For more than 150 years following their publication, Shakespeare’s Sonnets lay uncontested, largely unread. The details of the love story that they seem to tell followed them into obscurity, but remained there, so that when they finally re-emerged, in 1780, as literary biography was booming, the Sonnets appeared as a tantalising enigma. ‘With this key’, as Wordsworth said, ‘Shakespeare unlocked his heart’. As a record of feeling Shakespeare’s Sonnets remain shockingly, radically intimate, perhaps the most scrupulous and passionate autobiographical sequence ever written. But as a record of fact they continue to elude, perplex and ruin even the soundest minds. Who is the ‘Mr W. H.’ to whom the 1609 Sonnets are dedicated? Who is the Friend the sonnets themselves address? Are they one and the same? Are they the ‘onlie begetter’ of the dedication? Or is the ‘onlie begetter’ someone else? Is it Shakespeare? Who is the ‘Dark Woman’, and what exactly is her relation to the ‘Friend’? And who is the ‘Rival Poet’? What happens in the sonnets? Does it happen in the right order? And are we really as far above these questions as we pretend to be?

Tracing and retracing the riddles of the sonnets where others have followed and fallen before, Dead Poets Live returns to The Coronet Theatre to present this great sequence in all its glory.