Shakespeare's Sonnets

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Historian and broadcaster Simon Schama has selected the episode on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction will be available on BBC Sounds and the In Our Time webpage shortly after the broadcast and will be longer than the one broadcast on Radio 4). In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published a collection of poems entitled 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

Reading list:

Stephen Booth, Shakespeare's Sonnets (first published 1978; Yale University Press, 2000)

Hannah Crawforth and Elizabeth Scott-Baumann (eds.), On Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Poets’ Celebration (Arden, 2016)

Hannah Crawforth, Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Clare Whitehead (eds.), Shakespeare’s Sonnets: The State of Play (Arden, 2018)

Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare's Sonnets (The Arden Shakespeare, 1997)

Patricia Fumerton, ‘”Secret” Arts: Elizabethan Miniatures and Sonnets’ (Representations 15, summer 1986, University of California Press)

Kim Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Cornell University Press, 1995), especially chapter 2, ‘Fair Texts/Dark Ladies: Renaissance Lyric and the Poetics of Color’

John Kerrigan, The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Penguin Classics, 1986)

Jane Kingsley-Smith, The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

Don Paterson, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber, 2010)

Oscar Wilde (ed. John Sloan), The Complete Short Stories (Oxford World’s Classics), especially ‘The Portrait of Master W.H.’

This episode was first broadcast in June 2021.

Spanning history, religion, culture, science and philosophy, In Our Time from BBC Radio 4 is essential listening for the intellectually curious. In each episode, host Melvyn Bragg and expert guests explore the people, ideas, events and discoveries that have shaped our world

In Our Time is a BBC Studios production