english HW about 4 pages

Shakespeares In Love

In John Madden’s 1997 Academy Award-winning film, Shakespeare In Love, Judi Dench's Queen Elizabeth I referees a wager between Joseph Fiennes's Will Shakespeare and Colin Firth's Lord Wessex. Will, disguised as a "country cousin," wagers Wessex £50 that a play can reveal, as the Queen declares, "…the very truth and nature of love." At the end of the film, after the Queen attends the opening night of Will's Romeo & Juliet, the Queen rules in Will's favour. As the Queen and the cast and Wessex gather outside the theatre, the Queen orders Wessex to hand over the £50 to Gwyneth Paltrow's "Thomas Kent," whom the Queen directs to return inside the theatre and present the money to Will. Inside, Will, and Paltrow's real character, Lady Viola de Lesseps, exchange tearful declarations of their severed but undying love. But do Will and Viola really experience that truth and nature of love? Yes, because Will and Viola share the spark of attraction, the heat of passion, and the warmth of true affection.

First, Will and Viola share the spark of attraction. [Continues by not just citing specific moments and accurate lines of dialogue but INTERPRETS exactly HOW those moments and lines from the film support the topic sentence.]

My wife Susan and I also shared that same spark of attraction that Will and Viola share in the film.  After the travails of my fourth divorce, my most recent ex, Naomi, suggested that I join match.com, taunting me that with so many millions of women on the dating site, even I might find someone willing to tolerate me.  I took up her challenge defiantly and joined but quickly acquired a sense of dismay at how rarely did the members present themselves honestly.  As my membership played out over the summer of 2006, I began to automatically delete the emails that match.com would send me: i.e., those emails that listed my so-called "matches."  I wouldn't even open those emails.  However, as the weeks passed — the autumn equinox, Halloween — my previously mentioned dismay morphed into loneliness and despair.  Then, on a fateful day in November (the 14th to be exact), I responded to an email from match in an unusual manner.  Instead of automatically hitting my "delete" button, I clicked "open."  To my surprise and delight, a lovely brunette's garnett-blue eyes smiled at me.  As for her actual email, that equaled her facial loveliness.  "Dear Fellow Expatriate..." she wrote (Good lord! A fellow Brit?), "I really did enjoy reading your profile; I 'd like to see a photo of that noggin 'sans' glasses."  For me, love at first sight — what the French call coeur feu and the Italians "fulmine."  Love at first sight — and at first read:  A beautifully complected English woman who spoke Doughboy French ("'sans' glasses") and used semi-colons correctly ("….did enjoy reading your profile; I 'd like to see…").  As for Susan, her words — that she really enjoyed seeing my photo and reading my profile — suggested strongly that, logged on to her match.com account at her home computer, she too had experienced a measure of that same coeur feu as I experienced, the same spark of attraction that Will and Viola share; the spark that, for millions of lovers the world over, first illuminates the path to true love.

Secondly, Will and Viola share the heat of passion. [Continues by not just citing specific moments and accurate lines of dialogue, but INTERPRETS by exactly HOW those moments and lines from the film support the topic sentence.]

Just like Will and Viola, Susan and I also experienced that heat of passion. After exchanging emails (one, a sonnet I wrote for her about her name), and exchanging phone calls (she spoke with the sweetest of Liverpool accents), I somehow persuaded her to have dinner with me. I needed all my powers of persuasion because, while I lived in Missoula, Montana, Susan lived 489 miles due west, in the suburbs of Seattle. I offered to pay for her flight, pay for a nice hotel room (registered in her name only), all with "no strings attached." She agreed and on December the 1st, a brutally cold Friday Montana evening, her flight touched down and so did my angel. We drove from the airport to her hotel, then, after allowing her time to freshen up, we reveled in a sumptuous candlelit dinner at Missoula's cozy French bistro, Pearl Café. As dinner ended, I asked her to go dancing and she replied, "I'd love to. Except I can't dance." Nor could she, even to a slow love ballad that the band at the Union Club played. But as we danced as best she could, she tucked her own little nog into the crook of my neck and shoulders, gave my hands a squeeze and whispered, "Take me home?" What she really meant was, "Kiss me goodnight?" which I did in the hotel lobby while we waited for the elevator to descend: a long, deep kiss, rife with tenderness and passion which we ended as the elevator doors opened. I could still feel the heat of her body in my arms as she stepped in the elevator and her ascent back to heaven began — the same heat of passion that Will and Viola feel; a heat that countless lovers feel, even on the coldest nights on the Steppes of Russia, atop the peaks of Andes, or by the glacial rivers of northernmost Iceland.

Finally, Will and Viola share the warmth of true affection. [Continues by not just citing specific moments and accurate lines of dialogue but INTERPRETS by exactly HOW those moments and lines from the film support the topic sentence.]

Susan and I also shared a warmth of true affection very similar to Will and Viola. The morning after our sumptuous dinner and kiss — a crystal-clear, chandelier of a morning — Susan and I rendezvous'd at her hotel for breakfast. We spent an hour over bland scrambled eggs and toast, wishing we were gorging on classic English fare: kippers and custard! or at least a mixed grill (fried eggs, fried mushrooms, fried tomatoes, fried bread). Alas, the England of our near-identical childhoods lay 8,000 miles to the east, so we settled for 16-oz lattes from Starbucks and a tour of Missoula's charms. We visited the children's museum, the iron horse statue (an actual once-working steam locomotive engine) and the Bon Marché. During those visits, we found out we were born 107 days and 207 miles apart. We both liked Sting, though she liked his acting more than his singing. And we both shared an affinity for a certain bittersweet melancholy — we both were at peace with our similar sadnesses. Next, our tour almost over, we drove up Miller Creek Road, climbing almost to the creek-top where the tarmac ended and the gravel began. There, I slowed the car, U-turned and parked. Below us, the shivering town spread out, bathed in frost and sunshine. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us needed to. We just sat there, savoring our moment of silence, warmed by our growing affection while we watched the world glide soundlessly by. As our mutual affection and ease played out, she reached across the stick shift and set her hand atop mine: a simple silent gesture: a moment of true affection; a warmth of true affection similar to that shared by Will and Viola; a moment countless couples have enjoyed in all five continents, across all seven seas, for all seven millennia.

In conclusion, Will and Viola do indeed experience that truth and nature of love because, like Susan and I, Will and Viola share the spark of attraction, the heat of passion, and the warmth of true affection. [This concluding paragraph continues by succinctly summarizing each of the three ingredients in turn, touching quickly on events both from SIL and from the personal examples of Susan and me. The paragraph ends with generalization to support ubiquity of these three ingredients of true love.]

Works Cited

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