Shakespeare's Expression of Castiglione's Views on Beauty and Virtue

In The Courtier, Castiglione relates virtue with beauty, stating that virtue is the cause of beauty's manifestation and that beauty is the physical evidence of inner virtue. He lists all the proper behaviors of both the lovely maiden and the wooing lover. Castiglione's concepts, that suffused all of Renaissance culture, and especially literature, have appeared both as a standard and an issue of debate among known poets when it comes to matters of love and relations with women. William Shakespeare is one of the most famous poets who wrote sonnets on love and women. Shakespeare draws from these beliefs mentioned and explained by Castiglione and places them into his poems, and especially his sonnets. One can see many of these elements in Shakespeare's "Sonnet 94."

One of the issues that Shakespeare's "Sonnet 94" addresses is the view of virtue in beautiful women. Shakespeare agrees in his sonnet that virtue and beauty are intertwined, that these women should be somewhat distant and remain untainted and above temptation of bodily pleasures that men may offer, and that it is a pardonable and necessary character trait that these women are cold and spur their lovers with their glances and their words.

Shakespeare says in lines 3 and 4 of "Sonnet 94" writes, "Who, moving others, are themselves as stone, Unmovèd, cold, and to temptation slow" (1017). In this, Shakespeare writes that the woman's beauty and virtue move others to love her, but that she is as unmovable as stone. However, the words "and to temptation slow" turns her coldness into a semi-virtue that finishes in line 5 with the words "They rightly do inherit heaven's graces" (1017). Shakespeare praises all those qualities on the basis that, through them, even the coldness with which she treats those she moves, she has stayed virtuous though men may wish to possess her physically, and she has kept her virtue and her beauty in his eyes.

However, the last few lines of "Sonnet 94" reveal a warning and an important ideological belief that follows Castiglione's view. When Shakespeare says that a ruined, festering, once beautiful flower smells much worse than any common weed, he means that the beautiful and virtuous woman who falls from virtue would be more despised than a common woman who falls the same way. The beautiful woman is viewed this way because with her beauty and virtue she was upon a pedestal, and if she gave in to the temptations of her lover, her virtue would be ruined and thus her angelic beauty fade in the eyes of men.

Also, the speaker's own admiration for this scornful, beautiful, virtuous woman is the opposite role in the "courtier game," and to be the pining lover is to play a much desired part in the life of a successful courtier. The fact that Shakespeare wrote of such roles, in both courtly women and men, meant that the belief in platonic love and a strong connection between beauty and virtue were popular beliefs among the people of the Renaissance age. "Sonnet 94" brings out the influence that these beliefs had on literature, popular thought, and courtly life, and certainly agreed with Castiglione's views.