The Place 2 Be: Shakespeare's Sonnets

Critique of Sonnet 118

SHAKESPEARE’S SONNETS

Theme: Sick with Love
Content: An excellent, specious sonnet that plays on the maladies and cures for love while surreptitiously portraying the subject as someone whom the author has now got sick of.

Like as, to make our appetites more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As to prevent our maladies unseen
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge:

The 3 we's and 3 our's in this quatrain indicate that the author's alleged faults are those that are shared with the subject.

purge may allude to the Aristotelian cathartic purging or purification of the emotions, as well as physical purging such as vomiting.

Even so, being full of your ne'er cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding,
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased ere that there was true needing.

your ne'er cloying sweetness seems capable of being a thinly disguised insult of the subject's love by saying what it is by pretending not to, particularly as the Quarto spells ne're without punctuation as "nere" enabling this phrase to be read as "your near-cloying sweetness".

Pun on "meat" in meetness.

Sonnet 105's emphasis on the qualities of "fair, kind and true" are punningly represented in this quatrain by welfare...kind...true.

Thus policy in love, t' anticipate
The ills that were not, grew to faults assured,
And brought to medicine a healthful state
Which, rank of goodness, would by ill be cured.

Amusing reversal of ill- and good-health with medicine curing each condition.

Variants of sick explicitly appear in all quatrains and the couplet, except in this quatrain which contains phonetic fragments of si- in policy, anticipate and medicine, and -ck in rank (spelled rancke in the Quarto) and cured.

ill, itself a variant of sick, now explicitly features instead of sick.

But thence I learn, and find the lesson true:
Drugs poison him that so fell sick of you.

The couplet concludes with the suggestion that the author is poisoned by the medicine that is used to cure him of his love for the subject, which is not in fact a malady.

However, there is surely a double meaning meant here in which the subject is portrayed as someone whom the author is literally sick of.

Hidden reference to ill in I learn.

Q2's full of your morphs to the couplet's fell sick of you.