, and frightened the elite by its threat of freeing the masses from religious control. The Age of Reason came at the close of the Enlightenment, as reason was being dethroned. A century would pass before Paine´s message of political, religious, and economic freedom could again be clearly heard.// 6. Title: THE ALCHEMIST: Type of work: Drama, Author: Ben Jonson (1573?-1637), Type of plot: Comedy of manners, Time of plot: Early seventeenth century. Locale: London. First presented: 1610./ A masterpiece of plot construction, The Alchemist marked the peak of Jonson´s career. A delightful, entertaining satire on human greed, this play is free of the sermonizing that characterizes the dramatist´s other work./ Principal Characters: Subtle, the Alchemist, a moldy, disreputable cheat. Joining forces with Jeremy Butler and Dol Common, he uses his fund of scientific and pseudo-scientific jargon to fleece the gullible. He promises large returns from transmutation of metals, astrological prophecies, physical nostrums, or whatever seems most likely to entrap his victims. When the master of the house returns, he is forced to take flight without his gains./ Face (Jeremy Butler), Subtle´s contact man, who furnishes his master´s house as the Alchemist´s headquarters. He is a resourceful, quick-witted improviser. Disguised as a rough, blunt captain, he entices victims to the house. When his master, Lovewit, returns home unexpectedly, he arranges a marriage between Lovewit and the Widow Pliant, thereby escaping punishment./ Dol Common, the third of the tricksters, common mistress of the other two. Her dominant personality keeps her quarrelsome cohorts in line. She can act various roles, such as an exotic lady or the Queen of the Fairies to carry out Subtle´s various schemes. Along with Subtle she is forced to flee with the jeers of Face following her./ Sir Epicure Mammon, a fantastic voluptuary. He is a veritable fountain of lust and imagined luxury, and he seeks the philosopher´s stone to help him to unbounded self-indulgence. When his investment is wiped out by the explosion of the Alchemist´s furnace, planned and well-timed by Subtle, Sir Epicure confesses that he has been justly punished for his voluptuous mind./ Abel Drugger, a small-time tobacconist ambitious for commercial success. Engaged to the Widow Pliant, he brings her and her brother Kastril to the Alchemist. He is tricked out of not only his money but the widow./ Kastril, the angry boy, brother of the Widow Pliant. He has come up to London to learn to smoke and quarrel. Face uses him to get rid of the skeptic, Surly. He is much taken with old Lovewit, who quearrels well, and consents to shi sister´s marriage with him./ Pertinax Surly, a sour skeptic who prides himself on being too astute to be tricked. First coming to the Alchemist´s as a friend of Sir Epicure, he returns disguised as a Spanish don, planning to save the Widow Pliant from Subtle and Face and to marry her. He is driven away by Kastril and loses the widow to Lovewit./ Tribulation Wholesome, an oily Puritan hypocrite from Amsterdam. HImself quite willing to compromise his conscience for profit, he has difficulty restraining his uncompromising companion, Deacon Ananias./ Ananias, a deacon, a hot-tempered zealot who considers even the word Christmas a Papist abomination. Quarrelsome at first, he finally agrees that counterfeiting is lawful if it is for the benefit of the faithful. Along with Tribulation he is driven away by Lovewit./ Dame Pliant, an easy-going, attractive young widow, affianced to Drugger, but perfectly willing to accept another husband. Subtle and Face both hope to marry her, but the latter decides that it is safer to hand her over to Lovewith, his master./ Lovewit, the master of the house who has left London because of the plague. His absence sets up the plot; his return resolves it. He drives away Subtle, Dol, and their victims, but forgives Jeremy Butler (Face) when he arranges a marriage between his master and the rich young widow, Dame Pliant./ The Story: Master Lovewit having left the city because of plague, his butler, Jeremy, known as Face to his friends of the underworld, invited Subtle, a swindler posing as an alchemist, and Dol Common, a prostitute, to join him in using the house as a base of operations for their rascally activities. Matters fared well for the three until a dispute arose between Face and Subtle over authority. Dol, seeing their money-making projects doomed if this strife continued, rebuked the two men and cajoled them back to their senses./ No sooner had Face and Subtle become reconciled than Dapper, a gullible lawyer´s clerk given to gambling, called, by previous arrangement with Face, to learn from the eminent astrologer, Doctor Subtle, how to win at all games of chance. Dapper, in the hands of the two merciless rascals, was relieved of all his ready cash, in return for which Subtle predicted that Dapper would have good luck in the gaming tables. In order to gull Dapper further, Subtle told him to return later to confer with the Queen of Fairy, a mysterious benefactress who could promote Dapper´s worldly success./ Abel Drugger, an ambitious young druggist who had been led on by Face, was the next victim to enter the house. To his delight, he learned from Subtle, who spoke in incomprehensible pharmaceutical and astrological jargon, that he would have a rich future./ Next arrived Sir Epicure Mammon, a greedy and lecherous knight, with his friend Pertinax Surly, a man versed in the ways of London confidence men. Having been promised the philosopher´s stone by Subtle, Mammon had wild visions of transforming all of his possessions into gold and silver, but he was completely taken in by the duplicities of Subtle and Face. Subtle further aroused Mammon´s greed by describing at length, in the pseudo-scientific gibberish of the alchemist-confidence man, the processes which led to his approximante achievement of the mythical philosopher´s stone. Surly, quick to see what was afoot, scoffed at Subtle and at the folly of Mammon./ During the interview Mammon caught sight of Dol, who appeared inadvertently, and was fascinated. Thinking quickly, Face told Mammon that Dol was an aristocratic lady who, being mad, was under the care of Doctor Subtle but who in her moments of sanity was most affable. Before he left the house Mammon promised to send to the unprincipled Subtle certain of his household objects of base metal for the purpose of having them transmuted into gold./ The parade of victims continued, Elder Ananias of the Amsterdam community of extreme Protestants came to negotiate for his group with Subtle for the philosopher´s stone. Subtle, with Face as his assistant, repeated his extravagant jargon to the impressionable Ananias, who, in his greed, declared that the brethren were impatient with the slowness of the experiment. Subtle, feigning professional indignation, frightened Ananias with a threat to put out forever his alchemist´s fire./ Drugger reappeared to be duped further. Subtle and Face were delighted when he told them that a wealthy young widow had taken lodgings near his and that her brother, just come into an inheritance, had journeyed to London to learn how to quarrel in rakish fashion. The two knaves plotted eagerly to get brother and sister into their clutches./ Ananias returned with his pastor, Tribulation Wholesome. Both Puritans managed to wink at moral considerations as Subtle glowingly described the near completion of the philosopher´s stone. Prepared to go to any ends to procure the stone, Ananias and Tribulation contracted to purchase Mammon´s household articles, which, Subtle explained, he needed for the experiment; the proceeds of the sale would go toward the care of orphans for whom Subtle said he was responsible./ Subtle and Face also plotted to sell these same house-hold articles to the young widow, who, having just moved to London, was probably in need of such items. In the meantime Face met in the streets a Spanish Don -Surly in clever disguise- who expressed a desire to confer with Subtle on matters of business and health./ Dapper returned to meet the Queen of Fairy. At the same time Drugger brought to the house Master Kastril, the angry young man who would learn to quarrel. Kastril was completely taken in. Subtle, promising to make him a perfect London gallant, arranged to have him instructed by Face, who posed as a city captain. Kastril was so pleased with his new acquaintances that he sent Drugger to bring his sister to the house./ Kastil having departed, Dol, Subtle, and Face relieved Dapper of all of his money in a ridiculous ritual in which Dapper was to see and talk to the Quen of Fairy. During the shameless proceedings Mammon knocked. Dapper, who had been blindfolded, was gagged and hastily put into a water closet at the rear of the house, Mammon entered and began to woo Dol, whom he believed to be a distracted aristocratic lady. Face and Subtle, in order to have the front part of the house clear for further swindles, shunted the amorous pair to another part of the house./ Young Kastril returned with his widowed sister, Dame Pliant; both were deeply impressed by Subtle´s manner and by his rhetoric. When the Spanish Don arrived, Subtle escorted Kastril and Dame Pliant to inspect his laboratory. By that time both Subtle and Face were determined to wed Dame Pliant./ Fce introduced the Spaniard to Dame Pliant, who, in spite of her objections to Spaniards in general, consented to walk in the garden with the Don./ Meanwhile, in another part of the house, Dol assumed madness. Subtle, discovering the distraught Mammon with her, declared that Mammon´s moral laxity would surely delay completion of the philosopher´s stone. Following a loud explosion, Face reported that the laboratory was a shambles. Mammon despondently left the house, and Subtle simulated a fainting spell./ In the garden Surly revealed his true identity to Dame Pliant and warned the young widow against the swindlers. When, as Surly, he confronted the two rogues, Face, in desperation, told Kastril that Surly was an impostor who was trying to steal Dame Pliant away. Drugger entered and being Face´s creature, insisted that he knew Surly to be a scoundrel. Then Ananias