This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

There’s a moment of seeming to personify the agency of ‘Love’, but the human decision is clear: ‘both do grant the thing that both desire’. Their lustful behaviour leads to their downfall. There’s none of that fated or star-crossed language of Shakespeare, and even Brooke’s particular version of the sonnet, the kind without a rhyming final couplet, has a less inexorable sense of form than that of his imitator. So Shakespeare changes the motivation or causation for the tragedy quite distinctly. Brooke’s prefatory material is all moralistic, and in particular, anti-Catholic. His take-away message is that young people should do what their parents say, or terrible consequences will ensue, and especially they should avoid gossipy old women and dodgy friars (Brooke’s poem as a whole is a bit more sympathetic to the lovers than this framework suggests, but it starts in very didactic mode). We can see that Shakespeare – as often – jettisons this moralistic notion.