Philip Sidney

Both King Lear and Of Love and Dust are stories about characters who seek power, but die because a stronger power is in their way. In both stories, two kinds of power are contrasted: physical power, or violence, and psychological power. Physical power is the kind of power people use when they’re threatening to use or are using brute force on someone else. Cornwall uses this when he blinds Gloucester in King Lear, as does Bonbon when he shoots the hawk as a threat to Marcus in Of Love and Dust.…

In the novel, Edmund shows both greed and dutifulness as a way of showing duplicity of both society as a whole and man in particular. Edmund is a bastard to Gloucester, a duke of England. He has a step-brother, Edgar, who is a son of Gloucester by law, despite not actually being his biological offspring. Edmund shows his inner greed through his famous speech: (add quote, "Thy nature art my goddess") This quote clearly shows Edmund desiring his brother's holdings, lusting after them with a…

Power is the ability to manipulate and control what one desires; it is convincing someone to do something without asking authority, but it also has a positive connotation with favourable characteristics to support it. Shakespeare uses these characteristics to contrast between the moral and the corrupt. However in “King Lear” there is a prominent aspect of power that corrupts the characters foreshadowing their death. Goneril and Regan are corrupted by the power given by their father Lear and…

Throughout William Shakespeare’s sonnets, there are many highs and lows in his love life. Shakespeare encounters jealousy, heartbreak, utter bliss, and everything in between. All of the first 126 sonnets are addressed to a man. This man is Shakespeare’s rival poet, but also his younger, extremely handsome lover. However, this lover is not faithful and gives Shakespeare as much grief as he does pleasure. The poem I chose to analyze is Sonnet 71. The organization of the sonnet and the meaning…

The reason or theories behind Shakespeare focusing on topics of love, friendship and marriage in his sonnets “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” - William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s dream. (Goodreads). William Shakespeare’s works, especially his sonnets, namely sonnet 30, sonnet 55 and sonnet 116 included ideas of love, friendship and marriage. Topics of such, are important to Shakespeare because of what went on in…

Both Oscar Wilde and Christina Rossetti present the attractiveness of wrongdoing and fear of its consequences in both similar and different ways within An Ideal Husband and Rossetti’s Selected Poems. Rossetti and Wilde consider the attractiveness of wrongdoing under different themes. Wilde looks more at a political side of wrongdoing, whereas Rossetti considers wrongdoing in a religious sense. Mrs. Cheveley is a character that is very attracted to wrongdoing; this is evident in An Ideal…

A sonnet is a poem usually consisting of fourteen lines linked by a regular rhythm and one of two mayor rhyme schemes - that of either an Italian or Shakespearean sonnet (Prescott, 2010). Such forms will be analyzed in the works of two of the greatest poets of all time – John Donne and William Shakespeare. They are worthy canonical figures that are still acknowledged and studied today, were influenced by cultural and historical features of the era in which they wrote and included aesthetics…

The characters portrayed by Browning in his dramatic monologues are various and often rise from the world of the Italian Renaissance. From the artist Fra Lippo Lippi who has become a monk without his will, to Andrea del Sarto, a great painter who has subordinated his art to the demands of an exploitative wife, Browning manages to reveal the true value of art. The pictures of great artists blended with historical detail are embodied in his poems. Vasari’s Lives of the artistsis the source of the…

Self-knowledge is defined as the understanding of oneself or one’s own motives or characters. In the tragedy of King Lear, death is a common factor as is most tragedies written by Shakespeare. Throughout King Lear, many of the characters lacked self-knowledge when the play began. Due to the circumstances at large, many of the characters in the play either began to change for the chance of surviving, such like Edgar. Other characters like Lear began to change, but some characters remained “true…

The human condition questions human morality, the capacity to communicate deceit and the capacity to feel which is manifested in the perception of authentic or deceptive relationships, reflection and realisation and the altering of an individual’s identity. Shakespeare’s King Lear explores the human condition through characters of the play which give insight of the aspects of humanity. Shakespeare’s universality of concepts of deceit, realisation and identity provides relevance to the modern era…