... was departing from Petrarchan sonnets, though they still carried the Petrarchan conceit (that is to say a comparison between dissimilar things). It was during this time that Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare and Donne experimented with the sonnet form. The metaphors Petrarch used had become a cliché in Shakespeare's day and in the sonnet 130 Shakespeare himself plays a joke on the conventions of love poetry of his time. For ... example he compares nature and the mistress by saying that "her lips are red as coral- and "her breasts ... are white as snow-. Sonnets were also written during the...

• Word Count: 539
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... a man, although obviously very desirable. However, it could also be that Cesario's femininity renders him unthreatening to Olivia, and she is attracted to the idea of having dominance in a relationship. Ironically, although Orsino appears to act in a completely opposite way to Cesario in terms of wooing Olivia (or ... not), his language does have feminine qualities. He talks of his love being "more noble than the world," and this egocentricity and arrogance were generally accepted as manly qualities, although Olivia also displays vanity when she says that her face "'tis not ... asks Jov...

• Word Count: 2131
• Approx Pages: 9
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

... from the comic action, and, in particular, from the character of Falstaff. There are more references to the fat knight through the end of the eighteenth century than to any other literary character, and, until the last half-century, discussions of Falstaff "the most substantial comic character that was ever invented", as Hazlitt said, presumably aware of the joke) dominated the criticism of the play ... . On stage, throughout the eighteenth and ... nineteenth centuries, 1 Henry IV was inevitably Falstaff's play, and virtually every great actor of those times took on the role, from Thomas...

• Word Count: 1901
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate