Shakespeare's Sonnets

Several of the sonnets exhibit a cultural view that was relative to the time that Shakespeare's sonnets were written as well as today. They invoke a feeling that beauty is directly related to age. Society often views the elderly as unattractive. Beauty is equated, at least partially, to youth. Sonnet 12 displays this perfectly: "When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls all silver'd o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer's green all girded up in sheaves Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard, Then of thy beauty do I question make," Further evidence of this is given in Sonnet 15, lines 1 and 2: "When I consider everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment;" The last line in Sonnet 62 states "Tis thee, my self, that for myself I praise, Painting my age with beauty of thy days," Sonnet 65, lines 5-9 "O how shall Summer's honey breath hold out Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days, When rocks impregnable are not so stout, Nor gates of steel so strong but time decays?" These are but a few examples that invoke the feeling that much was related to age. Regardless of the standards the society set before him, Shakespeare found his immortality through the his sonnets as well as other works he wrote when he obtained an immortality of sorts through his words when he put them to paper.

Hero and Leander by Christopher Marlowe

Hero and Leander is a poem written by Christopher Marlowe during the Elizabethan Era. It is a love story about a young man named Leander who falls in love with a young girl named Hero. The poem has an erotic tone in places despite the fact they are both very young and have no experience with love. The first area that you see lines with a sexual connotation lies not in the description of the fair Hero, though she is beautiful and beyond compare of even Venus herself, but in the description of Leander. Line 88 is written as being the perspective of an unnamed gentleman who proclaims, "Leander thou art made for amorous play;". Another prime example of this involves Leander and Hero. It is the segment from lines 403-408 and tells about when Leander first takes Hero into his arms. "Till in his twining arms he locked her fast, And then he wooed with kisses, and then at last, As shepherds do, her on the ground he laid, And tumbling in the grass, he often strayed Beyond the bounds of shame, in being bold To eye those parts that no eye should behold;" The erotic references don't end with Hero and Leander alone. Later in the poem, Leander finds himself the object of Neptune's amorous attention. Line 639 states, " Whereat the sapphire-visaged god grew proud,". The sapphire-visaged god refers to Neptune, god of the sea. The rest of the line is interpreted by the translators in our text as meaning that he (Neptune) is sexually aroused.

The last couple of pages in the poem tell of the final conquest of Leander as he takes Hero, (lines 781-784)

"Leander now, like Theban Hercules, 

Entered the orchard of th' Hesperides, 

Whose fruit none rightly can describe but he,

That pulls or shakes it from the golden tree,"

What is initially viewed as being a story about young love that meets a tragic end and appears to focus much on mythology actually comes to light as being somewhat more controversial in nature.