Test Papers / Previous Question Papers of IGNOU MEG2 British Drama June 2007

MASTER'S DEGREE PROGRAMME IN ENGLISH
Term-End Examination

June, 2007

MEG-2 : BRITISH DRAMA

Time: 3 hours
Maximum Marks: 100

1. Annotate any four of the following passages with reference to the context in not more than 150 words each: (4x5=20)

(i) '....if I had an appointment with a Godin....Godet....Godot....anyhow, you see who I mean, I'd wait till its was a black night before I gave Up ....'

(ii) You see this creature with her kerbstone English : the English that will keep her in the gutter to the end of her days. Well, sir, in three months I could pass that girl off as a duchess at an ambassador's garden Party.

(iii) You know that I am an indulgent master; And therefore conceal nothing. What's your medicine, To draw so many several sorts of wild fowl?

(iv) List, list, O list! If thou didst ever thy dear father love.... Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder....

(v) I rage and shout my head off, and everyone thinks "poor chap!" or "what an objectionable young man!" But that girl there can twist your arm off with her silence... I want to be there when you grovel. I want to be there, I want to watch it, I want the front seat.

2.Write a long note on: Changes in the conventions of Revenge Drama in Elizabethan England. (400 words) (20)

(OR)

Where knowledge should be strength, it turns out to be a weakness in Doctor Faustus. Discuss. (400 words)

3. Analyse Hamlet's response to his mother's marriage to Claudius. (400 words) (20)

(OR)

In A Midsummer Night's Dream Athens has 'a hierarchical patriarchal order' while the forest seems to be 'a place of disorder' . Discuss.( 400 words)

4. Jonson's play is a satire on the profession of alchemy; but alchemy is also of metaphorical significance in his play. Comment. (400 words) (20)

(OR)

Discuss theatricality as a metaphor in any of the plays in your course (e.g. in Hamlet, etc.). (400 words)

5. Would you agree that the real themes of The Playboy of the Western World are love and marriage, and not patricide? Justify your answer. (400 words) (20)

(OR)

How does Look Back in Anger reflect the changing equations between the sexes in post-war Britain? (400 wgrds)

6. The martyrdom of Thomas Becket in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral is best understood as a conflict between the individual and the state. Discuss. (400 words) (20)

(OR)

In Waiting for Godot Beckett is not speaking of any particular place, but of a 'cosrnic state, a world condition in which all humanity is involved'. Discuss. (400 words)

7 . Write short notes on any two of the following in not more than 200 words each: (2x10=20)
(i) Chorus of women in Murder in the Cathedral
(ii) The serpent in Helena's dream
(iii) Dark comedy
(iv) Claudius in the prayer scene in Hamlet