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Out of the two Mercutio poems, I have chosen the first one on Mercutio's thoughts before death as my favourite. A poetic technique I have noticed used was the evocative imagery to create a mental picture for the reader. For example, "Looking toward the sky and praying for help" and "Swords in my soul, stabbed to death" paint powerful visual images. The use of imagery ties into another technique used metaphor. I believe that the recurring phrase, "I am madness", ties towards Mercutio's internal struggle, his vivid use of imagery in his final words conveys Mercutio's internal struggle with identity. I see this poem as despite all the misogynistic comments, and penis jokes Mercutio was never true to himself, and only in his final words he can express his inner thoughts.

Whilst not relating to both Romeo, and Juliet, the line "I am what I am, and You are what they want you do be" links to how throughout the play Juliet never had a say in anything, especially during her marriage with Paris. Juliet is her own person, yet because of how little her parents understand of her "[she] is what they want [her] to be.

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In Act 2, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet", Friar Lawrence engages in a soliloquy about the dual nature of plants, which can have both healing and poisonous properties. Lawrence draws a compassion to this to the duality in human nature, suggesting that like plants, humans can possess the same healing and poisonous qualities however it just depends on the nurturing of the plant to make it have either on of said qualities. Furthering on Lawrence's point, he extends this metaphor between the feud between the Capulet and Montague families, mentioning how it their conflict is not resolved it can lead to serious consequences in their world.

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Homework, Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio - 9.17.2023

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Homework, Romeo, Mercutio and Benvolio - 9.17.2023

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Mercutio:
Mercutio is Romeo's best friend, a character who Shakespeare has written in order to act as the epitome of a "masculine" figure, with masculinity in the play being aggression and sexualization. Throughout the play this is evident, with a great example when Mercutio makes his Queen Mab speech. In this speech Mercutio depicts Queen Mab as this fairy who affects peoples dreams, however Mercutio description of what Queen Mab would do to maids  reveals a degenerate, lonely side of Mercutio. I believe that Mercutio Queen Mab speech reveals Shakespeare's intention when writing Mercutio, this being a character who acts as a complete opposite to Romeo when regarding their views on love. Mercutio has a prosaic view on love, seeing it as nothing but sex, whilst Romeo is a romantic, seeing it liberating force.

Benvolio:
Benvolio is apart of the Romeo, and Mercutio trio, being apart of the Montague family as Romeo's cousin. Benvolio acting as the problem-solver or peacemaker in the trio. Yet despites these traits I view Benvolio as a somewhat irrelevant and boring character in the play. With the characters of Mercutio, a witty character who has so much depth, and Romeo, a character in which the audience is interested in seeing how his love with Juliet will play out. But yet in the trio there is still Benvolio, being out-shadowed by his two friends and just playing as a mediator throughout the entire play.

Romeo:
Romeo is a character who acts entirely on emotion without thinking his actions through. Whether this be marrying Juliet on the spot, or deciding he has to fake his death. But it is ultimately this trait which drives the play, and I think this is intentional by Shakespeare to separate the play from reality.

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Homework, Modern Perspectives of Romeo and Juliet - 9.6.2023

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Homework, Modern Perspectives of Romeo and Juliet - 9.6.2023

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In the essay "A modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet", the writer, Gail Kern Paster discuses William Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" from a historical and cultural perspective. Through Pastors essay, she explores the theme of desire, identity, and gender from within the play, highlighting cultural shifts towards attitudes towards individualism and love during Shakespeare's time. Paster focuses lots on the difference in attitudes surrounding womanhood, and objectification in the modern day.

Whilst I understand Shakespeare's writing as during his time discussion and attitudes towards woman are entirely different as they are today. I ultimately agree with Pastors argument towards how "Romeo and Juliet" acts as a reflection towards cultural tension surrounding gender and identity during Shakespeare's time. I agree with pastors argument as attitudes surrounding gender norms and the notion surrounding what it meant to be a man or women have been challenged in Shakespeare's play as the character Romeo is portrayed differently towards the masculine stereotype you would expect from a "man" during this time period.

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Does need an introduction? Of all Shakespeare's plays, it has been the most continuously popular since its first performance in the mid-1590s. It would seem, then, the most direct of Shakespeare's plays in its emotional impact. What could be easier to understand and what could be more moving than the story of two adolescents finding in their sudden love for each other a reason to defy their families' mutual hatred by marrying secretly? The tragic outcome of their blameless love (their "misadventured piteous overthrows") seems equally easy to understand: it results first from Tybalt's hotheaded refusal to obey the Prince's command and second from accidents of timing beyond any human ability to foresee or control. Simple in its story line, clear in its affirmation of the power of love over hate, Romeo and Juliet seems to provide both a timeless theme and universal appeal. Its immediacy stands in welcome contrast to the distance, even estrangement, evoked by other Shakespeare plays. No wonder it is often the first Shakespeare play taught in schools-on the grounds of its obvious relevance to the emotional and social concerns of young people.

