There is a theory that this was the first of all of them written, i believe. It could just be that he's not yet, uh, reached that level of facility with the form that you were describing so beautifully as a, as a kind of muscle memory. That terrible couplet i hate. From ha to wave, she threw and saved my life saying, not you. I mean, why is that even there? And it's in the middle of the dark. There are some that have un rimed lines. W w, what do you make of one? Four, five,. You know, the, the,the, the, an hathaway one that send, that
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