LOVE’S LABOUR’S FOUND

From late summer 1592 until the end of the following year, the plague was rife in London, and to stop packed crowds from spreading infection, theatres were closed. William Shakespeare, who had just begun to make a name for himself as a playwright, turned to narrative poetry and composed the erotic masterpiece Venus and Adonis, in which the goddess of love woos the beautiful youth, who resists her advances because, “Hunting he loved, but love he laughed to scorn.”

Printed in 1593 by Shakespeare’s Strat-ford-born contemporary Richard Field, it was a bestseller, particularly delighting “the younger sort”, according to the scholar Gabriel Harvey, and going into at least 16 editions by 1636. In 1594, Field printed Shakespeare’s second narrative poem, The Rape of Lucrece, dedicated, like Venus and Adonis, to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton.

Shakespeare may also have begun a stint of sonnet writing around this time, but it was not until 1609 that the collection entitled was published, long after the vogue for sonneteering had subsided. The sonnets, numbered 1?154, were followed by the 329-line poem The younger sort were evidently far less eager to buy this quarto volume, which was