came to the house and all but wrecked Subtle´s plot by talking indiscreetly of making counterfeit money. Unable to cope with the wily rascals, Surly departed, followed by Kastril./ Glad to be rid of his callers, Subtle placed Dame Pliant in Dol´s care. But they were once more thrown into confusion when Lovewith, owner of the house, made an untimely appearance. Face, quickly reverting to his normal role of Jeremy, the butler, went to the door in an attempt to detain his master long enough to permit Subtle and Dol to escape./ Although warned by his butler that the house was infested. Lovewit suspected that something was amiss when Mammon and Surly returned to expose Subtle and Face. Kastril, Ananias, and Tribulation confirmed their account. Dapper, having managed to get rid of his gag, cried out inside the house. Deciding that honesty was the only policy, Face confessed everything to his master and promised to provide him with a wealthy young widow as his wife, if Lovewit would have mercy on his servant./ In the house, meanwhile, Subtle concluded the gulling of Dapper and sent the young clerk on his way, dilled with the belief that he would win at all games of chance. Subtle and Dol then tried to abscond with the threesome´s loot, but Face, back in Lovewit´s good graces, thwarted them in their attempt. They were forced to escape empty-handed by the back gate./ Lovewit won the hand of Dame Pliant and in his good humor forgave his crafty butler. When those who had been swindled demanded retribution, they were finally convinced that they had been mulcted as a result of their own selfishness and greed./ Critical Evaluation: For anyone interested in learning how to take in the gable, Ben Jonson´s The Alchemist is a fundamental text. "Cony-catching" was a popular practice in Elizabethan England, and Jonson, an intimate of London´s jails, taverns, theaters, and places of even less repute, here reveals the technique on several of the most amusing and lucrative ploys. And his protagonist, it should be noted, gets scot-free./ The complex and incongruous tone of life in London in the Elizabethan Age helped account for the widespread faith in astrology and alchemy and helped make them leading gimmicks. People were not far from believing in the dragons slain by King Arthur´s knights. Many believed also that the dawning age of science would discover a "Philosopher´s Stone" which would transmute dross into gold. The classical ideas are so well met in The Alchemist that the play is in its own way a small masterpiece. Jonson observes unity of time in that the dramatic situation is enacted in the same amount of time that it would take in real life. Unity of place is maintained in that the scene, Lovewit´s house in the Friars, is specific and limited. The discrete beginning, middle, and conclusion of the play provide for unity of action. The characters are types who behave consistently, doing nothing unexpected and thus the ideal of decorum, the paramount classical precept, is met: Jonson´s prositute is bawdy, his churchmen sanctimonious./ Faithfulness to classical concepts, however, is not the only virtue of The Alchemist. Jonson was a masterful manipulator of theatrical effects. The simple yet ingenious plot provides for the multiplicity of incident dear to the Renaissance heart; costume, disguise, and transmutation fo identity are similarly exploited./ Despite its qualifications as a well-wrought, clever, and entertaining play in the classical mode. The Alchemist owes much of its literary interest and charm to Jonson´s rhetorical flourishes. The underworld slang and alchemichal jargon used by the protagonists lend color and authenticity. Double entendres and simultaneous dialogue (which originated with Jonson) add to the effect. But most impressive, perhaps, is the way Subtle and Face use a debased eloquence in perpetrating their frauds. One of Subtle´s elegant, highly rhetorical, pseudo-rational arguments, for example, seems unequivocally to establish the propensity of all metals to turn into gold./ The Alchemist dramatizes what might happen when moral order is suspended by plague in London. Lovewit, representing responsible society, jettisons civic responsibility and flees the city, leaving behind only knaves and fools. Although the reader is reminded early that order will eventually be restored, society in the hands of unscrupulous degenerates into chaos. The servant supplants dhe master, science is overthrown by alchemy, reason is toppled by rhetoric, neture´s secrets are transcended, and the moral order is subverted as churchmen become swindlers./ Jonson´s vehicle, satire, was quite popular in Elizabethan England, and in The Alchemist its effect is intensified by the plague in the background. Jonson intended to be instructive, even if it meant instructing by ridicule. And the classicist in him wanted to restore to England some of the glory of Augustan Rome. To this end Jonson adopted Cicéro´s famous definition of tragedy: "a copy of life, a mirror of custom, a representation of truth." Accordingly, he anchors his play in contemporary London and reflects the speech, behavior, and attitudes of its citizens. The Renaissance saw a shift in emphasis from the world of the Church to the world of experience, but while Jonson set an extremely worldly stage, his morality was severe and almost medieval. His moral values, clear from the first scene on, are constantly reiterated as The Alchemist indicts vain and wishful thinking and directs the mind to the contemplation of virtue. It is a sign of Ben Jonson´s genius that he does so both unequivocally and entertainingly./ 7. Title: ALICE´S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND: Type of work: Imaginative tale, Author: Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832 - 1898), Type of plot: Fantasy, Time of plot: Victorian England, Locale: The dream world of an imaginative child, First published: 1865./ Carroll´s classic fantasy can be read on many levels and appreciated by diverse audiences: it is at once a biting social and political satire sufficiently complex to satisfy the most sophisticated adult, and a delightfully whimsical fairy tale to capture the fancy of the imaginative child. Principal Characters: Alice, a curious, imaginative strong willed, and honest young English girl. She falls asleep by the side of a stream in a meadow and dreams that she follows a White Rabbit down his hole. She has many adventures in a Wonderland peopled by all kinds of strange characters and animals./ The White Rabbit, anxiously, aristocratic, dandified. Alice follows him down his hole, which leads to an enchanted house and garde. The White Rabbit is a Prime Minister of sorts in this Wonderland, for he has close contact with the royalty there and carries out their orders, although he does not institute policy./ The Queen of Hearts, the ill-tempered Queen of Wonderland, She constatnly demands that everyone who crosses her to be beheaded. Fond of croquet, she orders Alice to take part in a game in which flamingos are used for mallets and hedgehogs for balls. She issues an order for Alice´s execution at the end of the book, but his order is never carried out because Alice accuses the Queen and all her company of being only a pack of cards, an assertion that turns out to be true./ The King of Hearts, a timid, kindly man. Although he is completely under his wife´s power because of her temper, he manages to pardon all her victims surreptitiously./ The Duchess, another member of rayalty in Wonderland, a platitude-quoting, moralizing, ugly old woman who lives in a chaotic house. Deathly afraid of the Queen, she is ordered to be beheaded, but the sentence is never carried out./ The Cook, the Duchess´ servant. She flavors everything with pepper, insults her mistress, and throws cooking pans at her./ The Cheshire Cat, the Duchess´ grinning cat. Continually with pepper, insults her mistress, and throws cooking pans at her./ The Cheshire Cat, the Duchess´grinning cat. Continually vanishing and reappearing, he is a great conversatinalist, and he tells Alice much of the gossip in Wonderland./ The Duchess´ Baby, a strange, howling, little infant. The baby turns into a pig when the Duchess entrusts it to Alice´s care./ The Knave of Hearts, a timid, poetry-writing fellow accused of stealing some tarts that the Queen has made./ The March Hare, the rude host of a mad tea party to which Alice invites herself and then wishes that she had not./ The Mad Hatter, a riddle-making, blunt, outspoken guest at the tea party. He is a godd friend of the March Hare, and at the party the two try to prove to Alice that she is stupid./ The Dormouse, another guest at the tea party. He is a sleepy creature, aroused long enough to recite for Alice and then pushed headfirst into the teapot./ The Gryphon, a mythical creature, half bird, half animal, who escorts Alice to the home of the Mock Turtle so that she may hear the recital of the Turtle´s life story./ The Mock Turtle, an ever-sobbing animal. He recites his life´s story to Alice and everyone else within earshot./ The Caterpillar, a hookah-smoking insect who perches on the top of a maginc mushroom. Officious and easily offended, he tests Alice´s intelligence with a seires of ridiculous riddles./ Bill, The Lizard, an unfortunate fellow picked by the other animals to go down the chimney of the White Rabbit´s house and try to force out Alice, who has assumed gigantic proportions after drinking a magic potion she found on the table./ The Mouse, who greets Alice in the pool of tears which she had made by crying while she was of gigantic size. Now of minute proportions, she is almost overwhelmed by the Mouse, a creature easily offended./ The Lorry, The Duck, The Dodo, The Eaglet, The Crab, and The Baby Crab, all creatues whom Alice meets in the pool of her tears and who swim around with her./ Father William and His Son, characters in a poem that Alice recites. The old man, a former athlete, can still balance an eel on his nose, much to the amazement of his curious and impertinent son. The poem is a parody of Robert Southey´s "The Old Man´s Comforts."