ORIGINAL TEXT MODERN TEXT

My mistress' eyes are nothing like the My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun.
sun; Coral is much redder than the red of her lips.
Coral is far more red than her lips' red; Compared to the whiteness of snow, her breasts
If snow be white, why then her breasts are grayish-brown. Poets describe their
are dun; mistresses' hair as gold wires, but my mistress
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on has black wires growing on her head.
her head;
I have seen roses that were a mixture of red and
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
white, but I don’t see those colors in her cheeks. And
But no such roses see I in her cheeks; some perfumes smell more delightful
And in some pérfumes is there more
delight than my mistress’s reeking breath.
Than in the breath that from my mistress
reeks.
I love to hear her speak; yet I know perfectly
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know well that music has a far more pleasant sound. I
That music hath a far more pleasing admit I never saw a goddess walk; when my
sound. mistress walks, she treads on the ground.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on
the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my beloved is as
special as any woman whom poets have lied
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as about with false comparisons.
rare  
As any she belied with false
compare.  

Life and Times of William Shakespeare

Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important playwright of the
English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon in
Warwickshire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-maker, Shakespeare attended grammar
school, but his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582, he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway,
and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an
actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became the most
popular playwright in England and part owner of the Globe Theater. His career bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I
(ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted
Shakespeare’s company the greatest possible compliment by endowing them with the status of king’s players.
Wealthy and renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the time of
Shakespeare’s death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of Renaissance theatre.

Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following his death, and by
the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write in English was well established. The
unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life; but the
paucity of surviving biographical information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded
in mystery. Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays in reality were written by
someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—but the evidence
for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken seriously by many scholars.

In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author of the 37 plays and
154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays
seem to have transcended even the category of brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the
course of Western literature and culture ever after.

The Sonnets

Shakespeare’s sonnets are very different from Shakespeare’s plays, but they do contain dramatic elements and
an overall sense of story. Each of the poems deals with a highly personal theme, and each can be taken on its
own or in relation to the poems around it. The sonnets have the feel of autobiographical poems, but we don’t
know whether they deal with real events or not, because no one knows enough about Shakespeare’s life to say
whether or not they deal with real events and feelings, so we tend to refer to the voice of the sonnets as “the
speaker”—as though he were a dramatic creation like Hamlet or King Lear.

There are certainly a number of intriguing continuities throughout the poems. The first 126 of the sonnets seem
to be addressed to an unnamed young nobleman, whom the speaker loves very much; the rest of the poems
(except for the last two, which seem generally unconnected to the rest of the sequence) seem to be addressed to
a mysterious woman, whom the speaker loves, hates, and lusts for simultaneously. The two addressees of the
sonnets are usually referred to as the “young man” and the “dark lady”; in summaries of individual poems, I
have also called the young man the “beloved” and the dark lady the “lover,” especially in cases where their
identity can only be surmised. Within the two mini-sequences, there are a number of other discernible elements
of “plot”: the speaker urges the young man to have children; he is forced to endure a separation from him; he
competes with a rival poet for the young man’s patronage and affection. At two points in the sequence, it seems
that the young man and the dark lady are actually lovers themselves—a state of affairs with which the speaker is
none too happy. But while these continuities give the poems a narrative flow and a helpful frame of reference,
they have been frustratingly hard for scholars and biographers to pin down. In Shakespeare’s life, who were the
young man and the dark lady?

