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Shakespeare's Sonnets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 154 sonnets collected and printed in 1609 of which some are famous, many are glorious, most are inspiring and several are unsettling.

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the collection of poems published in 1609 by Thomas Thorpe: Shakespeare’s Sonnets, “never before imprinted”. Yet, while some of Shakespeare's other poems and many of his plays were often reprinted in his lifetime, the Sonnets were not a publishing success. They had to make their own way, outside the main canon of Shakespeare’s work: wonderful, troubling, patchy, inspiring and baffling, and they have appealed in different ways to different times. Most are addressed to a man, something often overlooked and occasionally concealed; one early and notorious edition even changed some of the pronouns.

With:

Hannah Crawforth
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King’s College London

Don Paterson
Poet and Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews

And

Emma Smith
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford

Producer: Simon Tillotson

Available now

52 minutes

Last on

Thu 2 Jun 2022 21:30

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

CONTRIBUTORS








READING LIST

Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (first published 1978; Yale University Press, 2000)

Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.), On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (Arden, 2016)

Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden, 2018)

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare's Sonnets (The Arden Shakespeare, 1997)

Patricia Fumerton, ‘”Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’ (Representations 15, summer 1986, University of California Press)

Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995), especially chapter 2, ‘Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color’

John Kerrigan, The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Penguin Classics, 1986)

Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber, 2010)

Oscar Wilde (ed. John Sloan), The Complete Short Stories (Oxford World’s Classics), especially ‘The Portrait of Master W.H.’


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Broadcasts

  • Thu 24 Jun 2021 09:00
  • Thu 24 Jun 2021 21:30
  • Thu 2 Jun 2022 09:00
  • Thu 2 Jun 2022 21:30

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