Researchers said the added lines "potentially transform" the sonnet from "a meditation on romantic love into a powerful political statement."

An Oxford researcher found a rare, handwritten variation of one of Shakespeare’s most famous love poems. About 400 years ago, its meaning might have been very different.

The recently discovered copy of Sonnet 116 "reads as a political love song" during England's Civil Wars, according to the professor who found it.

Dr Leah Veronese uncovered the version of William Shakespeare's Sonnet 116 tucked away in a 17th Century poetry collection at the University of Oxford. The manuscript was found among the papers of Elias Ashmole,