We don't know anything about um h, who is referred to here, and whether that's the right question to be asking. In some ways, the currency of the whole dark lady question might be an attempt to rearrange the sonates around more obviously hetrosexual themes. So i suspect the dark lady sequents of hoving being written sort of catamarously with a larger sequence. I think they are incredibly problematic, especially to modern readers. And there is a real streak of cruelty running through those poims.
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