Melissa Acosta
Period 05
March 18 2015
English 4
Fischer
Is love really the same as back then?

During the english Renaissance(1500­1600’s) poets and writers expressed their ideas of love prolifically, The genres varied from sonet to pastorals to essays. Messages of passion, the roles of men and women, and the institution of marriages fill volumes that reflects life’s most important values. Four centuries later, readers still appreciate and find relevance in the literature. i personally believe that love is not the same as how it used to be centuries ago. Many factors mentioned have made me decide that personally i do not believe love is the same as it was back then. For me its easier in today's world to find a friend with benefit than an actual true love to spend the rest of your life with. Today’s society has a lot of different ideas of love as oppose to back in the days. For instance, the roles of men and women vary today since we are more accepting of different sexual preferences. Now a days, its not only men and women but also men and men, women and women, transgenders, etc. This totally throws off the role of men and women, since they are both men or women. Centuries ago you wouldn't really see this as “normal”. The “normality” would have been that the men provides food and the women stays as a housewife. also both genders in todays world work. As for when it comes to terms of love and romance, an example of what the role of men were in the english renaissance time can be found in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, “shall i compare thee’ to a summers day...so long live this and this gives life to thee’.” (Shakespeare). i

believe this is how back in the days, men used to express their love to their beloved love and as we can tell, it was so nice and dramatic enough to be romantic. Some guys now a days still use this verse to tell their girls or wives, but aren’t really this passionate about it or romantic. Some may argue that there are still some guys like this out there; However, the men they talk about are like 5 in a million. in today's world, men say things like “ I love you as much as I love pizza!” and a girl will feel so loved with that simple statement as oppose to men saying things like
“Where whenas death shall all the world subdue, our love shall live and later life renew.”
(Sonnet 75, Edmund Spencer). Spencer is basically telling his lover that their love will go beyond death and people will still see how much they love each other. These are the roles of how men should be but unfortunately in todays world, these kind of men are close to being extinct. The role of women has tremendously changed as well, as i mentioned in the previous paragraph. It has changed in many aspects, For example now a days, women have more independence and don't depend on a man as much as they used to. When it comes to romance, many women have made it easier for men to obtain only sex from them instead of an actual relationship. During the English Renaissance, not a lot of women gave in when it came to intimacy, making men have to find a more romantic way to make them give up what they wanted. An example of such romantic words would be “My mistress when she walks treads on the ground, and yet by heaven i think my love as rare as any she believed with fall compare.”
(Sonnet 130, William Shakespeares). In other words, the author is showing how he loves her so much and doesnt only want to use her for pleasure. Jill Neimark’s “All You Need is Love”

article states that “love is a basic human need…” (par 1, line 4). Women are almost always the most sentimental, making them need to feel loved a necessity; Therefore, they do whatever they can to obtain this. In my opinion women have mostly lost most of their morals/values from back in the days in today’s world. Many of you may be wondering, what is love exactly? According to Neimark, “...Taking care of each other is the