Tommy Garcia
Prof l
Eng 102
Febuary 28,2013

Shakespeare's Definition of Love

Born on April 23, 1564, William lived, grew, and developed in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. He was brought up in a varying class family, with 7 other siblings, him being 3rd born. His mother, Mary, and father, John, lived an upper-class lifestyle, for the first 10 years of William's life. So, while his father went off to work as an alderman and bailiff, and his mother cared for the family at home, " he probably attended a local, free, and rather well respected, grammar school."1 This would be where his remarkable literary skills would get their roots.

In Shakespeare’ sonnets 128 they are a variety of themes such as time, love, gender, politics, sexuality, law, 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. Shakespeare always adds comedy or tragedy to any romance that might be taking place. For example as in Romeo and Juliet there is romance but he also puts comedy in there so love is not that easy. In the play Othello he makes it into a tragedy which makes the love even harder to take place. Shakespeare has always found a way to make love as complicated as he can which leads me to believe that he feels that you must work for love and it should not be handed to you. Love is already complicated, but when Shakespeare is involved he makes sure at least two things come around that can make it harder for those who are in love to actually stay in love . A man will use many things in order to attract the opposite sex. Often with the use of the notorious whistle, the perpetual use of lies about income, the stench of cologne, or the ever-popular use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way to her heart. William Shakespeare, a man who, based on his works, was full of passion for the opposite sex – whether it had been honest love or perverse lust. Nonetheless, Shakespeare, like most men, wished to charm women. With this having been so, Shakespeare’s weapon of choice to be inwrought to a woman’s heart was the powerful love poem. He understood love and how to attain love and demonstrated this in his often praised sonnets. Writing about the joys and tragedies while also writing about the trials and tribulations of love was Shakespeare’s objective in select sonnets – Sonnet 116 and Sonnet 129. His views on what is love put into prose enables all that read his sonnets to interpret Shakespeare’s definitions of love and lust.

Throughout his sonnets, Shakespeare discusses the conflicts that men have with time, such as time vs. the body and time vs. the mind. Although time withers the body and eventually the mind, Shakespeare writes that time has no effect, however, on love. Love prevails throughout time and is forever young when it is shared by two hearts that have become one. Love is a substance of the hearts united and calls for two individuals to commit to each other – commitment being marriage. Having committed one’s self through marriage both individuals now turn a blind eye to the other’s faults. To Shakespeare, this means that if one of the mates in the relationship cheats, the other should understand, forget, or forgive since adultery was the fault of one of the mate’s and love cannot see faults. This is best exemplified in Sonnet 116 when Shakespeare writes:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove: (1-4)

Love is not only forgiving of faults but is also invincible in the eye of any storm. Whether it is hostility in the marriage or the death of one of the individuals in the