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: Shakespeareâs Sonnets, ânever before imprintedâ. 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 Shakespeareâs 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 Kingâs 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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LINKS AND FURTHER READING
READING LIST
Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (first published 1978; Yale University Press, 2000)
Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.), On Shakespeareâs Sonnets: A Poetsâ Celebration (Arden, 2016)
Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds.), Shakespeareâs Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden, 2018)
Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare's Sonnets (The Arden Shakespeare, 1997)
Patricia Fumerton, ââSecretâ Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnetsâ (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, âFair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Colorâ
John Kerrigan, The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Penguin Classics, 1986)
Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeareâs Sonnets (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeareâs Sonnets (Faber, 2010)
Oscar Wilde (ed. John Sloan), The Complete Short Stories (Oxford Worldâs Classics), especially âThe Portrait of Master W.H.â
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