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William Shakespeare 's Romeo And Juliet

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Shakespeare was a well-known 16th century playwright and author. In a range of his sonnets and his popular play, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, he presents his views and ideologies of love and challenges the conventions of love at the time. Shakespeare does this in a multitude of ways that subtly but effectively changes society’s view on love. Throughout the majority of his sonnets and in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare goes against the Petrarchan views on love which were courtly love and also were the norm at the time. Petrarch was an Italian scholar and a poet who wrote sonnets which formed ideas on how love should be and by the 16th century, these ideas of love were the conventions. In sonnet 116, Shakespeare writes ‘love is not love’. The first ‘love’ being courtly love and the Petrarchan views on love, the second ‘love’ being true love and Shakespeare’s ideologies of love. Shakespeare is telling the audience at the time that the love they think they feel isn’t ‘true love’, it’s just the idea of love and courtly love rather than true love. This ‘mocking’ of the conventions at the time links to many other sonnets but mainly sonnet 130. The whole sonnet is a satirical piece that presents Petrarch’s ideologies of love in a way that makes them seem idiotic and untrue. The theme of courtly love being very different to true love is also seen in Romeo and Juliet. When Romeo is in courtly love with Rosaline, he talks about the feeling of love and how he deserves to have her, then when he

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