These films trace the tragic romantic triangle through the lives of three modern Londoners, each with the same sexual obsessions, desires and fears so beautifully described in the original sonnets.

The story concerns the man's obsessive attraction for a younger man who seems to be destroying himself with profligate pastimes. This older man also has a sexual addiction for a young, dark woman who continues to have many partners behind his back.

The man is further betrayed when the youth and the dark lady have an affair. The final, tragic irony is that the man contracts venereal disease from the woman and becomes fatally ill. But from this anguish comes marvelous poetry that is at once high art but also brutal honesty about himself, his lovers - and in many ways about us all.