Historical Mysteries

Of all the questions surrounding Shakespeare’s life, the sonnets are perhaps the most intriguing. At the time of
their publication in 1609 (after having been written most likely in the 1590s and shown only to a small circle of
literary admirers), they were dedicated to a “Mr. W.H,” who is described as the “onlie begetter” of the poems.
Like those of the young man and the dark lady, the identity of this Mr. W.H. remains an alluring mystery.
Because he is described as “begetting” the sonnets, and because the young man seems to be the speaker’s
financial patron, some people have speculated that the young man is Mr. W.H. If his initials were reversed, he
might even be Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, who has often been linked to Shakespeare in
theories of his history. But all of this is simply speculation: ultimately, the circumstances surrounding the
sonnets, their cast of characters and their relations to Shakespeare himself, are destined to remain a mystery.
A sonnet is a fourteen-line lyric poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameter—that is, in lines ten
syllables long, with accents falling on every second syllable, as in: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s
day?” The sonnet form first became popular during the Italian Renaissance, when the poet Petrarch published a
sequence of love sonnets addressed to an idealized woman named Laura. Taking firm hold among Italian poets,
the sonnet spread throughout Europe to England, where, after its initial Renaissance, “Petrarchan” incarnation
faded, the form enjoyed a number of revivals and periods of renewed interest. In Elizabethan England—the era
during which Shakespeare’s sonnets were written—the sonnet was the form of choice for lyric poets,
particularly lyric poets seeking to engage with traditional themes of love and romance. (In addition to
Shakespeare’s monumental sequence, the Astrophel and Stella sequence by Sir Philip Sydney stands as one of
the most important sonnet sequences of this period.) Sonnets were also written during the height of classical
English verse, by Dryden and Pope, among others, and written again during the heyday of English
Romanticism, when Wordsworth, Shelley, and particularly John Keats created wonderful sonnets. Today, the
sonnet remains the most influential and important verse form in the history of English poetry.

The Shakespearean sonnet, the form of sonnet utilized throughout Shakespeare’s sequence, is divided into four
parts. The first three parts are each four lines long, and are known as quatrains, rhymed ABAB; the fourth part
is called the couplet, and is rhymed CC. The Shakespearean sonnet is often used to develop a sequence of
metaphors or ideas, one in each quatrain, while the couplet offers either a summary or a new take on the
preceding images or ideas.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s use of the sonnet form is richer and more complex than this relatively simple
division into parts might imply. Not only is his sequence largely occupied with subverting the traditional themes
of love sonnets—the traditional love poems in praise of beauty and worth, for instance, are written to a man,
while the love poems to a woman are almost all as bitter and negative as Sonnet 147—he also combines formal
patterns with daring and innovation. Many of his sonnets in the sequence, for instance, impose the thematic
pattern of a Petrarchan sonnet onto the formal pattern of a Shakespearean sonnet, so that while there are still
three quatrains and a couplet, the first two quatrains might ask a single question, which the third quatrain and
the couplet will answer. As you read through Shakespeare’s sequence, think about the ways Shakespeare’s
themes are affected by and tailored to the sonnet form. Be especially alert to complexities such as the
juxtaposition of Petrarchan and Shakespearean patterns. How might such a juxtaposition combination deepen
and enrich Shakespeare’s use of a traditional form?

Themes

Real Beauty vs. Clichéd Beauty

To express the depth of their feelings, poets frequently employ hyperbolic terms to describe the objects of their
affections. Traditionally, sonnets transform women into the most glorious creatures to walk the earth, whereas
patrons become the noblest and bravest men the world has ever known. Shakespeare makes fun of the
convention by contrasting an idealized woman with a real woman. In Sonnet 130, Shakespeare directly engages
—and skewers—clichéd concepts of beauty. The speaker explains that his lover, the dark lady, has wires for
hair, bad breath, dull cleavage, a heavy step, and pale lips. He concludes by saying that he loves her all the more
precisely because he loves her and not some idealized, false version . Real love, the sonnet implies, begins
when we accept our lovers for what they are as well as what they are not. Other sonnets explain that
because anyone can use artful means to make himself or herself more attractive, no one is really beautiful
anymore. Thus, since anyone can become beautiful, calling someone beautiful is no longer much of a
compliment.

Motifs

The Significance of Sight

Readers’ eyes are as significant in the sonnets as the speaker’s eyes. Shakespeare encourages his readers to see
by providing vivid visual descriptions. One sonnet compares the young man’s beauty to the glory of the rising
sun, while another uses the image of clouds obscuring the sun as a metaphor for the young man’s faithlessness
and still another contrasts the beauty of a rose with one rotten spot to warn the young man to cease his sinning
ways. Other poems describe bare trees to symbolize aging. The sonnets devoted to the dark lady emphasize
her coloring, noting in particular her black eyes and hair, and Sonnet 130 describes her by noting all the
colors she does not possess. Stressing the visual helps Shakespeare to heighten our experience of the
poems by giving us the precise tools with which to imagine the metaphors, similes, and descriptions
contained therein.

