The empty couplet in Shakespeare's Sonnet 126 has puzzled readers for centuries. This essay begins by tracing the history of the sonnet's final couplet in editions from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century, giving an overview of the various reasons for its omission and inclusion. Despite the recent turn in scholarship on the empty couplet, the enigmatic parentheses continue to be omitted and their Quarto form questioned. A recurrent argument is that the poem seems thematically and syntactically complete within its twelve lines, ending in a full stop. This essay, however, explores what happens if we remove the full stop in line twelve and accept the empty couplet as an integral part of the Sonnet's structure. The result is a cascade of effects: as the verb "render" is allowed to spill over into the next line it takes on the blank silence in the empty couplet as its complement and the two italicized words Audite and Quietus in lines eleven to twelve emerge as complementary agents in a sonorous landscape.