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

Aflevering-ID: 1000526714459

GUID: urn:bbc:podcast:m000x6tr

Releasedatum: 24-6-2021 11:15:00