Symbols

Flowers and Trees

Flowers and trees appear throughout the sonnets to illustrate the passage of time, the transience of life,
the aging process, and beauty. Rich, lush foliage symbolizes youth, whereas barren trees symbolize old age
and death, often in the same poem, as in Sonnet 12. Traditionally, roses signify romantic love, a symbol
Shakespeare employs in the sonnets, discussing their attractiveness and fragrance in relation to the young man.
Sometimes Shakespeare compares flowers and weeds to contrast beauty and ugliness. In these
comparisons, marred, rotten flowers are worse than weeds—that is, beauty that turns rotten from bad character
is worse than initial ugliness. Giddy with love, elsewhere the speaker compares blooming flowers to the beauty
of the young man, concluding in Sonnets 98 and 99 that flowers received their bloom and smell from him. The
sheer ridiculousness of this statement—flowers smell sweet for chemical and biological reasons—underscores
the hyperbole and exaggeration that plague typical sonnets.

Summary

This sonnet compares the speaker’s lover to a number of other beauties—and never in the lover’s favor. Her
eyes are “nothing like the sun,” her lips are less red than coral; compared to white snow, her breasts are dun-
colored, and her hairs are like black wires on her head. In the second quatrain, the speaker says he has seen
roses separated by color (“damasked”) into red and white, but he sees no such roses in his mistress’s cheeks;
and he says the breath that “reeks” from his mistress is less delightful than perfume. In the third quatrain, he
admits that, though he loves her voice, music “hath a far more pleasing sound,” and that, though he has never
seen a goddess, his mistress—unlike goddesses—walks on the ground. In the couplet, however, the speaker
declares that, “by heav’n,” he thinks his love as rare and valuable “As any she belied with false compare”—that
is, any love in which false comparisons were invoked to describe the loved one’s beauty.

Commentary
This sonnet, one of Shakespeare’s most famous, plays an elaborate joke on the conventions of love poetry
common to Shakespeare’s day, and it is so well-conceived that the joke remains funny today. Most sonnet
sequences in Elizabethan England were modeled after that of Petrarch. Petrarch’s famous sonnet
sequence was written as a series of love poems to an idealized and idolized mistress named Laura. In the
sonnets, Petrarch praises her beauty, her worth, and her perfection using an extraordinary variety of metaphors
based largely on natural beauties. In Shakespeare’s day, these metaphors had already become cliche (as, indeed,
they still are today), but they were still the accepted technique for writing love poetry. The result was that
poems tended to make highly idealizing comparisons between nature and the poets’ lover that were, if taken
literally, completely ridiculous. My mistress’ eyes are like the sun; her lips are red as coral; her cheeks are like
roses, her breasts are white as snow, her voice is like music, she is a goddess.

In many ways, Shakespeare’s sonnets subvert and reverse the conventions of the Petrarchan love sequence: the
idealizing love poems, for instance, are written not to a perfect woman but to an admittedly imperfect man, and
the love poems to the dark lady are anything but idealizing (“My love is as a fever, longing still / For that which
longer nurseth the disease” is hardly a Petrarchan conceit.) Sonnet 130 mocks the typical Petrarchan
metaphors by presenting a speaker who seems to take them at face value, and somewhat bemusedly,
decides to tell the truth. Your mistress’ eyes are like the sun? That’s strange—my mistress’ eyes aren’t at
all like the sun. Your mistress’ breath smells like perfume? My mistress’ breath reeks compared to
perfume. In the couplet, then, the speaker shows his full intent, which is to insist that love does not need these
conceits in order to be real; and women do not need to look like flowers or the sun in order to be
beautiful.

The rhetorical structure of Sonnet 130 is important to its effect. In the first quatrain, the speaker spends
one line on each comparison between his mistress and something else (the sun, coral, snow, and wires—
the one positive thing in the whole poem some part of his mistress is like. In the second and third
quatrains, he expands the descriptions to occupy two lines each, so that roses/cheeks, perfume/breath,
music/voice, and goddess/mistress each receive a pair of unrhymed lines. This creates the effect of an
expanding and developing argument, and neatly prevents the poem—which does, after all, rely on a single
kind of joke for its first twelve lines—from becoming stagnant.