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.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• 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

• 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 →

Related episodes

• The Sonnet
  
  21 Jun, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare’s Life
  
  15 Mar, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream
  
  18 Apr, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures
• Romeo and Juliet
  
  17 Feb, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare’s Work
  
  11 May, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures
• The Tempest
  
  14 Nov, 2013 820 English and Old English literatures
• Hamlet
  
  28 Dec, 2017 820 English and Old English literatures
• Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
  
  4 Mar, 1999 820 English and Old English literatures
• Dylan Thomas
  
  16 Jun, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures
• Lear
  
  28 Feb, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures

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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.