In this special episode, Sebastian Michael looks at the second part of The Sonnets by William Shakespeare in the 1609 collection and examines the questions they present in parallel to those posed by the Fair Youth Sonnets:

- Is there a Dark Lady at all?

- If so, who is it?

- And what, if anything, do these sonnets tell us about the poet himself, irrespective of who she is?

The last poem in the collection to address William Shakespeare's mistress directly, Sonnet 152 conclusively answers some questions, while leaving many old and several new ones open for us to ponder into posterity.

It asserts again that his Dark Lady is indeed 'dark', both in appearance and in character, and here makes a stronger than ever point of how he as the poet is perjuring himself by repeatedly, even continuously, saying things about her that are simply untrue; these things, notably, not being slanderous lies but favourable compliments.

The sonnet thus epitomises the form that Shakespeare with his highly unusual series either deliberately or accidentally creates: that of the anti-love poem to someone he just can't resist, even though he knows that in this he presents as deep a character flaw in himself as the ones he perceives in the person or people he professes to love or desire.

The heavily and obviously innuendo-laden Sonnet 151 returns to a struggle the poet purports to experience between what his soul – the 'nobler part' of his being – knows to be right and what his body wants and, with the by implication reluctant permission of the soul, then also gets: sex with his mistress.

Although coached in euphemism and metaphor, it is in fact one of the most sexually explicit sonnets in the collection and succeeds in leaving remarkably little to the imagination, once unpacked.

The at first glance unspectacular Sonnet 150 sets off from the base laid down by the previous three sonnets and now wonders out loud just how the mistress with her numerous and by now well established flaws and a beauty that could – according to these poems – be most charitably described as unconventional, manages to make our poet love her at all, and apparently prize her above all others, even those who, when looked at with a clearer vision and a less feverish mind than his, are objectively much more beautiful and agreeable than she is.

The conclusion it comes to though offers not only a fairly familiar observation that as the lover so enfeebled by your superhuman powers I surely deserve some love and pity from you, but also a surprisingly stark deconstruction, so as not to say demolition, of the lady's character in its entirety.

After establishing in the previous two sonnets that he is possessed of a 'fever' that makes him 'mad' and that distorts his vision, William Shakespeare uses Sonnet 149 to further describe the effect this love for his mistress is having on him. So much is he in her thrall that no-one whom she hates he can love, no-one she admires he may disdain. Just a glance of her eyes, and he will obey. And yet, in spite of all this, she loves him not but pursues other lovers who are not so blinded by love as he.

In Sonnet 148, William Shakespeare develops the themes revisited with Sonnet 147 and further elaborates on his realisation that reason has abandoned him and he is therefore incapable of judging properly what he sees. Either that, or his eyes themselves are faulty, since they seem to distort what they are looking at.

The conclusion he comes to, much in line with the previous sonnet, is that his defective vision stems from his love for his mistress, but he here adds the almost 'technical' but for this not at all inconsequential detail that his eyes couldn't possibly be expected to deliver a true picture to the brain of what they see, since their vision is blurred by tears, suggesting therefore that this love he feels for his mistress is tinged with sadness, sorrow, or pain.

In Sonnet 147, William Shakespeare brings together two themes that have agitated him before: firstly the at the time fairly commonplace notion of love – and, more to the point, desire – as a disease that weakens the mind to the point of an irrational madness and afflicts the body in a similarly stark fashion, and secondly the ways in which his mistress deviates from the ordinarily praised ideal of beauty.

The sonnet therefore returns the series firmly and identifiably to the 'Dark Lady' and the effect she is having on our poet in an unequivocally physical manner, leaving behind the reflections on the soul of the previous sonnet and concerning itself once more with his lust for someone he knows – or at the very least declares – to be neither traditionally beautiful nor morally sound.

With his solemn, near pious, Sonnet 146, William Shakespeare for the first and only time speaks directly to his soul and entreats it to look after itself; to stop expending its energy on the pursuit of outward, physical adornments which are all doomed to swift decay – effectively starving and weakening itself whilst feeding and strengthening the gluttonous body that is only meant to house it and that will soon succumb to death – and to instead let go of material riches and with the 'return' from 'selling' them, 'purchase' something infinitely more valuable: eternal life in concord with, and on the terms ordained by, God.

The poem makes no mention, nor does it allude to or reference indirectly, any lover, mistress, or wife, nor love itself, or sex. This, too, makes it unique in the collection. As does its close alignment with a Christian notion of redemption through spiritual nurture at the expense of, and in preference to, physical or material gratification.