In this seminar, developed from his contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, Robert Ellrodt offers a detailed and rigorous reading of Shakespeare's Sonnets and an introduction to the playwright's narrative poems Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Professor Ellrodt considers the Sonnets within the tradition and conventions of the English sonnet form, and he discusses Shakespeare's key innovations. He analyses questions about the ordering of the poems and explores their language and imagery.