Love Styles of Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet
The heart of many of Shakespeare’s works is love and tumultuous relationships. It is not a difficult task to attempt to analyze the relationships of his protagonists. Many of his characters would fit into at least one of the “love-styles” presented by John Alan Lee. There are many different types of relationships and John Alan Lee aims to categorize them, or breaking them down into “different colors,” (Lee, 40). The love-styles can be applied to many relationships such as those in the works of Shakespeare. The love styles that John Alan Lee describes can also determine the successfulness of a relationship. He fits the love styles into a diagram and the location of one style of lover in relation to another can cause a relationship to succeed or fail. This phenomenon is known as the “theory of proximity” (Lee). Two people who share the same love style or who are close to each other on the diagram have a better chance at a successful relationship.
Two of Shakespeare’s most famous works, Antony and Cleopatra and Romeo and Juliet, have much in common. Both center around the romantic relationship between two people who have many reasons why they shouldn’t be together. Romeo and Juliet is focused on the love of two children of feuding families, the Montagues and the Capulets. Similarly, Cleopatra is queen of Egypt and Antony is one of the triumvirs of the Roman Empire. Both are expected to handle their duties but disregard this in order to be together. Both couples meet an early demise due to their inability to live without the other. Both couples also have an underlying awareness that their relationship is doomed to fail. Antony and Cleopatra are somewhat more...
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...leopatra were fated to fail. If this theory is correct, perhaps Romeo and Cleopatra would have been better suited for one another. Romeo would give Cleopatra the attention she craved and Cleopatra would return the same attention. Cleopatra needs someone to give her his undivided attention. Romeo would happily oblige to this. While the relationship would indeed be quite dramatic, it might have a better chance at success. The ideals of relationships that Shakespeare holds differ quite a bit from those of John Alan Lee.
John Alan Lee and Shakespeare both have conflicting ideals on what is necessary in order to maintain a successful relationship. Shakespeare writes his characters into relationships that would be extremely successful had some matter of fate not torn them apart. John Alan Lee would argue that their relationships were doomed from the beginning.
Being one of the most debated texts in history, Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, has the power and ability to divide audiences. Throughout the play, it is seen that Shakespeare has left the audience to contemplate the underlying cause of the Romeo and Juliet tragedy. Shakespeare begins by showing the reckless actions and choices of the lovers, illustrating one of the main contributing factors to their deaths. Friar Lawrence plays a large role in the deaths of the lovers as he is the main instigator, greatly contributing to the deaths. Also, demonstrated through the play is that the lover’s destiny is written in the stars. Without
The romantic tension between Romeo and Juliet and Tony and Maria in Shakespears original play and its modern day remake, Westside Story, is what makes them have such passionate and entrancing scenes. The main reason for romantic tension in these two plays is because the two couples can’t be together like they want to be. There are many different aspects that create different quality of romantic tension in these two scenes. Although the two plays have similar plots, the romantic tension between the two lovers is very different because of the setting, the language and the circumstances in which the lovers face.
Love is only as strong as the people who share it. In William Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, there are relationships from all different viewpoints of love. Four Athenian lovers are caught in a web of love for the wrong person, according to fellow peevish characters. Along the story line of the play, one will be introduced to additional characters that try to be helpful by committing acts they presume will benefit the young lovers, but these characters actually create plot-twists. Also, there are other characters that have the authority to change whatever they feel is necessary without thinking twice. Furthermore, throughout this humored play, Shakespeare portrays various forms of love through arranged marriages, forbidden love, magically tampered love, and unanticipated romances to show how there’s no right or wrong way to love someone.
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is perhaps one of the most well-recognized love stories of all time. However, it is more than just a classic love story, it is a tale of desperation and obsession. While developing these themes, Shakespeare contrasts Romeo and Juliet’s obsession with the concept of real love; he also demonstrates the danger of obsession-Romeo and Juliet do not heed Friar Laurence’s ominously omniscient warning “[t]hese violent delights have violent ends/ and in their triumph die, like fire and powder,/ which, as they kiss, consume”(II vi 9-11), and obsession with honor is likewise dangerous. He probes the theme of despair; the suicidal impulses that become reality for Romeo and Juliet are grounded in the dynamic and
Throughout the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, by William Shakespeare, various types of love are portrayed. According to some of the students of Shakespeare, Shakespeare himself had accumulated wisdom beyond his years in matters pertaining to love (Bloom 89). Undoubtedly, he draws upon this wealth of experience in allowing the audience to see various types of love personified. Shakespeare argues that there are several different types of love, the interchangeable love, the painful love and the love based on appearances, but only true love is worth having.
Many of Shakespeare's plays show a strong theme of love. Romeo and Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing deal primarily with the issue of true and false love. Romeo and Juliet, tragic play, is about two lovers who struggle, sacrifice, and defy their families and society for the sake of love that changes them completely. Although the end of Romeo and Juliet's story is death both of the lovers, their love turns to be immortal. Much Ado About Nothing, comedy play, is about two lovers who their relationship starts as child like and develops to be true love that motives the lovers to sacrifice in order to keep their love. The two plays deal also with the idea of false love. Romeo, the hero of Romeo and Juliet, thinks that he loves Rosaline, but when he meets Juliet, the heroin of Romeo and Juliet, he falls in love with her, forgetting his love to Rosaline. In Much Ado About Nothing, the relationship between Claudio and Hero's, main characters in the play, is based on wealth and appearance attraction. Conventional love is another kind of that is shown in Romeo and Juliet, where it develops in social situations without any consideration to emotions.
