In the present text I am going to analyse Shakespeare’s  sonnet 20 , called  “A woman's face with nature's own hand painted” as well, in order to discover the poet’s message and to compare it to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”.

The title is meant to present to the reader the identity of the woman portrayed by the nature itself. Nature is a personification because it paints, it depicts the woman giving an idea of perfection. Therefore the effect conveyed is to increase the reader’s curiosity to go on reading in order to find out more about the woman.

As for the layout, since the poem is a sonnet, it’s arranged into one single stanza of 14 lines of different length. The poem presents three quatrains and a couplet. The three quatrains are written in alternate rhyme, whereas the couplet is a rhyme couplet. Naturally each of them plays its own role in the poem. The three quatrains are essentially descriptive of the appearance and effects of the beauty of the young; they are based on the ambiguity between feminine and masculine since the poem expresses both Master and Mistress with an uncertain sexual connotation, which creates an effect of "lie" that the text never reveals.The sonnet begins with a description of the protagonist’s face which seems to be painted and colored by the Nature’s own hand. However the reader can not understand if the protagonist is a man or a woman since the figure is described like a woman for her delicate facial features and her gentle heart. The woman is very different from the others because she is not deceitful as all women are when they are looking at other people. Unlike the reader’s expectations created since the first line, he discovers at line 7 that the woman is actually a man in shape and form. Moreover in the second quatrain the poet describes his gaze: all other men are under his control since he catches men’s attention and amazes all women’s soul thanks to his eyes and his beauty. In the last quatrain the writer explains the reader the man was created at the beginning as a woman; nevertheless  Nature changed her idea and turned the woman into a man since she loved him. In addition, analysing the last couplet of the poem, the writer expresses all his love for the man. Even if it isn’t a real love, the poet declares it in order to receive it. So he lets the reader think about his sexual identity which is different from the other people since he loves another man.

Moving on with a more detailed connotative analysis, the reader notices the presence of figures of speech and of some sound devices in the poem. First of all there is the personification of Nature, depicted by the poet as a painter, so assigning to it physical and psychological features typical of human beings. As for level of sound, the reader can find out some alliterations, like the repetition of the letters “n”, “m”, “s”, and some assonances as well, like the repetition of vowels “a”, “e” and “o”. This kind of devices contributes to create musicality and a rhythmic sound pattern in the poem. As for semantic level, the language used in the text is typical of the 16^th century, characterised by some archaic words.

To conclude the themes treated by the poem are beauty and the poet’s love for another man. These themes have been treated also by Oscar Wilde in his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. In the novel is told the story of a young man named Dorian Gray who was very handsome so a painter, Basil Hallward, who was very fascinated by Dorian at the beginning, decided to make him a portrait. This feeling was soon transformed into obsession. His biggest desire was to make eternal Dorian’s beauty. Even Shakespeare’s aspiration was the same of Wilde, so to eternalize beauty with a sonnet. Another similarity consists of loving another man, which was a delicate theme at that time and those men who loved another one could be considered strange or different, uncommon.