Recent work by social historians on the history of private life in western European culture, however, offers a complicating perspective on the timelessness of Romeo and Juliet. At the core of the play's evident accessibility is the importance and privilege modern Western culture grants to desire, regarding it as deeply expressive of individual identity and central to the personal fulfillment of women no less than men. But, as these historians have argued, such conceptions of desire reflect cultural changes in human consciousness-in ways of imagining and articulating the nature of desire. In England until the late sixteenth century, individual identity had been imagined not so much as the result of autonomous, personal growth in consciousness but rather as a function of social station, an individual's place in a network of social and kinship structures. Furthermore, traditional culture distinguished sharply between the nature of identity for men and women. A woman's identity was conceived almost exclusively in relation to male authority and marital status. She was less an autonomous, desiring self than any male was; she was a daughter, wife, or widow expected to be chaste, silent, and, above all, obedient. It is a profound and necessary act of historical imagination, then, to recognize innovation in the moment when Juliet impatiently invokes the coming of night and the husband she has disobediently married: "Come, gentle night; come, loving black-browed night, / Give me my Romeo" ( 3.2.21 -23).

Recognizing that the nature of desire and identity is subject to historical change and cultural innovation can provide the basis for rereading Romeo and Juliet. Instead of an uncomplicated, if lyrically beautiful, contest between young love and "ancient grudge," the play becomes a narrative that expresses an historical conflict between old forms of identity and new modes of desire, between authority and freedom, between parental will and romantic individualism. Furthermore, though the Chorus initially sets the lovers as a pair against the background of familial hatred, the reader attentive to social detail will be struck instead by Shakespeare's care in distinguishing between the circumstances of male and female lovers: "she as much in love, her means much less / To meet her new belovèd anywhere" ( 2. Chorus. 11 -12, italics added). The story of "Juliet and her Romeo" may be a single narrative, but its clear internal division is drawn along the traditionally unequal lines of gender.

Because of such traditional notions of identity and gender, Elizabethan theatergoers might have recognized a paradox in the play's lyrical celebration of the beauty of awakened sexual desire in the adolescent boy and girl. By causing us to identify with Romeo and Juliet's desire for one another, the play affirms their love even while presenting it as a problem in social management. This is true not because Romeo and Juliet fall in love with forbidden or otherwise unavailable sexual partners; such is the usual state of affairs at the beginning of Shakespearean comedy, but those comedies end happily. Rather Romeo and Juliet's love is a social problem, unresolvable except by their deaths, because they dare to marry secretly in an age when legal, consummated marriage was irreversible. Secret marriage is the narrative device by which Shakespeare brings into conflict the new privilege claimed by individual desire and the traditional authority granted fathers to arrange their daughters' marriages. Secret marriage is the testing ground, in other words, of the new kind of importance being claimed by individual desire. Shakespeare's representation of the narrative outcome of this desire as tragic-here, as later in the secret marriage that opens Othello-may suggest something of Elizabethan society's anxiety about the social cost of romantic individualism.

The conflict between traditional authority and individual desire also provides the framework for Shakespeare's presentation of the Capulet-Montague feud. The feud, like the lovers' secret marriage, is another problem in social management, another form of socially problematic desire. We are never told what the families are fighting about or fighting for; in this sense the feud is both causeless and goal-less. The Chorus's first words insist not on the differences between the two families but on their similarity: they are two households "both alike in dignity." Later, after Prince Escalus has broken up the street brawl, they are "In penalty alike" ( 1.2.2). Ironically, then, they are not fighting over differences. Rather it is Shakespeare's careful insistence on the lack of difference between Montague and Capulet that provides a key to understanding the underlying social dynamic of the feud. Just as desire brings Romeo and Juliet together as lovers, desire in another form brings the Montague and Capulet males out on the street as fighters. The feud perpetuates a close bond of rivalry between these men that even the Prince's threat of punishment cannot sever: "Montague is bound as well as I," Capulet tells Paris ( 1.2.1). Indeed, the feud seems necessary to the structure of male-male relations in Verona. Feuding reinforces male identity-loyalty to one's male ancestors-at the same time that it clarifies the social structure: servants fight with servants, young noblemen with young noblemen, old men with old men.

