Sonnets 11, 20, 127; Nature & Culture

"A woman’s face with Nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women’s fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hue, all ‘hues’ in his controlling,
Much steals men’s eyes and women’s souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prick’d thee out for women’s pleasure,
Mine be thy love and thy love’s use their treasure." (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 20)

The poet describes a young man's creature with feminine, fair traits that Nature itself has created:

“A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted” (20:1). 

The Nature is considered as a thinking or acting feminine/female aspect or essence who knows and dresses her offsprings, at Her own discretion, as here when Nature responds to Her own tender feelings towards a being - who originally was intended as a woman - and provides the feminine creature with a masculine attribute – the part of a man’s body that he uses for having sex, "a-doting" (20:10)

[When S. is playful with the language it is infectuos (entailing the risk of overinterpretation); it becomes very tempting to find counterparts to “pricked”, but also by the fact that sonnet itself oscillates between feminine and masculine features.

If you allow yourself to be sprited away by Shakespeare's puns, I would like to suggest that the noun that concludes the sonnet, "treasure", is a pendant (!) to “pricked” (as well as an appendix to the introduction!), i.e. vagina.

I have been enchanted by the phrase "a-doting" in line 10: "For nature as she wrought thee fell a-doting" in response to the "one thing" (penis) and "nothing" ('no thing'/vagina). It seems that "a-doting" in S's imagination (at least in mine!) carries a double meaning, both as an adjective and a noun, and in this [my!] case becomes “a do-thing", again the male sexual organ but also a comment on men's [my?] sexual obsession “a doting do-thing”.]

Or as here when Nature responds with eternal death for those who defy Her hatred of infertility:

"As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestowest
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:
Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
 Let those whom nature hath not made for store,
Harsh, featureless and rude, barrenly perish;
Look, whom she best endowed, she gave the more,
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die. (Shakespeare's Sonnets, 11)

Described in this way I perceive the feminine as a superior aspect unlike the renaissance ideal which regarded the woman as the weaker sex who ought to be controlled and the male an active and precocious aspect which supervised the agenda of the continuing contract of the creation.

In Sonnet 127, it is instead the Culture, in conflict with Nature, which has given a woman masculine dark features, profaning the original; as if Time has caught up with the poet, as if  Culture with the passing of time over the years has conquered Nature and taken its abode in him (the dilemma that Marcel Proust centuries and thousands of pages later brings up an refines in his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past, about involuntary memories [Nature] and voluntary memories [Culture]. Proust's narrator laments that memories of the latter (as in Sonnet 127) are inevitably partial, and do not bear the "essence" of the Past, which Shakespeare himself were desperately looking for [as in Sonnet 30] unknowingly using the wrong memory [according to Proust]). The poet might have grown older and perhaps consider Beauty in a different way than before, or that Culture has taught him that Beauty is able to create. Previously the poet considered Beauty as the natural bright and feminine look in young men, now it is possible to see the opposite as Beautiful: a black-rouged woman.

“For since each hand [Culture] hath put on nature’s power,
Fairing the foul with art’s false borrowed face [Cultural intervention],
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack [by Cultural intervention],” (127: 5-6, 11)

Reference list

Proust, Marcel & Scott-Moncrieff, C. K. (2006). Remembrance of things past. Volume 1 / .. Wordsworth Editions

Shakespeare, William (2010). Shakespeare's sonnets. Pbk. ed., Rev. ed. London: Methuen Drama