/ The Pigeon, a bird Alice meets after she has made herself tall by eating part of the Caterpillar´s mushroom./ The Fish Footman, the bearer of a note from the Queen inviting the Duchess to play croquet./ The Frog footman, the impolite servant fo the Duchess; his wig becomes entangled with that of the Fish Footman whe the two bow in greeting each other./ The Puppy, a playful animal Alice meets while she is in her small state./ The Flamingo, the bird Alice uses for a croquet mallet in the game with the Queen./ The Hedgehog, the animal that acts as the ball in the croquet game./ Five, Two, and Seven, three quarrelsome gardeners of the Queen. When Alice meets them, they are painting red all the white roses in the garden to obliterate the mistake someone had made in ordering white ones./ Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie, three sisters in the Dormouse´s story. They live at the bottom of a well and exist solely on treacle./ Dinah, Alice´s pet cat in real life./ Alice´s sister, the wise older sister who is charmed by Alice´s tales of her adventures in Wonderland./ The Story: Alice was quietly reading over her sister´s shoulder when she saw a White Rabbit dash across the lawn and disappear into its hole. She jumped up to rush after him and found herself falling down the rabbit hole. At the bottom, she saw the White Rabbit hurrying along a corridor ahad of her nad murmuring that he would be late. He disappeared around a corner, leaving Alice standing in front of several locked doors./ On a glass table, she found a tiny golden key that unlocked a little door hidden behind a curtain. The door opened upon a lovely miniature garden, but she could not get through the doorway because it was too small. She sadly replaced the key on the table. A little bottle misteriously appeared. Alice drank the contents and immediately began to grow smaller, so much so that she could no longer reach the key on the table. Next, she ate a piece of cake she found nearby, and soon she began to grow to such enormous size that she could only squint through the door. In despair, she began to weep tears as big as raindrops. As she sat crying, the White Rabbit appeared, bewailing the fact that the Duchess would be angry if he kept her waiting./ The White Rabbit dropped his fan and gloves. Alice picked them up, and she did so, she began to grow smaller. Again she rushed to the garden door, but she found it shut and the golden key once more on the table out of reach./ Then she fell into a pond of her own tears. Splashing along, she encountered a mouse who had stubled into the pool. Alice tactlessly began a conversation about her cat Dinah, and the mouse became speechless with terror. Soon the pool fo tears was filled with living creatures -birds and animals of all kinds. An old Dodo suggested that they run a Caucus Race to get dry. Having asked what a Caucus Race was, Alice was told that the best way to explain it was to do it, whereupon the animals ran themselves quite breathless and finally became dry./ Afterward, the mouse told a "Tail" to match its own appendage. Alice was asked to tell something, but the only thing she could think of was her cat Dinah. Frightened, the other creatures went away, and Alice was left alone./ The White Rabbit appeared once more, this time hunting for his gloves and fan. Carching sight of Alice, he sent her to his himoe to get him a fresh pair of gloves and another fan. In the Rabbit´s house, she found the fan and gloves and also took a drink from a botttle. Instantly, she grew to be a giant sizae and was forced to put her leg up the chimney and her elbow out of the window in order to keep from beng squeezed to death./ She managed to eat a little cake and shring herself again. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran into a nearby wood where she found a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. The caterpillar was very rude to Alice, and he scorfully asked her to prove her worth by reciting "You are Old, Father William." Alice did so, but the words sounded very strange. Disgusted, he left her after giving her some valuable information about increasing or decreasing her size. She broke off pieces of the mushroom and found to her delight that by eating from the piece in her left hand she could become taller, and from the piece in her right hand, smaller./ She came to a little house among th trees. There a footman, who looked very much like a fish, presented to another footman, who closely resembeled a frog, in invitation for the Duchess to play croquet with the Queen. The two amphibians bowed to each other with great formality, tangling their wigs together. Alice opened the door and found herself in the chaotic house of the Duchess. The cook was stirring a large pot of soup and pouring plenty of pepper into the mixture. Everyone was sneezing except the cook and a Cheshire cat, which sat on the hearth grinning. The Duchess herself held a sneezing, squalling baby and sang a blaring lullaby to it. Alice, in sympathy with the poor child, picked it up and carried it out into the fresh air, whereupon the baby turned slowly into a pig, squirmed out of her arms, and waddled into the forest./ Standing in bewilderment, Alice saw the grinning Cheshire cat sitting in a tree. He was able to appear and disappear at will, and after exercising his talents, he advised Alice to go to a tea party given by the Mad Hatter. The cat vanished, all but the grin. Finally, that, too, disapeared, and Alice left for the party./ There, Alice found she had to deal with the strangest people she had ever seen -a March Hare, a Mad Hatter, and a sleepy Dormouse. All were too lazy to set the table properly; dirty dishes were everywhere. The Dormouse fell asleep in its teacup; the Mad Hatter told Alice her hair needed cutting; the March Hare offered her wine and then told her there was none. They asked her foolish riddles that had no answers. Then worse, they ignored her completely and carried on a ridiculous conversation among themselves. She escaped after the Dormouse fell asleep in the middle of a story he was telling./ Next, she found herself in a garden of talking flowers. Just as the conversation was beginning, some gardener appeared with paintbrushes and began to splash red paint on a rosebush. Alice learned that the Queen had ordered a red bush to be placed in that spot, and the gardener had made a mistake and planted a white one. Now they were busily and fearfully trying to cover their error before the Queen arrived. The poor gardeners, however, were not swift enough. The Queen caught them in the act, and the wretched gardeners were led off to be decapitated. Alice saved them by showing them down into a large flowerpot, out of sight of the dreadful Queen./ A croquet game began. The mallets were live flamingos, and the balls were hedgehogs which thought nothing of uncurling themselves and running rapidly over the field. The Duchess cornered Alice and led her away to the seaside to introduce her to the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon/ While engaged in a Lobster Quadrille, they heard the news of a trial. A thief had stolen some tarts. Rushing to the courtroom where a trial by jury was already in session, Alice was called upon to act as witness before the King and Queen of Hearts, but the excited child upset the jury box and spilled out all of its occupants. After replacing all the animals in the box, Alice said she knew nothing of the matter. Her speech infuriated the Queen, who ordered that Alice´s head be cut off. The whole court rushed at her, and Alice defiantly called them nothing but a pack of cards. She awoke from her dream as her sister brushed away some dead leaves blowing over her face./ Critical Evaluation: One summer afternoon in 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford friend, and three little girls set out on a boat trip. Somewhere along the way, "Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland" was born. Although it was not the first story that Dodgson had told the girls, children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, it was one that immediately captured Alice Liddell, the prototype for the fictional seven-year-old heroine. Her later requests for Dodgson to "write it down" were to turn him into one of the world´s favortie authors, with his work translated into many languages and part of the heritage of most literate people./ Dogdson, who transposed his first two names into the pen name Lewis Carroll, was on the surface a shy but seemingly conventional Oxford mathematician. Today, however, his outwardly harmless affinity for little girls is viewed as the sign of a serious neurosis, an inability to grow up, which also revealed itself in his writings. Alice was only one of many young girls who would provide Carroll with the only love -innocent and sexless as it seemed- to which he could respond. As she matured, each child was replaced in Carroll´s affections by another young lady who shared the secret world of childhood in which he spent much of his adult life./ Expressing itself in many ways, this attraction to fantasy gave rise to Carroll´s love of whimsical letters, gadgets, theatricals, toys, and, of course, to the Alice stories. First prepared in a handwritten manuscript book for Alice Liddell (then called Alice´s Adventures Under Ground), the book was published in its present form in 1865 and was almost immediately popular. Adding to the originality were the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, who did not use the real Alice for his model. (She unlike the pictured child, had short dark hair and bangs.) Followed in 1871 by the even more brilliant sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There the book has always been enjoyed on several levels. Initially, it is a very special children´s story, but it is also a book teeming with fascination for certain specialists -mathematicians, linguists, logicians, Freudians, and even those who envision the book as an example of a drug trip. Yet, perhaps its philosophical suggestions give the work most of its never-ending appeal for adults./ If readers examine the book as children´s literature, readers see that if offered its young audience a charming new outlook, dispensing with the moralistic viewpoint then prevalent in almost all tales for youngsters. Alice