In the present text I am going to analyse William Shakespeare’s poem “A woman’s face with Nature’s hand painted” or Sonnet 20 to discover the poet’s message and make my personal considerations after a careful analysis of the text.

The title invites the reader to find out who the woman is, how she looks like and why she is so beautiful. At the same time the reader understands that the language is not particularly archaic. The title increases the reader’s curiosity to go on reading in order to discover more about the woman.

The layout shows clearly the poem, since it is a sonnet, is arranged into three quatrains and into a couplet, where the lines are of different length. Moreover the quatrains are written in alternate rhyme, while the couplet is a rhyme couplet. After a careful reading of the text, the reader discovers why the poem is arranged in this way, because each stanza has its own role. The first stanza is used to introduce the figure of a man, who is described like a woman for his delicate and gentle face and for his feelings, that are those typical of women. However he is not perfidious, as all women are when they are looking at other people. The reader is surprised because he/she discovers that the woman of the first line is a man. The second stanza is focused on his gaze that enhances whatever he looks. The poet says the man was handsome and for this reason both men and women like him. In the last quatrain and then in the couplet, the poet says that the man is loved by everyone as well as by the Nature. He was created as a woman at the beginning, but Nature changed her idea and turned her into a man, since she loved him. For this reason, the poet cannot love him, as he would love a lady, but would like to receive his real love, leaving the physical manifestation of it to women, because the poet knows that sex is less precious than real love. The reader is now astonished, because he/she discovers that the poet loves another man and this was strange in the 16^th century. Moreover it is unexpected that the poet declare his sexual identity in one of his poems.

Moving now on with a more detailed connotative analysis, the reader realizes the presence of some sound devices and figures of speech throughout the text. As regards sound devices, the reader finds a lot of alliterations of letters h, s, and m and some assonances that are present in quite all lines. The use of these devices creates the rhythm and the melody of the poem. Considering figures of speech, the most important is the personification of the Nature, that is described like a woman who creates and decides the physical and psychological characteristics of all human beings. As regards the language used by Shakespeare in the sonnet, the reader discovers that it is partly archaic, because a lot of words are not commonly used nowadays. Indeed the language is the typical 16^th century English language.

In conclusion the reader understands that the poem’s theme, which is the man’s beauty and the poet’s love for this man, has been represented by Oscar Wilde in his novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” in the last years of Victorian age. Wilde’s novel is about a painter, Basil Hallward , who decides to portray a young handsome man, Dorian Gray, because he is fascinated by his beauty. The painter’s greatest desire is to make eternal Dorian’s beauty. This desire can be easily found also in the poem, where Shakespeare decides to make eternal the man’s beauty with a sonnet, as the painter does with a Dorian’s portrait in Wilde’s novel. Both the poem and the novel present another similarity. It is the strange feeling, that can seem a particular kind of love, between two male people. In the novel it is Basil’s love for Dorian, while in the poem is Shakespeare’s love for the man. In both situations artists fall in love with another man. The present situation is atypical in literary texts, because of the historic period, when lived Shakespeare and Wilde, that was characterised by a strict social moral, influenced by the puritan moral.