Shakespeare's first 17 or 18 sons is one of the most well known in his sequence. The poem was written for william boyd, but it seems from son 18 that after they met, uh, the discovered, shall we say, in common. And i think there's a kind of strangely, kind of unhealthy relationship that sh Shakespeare sets up between love and the development of his arts. As you read it further though, you find there is this edge to it, as with so many of shakespear's sonate poems.
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