Patterns of Consolation in Shakespeare's Sonnets 1-126 | Neoplatonic Consolation (Sonnets 22-42)
Neoplatonic Consolation (Sonnets 22-42)
The manipulation of the Neoplatonic commonplace that lovers share identities provides the dominant strategy of consolation among those sonnets numbered 22-42. Concern with the mutability of love replaces the concern with the mutability of beauty. Because the speaker loves an individual, the problem that occupies most of the remaining subsequence is how to maintain that love and how to find consolation for its possible loss. Consolation is necessary because, in spite of the frequent arguments that the lovers are fundamentally united by their love, the sonnets portray both implicitly and explicitly the betrayal of that love. The following quotation from Marsilio Ficino's Commentary on Plato's Symposium, with its argument that lovers freely share identities, explains the idea that the sonnets in this group both depend upon and undermine:
Whenever two men embrace each other in mutual affection,...
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