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Whilst it hath thought itself so blessed never! How have mine eyes out of their spheres been fitted, In the distraction of this madding fever! O benefit of ill! now I find true That better is by evil still made better; And ruin’d love, when it is built anew, Grows fairer than at first, more strong, far greater. So I return rebuk’d to my ...
William Shakespeare's play Hamlet has contributed many phrases to common English, from the famous "To be, or not to be" to a few less known, but still in everyday English. Some also occur elsewhere (e.g. in the Bible) or are proverbial. All quotations are second quarto except as noted:
"To be, or not to be" is a speech given by Prince Hamlet in the so-called "nunnery scene" of William Shakespeare's play Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1). The speech is named for the opening phrase, itself among the most widely known and quoted lines in modern English literature, and has been referenced in many works of theatre, literature and music.
Richard Strier additionally notes the complexity of the word "flatter" not only within Sonnet 87 but within other Shakespeare sonnets as well. While the word has been used "in contexts of purely negative self-deception" as well as "in the context of providing genuine beauty," it is utilized within this poem as an "evocation of joy that is brief ...
Parallels have been noted in Petrarch and in Theodore Beza's Poematica, but these are not as implicitly sexual as Shakespeare's poem. Line 5 is glossed by Edward Dowden as "If for love of me thou receivest her whom I love"; George Wyndham, though, has it "If, instead of my love, you take the woman whom I love." Line 8, the next vague line, has ...
Finally, the couplet may be read as reflecting the shame imposed on same-sex love by some, and a desire by the author to spare the young man the cruel harshness of such mockery. Overall, "the couplet is superbly organized, both in the management of its rhythms and in its backward verbal reflection to the patterning of the whole poem."
Tarquin and Lucretia by Titian. The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary Roman noblewoman Lucretia.In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593), Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which he promised to compose a "graver labour".
The character the poet is writing to, in Sonnet 57, is a young male he seems to be attracted to. "Shakespeare's sonnets display a narrative and a Dramatic Personae which combine to threaten conventional assumptions of appropriate love."