The Anglo-American philology’s fundamental text-critical distinction between substantials and accidentals cannot be applied to Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It is here confronted with continental text-critical concepts going back to Hans Zeller. As a result of this distinction – and of modernizing the text’s accidentals – critical editions have deprived Shakespeare’s language of the abundance of its ambiguity as it can be studied in the first edition. This is illustrated with reference to Sonnet 129 and the history of its critical edition. Considering the quarto’s uncertain status of authorization, a more objective and self-critical textual criticism should not take a bibliographical explanation for a peculiarity in the text as a sufficient justification for an emendation; for that, it must coincide with absolute senselessness within the text’s semantic structures.