British Literature: First Half

What would the perfect year of studying British literature in high school incorporate? I've often wished I could create my own textbook for just such a purpose. This is my stab at what I would include. You could actually use my advice here if you used Prentice-Hall's The English Tradition and supplemented it with paperbacks from the library. In this blog I'm just going to write about what I would include in the first semester.
The Anglo-Saxon period: parts of Beowulf in Burton Raffel's translation, which I think is the most readable verse version, the scenes where Grendel attacks Heorot and where Beowulf fights Grendel, maybe also the scene where Beowulf swims down and fights Grendel's water-hag mother. I would not make any high school student suffer through the whole epic poem! Read the gory parts and skip the long speeches. Note what is said about the pervasive influence of fate.
The Medieval period: Listen to "Barbara Alan" in several forms. You can get a bunch of versions on ITunes and compare them. Some of them have a sappy rose and briar ending that makes me want to gag, but I've had students who love it (and would have swooned over it if we lived in the twelfth century, though I think it was added much later). Enjoy Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (especially if you read it aloud together), the marriage group of The Canterbury Tales--which includes The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Wife of Bath's Tale, and The Franklin's Tale--and Everyman. This last piece is very dull, mind you, but you have to act it out using dramatic voices. Death needs to have something like Darth Vader's voice, and Everyman needs to really cower with fear. When you get the gist of it, you can see the awful theology and the need for the Reformation. I would not mess with Thomas Malory directly, but honor him by reading T. H. White's The Once and Future King. This book manages to incorporate the farsical, the romantic, the grand, and the tragic all in one story, and makes it all fit into one narrative, a task Malory did not accomplish to my satisfaction.
The Renaissance period: Macbeth for a Shakespearean tragedy or The Merchant of Venice for a Shakespearean comedy. After reading and understanding each act, watch it on DVD. Get the BBC versions from the late 90's; they feel like stage productions, but are done in a studio with better cinematography. The acting is terrific in both, though there is no way on earth that anyone would travel far to see this Portia's beauty. I would not do more than one Shakespeare in a year, but I think high school kids should have read both a comedy and a tragedy before they graduate. Also read Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 for inspiration and 130 for fun. For some 16th century gender conflict, read Christopher Marlowe's "A Passionate Shepherd to His Love" and then Sir Walter Raleigh's "The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd." Finally, read Sir Philip Sidney's "Apology for Poetry," a defense for enjoying poetry from a classical and Christian perspective.
The 17th Century: John Donne's Meditation 17 and Holy Sonnet 14, George Herbert's "The Pulley," Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," and Robert Herrick's "To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time." Be careful how you read "To His Coy Mistress." I believe that Marvell is taking on the persona of a careless atheist, and that the weaknesses in his argument to the woman are embedded in the poem. Then read the passage in John Milton's Paradise Lost in which Lucifer lands in Hell. This has the famous lines where he says he can make a Heaven out of Hell and that what's in the mind is all that matters. For a richer discussion, you could read Richard Lovelace's "To Althea, from Prison" where the same idea is presented in a more positive way. Finally, read The Pilgrim's Progress.
If you think it through, the best thing would be to have the students read The Once and Future King and The Pilgrim's Progress on their own, and the rest of it together. This would get you to Christmas.