is neither continuously nice nor thoroughle naughty, for she is simply a curious child whoe queries lead her into strange situations, and in the end, she is neither punished nor rewarded. A moral, proposing that she do this or that, is absent. Departing even further from the saccharine stories praising standard virtues, Carroll pokes fun at the many of the ideas with which Alice, a well-bred English child, has been imbued. The Mock Turtle, for example, chides the sacred subject of learning by terming the branches of arithmetic Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. Children who read the book are permitted to see adults quite unlike the perfect beings usually portrayed. It is the story´s adults rather than Alice who are rude, demanding, and ridiculous./ As a work for the specialist, Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland touches on many puzzles more thoroughly presented in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Its playfulness with language, for example, invoves puns, parodies, and clever phrasing, but it does not deal as fully with the basic nature of language as does its sequel. Even in Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland, however, Carroll´s casual amusement with words often has deeper meaning. When he parodies the well-known poems and songs of his day, he is again questioning their supercilious platitudes. When he makes a pun (the Gryphon tells the reader that boots and shoes under the sea are "done" with whiting rather than blacking and are, of course, made of soles and eels), Carroll is asserting the total logic of illogic. When he designs a Cheshire cat, he is taking a common but unclear phrase of his time ("Grin like a Cheshire cat" referred either to inn signs in the county of Cheshire depicting a grinning lion or to Cheshire cheeses modeled in the shape of a smiling cat) and turning it into a concrete reality. Logicians also find a multitude of tidbits. The Cheshire cat "proves" it is not mad by adopting the premise that if a dog is not mad, anyone who reacts in ways opposite to a dog must be. The March Hare offers a nice exercise in logic and language with his discussion of taking "more" versus taking "less" and his challenge as to whether "I mean what I say" is the same as "I say what I mean." / For Freudians, the book is also a mass of complicated mysteries. Freudians see significance in most of the characters and incidents, but the fall down the rabbit hole, the changes in size, the great interest in eating and drinking, the obnoxious mature females, and Alice´s continual anxiety are some of the most revealing topics, all of them suggesting Carroll´s neuroses about women and sex./ The larger philosophical questions rased by Alice center on the order of life as readers know it. Set in the context of the dream vision, a journey different from a conscious quest, the book asks whether there is indeed any pattern or meaning to life. Alice is the curious innocent who compares so favorabbly with the jaded and even wicked grown-ups. Always sensible and open to experience, she would seem the ideal messenger to gring readers a true concept, yet her adventures hint that all readers may know is the ridiculousness of logic and what readers imagine to be reality and the logic of nonsense. Readers see that Wonderland is no more incomprehensible than Victorian England, that the Mad Duchess lives next door, that as teh Cheshire cat says, "We´re all mad here." / Alice brings to Wonderland a strong belief in order and certain concepts, and she must continually refuse to accept the chaos that she finds there. When Wondeland turns her views askew, she can withstand the strain for only so long. Then she must rebel. The trial, which is the last refuge of justice in man´s world, is the key factor in Alice´s rejection of Wonderland, for it is a trial of Wonderland itself, with many of the earler encountered creatures reassembled to assert forcefully, once more, that expectations and rules are meaningless. Like the child of the world that she is, Alice (and Carroll) must deny the truth that there is no truth. She must shout "Nonsense" to it all. As one critic has pointed out, she rejects "mad sanity in favor of the sane madness of the ordinary existence." Facing the same confusion and frightened by what it hints, th reader also rebels, laughing and turning to more serious considerations.// 8. Title: ALL´S WELL THAT ENDS WELL: Type of work: Drama, Author: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Type of plot: Romantic comedy, Time of plot: Sixteenth century, Locale: France and Italy, First published: 1602./ Uneven in tone, All´s Well That Ends Well ranges from scenes of farce to moments of serious insight. Helena´s character, of rather dubious virtue in terms of her tactcs with Bertram, sheds interesting ambiguity on the play´s general theme of the blindness of prejudice and unreason./ Principal Characters:
PAGINA 28 En el círculo
5. Title: THE AGE OF REASON Type of work: Theological study Author: Thomas Paine (1737-1809) First published: Part I, 1794; Part II, 1796./ Thomas Paine earned lasting fame as one of history´s most powerful and persuasive writers. Born in England, he wrote robust, plain, emotionally intense English that crystalized thought and galvanized into action the common people of America, Great Britain, and France. Paine, a young English immigrant sponsored by Benjamin Franklin, became bloved in his adopted country after he wrote Common Sense (1776), an impelling force in persuading Americans to break their remaining ties with England./ Paine placed before the common people the Enlightenment ideas of intellectual circles. He possessed an uncanny ability to translate the abstractions of the well-educated elite into living ideas that moved the masses. He beliefec that just as Sir Isaac newton revealed the natural laws governing the universe, he and others could use reason to uncover the natural rights of individuals, republican principles in politics, or the laws of the marketplace./ While millions of people responded positively to Paine´s early writings calling for independence and individual liberty, The Age of Reason made him a hated and reviled figured. The once-beloved advocate of humane and gentle treatment of all God´s creatures ws now presented as a drunkard and moral degenerate -a "filthy little atheist," in the words of Theodore Roosevelt, almost a century after Paine´s death./ Although thousands of ministers denounced Paine as an atheist, he clearly stated on the first page of The Age of Reason that "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.", "I belive in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties conisit in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." / Paine wrote The Age of Reason in 1793 in Paris during the French Revolution, which he had promoted and defended. He had seen reason overthrown and monarchy replaced with new despots. Similarly, in religion he saw the spread of atheism as a by-product of attacks on the established church. The Age of Reasonwas a blow against institutionalized religion on the one hand and an antidote to what Paine regarded as th poison of atheism on the other./ As his fellow revolutionaries executed the French king and abolished the established church, Paine cautioned them not to dethrone reason, "lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the theology that is true." / Paine outraged many former admirers not because he rejected God, which he did not do, but because he attacked the Christian church: "I do not believe in the creed professed... by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church." Anticipating Karl Marx, Paine wrote: "All national institutions of churches... appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit." Government officials propped up the church for the benefit of greedy priests, and in return the church lent legitimacy to government, Paine said. He understood the dangers of excess as the church-state edifice toppled, but he believed that reason would free humanity from the despotism of the clerics and protect it from the abyss of amoral anarchism./ Before Paine could present a theology appropriate to an age of reason, he had to strip away the false doctrine of Christianity. All existing religions claimed to be based on revelations from gods, but Paine argued that revelations could only occur between God and those to whom he directly revealed himself. After that, revelations, in the unlikely event that they had occurred, became mere hearsay and had been distorted to protect the position of the clerics./ The Bible was composed of hearsay, not revelation, Paine argued: using what would later be called biblical criticism, he found that many of the Old Testament stories were mere reworkings of ancient pagan tales. God´s victory over Satan and the latter´s confinement in the pit of fire reminded him of the tale of Jupiter´s defeaing a giant and confining him under Mount Etna, where he still belches fire, Christian mythologists did not settle the Satan problem so easily, Paine asserted: ... they could not do without him; and after being at the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and Mahomet into the bargain./ Christian mythologists deified Satan, Paine charged, even forcing God to capitulate to him by surrendering His Son on the cross./ The Old Testament degraded God by having HIm order His people to engage in treachery, murder, and genocide, Paine wrote. It was full of confused chronology and fragments of non-Jewish writing. The books ascribed to Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and others could not have been written by them. That which was not absurd was an obscene history of wickedness. The Book of Job was interesting but was not Hebrew in origin; some of the Psalms properly exalted God but were not superior to other such writings before or since; the bits of wisdom in the Proverbs were not any wiser than those of Ben Franklin./ Paine then turned to the New Testament. It was not as full of brutality and blood as the Old Testament, but it was even more absurd, he believed. