Sonnet CXXX By William Shakespeare Literary Analysis

In what concerns the sonnet, Shakespeare continued the work of Wyatt and mostly that of Henry Howard Earl of Surrey for he had written his sonnets according to the latters scheme. This scheme known at that time under the name of the English sonnet is now called the Shakespearean sonnet. A clear subdivision into sequences of the sonnets may be summarized as it follows: 1-126 addressed to the Friend, 127-152 addressed to the Dark Lady, 153154 deal with the Cupids Fire. The friends physical beauty and nobility of character, his generosity and graciousness are seen in contrast to the Dark Lady who is physically unattractive, promiscuous. She represents the obverse side of love as a negative energy opposed to the beauty and pureness of the fair friend, the antithesis between good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell, The Dark Lady was almost sure a lady of high social position. Some critics, among whom George Lyman Kittredge, are convinced that she was somehow connected with Rosalind, the heroine of Shakespeares Loves Labours Lost. She resembles the Dark Lady in a number of important details. She is a brunette, seductive and easy to seduce, Allusions to her easy virtue recur throughout the comedy. The Dark Lady is unique. No character like her appears in any other sonnet sequence written during the Renaissance in Italian, French or English. Unlike the other sonneteers that praised the beauty of their lovers, Shakespeare seems to praise her unusualness.

In the first poems dedicated to the Dark Lady the poet addresses her in a half teasing manner. With a touch of irony he praises her unfashionable black beauty and expresses amorous delight in her lute playing. Following the pattern of this attitude sonnet CXXX ridicules the conventional comparisons between the adored one and objects in Nature, Even though a denigration, at first side, sonnet CXXX is in fact a defense of the woman as Shakespeare sees it. The first quatrain describes the woman in terms of denial: are nothing like the sun, for more than her lips red, black wires grow on her head. This description, an intensified one, from just stating the of the womans beauty to specifically describing why the Dark Lady does not belong to the standard beauty. The next two quatrains introduce a personal description of the lady in terms of visual, olphactory, auditory and kinesthetic imagery: no such roses see I in her cheeks, in some perfumes is there more delight/ than in the breath, music hath a far more pleasing sound. The unfashionable beauty of the lady is introduced by these comparisons, yet the couplet states the whole purpose of the sonnet and this is a denouncing of the misrepresentations of other women in contemporary love lyrics. In a time when the ideal beauty demanded a fair hair and physical qualities in agreement with beauties from Nature Shakespeare dears to praise and immortalize the unusual beauty of the Dark Lady.

Luciana Ursu English-Romanian