7/29/2019 Different Types of Romantic Love.doc

1/1

Different Types of Romantic Love

Modern readers associate the sonnet form with romantic love and with good reason: the firstsonnets written in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy celebrated the poets feelings for theirbeloveds and their patrons. These sonnets were addressed to stylized, lionized women anddedicated to wealthy noblemen, who supported poets with money and other gifts, usually in returnfor lofty praise in print. Shakespeare dedicated his sonnets to Mr. W. H., and the identity of thisman remains unknown. He dedicated an earlier set of poems, Venus and Adonis and Rape of

Lucrece, to Henry Wriothesly, earl of Southampton, but its not known what Wriothesly gave him forthis honor. In contrast to tradition, Shakespeare addressed most of his sonnets to an unnamedyoung man, possibly Wriothesly. Addressing sonnets to a young man was unique in ElizabethanEngland. Furthermore, Shakespeare used his sonnets to explore different types of love between theyoung man and the speaker, the young man and the dark lady, and the dark lady and the speakerIn his sequence, the speaker expresses passionate concern for the young man, praises his beauty,and articulates what we would now call homosexual desire. The woman of Shakespeares sonnetsthe so-called dark lady, is earthy, sexual, and faithlesscharacteristics in direct opposition to loversdescribed in other sonnet sequences, including Astrophil and Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney, acontemporary of Shakespeare, who were praised for their angelic demeanor, virginity, andsteadfastness. Several sonnets also probe the nature of love, comparing the idealized love found inpoems with the messy, complicated love found in real life.

The Dangers of Lust and Love

In Shakespeares sonnets, falling in love can have painful emotional and physical consequencesSonnets 127152, addressed to the so-called dark lady, express a more overtly erotic and physicalove than the sonnets addressed to the young man. But many sonnets warn readers about thedangers of lust and love. According to some poems, lust causes us to mistake sexual desire for truelove, and love itself causes us to lose our powers of perception. Several sonnets warn about thedangers of lust, claiming that it turns humans savage, extreme, rude, cruel (4), as in Sonnet 129The final two sonnets of Shakespeares sequence obliquely imply that lust leads to venereadisease. According to the conventions of romance, the sexual act, or making love, expresses thedeep feeling between two people. In his sonnets, however, Shakespeare portrays making love notas a romantic expression of sentiment but as a base physical need with the potential for horribleconsequences.

Several sonnets equate being in love with being in a pitiful state: as demonstrated by the poems,love causes fear, alienation, despair, and physical discomfort, not the pleasant emotions or euphoriawe usually associate with romantic feelings. The speaker alternates between professing great loveand professing great worry as he speculates about the young mans misbehavior and the dark ladysmultiple sexual partners. As the young man and the dark lady begin an affair, the speaker imagineshimself caught in a love triangle, mourning the loss of his friendship with the man and love with thewoman, and he laments having fallen in love with the woman in the first place. In Sonnet 137, thespeaker personifies love, calls him a simpleton, and criticizes him for removing his powers ofperception. It was love that caused the speaker to make mistakes and poor judgments. Elsewherethe speaker calls love a disease as a way of demonstrating the physical pain of emotional woundsThroughout his sonnets, Shakespeare clearly implies that love hurts. Yet despite the emotional andphysical pain, like the speaker, we continue falling in love. Shakespeare shows that falling in love isan inescapable aspect of the human conditionindeed, expressing love is part of what makes ushuman.