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were not revelations but anecdotal hearsay written by unknown figures long after the events they described. The biblical story of Jesus, a modest and humane man whose message was distorted by church mythologists, was an absurdity. The story of his birth was an obscene tale of the violation of a virgin by a ghost. Jesus´ death, God dying on a cross, was even more ridiculous: "His historians, having brought him into the world in a supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground." / Jesus was a good man, a reformer and revolutionist, who was killed because he posed a threat to greedy priests and power-hungry Romans. Subsequently, the church built myths about him to support and justify a priestly religion of pomp and revenue. It created a false concept of redemption to obscure the fact that all humans at all times occupy the same relation to God, needing no mediation by churches or ministers. The doctrine of redemption served the clerics by turning humans into outcasts living in a dunghill and needing the chruch to regain the kingdom. The Bible, books of hearsay written centuries after the events they described, was shaped to fit the needs of the church. Church leaders settled by majority vote what would make up the Bible. If the vote had been different, Paine said, then Christian belief would be different./ Reason taught a very clear lesson to Paine. All human languages were ambiguous, early miscopied, or even forged. The word of God would never have been revealed in a human language, a changeable and varying vehicle. The word of God would be revealed in a way that could never be changed or distorted or misunderstood, and it would be revealed to all people in every generation./ "The Word of God IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." In God´s creation of the earth and all the universe, we see His wisdom, power, munificence, and mercy, Paine said. The absurdities and creations of the Bible paled beside the workings of the universe in which God placed humanity. The Bible was so inferior to the glory and power of God revealed in His creation that the church had to suppress philosophy and science that would reveal the true theology revealed in the creation. Christianity so offended reason that in order to survive the church had to suppress freedom of thought./ There was a religion creed suitable for an age of reason, Paine believed, the deistic creed of Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, as well as Voltaire and other European Enlightenment leaders. Paine made his deistic beliefs clear: The only idea man can affix to the name of God is that of a first cause, the cause of all things. And incomprehensible and difficult as it is for a man to conceive what a first cause is, he arrives at the belief of it from the tenfold greater difficulty of disbelieving it./ People did not need the church and ministers to have access to the mind of God: "It is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God." The Bible served only to diminish God and make Him appear cruel and angry./ So Paine ended the first part of The Age of Reason. He did not have the leisure to worry about its reception. Maximilien Robespierre and his radical comrades imprisoned Paine and kept him locked up through most of 1794. They probably did not intend to execute him but wanted to keep his pen from being turned against their excesses. He nearly died of illness before James Monroe helped free him. As Paine recovered, he read attacks on the first part of The Age of Reason. He had not had access to a Bible in anticlerical France when he wrote the first part. Now he had a Bible at hand and, he wrote, found that it was worse than he remembered./ Paine did not develop new themes in part 2 of The Age of Reason but provided more details of biblical criticism to support his argument that Moses, Joshua, Samuel, and others could not have written the books ascribed to them, thus removing any authority that they had as revelation. Paine again hammered at the theme that the Bible reduced God and His holy disciples to barbaric evildoers. Only the Book of Job could be read without indignation and disgust, he said. The New Testament began with the debauchery of Mary and ended with the absurdity of men placing God on the cross. The heart of the New Testament was the often-conflicting Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, each of whom seemed to have known a different Jesus./ Paine reiterated his central message. God´s glory and benevolence were not found in the Bible or in churches or in ministers´ sermons. Humans did not need mediating instituions to reach God. All people could find God´s revelation by looking at his creation, using reason./ Although The Age of Reason was a book of profound morality and ethics and a paean to the glories of God, it gained for Paine undying hatred throughout the Christian world. His message was derived form the thought of Isaac Newton and René Descartes. He did not add anything to the deistic thought of Voltaire, Franklin, and Jefferson. Paine´s unforgivable sin was to take deistic theology out of the gentlefolk´s drawing rooms and to place it in the plain language of the people. His book horrified many of the common people by its seeming blasphemy, and frightened the elite by its threat of freeing the masses from religious control. The Age of Reason came at the close of the Enlightenment, as reason was being dethroned. A century would pass before Paine´s message of political, religious, and economic freedom could again be clearly heard.// 6. Title: THE ALCHEMIST: Type of work: Drama, Author: Ben Jonson (1573?-1637), Type of plot: Comedy of manners, Time of plot: Early seventeenth century. Locale: London. First presented: 1610./ A masterpiece of plot construction, The Alchemist marked the peak of Jonson´s career. A delightful, entertaining satire on human greed, this play is free of the sermonizing that characterizes the dramatist´s other work./ Principal Characters: Subtle, the Alchemist, a moldy, disreputable cheat. Joining forces with Jeremy Butler and Dol Common, he uses his fund of scientific and pseudo-scientific jargon to fleece the gullible. He promises large returns from transmutation of metals, astrological prophecies, physical nostrums, or whatever seems most likely to entrap his victims. When the master of the house returns, he is forced to take flight without his gains./ Face (Jeremy Butler), Subtle´s contact man, who furnishes his master´s house as the Alchemist´s headquarters. He is a resourceful, quick-witted improviser. Disguised as a rough, blunt captain, he entices victims to the house. When his master, Lovewit, returns home unexpectedly, he arranges a marriage between Lovewit and the Widow Pliant, thereby escaping punishment./ Dol Common, the third of the tricksters, common mistress of the other two. Her dominant personality keeps her quarrelsome cohorts in line. She can act various roles, such as an exotic lady or the Queen of the Fairies to carry out Subtle´s various schemes. Along with Subtle she is forced to flee with the jeers of Face following her./ Sir Epicure Mammon, a fantastic voluptuary. He is a veritable fountain of lust and imagined luxury, and he seeks the philosopher´s stone to help him to unbounded self-indulgence. When his investment is wiped out by the explosion of the Alchemist´s furnace, planned and well-timed by Subtle, Sir Epicure confesses that he has been justly punished for his voluptuous mind./ Abel Drugger, a small-time tobacconist ambitious for commercial success. Engaged to the Widow Pliant, he brings her and her brother Kastril to the Alchemist. He is tricked out of not only his money but the widow./ Kastril, the angry boy, brother of the Widow Pliant. He has come up to London to learn to smoke and quarrel. Face uses him to get rid of the skeptic, Surly. He is much taken with old Lovewit, who quearrels well, and consents to shi sister´s marriage with him./ Pertinax Surly, a sour skeptic who prides himself on being too astute to be tricked. First coming to the Alchemist´s as a friend of Sir Epicure, he returns disguised as a Spanish don, planning to save the Widow Pliant from Subtle and Face and to marry her. He is driven away by Kastril and loses the widow to Lovewit./ Tribulation Wholesome, an oily Puritan hypocrite from Amsterdam. HImself quite willing to compromise his conscience for profit, he has difficulty restraining his uncompromising companion, Deacon Ananias./ Ananias, a deacon, a hot-tempered zealot who considers even the word Christmas a Papist abomination. Quarrelsome at first, he finally agrees that counterfeiting is lawful if it is for the benefit of the faithful. Along with Tribulation he is driven away by Lovewit./ Dame Pliant, an easy-going, attractive young widow, affianced to Drugger, but perfectly willing to accept another husband. Subtle and Face both hope to marry her, but the latter decides that it is safer to hand her over to Lovewith, his master./ Lovewit, the master of the house who has left London because of the plague. His absence sets up the plot; his return resolves it. He drives away Subtle, Dol, and their victims, but forgives Jeremy Butler (Face) when he arranges a marriage between his master and the rich young widow, Dame Pliant./ The Story: Master Lovewit having left the city because of plague, his butler, Jeremy, known as Face to his friends of the underworld, invited Subtle, a swindler posing as an alchemist, and Dol Common, a prostitute, to join him in using the house as a base of operations for their rascally activities. Matters fared well for the three until a dispute arose between Face and Subtle over authority. Dol, seeing their money-making projects doomed if this strife continued, rebuked the two men and cajoled them back to their senses./ No sooner had Face and Subtle become reconciled than Dapper, a gullible lawyer´s clerk given to gambling, called, by previous arrangement with Face, to learn from the eminent astrologer, Doctor Subtle, how to win at all games of chance. Dapper, in the hands of the two merciless rascals, was relieved of all his ready cash, in return for which Subtle predicted that Dapper would have good luck in the gaming tables. In order to gull Dapper further, Subtle told him to