That the feud constitutes a relation of desire between Montague and Capulet is clear from the opening, when the servants Gregory and Sampson use bawdy innuendo to draw a causal link between their virility and their eagerness to fight Montagues: "A dog of that house shall move me to stand," i.e., to be sexually erect ( 1.1.12). The Montagues seem essential to Sampson's masculinity since, by besting Montague men, he can lay claim to Montague women as symbols of conquest. (This, of course, would be a reductive way of describing what Romeo does in secretly marrying a Capulet daughter.) The feud not only establishes a structure of relations between men based on competition and sexual aggression, but it seems to involve a particularly debased attitude toward women. No matter how comic the wordplay of the Capulet servants may be, we should not forget that the sexual triangle they imagine is based on fantasized rape: "I will push Montague's men from the wall and thrust his maids to the wall" ( 1.1.18-19). Gregory and Sampson are not interested in the "heads" of the Montague maidens, which might imply awareness of them as individuals. They are interested only in their "maidenheads." Their coarse view of woman as generic sexual object is reiterated in a wittier vein by Mercutio, who understands Romeo's experience of awakened desire only as a question of the sexual availability of his mistress: "O Romeo, that she were, O, that she were / An open-arse, thou a pop'rin pear" ( 2.1.40 -41).

Feuding, then, is the form that male bonding takes in Verona, a bonding which seems linked to the derogation of woman. But Romeo, from the very opening of the play, is distanced both physically and emotionally from the feud, not appearing until the combatants and his parents are leaving the stage. His reaction to Benvolio's news of the fight seems to indicate that he is aware of the mechanisms of desire that are present in the feud: "Here's much to do with hate, but more with love" ( 1.1.180). But it also underscores his sense of alienation: "This love feel I, that feel no love in this" ( 187). He is alienated not only from the feud itself, one feels, but more importantly from the idea of sexuality that underlies it. Romeo subscribes to a different, indeed a competing view of woman-the idealizing view of the Petrarchan lover. In his melancholy, his desire for solitude, and his paradox-strewn language, Romeo identifies himself with the style of feeling and address that Renaissance culture named after the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca or Petrarch, most famous for his sonnets to Laura. By identifying his beloved as perfect and perfectly chaste, the Petrarchan lover opposes the indiscriminate erotic appetite of a Gregory or Sampson. He uses the frustrating experience of intense, unfulfilled, and usually unrequited passion to refine his modes of feeling and to enlarge his experience of self.

It is not coincidental, then, that Shakespeare uses the language and self-involved behaviors of the Petrarchan lover to dramatize Romeo's experience of love. For Romeo as for Petrarch, love is the formation of an individualistic identity at odds with other kinds of identity: "I have lost myself. I am not here. / This is not Romeo. He's some other where" ( 1.1.205-6). Petrarchan desire for solitude explains Romeo's absence from the opening clash and his lack of interest in the activities of his gang of friends, whom he accompanies only reluctantly to the Capulet feast: "I'll be a candle holder and look on" ( 1.4.38). His physical isolation from his parents-with whom he exchanges no words in the course of the play-further suggests his shift from traditional, clan identity to the romantic individualism prefigured by Petrarch.

Shakespeare's comic irony is that such enlargement of self is itself a mark of conventionality, since Petrarchism in European literature was by the late sixteenth century very widespread. A more cutting irony is that the Petrarchan lover and his sensual opponent (Sampson or Gregory) have more in common than is first apparent. The Petrarchan lover, in emphasizing the often paralyzing intensity of his passion, is less interested in praising the remote mistress who inspires such devotion than he is in displaying his own poetic virtuosity and his capacity for self-denial. Such a love-like Romeo's for Rosaline-is founded upon frustration and requires rejection. The lover is interested in affirming the uniqueness of his beloved only in theory. On closer look, she too becomes a generic object and he more interested in self-display. Thus the play's two languages of heterosexual desire-Petrarchan praise and anti-Petrarchan debasement-appear as opposite ends of a single continuum, as complementary discourses of woman, high and low. Even when Paris and old Capulet, discussing Juliet as prospective bride, vary the discourse to include a conception of woman as wife and mother, she remains an object of verbal and actual exchange.

