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Use Of Similes In William Shakespeare's Description Of The Mistress

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Use Of Similes In William Shakespeare's Description Of The Mistress
By looking at Shakespeare’s similes and the descriptions of the mistress, we can see that the beauty standards of the time are haunting the mistress and giving her a corpse-like appearance. Shakespeare’s sonnet consists of similes used to describe the mistress in unpleasant ways in order to show how different she is from the typical woman one would see during the Elizabethan Age: “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun / […] / I have seen roses damasked red and white, / But no such roses see I in her cheeks;” (3, 5-6). These similes serve a dual purpose of painting a picture that this woman has haunting or corpse-like features; the mistress is characterized as having a “dun” skin tone, which is a dingy gray color that is commonly
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