Christopher Marlowe is a late sixteenth-century writer sometimes placed “close to Shakespeare in his achievement” (Ribner 212); Marlowe's pastoral poem “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” (1599) was even initially “ascribed to Shakespeare” (Brooke 393). With a different tone than most of his dramatic work, Marlowe's poetry often includes a male and a female character in a real or imagined romantic relationship. “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” portrays a somewhat powerful male character who performs all of the action, while the female character is portrayed as passive and superficial. Like many of the metaphysical poets of the next century, Marlowe's sixteenth century male character uses rhetoric to seduce the female character (which is paradoxical since the men tend to praise and ideal chaste women), and in the case of Marlowe's Shepherd, the rhetoric he uses tends to focus on superficial promises of idealistic love and pleasure. He enforces the common theme of carpe diem suggesting that there will be immediate gratification of their sexual passions, escaping societal rules and returning to a pristine condition of happiness. Furthermore, the Shepherd is often so preoccupied with convincing his lover “to come live with” him and be his “love” (Marlowe 20), that at times he becomes forceful, sexual and aggressive by using double entendres and hidden sexual images. Thus, in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” not only does Marlowe's poetry reinforce gender stereotypes of the male as active and the female as acted upon, Marlowe's male character goes one step further and use aggression to get what he wants from his female lover: her body.
Marlowe’s contemporary, Sir Walter Ralegh’s response titled “The Nymph’s Reply to t...
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There are times in Marlowe's poetry when it seems as if true love is desired by the male characters, but the men seem to have a false belief about what love actually is. The men in Marlowe's poetry seem to be ignorant of what women actually desire and believe that women are like animals and need to be manipulated, so when the men try to state their love for a woman, they spend all of their time describing superficial things thinking that it is what women want to hear. Thus, Marlowe's poetry portrays both women and men in a stereotypical fashion which is unrealistic, and the misogynistic representation of gender relations goes beyond merely showing males as active and females as inactive. There is an implicit belief in Marlowe's poetry is that there is nothing fundamentally wrong about males using excessive manipulation and physical force to have sex with women.
Literature of the English Restoration offers the example of a number of writers who wrote for a courtly audience: literary production, particularly in learned imitation of classical models, was part of the court culture of King Charles II. The fact of a shared model explains the remarkable similarities between “The Imperfect Enjoyment” by the Earl of Rochester and “The Disappointment” by Aphra Behn—remarkable only because readers are surprised to read one poem about male sexual impotence from the late seventeenth century, let alone two examples of this genre by well-known courtly writers. In fact, Richard Quaintance presents ten more examples by lesser-known poets as he defines the literary sub-genre of the neo-Classical “imperfect enjoyment poem,” written in imitation of Roman poems on the same subject, which is shared by Rochester and Behn (Quaintance 190). Since Rochester and Behn are working along such closely similar lines in terms of the artistic models that their own poems aim to imitate, it is therefore fair to ask the question: what are the main differences in their compositional technique within this tightly-defined literary sub-genre of the neo-Classical “imperfect enjoyment poem”? By examining features of each poem in turn—including form (including this sub-genre they share), but also narrative voice and tone—with some examination of the secondary critical literature on both Rochester and Behn, I hope to demonstrate that there are distinct differences in compositional technique which involve the difference in sex between these two writers. But my conclusion will attempt to problematize the very notion of an authorial sex difference by raising the concept of gender, and in particular the aspect of “performativity”—...
Perhaps it is Shakespeare’s last unspoken word on the concept of love: childlike and mischievous. For those under love’s spell, perception becomes distorted in the subjectivity of the imagination rather than the objectivity of truth. Helena’s metaphor effectively imparts Shakespeare’s notion that Love has a beguiling and capricious nature. For Shakespeare, lover’s left disillusioned and irrational is conceivably the happiest
Throughout his life... was a man self-haunted, unable to escape from his own drama, unable to find any window that would not give him back the image of himself. Even the mistress of his most passionate love-verses, who must (one supposes) have been a real person, remains for him a mere abstraction of sex: a thing given. He does not see her --does not apparently want to see her; for it is not of her that he writes, but of his relation to her; not of love, but of himself loving.
Marvell, Andrew. "To His Coy Mistress." The Norton Anthology Of English Literature. The Major Authors Ninth ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2012. 751. Print.
Traditional female characteristics and female unrest are underscored in literary works of the Middle Ages. Although patriarchal views were firmly established back then, traces of female contempt for such beliefs could be found in several popular literary works. Female characters’ opposition to societal norms serves to create humor and wish- fulfillment for female and male audiences to enjoy. “Lanval” by Marie De France and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” by Geoffrey Chaucer both show subversion of patriarchal attitudes by displaying the women in the text as superior or equal to the men. However, “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” also incorporates conventional societal ideas by including degradation of women and mistreatment of a wife by her husband.
