Sonnet 20 Sonnet 20 Sonnet 20 is one of the best-known of 154 sonnets written by the English playwright and poet William Shakespeare. Part of the Fair Youth sequence (which comprises sonnets 1-126), the subject of the sonnet is widely interpreted as being male, thereby raising questions about the sexuality of its author. In this sonnet (as in, for example, Sonnet 53) the beloved's beauty is compared to both a man's and a woman's. Sonnet 20 is a typical English or Shakespearean sonnet, containing three quatrains and a couplet for a total of fourteen lines. It follows the rhyme scheme of this
Sonnet 25 rhymes may have been intended to be trisyllabic: "belovèd" and "removèd", although other editors (like John Kerrigan) prefer the standard 2-syllable pronunciations. This sonnet, as originally printed, departs from the English sonnet's typical rhyme scheme, "abab cdcd efef gg". Lines 9 and 11 (the expected "e" lines) do not rhyme. These lines in the Quarto of 1609 read (with emphasis added): <poem>The painefull warrier famoſed for worth, Is from the booke of honour raſed quite,</poem> No other lines in "Shakespeare's Sonnets" fail to rhyme, and Shakespeare's typical sonnet structure demands that these lines should rhyme with each other. Most editors