return later to confer with the Queen of Fairy, a mysterious benefactress who could promote Dapper´s worldly success./ Abel Drugger, an ambitious young druggist who had been led on by Face, was the next victim to enter the house. To his delight, he learned from Subtle, who spoke in incomprehensible pharmaceutical and astrological jargon, that he would have a rich future./ Next arrived Sir Epicure Mammon, a greedy and lecherous knight, with his friend Pertinax Surly, a man versed in the ways of London confidence men. Having been promised the philosopher´s stone by Subtle, Mammon had wild visions of transforming all of his possessions into gold and silver, but he was completely taken in by the duplicities of Subtle and Face. Subtle further aroused Mammon´s greed by describing at length, in the pseudo-scientific gibberish of the alchemist-confidence man, the processes which led to his approximante achievement of the mythical philosopher´s stone. Surly, quick to see what was afoot, scoffed at Subtle and at the folly of Mammon./ During the interview Mammon caught sight of Dol, who appeared inadvertently, and was fascinated. Thinking quickly, Face told Mammon that Dol was an aristocratic lady who, being mad, was under the care of Doctor Subtle but who in her moments of sanity was most affable. Before he left the house Mammon promised to send to the unprincipled Subtle certain of his household objects of base metal for the purpose of having them transmuted into gold./ The parade of victims continued, Elder Ananias of the Amsterdam community of extreme Protestants came to negotiate for his group with Subtle for the philosopher´s stone. Subtle, with Face as his assistant, repeated his extravagant jargon to the impressionable Ananias, who, in his greed, declared that the brethren were impatient with the slowness of the experiment. Subtle, feigning professional indignation, frightened Ananias with a threat to put out forever his alchemist´s fire./ Drugger reappeared to be duped further. Subtle and Face were delighted when he told them that a wealthy young widow had taken lodgings near his and that her brother, just come into an inheritance, had journeyed to London to learn how to quarrel in rakish fashion. The two knaves plotted eagerly to get brother and sister into their clutches./ Ananias returned with his pastor, Tribulation Wholesome. Both Puritans managed to wink at moral considerations as Subtle glowingly described the near completion of the philosopher´s stone. Prepared to go to any ends to procure the stone, Ananias and Tribulation contracted to purchase Mammon´s household articles, which, Subtle explained, he needed for the experiment; the proceeds of the sale would go toward the care of orphans for whom Subtle said he was responsible./ Subtle and Face also plotted to sell these same house-hold articles to the young widow, who, having just moved to London, was probably in need of such items. In the meantime Face met in the streets a Spanish Don -Surly in clever disguise- who expressed a desire to confer with Subtle on matters of business and health./ Dapper returned to meet the Queen of Fairy. At the same time Drugger brought to the house Master Kastril, the angry young man who would learn to quarrel. Kastril was completely taken in. Subtle, promising to make him a perfect London gallant, arranged to have him instructed by Face, who posed as a city captain. Kastril was so pleased with his new acquaintances that he sent Drugger to bring his sister to the house./ Kastil having departed, Dol, Subtle, and Face relieved Dapper of all of his money in a ridiculous ritual in which Dapper was to see and talk to the Quen of Fairy. During the shameless proceedings Mammon knocked. Dapper, who had been blindfolded, was gagged and hastily put into a water closet at the rear of the house, Mammon entered and began to woo Dol, whom he believed to be a distracted aristocratic lady. Face and Subtle, in order to have the front part of the house clear for further swindles, shunted the amorous pair to another part of the house./ Young Kastril returned with his widowed sister, Dame Pliant; both were deeply impressed by Subtle´s manner and by his rhetoric. When the Spanish Don arrived, Subtle escorted Kastril and Dame Pliant to inspect his laboratory. By that time both Subtle and Face were determined to wed Dame Pliant./ Fce introduced the Spaniard to Dame Pliant, who, in spite of her objections to Spaniards in general, consented to walk in the garden with the Don./ Meanwhile, in another part of the house, Dol assumed madness. Subtle, discovering the distraught Mammon with her, declared that Mammon´s moral laxity would surely delay completion of the philosopher´s stone. Following a loud explosion, Face reported that the laboratory was a shambles. Mammon despondently left the house, and Subtle simulated a fainting spell./ In the garden Surly revealed his true identity to Dame Pliant and warned the young widow against the swindlers. When, as Surly, he confronted the two rogues, Face, in desperation, told Kastril that Surly was an impostor who was trying to steal Dame Pliant away. Drugger entered and being Face´s creature, insisted that he knew Surly to be a scoundrel. Then Ananias came to the house and all but wrecked Subtle´s plot by talking indiscreetly of making counterfeit money. Unable to cope with the wily rascals, Surly departed, followed by Kastril./ Glad to be rid of his callers, Subtle placed Dame Pliant in Dol´s care. But they were once more thrown into confusion when Lovewith, owner of the house, made an untimely appearance. Face, quickly reverting to his normal role of Jeremy, the butler, went to the door in an attempt to detain his master long enough to permit Subtle and Dol to escape./ Although warned by his butler that the house was infested. Lovewit suspected that something was amiss when Mammon and Surly returned to expose Subtle and Face. Kastril, Ananias, and Tribulation confirmed their account. Dapper, having managed to get rid of his gag, cried out inside the house. Deciding that honesty was the only policy, Face confessed everything to his master and promised to provide him with a wealthy young widow as his wife, if Lovewit would have mercy on his servant./ In the house, meanwhile, Subtle concluded the gulling of Dapper and sent the young clerk on his way, dilled with the belief that he would win at all games of chance. Subtle and Dol then tried to abscond with the threesome´s loot, but Face, back in Lovewit´s good graces, thwarted them in their attempt. They were forced to escape empty-handed by the back gate./ Lovewit won the hand of Dame Pliant and in his good humor forgave his crafty butler. When those who had been swindled demanded retribution, they were finally convinced that they had been mulcted as a result of their own selfishness and greed./ Critical Evaluation: For anyone interested in learning how to take in the gable, Ben Jonson´s The Alchemist is a fundamental text. "Cony-catching" was a popular practice in Elizabethan England, and Jonson, an intimate of London´s jails, taverns, theaters, and places of even less repute, here reveals the technique on several of the most amusing and lucrative ploys. And his protagonist, it should be noted, gets scot-free./ The complex and incongruous tone of life in London in the Elizabethan Age helped account for the widespread faith in astrology and alchemy and helped make them leading gimmicks. People were not far from believing in the dragons slain by King Arthur´s knights. Many believed also that the dawning age of science would discover a "Philosopher´s Stone" which would transmute dross into gold. The classical ideas are so well met in The Alchemist that the play is in its own way a small masterpiece. Jonson observes unity of time in that the dramatic situation is enacted in the same amount of time that it would take in real life. Unity of place is maintained in that the scene, Lovewit´s house in the Friars, is specific and limited. The discrete beginning, middle, and conclusion of the play provide for unity of action. The characters are types who behave consistently, doing nothing unexpected and thus the ideal of decorum, the paramount classical precept, is met: Jonson´s prositute is bawdy, his churchmen sanctimonious./ Faithfulness to classical concepts, however, is not the only virtue of The Alchemist. Jonson was a masterful manipulator of theatrical effects. The simple yet ingenious plot provides for the multiplicity of incident dear to the Renaissance heart; costume, disguise, and transmutation fo identity are similarly exploited./ Despite its qualifications as a well-wrought, clever, and entertaining play in the classical mode. The Alchemist owes much of its literary interest and charm to Jonson´s rhetorical flourishes. The underworld slang and alchemichal jargon used by the protagonists lend color and authenticity. Double entendres and simultaneous dialogue (which originated with Jonson) add to the effect. But most impressive, perhaps, is the way Subtle and Face use a debased eloquence in perpetrating their frauds. One of Subtle´s elegant, highly rhetorical, pseudo-rational arguments, for example, seems unequivocally to establish the propensity of all metals to turn into gold./ The Alchemist dramatizes what might happen when moral order is suspended by plague in London. Lovewit, representing responsible society, jettisons civic responsibility and flees the city, leaving behind only knaves and fools. Although the reader is reminded early that order will eventually be restored, society in the hands of unscrupulous degenerates into chaos. The servant supplants dhe master, science is overthrown by alchemy, reason is toppled by rhetoric, neture´s secrets are transcended, and the moral order is subverted as churchmen become swindlers./ Jonson´s vehicle, satire, was quite popular in Elizabethan England, and in The Alchemist its effect is intensified by the plague in the background. Jonson intended to be instructive, even if it meant instructing by ridicule. And the classicist in him wanted to restore to England some of the glory of Augustan Rome. To this end Jonson adopted Cicéro´s famous definition of tragedy: "a copy of life, a mirror of custom, a