In lyric poetry, the Petrarchan mistress remains a function of language alone, unheard, seen only as a collection of ideal parts, a center whose very absence promotes desire. Drama is a material medium, however. In drama, the Petrarchan mistress takes on embodiment and finds an answering voice, like Juliet's gently noting her sonneteer-pilgrim's conventionality: "You kiss by th' book" ( 1.5.122). In drama, the mistress may come surrounded by relatives and an inconveniently insistent social milieu. As was noted above, Shakespeare distinguishes sharply between the social circumstances of adolescent males and females. Thus one consequence of setting the play's domestic action solely within the Capulet household is to set Juliet, the "hopeful lady" of Capulet's "earth" ( 1.2.15), firmly into a familial context which, thanks to the Nurse's fondness for recollection and anecdote, is rich in domestic detail. Juliet's intense focus upon Romeo's surname-"What's Montague? . . . O, be some other name" ( 2.2.43, 44)-is a projection onto her lover of her own conflicted sense of tribal loyalty. Unlike Romeo, whose deepest emotional ties are to his gang of friends, and unlike the more mobile daughters of Shakespearean comedy who often come in pairs, Juliet lives isolated and confined, emotionally as well as physically, by her status as daughter. Her own passage into sexual maturity comes first by way of parental invitation to "think of marriage now" ( 1.3.75). Her father invites Paris, the man who wishes to marry Juliet, to attend a banquet and feast his eyes on female beauty: "Hear all, all see, / And like her most whose merit most shall be" ( 1.2.30 -31). Juliet, in contrast, is invited to look only where her parents tell her:

I'll look to like, if looking liking move.

But no more deep will I endart mine eye

Than your consent gives strength to make it fly.

The logic of Juliet's almost instant disobedience in looking at, and liking, Romeo (rather than Paris) can be understood as the ironic fulfillment of the fears in traditional patriarchal culture about the uncontrollability of female desire, the alleged tendency of the female gaze to wander. Petrarchism managed the vexed question of female desire largely by wishing it out of existence, describing the mistress as one who, like the invisible Rosaline of this play, "will not stay the siege of loving terms, / Nor bide th' encounter of assailing eyes" ( 1.1.220-21). Once Romeo, in the Capulet garden, overhears Juliet's expression of desire, however, Juliet abandons the conventional denial of desire-"Fain would I dwell on form; fain, fain deny / What I have spoke. But farewell compliment" ( 2.2.93 -94). She rejects the "strength" implied by parental sanction and the protection afforded by the Petrarchan celebration of chastity for a risk-taking experiment in desire that Shakespeare affirms by the beauty of the lovers' language in their four scenes together. Juliet herself asks Romeo the serious questions that Elizabethan society wanted only fathers to ask. She challenges social prescriptions, designed to contain erotic desire in marriage, by taking responsibility for her own marriage:

If that thy bent of love be honorable,

Thy purpose marriage, send me word tomorrow,

By one that I'll procure to come to thee,

Where and what time thou wilt perform the rite,

And all my fortunes at thy foot I'll lay

And follow thee my lord throughout the world.

The irony in her pledge-an irony perhaps most obvious to a modern, sexually egalitarian audience-is that Romeo here is following Juliet on an uncharted narrative path to sexual fulfillment in unsanctioned marriage. Allowing her husband access to a bedchamber in her father's house, Juliet leads him into a sexual territory beyond the reach of dramatic representation. Breaking through the narrow oppositions of the play's two discourses of woman-as either anonymous sexual object (for Sampson and Gregory) or beloved woman exalted beyond knowing or possessing (for Petrarch)-she affirms her imaginative commitment to the cultural significance of desire as an individualizing force:

Come, civil night,

Thou sober-suited matron all in black,

And learn me how to lose a winning match

Played for a pair of stainless maidenhoods.

Hood my unmanned blood, bating in my cheeks,

With thy black mantle till strange love grow bold,

Think true love acted simple modesty.

Romeo, when he is not drawn by desire deeper and deeper into Capulet territory, wanders into the open square where the destinies of the play's other young men-and in part his own too-are enacted. Because the young man's deepest loyalty is to his friends, Romeo is not really asked to choose between Juliet and his family but between Juliet and Mercutio, who are opposed in the play's thematic structure. Thus one function of Mercutio's anti-Petrarchan skepticism about the idealization of woman is to offer resistance to the adult heterosexuality heralded by Romeo's union with Juliet, resistance on behalf of the regressive pull of adolescent male bonding-being "one of the guys." This distinction, as we have seen, is in part a question of speaking different discourses. Romeo easily picks up Mercutio's banter, even its sly innuendo against women. Mercutio himself regards Romeo's quickness at repartee as the hopeful sign of a return to a "normal" manly identity incompatible with his ridiculous role as lover:

Why, is not this better now than groaning for love? Now art thou sociable, now art thou Romeo, now art thou what thou art, by art as well as by nature. For this driveling love is like a great natural that runs lolling up and down to hide his bauble in a hole.

