‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ by Robert Browning and Top Girls: Critical Analysis

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Studying Poetry and Drama

Section 1) Robert Browning, Extract from ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’
Section 2) ‘What’s it going to do to him working for a woman?’ (Top Girls). Analyse the presentation of patriarchal authority andor challenges to patriarchal authority in texts studied on the module.

1. Robert Browning, Extract from ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’

‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ by Robert Browning focuses on the deep-seated fears and lack of faith one of the church leaders has. On his death bed, instead of trusting in the ways of the church or being grateful, he had committed his life to serving God, this bishop is filled with sentiments of fear, petty materialism, lament, and even envy. ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ is ironic in its intrinsic nature as a man whom, near all of his lifetime, was looked to as a devout religious authority figure, boasts his sins counting with an unusual candour for such actions; an affair and a his insurmountable adoration for vain material wealth. He thinks on the different conceivable outcomes of what should happen to him when he passes, but eventually appears persuaded that he will remain in his tomb for forever abandoning his Christian theology. Each conviction, feeling, and request that this bishop communicates uncovers that in his heart, he believes precisely the inverse of what he has instructed others on all through his lifetime.

In the opening of this segment of ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ The Bishop then bemoans about lying in his grave ‘through centuries’ hearing ‘the blessed mumble of the mass’. He trusts he will in the slightest be able to ‘feel the steady candle flame’ and ‘taste’ the ‘incense smoke’. This proceeds to uncover the bishop’s lack of conviction in heaven as his pre-supposed next step.

In the following section the bishop starts by scrutinising what it feels like to be dying ‘by such slow degrees’. He at that point depicts his passing as he ‘fold[s] [his] arms’ and ‘stretch[es his] feet’ and permits the burial clothes to be laid over him. He talks much to the effect that in the event that he will still be cognizant of what is happening to him even in death. He goes on to portray ‘a certain humming in [his] ears’ and appears to accept that he will lie in his tomb forever. He addresses his child when he says that he will think of, ‘[his] tall pale mother with her talking eyes’. He’s having a mistress moreover negates his position as a leader in a Christian church. But this bishop, shows little interest in persuading his listeners of his Christian convictions or way of life, but or maybe on his deathbed talks of each and every activity and belief that contradicts the Christian way of life and philosophy.

In the final portion, the bishop tells his audience that in the event that if they still somehow adore him, they will do as he has requested of them, turning his tomb into a sceptical and an exceptional work of craftsmanship by which the world would never forget him or his newly tarnished legacy. He recognizes that his life has been brief and fiendish, when he says, ‘Evil and brief hath been my pilgrimage’. And at that, he proceeds to ask increasingly more blue gems to decorate the inside of his tomb. He wishes them to carve a vase full of grapes on the wall of his tomb. He gives additional instruction for what to etch on his tomb, particularly guideline, ‘And to the tripod ye would tie a lynx’.

‘That in his struggle throws the thyrsus down’ which proposes that there will be a complex work of art of the lynx, tied to a tripod and battling with a thyrsus. It is likely that these pictures speak to the struggle the bishop has felt in life. He tells his listeners that these works of art on his tomb would ‘comfort [him] on [his] entablature’ (tomb). In his tomb, he believes, he will lie and inquire himself, ‘Do I live? Am I dead?’

At this point, the hysteria sets in and the bishop starts to panic, crying out to God, nature, whomever there’s to cry out to, inquiring why he is destined to lay within the stone which can ‘crumble’ in a ‘clammy’ restricted tomb in which his exceptionally own cadaver will start to fall apart. The bishop can imagine people leaving him there in his tomb, and he can now not delight within the ‘lapis’ of the world, nor in any other excellence the earth has got to offer. He can envision his forerunner, Gandolf, laying within the tomb that the bishop had planned for himself. He envisions that Gandolf, in his tomb that the bishop had specifically requested for himself. This is uncovered within the final two lines of ‘The Minister Orders His Tomb’, in which the cleric says ‘Old Gandolf, at me, from his onion-stone, As still he envied me, so fair she [the bishop’s tomb] was!’

