Shakespeare’s Sonnets
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.
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Guests
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Hannah Crawforth No other episodes
Senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King's College London -
Don Paterson No other episodes
Poet and Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews - Emma Smith
6 episodes
Professor of Shakespeare Studies at Hertford College, Oxford
Reading list
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Shakespeare's Sonnets
Stephen Booth (Yale University Press, 2000) Google Books → -
On Shakespeare's Sonnets: A Poets' Celebration
Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.) (Arden, 2016) Google Books → -
Shakespeare's Sonnets: The State of Play
Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds.) (Arden, 2018) Google Books → -
Shakespeare's Sonnets
Katherine Duncan-Jones (The Arden Shakespeare, 1997) Google Books → -
"Secret" Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets
Patricia Fumerton (Representations 15, summer 1986, University of California Press ) -
Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England
Kim Hall (Cornell University Press, 1995) Google Books → -
The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint
John Kerrigan (Penguin Classics, 1986) Google Books → -
The Afterlife of Shakespeare's Sonnets
Jane Kingsley-Smith (Cambridge University Press, 2019) Google Books → -
Reading Shakespeare's Sonnets
Don Paterson (Faber, 2010) Google Books → -
The Complete Short Stories
Oscar Wilde (ed. John Sloan) (Oxford World's Classics ) Google Books →
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Programme ID: m000x6tr
Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000x6tr
Auto-category: 821.3 (English poetry)
Hello (First sentence from this episode)
Hello. In 1609, Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's Sonnets.