Sonnets to a Young Man

By the beginning of the Twentieth Century, almost anyone in England who knew anything about Shakespeare knew that he had written his famous love sonnets to a beautiful adolescent male who was fifteen when the first sonnet was written. The debate was not about what gender the poems addressed but what specific young man had been the object of Shakespeare's affection. Read in sequence, the sonnets tell a story. Shakespeare was instructed by his patron to try to get the patron's son to marry an...