Compare the way Shakespeare and two poets of your choice present emotions related to love

comparing three texts, The play; 'Romeo and Juliet' by William Shakespeare and two poems; 'Les Grands Seigneurs' by Dorothy Molloy and 'Havisham' by Carol Ann Duffy. 

There are some paragrpahs that you might want to use in your own essay, you can tweak them to suit your topic of course!!!!!

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  • Created by: Molly
  • Created on: 05-01-13 17:56

Compare the way Shakespeare and two poets of your choice present emotions related to love

Similarities

  • 'Romeo and Juliet' are similar to the two other poems as the text shows a journey through love with sad consequences.
  • Another similarity is that in Romeo and Juliet and the poem, 'Les Grands Seigneurs', The women have a idea of love before hand and it is very different to when they actually experience.
  • All three texts have one thing in common, After all three women get married, their love life and how they view love changes. For 'Havisham', She was jilted, then she became more and more objectified; for the lady in 'Les Grands Seigneurs', she thought that she would have a wonderful time being married and that she would have a equal control in the marriage, but she also became objetified by marriage, like 'Havisham'. In 'Romeo and Juliet', Juliet became more and more conflicted and confused with herself after Romeo kills her cousin, Tybalt. Juliet uses Oxymorons like "Beautiful tyrant,", "fiend angelical", "Dove-feathered raven" and "Wolvish-ravening lamb"

Differences

  • There is an obvious difference in the gender of the three writers. Shakespeare is male, where as Molloy and Duffy are female. This gives the reader a different perspective of love from the two gender's positions. If you read the two poems in comparison to Romeo and Juliet, you can see that The female perspective of love is a lot more realistic, raw and lets the reader see a darker side to love. Whereas  Shakespeare's perspective is much more fantastical and somewhat stereotypical of his time. You can see in the play, that even though Juliet does have power for some of the time (e.g in the balcony scene) she gets that power, slandered somewhat by the more predominant males, like her father, Paris and Romeo. Although, in the play, you see some more powerful sides to women, like when Romeo and Juliet are speaking in the balcony scene, she is in power for most of the time. The reader can see this through the stage directions, because Juliet is up high for the entire scene and this shoes her power. She also tells Romeo to tell him that he loves her and arranges the time of the wedding.
  • Another difference of Romeo and Juliet to the two poems are that, ultimatly, Juliet died for love, not because of it. We can see this very clearly in 'Havisham; In 'Havisham', Duffy shows that Havisham is becoming less and less human and woman-like because of what love did to her. Duffy uses imagery techniques in her writing, such as the line "I've dark green pebbles for eyes," and "Ropes on the back of my hands I could strangle with" and also the title of the Poem, "Havisham" this lack of title could show even more objectification, It almost shows that she isn't a person any more, she doesn't even have a title. These techniques give the impression that love has destroyed her. We can also see something similar in Duffy's 'Les Grands Seigneurs'. In the last stanza of the poem, the lady talks about  how she has become nothing more than a "toy", "a bit of fluff". This also shows objectification and how love is to blame for this. The difference of this to Romeo and Juliet, is that in the end, Romeo and Juliet die because they loved each other so much. Essentially, Juliet could be counted as the only happy one of all the women, even though she committed suicide. You can see that a good thing has come out of a bad thing, as the two feuding families resolved their differences and made up because of what happened to the children, whereas in the two other poems, their grief and suffering hasn't made anything better, for anyone.

Overall comparison

The three texts and women's voices I have looked at...............

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