The Procreation Sonnets are something of a conundrum: they are entirely clear in their intention, in their message, and in their poetic purpose, they stand at the beginning of the originally published sequence, and yet at first glance they seem to fit nowhere properly. And more than anything else – and more than many if not most of the other sonnets that we have of William Shakespeare’s – they raise the basic question: why? Why does William Shakespeare at some point in his life take time out of what cannot have been anything other than a busy schedule to tell a young man to produce an heir? What concern is the young man of his? And who is the young man? In this Special Edition of SONNETCAST, Sebastian Michael, author of The Sonneteer, summarises what the Procreation Sonnets tell us so far about William Shakespeare and the recipient of the first 17 Sonnets...

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.

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