Shakespeare’s sonnets go deeply—with wisdom, sympathy, rage, and sly humor—into the heart of countless human struggles and joys, as readers have kept discovering for more than 400 years.

Through close readings of a dozen poems, prominent Shakespearean scholar Robert N. Watson examines nostalgia, depression, professional rivalry, solitary travel, biblical interpretation, heterosexual and homosexual desire, post-coital regret, the art of writing a better love letter, the etiquette of breaking up gently or sharply (or both), and the challenges of aging.

Watson is an author of prize-winning books on Shakespeare, poetry, and Renaissance culture and is a widely published poet. A former professor at Harvard and Middlebury and a Fellow of colleges at Cambridge and Oxford, he is now a distinguished professor of English at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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