Preview

Love and Lust in Shakespeare'

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
452 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Love and Lust in Shakespeare'
Love and Lust in Shakespeare' sonnets Shakespeare' sonnets are on a variety of themes such as time, love, gender, politics, sexuality, law, methaphysics and many others. They express strong feelings and strong arguments. However shakespeare struggle with love and lust is evident in his sonnets. Troughout the reading of Shakespeare' sonnets I can persieve that he is a profound admirer of beuty; and he persieves beuty of different ways. There are some kinds of beuty that he considers good for his spirit, and others that he considers bad or evil for his spirit. The beuty of the sun, earth, and sea for example are good for shakespeare; On the other hand the beuty of women is evil for him, because it persuades him to act with lust. Here initiates the dilema that causes the struggle he has with love ans lust. It seems that Shakespeare consider women as symbols of lust, since their beuty seduces men and makes them act in response to the evil desires that are inside of them - desires of the flesh -which corrup the spirit. " Two loves I have of comfort and despair, which like two spirits do suggest me still: The better angel is a man right fair, The worser spirit a woman, colored ill. To win me soon to hell, my female evil. Tempteth my better angel...and would corrupt my saint to be a devil" ( Sonnet 144, page 821, red book). The beuty of women is the cause of lust, as it is also pictured in sonnet 1, when it says: " From fairest creatures we desire increase, That thereby beuty's rose might never die". Another sonnet that express Shakespeare's blame on women for being the symbol of passion is sonnet 29: " A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion" (page 811). Not only the beuty of women causes passion and lust according to shakespeare sonnets, but also the beuty of art seduces men to passionate and lust. In sonnet 128, the author is being seduced by the woman who is playing the instrument;

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The art of seduction has been accomplished in numerous ways throughout history and has always remained dependent on the assumed appeal of the person being seduced. In Shakespeare's “Sonnet 130”, the genre of Carpe Diem was exemplified with a largely satirical approach. In doing so, the speaker tried to appeal to his mistress by appealing to ethos with Aristotle's first version of ethos, appeal of your own good character, more specifically, will-power or arete, as well as Aristotle's second version of ethos, appealing to the character of one's audience.…

    • 506 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    beauty of the Fair Lord in Sonnet 18. Finally, Mercutio’s sexual love and objectification of…

    • 2235 Words
    • 1 Page
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    they become more evident. In both sonnets the Shakespeare does not mention said love until the…

    • 545 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    First of all, sonnets are interesting mystery puzzles of literature, but yet it’s an important part of it too. One of the most renowned poets of all time is no less William Shakespeare. He has written plenty of sonnets, in which is formed by three quatrains and a couplet. What is most interesting though, are that many of his sonnets are similar and some have highly contrasting styles. It’s as if you could tell that Shakespeare was a maudlin person, and his emotions and feelings can change drastically. There are happy and peaceful sonnets by him, as well as sonnets full of anger and hatred. Sonnet number 18 and 129 can be a good example of this, so I chose to make a comparison between them in this final paper.…

    • 882 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “An intense feeling of deep attraction.” That is the definition of love. Love between a man and a dog, a kid and ice-cream, a mother and her family, and love between two selfless people. This is true love. In the play, Romeo and Juliet, written by William Shakespeare, the feeling of attraction between the two main characters is not true love. The setting of this play is the streets of Verona, Italy, during a time when arranged marriages at the age of 14 were socially acceptable. Two young teens, Romeo and Juliet, were convinced that they had feelings for each other, but acted more out of lust than anything else. Lust is defined as “a very strong sexual desire”, and it becomes more apparent as the play progresses that these two young teens act on lustful desires. Love is more potent than lust, but it is clear that Romeo and Juliet act out of sheer lust, not love.…

    • 1171 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Many of Shakespeare’s plays revolve around the common source of love and hatred. In “Othello” and “Much Ado about Nothing” there is an obvious love story between Othello and Desdemona and Claudio and Hero. In both plays, women have put shame on their families. Desdemona betrays her father by marrying a Moor and Hero was accused of cheating on her wedding day. In “Othello” women are degraded and are looked down upon, as inferior. Iago has the mind-set that women are only good for one thing, having the pleasure to pleasure men.…

    • 420 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    In The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare, tells a romantic tragedy of two young teenagers that fall in love.…

    • 576 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Lust In Romeo And Juliet

