The opening lines of Shakespeare's 106th sonnet introduce many of the themes of this study. Fittingly, for a collection of verse much concerned with questions of reading and writing – questions about the power of literary discourse – the poem opens by referring to the poet reading a book. But what sort of book? ‘Chronicle’ seems to have been applied to a wide range of historical works (including a number of Shakespeare's plays) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so hardly helps us to pinpoint the sort of text being mentioned. As if aware of this vagueness, Shakespeare rapidly moves to narrow the field of reference. First we have the self-consciously archaic word, ‘wights’; next we are told that the people featured in this text are beautiful; then that it comprises ‘old rime’. Taken with the preceding clues, ‘Ladies dead, and lovely Knights’ suggests that when he describes himself reading in ‘the chronicle of wasted time’, it is likely that Shakespeare is studying what we would now call a romance, or, more specifically, a chivalric romance.