Sonnet 20 - Context

Context

Sonnet 20 is most often considered to be a member of the “Fair Youth” group of sonnets, in which most scholars agree that the narrator addresses a young man. This interpretation contributes to common assumption of the homosexuality of Shakespeare, or at least the speaker of his sonnet. The position of Sonnet 20 also influences its analysis and examinations. William Nelles, of the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, claims that, “Sonnet 20 splits readers into two groups: those who see an end to any clear sequence after this point, and those who read on, finding a narrative line connecting the rest of the sonnets in a meaningful pattern.” Scholars have suggested countless motivations or means of organizing Shakespeare’s sonnets in a specific sequence or system of grouping. Some see the division between the sonnets written to the “young man,” while others do not. A number of academics believe the sonnets may be woven into some form of complex narrative, while “Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells confidently assert that the sonnets are ‘better thought of as a collection than a sequence, since…the individual poems do not hang together from beginning to end as a single unity…Though some of the first 126 poems in the collection unquestionably relate to a young man, others could relate to either a male or female.’”