A Motif Of Love Throughout The Elizabethan Era

William Shakespeare wrote at least 37 plays and over 150 sonnets. It is believed that the sonnets were a part of his private diary that was never meant to be publicized. It is not confirmed but many believe that his sonnets portray his heart. This led us to venture as to what Shakespeare's views were on religion, sex, marriage, and life. For the last part of his writing career, Shakespeare focused on tragedies. In this time he wrote the works called “Hamlet” and “Macbeth”. There are seven years of his life after the birth of his twins in where no records exist. Scholars call

The Middle Ages is the time of discovery of courtly love and it became a very dominant period in arts, philosophy, and even religion. As illustrated by the many stories in existence about the Middle Ages, love was a target that one could successfully obtain. The woman was seen as something that could be owned and possessed by a man (Muir, 72). If a man was to profess attraction to a woman, the woman was expected to drop everything and take the man to bed immediately. In the case of married couples, some secrets would destroy a marriage. Many stories of this period revolve around actions of revenge resulting from forbidden affairs or betrayal. Today, the concept of love has changed and it is described like a fairy tale. The man has to get a girl after the completion of an almost impossible task (Glendinning 101). Some aspects in the middle ages have continue into the present time although with a bit of modification. For instance, one individual in the relationship is expected to rule over the home while the other, often the woman is expected to keep the room tidy and meet the needs of the other and obeying every command (Herlihy 112). This is wrong as both individuals should provide the necessary effort in making the relationship work and this can only be possible with compromise.

During the Medieval Times Culture was a significant part of everyday life. Compared to today there are some differences, yet there are some similarities. The case for women was disparate from what women are seen as today, and corresponding to men as well. Furthermore, the ideology of “Love” was big during the medieval times, accompanied by chivalry. First and foremost, the case for women was not what it was today.

For centuries scholars have been examining the question whether William Shakespeare wrote all the work that has been credited to him. In his short 52 years of life, he is said to have authored 154 sonnets, two epic poems, and 38 five-act plays. Following the death of Shakespeare, many scholars began researching information that may have proven why Shakespeare could not have been the primary author or the author at all for many of these works. Four theories as to why Shakespeare could not have written all the work that has been credited to him include: his limited education as an individual of common birth; the shear difficulty and near impossibility for one individual to write so many varied pieces, not

William Shakespeare was born on 23rd April 1564 (Honan, 1998). He was an English playwright and poet. People of his era and others after it regarded him as the greatest English writer and dramatist. According to Dobson (1992), he is often referred to as the national poet of England. His work is extensive and includes more than 38 plays, narrative poems and over 150 sonnets. Most of the early works that he produced were mainly histories and comedies which he perfected and made more sophisticated. Shakespeare’s sonnets had three underlying themes. These were beauty’s transience, life’s brevity and desire’s trapping (Analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, n. d).

“To be or not to be….” For most it leaves no question as to who wrote these infamous words. William Shakespeare is regarded by some as the greatest author within all of the English language. Regardless of one’s true opinion of Shakespeare’s writings, they continue to cycle their way from one generation to the next. His works still hold significant value within all levels of academic teachings. Shakespeare’s literatures range from poems and plays to sonnets. Once he gathered the notion of how the style of blank verse operated, he began to cultivate it into something unique and one he could call his very own. His latest works was that of sonnets, in which were found to be the last of his non-dramatic works to be

During the Shakespearean period love was presented in several different ways. Love was sometimes portrayed as a war between two lovers and sometimes used to profess admiration to a lover. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare redefined what love poems were, by making his poem a parody of the conventional love poems that were written by poets in the sixteenth to seventeenth century. Prior to this poem, love poems were praised for their romantic appeals where more often than not they praised women for their beauty and god like appearance. This poem was known to be one of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets because of its central idea that love is not only physical attraction. In the typical love poems women were described to have flawless skin, rosy cheeks and were admired by everyone in their society, while this poem particularly has a different tone to it. It mocks the typical love poems by stating his honest feelings towards his lover.

William Shakespeare has wrote many plays, stories, and poems in his lifetime. William Shakespeare lived for 52 years, and in his lifetime he wrote 38 plays, his series on Sonnet poems, and 5 other poems. He is the most popularly read author right behind the Bible. The sonnets he wrote were always 14 lines, and they all have the same amount of syllables. So, if you wanted, you can actually sing every single sonnet to a melody. The two sonnets I chose have to do with expressing your own beauty and passing the beauty on.

