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