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In Our Time: Shakespeare's Sonnets

24/06/2021

Shakespeare's Sonnets

BBC Radio 4 - In Our Time, Shakespeare's Sonnets

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the greatest and most challenging poems in English

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

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