The large cast of most Elizabethan and Jacobean plays means that friendships are necessarily implicated, as in life, in a larger social structure; they cannot be taken in isolation as they are in philosophical texts. The more rarefied mode of the sonnet sequence, however, allows a laboratory-like isolation of an individual friendship. Even here, however, the ‘base infection’ of the social world ultimately compromises friendship: sexual desire, homoerotic as well as heterosexual, complicates ideal friendship, and all emotions are ultimately informed by social hierarchy. Nonetheless, the sonnet form allows for moments of negotiated intimacy which have greater intensity than any comparable moment in the more urgently active world of the plays.

The Sonnets' friendship is an unequal one. Their rhetorical strategies attempt to bridge differences between the poet's persona and the young man to whom the poems are addressed. The bridges are made by fictions of mutuality, which Shakespeare often knows to be fictions, and only temporary ones at that. In the larger sequence, each creation of a bridging fiction tends in turn to open another gap between the men. In the end a respect for distance and difference emerges, but this fatally compromises any idealized friendship, which (according to the Humanists) should be based on similarity, closeness and equality. Shakespeare makes the young man radically different from himself, but in doing so, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues, he makes him passive, partly as a mode of ‘anticipatory self-protectiveness’.