IT'S 1592 and Shakespeare is but an 'upstart crow'. The theatres are shut due to plague and he is forced to fall upon the patronage of Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, who, young, wealthy and sought after as patron by many poets, welcomes Shakespeare at the big house. There, in a two-year candlelit stretch, 154 sonnets are mostly composed, many addressing the Earl.

Brandishing 32 of them, Collins sets out his narrative stall rooted in this spurt of symbiotic flaming youth. Espionage and threats are brought to the piece by Wriothesley's guardian, Lord Burghley, effective chief minister to Queen Elizabeth. In the light of such intrigues, alongside the erotic overtures lent by Wriothesley's naked swims, suppressed whispers about his sexuality, a shared mistress and the ambiguous bent of the sonnets, one could be forgiven for expecting a seamier romp. But Collins' approach is an altogether more contemplative, temperate one.

For a start, it is written looking back from 'the end of (my] life', from the vantage of old age and a successful life as a playwright, at what was a strange and troubled time. Writing in the first person, Collins attempts to convey Shakespeare's internal turmoil, to conjecture at the sonnets' inspiration and wedge them into the narrative; as a result, the links between emotional catalyst and penned result can seem tenuous, where many words are mobilised in mutual navel-gazing. A small but nagging feature is the manner in which we are to believe Shakespeare's inspiration is nurtured; namely, as soon as a telling conversation takes place or a heart gets broken, he scuttles off to his garret and scratches perfect sonnets out with a quill.

Collins' prose is capable of providing slick interchange and the conversations in which future Shakespeare play titles are innocently dropped are a lovely, subtle motif of his development as a magpie. But more commonly the formal speech of the plays jars here.

As the curtain comes neatly down, with rumours of Thomas Kyd and Christopher Marlowe done to death by slanderous tongue and Shakespeare contemplating new boards fit to be trod, it would seem that more matter with less imitation art would make this plodding monument the more beguiling.