Abstract
Despite his disillusionment with the moral condition of his friend, the beloved young man of the sonnets, Shakespeare's vocabulary of praise remains unabated. The key to this paradox lies in a shift of focus from the friend's “truth” to his power to inform the poet's style, that is, from moral fidelity to metaphysical and aesthetic constancy. This shift is attended by a heightened awareness of language as a way to grasp reality through participation in it. The sonnets portray the beloved as the incarnation of an unchanging truth, and poetry as a vehicle for evoking or re-creating that truth. These developments lead Shakespeare to a sacramental or “figural” conception of his poetry of praise that replaces the Petrarchan convention with which he begins.
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