Thy Daddies Dead! Thy Daddies Dead!

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Hurray! Rather a lengthy week has now come to an end - it's been pretty exhausting, and the final hurdle isn't, erm, hurdled over yet - but it's also been nice to share the experience with you all here. This will my last report, since my final exam (next Wednesday) is a commentary paper, and, love you though I do, I'm not going to type out a page of Middle English text for your delectation.

The title to today's entry is my favourite quotation from Thomas Duffett's 1675 The Mock Tempest or The Enchanted Castle - a parody of Dryden and Davenant's 1667 The Tempest or The Enchanted Island, in turn an adaptation of Billybob's The Tempest. Can you work out which line it satirises? I'll give you a moment.

Any guesses? 'Thy Daddies Dead! Thy Daddies Dead!' is Duffett's reworking of 'Full fathom five thy father lies'. Which is why I had so much fun doing the Restoration Adaptations of Shakespeare essay - well, an essay I had to squeeze into the first of the following:

'The Great Man' (satirical name for Robert Walpole). Discuss how any writer or writers in the period represent greatness

'Haywood's importance as a writer is contingent on the theme that informs virtually all of her novels: the power of women's desires'. Discuss in relation to Haywood and/or any other female writer of the period.
-I wrote about Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, and how desire (esp. women's desire) is used to present comic situations in the former, but more didactically in the latter

'Our minds our perpetually wrought on by the temperament of our Bodies: which makes me suspect, they are nearer alli'd, than either our Philsophers or School-Divines will allow them to be.' (Dryden). Examine the relationship between mind and body in any writer or writers of the period.
-Well, I wanted to write on Katherine Philips and coterie writing, so I used this question a little dubiously. She was published by some scoundrel or other, and reacted indignantly against this - I argued her response was due to the correlation between mind and body possible in a coterie, but impossible in publication. A bit hurried, but by this point I was so excited to be leaving the exam hall that I didn't much care!