The Theme Of Love In Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets

ENG3110 Midterm Essay
Chan Chi Hin, Tony s156774
Q.2
In Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets, almost all of them are related to one common topic, love, especially the romantic love. The romantic love is an intangible thing, a sentiment between two individuals. It is a primal and spiritual feeling within our heart, sometimes even words cannot be sued to describe the sense of love. The romantic love is unlike other love, for example, a family love, it fluctuates a lot, adding lots of uncertainty to the consequence, sometimes good, sometimes bad and eventually, some of them are destined to end in mystery and pain. There are 2 types of love we can found in Shakespeare’s sonnet. In the first half of the sonnets, we can see the romance and power of love, the conventional image of love. In the second half of the sonnets, we can see the ugliness and pain of a twisted love, the subversion of love. These various kinds of love would be discussed with reference to Shakespeare’s sonnet 18, 116 and 138. The convention of love is well captured in the sonnet 18, one of the fair youth sonnets. It shows the essence of love within a 14

From the sonnet 138, we can see the hypocrisies and deceits in love. In sonnet 138, we can see even people lies to others when they are in love. It is ignorant to think that all the love are like the iconic prince and princess love in the fairy tale. The deceitful love is a kind of twisted love, breaking the convention of the loyal and faithful in love relation. It is heartbreaking to read the sonnet, “ When my love swears that she is made of truth I do believe her, though I know she lies, That she might think me some untutored youth, Unlearned in the world’s false subtleties. Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young, Although she knows my days are past the best, Simply I credit her false-speaking