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 14 quatrains, and a resolution in the final couplet. This sonnet suggests this pattern, but its rhetorical structure is more closely modeled upon the older Petrarchan sonnet which arranges the octave (the first eight lines) in contrast to the sestet (the final six lines). Line 3 exemplifies a regular iambic pentameter: Some critics argue that the Fair Youth sequence follows a story-line told by Shakespeare. Evidence that corroborates this is that the sonnets show a constant change of attitude that would seem to follow a day-by-day private journal entry. Furthermore, there is an argument that the Fair Youth sequence was written