the shift

Oh Collegeboard people you have done it again, your logic never ceases to amaze me. We start off reading Hamlet, a classic renaissance play illustrating the greatness and absolute, infinite demise that lies that lies within us all. Now all of a sudden we have switched to the period of Romanticism; if there is a connection between the two, I must be blind and should go back to my freshman English class. Before staring on Mary Shelly’s classic novel Frankenstein, we have been tasked with reading a passage from John Milton’s Paradise Lost, which is about as biblical as biblical can get. In this, John Milton explains how the evil of this world came to be, elaborating that it all started with Adam and Eve. In the beginning, god knew there was a potential for evil to roam the world, but he gave Adam and Eve the choice of which path to follow, god’s grace or the path to evil. When they chose the latter, and then their children decided to follow them, evil was born in the world. Milton then moves to the story of how Satan came to roam the depths of hell. Originally, he was one of god’s angels; but, when he tried to overthrow the will of god in an effort to gain his thrown, god sentenced him to eternal damnation. After a while, Satan would allure men by telling them that hell is the only place where you can truly be free, and that you are only ruled by yourself. This is very ironic, as it explains, because god lets Satan believe it is a place free from his grace, when in fact its sole purpose is to fulfill his will.

 

How these stories are connected, or if they are even connected, I have not a clue. I guess I must stay tuned for the next episode of AP English Lit.