1. Poet and playwright

‘Poet and playwright’ explains that, in many regards, the single most important point about Shakespeare’s double life as poet and playwright is how fruitful this generic crisscrossing was for him artistically. His poems and sonnets have an earthy, psychological, and theatrical element to them rarely found among his more exclusively elite poetic contemporaries like Spenser and Samuel Daniel. Shakespeare wrote poems to connect with the elite and the financial rewards that might come from patronage. He wrote drama to survive. However, from the period 1593-1623, the narrative poems constituted an astonishing 40 per cent of all Shakespeare’s published works.

5. Further patterns and irruptions in the Sonnets

Along with the passions they voice, there are important recurring motifs in the Sonnets, lending a special rhythm to the whole. One of the most resonant is that of Time’s inexorable march, but there is also seasonal change and human mutability, and the corruptibility of relationships and bonds. ‘Further patterns and irruptions in the Sonnets’ also considers the strange, painful love plot that shadows the whole: the triangle linking the poet, the young man (or men), and the ‘dark lady’ in an unseemly and humiliating relationship. It also explains that we feel the speaker’s situation in the sonnets so intimately and intensely due to the brief action always being in the present.

3. The Rape of Lucrece

‘The Rape of Lucrece’ considers the range of sources—and their particular emphases—that Shakespeare may have drawn on when writing his poem, published in 1594: Livy’s Roman civic history; Ovid’s lures of the emotions; and Chaucer’s Lucrece as the exemplary, loyal wife. Shakespeare broadened, deepened, and updated the known outlines of the story, selecting and expanding what he needed to fit the stylistic and thematic needs of the poem and the expectations of its readers. The result is a profoundly thoughtful poem, exploring the psyches of both villain and victim in greater depth and concentration than even his experience in the theatre had yet allowed.

6. A Lover’s Complaint and ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’

‘A Lover’s Complaint and “The Phoenix and Turtle” ’ considers two poems that are, in many ways, outliers among Shakespeare’s poems and fascinating for being so. A Lover’s Complaint was originally published at the end of the 1609 edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It narrates the story of a forlorn maid, who was seduced by an experienced courtly wooer and left abandoned on a country hillside. ‘The Phoenix and Turtle’ first appeared in 1601. It was part of an obscure work, Love’s Martyr, like its title page, a lengthy, rambling poem ‘allegorically shadowing the truth of love in the constant fate of the Phoenix and Turtle’ by a little-known poet, Robert Chester.

2. Venus and Adonis

Venus and Adonis—Shakespeare’s best-selling first venture into print, a poem soon to become one of the era’s most popular works—is a young person’s poem, written by a 29-year-old emerging poet, about the topsy-turvy, innocent yet dangerous impulses of sexual desire. Although often comical, Venus’s hot pursuit of the young Adonis ends in his being gored by a boar. The near rhyme is almost a pun, as proximate and painfully inevitable as the familiar equation in the period between sex and death. ‘Venus and Adonis’ explains how this Ovidian erotic poem helped to launch Shakespeare’s career as a poet and to elevate him above lowly groundlings and fellow, rival dramatists and poets.

4. On first looking into Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are generally regarded as the finest collection of sonnets in the English language, and ‘On first looking into Shakespeare’s Sonnets’ seeks to offer yet one more perspective on why this is so. It outlines some of the puzzles and problems linked to the date of authorship and structure of the Sonnets; describes the sonnet form, comparing Shakespeare’s sonnet structure with that of Spenser; and considers some of the Sonnets in more depth, including Sonnet 116, the great ‘marriage’ poem. It is also noted that the Sonnets raise many ‘contemporary’ issues: matters of homosexual desire and transsexuality, of gender and racial stereotyping, of temptation and sexual addiction.