In this special episode, Sebastian Michael looks at the first 126 Sonnets in the 1609 collection and examines the principal questions they present:
- Is there a Fair Youth at all?
- If so, is this the same young man throughout, or could it be that the first 17 poems, the Procreation Sonnets, are addressed to someone else?
- And if there is a Fair Youth, who is it?
While there will most likely never be answers that can be offered with cast-iron certainty, a detailed analysis of the textual and external evidence we have does yield significant pointers and offers an idea as to where, on a scale of plausibility, we may locate them.
