Sonnet 130

“Sonnet 130” relates to Shakespeare’s other sonnets about the mistress because they build upon the woman’s departure from beauty norms. In the poem that starts the sequence, “Sonnet 127,” the speaker argues that people didn’t consider the color black beautiful or “fair,” but, for the speaker, black is beautiful, and his mistress’s eyes, while “nothing like the sun” (Line 1) are, in “Sonnet 127,” “raven black.” Thus, “Sonnet 130” aligns with the other sonnets when it comes to toppling conventions about the ideal look for women.

In the context of Shakespeare’s plays, “Sonnet 130” fits in rather nicely. Like the mistress in the sonnet, Shakespeare tends to create women characters who defy objectification. In Romeo and Juliet, a play about two lovestruck teens, Juliet has agency and the mind to subvert her parents’ plan to marry her off to someone else, as she hatches a scheme to elope with Romeo. In Macbeth (1606), Lady Macbeth possesses the will to propel her husband to kill so that he can become king. The mistress in “Sonnet 130” is one of several women in Shakespeare’s repertoire that counters objectification.

Concerning love poems by different authors, “Sonnet 130” stands out since it explicitly doesn’t fetishize the beloved woman. Shakespeare wrote his poem in the context of poets like Plutarch and Thomas Watson. In 1581, Watson published a multipart poem Hekatompathia. Some scholars see “Sonnet 130” as a direct response to “Part VII” of Watson’s poem, where his speaker presents a standard portrait of a woman, so “[h]er words are music all of silver sound”; “[h]er breath is sweet perfume, or holy flame”; and “[h]er lips more red than any Coral stone.” Shakespeare uses “[c]oral” (Line 2), “perfumes” (Line 7), and “music” (Line 10) too. Yet in “Sonnet 130,” the speaker refuses to link his mistress to these things.