Implicit here is a central tenet of traditional misogyny that excessive desire for a woman is effeminizing. For Mercutio it is the effeminate lover in Romeo who refuses shamefully to answer Tybalt's challenge: "O calm, dishonorable, vile submission!" he exclaims furiously ( 3.1.74). Mercutio's death at Tybalt's hands causes Romeo temporarily to agree, obeying the regressive emotional pull of grief and guilt over his own part in Mercutio's defeat. "Why the devil came you between us?" Mercutio asks. "I was hurt under your arm" ( 3.1.106-8). Why, we might ask instead, should Mercutio have insisted on answering a challenge addressed only to Romeo? Romeo, however, displaces blame onto Juliet: "Thy beauty hath made me effeminate / And in my temper softened valor's steel" ( 3.1.119 -20).

In terms of narrative structure, the death of Mercutio and Romeo's slaying of Tybalt interrupt the lovers' progress from secret marriage to its consummation, suggesting the incompatibility between romantic individualism and adolescent male bonding. The audience experiences this incompatibility as a sudden movement from comedy to tragedy. Suddenly Friar Lawrence must abandon hopes of using the love of Capulet and Montague as a force for social reintegration. Instead, he must desperately stave off Juliet's marriage to Paris, upon which her father insists, by making her counterfeit death and by subjecting her to entombment. The legal finality of consummated marriage-which was the basis for Friar Lawrence's hopes "to turn your households' rancor to pure love" ( 2.3.99)-becomes the instrument of tragic design. It is only the Nurse who would allow Juliet to accept Paris as husband; we are asked to judge such a prospect so unthinkable that we then agree imaginatively to Friar Lawrence's ghoulish device.

In terms of the play's symbolic vocabulary, Juliet's preparations to imitate death on the very bed where her sexual maturation from girl- to womanhood occurred confirms ironically her earlier premonition about Romeo: "If he be marrièd, / My grave is like to be my wedding bed" ( 1.5.148 -49). Her brief journey contrasts sharply with those of Shakespeare's comic heroines who move out from the social confinement of daughterhood into a freer, less socially defined space (the woods outside Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the Forest of Arden in As You Like It). There they can exercise a sanctioned, limited freedom in the romantic experimentation of courtship. Juliet is punished for such experimentation in part because hers is more radical; secret marriage symbolically is as irreversible as "real" death. Her journey thus becomes an internal journey in which her commitment to union with Romeo must face the imaginative challenge of complete, claustrophobic isolation and finally death in the Capulet tomb.

It is possible to see the lovers' story, as some critics have done, as Shakespeare's dramatic realization of the ruling metaphors of Petrarchan love poetry-particularly its fascination with "death-marked love" ( Prologue. 9). But, in pondering the implications of Shakespeare's moving his audience to identify with this narrative of initiative, desire, and power, we also do well to remember the psychosocial dynamics of drama. By heightening their powers of identification, drama gives the members of an audience an embodied image of the possible scope and form of their fears and desires. Here we have seen how tragic form operates to contain the complex play of desire/identification. The metaphors of Petrarchan idealization work as part of a complex, ambivalent discourse of woman whose ultimate social function is to encode the felt differences between men and women on which a dominant male power structure is based. Romeo and Juliet find a new discourse of romantic individualism in which Petrarchan idealization conjoins with the mutual avowal of sexual desire. But their union, as we have seen, imperils the traditional relations between males that is founded upon the exchange of women, whether the violent exchange Gregory and Sampson crudely imagine or the normative exchange planned by Capulet and Paris. Juliet, as the daughter whose erotic willfulness activates her father's transformation from concerned to tyrannical parent, is the greater rebel. Thus the secret marriage in which this new language of feeling is contained cannot here be granted the sanction of a comic outcome. When Romeo and Juliet reunite, it is only to see each other, dead, in the dim confines of the Capulet crypt. In this play the autonomy of romantic individualism remains "star-crossed."

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A Modern Perspective: Romeo and Juliet | Folger Shakespeare Library

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Does need an introduction? Of all Shakespeare's plays, it has been the most continuously popular since its first performance in the mid-1590s. It would seem, then, the most direct of Shakespeare's plays in its emotional impact.

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The Petrarchan Sonnet is a rhyming scheme created by the Italian Poet Petrach. In this  rhyming scheme it divides the 14 lined poem into 2 sections, one with an 8 lined stanza with a ABBABBA rhyming, and one 6 lined stanza with either CDCDCD or CDECDE rhyming. Petrarchan Sonnets are typically love poems about her or to her, Petrach the creator of this rhyming verse hoped that through his poetry those who have loved before will understand his suffering. Centuries after Petrarch's poetry Shakespeare continued the theme of "the greater the sighs, the greater the suffering, the greater the love" in his play Romeo and Juliet.

[1]https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2017/11/francesco-petrarch-love-sonnets-christine-norvell.html#:~:text=Francesco%20Petrarch%20and%20Laura%20de,mush%20in%20cheap%20greeting%20cards.

