"In What the Shepherd Saw" Text Analysis

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In the light of the results shown above, it is obvious that this cluster is more interested in the words duke, castle, shepherd, duchess, stranger, closet, curate, captain, knight, boy, grace, dance, rector, light, hut, hill, and gate. The words are associated with the idea of hidden or unrevealed death. The idea is repeated in the three texts where problems of jealousy and suspicion in marriage lead to death. In the three texts, the main idea of each one is that that there is a wife who belongs to the elite and she is beautiful. Her husband as a man of high position feels jealous about her and decides to take revenge against the one who is thought to be her lover because of the disgrace caused to him as a result of such an illegal relationship. This idea is tackled differently however in the three texts. This is supplemented by critical reading of the three texts as below.

In What the Shepherd Saw, we have a story of jealousy, suspicion, death, and mystery. The action begins with a little shepherd witnessing some unusual act in the darkness. This is the Duke’s wife Harriet coming to meet her cousin Captain Fred Ogbourne who has been out of England for years as he used to live in Canada. Fred is asking Harriet about her husband’s mistreatment of her. On her part, she stresses the idea that the Duke is a good husband. And in spite of all Fred’s seductions of her, she stays firm against such temptations. She even feels sorry for coming to see him: “I should not have come now”. However, Harriet’s act of going out without the knowledge or permission of her husband to see Fred is suspected by the Duke. Upon that, he goes out the next night to see his wife with Fred thinking that she will go to meet her lover. To his surprise, his wi...

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...he could see the stranger coming through the chamber where he was sleeping. He could see the stranger taking his personal belongings and he did not move. Some days after this incident, the utter defeat of the Duke’s army and the Duke’s disappearance at an early stage of the battle was announced. Swetman came to be sure now that his guest was the Duke himself. Now he began to feel sorry for acting so harshly for such a small breach of good faith as he described the behaviour of the refugee towards his daughter. After all, rumours spread over the country that the man beheaded in the Tower was not the Duke, but one of the officers taken after the battle whereas the Duke has been assisted to escape out of the country. Finally Swetman came to the conclusion “that his friend might have been a friend of the Duke’s, whom he asked to fetch the things in a last request”.

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