Sonnet 20, Shakespeare

Considering the layout the reader understands the sonnet follows the Elizabethan model, because it’s organized into three quatrains and a rhyming couplet.

The three quatrains describe the young man's beauty; they are based on the ambiguity between feminine and masculine in an articulated formal, stylistic, linguistic and content game.

Fair youth has all the positive attributes of women, indeed it surpasses them all, lacking their typical defects.

In the first line, Shakespeare gives an image of nature as a painter, who painted the young man of androgynous beauty, makes him a sculptor and craftsman.

The final couplet, introduced by but, is presented as an opponent, giving an apparent solution to the problem of women with a penis: according to the choice of nature, to endow it with masculine attributes, even in a body with femininity which attracts men.