    • 948 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Stories have always been a very important form of entertainment and date back countless millennia. A specific type of story, a love story, shows the audience of love, and teaches them something about it. The story of Romeo and Juliet is a widely known Shakespearean tragedy and love story. The play is about two teenagers, Romeo and Juliet, who fall in love or lust, depending upon how the audience sees it. The two believe they cannot be together because their two families, the Montagues (Romeo), and the Capulets (Juliet), are fighting. The two lovers are only in the relationship for sex, meaning they are not truly in love. Eventually, the two get married (in secret), causing problems, like them going to hell if they marry again. Later that day,…

    • 948 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    A majority of Shakespeare’s plays include significant presence of female characters that reveal his views regarding woman’s role during the time period. Generally, women during the Shakespearean time period were obligated to suppress their opinions and were stripped from rights that women in the twenty-first century possess. They were expected to manage the household, as opposed to men, who were expected to be the decision makers. Additionally, the qualities of an ideal woman were mainly her virtue, beauty and youth. With that said, many of the female characters in Shakespeare’s plays oppose the societal norms of that time period in some form or another. For example in Twelfth Night, we observe opposition to these cultural assumptions in an…

    • 1948 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    There is a thin line between the powerful contrasting passions of love and lust. The well-known tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is a play written by William Shakespeare during the Renaissance. It is set in the city of Verona, Italy, where the love of two star-crossed lovers from feuding families send them to their graves. These lovers, Romeo and Juliet, are from the houses of Montague and Capulet. The influence of Friar Laurence will prove to be their demise and is responsible for the catastrophe that is their love. This is because he married the two despite knowing better, which later results in Romeo being banished. His involvement in the false death of Juliet is another factor of how the friar is to blame for Romeo and Juliet’s ultimate tragedy.…

    • 869 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In life, romantic relationship happen through true love not lust.This is what the author William Shakespeare’s character Romeo in Romeo and Juliet believes that is true love. When Romeo first sees Juliet he automatically falls in with a person that he doesn’t even know yet and he just looks at her appearance and sees a beautiful little girl. Romeo’s lust eventually got him trouble and it also led him to his death and the death of Paris and Juliet which plays a whole affect on the whole book. Romeo demonstrates lust rather true love with Juliet. Lust is not more important than physical appearance in any way.…

    • 696 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The presence of homoerotic references in the works of William Shakespeare was a direct result of the Elizabethan attitude towards sex during the English Renaissance. Within the privacy of the sonnets, Shakespeare could effusively express a passion that the Elizabethan Era, with its social mores, stifled greatly as it frowned upon homosexuality. Given the freedom to express himself uninhibitedly, Shakespeare cast aside the homophobia of his age and inscribed love sonnets for another male, Mr. W.H. This unrestricted honesty created great tension and drama between Shakespeare and his adversary, the dark lady as well as fueling some of the greatest love poems of all time.…

    • 1258 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Good Essays

    Across the Capulet’s ballroom, a girl with the name Juliet catches the eye of a boy named Romeo. Little do both Romeo and Juliet know that the relationship of what they thought was love would cost them their lives because of lust. Romeo and Juliet were said to have fallen in love at first sight, but as the story proceeds it spirals downwards into a pit of lust. In reality they were just looking to fill a missing part of their own broken heart. Love is where a person will take a bullet for one, where someone would jump in front of a train or even in the most extreme case, lay down their life for someone who means the world to them. However, lust is the exact opposite of love. Lust is just for looks and the pleasure of the eyes and flesh. It is selfish and only focuses on the benefits someone might receive from their so called significant other. Romeo and Juliet's fast paced relationship was not based on a strong…

    • 991 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Sonnets were usually used for love poetry, although this sonnet is used as a prologue. A prologue is very strange thing that Shakespeare has done. He has not done this on any other play that he has written. There are many reasons for this. One probably being to make sure that everyone in the audience knows what is going to happen. This leads me to the second point. Destiny. Many people in the audience believed that their lives were destined and written in stone. He wanted to show how God sees the world with the paths he has created. And there is no control over what can happen as we are only viewers of our own lives. "A pair of star crossed lovers take their life" shows that Romeo and Juliet were made to fall in love. It was in the stars. But that same love would be…

    • 5110 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    Two Gentlemen of Verona

    • 2222 Words
    • 9 Pages

    Traub, Valerie. “Gender and sexuality in Shakespeare.” The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Ed. Margreta De Grazia and Stanley Wells. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 2001.129-46. Print.…

    • 2222 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Better Essays

Related Topics