The poem “Venus and Adonis” brought fame to Shakespeare among the educated public; they say that London beauties kept the book under their pillows, and Oxford students memorized entire passages and sang them in the streets. “Lucretia” also had considerable success with the reader; the poem is based on a plot from ancient Roman history, described by Titus Livy and Ovid, retold by J. Chaucer in “Legends of the Good Wives.” Discussions around the sonnets of William Shakespeare still do not subside: are they really Are the sonnets autobiographical? Was there a love triangle mentioned in sonnets 133, 134 and 144? Who was the prototype of the Friend and the Dark Lady? The addition includes four essays by the translator G. M. Kruzhkov, devoted to intriguing and not fully clarified questions concerning Shakespeare’s poems and his sonnets.