Shakespeare was primarily a public writer, an entertainer, a teller of tales about people other than himself, two of them – Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece – in narrative verse, but mostly dramas which cast only an oblique light on the mind and emotions of their writer. But he also wrote 154 individual, non-dramatic sonnets, almost all cast in the first person singular, as if they were personal utterances. They are at once some of the most famous, the most personally revealing, and the most badly misunderstood poems ever written.

Like many readers, I got to know some of the sonnets as an adolescent, attracted by their quintessentially romantic reputation – a bit like Abraham Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor who, inarticulate at the prospect of wooing Anne Page, wishes he had his ‘book of songs and sonnets here’ (1.1.181–182).