This gathering prints Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse: the 154 sonnets first issued in 1609, the narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, and shorter pieces such as A Lover's Complaint. The sonnets address a fair young man, a dark mistress, time, rivalry, and the claim that verse can outlast flesh. The longer poems retell, in erotic and rhetorical set pieces, Venus's pursuit of the hunter Adonis and Tarquin's assault on Lucrece. There is no single story across the volume. The book is a collection of lyrics and epyllia, not a play and not a biography.
