ABSTRACT
With a surprising amount of certitude we can infer the development of Shakespeare's Sonnet 20 from its nuclear conception to its final existence as an elaborated fusion of content and form. More particularly, warded-off homosexual strivings and the frustration over the phallicized identity of an object give rise to linguistically expressed derivatives of absence and overcompensating excess. The upshot is a beautiful expansion of a symbolic nuclear principle into the lyric's lexical, syntactical, logical, and prosodical structures.
