There are broadly 2 types of sonnet
1. the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet, from the form used by
the Italian poet Petrarch (1304 - 1374).
2. the English sonnet (as used by Shakespeare)
• The Petrarchan sonnet has 2 main divisions:
an octave (8 lines) and a sestet (6 lines). It typically
rhymes abba abba / cdecde or cdccdc. Wyatt’s “Whoso list
to hunt” is Petrarchan with a twist: octave abba abba /
sestet cddc ee.
• The English sonnet has 4 main divisions:
3 quatrains (4 lines each) and a closing couplet: it rhymes
abab bcbc cdcd ee.
William Shakespeare, The Chandos Portrait.
National Portrait Gallery, London.
1609 title page of first
edition of Shakespeare’s
Sonnets.
SHAKE-SPEARES
SONNETS.
Neuer before Imprinted.
At LONDON
By G. Eld for T.T and are
to be solde by John Wright,
dwelling at ChristChurch
gate. 1609.
Sonnet 20, 1609
printed edition.
Shakespeare, Sonnet 20
A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling, 5
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue all hues in his controlling,
Which steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created,
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
10
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love’s use their treasure.
Questions
• How do we understand the speaker’s
desire in Sonnet 20?
• How does this understanding matter
to us today??
thing/nothing (l. 12)
• thing (1) object; (2) generative organ
(used both for “penis” … and for
“vulva”)
• nothing (1) worthless; (2) no-thing, a
non-thing. “Nothing” and “naught”
were popular cant terms for “vulva”
(perhaps because of the shape of a
zero). Booth 1977, 164
Sonnet 20:
Even the speaker’s apparent disclaimer of any active,
genital sexual interest in the youth … suggests a
light-hearted equivocation [the pun on “nothing” as
both male and female genitals]. (I do not make this
point in order to assert that the Sonnets say that there
was a genital sexual relationship between these men;
… the sexual context of that period is far too
irrecoverable for us to be able to disentangle boasts,
confessions, undertones, overtones, jokes, the
unthinkable, the taken-for-granted, the
unmentionable-but-often-done-anyway, etc.).
(Sedgwick 1985, 34–5)
Nicholas
Hilliard,
Portrait of a
young man
among
roses.
1585-95
What can be said is that the speaker in this
sonnet [20] can, for one reason or another,
afford to be relaxed and urbane … on the
subject of sexual interchangeability of males
and females – as long as he is addressing a
male. And this closeness between males, to
which a reader from outside the culture finds
it difficult to perceive the boundaries, seems
to occur within a suasive [serving to
persuade] context of heterosexual
socialization.
(Sedgwick 1985, 34–5)
References
• Booth, Stephen, ed. Shakespeare’s Sonnets. New
Haven and London: Yale UP, 1977. Print.
• Goldberg, Jonathan. “Part One: ‘Wee / Men’:
Gender and Sexuality in the Formations of
Elizabethan High Literariness.” Sodometries:
Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities, Stanford:
Stanford UP, 1992. 29-101. Print.
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofksy. “Swan in Love: The
Example of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.” Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire.
New York: Columbia UP, 1985.28-48. Print.