With his exceptionally explicit and startlingly revelatory Sonnet 144 William Shakespeare addresses head on the fact that his mistress and his lover are certainly friends, and that he suspects – rather strongly, we get the impression – them to be so with benefits.

By identifying the man as 'right fair' and contrasting him with a woman who is 'coloured ill', he confirms what we have long thought to be the case: this is a constellation that has turned triangular, and it involves these precise three individuals, the poet, his younger male lover, the Fair Youth of the first 126 sonnets in the collection, and the Dark Lady around whom 25 of the remaining 28 sonnets revolve.

This rather puts paid to the suggestion espoused by some scholars that these sonnets can or let alone should be read in isolation, that no narrative of any kind should ever be deduced from them, or that they may have been written to and about any number of lovers of any gender over the period of their composition. What Sonnet 144 shows beyond anything that might still be considered reasonable doubt, and much in line with Sonnets 33 through 42 in the Fair Youth section and Sonnets 133 and 134 in this, the Dark Lady section of the collection, is that these two groups of poems overlap, that they concern themselves with the same 'two loves' of Shakespeare's, and that our poet is profoundly disturbed by the fact that, as he sees and presents it, his mistress has seduced his young man.

With his uncharacteristically lighthearted Sonnet 143, William Shakespeare plants a picture in our minds of the poet as a crying toddler placed on the ground while his mother is running after a wayward chicken, and expresses his hope, not unreasonable in the imagined circumstances, that the mother, once she has caught the bird she's chasing, will come back to him and comfort him with her affection and her love.
It's an unusual simile to say the least: not because it is complex or difficult to visualise – in fact the opposite – but because it departs from virtually all and any traditional or even just, one might argue, advisable comparison for a lover to invoke: rare is the Lothario who impresses his mistress by likening himself to her babe. And it continues to expressly accept the fact that this woman has other men whom she actively pursues. In this case, it would appear, one particular other man, who in this oddly farcical setup is assigned the role of the runaway cockerel.

With Sonnet 142 William Shakespeare picks up on the notion of 'sin' employed in the last line of the previous sonnet, and now juxtaposes this sin or sinful love of his for his mistress with her supposed 'virtue' in rejecting this love for being sinful, while simultaneously undermining any suggestion that she is in fact virtuous by asking her to just take a long, hard look at herself and her own behaviour, from which she will readily recognise that it is just as bad, if not in fact much worse.

The sonnet thus continues the poet's double-edged approach to wooing his mistress, by on the one hand expressing his wish to have sex with her, while on the other hand also mildly rebuking her for having sex with other men, or, to be more precise, while refusing to be rebuked by her for wanting to have sex with her, when she herself is liberally sleeping around.

Sonnet 141 is one of several poems in the collection that show William Shakespeare to be deeply ill at ease with his lust and his love for his mistress.

It may easily be argued that all of the Dark Lady Sonnets come over with a greater or lesser degree of ambiguity, with her appearance, her comportment, her smell, her touch, her sound, and most certainly her fidelity, all having either been brought into question or downright decried.

Sonnet 141 does all of the above, summarising these 'thousand errors' his mistress appears to possess and laying them out as a supposedly sensual feast, the like of which he has no appetite for. Yet he still finds his foolish heart drawn to her, and for this, he concludes, he must suffer the pain that he appears to accept as his – perhaps in a somewhat perverse way – due reward.

In this special episode, Phyllis Rackin, Professor Emerita of English from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and former president of the Shakespeare Association of America talks to Sebastian Michael about the position of women in Elizabethan society, about William Shakespeare's relationship with the women in his life, and about what we can and cannot know specifically of the Dark Lady in his Sonnets.

With Sonnet 140, William Shakespeare at first seems to set out on some general counsel for his mistress not to try his patience too much, as doing so might drive him mad and cause him, in his madness, to say bad things about her. The damage this could do would be exacerbated by a world that is itself full of mad people who would be inclined to believe him even if what he came out with were but scurrilous lies.

Strongly implied also though is that not everything scandalous he might say about his mistress would necessarily be untrue, And with the last line of the closing couplet, he then ties his sonnet firmly back to the previous one and reiterates his request that even though she obviously has other lovers, she keep her eyes on him when they are together at least.

With Sonnet 139, William Shakespeare finds himself quite comfortably in the domain of the classical Petrarchan sonnet, invoking the themes and poetic tropes that other sonneteers of the period, most notably Sir Philip Sidney in his Astrophel and Stella use to speak about their mistress's capacity to captivate and, if they so wish, kill them with their looks.

The initial plea with the mistress is simple and straightforward: I know you have other men, so when you are with me, just tell me to my face that this is the case, rather than flirting with them with furtive glances. Having devoted the octave – the eight lines of the first two quatrains – of his sonnet to this principal argument, he then uses the sestet – the six lines of the final quatrain and the closing couplet – to propose a somewhat sophistic excuse for his mistress's behaviour, allowing for the fanciful idea that she divert her devastating looks to other men so as to spare him additional suffering, which, he finally resolves she shouldn't do, since he'd rather 'die' – at least metaphorically – than be left in limbo...

With Sonnet 138 William Shakespeare takes a step back and reflects on how both he and his mistress in their relationship with each other are effectively living a lie which they both actively conspire to maintain: she pretends to be faithful to him although she fully knows that he knows that she obviously isn't, and he goes along with it when she treats him as if he were an innocent young lover who not only is still in his prime but who is also uneducated in matters of love, both of which she similarly knows not to be the case.