In sonnet 130, William Shakespeare describes his mistress, who is commonly referred to as the dark lady, in a very unconventional way. The sonnet is clearly a parody of the traditional love sonnet, which was very popular in Britain in the 16th century, and Shakespeare uses it to distance himself from other poets of the time. Being written in iambic pentameter, the poem is a typical Shakespearean sonnet that consists of three quatrains featuring the rhyme scheme abab / cdcd / efef and one couplet with the rhyme scheme gg. In the first quatrain, the speaker describes his mistress on a visual basis using images that are typical of the Petrarchan beauty catalogue and were employed by many contemporary and preceding poets such as Thomas Watson. However, Shakespeare’s speaker points out that none of the pertinent similes are an accurate description of his mistress, saying: “My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; / Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;” (ll. 1-2). At first glance, these contrastive comparisons make the sonnet seem like a denigration of the speaker’s mistress. The second quatrain supports this idea by alluding to further examples from the above-mentioned beauty catalogue, which the mistress does not fulfil, and now also referring to the mistress’ smell. However, the contrastive observation “And in some perfumes is there more delight / Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.” (ll. 7-8) suggests that it is not the mistress’ appearance that is denigrated but the beauty catalogue itself, because the common poetic hyperboles are not an accurate depiction of a real person. The third quatrain gives further evidence for this interpretation as it starts with the words “I love to hear her speak, yet well I know / That music has a far more pleasing sound” (ll. 9-10). This comparison not only adds hearing to the aforementioned sensations smell and vision but also shows that the speaker in fact loves his mistress and has no intention of denigrating her but merely wants to point out that a real person cannot be described adequately in hyperbolic speech. The third quatrain ends with the words “I grant I never saw a goddess go – / My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.” (ll. 11-12). The speaker thus tops off his collection of contrastive comparisons with a climax by denying the strongest of all hyperboles, i.e. giving the beloved a godlike status. The fact that the sonnet’s focus is on criticising traditional hyperbolic love sonnets rather than denigrating the mistress becomes evident in the couplet, which summarises the argument of the quatrains by stating that although the mistress might not be godlike, she is still just as “rare” (l. 13) as all the other beloved women that have been described in highly exaggerated terms. The speaker concludes his argumentation by explicitly labelling this traditional style “false compare” (l. 14).

Conclusion: […]