representation of truth." Accordingly, he anchors his play in contemporary London and reflects the speech, behavior, and attitudes of its citizens. The Renaissance saw a shift in emphasis from the world of the Church to the world of experience, but while Jonson set an extremely worldly stage, his morality was severe and almost medieval. His moral values, clear from the first scene on, are constantly reiterated as The Alchemist indicts vain and wishful thinking and directs the mind to the contemplation of virtue. It is a sign of Ben Jonson´s genius that he does so both unequivocally and entertainingly./ 7. Title: ALICE´S ADVENTURES IN WONDERLAND: Type of work: Imaginative tale, Author: Lewis Carroll (Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 1832 - 1898), Type of plot: Fantasy, Time of plot: Victorian England, Locale: The dream world of an imaginative child, First published: 1865./ Carroll´s classic fantasy can be read on many levels and appreciated by diverse audiences: it is at once a biting social and political satire sufficiently complex to satisfy the most sophisticated adult, and a delightfully whimsical fairy tale to capture the fancy of the imaginative child. Principal Characters: Alice, a curious, imaginative strong willed, and honest young English girl. She falls asleep by the side of a stream in a meadow and dreams that she follows a White Rabbit down his hole. She has many adventures in a Wonderland peopled by all kinds of strange characters and animals./ The White Rabbit, anxiously, aristocratic, dandified. Alice follows him down his hole, which leads to an enchanted house and garde. The White Rabbit is a Prime Minister of sorts in this Wonderland, for he has close contact with the royalty there and carries out their orders, although he does not institute policy./ The Queen of Hearts, the ill-tempered Queen of Wonderland, She constatnly demands that everyone who crosses her to be beheaded. Fond of croquet, she orders Alice to take part in a game in which flamingos are used for mallets and hedgehogs for balls. She issues an order for Alice´s execution at the end of the book, but his order is never carried out because Alice accuses the Queen and all her company of being only a pack of cards, an assertion that turns out to be true./ The King of Hearts, a timid, kindly man. Although he is completely under his wife´s power because of her temper, he manages to pardon all her victims surreptitiously./ The Duchess, another member of rayalty in Wonderland, a platitude-quoting, moralizing, ugly old woman who lives in a chaotic house. Deathly afraid of the Queen, she is ordered to be beheaded, but the sentence is never carried out./ The Cook, the Duchess´ servant. She flavors everything with pepper, insults her mistress, and throws cooking pans at her./ The Cheshire Cat, the Duchess´ grinning cat. Continually with pepper, insults her mistress, and throws cooking pans at her./ The Cheshire Cat, the Duchess´grinning cat. Continually vanishing and reappearing, he is a great conversatinalist, and he tells Alice much of the gossip in Wonderland./ The Duchess´ Baby, a strange, howling, little infant. The baby turns into a pig when the Duchess entrusts it to Alice´s care./ The Knave of Hearts, a timid, poetry-writing fellow accused of stealing some tarts that the Queen has made./ The March Hare, the rude host of a mad tea party to which Alice invites herself and then wishes that she had not./ The Mad Hatter, a riddle-making, blunt, outspoken guest at the tea party. He is a godd friend of the March Hare, and at the party the two try to prove to Alice that she is stupid./ The Dormouse, another guest at the tea party. He is a sleepy creature, aroused long enough to recite for Alice and then pushed headfirst into the teapot./ The Gryphon, a mythical creature, half bird, half animal, who escorts Alice to the home of the Mock Turtle so that she may hear the recital of the Turtle´s life story./ The Mock Turtle, an ever-sobbing animal. He recites his life´s story to Alice and everyone else within earshot./ The Caterpillar, a hookah-smoking insect who perches on the top of a maginc mushroom. Officious and easily offended, he tests Alice´s intelligence with a seires of ridiculous riddles./ Bill, The Lizard, an unfortunate fellow picked by the other animals to go down the chimney of the White Rabbit´s house and try to force out Alice, who has assumed gigantic proportions after drinking a magic potion she found on the table./ The Mouse, who greets Alice in the pool of tears which she had made by crying while she was of gigantic size. Now of minute proportions, she is almost overwhelmed by the Mouse, a creature easily offended./ The Lorry, The Duck, The Dodo, The Eaglet, The Crab, and The Baby Crab, all creatues whom Alice meets in the pool of her tears and who swim around with her./ Father William and His Son, characters in a poem that Alice recites. The old man, a former athlete, can still balance an eel on his nose, much to the amazement of his curious and impertinent son. The poem is a parody of Robert Southey´s "The Old Man´s Comforts."/ The Pigeon, a bird Alice meets after she has made herself tall by eating part of the Caterpillar´s mushroom./ The Fish Footman, the bearer of a note from the Queen inviting the Duchess to play croquet./ The Frog footman, the impolite servant fo the Duchess; his wig becomes entangled with that of the Fish Footman whe the two bow in greeting each other./ The Puppy, a playful animal Alice meets while she is in her small state./ The Flamingo, the bird Alice uses for a croquet mallet in the game with the Queen./ The Hedgehog, the animal that acts as the ball in the croquet game./ Five, Two, and Seven, three quarrelsome gardeners of the Queen. When Alice meets them, they are painting red all the white roses in the garden to obliterate the mistake someone had made in ordering white ones./ Elsie, Lacie, and Tillie, three sisters in the Dormouse´s story. They live at the bottom of a well and exist solely on treacle./ Dinah, Alice´s pet cat in real life./ Alice´s sister, the wise older sister who is charmed by Alice´s tales of her adventures in Wonderland./ The Story: Alice was quietly reading over her sister´s shoulder when she saw a White Rabbit dash across the lawn and disappear into its hole. She jumped up to rush after him and found herself falling down the rabbit hole. At the bottom, she saw the White Rabbit hurrying along a corridor ahad of her nad murmuring that he would be late. He disappeared around a corner, leaving Alice standing in front of several locked doors./ On a glass table, she found a tiny golden key that unlocked a little door hidden behind a curtain. The door opened upon a lovely miniature garden, but she could not get through the doorway because it was too small. She sadly replaced the key on the table. A little bottle misteriously appeared. Alice drank the contents and immediately began to grow smaller, so much so that she could no longer reach the key on the table. Next, she ate a piece of cake she found nearby, and soon she began to grow to such enormous size that she could only squint through the door. In despair, she began to weep tears as big as raindrops. As she sat crying, the White Rabbit appeared, bewailing the fact that the Duchess would be angry if he kept her waiting./ The White Rabbit dropped his fan and gloves. Alice picked them up, and she did so, she began to grow smaller. Again she rushed to the garden door, but she found it shut and the golden key once more on the table out of reach./ Then she fell into a pond of her own tears. Splashing along, she encountered a mouse who had stubled into the pool. Alice tactlessly began a conversation about her cat Dinah, and the mouse became speechless with terror. Soon the pool fo tears was filled with living creatures -birds and animals of all kinds. An old Dodo suggested that they run a Caucus Race to get dry. Having asked what a Caucus Race was, Alice was told that the best way to explain it was to do it, whereupon the animals ran themselves quite breathless and finally became dry./ Afterward, the mouse told a "Tail" to match its own appendage. Alice was asked to tell something, but the only thing she could think of was her cat Dinah. Frightened, the other creatures went away, and Alice was left alone./ The White Rabbit appeared once more, this time hunting for his gloves and fan. Carching sight of Alice, he sent her to his himoe to get him a fresh pair of gloves and another fan. In the Rabbit´s house, she found the fan and gloves and also took a drink from a botttle. Instantly, she grew to be a giant sizae and was forced to put her leg up the chimney and her elbow out of the window in order to keep from beng squeezed to death./ She managed to eat a little cake and shring herself again. As soon as she was small enough to get through the door, she ran into a nearby wood where she found a caterpillar sitting on a mushroom. The caterpillar was very rude to Alice, and he scorfully asked her to prove her worth by reciting "You are Old, Father William." Alice did so, but the words sounded very strange. Disgusted, he left her after giving her some valuable information about increasing or decreasing her size. She broke off pieces of the mushroom and found to her delight that by eating from the piece in her left hand she could become taller, and from the piece in her right hand, smaller./ She came to a little house among th trees. There a footman, who looked very much like a fish, presented to another footman, who closely resembeled a frog, in invitation for the Duchess to play croquet with the Queen. The two amphibians bowed to each other with great formality, tangling their wigs together. Alice opened the door and found herself in the chaotic house of the Duchess. The cook was stirring a large pot of soup and pouring plenty of pepper into the mixture. Everyone was sneezing except the cook and a Cheshire cat, which sat on the hearth grinning. The Duchess herself held a sneezing, squalling baby and sang a blaring lullaby to it. Alice, in sympathy with the poor child, picked it up and carried it out into the fresh air, whereupon the baby turned slowly into a pig, squirmed out of her arms, and waddled into