It's possible that the was material in the sonits that that shakespear might have felt sensitive about publishing during elisabeth's lifetime. We think, during the years 16 o seven to o nine, there was another outbreak of plague. So there may have been sensitivities around it. There is an over view available, a biographical view, a poetic over view. People have frequently turned to the sonits to understand shakespeare's life and also look to the poems for a story,. perhaps a drama.
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