Through his countless sonnets and plays, William Shakespeare rarely, if ever, runs with a preconceived notion of something. His work is unique, calling upon a vast array of subjects while inventing newfound ways of approaching them. One topic in which Shakespeare is all too familiar with is love. His sonnets especially deal with this subject, with sonnet 130 standing out as probably the largest betrayal of our normal expectations of love as any. Within 14 lines, Shakespeare manages to describe his love in a less than positive fashion for most of the poem, quite contrary to the dreamy-eyed poems about love to which many are familiar. Through the use of figurative language, Shakespeare manages to create his own social expectation for love while

Knights in armor, damsels in distress, heroic quests, masquerade balls—this was the essence of romance in the Middle Ages. In medieval European literature, love is for the nobility, chivalrous, and virtuous. Andreas Capellanus defined courtly love as “Love is a certain inborn suffering derived from the sight of and excessive meditation upon the beauty of the opposite sex, which causes each one to wish above all things the embraces of the other and by a common desire to carry out all of love’s precepts in the other’s embraces.” Capellanus 28) In other words love and suffering go hand-in-hand, much like modern love. Capellanus gives the “Rules of Love” (1) governing how men and women should behave in relationships.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets and 37 plays in total, including tragedy, comedy, and history. The Four Great Tragedies were his greatest achievement as a playwright, and are greatly studied in English literature, performed in theatre, and made into several films; include Romeo and Juliet (1594), the timeless tale of young lovers whose names were synonymous with star-crossed romance; Hamlet (1600), the revenge drama centering on the introspective Prince of Denmark; Othello (1604), a story of

The play’s central conflict is about seeking connection in a marriage. Although sexual frustrations can be treated by the vibrator that became available after the discovery of electricity, the need for psychological intimacy cannot be fixed by technological advancements. The first part of the play shows the physical needs of the female body and their solutions. The main plot is about two upper-class women discovering their sexual needs and finding treatment from the vibrator despite the ignorance of their husbands to female sexuality. A secondary plot is about the problem with breast feeding. Mrs. Givings’ body cannot produce enough milk for her baby, so she finds Elizabeth to attend her child. In the second part of the play, it becomes more evident that the problems are caused by inadequate communications in a marriage. The dilemmas of both women are caused by their husbands’ ignorance to feminine desires. Mrs. Daldry’s husband becomes more and more disinterested in her and keeps neglecting her. At the end, she stops her treatment when she realizes that the physical treatments are futile with her desire to feel an emotional connection with someone. After leaving the baby for Elizabeth, Mrs. Givings experiences emotional distress. She feels deprived of the right of a mother and feels more and more disconnected with her child. Mr. Givings disapproves of her desire to feed her own baby, because he is ignorant to how breast feeding can build a psychological connection

Some of the most renowned sonneteers express their love for another person in terms of the magnitude of that person’s beauty, especially during the Elizabethan era. But, the most powerful form of love is loving someone for who they are instead of what they look like. Loving someone for love’s sake allows love to last a lifetime because love is true and the truth does not change. This differs from loving someone for physical features in which both the love of looks and the beauty fade with time. While in the moment it may be charming to be characterized by eternal beauty, as William Shakespeare does in Sonnet 18, being loved for the real feeling of being loved is more lovely where true love does not fade like the love for physical features. The truth of true love is evident in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 14 where she insinuates that the failure to love someone for only love’s sake reveals the love as being superficial. True love should be something that is not only contained in human nature or characteristics but should be something beyond humanity that is eternal. Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 14 dismisses the love of physical features that William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18 prides on in order to illustrate that true love is unearthly, unchanging, and eternal.

What is beauty? In Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” a shepherd calls to his love so that she may spend her life with him in “buckles of the purest gold;” and “Belts of straw and Ivy buds, / With Coral clasp and Amber studs” (15-18). The beauty of artifice is clear in the stanzas of this sonnet, however, should one compare it with that of William Shakespeare’s sonnets featuring the “Dark Lady,” one can see the change in perspective of love. Shakespeare expresses his “love” through the words, “In faith, I do not love thee with mine eyes, / For they in thee a thousand errors note, / But ‘tis my heart that loves what they despise” (1869). Through his verses, Shakespeare articulates his disdain for vanity and artifice by declaring that no one can legitimately be beautiful and that no single form of beauty is better than the other, physically, or otherwise. Shakespeare denotes the change in standards of beauty through writing about the Dark Lady, expressing his clear disinterest in her lack of beauty and loving her anyway. Through his Dark Lady sonnets, Shakespeare challenges the ideas of what beauty is by suggesting that the idea of “fair” beauty through the use of artifice is not beautiful. This, however, contradicts his argument about the artifice and beauty of the “Fair Youth” being able to preserve one’s legacy in the first 127 sonnets. Yet, while Shakespeare is biased towards the Fair Youth because of his relationship with said youth, be it

During the Middle Ages, numerous forms of lyrics arose, which recreated the way that poetry was looked at for centuries afterward. The poetry that will be discussed was written by the troubadours, a southern French romance language, and the minnesingers, which were German singers of love songs. The troubadours are known for being “the first secular poets to rhyme their songs and put them to music,” as well as the first to redefine the idea of love (Medieval 1, pg. 2). Guillem IX, named “the First Troubadour,” went on to create many different poems, addressing themes of love and even satirizing the different conventional demands of courtly love during that time (Medieval 1, pg. 5). His poems, being among the first available that addressed courtly