The aggregate of The Bishop Orders his Tomb is the regrets of a passing on church leader who does not truly accept in what he has been instructing his entire life. This can be inferred by his profound concern with the materialistic magnificence of his tomb and his ask to be buried with precious stones. His specifying of pagan gods at the side Jesus and Moses uncovers his endeavour to ‘cover his bases’ but too appears that he has no genuine confidence in what he has claimed to accept for his entire life. He does not conversate about his assembly his saviour or life after passing in heaven, but is or maybe concerned with the materialistic perspective of his tomb, his memory on earth, and the comfort of his cadaver. The Bishop Orders his Tomb is ironic in nature as this religious leader passes on with no confirmation of consolation in death or life after death, but or maybe with a feeling of articulate unimportance and a solid want to make a luxurious piece of craftsmanship out of his tomb in order to be recalled as else his actions in life shan’t.

2. ‘What’s it going to do to him working for a woman?’ (Top Girls).

Analyse the presentation of patriarchal authority andor challenges to patriarchal authority in texts studied on the module.Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls debuted in 1982 at the Royal Court and immediately got to be a classic with its tricky reflection of the early Thatcher period of elitist independent and its brilliant take on the classes, sex and inequality. The quote by Mrs Kidd is ‘What’s it going to do to him working for a woman?’ wholly encompasses a large portion of Churchill’s intentions for the play as a whole.

The central segment of Top Girls appears to present the agency’s workers meeting potential clients. These keen, nearly wince inducing precise scenes uncover that the ladies who have attained a position within the ‘new’ office culture of the 1980s have acquired a frame of sexist control that pales in comparison to the masculine values and shallow, misogynist judgements that came before. Judgements surrounding women’s marital status, parenthood, appearance and age have been retained by and are imitated by the modern era of women who are succeeding in a man’s world by re-enacting men’s prejudices. Life is still a every day scrape for survival let alone success, in which fantastic desires are subjected to trivial reasoning, inflexible hierarchies and out of line expectations.

In one of the interviewing scenes we experience Janine, who is entangled between desire, convention, sentimentalism and female obligation. She states, ‘I wanted to go to work’ and, ‘I want a change!I do want prospects. I want more money!.I’d like to travel.’ At the same time she apologizes for herself: ‘I expect it’s silly.’ But she is apologizing for needing what more than not what men have given to them: to be engaged but occasionally escape from London to travel for work and be free from family life. Just because it was for the historical characters, there’s a deep inner conflict about babies and parenthood during the 1980s scenes. There’s an unspoken presumption in all the interview scenes that parenthood terminates a woman’s career which women must take off work when they have babies.

Another interviewee, Louise, is told that her age – as it were 46 is in fact ‘a handicap’ which she ought to hope that ‘experience does count for something’. She isn’t empowered to endeavour to gain more than she already has; she ought to be grateful with her station and not supersede herself. Both she and Janine are unobtrusively constrained over their appearance and attire; the capitalist ‘modern’ world isn’t a meritocracy after all but a diversion in which ladies must see and in-act their role, techniques as objects in order to succeed.

In a very dreadful manner the play truly underpins the supposition of its most misogynistic characters: that ladies who succeed are monstrous, cold, unnatural, abnormally narrow minded and pathological. Marlene is nauseated by Joyce’s plain enduring and hopelessness and in refusal about her household’s mess she left behind. She calls Joyce’s theory surrounding babies simple ‘gynaecology’ and ‘messy conversation about blood’ as in case that she has retained a few Pope Joan-era medieval misogyny with respect to the rankness and corruption of the female body.

Top Girls conveys that one woman’s victory does not raise the destiny of all women; liquidity and status within the office don’t make the world close to even ground or alter the frameworks set in place to hinder change, reduce women’s emotional and sexual exploitation or resolve the problems they are in. ‘Nothing’s changed for most people, has it?’ says Joyce.

The play has moved from the luxurious, the celebratory and the universal to the tacky, the recriminatory, the obstinately neighbourhood. As Top Girls closes, the battle lines are created and they are lines of social class, un fair sex; culture, not just financial equivalents. Marlene and Joyce are candidly not sisters, not companions and not ideological partners. Marlene’s celebrated line, ‘I think the eighties are progressing to be stupendous’, which continuously gets a dim snicker, is less influencing presently than the lines that take after. Joyce inquires, ‘Who for?’ and Marlene says gaily, ‘For me’. For Joyce and Angie, there will be no Marlene like rise into a modern age of being truly ‘free in a free world.’ yet the very inverse: when Angie is more wise to due to her age, says Joyce presciently, history will rehash itself and ‘her children will say what a squandered life she had.’

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‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb’ by Robert Browning and Top Girls: Critical Analysis

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