Sonnet 20 calls a young man the master mistress of the poet's passion
Sonnet 20 is the sonnet that makes readers sit up. Shakespeare describes a man with a woman's face, painted by Nature herself, and calls him the master mistress of his passion. Then he tells a teasing myth: Nature meant to make a woman, fell in love while working, and added one thing too many.
The first eight lines build a portrait out of comparisons with women, almost always to the women's disadvantage. The beloved has a feminine face that needs no cosmetics, and a gentle heart without the fickleness the speaker blames on women in general. His eye is brighter and less roving, and it turns gold whatever it rests upon. He holds every hue in his command, catching men's eyes and astonishing women's souls. The misogyny in these lines is plain, and it is part of what makes the poem uncomfortable as well as dazzling.
The central phrase, master mistress, fuses both genders into one title, a lord and a lady at once. Few records of Shakespeare's private life survive, and that silence has fed extensive speculation about many matters, his sexuality included. A poem like this one invites biographical guesses, yet what it reveals about the author himself cannot be settled from fourteen lines.
The third quatrain turns into a comic creation story. Nature first set out to make a woman, but while she was shaping him she became infatuated, and by adding one thing she cheated the speaker out of him, since that addition is useless for the speaker's purposes. The bawdy pun is left for the reader to decode, and the tone is rueful rather than bitter.
The couplet settles on a division of the spoils. Since Nature marked him out for women's pleasure, the speaker asks for his love while women get its physical use as their treasure. The line draws a boundary between affection and sex, and the poem's cleverness lies in how openly it names both. Shakespeare married Anne Hathaway, eight years his senior, in 1582, and the sonnet does not resolve how any of this relates to his life.
Source: Sonnet 20: A woman's face with nature's own hand painted
