Sonnet 93 is the third of three sonnets that pivot William Shakespeare's stance towards his young lover from one of pure praise and adulation to one that not just questions his conduct and character, but begins to actively admonish him.

It picks up directly from the closing couplet of Sonnet 92 and imagines a situation in which the young man is unfaithful to Shakespeare without Shakespeare knowing about this, and so it compares our poet to a 'deceived husband'. In doing so it reinforces the claim made by Sonnet 92, that the young man is in effect pledged to Shakespeare for life, and it further likens their relationship to a marriage.

And while this can't, of course, be read literally – not least because equal marriage did not exist at the time and Shakespeare was already married with children to Anne in Stratford – it nevertheless gives us a deep insight into how William Shakespeare views himself constellated to his young lover.

Sonnet 92 continues from Sonnet 91 and sets out a compelling – if perhaps strictly speaking somewhat sophistic – argument why the young man may, as the previous sonnet in its closing couplet considered to be a distinct possibility, leave Shakespeare whenever he feels like it, but without in doing so actually making him, Shakespeare, most wretched as a result, as the same sonnet also suggested would be the case.

This sonnet thus appears to contradict the consequence to the poet of a breakup put forward by Sonnet 91, but the ostensible options it offers for his happiness are stark: I can be happy because you love me or because I am dead.

Like Sonnet 91, though, this poem too weaves the thread of thought further and leads into Sonnet 93 as the third part of the argumentation and in doing so it ushers in a rather radical change in tone which will become increasingly pronounced in the two poems that then follow, Sonnets 94 and 95. 

With Sonnet 91, William Shakespeare reclaims his place in the young man's favour, and for the first time in a while – in the published sequence since the group that contains Sonnets 71 to 76 – speaks primarily of how the young man's love privileges him, Shakespeare, above all else.

It is for the most part a return to a happier, more confident, more celebratory tone, which, however, tellingly is then tempered with a closing couplet that once again conjures up the spectre of this love being taken away entirely at the young man's whim.

Sonnet 90 is the third of three poems that form a 'group within a group', purporting to accept, even support, any decision the young man may wish to take to leave his poet lover, for whatever reason he deems justified.

Its principal message is straightforward: if you are going to leave me, then do it now, while everything else is going against me anyway; and with this emphasis on what 'now' is like for William Shakespeare, it sheds a fairly powerful light on Shakespeare's position – or at the very least on how he perceives his position – as he writes this sonnet and the ones that accompany it.  

Sonnet 89 continues the line of argumentation set up with Sonnet 88 and expounds on the steps William Shakespeare is willing to take to demonstrate to his young man how fully he is prepared to subject himself to his will and to accept a termination of the relationship as perfectly within the young man's rights.

In spelling out the things that Shakespeare will no longer do if he is thus forsaken, and in the choice of its vocabulary, the sonnet lends a fascinating insight into the nature of a relationship that is here shown to be acutely on the brink.

Having bid his lover farewell in Sonnet 87 and effectively conceded that this young man is out of his league, starting with Sonnet 88, and stretching over the next two poems, Shakespeare sets the ground for a spirited fightback that will materialise properly in Sonnets 91 to 96.
In its tone and its stance Sonnet 88 seems submissive, even self-debasing. It echoes sentiments that were expressed in several sonnets before, notably Sonnet 49, which similarly expressed that when the time comes for the young nobleman to distance himself from his poet friend and lover, he, Shakespeare, will take the young man's side and argue his lover's case for leaving him, rather than defending himself and pleading for his lover to stay.

With its complete change in tone, Sonnet 87 ushers in a new and decidedly different phase in the relationship between William Shakespeare and his young lover.

The sonnet draws on the vocabulary of law, ownership, and finance and in these largely factual terms Shakespeare appears to concede that the young man is simply out of his league: it is the most dejected and most resigned we have heard our poet in relation to the young man, and it marks the beginning of a long end to their extraordinary and extraordinarily complex connection.

In this special episode, Gabriel Egan, Professor of Shakespeare Studies and Director of the Centre for Textual Studies at De Montfort University in Leicester, UK, talks to Sebastian Michael about computational approaches to the study of Renaissance literature in general and to Shakespeare's works in particular: what are the methodologies employed and what insights can they yield, especially in the context of the Sonnets.

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?

Sonnet 86 is the last of the Rival Poet group of sonnets, and it gives a final reason why William Shakespeare has, as he himself put it in Sonnet 85, become tongue-tied and been unable to express himself adequately in his praise of the young lover.

Together with Sonnet 80 it bookends the group-within-a-group consisting of Sonnets 82 to 85 which together make an elaborate argument in Shakespeare's defence and connecting, as it does, with the theme of seafaring and relaunching the metaphor of a sailing vessel, Sonnet 86 draws a direct link not only to the imagery of Sonnet 80, but also its tonality, which is decidedly distinct from that of the sonnets so bracketed. Both, this much more suggestive tone and the thematic reference to Sonnet 80, as well as the on its own somewhat perplexing conclusion Sonnet 85 had come to, will help us greatly in our understanding of this heavily laden and layered poem.