ENGL 225 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Sonnet 130, Sonnet 18, Benvolio
Romeo & Juliet (1594-1596)
Shakespearean Sonnet Form
ABAB
CDCD
EFEFE
GG
Sonnet 18
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Sonnet 130
My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red, than her lips red:
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
I grant I never saw a goddess go,
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:
And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,
As any she belied with false compare.
Sonnet Conventions
• Chase cruelty
• Blazon
• Metaphor
• Order
• Formality
• Symmetry
• Condensation
• Intensity
• Idealism
• Isolation
• Stasis
• Timelessness
• Placelessness
• Poetry
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Romeo & Juliet (1594-1596)
Romeo & Juliet (1595)
• 1.1.1ff PROLOGUE
Two households, both alike in dignity,
In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes
A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;
Whose misadventured piteous overthrows
Do with their death bury their parents' strife.
The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,
And the continuance of their parents' rage,
Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,
Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;
The which if you with patient ears attend,
What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
Prologue Characteristics
• Erotic potentiality
• Audience
• Metonymy
• Narrative
• Asymmetric
• Expansion
• Movement
• society
• Realism
• Law
• Tragedy
• Time-specificity
• Place-boundedness
• Lies
Romeo
• 1.1.163ff
BENVOLIO
It was. What sadness lengthens Romeo's hours?
ROMEO
Not having that, which, having, makes them short.
BENVOLIO
In love?
ROMEO
Out--
BENVOLIO
Of love?
ROMEO
Out of her favour, where I am in love.
BENVOLIO
Alas, that love, so gentle in his view,
Should be so tyrannous and rough in proof!
ROMEO
Alas, that love, whose view is muffled still,
Should, without eyes, see pathways to his will!
Where shall we dine? O me! What fray was here?
Yet tell me not, for I have heard it all.
Here's much to do with hate, but more with love.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate!
O any thing, of nothing first create!
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Mis-shapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire,
sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this.
Dost thou not laugh?
BENVOLIO
No, coz, I rather weep.
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, And summer"s lease hath all too short a date: Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines, Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow"st, Nor shall death brag thou wander"st in his shade, When in eternal lines to time thou grow"st, So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. My mistress" eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red, than her lips red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see i in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight. Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well i know. That music hath a far more pleasing sound:
