In This Episode
In this week’s Book Club podcast I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells about their new book All The Sonnets of Shakespeare – which by collecting the sonnets that appear in the plays with the 154 poems usually known as ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, and placing them in chronological order, gives a totally fresh sense of what the form meant to our greatest poet-dramatist. They tell me what sonnets meant to Elizabethans, why so much of what has been said about ‘the sonnets’ has been wrong – they’re not a sequence, and it’s vain to look for a Dark Lady or Fair Youth in these candidly bisexual poems – and how they provide perhaps the most intensely inward view of the poet we have.
Comments
Black Friday sale: Get 10 weeks for just $1
Unlimited access to the The Spectator, online and via the app
SUBSCRIBE NOW Just $1 for 10 weeksAlready a subscriber? Log in