This artifact is an explication of William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116. It was written this past spring for the same History or British Literature class as the recipe transcriptions artifact, though a fair bit earlier in the semester. It demonstrates an understanding of human experience and art within a specific social, historical, and cultural context. More specifically, it examines Shakespeare’s notions of romantic love in light of English Christian theology, especially as relates to sacramentology, Mariology, chronology (here not meaning a sequence of events as much as how time interacts with Eternity), and the theology of Love in general. Looking at how Shakespeare writes of romantic love from this context of living in a society where Anglican Christianity is the defining overarching principle of cultural identity in England, insights can be gained into his remarkably holistic view of the nature of what Love is supposed to be, as opposed to the shallow understanding modern persons tend to have today.

While I am by no means a Shakespeare scholar, one of my goals in writing this was to present an analysis of his work and engage with it somewhat on the contextual level.  Though he may not have been consciously thinking about all the various points of similarity with other concepts floating around in his time that I pointed out, this essay afforded me the opportunity to practice both engaging with products of history on their own terms, and presenting a wider perspective drawing from multiple other sources. For example, while he probably did not have St. Thomas Aquinas’ comparison of the Blessed Virgin to a guiding mariner’s star in the back of his mind, it can nonetheless be seen that he has the same idea of a guiding archetypal feminine influence at work in his writings.