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Of all Shakepeare's works, sonnets seem best to portray this word marriage from past and present. Not only do the words and style of the sonnet show this transition of time, but the era in which it was created was a great transitory time as well.
Gutenberg had invented the printing press over a hundred years previous, but the full benefits of that marvelous invention had just begun to be felt by the time Shakespeare arrived on the literary scene.
Shakepeare's sonnets especially brought those benefits to full fruition. Sonnet 116...
Shakespeare writes of the love struck soul who 'is never shaken' and even to death finds that love 'it is an ever-fixed mark'. He then ends the sonnet by stating with tongue in cheek that there is very little possibility of him being proven wrong in his statements. He was well-known for ending sonnets in such a manner, seemingly always with a twist of humor. Perhaps that is why the genre he had such influence over became more than just the genre of bards and poets, but of lovers of life as well.
Greeenblatt also points out that to truly grasp the meaning of the poem and the transience alluded to therein, readers must consider the social code for homosexual love. The Church did not tolerate sodomy and it would make sense that men would be attracted to other men considering how women were often treated as lower-class citizens. Through this "seesaw game of acknowledgment and denial" (253), Shakespeare "stages his sexual
The rhyme scheme of this sonnet follows Shakespeare's usual structure, wherein the quatrains all have an independent alternating rhyme (ABAB CDCD EFEF), and the final two lines form an heroic couplet (GG). This adds to the feeling of receiving discrete steps of an argument, and enhances the divisions of the versification. There is also a noticeable prevalence of "l's and "s's in the poem, particularly in the first and third
Shakespeare Journal 9/14 Sonnets (1. I usually have to force myself to read poetry, especially sonnets about romance that seem contrived or sentimentalized. Also, I am not very good at understanding and explaining the various metaphors, hidden meanings and so on. Sonnet 18 is so famous that it has long since turned into a cliche ("Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?") and would simply not go over very well is
Renaissance The word renaissance means a complete change in modes of art, literature, music, and architecture, as well as an altered sense of morality and ethicality during a given period of time. This change stems from an expansion of thought and with that a new sense of what matters in the world. In literature, the term renaissance means an adoption and adaptation of new rules with regard to form, function, and
For the poet, Christianity must be devoid of the cultures of corruption and hypocrisy that prevailed during his time. Ideally, a religion, in order to be respected and followed by the people, must maintain a clean image -- that is, an image that reflects the truth of its teachings, wherein its religious principles are embodied by the people who make up the Church. It is also through "Canterbury" that Chaucer
John Keats The most widely respected source for the history of the English language, the Oxford English Dictionary, records as early as Chaucer in the fourteenth century a meaning for the word "star" used (as the OED puts it) "with reference to the pagan belief that the souls of illustrious persons after death appear as new stars in the heavens." This metaphor seemingly takes a long time to devolve to