University Degree: Shakespeare
-
Gabriela Villanueva Noriega
The particular structure of the sonnet is often used in such a manner that a whole body is built up only to collapse in one or two final lines. We only have to think of Gongora's "Mientras por competir con tu cabello" to find a very clear example. We can, as well, find other examples of this in Shakespeare and in Sidney, for example in Shakespeare's sonnet 19 and in Sidney's sonnet 71. In the sonnets we are looking at, the same process takes place: both poets enumerate a number of principles to finally throw them down in the final lines.
- Word count: 1481
-
Close Reading of Mary Wroth's Sonnet #40.
The sonnets first quatrain gives us the image of a pregnant woman bearing 'false hope'. Wroth uses enjambment in the first three lines to make the size of Pamphilia's loss explicit; her lines are so full they spill over into the next. Forgive the pun, but the lines are absolutely pregnant with meaning. "False hope which feeds but to destroy, and spill/ What it first breeds; unnatural to the birth/ Of thine own womb; conceiving but to kill," (1-3). Wroth's word choice enforces this miscarriage theme.
- Word count: 968
-
William Shakespeare (1564-1616).
Nevertheless, the circumstances about the production of his sonnets are not clear. Scholars do not exactly know how long before their unauthorized publication (1609) they were in fact written, if they were all written in the same period, or if the sequence in which they appeared was the same in which they were composed. The vivid and dramatically intense Shakespearean plays entertained the Elizabethan audience, whether in a tragic or in a comic way, with plots that covered different topics such as historical facts, wars, voyages, romance, family conflicts, internal problems, human psychology and so on.
- Word count: 1772
-
William Shakespeare - Sonnet 130
However, once further analyzed it is evident that this poem is actually about a woman he finds beautiful. It is assumed that the woman this poem focuses on was a woman that William Shakespeare personally knew. It is possible the woman in this poem, granted she is not given a name, could be created based on how Shakespeare felt about the unrealistic view of women in general.
- Word count: 347
