Sonnets ..... wot Shakespeare wrote .... today on the wireless

Now, this is one I enjoyed.

Shake-Speare's Sonnets, 1609

It is another in the In Our Time series, has a bonus few minutes, from Historian and broadcaster Simon Schama who has selected the episode on Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

"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"

Locatiob; BBC Radio 4

Picture; Shake-Speare's Sonnets, quarto published by Thomas Thorpe, London, 1609

*Shakespeare’s Sonnets, https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/live/bbc_radio_fourfm