ABSTRACT
A natural transition from the preceding excursus to the subject of what I can only call the ‘religiousness’ of so many of Shakespeare's sonnets may be provided by a further consideration of the frequently recurring topic of ‘compensation’. Hitherto I have referred to it only in connection with what I have called the ‘catalogue of uncompensating delights’, which we find in sonnets and poems written during the absence or after the loss of the beloved by Shakespeare, by Ronsard and Petrarch, and by Petrarch's medieval predecessors, both courtly and popular. This, though, is only the negative expression (and, with Shakespeare, only one of the negative expressions), only the obverse or corollary, of those great positive affirmations which are so characteristically Shakespearean and for which it is hard to find any real precedent in earlier poetry. Familiar as they are, or should be, it will be well to have them before us, so that we may become sufficiently penetrated with a sense of their uniqueness.
