Shakespeare explores the notion of romantic love in order to demonstrate that belonging in a relationship is a difficult process which ultimately leads to acceptance and fulfilment. The play's comedic structure allows characters to be removed from their world of corruption to a pastoral settin...

Task By looking closely at the sonnet, consider to what extent its particular techniques add to the impact of its subject matter. The sonnet 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds' written by Shakespeare is about constant love. There are three quatrains that are about the three st...

Shakespeare presents love and lust as two very different things. Although one is the perpetrator of the other and both are kin, lust is presented as love's darker cousin. The imagery used to depict love in Sonnet 116 shows how noble and altruistic the ideal of love is. Shakespeare presents it as un...

"La Belle Dame sans Merci," seems to depict a knight-at-arms who has been seduced and abandoned by an unpredictable fairy. Told in the form of a dialogue, the poem tells the experience of loving wholly and the sting of abandonment, along with the solitude of faithfulness. At the beginning...

(A) Compare how love and hate are presented in Sonnet 130 by Shakespeare and Havisham by Carol Ann Duffy. (B) Compare these poems with two more poems, one by Carol Ann Duffy and one from the pre-1914 poetry bank. Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 is a poem in which he forms an argument against con...