This new edition focuses on the Sonnets as poetry - at times strikingly individual poems, but often subtly interlinked in thematic, imagistic, and other groupings. Gwynne Evans and Anthony Hecht also address the many questions that cast a veil of mystery over the genesis of the Sonnets: to what extent are they autobiographical? What is the nature of the ‘love’, strongly expressed, between the ‘poet’, the ‘youth’, and the ‘Dark Lady’? Can they, apart from the poet, be identified? Who is the ‘rival poet’? When were the Sonnets written and in what order? What were the circumstances surrounding their publication?