Best known for his many theater masterpieces, William Shakespeare was also a prolific poet. It seems likely that an outbreak of the plague in London, which led to a closure of public gathering places like theaters, forced Shakespeare to find another means of earning wages. In the third Earl of Southampton, Henry Wriothesley he found a patron that allowed him to stay in London and write the brief epics Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, which would become his most widely printed works during his lifetime. His collection of 154 Sonnets was published in 1609. Mostly about love, they are an intriguing and fascinating work both individually and as a whole. At the time poetry was more respected than works for the theater and with these poems he did much to build his reputation. Enjoy the richness of language and depth of feeling in this edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets and other Poems.