His Not So Fair Lady

Evelyn Choi

Professor Eric Nebeker

Comp Lit 30B

23 January 2014

His Uncomely Mistress

Poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries frequently composed series of sonnets, cataloguing their experiences and feelings towards a wide variety of subjects. William Shakespeare, one of the most widely renowned poets of this period, authored a series of sonnets, which are widely regarded as the greatest of their kind. While most authors embellished their women’s physical characteristics, Shakespeare, in Sonnet 130, claims that his mistress, the “Dark Lady”, lacks most of the physical attributes of idealized beauty. His method of dcribing his mistress in Sonnet 130 highly contrasts Sir Philip Sidney’s utilization of godly imagery in his account of Stella in Astrophel and Stella. Shakespeare uses negative connotations in his representation of the Dark Lady to prove the underlying idea of complete love in spite of physical flaws. By harshly assessing his mistress’ appearances, he makes his turn in the last few lines about the theme of love more effective while enhancing his parody of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet. Through descriptions of his mistress’ physical flaws in Sonnet 130, Shakespeare portrays female beauty in ways that deviate from beauty depicted in conventional love sonnets, including the traditional Petrarchan sonnet typified by Sir Philip Sidney’s work.

While Sidney addresses his sonnets to an idealized woman, Stella, whose beauty he likens to that of a goddess, Shakespeare in his Sonnet 130, which is bereft of godlike imagery, expresses his infatuation for his subject in negative comparisons. In Astrophel and Stella, Stella’s physical features are compared to objects that emphasize her beauty. For example, Sidney describes Stella with eyes like “bright rays” (Sidney 7) that “dazzle [more] than delight” (Sidney 7) and with “fair skin, beamy eyes, like morning sun on snow” (Sidney 8). In addition, her cheeks, or “porches rich,” are interlaced with “red and white” marble, her teeth are “lock of pearl,” and her face is compared to “Queen Virtue’s court” (Sidney 9). In stark contrast to Sidney’s deification of Stella’s goddess like beauty, Shakespeare uses references to objects of beauty to illustrate that his mistress has physical flaws, rejecting traditional Petrarchan form. Shakespeare simply compares his mistress to natural objects in order to portray the nonstandard image of women. For example, he notes that her eyes are “nothing like the sun,” (Shakespeare 130) where the simile that Sidney uses to describe Stella’s eyes is not applied. In line 3 of the sonnet, Shakespeare describes the mistress’ breasts as “dun,” or a dull brownish gray, and her hair as “black wires [that] grow on her head” (Shakespeare 130). In lines 5-6, the narrator mentions that he has “seen roses damasked, red and white,” but his mistress’ cheeks do not remind him of such beautiful roses. In lines 7-8, he notes that there is “more delight” in perfumes than her reeking breath (Shakespeare 130). Shakespeare further refutes the resemblance of goddess qualities by underscoring his mistress’ earth-bound properties in lines 11-12: “I grant I never saw a goddess go,/ My mistress when she walks treads on the ground” (Shakespeare 130). Shakespeare develops, in three quatrains, a straightforward description of his mistress’ flaws and simplicity by scrutinizing all her physical attributes, including her face, body and fragrance. By avoiding descriptions of ideal beauty and attaching importance to natural elemental features, he satirizes the traditional Petrarchan sonnet exemplified in Sidney’s work. Essentially, Shakespeare mocks traditional love sonnets and criticizes their repletion with exaggerated comparisons of goddess like imagery to females by using typical love poetry metaphors against themselves.