Playwright, William Shakespeare, conveys the different forms of love between characters in his drama, Romeo and Juliet. In the small town of Verona the different types of love are highlighted, through character actions and speech. Unrequited love is seen in Romeo and Juliet through Romeo 's 'love ' for Rosaline in Act one, while the forbidden love at first sight, also known as romantic love is seen between Romeo and Juliet. Furthermore, the motherly love/ familial love, Juliet and the Nurse share is also explored.
William Shakespeare has provided some of the most brilliant plays to ever be performed on the stage. He is also the author of numerous sonnets and poems, but he is best known for his plays such as Hamlet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Romeo and Juliet. In this essay I would like to discuss the play and movie, "Romeo and Juliet", and also the movie, Shakespeare in Love.
Romeo and Juliet are madly in love with each other and will go to any lengths to be together.
What is so interesting about Shakespeare's first play, The Comedy of Errors, are the elements it shares with his last plays. The romances of his final period (Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest) all borrowed from the romantic tradition, particularly the Plautine romances. So here, as in the later plays, we have reunions of lost children and parents, husbands and wives; we have adventures and wanderings, and the danger of death (which in this play is not as real to us as it is in the romances). Yet, for all these similarities, the plot of The Comedy of Errors is as simple as the plots of the later plays are complex. It is as though Shakespeare's odyssey through the human psyche in tragedy and comedy brought him back to his beginnings with a sharper sense of yearning, poignancy, and the feeling of loss. But to dismiss this play as merely a simplistic romp through a complicated set of maneuvers is to miss the pure theatrical feast it offers on the stage - the wit and humor of a master wordsmith, the improbability of a plot that sweeps...
In the play “Romeo and Juliet”, Shakespeare shows that love has power to control one’s actions, feelings, and the relationship itself through the bond between a destined couple. The passion between the pair grew strong enough to have the capability to do these mighty things. The predestined newlyweds are brought down a rocky road of obstacles learning love’s strength and the meaning of love.
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was a Renaissance poet and playwright who wrote and published the original versions of 38 plays, 154 sonnets, two long narrative poems, and several other poems. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language, and often called England’s national poet. Several of his works became extremely well known, thoroughly studied, and enjoyed all over the world. One of Shakespeare’s most prominent plays is titled The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet. In this tragedy, the concept that is discussed and portrayed through the characters is love, as they are recognized as being “in love”. The general umbrella of love encompasses various kinds of love such as romantic love, the love of a parent for a child, love of one’s country, and several others. What is common to all love is this: Your own well-being is tied up with that of someone (or something) you love… When love is not present, changes in other people’s well being do not, in general, change your own… Being ‘in love’ infatuation is an intense state that displays similar features: … and finding everyone charming and nice, and thinking they all must sense one’s happiness. At first glance it seems as though Shakespeare advocates the hasty, hormone-driven passion portrayed by the protagonists, Romeo and Juliet; however, when viewed from a more modern, North-American perspective, it seems as though Shakespeare was not in fact endorsing it, but mocking the public’s superficial perception of love. Shakespeare’s criticism of the teens’ young and hasty love is portrayed in various instances of the play, including Romeo’s shallow, flip-flop love for Rosaline then Juliet, and his fights with Juliet’s family. Also, the conseque...
It is well known that Shakespeare’s comedies contain many marriages, some arranged, some spontaneous. During Queen Elizabeth's time, it was considered foolish to marry for love. However, in Shakespeare’s plays, people often marry for love. With a closer look into two of his most famous plays As You Like It and Twelfth Night or What You Will, I found that while marriages are defined and approached differently in these two plays, Shakespeare’s attitudes toward love in both plays share similarities. The marriages in As You Like It’s conform to social expectation, while the marriages are more rebellious in Twelfth Night. Love, in both plays, was defined as
The lovers of Shakespeare’s famous tragedy Romeo and Juliet are perhaps the most famous pair of lovers in history. Their story has been told and remade in countless ways, with a variety of endings. The original piece however ends with tragedy in Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet. Throughout Shakespeare’s tragedy Romeo and Juliet, fate is the driving force in that the star-cross lovers are destined to have a tragic end. Throughout the play, Shakespeare uses literary elements to reveal that our actions are not what controls our life, but it is fate that determines what will happen to us.
Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night revolves around a love triangle that continually makes twists and turns like a rollercoaster, throwing emotions here and there. The characters love each another, but the common love is absent throughout the play. Then, another character enters the scene and not only confuses everyone, bringing with him chaos that presents many different themes throughout the play. Along, with the emotional turmoil, each character has their own issues and difficulties that they must take care of, but that also affect other characters at same time. Richard Henze refers to the play as a “vindication of romance, a depreciation of romance…a ‘subtle portrayal of the psychology of love,’ a play about ‘unrequital in love’…a moral comedy about the surfeiting of the appetite…” (Henze 4) On the other hand, L. G. Salingar questions all of the remarks about Twelfth Night, asking if the remarks about the play are actually true. Shakespeare touches on the theme of love, but emphases the pain and suffering it causes a person, showing a dark and dismal side to a usually happy thought.