Analysis Of The Duchess Of Malfi And The Castle Of Malpe

In North America, people will argue that love needs to happen before marriage but, historically, this is actually a very new notion. Mr. Smolinsky was in shock when his daughters wanted to marry for love. He asked his wife if they even looked at each other before the engagement and she replied, “’Maybe if I had the sense of my daughters in America, I would have given you a good look over before the wedding’” (76). This implies that if she had the choice, she would have married for love or perhaps a different man at least.

In Elizabethan Society during the time in which William Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice, many marriages were arranged by the parents of the betrothed couple to ensure the transfer of wealth as opposed to assuring true love. Once married, the woman was expected to be subservient to her husband and not control any matters of the estate. Although not necessarily written as a stance on women’s position in society, it is from this perspective that Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice laying down an underlying theme of marriage for wealth within the play. Love in William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice is bartered like a tradable commodity in order to gain money, status, and resources.

This unit, on the first two acts of John Webster’s Renaissance tragedy The Duchess of Malfi, focuses on the representation of the theme of love and marriage in the Malfi court,

Back in the eighteenth century, marriage was seen as a business contract without considering love as the main reason for any relationship. According to Ingrid H. Tague, an assistant

While Europeans in the Elizabethan Era were over the top and elaborate in many ways, marriage was not one of them. Regarded as a rite of passage, marriage lacked the festivities and passion to make it any more than what it was: a social requirement. From the extensive marriage contract process to the obvious pressure from their parents, youth hardly considered marriage lightly. After all, choosing the wrong spouse, or even choosing to not marry at all, could negatively impact one’s future severely. For the majority of the population, marriage was an expectation for means of improvement, not for love. Forget finding oneself infatuated with someone then marrying them or feeling like a goddess on your wedding day, because marriage was common, anticipated and carried out by reasons of sensibility. Even a bride’s wedding dress was chosen for practicality and eventually turned into part of her everyday wardrobe.

To provide some context, Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream interferes with love through the deception of fairies. When Hermia’s father insists she marry Demetrius, she runs away with Hermia and Lysander. Contrastingly, Helena chases after an uninterested Demetrius, helplessly in love. The fairies meddle with these two couples by accidentally casting a love

Courtly love is interesting, and a large influencer of modern love. Many people associate certain things such as jealousy and a willingness to do anything for someone as love and why people get married and have children, but people not too long ago got married for many other reasons, and never for the reasons people do today. There are also some similarities between then and now as far as love is concerned. Courtly love was a kind of love that came about in the Medieval times between a usually married lady and a man that she was not married to.

For a country that places such a huge emphasis on being educated, it is incomprehensible for some to imagine why so many people take accessible education for granted. Many have the idea that this is due to people having become lazy over time. I, however, believe that this disinterest in education is due primarily to the singular way in which everyone is expected to learn. Education is formally defined as, “the process of receiving or giving systematic instruction, especially at a school or university” (“Education” def. 1). To have education is to acquire information in a way that follows structured procedure. One flaw in following this definition exclusively is that it fails to acknowledge other ways in which a person can learn effectively.

In the play, The Tragedy of Othello, Shakespeare really tests our conception as to what love is, and where it can or can't exist. Judging from the relationship between Desdemona and Othello, through Nicholson’s "Othello" And The Geography Of Persuasion." the play seems to say that marriage based on an innocent romantic love or profane love is bound to fail. Shakespeare is pessimistic about the existence and survival of a true type of love.

. .Woman may not posses rational powers as great as those of man, grudgingly, woman is given some sort of precarious place in the moral universe."3 Even those women who chose to marry were not soothed by love. Marriage in the Renaissance was not to be confused with love. It was much more like a business partnership in which the husband made the money and the wife distributed it into the proper household funds. Love matches were frowned down upon as much as arranged marriages. Van Eyck also portrays this situation quite clearly in the wedding portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and his wife Giovanna Cenami. Here Giovanna Cenami gazes through the open window where the world awaits her husband knowing that she will experience very little of it. Her husband looks past her to something more interesting in the room.

In the Medieval times during courtship, woman seems to be in control of the relationship and men would show their devotion to her with his heart and hope that she would notice. I believe with older lover, the aspects of Courtly love still exist in our cultural today. However, the medieval time, men would also accept challenges and travel great distance to express his love for a woman. One example from the book stated (pg353) that Lancelot faces many challenges and temptations as he defeated the Knight Sir Maleagant of Gorre, by virtue of his love for Guinevere. In today’s culture, men will undertake different challenges either by songs or dances the gain the interest or the love of a woman. In a documentary on some parts of Africa cultures

In Le Morte d’Arthur love plays a very important part in people’s motives and in the way Malory wants us to think about characters. On their quests knights like Gawaine and Balin meet quite a lot of people who are ready to kill themselves because a lady does not answer their love. There are also a lot of star-crossed lovers in Le Morte d’Arthur, like Tristram and Isoud and Launcelot and

This event could be Shakespeare saying that everyone has and want to be loved, even if it’s not they project on the outside. He realizes how odd his sudden change in opinion is, exclaiming: “When I said I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I were married” (2.3 263-64). A similar situation is put onto Beatrice, who is tricked into believing benedick loves her. She makes a similar change in view. And the woman who once said that: “I would rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me” (1.1 107-08), is in love.

The economics of marriage was not the only pressure on children to marry where their parents directed. Sixteenth-century children, and girls in particular, were very much brought up to obey, and to believe that it was their duty to their parents… to marry the person chosen for them. It would have taken a very strong-minded girl indeed to have refused to follow her parents’ wishes. Girls who did refuse the partner offered could find themselves bullied by their parents. (3)

The modern concept of love owes a great deal to the Humanist tradition of the Renaissance. The humanists focused on perfection and exaltation of this life as opposed to the afterlife. In Tristan and Iseult the seeds of Renaissance love are present in the Middle Ages. To the modern eye, it is a mystery how the period of the Middle Ages produced the seeds of the diametrically opposite Renaissance. Yet it is necessary to understand this transformation if one is to fully comprehend the forces that helped produce the modern consciousness. Courtly Love is a transitional concept that emerged in the Middle Ages. It is transitional because it emerged early and acknowledges God as the creator of love,