Mock-Epic style within Pope’s prose

           Since I consider extremely interesting the way in which Pope developed his masterwork “The Rape of the Lock”, I have decided, this time, to talk about the mock-epic style in Pope’s prose.

 Mock-epic style, also called mock-heroic or heroi-comic, constitutes a form of satire that adapts the elevated heroic style of the classical epic poem to a trivial subject. The tradition, which originated in classical times with an anonymous burlesque of Homer, the Batrachomyomachia (Battle of the Frogs and the Mice), was honed to a fine art in the late 17th- and early 18th-century Neoclassical period. A double-edged satirical weapon, the mock-epic was sometimes used by the “moderns” of this period to ridicule contemporary societies and ways of behavior. Pope was one of those moderns. The Rape of the Lock is perhaps, the most prominent example in the English language of the mock-epic gender. In this case, Pope’s intention was not to mock the style, but to mock his society, exposing its pettiness and emphasizing the ridiculousness of a society in which values had lost all proportion, and the trivial was at the same level as the gravity and solemnity, that ought to be understood as important issues.

Consciously, Pope imitated the epic opening in his lines, which may be called the invocation in the approved epic manners. His tone did gather declamatory epic ring as he commands the goddess: “Say what strange motive…?” ….. At a certain moment we began to notice that Pope is not mocking the epic form, on the contrary, he was laughing at his subject. Once we realized that we are reading a mock-epic story, it acquired a different light on the apparent solemnity and dignity of Pope’s propositions and invocation.

This extraordinary writer was also mindful of the fact that a mock-epic story should have a moral just as an epic did. Clarissa’s speech in "The Rape of the Lock” opened out the moral of the poem about the fashionable society. The speech could be taken as an attempt to redefine for contemporary women a concept of honor, which applied to male epic heroes. In the world of belles, honor became courage to face decay with humour and duty, to use the power of beauty well. In this way, The Rape of the Lock is a poem in which every element of the contemporary scene conjures up some image from epic tradition or the classical world view, the pieces are wrought together with an ingenuity and magnificence that makes the poem surprising and delightful. Pope’s transformations are numerous, striking, and hazardous but with a high level of common sense and moral implications. That is why, it has become one of the most famous English-language poems of all times .

Theory of Four Humours

Chicos aquí les dejo la teoría de los cuatro humores completa para que le den un vistazo!!!!!!!!! 

The Four Humours

From Shakespeare's Life and Times

In Greek, Medieval, and Renaissance thought, the traditional four elements form the basis for a theory of medicine and later psychological typology known as the four humours. They constituted the western equivalent of the Chionese five states of change. Each of the humours was associated with various correspondences and particular physical and mental characteristics, and could, moreover, be combined for more complex personality types: (e.g. choleric-sanguine, etc). The result is a system that provides a quite elaborate classification of types of personality.

The Four Humours and Classical Thought

In classic times, medicine was equated with philosophy and three Greek philosophers: Hippocrates (c.460 – 370 b.c.e.), Plato (427-348 b.c.e.) and Aristotle (384-322 b.c.e.) contributed to the vision of health, disease and the functions of the body. Although they had differences in general they saw health as an equilibrium of the body as determined by the four humors. Sap in plants and the blood in animals is the fount of life. Other body fluids- phlegm, bile, faeces, became visible in illness when the balance is disturbed. For instance, epilepsy, the sacred disease was due to phlegm blocking the airways that caused the body to struggle and convulse to free itself. Mania was due to bile boiling in the brain. Black bile was a late addition to disease theory and was associated with melancholy."

[ref. The Roots of Scientific Medicine by Dr. P. Warren, - The Humoral Theory of Diseases.]

Essentially, this theory holds that the human body was filled with four basic substances, which are in balance when a person is healthy. All diseases and disabilities resulted from an excess or deficit of one of these four humors. These deficits could be caused by vapors that were inhaled or absorbed by the body. The four substances were black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. Greeks and Romans, and the later Muslim and Western European medical establishments that adopted and adapted classical medical philosophy, believed that each of these humors would wax and wane in the body, depending on diet and activity. When a patient was suffering from a surplus or imbalance of one fluid, then his or her personality and physical health would be affected. This theory was closely related to the theory of the four elements: earth, fire, water and air; earth predominantly present in the black bile, fire in the yellow bile, water in the phlegm, and all four elements present in the blood.

The four humors, their corresponding elements, seasons, sites of formation, and resulting temperaments are:

Humour	Body substance	produced by	Element	Qualities	Complexion and Body type	Personality
Sanguine	blood	liver	air	hot and moist	red-cheeked, corpulent	amorous, happy, generous, optimistic, irresponsible
Choleric	yellow bile	spleen	fire	hot and dry	red-haired, thin	violent, vengeful, short-tempered, ambitious
Phlegmatic	phlegm	lungs	water	cold and moist	corpulent	Sluggish, pallid, cowardly
Melancholic	black bile	gall bladder	earth	cold and dry	sallow, thin	Introspective, sentimental, gluttonous

 The "humours" gave off vapors which ascended to the brain; an individual's personal characteristics (physical, mental, moral) were explained by his or her "temperament," or the state of theat person's "humours." The perfect temperament resulted when no one of these humours dominated. By 1600 it was common to use "humour" as a means of classifying characters; knowledge of the humours is not only important to understanding later medieval work, but essential to interpreting Elizabethan drama"

 Taming of the Shrew is an example of the presence of four humours in the Elizabethan works. Here, the character Petruchio pretends to be irritable and angry to show Katherina what it is like being around a disagreeable person. He yells at the servants for serving mutton, a "choleric" food, to two people who are already choleric.

Foods in Elizabethan times were believed all to have an affinity with one of these four humors. A sick person coughing up phlegm was believed to be too phlegmatic, and might have been served wine (a choleric drink and the direct opposite humor to phlegmatic) to balance it out.

The Four Humours in the modern world

Rudolph Steiner, who derived a lot of his ideas from Graeco-Medieval thought, not unsurprisingly incororated the humours into his overall synthesis, here is his lecture on the four temperaments. These are associated with dominance of one or the other of the four levels of self. Choleric with the ego (which Steiner associates with "warmth", hence "fire"), the Sanguine with the astral body, the Phlegmatic with the etheric body, and the Melancholic with the physical body. The sequence is from most subtle (fire, traditionally "spirit") to most dense (earth, hence physical) elements

Steiner's thinking, being occult-theosophical based, has had little impact outside the specialised world of Anthroposophy. Of mucfh greater influence however was the personality classification of Hans Eysenck (1916 - 1997). Eysenck took the two gradations of extrovert-introvert and stable-unstable, to come up with four quadrants which could be associated with the classic four temperaments. Each quadrant is also are further divided by keywords, creating a 360° gradation as follows:

Another 20th century equivalent (although with only three temperaments) are Sheldon's Somatotypes. Additional recent temperament theories are reviewed by Richard Dagan.