Sonnet Analysis Essay

This piece of a sonnet by William Shakespeare tells us a lot about his idea of what love is.

In his time, people were swept away by outward beauty and wrote about it often in literature. Some of the other sonnet writers in Shakespeare’s time equated their woman’s beauty to almost a fairytale. They write about how their woman is perfect, as to almost compare them to the beauty of God or an angel. They usually embellished their woman a little bit and made them sound more extravagant then they probably really were. In the above sonnet, Shakespeare shuts down this idea of unimaginable beauty. He writes realistically about his mistress’ outward beauty. Shakespeare believed that inward beauties were entirely more important than outward beauties.

We talked about writers such as Sidney, Marlowe, and Raleigh who all wrote about love and had their different opinions about it. For example, Marlowe wrote about wanting to get a woman to love and him and be with him forever. He wrote in a style that would try to woo the girl into wanting because of his profligate wording of her physical beauty. Shakespeare did not want anything to do with that. Shakespeare felt that a woman’s true qualities were derived from her character and what she had to offer other than her physical beauty. Things like patience, integrity, and loyalty would have been really great things to Shakespeare. We were given a packet full of sonnets and when we read the first few they are all about excessive physical beauty. Shakespeare does a really good of brining realism to love. He talks about what real love is and how each and every one of us could experience it, but we may

Firstly, we watched the movie Much Ado About Nothing. This was a humorous movie that I really enjoyed. It was all about love and tragedy. One part of the movie really emphasized how Shakespeare felt about love. Benedict is questioning his love for Beatrice and while doing that, he starts listing off things that he would love in a woman. Basically all of the things he lists have nothing to do with outward beauty, they are all characteristics of inward beauty. Then, after he says all the traits he would like, Benedict adds in something along the lines of, “And her hair, well, whatever God wishes it to be.” This is a clear indicator that Benedict was not too concerned with the outward beauty of the woman he would like to fall in love with. We also looked at some other sonnets written by Shakespeare. In his sonnet, Let me not to the marriage of true minds, Shakespeare talks about how strong and enduring love can be and how it leads so many people. He claims that if the love between two people is true, then it will last forever. He then goes so far to say if he is proven wrong, then he takes back everything he has said and that no man has ever truly loved before. That is such as powerful line that rings very