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/sonnet#:~:text=The%20Petrarchan%20sonnet%2C%20perfected%20by,sestet)%20rhyming%20CDCDCD%20or%20CDECDE.

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A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme originating in Italy and brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey in the 16th century. Literally a "little song," the sonnet traditionally reflects upon a single sentiment, with a clarification or "turn" of thought in its concluding lines. There are many different types of sonnets.

The Petrarchan sonnet, perfected by the Italian poet Petrarch, divides the 14 lines into two sections: an eight-line stanza (octave) rhyming ABBAABBA, and a six-line stanza (sestet) rhyming CDCDCD or CDECDE. John Milton's "When I Consider How my Light Is Spent" and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "How Do I Love Thee" employ this form. The Italian sonnet is an English variation on the traditional Petrarchan version. The octave's rhyme scheme is preserved, but the sestet rhymes CDDCEE. See Thomas Wyatt's "Whoso List to Hunt, I Know Where Is an Hind" and John Donne's "If Poisonous Minerals, and If That Tree." Wyatt and Surrey developed the English (or Shakespearean) sonnet, which condenses the 14 lines into one stanza of three quatrains and a concluding couplet, with a rhyme scheme of ABABCDCDEFEFGG (though poets have frequently varied this scheme; see Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth"). George Herbert's "Love (II)," Claude McKay's "America," and Molly Peacock's "Altruism" are English sonnets.

These three types have given rise to many variations, including:

-The caudate sonnet, which adds codas or tails to the 14-line poem. See Gerard Manley Hopkins's "That Nature Is a Heraclitean Fire."

-The curtal sonnet, a shortened version devised by Gerard Manley Hopkins that maintains the proportions of the Italian form, substituting two six-stress tercets for two quatrains in the octave (rhyming ABC ABC), and four and a half lines for the sestet (rhyming DEBDE), also six-stress except for the final three-stress line. See his poem "Pied Beauty."

-The sonnet redoublé, also known as a crown of sonnets, is composed of 15 sonnets that are linked by the repetition of the final line of one sonnet as the initial line of the next, and the final line of that sonnet as the initial line of the previous; the last sonnet consists of all the repeated lines of the previous 14 sonnets, in the same order in which they appeared. Marilyn Nelson's A Wreath for Emmett Till is a contemporary example.

-A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets sharing the same subject matter and sometimes a dramatic situation and persona. See George Meredith's Modern Love sequence, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophel and Stella, Rupert Brooke's sequence, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Sonnets from the Portuguese.

-The Spenserian sonnet is a 14-line poem developed by Edmund Spenser in his that varies the English form by interlocking the three quatrains (ABAB BCBC CDCD EE).

-The stretched sonnet is extended to 16 or more lines, such as those in George Meredith's sequence Modern Love.

-A submerged sonnet is tucked into a longer poetic work; see lines 235-48 of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

Browse more sonnets. You can also read the educational essays "Learning the Sonnet" and "The Sonnet as a Silver Marrow Spoon."

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A 14-line poem with a variable rhyme scheme originating in Italy and brought to England by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey in the 16th century. Literally...

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Death of the Author is a term concept from the mid 20th century in which states that "an author's intentions and biographical facts should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing." This in laymen's terms (a way I understood it as) is that it is not the authors intention of the text which creates it meaning but rather how the reader interprets the text. The logic - as the article suggests - behind the concept of "Death of the Author" is that books are meant to be read, not written.

However, it is only recently in which literature has garner such a fanbase to where authors would feel obliged to share their intention behind their works in order for critics to further their knowledge on the text. Therefore it can also be argued that the concept "Death of the Author" no longer holds any value as the literature community as evolved since the  introduction of the concept. Whilst there is no definite answer highlighted in the article (at least from what I've read), I personally believe that an authors intention behind a text should be taken with a grain of salt. As it is not the plan of an average reader to analyse and break down the authors text, and it is also (in my opinion) the readers interpretation on the text which gives it meaning, because without a reader its just words on a page.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathOfTheAuthor#:~:text=Death%20of%20the%20Author%20is,an%20interpretation%20of%20their%20writing.

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"A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations."

...is the birth of the reader.

Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. This is usually understood as meaning that a writer's views about their own work are no more or less valid than the interpretations of any given reader. Intentions are one thing. What was actually accomplished might be something very different. The logic behind the concept is fairly simple: Books are meant to be read, not written, so the ways readers interpret them are as important and "real" as the author's intention. On the flip side, a lot of authors are unavailable or unwilling to comment on their intentions, and even when they are, they don't always make choices for reasons that make sense or are easily explainable to others (or sometimes even to themselves).

