In this essay, I will be showing a comparison between ‘Romeo and Juliet’ (Shakespeare), ‘To His Coy Mistress’ (Marvel) and ‘Sonnet 130’ (Also by Shakespeare). The first main comparison between these three texts is that they all show different types of love. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ is based on true love as both main characters fall in love with each other at first sight. Shakespeare shows their love by the soliloquy and the sonnet that he added to this text as the words and techniques used in them project a connection between Romeo and Juliet. ‘To His Coy Mistress’ shows an idea of a sexual and lustful love.
The depiction of love is shown as true. Shakespeare has used religious imagery to show how Romeo and Juliet’s love is pure and that Romeo worships Juliet as a relic or a saint. The play also explores true love in act two, scene two where Romeo and Juliet exchange love vows. They show quick progression in their relationship because in this scene they get married. The poem ‘Valentine’ depicts love in a more truthful way, though it seems harsh and almost cynical.
Compare how ideas about love are presented in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and Barrett-Browning’s Sonnet 43. In the course of the essay, I will compare and contrast both poems’ idea of love. Both poems generally give a positive overview of love; both poets suggest that love is never ending and can battle through bad situations. Shakespeare’s sonnet takes the form of argument, talking about the unchanging and eternal qualities of love whilst Browning’s sonnet is like a direct poem to her husband discussing the nature of her love for him. Shakespeare starts the poem with the imperative “let me not to the marriage of true minds” which sets the tone and exploration of true love.
Shakespeare uses language, structure and dramatic devices to convey and create the effect of strong emotions through his ambitious characters, which is similarly portrayed in laboratory with the narrator’s strong and bitter emotions towards her husband’s infidelity. These characters can also be compared to the narrator of Porphyria’s lover whose intense emotions of love become too overwhelming for him to handle. Both Shakespeare and Browning show Elizabethan society as patriarchal, where men were considered to be the leaders and women subservient. Women were regarded as the weaker sex not just in terms of physical strength, but also emotionally. Women were also depicted as kind and caring as well as being the perfect mother and housewife, on the other hand men were portrayed as brave, strong and loyal.
Suzanne Eastwood Dr. Caughron Literature Class 4 10 December 2012 Romeo and Juliet: An Analysis of Various Forms of Love In the romantic tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare illustrates through character relationships the power of Romeo’s and Juliet’s agape love for each other and its transcendence over all other forms of love. Shakespeare permits the way the characters speak and relate to each other to reveal truths about the general nature of love and the distinguishing features of agape love. Particular relationships in the drama, Romeo’s love for Rosaline and Friar Lawrence’s fatherly love for Romeo, provide evidence for the potency of Romeo’s genuine, sacrificial love for Juliet. One particular relationship which accentuates Romeo’s love for Juliet is Romeo’s love for Rosaline which demonstrates eros love. While Romeo felt passionate, eros love for Rosaline, the sincerity was lacking and eventually deteriorated.
As the sonnet begins the speaker has already met love, when he sees that his reason, the “physician to [his] love” (5) “hath left [him]” (7) when he picks love instead. The speaker at first sees himself “longing” (1) for a cure to his lovesickness either by perfecting the love or destroying it altogether. However, soon the speaker is “angry” (6), that he cannot give up on love and realizes its power just then. Shakespeare uses personification, repetition of certain sounds and a rhyme scheme to illustrate that love is powerful. First off Shakespeare personifies love and reason in this sonnet, as two different forces, to develop the theme to the negative side of love.
He is describing how the man appears to him, physically and emotionally. In the sentences “But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure/ Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure” (13-14). Shakespeare is saying that since nature made the man to pleasure women, let him pleasure them, but let Shakespeare have his love. This is just one of many sonnets/plays of William
This sort of theme is seen in the Shakespearian sonnet 132 which I will now analyse. This sonnet is part of a “dark lady” series written by Shakespeare linking to the previously mentioned unreachable lady. In it we find classic examples of how a woman’s simple gaze can capture a man’s heart and dormant it so unintentionally, I presume. In the first line Shakespeare refers to “thine eyes [he] loves” and how it seems they “pity [him]”.This is a clear example of how the beauty of a woman’s eyes can seduce a man’s heart in believing he could venture into hers. This sort of pain is compared to death when he refers to the woman “[having] put on black” .This typifies the pain that men can feel and shows a somewhat excellent sensitive side that not only Shakespeare but other patriarchally born men of his time may have shared.
Elements of Romantic Comedies Romantic comedies have grown from everyday comedies to include very specific elements that distinguish them from the normal. One of the main elements of romantic comedies is that the idea of love and its shift from the thought that women should love their husbands more than men love their wives, as well as the belief that sex is something that the man should obtain whenever he asks for it because men are the bread-winners of the home. Instead, romantic comedies are based on heroic love, or love that is not focused on servitude. In this type of love, a man falls in love with a woman and serves her in the hopes that he can obtain sex from her. Although sex is still a factor in this situation, the men have to earn it which in the long run makes the man a better more understanding person.
Such speculations—which reached their peak in critics and readers wedded to the sentimental Romantic insistence on an intimate tie between literary and historical “events”—are in one sense a tribute to the power of the sonnets. They are arguably the greatest collection of love poems in the language, and they provide a crucial test for the adequacy of both the love of poetry and the sense of the fascinating confusion that makes up human love. In a sense, the sonnets are as “dramatic” as any of Shakespeare’s plays inasmuch as their art is that of meditations on love, beauty, time, betrayal, insecurity, and joy. Each sonnet is like a little script, with (often powerful) directions for reading and enactment, with textual meanings that are not given but made anew in every performance, by different readers within their individual and social lives. What Sonnet 87 terms “misprision” may stand as the necessary process by which each sonnet is produced by each reader.