Michael Schoenfeldt is Professor of English at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton and Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship, and he has contributed to publications including A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets and Imagining Death in Shakespeare and Milton.

• 1. Shakespeare and English poetry; 2. Shakespeare's banquet of sense: 'Venus and Adonis'; 3. 'My tongue shall utter all': constraint and complaint in 'Lucrece'; 4. Mysteries of the Sonnets; 5. 'All in war with time': progeny, poetry, and entropy in the Sonnets; 6. Friendship and love, darkness and lust: desire in the Sonnets; 7. Solitary and mutual flames: 'A Lover's Complaint' and 'The Phoenix and the Turtle'; 8. Passionate pilgrims: fantasies of Shakespearean authorship; Further reading.

"Schoenfeldt's volume has all the merits of a first-rate lecture series. It provides the facts, engages judiciously with current scholarship, and models exacting readings of target texts." --Recent Studies of the English Renaissance