Likewise, as some critics note, it is elitist to assume that all artists are intellectuals or they have to be intellectuals, i.e., that works with deep meaning and ideas come only from people who are culturally and philosophically learned, rather than deriving from instinct, observation, creative inspiration, and artistic genius. Many consider this the Shakespeare authorship fallacy, i.e., that because Shakespeare was unlikely to possess the intellectual wherewithal to write his plays, the alderman's son from Stratford cannot have been the author of deep philosophical plays with dazzlingly complex characters. The academic consensus and textual studies overwhelmingly support William Shakespeare as the author and they note that whatever makes the plays deep comes entirely from command of language, stagecraft, and dramatic intuition, and while these skills can be intellectualized they are not innately intellectual, and while there's great depth, power, and meaning to a number of scenes in his plays the reasons for such meaning can vary between appealing to different kinds of audiences, subverting or parodying a convention that had already gotten stale way back then, or simple playfulness.

Although popular amongst postmodern critics, this has some concrete modernist thinking behind it as well, on the basis that the work is all that outlives the author (hence the concept's name) and we can only judge the work by the work itself. The author's later opinions about their work are themselves a form of criticism and analysis, and therefore are not necessarily consistent with what's written unless the author or publisher actively goes back and changes it-and it can still be argued that, since the original work still exists, the author has merely created a different version of it. One critic's understanding of the author's background and opinions is likely to be just as accurate as another's, especially if the author has an idiosyncratic or even anachronistic perspective on their own work. Modernists are more likely to appeal to the similar-yet-different concept of the Intentional Fallacy, which does not discount biographical information or other works by the same author. Playwright Alan Bennett claims he responded to students asking for assistance on analyzing his works as part of their A-Levels to "treat [him] like a dead author, who [is] thus unavailable for comment".

Needless to say, many writers as well as many other critics, don't like this or believe that this view holds true for all authors and all works. Margaret Atwood famously remarked that if the Death of the Author theory became prevalent, then "we [writers] are all in trouble". They also disagree with the implication that the Death of the Author/Birth of the Reader means that all interpretations are equally valid or that a reader's creative sensibility (if it exists) is equal to that of a writer. Obviously, some writers are more talented and capable than others, and certain works can only be written by certain individuals. The notion also offends writers since it potentially leads to an overvaluing of the intellectual property of their works rather than the creative/legal rights of the author which has a contentious history in much legal and copyright disputes between creators and publishers. J. R. R. Tolkien acknowledged the influence of his experiences on his works (The Lord of the Rings), but he denied that he had written allegory, insisting that his works simply had Applicability; this arguably makes him an early supporter of the Death of the Author, since pointless speculations about an author's allegorical intent are exactly what the concept seeks to avoid, favoring an analysis of the "applicability" of the text itself. On the other hand, Tolkien and his estate are quite protective of his works to ensure that it respects the overall basic intent of his work and restrictive over what filters in adaptations. In his essay "Creative Writing and Daydreaming" Sigmund Freud broached on the concept by noting that writers who work in popular genres tend to create works more reflective of the tensions and desires of the society as a whole than more artistic writers whose works mainly reflect their own sentiments and desires, which was an early attempt at qualifying intentionality in a work of art while also providing nuanced views on which kinds of works and authors display stronger intent than others.

Some people have noted that Roland Barthes, who actually wrote the trope naming essay, probably had to say "No, that's not what I meant at all!" at least once in his lifetime while discussing it. They have a point. In that essay, while discussing a story by Honoré de Balzac through a very close reading, Barthes simply noted how in the act of writing a complex work, Balzac's voice as author diffuses into multiple planes, so that one cannot know from reading closely if the narrative voice, character voice, and plot voice truly expresses the author's perspective; one cannot necessarily extract insight into Balzac's own thoughts, viewpoints, and beliefs from the work through such a reading. For Barthes, the act of writing (and he meant writing only, with no hint as to how this trope applies to other media), allows the author to lose some of his conscious self and that for a work to be enjoyed, a reader has to project some of his own thoughts and views. Barthes' argument was based on close-reading i.e. the scattered random sentences in a story and other bits of detail, Rewatch Bonus and so on, not, as this trope is usually applied, on basic fundamental story beats and major plot points, in which the author's intent is far more conscious and clear. Barthes was challenging the assumption that the author had clear and conscious intentions about every part of his work, but was not proposing that the author had no intentions at all.

Barthes was also discussing a 19th Century author who-while certainly popular-did not write in genres with a vocal fanbase who had questions about everything and a medium to transmit those discussions and views to a wider community. Because fandom and other conventions have grown so much in modern times, prominent authors tend to be interviewed far more often than they might have been in the past, putting greater pressure on them to stay consistent. Some authors, such as Ray Bradbury and William Gibson can't be bothered to stay consistent when talking about the major themes or concepts in their books for more than a few years at a time.