Shakespeare’s story, Love Labour’s Lost, focuses the story on the endearing lust of men. Women are a powerful force, so in order to persuade them men will try to use a variety of different resources in order to attract the opposite sex. Men will often use their primal instincts like a mating call, which could equivocate today to whistling at a woman as she walks by. With the use of lies to tell a girl what she wants to hear, the musk cologne in order to make you appear more sensual, or the cliché use of the love poem, men strive to appeal to women with the intent to see his way into her heart. William Shakespeare is a man, who based on some of his other works, has a pretty good understand and is full of passion for the opposite sex. Nonetheless, whether it had been honest love or perverse lust, Shakespeare, along with most men, aimed to try to charm women. With keeping this understanding of Shakespeare in mind, his weapon of choice, to find his portal way into a woman’s heart, was his power of writing.
Fiction of this period addressed the paradigms of English masculinity and its modeling. The combination of virility, manliness and social respectability is explored throughout the works of many writers of the period. Men continue to find themselves trapped by the construct of a “gentleman”: a “strict doctrine of male virtue placed tremendous pressure on men, who represented in a sense the purveyors of patriarchal respectability,” as Annette Federico notes (56). Englishness as an identity is based upon the ideal of the gentleman and male characters of this period comply with this ideal. In the world of a rising middle class, imperial conquests, shifting gender roles and economic changes, it was getting harder for men to achieve the ideal of being gentlemen.
The speaker of “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd” shines yet another light on the general plot of the poems. In this poem, we see a possible reply of the woman to the original “Passionate Shepherd” in the Christopher Marlowe poem. Unimpressed by the shepherds extravagant promises, she practically answers that such material things will fade and the only things valuable are the passionate and pure feelings of love in youth. If her shepherd could make these last, she might be moved to be his love. This poem evokes in the reader both feelings of romance (the nymph does seem as though she may care about the eloquent shepherd and want to be his love) and those of sadness (the nymph seems to want something more than what the shepherd may be able to offer her).
In the article “Courtly Love: Who Needs It?” by E. Jane Burns, the author establishes what would be considered the quintessential female persona as it appears in medieval literature, particularly in the romance genre. She begins by calling attention to the similarities between the expected mannerisms of women in the structure of courtly love and the modern book The Rules. The text is a self-help guide for women who are looking to attract a husband by employing medieval methods of attraction (Burns 23). It employs outdated strategies to encourage women to become unemotional and disinterested, but also subservient, with anticipation of attaining the unwavering affection of a potential suitor. Thereby perpetuating the well-established “ideology
Authors use poetry to creatively present attitudes and opinions. “A Man’s Requirements,” by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent upon Public Employment” are two poems with distinct attitudes about love that contain different literary approaches. In both of the poems, love is addressed from a different perspective, producing the difference in expectation and presentation, but both suggest the women are subservient in the relationships.
Literature is a form of art with many facets, many obvious and others subtle. The surface of literature can be composed of many elements such as genre, form, rhythm, tone, diction, sentence structure, etc. Time periods, authors’ personal style and type of work all determine what elements are used in the literature. The deeper more subtle side of literature is the use of symbolism, imagery and the significance of the work. In most works of literature, parallels can be drawn between the author’s personality and current life’s events through the subject matter, the characters, and the use of specific literary techniques. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s use of literary techniques in the first two stanzas of The Lover: A Ballad, are consistent throughout the six stanza ballad identifying and refuting the ways in which women were defined by literature of the 18th century era.
Marlowe, Christopher. "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love." From The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Sixth ed. New York: Norton, 1993.
Snow, Edward A. "Marlowe's Doctor Faustus and the Ends of Desire." Two Renaissance Mythmakers: Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. Ed. Alvin Kernan. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Print.
They seemed to had deifted off from thinking about those above them, and instead started focusing on themselves more than anything else. This is evident by the large amount of poems about a significant other. Christopher Marlowe demonstrates this idea in “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love” by speaking about nature and how the “steepy mountain yield” all of the beautiful sights he sees (Marlowe 4). He is also describing this to his interest, and does not seem to even mention another entity throughout the whole poem, emphasizing the change to individualism. This change is also demonstrated in Sonnet 31 by Sir Philip Sidney were he brings up, “that busy archer,” referring to Cupid (Stanley 4). This shows that poets at the time were not afraid to go against what the Church would deem suitable at the time, so they wrote whatever they felt was best for themselves. The poets translated the idea of becoming more independent and not having to get so much from a higher entity, which could still be translated into