Both Shakespeare and Robert Browning show that love makes people do hateful acts. In Julius Caesar, Brutus Kills Caesar telling the people “not that I loved Caesar less, but that I loved Rome more”. This shows that he has more love for his country than for someone who has been a father figure. In Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover, the speaker strangles Porphyria in a horrific way because she pushes him over the edge.

You can see similarities between Shakespeare and Browning’s writing in the structure of foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is a warning or indication of a future event. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, foreshadowing takes place in Act 1 Scene 2 when a soothsayer says “beware the Ides of March” and this is repeated in the same scene, when Brutus repeats what the soothsayer said, “A soothsayer bid you beware the Ides of March”. This is very significant because he is predicting the conspiracy. Additionally, in Act 2 Scene 1, Brutus has a soliloquy where he talks about Caesar being crowned, “And therefore think him as a serpent’s egg and kill him in the shell”. Brutus is saying that Caesar must be killed before he “hatches” into a snake and becomes evil through power. In this Brutus is showing his real feelings towards Rome and Caesar. In Act 2 Scene 4, where Caesar speaks to his wife Calpurnia, he states that “cowards die many times before their death, the valiant never taste of death but once”. Calpurnia is trying to get him to stay at home and not go to the Senate but Caesar is arguing that cowards who hide from things die many times from running away from battles but when he dies he will do so honourably. He says this just before he dies, bravely.

I think that the Ides of March is talking about the conspiracy and I think this is a build up to Caesars death. When Caesar is stabbed by all the other conspirators, he doesn’t speak. However, when Brutus goes to stab him, he exclaims “Et tu, Brute?”. This means “do you hate me so much you want to kill me?”. It is important that Caesar only speaks to Brutus because it tells us that Brutus is very dear to him and is questioning why he would hate him, or where their previous love had gone. Brutus doesn’t say anything afterwards because I think that he knows that he has killed a father figure and has respect for him still, but again, I have seen a production of Julius Caesar where Brutus stabs him in the groin, which is one of the worst acts of death, suggesting the murder was actually done out of hate.

The idea of being betrayed by someone you loved is also represented in Robert Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover. When Porphyria is strangled she is strangled because the speaker thinks that she will betray him, by going with another lover “murmuring how she loved me — she too weak, for all her heart’s endeavour, to set its struggling passion free”. As such, he is trying to say I want you and if I can’t have you then no one can. This suggest that he is unstable as a normal couple would not be so extreme even in the break-up period, and the characters were not even in the break-up period. That that is why I think he is unstable.

In Act 1 Scene 3 Cassius says Brutus is noble but can be easily manipulated, “well Brutus, thou art noble; yet I see that honourable metal may be wrought”. This is suggesting that Brutus could be told what to do easily and would be proud in doing what he was told to do. this analogy becomes true when Brutus is misled by Cassius and joins the conspiracy even though he does not want to at first.

In Porphyria’s Lover, the scene is set as a cold and rainy day when a young lady walks in and takes off her jacket, lets her hair down and “made her smooth white shoulder bare”. She puts the man’s arm around her and then he strangles her with her own hair. This suggests to me that he may be mentally unstable as there was no apparent reason why he killed her. I think this poem was written after he killed her. This tells me about hate because he must hate her so much to kill her.

Shakespeare uses pathetic fallacy in Julius Caesar by having Casca and Cassius discuss a storm of lightning and thunder in Act 1 Scene 3, which symbolises that there is going to be rage and destruction. This could symbolise the God’s hatred of the act that is going to be committed, with Casca saying “the world, too saucy with the gods, incenses them to send destruction”, or even the conspirator’s hatred for Caesar. Lots of the conspirators hate Caesar, apart from Brutus who has been misled, so therefore the lightning strikes may represent the physical stabbing of Caesar, “the cross blue lightning seemed to open the breast of heaven”, and the thunder may represent the conspirators’ shouting both during and after the murder. This idea can be related to Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover as before the lady walks in it is raining and it is very windy. It seems like the storm is doing it on purpose with “it tore the elm-tops down for spite”, suggesting something angry and bad is going to happen in the poem. The use of the word “spite” suggests that hatred is in play. The hatred of the storm then suggests the speaker strangling the lady with her own wet hair.

The Laboratory is about the speaker finding out that her lover has a lover and she wants her lover to feel pain by killing her lover’s lover with a poison. Browning represents hate to us by using repetition. As the speaker tells us the plot, we can see her anger building towards the situation as in stanza VI “with her head and her breast and her arms and her hands,should drop dead!” the use of using no commas and using repetition means that when you are reading it, the speed you read at increases. This is trying to tell us that she it getting angry with every word she speaks, especially when at the end of dead she uses a exclamation mark.

The story is about getting revenge on her lover by killing his lover, revenge is shown in stanza II “at me fled to the dear empty church, to pray god in,for them—I am here.” and in stanza X “he is sure to remember her dying face!”. Stating that she is trying to get revenge by killing her lover’s lover, and letting her lover watch her die and he will have to remember that the rest of his life. Again the speaker uses the exclamation mark to show that she is explaining the point with aggression. In doing all of these hateful acts she know that he will never come back to her because they’re unforgivable by anyone’s standards but yet she still wants to do this because she feels the need to hurt the person she loves. He hurt her but it makes me think did she never loved him because you would not hurt him that much, that is why you could compare it to Porphyria’s Lover as both speakers could be stated unstable.

To conclude, Shakespeare and Robert Browning both show that love makes people do hateful actions. You can see this in Julius Caesar, when Brutus kills Caesar and in Browning’s Porphyria’s Lover where Porphyria is killed by the speaker and in The Laboratory the speaker kills her lover’s lover by letting her lover live with it his whole life. All of this presents hate as related to the motivations of characters in one way or the other.