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We speak Student! shakespeare on love

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Romeo oh Romeo, wherefor art thou uh Romeo

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a Ia Shmoop. Ah! love everyone has a favorite love story

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and some of the greatest love stories of all time were written by Shakespeare

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there's Romeo and Juliet which was all about true love

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and death there's a Othello

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which was also about love and jealousy and death

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lots of death mixed in with love here huh

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so while Shakespeare did write a lot of love stories, his love stories were not simple

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formulaic

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rom coms, instead they were messy complicated

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and the Grim Reaper sometimes made a guest appearance

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Hey guys! How's it going?

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One of shakespeare's favorite things to do in his love stories was to take

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characters who absolutely loathe each other

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at the beginning at the play and throw them together until hey they get hitched

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For example in taming of the Shrew

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Petruchio of screws with the mind of headstrong stubborn Katharina

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until she turns into a loving and obedient bride

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Wow shakespeare you're sick man. I'm not sick

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It's just written that way. Another trick the playwright liked to employ was to have

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someone fall in love with completely different person halfway through the

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play

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take Phebe the character in As You Like It

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the poor girl is in love with Ganymede whose actually Rosalind in disguise

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as a guy by the end of the play however Phoebe has forgotten all

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about her crush on a cross-dressing Rosalind she marries the shepherd

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Silvius

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and they spend the rest of their lives happily herding sheep together

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or take The Comedy of Errors in which a pair of twins both named Antipholus

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accidentally end up switching places

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without realizing it the Antipholus who everyone thinks is married to

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Adriana

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falls for and Adriana's sister Luciana who was seriously concerned that a man she

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thinks is her brother-in-law

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is attracted to her. Got all that? Yea, we thought so

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So perhaps what Shakespeare was actually trying to do was tell us

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something important about love in his plays

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namely that people in love tend to act foolishly

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I love you Shmoopy Whoopy Cakes I Wub you to my Sappy Wappy

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We've all sent text messages to a love interest that we immediately regretted

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mom it just goes to show that people in love today still

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act very much like people who are in love during Shakespeare's time

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people have been are and always will be

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fools for love

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