'True Love' vs 'Courtly Love'

The origins of courtly love were believed to be in France in the 12th century. In English courts, courtly love wasn't practised until and from the 1300’s to 1500’s. In the Middle Ages, a successful marriage was seen as one that brought wealth and material or economic advantages to a family. Marriages were usually arranged by the parents, this would have been for many reasons; to join ties, expand businesses or perhaps for land or an increased amount of riches. Love and Marriage were rather two separate things, than one combined.

William Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 is one of his most famous, Shakespeare plays on the ‘love’ of the courtiers in Elizabethan time. I wouldn't consider it real love but more an affection that was only considered to be love. Sonnet 130 is a love poem that is the complete opposite of what love poems in the Middle Ages were about. Love poems usually confess the beauty of one’s love, praising the big or small things about their love, confessing to their affection towards the other person. Shakespeare however turns it around with his humour yet seriousness of what love really is. Sonnet 130 has a few themes tied to it, Shakespeare rhymes about love but also truth, women and stereotypes. He expresses that women are not perfect and love is not trying to win them with ‘in comparison’s’ to natural or artificial things. Love is defining beauty as something that will indeed come with flaws, but it is what you make of it, and how you see it that defines oneself, ones love and the one you love. Love does not need conceits or deceits for it to be true love.

Shakespeare’s last line in sonnet 130; ‘as any she belied with false compare’ - his way of showing that his love, which is ‘rare’ is the kind that accepts her as she is, despite physical or non physical flaws. Appearances becomes a major theme here, appearances can be in reference to how true love appears and what it really is. Appearances can also be linked in with the theme of women and stereotypes, of what the ‘perfect’ woman may be. Shakespeare describes the appearances of a woman from the strands of her ‘black wires’ to her skin and ‘breath’. He uses descriptions of nature in comparison to the realness of her actual self; he says ‘my mistresses eyes are nothing like the sun’, the first line of his sonnet, a contradiction to what love poems were usually about. Shakespeare states as he continues on to produce thirteen more lines; ‘the breath that from my mistress reeks’, her breath is not something that smells sweet but the smell reeks. A statement that would leave a woman stunned. Beauty doesn't always remain, sometimes it can fade with age, but if love remains, beauty would too.

In comparison to Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 is his sonnet 116. Sonnet 130 speaks truth the way sonnet 116 does, only Shakespeare’s tone in sonnet 116 is softer. Sonnet 116 is Shakespeare attempting to define love, what love is and what love isn't. Shakespeare describes love to be ‘the star to every wandering bark’- a guiding star to lost ships and ‘the marriage of true minds’, perfect and unchanging.  Shakespeare says ‘love is not love’, ‘which alters when it alteration finds’; so love does not change in response to change, it is ‘an ever fixed mark’. ‘Love’s not Time’s fool’; true love does not change with time, ‘love alters not with its brief hours or weeks’; love endures and lives through time. Love ‘bears it out even to the edge of doom’, so even up to the day of reckoning love is still love. William Shakespeare masterfully includes in this sonnet - ‘whose worth unknown, although his height be taken’, love’s value cannot be calculated although its altitude can be measured.

Sonnet 116 is full of imagery, images of marriage, fixed marks, stars and ships, of time and rosy lips, of cheeks and the day of reckoning. In comparison to sonnet 130, instead of love being compared to nature and colour, Shakespeare uses more real imagery and the passion is more evident in his sonnet 116 than in 130. He ends with ‘if this be error and upon me proved’- if his statements are incorrect and it has been proved so, then ‘I never writ, nor no man ever loved’; he declares that he has not wrote a word and neither has a man ever been in love. The ending of the sonnet is powerful and he leaves with two sentences strong enough, bold enough and challenging enough to let the readers of this poem know that he has spoken the truth.

iH