SPECIAL

Diane Tarabay-Rodriguez 

William Shakespeare’s sonnet,”My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun”is a poem that focuses on the idea of female beauty in a completely different perspective. It contains a similar theme to other traditional sonnets-Female Beauty-but it goes about it in a realistic way. This sonnet contains fourteen lines that are composed of three quatrains and a rhyming couplet. The poem is dominated by an iambic pentameter, and many of the lines are not punctuated, which allows the rhyme to flow smoothly. There are three types of literary devices that work towards enhancing the sound of the poem There is the use of alliteration when words of the same consonants get close together in lines. For example: (1 My, mistress/ 4 wires, black wires/ 9 hear, her/ 11 grant, goddess go). The sonnet contains assonance throughout most of the poem. This happens when words with same/similar vowels are near each other in lines. For example, (1 My, eyes, like/ 4 hairs, hers/ 6 see, cheeks/ 10 that, hath). The repetition in the sonnet places special emphasis on the repeated words and phrases.

When viewing the skit performed by Catherine Tate, we instantly get annoyed by Tate’s character because she is obnoxious. She continues to interrupt the teacher to the point where she makes him explode in anger. He tells her that she will never be as genus and brilliant as Shakespeare. Towards the end, she begins to recite Shakespeare sonnet off the top of her head. She blurs it out in a very fast pace that is difficult to understand with a tone of anger. The reason she recites it in that way is because she is only trying to prove to the teacher that she knows the poem and that she needs no further explanation of it. It came to my understanding that the meaning of Shakespeare sonnet was poorly transformed by Tate’s classroom performance and not enhanced in anyway because I could barely understand what she was saying. After going more in depth between the poem and the skit, I came to the conclusion that the theme of the poem and the way it is performed had a similarity. For example, Shakespeare’s poem talked about how his mistress isn’t anything unique. He states, “My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground. And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare” (12-13). This shows that the poet does not consider his lover as ideally beautiful yet he still loves her. She might seem like any other ordinary women but to him she is special. Tate makes the poem seem meaningless by the way she performs it but THAT sonnet is just like the mistress in the poem, special.