Week One
Nobody has a Garden in their Face!*
All my life I have preoccupied myself with contemporary authors and poets, keeping one thing in mind-- Aslong as your not near Shakespeare, your doing alright! I, like many others, studied Romeo and Juliette and HATED it. I loved Baz Luhrmann's interpretation, but despised of the actual reading of it. Why? Simply because it was another devastating love story that depicted the unquestionable and expected beauty of woman and also the expected strength as a character of man. I also despised the fact that true love meant that someone needed to die. It was all way to controversial for me, and way dramatic... oh and also... funny enough... it was just too beautified. I needed guts and gory and the truth about love! Which many would argue that was the case in Romeo and Juliette, but in my reading, it was not. Maybe it was the popularity of Romeo and Juliette that put me off, or the way my teacher drilled the images of beauty and true love into our heads, either way, I hated shakespeare. Steered right away from it, until now!
So welcome to week-bloody-one, the week where 2010 seems soooo far away! Jumping straight into shakespeare in the tutorial, I must admit, resulted in my taking out my mobile placing it on my desk and keeping an eye on the time to see how much longer of this 50 minutes I had to endure. Then MG whips out Sonnet 130... and if someone stole my phone, I wouldnt have had a clue. The truth in that Sonnet makes me want to weep at how honest Shakespeare is (Im going to refer to him as W.S. from now on). The way W.S. portrays the true beauty of a lady is, well beautiful. He basically said your breast are dull and your breath smells, but I love ya! The part of this Sonnet I admire the most is W.S's dig at other authors and other depictions, through art, of woman.
"As any she belied with false compare" (14)
False compare, refering to the way woman compare themselves to the way art represents them (Elizabethan's representation of woman), stands out very much as, in my eyes, W.S. is telling woman that he along with many men do not expect such beauty from a woman. They understand the way art portrays woman is ridiculous and they love us for our real beauty- smelly breath and all!
*With the exception of Adrian Grenier, his face is full of gardens.
My comment to Nancy;
Hey Nancy,
My reading of Sonnet 130 concurs with that of your reading. Shakespeare demonstrates the 'real' beauty of humanity through that of not woman, but his wife. He represents all her flaws in a beautiful manner. It sounds foolish, but he represents her as herself and claims he loves her, not regardless of her flaws, but that he just loves her. And that the comparisons are stupid, foolish comparisons.
http://nancy-m.livejournal.com