As we haven´t spoken a lot about The Beggar´s Opera up to now, I have decided to write this post about my role in this play, which is the vocabulary enricher, since probably I´m not going to have time to speak about it in class and I would like to share what I have found with all of you. I have concentrated my search on the vocabulary related to women, because they are very important through the whole play.
Page 2615: Peachum (about women in general): he calls women "hen partridges" (it means a short-tailed game bird with mainly brown plumage; in Spanish "perdiz") obviously in a pejorative way.
Page 2617: Peachum: 
he calls his own daughter "a plague".
he uses the word "wench" (it means woman. It´s an archaic form to say "woman, girl").
Page 2618: Mrs. Peachum: she disagress with her husband regarding her daughter and the matter of marriage and she sings a song about women. She compares them to:
"(golden) ore" (here I´m not sure if it means: a naturally ocurring solid material from which a metal or valuable mineral can be extracted profitably; in Spanish, "mineral"; or if it is a monetary unit of Sweden, equal to one hundredth of a krona).
"guinea" (it is a former British gold coin with a value of 21 shillings).
Page 2619: Polly (about women in general): she says:
"a woman knows how to be `mercenary´" (it means primarily concerned with making money at the expense of ethics; in Spanish "materialista, interesado").
"common" (it means common land, common law, but also a name for a prostitute).
Page 2620: Mrs. Peachum (about her daughter): 
"slut" (it means prostitute).
"hussy" (it means an impudent or immoral girl or woman).
Page 2622: Peachum (within the song): "whore" (another way to say "prostitute").
Page 2628: Matt: he uses the word "bawd" (it means a woman who is in charge of a brothel; in Spanish "patrona de burdel").
Page 2630: in this page a scene where there are a lot of words related to women starts, but some of these words have been used and explained previously. Some new words that Macheath uses are:
"quality" (it means women of high social position).
"coquette" (it means a flirtatious woman).
Page 2632: Jenny (within the song): "gypsies" (it means a member of a travelling  people speaking a language related to Hindi, and traditionally living by itinerant trade; in Spanish "gitana").
Macheath (when he is captured): "beast, jades, jilts, harpies, furies, whores" (all of them are disqualifying words for women).
Page 2643: Lockit (to his daughter): "strumpet" (it means "prostitute").
That´s all I have found related to women. I hope it is useful in order to understand better the play.

The Queen of Amazons

As my role in the comment of the Rape of the Lock was characters collector, I was interested in writing about one of them, Thalestris.

In the poem Thalestris is Belinda´s friend and she is representing the historical Gertrude Morley, a friend of Pope and the wife of Sir George Browne.

I decided to write about her because she is the only one who encourages Belinda to think about the Baron´s misdeed as an affront to her honour and fight for the restore of her honour and her stolen lock.

All of us are supposed to know it, but we are not supposed to know who Thalestris was. According to the Greek mythology, she was the Queen of the Amazons, a race of warrior women who excluded men from their society. Thalestris brought 300 women to Alexander the Great, hoping to breed a race of children as strong and intelligent as he.

Alexander met Thalestris, and they hunted lions together and had thirteen nights of lovemaking (thirteen is a sacred fertility number for moon worshippers, due to the number of moons in a year).She had hoped to have a mighty daughter from Alexander, but she died soon afterward without issue.

Pope used the name of Thalestris to represent that character probably due to the name suggests a fierce, combative woman. Thalestris´ attempts to rouse Belinda’s anger serve as a reminder of the behaviour Belinda should be demonstrating as the epic hero. In Belinda’s place, Thalestris is outraged. Her presence reinforces Pope’s manipulation of the epic genre, borrowing the Amazon from Greek mythology.

Pope is not the only one who used the name of Thalestris in one of his works. Thalestris is also the name of a character in Mary Renault´s historical novel The King Must Die and there is also a brief reference to the courtship between Alexander and Thalestris in Beaumarchais´" Le Mariage De Figaro".

Slavery in English literature

Everybody can say that slavery is a huge theme to be treated, actually it is. During the eighteenth century several litarary works focused on that theme.
In the early 1660s, when the events described in Behn´s Oroonoko are supposed to have taken place, England was not yet a major power in the slave trade. The first European slave traders were from Portugal. Soon, people from other countries found out about the slave trade. Spain was one of the biggest slave trading nations. England was one of the latest countries to start slave trade, during the reign of Charles II. Soon England became one of the biggest slave trading nations. This had a quite big repercussion on the mentality of some English writers: some of them started to write about their discontent regarding this subject.
Oroonoko has been seen by many writers as the pioneering antislavery work. After Oroonoko, comments on slavery in the works of many major British writers of the eighteenth century, including Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, denounced slavery. These writers were generally driven by their humanitarian and philosophical concern.
Also it has to be said that not all white British authors opposed slavery, and many travel narratives by participants in the trade and writings of racist thinkers such as Edward Long were used to reinforce public support for the slave trade. However, the intellectual and social climate created by British antislavery writers in the 1700s did a great deal to make possible the abolition of slavery in Britain in the early nineteenth century.

Presentation Post

Hi everybody!
This is my first post on my first blog. Perhaps all of you are wondering why that weird name, don´t you?Ok, I´m going to share with you my thoughts. We had to give our blogs a name related to the period of the Restoration, and as you know, APHRA BEHN was one of the most successful writers in that period (actually, her most remarkable work, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, was published during those years). But, probably, few people know that another name used for Aphra is "Affera", and that etimologically, Aphra means "dust". With this, my intention was to create a kind of wordplay, since although you do the dusting everyday, dust always stays everywhere, and this is what happens to Aphra Behn: she was and still is very influential for many writers,  that is, "she always stays everywhere".