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Infidelity: the Consolation of Mutability (Sonnets 113-125)

Following this attempt to deny reality, Shakespeare shifts the terms of reality itself in a fundamental way. This change, coming in the final group of poems in the first subsequence, provides a final solution to the problem of the loss of love. Throughout much of the subsequence, the speaker has been seeking consolations for the mutability of the young man's love. At the conclusion of the subsequence, however, mutability comes to the speaker's aid: the mutability of his own love for the young man provides him with the ultimate answer to his insoluble problem. This shift in reality brings about a corresponding shift in the object of the speaker's consolatory arguments. No longer does he formulate for himself consoling explanations and responses to the young man's actions. Consolations for the decay of the young man's love become unnecessary because the speaker's own love for him has altered. Instead, the...

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1. Introduction
2. Conventional Consolation (Sonnets 1-18)
3. Neoplatonic Consolation (Sonnets 22-42)
4. Absence and the Consolation of Alternation (Sonnets 43-56)
5. Death and the Algebra of Consolation (Sonnets 62-74)
6. The Consolation of Isolation (Sonnets 87-93)
7. Infidelity: the Consolation of Mutability (Sonnets 113-125)
8. Conclusion
9. Copyright