Conceits in sonnets addressed to a woman.
Shakespeare, in his references to his ‘eternal lines’ (xviii. 12) and in the assurances that he gives the subject of his addresses that the sonnets are, in Daniel’s exact phrase, his ‘monument’ (lxxxi. 9, cvii. 13), was merely accommodating himself to the prevailing taste. Characteristically in Sonnet lv. he invested the topic with a splendour that was not approached by any other poet: [115]
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; [116]
But you shall shine more bright in these contents
Than unswept stone besmear’d with sluttish time.
When wasteful war shall statues overturn,
And broils root out the work of masonry,
Nor Mars his sword nor war’s quick fire shall burn
The living record of your memory.
‘Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity
Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room
Even in the eyes of all posterity
That wear this world out to the ending doom.
So, till the judgement that yourself arise,
You live in this, and dwell in lovers’ eyes.
The imitative element is no less conspicuous in the sonnets that Shakespeare distinctively addresses
to a woman. In two of the latter (cxxxv.-vi.), where he quibbles over the fact of the identity of his own name of Will with a lady’s ‘will’ (the synonym in Elizabethan English of both ‘lust’ and ‘obstinacy’), he derisively challenges comparison with wire-drawn conceits of rival sonnetteers, especially of Barnabe Barnes, who had enlarged on his disdainful mistress’s ‘wills,’ and had turned the word ‘grace’ to the same punning account as Shakespeare
turned the word ‘will.’ [118a] Similarly in Sonnet cxxx. beginning
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red . . .
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head, [118b]
he satirises the conventional lists of precious stones, metals, and flowers, to which the sonnetteers likened their mistresses’ features.