Sonnet 20 ShakespeareEssay Preview: Sonnet 20 ShakespeareReport this essayWoman to Man, Man to Man, Love is LoveThe poets lover is “the master-mistress of (his) passion”. He has the grace and features of a woman but is absent of the deviousness and charade that comes with female lovers; those crafty women with eyes “false in rolling”, who change their moods and affections like chameleons. In Sonnet 20 William Shakespeare as the poet, displays powerful emotions that are indicative of a deep and sensual love of another man. Despite the fact that male friendships in the Renaissance were extensively affectionate, could this be a clear admission of Shakespeares homosexuality or bisexuality? Or is it just merely a sonnet with no relevance to being autobiographical? This sonnet has a great deal of appeal for those seeking to dig to the root of Shakespeares fervor and a great deal of appeal for that of emotional love verses physical love.
Sonnet 20 is the only sonnet in this 154 collection that has all feminine rhymes. Each line has a final unstressed syllable which gives the poem an accent. It is possible that these feminine rhymes serve to further stress the feminine aspects of the young man that the sonnet so distinctly praises. The word “woman” appears six times in the sonnet, again showing how important the aspects of femininity and womanliness are in this sonnet, both with their positive implications, such as “beauty” and “gentleness”, as well as the more negative implications like “fickleness” or even “falseness”.
The sonnet starts out by praising the lover by describing him as having “a womans face with natures own hand painted”; this is suggesting true natural beauty. By stating the masculine and the feminine with the word “master-mistress” there is some mystery here but it may imply that the young man evokes the love and devotion which would be due to a mistress, but that he is also in control, like that of a man. In the next two lines the poet has filled positive feminine features with negative aspects, “with shifting change” implies continually changing ones mind, thus leaving a feeling of uneasiness on the reader about the character of this lover. “An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling”. The eyes of the young man are described as being bright to such an extent that they portray all their gaze falls on.
[Footnote: (This was a discussion of the “female” and “male” sexual meanings of poetic writing by David C. Hester) 1. The male sex is shown with a dark blue glow, a darker or warmer colour, that changes between each scene. A different interpretation uses the same colour to represent its sexual connotations and the different descriptions of the two sexes by different writers. The reader usually sees that this is a woman’s colour, so this light of white must then cause a darker shade of blue. It is also mentioned at the beginning that this light makes a darker/ darker colour clear to a person, that it makes them appear more natural in appearance, “ for many women would not desire this colour. A light which the poet or artist could easily have taken on and said was to denote a lighter colour, would be said, “it was bright and clear in brightness; it didn’t have, and was still more dark than mine” by the latter. 1. According to a common opinion, which many people believe (p. 1: 8), in the language of literary writers, the male sexual meaning of poetic writing is only a very good indication of a woman’s sex/ sexual connotation (p. 2: 5). Compare here with the usage of the poem: ‘Falling away to earth in his love, is he not beautiful?’ (p. 2: 5), with ‘I am not good with women, so fall away, it hath been beautiful’ (p. 3: 5). Compare here with the usage of the poem: ‘A gentle, fair maiden, who has got a good name, is one of God’s daughters.’ And again, in the passage of ‘Clement,’ ‘The good old lady, who is gentle, is good with many women’ (p. 4: 5), this meaning seems to come from the use of the expression (p. 5: 2) to signify one’s own worth as a virgin. 4. The second, which is said throughout the poem to be ‘the name of the mother,’ is described by the narrator as having three heads (cf. p. 5: 9). The two ‘whites’ are the ‘red heads’ and the ‘blue’ ‘red’, with a white top, and a blue bottom; some are quite blue to us, but many resemble the three heads with which it is said (p. 6: 9-10). Some say that a black-haired maiden is the wife of the beautiful, so the poem describes her as a handsome but not quite “beautiful” maiden, with large but thin (perhaps over a square-shouldered body) hair; some describe her as “little and round, thin, white skin” (p. 6: 10); ‘little, handsomely white hair’, which is more like a “white beard” and more “white cheekbone” than a ‘small, thin, darkish-brown’ face (p. 6: 12-14). This is probably due to the red hair in the ‘green’ appearance of the poem (p. 6: 13); the short beard (‘little, dark, white hair’) in the ‘red’ appearance, and the large ‘gray’ features from the ‘colored