Study Questions

Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day

1. This poem is an extended comparison between the speaker's lover and a summer's day. According to the first two lines, how is the speaker's lover UNLIKE a summer's day?
2. Lines three through eight point out a number of negative characteristics of summer. Identify them.
3. Lines nine through fourteen offer a view of the lover's many contrasts with nature. How is she better than a summer's day?
4. What will keep her young forever? What does this poem suggest about the value of art?
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The Merry Wives of Windsor
	"Merry Wives gives an impression of life in an English provincial town as it was lived at the time of the play's first performance…. Though the play does contain characters both above and below the middle class, as well as culturally stereotyped foreigners, ultimately everything functions to demonstrate the assimilating power of the middle class." "Shakespeare's most middle-class play, and one of his most farcical ones, The Merry Wives of Windsor was heartily admired by Friedrich Engels, co-author of the Communist Manifesto. Perhaps Engels enjoyed the way Shakespeare dramatized the formation of the middle class out of disparate social tensions. The play's farcical, comic intrigues create a jovial tone, which suspends hierarchies, reconciles upper and lower class characters, and draws them together into the burgeoning middle class." quoted from SPARK NOTES
Source of image with Analysis; from Shakespeare Illustrated Joseph Kinny Meadows. Falstaff and Mistress Quickly, 1869. Source of image with Analysis; from Shakespeare Illustrated Frederick William Davis. Falstaff, 1907.

li>Identify the metaphors, personification, and hyperbole in this sonnet. 
5. Try to feel and describe the effects pf spondaic (double stress) rhythm in line 3, as opposed to the predominantly iambic rhythm in other lines, esp. ll. 4, 7-8 and 13-14..