In the case of non-literary media, some critics note that the material nature of the medium and the logistics of production often require some amount of clarity of intent. For instance, for a film to be made, in most cases the director, the cast, and the crew have to know beforehand what the story is, what a scene does, and what choices have to be made in terms of costumes, lighting, and special effects. Producers and others also need to get permission to shoot scenes at particular locations, and usually such permissions depend on the approval of the scene by the location hosts. Therefore there can be less room than in writing for the author to be ignorant of the overall intent of their work, and Death of the Author defenses in such cases can be disingenuous, or sometimes even dangerous. For instance, the Nazi era film-maker Leni Riefenstahl claimed in the post-war era that her propaganda film Triumph of the Will should be celebrated as a pure work of art independent of its politics, and that she didn't really have political intentions in making it. This claim is belied by the obvious logistics of the entire production, the level of state backing needed for the shooting of many scenes, and the fact that she went to painstaking lengths to show Hitler and the Nazi party in the most flattering possible light. The level of documentation during production-from screenplay drafts, to shooting script, to the different stages of production and editing-are also often documented publicly, with much information on multiple productions noting the variety of subtle and major changes made at different stages. As such, it's quite possible to figure out what the intent really is by noting the changes and shifts at multiple stages of productions.

An author at a later moment may come around to rejecting their own work, or express dissatisfaction with some parts and not others. Hence, "the perfect is the enemy of the good" (a.k.a., "coulda, woulda, shoulda"). This is why some, but not all, auteur filmmakers oppose the notion of a Director's Cut, or of the creators fiddling with and updating a film after its initial release, on the grounds that the "real" film will always be the one people saw in cinemas in the year of release, not the ideal film in the director's head. In any case, most directors never get a chance to alter their work after it's been released, since very few of them have the legal and financial resources to actually do this. This is a given in works where the authors don't hold a copyright and can be replaced, especially Shared Universes; if a writer is fired and replaced by another, anything the old writer has stated in interviews can be (and often is) freely Jossed by the new writer.

There is an Older Than Feudalism example about some Jewish sages having an argument about their law...and ignoring God's interpretation in favor of their own. Because you see, the Torah is not in Heaven. There is another in the Apology of Socrates: Socrates testifies that in his search for a wiser man than himself, he listened to the great poets. He thought their works very fine, but when they tried to explain them, he thought they were hopeless-and that the dumbest spectators around would do a better job. (He took this as proof that their poetic skills were a divine gift rather than an exercise of intellect.) It could be argued, however, that this hypothesis removes the only objective standard by which a text can be said to have a given meaning, or even any meaning at all. For since there are few times one could back up their interpretation of a poem with evidence, this hypothesis reduces all possible interpretations to mere subjective opinions (or at best, educated guesses). It might also be asked that, if it is meaningless for someone to say "That's not what I meant" when talking about any literature they might have written, then how can it be meaningful for any other situation where one might say that? How, for example, could a general criticize an underling for getting something absurd out of a set of instructions he or she may have given them? "Sir/ma'am, what makes you think you know what the orders meant just because you wrote them?"

Bottom line: A) when discussing a fictional work with others, don't expect "Author intended this to be X; therefore, it is X" to be the end of or your entire argument; it's universally expected that interpretations of fiction must at least be backed up with evidence from within the work itself and B) don't try to get out of analyzing a work by treating "ask the author what X means" as the only or even best way to find out what X means - you must search for an answer yourself, young seeker. Writing is the author's job; analyzing the work and drawing conclusions based on it is your job - if the author just gave away the answers every time, where would the fun be in that?

Related tropes include Shrug of God, The Walrus Was Paul (when the author encourages fans and critics to find their own interpretations), and Misaimed Fandom (which is what can happen when they do so). Often the driving force in Fanon Discontinuity where the fans dislike the author's interpretation to the point of ignoring it. This trope can be particularly useful and sometimes even encouraged in regard to tropes like Accidental Aesop, Broken Aesop, Unfortunate Implications, and others; see Warp That Aesop.

This trope does not mean "there is no such thing as canonicity for a work's events", which is a common misinterpretation of this theory used to justify Canon Defilement. It only proposes that questions not explicitly answered by the text of the work cannot simply be resolved by Word of God or by trying to guess the author's intention. Compare this trope with Applicability and the Fiction Identity Postulate. A somewhat related trope is Word of Dante. This trope is not for literal deaths; Died During Production covers certain cases in which an author leaves behind unfinished work, while other cases fall under People Sit on Chairs.

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is the birth of the reader. Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no special weight in ...