This Is a Fine Romance

Este es el texto que he puesto para comentar en el primer examen de grado de Estudios Ingleses que hago (hoy); la asignatura es "Literatura Inglesa II", de los siglos XVII y XVIII, y el texto viene de Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, de Samuel Richardson.

At last he came in again, but with mischief in his heart! and raising me up, he said, 'Rise, Pamela, Rise; you are your own enemy. Your perverse folly will be your ruin: I am very much displeased with the freedoms you have taken with my name to my house-keeper, as also to your father and mother; and you may as well have real cause to take these freedoms with me, as to make my name suffer for imaginary ones.' And saying so, he lifted me up, and offered to set me on his knee.

O how I was terrified! I said, like as I had read in a book a night or two before, 'Angels and saints, and all the host of heaven, defend me! And may I never survive one moment, the fatal one in which I shall forfeit my innocence!' 'Pretty fool!' said he, 'how will you forfeit your innocence, if you are obliged to yield to a force you cannot withstand? Be easy, for let the worst happen that can, you'll have the merit, and I the blame; and it will be a good subject for letters to your father and mother, and a pretty tale moreover for Mrs Jervis.'

He then, though I struggled against him, kissed me, and said, 'Who ever blamed Lucretia? The shame on the ravisher only: and I am content to take all the blame upon myself; as I have already borne too great a share for what I have deserved.' 'May I,' said I, 'Lucretia like, justify myself by my death, if I am used barbarously?'

'O my good girl!' replied he, tauntingly, 'you are well read, I see; and we shall make out between us, before we have done, a pretty story for a romance.'

El tema a desarrollar ha sido John Milton (cuénteme vd. lo que quiera); y las preguntas cortas eran tal que así:

a) Which of these works should be described as a mock epic?
a) Paradise Lost     b) The Aeneid             c) The Dunciad    
d) The Rambler    e) On American Taxation    e) Biathanatos

b) Who is the author of The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia?
a) Ben Jonson            b) John Donne        c) Oliver Goldsmith
d) William Shakespeare    e) Adam Smith    f) Samuel Johnson

c) Which of the following works is NOT by Mary Wollstonecraft?
a) Mary, a Fiction                b) Humphry Clinker
c) A Vindication of the Rights of Men     d) Original Stories
e) Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
f) An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution
   
d) Which is the metrical form of Alexander Pope's Essay on Criticism?
a) Heroic couplets            b) Blank verse
c) Prose fiction            d) Elizabethan sonnet
e) Accentual essay            f) Spenserian stanza



De resultados, ya hablaremos más adelante, quizá en la web de la asignatura.

Samuel Johnson's Rasselas: The Duplicity of Choice and the Sense of an Ending