Love Language of Shakespeare

Love Language of Shakespeare

Shakespeare often interweaves the theme of love in his stories through his utilization of love languages. He often juxtaposes passionate love with uncontrollable conflicts through his own elaboration of language devices and images. “Sonnet 130” is his famous sonnet to his mistress, the portrait of the lady is shown through a series of poetic languages. Likewise, in “Twelfth Night”, romantic love is also the main theme in the play with love and pain leading to a happy ending. As a result, although Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130” and “Twelfth Night” are not discussing love precisely the same way, Shakespeare explores several conventions with the utilization of love language, through the use of diction, sentence structure, and utilization of poetic devices including similes and metaphors. 

The characters drive Shakespeare's plays, and each word, sentence structure, and rhythm choice reveals something about the character, their relationships, or their emotions at that particular time. Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night is centered on the idea of deception (Le PoiDevin, 2018). It follows Viola as she pretends to be a guy named Cesario to work for Duke Orsino (falling in love with him in the process). Despite Olivia's complaints that she is too depressed to date, Duke Orsino believes they are in love (until she proceeds to fall in love with the disguised Viola, still pretending to be Cesario). The misunderstanding is even worse when Viola's twin brother Sebastian shows up there because he will be taken for Viola's new identity (and Viola, likewise, mistaken for her brother).In the play Twelfth Night, Acts 1 and 2 are about love; almost every character has romantic feelings for someone. Through their language and the imagery they employ, they individually convey these feelings differently, revealing a lot about them. For instance, Orsino discusses love in verse or poetry, the everyday language of courtly love. On the other hand, Malvolio nearly exclusively uses prose when expressing his love for Olivia.  

Shakespeare modifies the conventional idea in Sonnet 130. This poem is reversed. The woman is indicated to be quite attractive, yet the poet needs to be realistic about the person he loves (Sohmer, 2019). The metaphors are not acceptable in this context, nor are customary exaggerations of a woman's beauty. This sonnet makes numerous comparisons between the speaker's sweetheart and other attractive women, never in the lover's favor. Her eyes are "nothing like the sun," her lips are "less red than coral," her breasts are "dun-colored," and the hair on her head looks like black cables. The poet asserts to have observed flowers that had been "damasked". He uses red and white to distinguish between them in the second quatrain, but he does not notice any roses like that on his mistress' cheeks. Furthermore, he claims that his mistress's breath "reeks" less seductively compared to perfume. Even though he loves the sound of her voice, he acknowledges in the third quatrain that music "hath a far more delightful sound" and that his mistress—despite never having seen a god—walks with a distinct gait. The speaker, however, asserts throughout the couplet that he cherishes and is exceptional in his love, as with any love in which false comparisons are created to exaggerate the loved one's beauty, it is believed with false comparison. 

Moreover, in order to address his love languages. For instance, iambic pentameter is utilized in the Twelfth Night, showing the rhythm of a heartbeat, with strong and soft beats. Shakespeare speaks in metaphors, similes, and personification, which are all examples of poetic devices. Understanding the play is aided by being able to tell when his characters are speaking metaphorically. The poetic device displayed by the two texts is the use of metaphor. A metaphor uses a term or phrase to describe someone or something that is not intended to be taken literally but rather to establish a contrast. In the first text 'Twelfth Night, acts 1 and 2, metaphor is displayed when Orsino likens music to food for lovers by establishing the victory of love over Orsino when he asks the musicians to keep playing the music so that he is never hungry for love again. He uses this metaphor in his speech to try to build control over love, which makes it quite complicated. He requests that the musicians provide him with so much music—the "meal of love," as he puts it—that he will become overstimulated and cease to need it. However, Orsino's method turns out to be too easy; while it makes him tired of the music, it is unsuccessful in getting him to stop thinking about love. The metaphor of the second text, 'Sonnet 130, ' is displayed when Shakespeare describes his mistress (Hasan, 2020). He claims that if hairs were cables, her head would be covered in black wires. I've seen red, white, and damask roses, but I haven't seen any search roses in her check.' This metaphor is used to describe the hair and cheek of the mistress. He does not define her exaggeratedly but rather in a more natural form. 

A contrasting poetic device used is personification in Twelfth Night Acts 1 and 2. Personification applies human traits or characteristics to inanimate things or conceptual ideas. The Captain says, for instance, the waves are Sebastian's acquaintances. This means that Sebastian is familiar with the wars. Another contrasting poetic device used in 'Sonnet 130' is the use of alliteration. Alliteration is the rapid succession of similar consonant sounds in a line. The sounds of /b/, /w/, and /h/, for instance, in the bars, "If hairs are wires, black wires grow on her head," "Than in the breath that from my mistress smells," and "If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun." 

A metaphor is a figure of speech that directly alludes to one subject while discussing another to achieve a particular rhetorical impact. Metaphors are utilized to reveal his longings of love. It could indicate, conceal clarity, or point up unnoticed connections between two disparate concepts. This has been demonstrated through the metaphors in the opening lines of Twelfth Night, discussing how music is compared to food for lovers and how her hair is compared to wire. A metaphor's primary purpose is to express something unfamiliar by comparing it to something well-known. It is also utilized to convey emotion and reflect the speaker's viewpoint, serves as a tool for justification, and serves as both an analogy and a figure of speech. This shows that this poetic device has caused certain symbols, traits, or feelings to be linked together. 

Therefore, “Sonnet 30” and “Twelfth Night” shows different kinds of love. In order to portray lust and true love in the two works, language devices are utilized. The words, rhythm, and structure of the sentence all depict the character, the love relationships, and the emotion in the plot. Like “Twelfth Night” where almost all of the characters had romantic feelings, the love languages are different for various purposes, and Orsino speaks love in verse or poetry to depict typical courtly love. In Sonnet 130, love language is adopted through a series of literary devices to praise the mistress’s imperfections to illustrate true love of accepting paragons in outside appearances. As a result, Shakespeare plays with the love language to depict the tone of truthfulness and falseness in both works for the purpose of characterizations and developing the plot, bringing high romantic imaginations to the readers. 

Work Cited 

Hasan, Mariwan, et al. “William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 130: A Reconsideration.” Acuity: Journal of   English Language Pedagogy, Literature and Culture, vol. 5, no. 2, 2020, pp. 148–169., https://doi.org/10.35974/acuity.v5i2.2370. 

Poidevin, Robin Le. “Love, Identity and the Way of Ideas in Twelfth Night.” The Routledge Companion to Shakespeare and Philosophy, 2018, pp. 473–482., https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315677019-33. 

Sohmer, Steve. “The Dark Lady of the Merchant of Venice.” Reading Shakespeare's Mind,  2017, pp. 53–74., https://doi.org/10.7228/manchester/9781526113276.003.0003.