With Sonnet 120 William Shakespeare draws a line under the explanations and excuses offered throughout the previous three sonnets for his own infidelities in relation to his young man, and simply reminds himself now of how awful he felt when his lover treated him in a similar way on those occasions when it was him who was sleeping around with other people. The conclusion Shakespeare comes to is that they both in turn have been through hell, and that their respective debt to each other for each other's transgressions now must surely cancel itself out.

With Sonnet 119, William Shakespeare further elaborates on his metaphor, introduced in Sonnet 118, of having taken bitter medicines to prevent himself from ever getting sick of his younger lover, these potions having been affairs, encounters, or even relationships of sorts with other people.

Who these other people were he still doesn't tell us, but he here makes it even clearer that they were fundamentally bad for him, their principal, if not sole, redeeming feature being that their experience has ultimately strengthened him and cemented his love for his young man.
​The sonnet is the third of three sonnets which all attempt to explain and to some extent excuse Shakespeare's infidelities of the past, and they all do so in the wake, directly, of Sonnet 116 which famously and categorically posited, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds | Admit impediments."

Sonnet 118 continues William Shakespeare's defence or explanation of his infidelities towards his younger lover with an argument that may well strike us as similarly spurious as the one deployed in Sonnet 117, even though unlike the previous poem, this one possesses an internal logic that allows him to come to a conclusion which does make some sense: so as not to get sick and tired of you, I have been tasting some bitter 'appetisers', as we might call them today, even going as far as purging myself with medicinal concoctions to ward off any such 'illness', but what I found in fact was that these 'treatments' themselves turned out to be harmful to my health and wellbeing.

Sonnet 117 is the first of three distinct but related sonnets that all seek to excuse, or at the very least explain, Shakespeare's own infidelities and inconstancies, first confessed to his lover in Sonnet 109 and, most directly, in Sonnet 110.

Here, our poet lists a whole raft of failings on his part in his conduct towards his young man, and positively invites him to level accusations to their end against him, only to then, with the closing couplet, claim that although such charges be justified in so much as all of this may well have been the case, he has with his actions merely been putting his lover's own fidelity and character to the test.

With his celebrated and oft-recited Sonnet 116, William Shakespeare offers not so much a definition as a characterisation of what true love is: unshakeable and unaffected by external changes or temptations, steady and dependable as a lodestar in the darkest, stormiest hour, and everlasting "even to the edge of doom."

With its religious overtones that echo the Christian marriage vows and invoke absolute certainties in a world that is inherently uncertain, it speaks to generations of lovers in a language that is direct and easy to understand.

It is hardly surprising, then, that together with Sonnet 18, Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day, and perhaps the nearly as famous Sonnet 29, When in Disgrace With Fortune and Men's Eyes, Sonnet 116 occupies the top spot of Shakespeare's Sonnets 'Greatest Hits', and it is also one of the most confident statements made by Shakespeare about, as much as in, his craft, poetry.

With Sonnet 115 William Shakespeare turns his attention to the perplexing paradox that a love that is experienced as complete and absolute and therefore perfect, such as his love for his young man, may turn out, over time, to have been but a fledgling infant compared to the even fuller, more profound, more mature love that it has the potential to grow into.

In acknowledging that love can evolve and grow over time it sets the premise that love itself is changeable – here for the better, to be more deeply and more sincerely felt than ever before – and it therefore not only concedes, but claims as a lover's right, the necessity, perhaps, to revise statements made about love in the past, and in doing so to effectively give those pronouncements the lie.

With his curiously cryptic Sonnet 114, William Shakespeare poses a rhetorical question to his younger lover, asking whether his experience of seeing him in everything he looks at is down simply to his eye flattering him, or to his eye having acquired the ancient mystical art of alchemy and actually turning even ugly creatures into beautiful angelic beings just such as the young man himself.

He then also settles the matter emphatically and declares without reservation that it is indeed flattery on the eye's part that has this effect on him, but that any sin the mind may be committing in lapping it all up is mitigated by the fact that the eye too loves what it wants to see – the young man's beauty – and so willingly tastes of this flattering, though therefore potentially poisonous, potion first, before passing it on for the mind to metaphorically imbibe.

With Sonnet 113, William Shakespeare returns once more to the theme of separation, reflecting on how, when he is away from his younger lover, everything he sees takes on his lover's shape and thus reminds him of him.

Although we don't know when exactly the sonnet was written and therefore where precisely in the collection it belongs, it would appear to also, therefore, pick up on the notion, emphatically expressed in the previous sonnet, of his lover being his 'all the world', and it certainly also connects strongly to the sonnet that follows, which will further elaborate on the idea that the younger man with his beauty turns even the ugliest appearance to loveliness in Shakespeare's mind.