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 20 syllable to the traditional form may also represent a phallus. Sonnet 20 is one of only two in the sequence with feminine endings to its lines; the other is Sonnet 87. Stackhouse also comments on the reveal of the gender of the addressee in the final few lines as a way of Shakespeare playing with the idea of gender throughout the poem. Stackhouse's analysis of the nature aspect also seemed to play into the "gender-bending" model by creating this idea of Mother Nature falling in love with her creation and thus imparting a phallus to him. Which is represented in