In the present text I am going to analyse the poem “A woman’s face, with Nature’s own hand painted” by William Shakespeare to try to find a link with the novel “The Picture of Dorian Gray” by Oscar Wilde.

The poem is part of William Shakespeare’s sonnets. The tile is about “a woman’s face” which has been painted by Nature, which at first sight seems to be personified. The reader is curious about whether the poet is going to tell about a specific woman or if the poem is about the creation of men and women.

Following the form of the English sonnet, the poem is arranged into a single stanza, of thirteen lines. The first lines present the so-called “Fair Lord” as feminine, because he has “a woman’s face”, “a woman’s gentle heart”, but he is not as capricious as a woman. In the first line the poet refers to the young man as “the master-mistress of my passion” meaning that the beauty of the “Fair Lord” is similar to that of a woman, but he is still a man. In the following lines, William Shakespeare tells that the young man’s beauty sets the standard for what a man should look like. Furthermore, he adds that his appearance attracts both men and women. After that, the poet states that the “Fair Lord” was created as a woman but Nature added something to him that wasn’t helpful to the poet. In this part, he is referring to male’s genitalia. Lastly, Shakespeare says that this “insertion” was made for women’s pleasure, but his love was for him.

The sonnet seems to be a very controversial one, given the main topic. Shakespeare is basically drawing a line between the physical love between a man and a woman and the platonic and non-physical love between two men. In lines 11-12, for example, the poet highlights the fact that the “Fair Lord” was created as a man, but at the same time he explicitly denies any interest in his's genitalia: "And by addition me of thee defeated / By adding one thing to my purpose nothing". In line 13 there is a pun on the word “prick” given by the double meaning of the word: as a verb, Shakespeare uses it meaning “to choose”, while as a noun it is a vulgar term for “penis”. Furthermore, there is a lot of controversy and speculation on the symbolic meaning of the word “Hews”: scholars believe that Shakespeare inserted the actual name of the “Fair Lord” in the Sonnet 20. Shakespeare himself underlines this word by capitalising it. The letters of the word “Hews” appear in every line of the sonnet and the could be similar to the name of the boy who is the model for the “Fair Lord”.

Similarly to Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, the “Fair Lord” seems to embody all the characteristics which make his appearance handsome to both men and women. They both have some feminine traits that are regarded as the most beautiful ones.