the forest./ Standing in bewilderment, Alice saw the grinning Cheshire cat sitting in a tree. He was able to appear and disappear at will, and after exercising his talents, he advised Alice to go to a tea party given by the Mad Hatter. The cat vanished, all but the grin. Finally, that, too, disapeared, and Alice left for the party./ There, Alice found she had to deal with the strangest people she had ever seen -a March Hare, a Mad Hatter, and a sleepy Dormouse. All were too lazy to set the table properly; dirty dishes were everywhere. The Dormouse fell asleep in its teacup; the Mad Hatter told Alice her hair needed cutting; the March Hare offered her wine and then told her there was none. They asked her foolish riddles that had no answers. Then worse, they ignored her completely and carried on a ridiculous conversation among themselves. She escaped after the Dormouse fell asleep in the middle of a story he was telling./ Next, she found herself in a garden of talking flowers. Just as the conversation was beginning, some gardener appeared with paintbrushes and began to splash red paint on a rosebush. Alice learned that the Queen had ordered a red bush to be placed in that spot, and the gardener had made a mistake and planted a white one. Now they were busily and fearfully trying to cover their error before the Queen arrived. The poor gardeners, however, were not swift enough. The Queen caught them in the act, and the wretched gardeners were led off to be decapitated. Alice saved them by showing them down into a large flowerpot, out of sight of the dreadful Queen./ A croquet game began. The mallets were live flamingos, and the balls were hedgehogs which thought nothing of uncurling themselves and running rapidly over the field. The Duchess cornered Alice and led her away to the seaside to introduce her to the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon/ While engaged in a Lobster Quadrille, they heard the news of a trial. A thief had stolen some tarts. Rushing to the courtroom where a trial by jury was already in session, Alice was called upon to act as witness before the King and Queen of Hearts, but the excited child upset the jury box and spilled out all of its occupants. After replacing all the animals in the box, Alice said she knew nothing of the matter. Her speech infuriated the Queen, who ordered that Alice´s head be cut off. The whole court rushed at her, and Alice defiantly called them nothing but a pack of cards. She awoke from her dream as her sister brushed away some dead leaves blowing over her face./ Critical Evaluation: One summer afternoon in 1862, the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, an Oxford friend, and three little girls set out on a boat trip. Somewhere along the way, "Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland" was born. Although it was not the first story that Dodgson had told the girls, children of Henry George Liddell, dean of Christ Church, Oxford, it was one that immediately captured Alice Liddell, the prototype for the fictional seven-year-old heroine. Her later requests for Dodgson to "write it down" were to turn him into one of the world´s favortie authors, with his work translated into many languages and part of the heritage of most literate people./ Dogdson, who transposed his first two names into the pen name Lewis Carroll, was on the surface a shy but seemingly conventional Oxford mathematician. Today, however, his outwardly harmless affinity for little girls is viewed as the sign of a serious neurosis, an inability to grow up, which also revealed itself in his writings. Alice was only one of many young girls who would provide Carroll with the only love -innocent and sexless as it seemed- to which he could respond. As she matured, each child was replaced in Carroll´s affections by another young lady who shared the secret world of childhood in which he spent much of his adult life./ Expressing itself in many ways, this attraction to fantasy gave rise to Carroll´s love of whimsical letters, gadgets, theatricals, toys, and, of course, to the Alice stories. First prepared in a handwritten manuscript book for Alice Liddell (then called Alice´s Adventures Under Ground), the book was published in its present form in 1865 and was almost immediately popular. Adding to the originality were the famous illustrations by Sir John Tenniel, who did not use the real Alice for his model. (She unlike the pictured child, had short dark hair and bangs.) Followed in 1871 by the even more brilliant sequel Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There the book has always been enjoyed on several levels. Initially, it is a very special children´s story, but it is also a book teeming with fascination for certain specialists -mathematicians, linguists, logicians, Freudians, and even those who envision the book as an example of a drug trip. Yet, perhaps its philosophical suggestions give the work most of its never-ending appeal for adults./ If readers examine the book as children´s literature, readers see that if offered its young audience a charming new outlook, dispensing with the moralistic viewpoint then prevalent in almost all tales for youngsters. Alice is neither continuously nice nor thoroughle naughty, for she is simply a curious child whoe queries lead her into strange situations, and in the end, she is neither punished nor rewarded. A moral, proposing that she do this or that, is absent. Departing even further from the saccharine stories praising standard virtues, Carroll pokes fun at the many of the ideas with which Alice, a well-bred English child, has been imbued. The Mock Turtle, for example, chides the sacred subject of learning by terming the branches of arithmetic Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision. Children who read the book are permitted to see adults quite unlike the perfect beings usually portrayed. It is the story´s adults rather than Alice who are rude, demanding, and ridiculous./ As a work for the specialist, Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland touches on many puzzles more thoroughly presented in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Its playfulness with language, for example, invoves puns, parodies, and clever phrasing, but it does not deal as fully with the basic nature of language as does its sequel. Even in Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland, however, Carroll´s casual amusement with words often has deeper meaning. When he parodies the well-known poems and songs of his day, he is again questioning their supercilious platitudes. When he makes a pun (the Gryphon tells the reader that boots and shoes under the sea are "done" with whiting rather than blacking and are, of course, made of soles and eels), Carroll is asserting the total logic of illogic. When he designs a Cheshire cat, he is taking a common but unclear phrase of his time ("Grin like a Cheshire cat" referred either to inn signs in the county of Cheshire depicting a grinning lion or to Cheshire cheeses modeled in the shape of a smiling cat) and turning it into a concrete reality. Logicians also find a multitude of tidbits. The Cheshire cat "proves" it is not mad by adopting the premise that if a dog is not mad, anyone who reacts in ways opposite to a dog must be. The March Hare offers a nice exercise in logic and language with his discussion of taking "more" versus taking "less" and his challenge as to whether "I mean what I say" is the same as "I say what I mean." / For Freudians, the book is also a mass of complicated mysteries. Freudians see significance in most of the characters and incidents, but the fall down the rabbit hole, the changes in size, the great interest in eating and drinking, the obnoxious mature females, and Alice´s continual anxiety are some of the most revealing topics, all of them suggesting Carroll´s neuroses about women and sex./ The larger philosophical questions rased by Alice center on the order of life as readers know it. Set in the context of the dream vision, a journey different from a conscious quest, the book asks whether there is indeed any pattern or meaning to life. Alice is the curious innocent who compares so favorabbly with the jaded and even wicked grown-ups. Always sensible and open to experience, she would seem the ideal messenger to gring readers a true concept, yet her adventures hint that all readers may know is the ridiculousness of logic and what readers imagine to be reality and the logic of nonsense. Readers see that Wonderland is no more incomprehensible than Victorian England, that the Mad Duchess lives next door, that as teh Cheshire cat says, "We´re all mad here." / Alice brings to Wonderland a strong belief in order and certain concepts, and she must continually refuse to accept the chaos that she finds there. When Wondeland turns her views askew, she can withstand the strain for only so long. Then she must rebel. The trial, which is the last refuge of justice in man´s world, is the key factor in Alice´s rejection of Wonderland, for it is a trial of Wonderland itself, with many of the earler encountered creatures reassembled to assert forcefully, once more, that expectations and rules are meaningless. Like the child of the world that she is, Alice (and Carroll) must deny the truth that there is no truth. She must shout "Nonsense" to it all. As one critic has pointed out, she rejects "mad sanity in favor of the sane madness of the ordinary existence." Facing the same confusion and frightened by what it hints, th reader also rebels, laughing and turning to more serious considerations.// 8. Title: ALL´S WELL THAT ENDS WELL: Type of work: Drama, Author: William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Type of plot: Romantic comedy, Time of plot: Sixteenth century, Locale: France and Italy, First published: 1602./ Uneven in tone, All´s Well That Ends Well ranges from scenes of farce to moments of serious insight. Helena´s character, of rather dubious virtue in terms of her tactcs with Bertram, sheds interesting ambiguity on the play´s general theme of the blindness of prejudice and unreason./ Principal Characters:
PAGINA 28 En el círculo
TIMES NEW ROMAN 8 NORMAL
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