The Rival Poet

SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

Much has been written and said, speculated and surmised about the Rival Poet in William Shakespeare’s Sonnets, with hypotheses ranging from the idea that there was no ‘rival poet’ and that Shakespeare essentially made up this figure, through the notion that there was perhaps a rival or possibly several rivals but that Shakespeare is not writing about a real person but about an amalgam of them all, to the assertion that it is most definitely a man who vies for the attention of Shakespeare’s young lover and quite evidently receives it, possibly, as we saw when looking at Sonnet 86, in more than one sense.

This Special Episode examines in detail the three principal questions that present themselves through the existence of this sequence of sonnets:

1 – Is the figure made up or are we talking about a real person or real people?

2 – If the latter, who is it or who are they?

3 – What is their relationship to the young man, and through him indirectly to William Shakespeare?