The Views on Beauty in William Shakespeare’s Poetry

We can read in William Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost that “Beauty is bought by the judgement of the eye”. It is not a thing that people could grasp or comprehend fully, as well as, it is a subjective experience. Something will be beautiful as long as we can find beauty in them, no matter what the others will think. It is said in an article on beauty by E. F. Carritt “Pure delight in a sunset or a symphony and our value for such experiences are unimpaired by the discovery that other people find no beauty in them or by the admission that there may be no objective beauty in them at all.” Furthermore, it is written in Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, which strengthens the statement that it cannot be grasped, “We have lost the abstract sense of beauty.” It does not exist physically because, as individuals, we will see beauty and think of it in different ways. Just like Shakespeare in Sonnet 54 or Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey in The Frailty and Hurtfulness of Beauty express different views about it.

Shakespeare says that beauty can be more than it is just by itself, an outward appearance, because truth and inner qualities are what give it the essence. He states right at the beginning in the first two lines of the sonnet 'O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,/By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!”, that is, an already beautiful thing can be even more beautiful if honesty and truth come with it. On the other hand, Surrey, as it is foreshadowed in the title, says that beauty is frail and hurtful. Reading further in the sonnet we can see how he considers the transitory nature of beauty, as it is illusive and deceiving. So, while Shakespeare finds beauty in the interior, Surrey sees only the negative side of it and so judges it because of its transitoriness.

Shakespeare’s sonnet can be divided into three quatrains and a final couplet. He talks about two flowers, the fragrant rose in the first quatrain and the canker-bloom in the second quatrain. In the first quatrain, after declaring that beauty can be made more beautiful, Shakespeare reinforces his statement with the example of sweet roses in line three and four. He says that roses are beautiful, but we deem them even more so because of their sweet scent. In contrast, the canker-blooms or wild roses “have full as deep a dye as the perfumed tincture of the roses” they lack the scent that makes roses beautiful. The appearance is the same, but they do not have what really matters. He continues the comparison between the two roses in the third quatrain. The canker-blooms only look beautiful, “...for their virtue only is their show,”, but do not contain inner beauty and so they “die to themselves” because nobody loves them. However, fragrant roses do not disappear after dying because people make rosewater and perfumes from them. In the final couplet we can see the sonnet’s message, that is, just like fragrant roses live after death, the beauty in Shakespeare’s words never fade. After youth passes away, outward beauty goes with it as well. As it was said in Dorian Gray “When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it…”. But Shakespeare distills what remained, the truth, the inner beauty, and makes them immortal in his poetry. In brief, just how John Keats said in his poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

Surrey’s poem, once it is a sonnet as well, can also be divided into three quatrains and a couplet, but it is not splitted into parts. There is no separable quatrains or themes because he, all through the sonnet, talks about beauty as an evil and deceitful thing. Surrey starts the poem with an alliteration, which will appear in almost every line afterwards, so we can get the image of beauty’s weakness right from the first two words, “brittle beauty”, without reading any further. It was made so frail by nature, so nature, which is changeable, affects beauty then beauty is changeable as well. The end of the second line “...short the season;” also hints that beauty, similar to seasons, is short and will soon come to an end. It is a transitory state, “flow’ring today, tomorrow apt to fail”. Moreover, in the seventh line with a simile, Surrey uses a moving image to show how temporary beauty is, “Slipper in sliding, as is an eel’s tail”.

From the fifth line Surrey starts to enumerate the negative attributions of beauty. It is “dangerous to deal with”, “vain”, and “costly in keeping” just to mention a few of them. We can see the costly nature of beauty to appear in films and books, for instance Dorian Gray, who sells his own soul to keep his beauty, or the Evil Queen from Snow White, who is ready to kill in order to be the most beautiful in the land, or Mother Gothel from Tangled, who steals a baby to keep her youth and beauty. Surrey also says, using an oxymoron, that it is “bitter sweet”. It can seem wonderful but it does not last forever and will eventually disappear.

In the final couplet Surrey expresses his view on beauty’s temporariness with a last example comparing beauty to a fruit, “Thou farest as fruit that with the frost is taken,/Today ready ripe, tomorrow all to-shaken”. It is fair like a fruit but when it is frozen it loses its enticing appearance because the frost is all we can see and not the fruit. And in the last line there is another contrast between today and tomorrow. It talks about beauty’s temporary state as well, something can be beautiful today and damaged tomorrow.