It is the star by which every lost ship can be guided: one can calculate it’s distance but not gauge its quality. Oh no, it’s an eternally fixed point that watches storms but is never itself shaken by them. Love that alters with changing circumstances is not love, nor if it bends from its firm state when someone tries to destroy it. I would not admit that anything could interfere with the union of two people who love each other. Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,īut bears it out even to the edge of doom. Within his bending sickle’s compass come

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. That looks on tempests and is never shaken And in sonnet 116 – as with all of his sonnets – Shakespeare manages to squeeze all of these thoughts and words into just fourteen lines. Shakespeare employs an amazing array of poetic devices throughout the sonnet to convey the eternal nature of love, and ends by staking everything on his observations by asserting that if he is wrong, then no-one ever wrote anything, and no-one ever loved. Love, unlike the physical being, is not subject to decay.

Love is given an identity as an immortal force, which overcomes age, death, and time itself.

The language of the sonnet is as deep and profound as any philosopher’s could be, expressed in the most beautiful language. Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 can be seen as the definitive response to the ‘what is love’ question. Each Shakespeare’s play name links to a range of resources about each play: Character summaries, plot outlines, example essays and famous quotes, soliloquies and monologues: All’s Well That Ends Well Antony and Cleopatra As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Coriolanus Cymbeline Hamlet Henry IV Part 1 Henry IV Part 2 Henry VIII Henry VI Part 1 Henry VI Part 2 Henry VI Part 3 Henry V Julius Caesar King John King Lear Loves Labour’s Lost Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night’s Dream Much Ado About Nothing Othello Pericles Richard II Richard III Romeo & Juliet The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest Timon of Athens Titus Andronicus Troilus & Cressida Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Winter’s Tale This list of Shakespeare plays brings together all 38 plays in alphabetical order.

Plays It is believed that Shakespeare wrote 38 plays in total between 15.

Sonnet 116 by william shakespeare