By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘In loving thee thou know’st I am forsworn’: so begins the antepenultimate sonnet in William Shakespeare’s Sonnets – there are still two more to go in the sequence – but the last sonnet to advance a new argument. (The final pair are more of a coda to the overall cycle.) Sonnet 152 is not one of the most famous or memorable sonnets Shakespeare wrote, and some commentators (such as Don Paterson in his enjoyable Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary) have condemned it as misogynistic.