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Unassessed Essay

This essay is 1,500 words long and is due the week after Reading Week in term 1 -- please give it to your seminar tutor at your seminar.

Before you start to write please read the How to Write An Essay, linked from the Seventeenth Century front page. You should also look at the Referencing section of the website.

Use this guide to Working with Sources in your first essay -- it is about 'evidence' (very important).

The Style Guide (Word Document) is a handy downloadable guide to formatting in the MHRA system. Dr Jonathan Davies wrote this for the MA in Renaissance Studies at Warwick and it is the best guide I have ever seen. We are very grateful to him for letting us use it.

We advise that you use MHRA because it is easier to reference using this system when you are writing about texts written in the 17th Century and the resources you need to understand them, many of which are available online. But please do use MLA if you are happier with it, as long as you can make it show all the information it needs to.

Here is a link to the department's guide to Academic Writing which will show you how to do footnotes in MLA.

In the unassessed essay, we will be penalising heavily for mistakes in referencing and scholarly practice (up to 10% of the mark). We will also exact the full penalty available to us for mistakes of this nature in the assessed essays on the grounds that you have had an opportunity to learn how to do this properly in this unassessed work, and will have been provided with feedback.

Essay Questions:

1. 'To understand Eastward Ho! properly demands an understanding of early Jacobean society.' Show how your knowledge of one aspect of early Jacobean society helped you to understand the play.

2. Leah Marcus has described the masque as 'the most inherently topical of all seventeenth-century art forms'. Discuss this view, using evidence from one masque in its context.

3. What do we need to know about Herbert's confessional commitments to understand the purpose of his poetry? You should refer in detail to at least one poem.

4. 'Marvell's pre-Restoration poetry sums up the best of early Stuart court culture and surpasses it.' Respond to this statement, using one of his poems in your answer.