Super Art And Craft In Unfolding Love Stories-a Linguistic Approach To Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream And Romeo And Juliet Coupled With Sonnets

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” Keats observes in his “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. Humanity’spursuit of beauty throughout history invariably finds expression in divergent species of art,among which are music, dancing, arts, literature and what not. While each form of artblesses man with exquisite sensual experiences, the immense aesthetic worth of any and allreal artistic works resides in a core area where the currents of effects upon the “five portsof knowledge” converge and conflate. That core area is where truth dwells. In otherwords, beneath the multifarious facades of beauty lies subtle and scintillating truth.Insofar as beauty is a sure consequence of truth, the disparate raiment each species of artresorts to is largely a matter of choice. Whatever the choice, however, they all share adose of truthfulness. Then, if a specific work of art is worshipped as a constant source ofinspiration for other forms of art, this work boasts a bountiful supply of truth.The paramount enduring worth of a work stemming from the happy concurrence of innatetruth and outward fairness is what creative artists have been painstakingly seeking after.Among the huge tribe of artists, Shakespeare deserves a leading place in the forefront.For the average reader, Shakespeare’s works serve a purpose at once entertaining andenlightening. For artists, his stunning output of dramas is of seminal significances. Hisplay Romeo and Juliet is a most eloquent case in point. In the world of music alone, ithas instilled inspiration into such maestros as Louis-Hector Berlioz, Sergey Prokofiev andPyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, not to mention in other realms of art. It’s the overwhelminginfluence of this play upon various artistic creations that urges me in the first place toperuse this play in a pilgrim-like spirit so as to acquire insight into the infinite charm of thework.Nevertheless, as Eliot puts it, a comprehensive and in-depth understanding of a play byShakespeare cannot be obtained until one has acquainted himself with the entire body ofhis works. This is admittedly an ideal situation hard to come by. Where Eliot’s remarkis relevant to me in terms of this dissertation, I deem it as a judicious consideration to study Romeo and Juliet in a certain context. What I finally settle on as regards the “context” isthe incorporation into the study of two other plays composed around the same period oftime by Shakespeare, namely between1590and1600, and revolving around the sametheme, i.e., love. The two plays I eventually decide on are Love’s Labour’s Lost and AMidsummer Night’s Dream. In other words, my destination for this dissertation is the“core area” of truth which accounts for the beauty of the play Romeo and Juliet. And tofind my way to that destination, I am in need of a chart, which comes in the form of anintricate pattern composed by the three plays. In the course of conducting a critical studyof the three plays with a linguistic approach, I will invoke Shakespeare’s sonnets, anothermonumental work centered on the theme of love, as well as his other plays.This dissertation consists of five parts. The first part is Introduction, in which a furtherexplanation for the choice of the three plays is given, an overview of the literary criticismsconcerning relevant themes and the three plays is made, and a statement of the majorcritical approaches to be adopted in this dissertation is put forth. What ensues is the bodyof the dissertation. It is divided into three chapters, each of which deals with a play fromthree perspectives, namely “the basic linguistic features”,“the relationship between thelanguage and the characterization”, and “the relationship between the language and thethemes”. Chapter One is devoted to the analysis of Love’s Labour’s Lost, Chapter Two AMidsummer Night’s Dream, Chapter Three Romeo and Juliet. The final part of thedissertation is Conclusion, in which a summary of the entire study is given with the aim ofdiscerning, in an aesthetic sense, where the three plays echo and correlate with each otherand how Shakespeare’s conceptions and assumptions about love, especially in the light ofliterary endeavors, is sprinkled over the three plays and crystallized in Romeo and Juliet inparticular.Chapter One deals first with the two prominent linguistic features of Love’s Labour’s Lost:exuberant diction and parallel syntax. Nearly all characters in the play are obsessed withthe inclination to display their linguistic facility. And it is by means of exhausting thepool of diction and parading parallel sentences that they gratify what they subconsciously desire. However, in their ceaseless pursuit of linguistic exuberance, the wooers fatallyfail in their courtships. That language in too grand a form proves futile in the matter oflove is one of the major themes of Love’s Laboour’s Lost. In terms of characterization,this dissertation holds that the four lords and the four ladies are group types, which meansthat they are identical to each other due to their shared attributes. This kind ofcharacterization helps to enlighten the other major themes of the play, i.e., love at firstsight, love prevails and love tries.In the analysis of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Chapter Two is concerned with the sametwo linguistic features: copious diction and parallel syntax. This chapter finds sharedfeatures in terms of diction and syntax between this play and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Bothplays demonstrate a considerable measure of linguistic exuberance. However, theabundance of diction and parallel sentences in Love’s Labour’s Lost and that in AMidsummer Night’s Dream are distinct from each other on one front: the former beingsystematic, the latter being quite selective. Such a distinction stems from the disparatepurposes of linguistic devices in the two dramas. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, language isone of the themes, i.e., the futility of fancy language in courtship; in A Midsummer Night’sDream, linguistic devices are applied to highlight a certain theme of the drama. Forexample, the verbal variations of the word “gifts” in Egeus’ accusation of Lysander hint atthe lack of substantial bond between the two young lovers; the string of eulogizing wordsthat flows out of people under the effect of love-in-idleness bespeaks the unaccountabilityand unreliability of passionate love. In like manner, parallel sentences in A MidsummerNight’s Dream augment the force of delivery for its various themes, among which arewhere love gets engendered, the irrationality and unpredictability of love, love’s trajectory,and marriage as the destination of love.Chapter Three discerns a marked difference between Romeo and Juliet and the other twoplays. In lieu of linguistic abundance, an intense aesthetic feel is derived from sharpcontrasts that permeate this play. In terms of language, this play teems with antonymsand features repeated uses of certain words that evoke striking images in the reader’s mind.In terms of characterization, Romeo and Juliet are respectively distinct from people surrounding them. Love’s Labour’s Lost and A Midsummer Night’s Dream are analogousto each other in that the heroes and heroines are type characters. In other words, they canexchange their roles among themselves without making any huge difference to the play.It is an effective device to have characters identical to each other when the play at issue ismore focused on delivering certain themes than presenting a full-bodied love story.Romeo and Juliet is an exception, where charting the trajectory of Romeo and Juliet’s loveis the major concern. That the depiction of the hero and the heroine as distinguished fromother people helps bring out the unique qualities of them and augments pathos to beruminated over by the reader. In the analysis of the major themes of the play, thisdissertation is focused on two aspects, namely, the potency of love as reflected in hatebeing eventually conquered, as well as the consummation of love through the combinationof sex and spirit. Of course, there is a certain overlapping of themes between this playand the other two plays. For instance,“love at first sight” and “love’s course is neversmooth” are present in all three plays. I deal with them as an integral part of the “potency”of love.Aphrodite, the embodiment of love, means “born from the spume”. Bearing such a name,Love holds twofold implication for us: love, like waves, invariably catches us off guardand swamps our reasoning power; on the other hand, love is as insubstantial as foams, themore we attempt to grasp it, the less we find left in our palms. Therefore to harp ondramas that revolve around the theme of love is frequently frustrating. Dealing withplays with love as the subject matter, I have learnt to come to terms with the subtlety andelusiveness of love.