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I cannot tell you how welcome your words are.
And we have wished for them.
My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true that you love me too?
It is true.
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama Collection, available wherever you get your audiobooks.
To celebrate Melvin Bragg's 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes.
Here's the historian and broadcaster Simon Sharma.
In Our Time is really a broadcasting miracle.
It's the closest thing to a complete university of the air.
So it's something which enshrines deep knowledge, academic knowledge, with an extraordinary sense that everybody will want to hear this if it's not dumbed down.
And Melvin Bragg is the only person really, I think, who could have done this as brilliantly as he did, because he himself is excited by knowledge and he's a natural entertainer.
He's a great ringmaster of personalities.
I chose Shakespeare's sonnet because I've been obsessed with Shakespeare really since I was a child.
When the first Shakespeare play I went to see was, I was 10 years old.
It was 1955.
It was Richard Burton's Henry V, and my father made me learn Shakespeare's speeches off by heart.
But I've always loved this non-play side of Shakespeare's personality, which is at the same time, you know, lyrical and mysterious and full of these extraordinary emotional, psychological and temperamental twists and turns.
The program turns out to be extraordinary because it did exactly what I was hoping.
It looked particularly through the voice of a very good poet, Don Patterson, Scottish poet, at the internal structure of the sonnet form, the difference between Shakespeare's version and the English version and the original Italian sonnets which have a kind of different structure.
So it was almost as if Don Patterson and the others, with Melvin, who was brilliant at bridging these different kinds of approaches, you could see the anatomy of the poet of the sonnets really exposed.
And then Hannah Crawforth and Emma Smith.
The other two contributors were wonderful really, both about the history of the times, explaining the context of of it all at the early period of James I and how Shakespeare adapted to that, and also the context of Shakespeare's long career.
So I came away from that feeling, well, there's not much more I really ever need to know.
I'm sure that's not true.
All of Melvin's brilliant tactics.
The phrase I love from him, the friend, is would you like to develop that a little bit more?
Yeah.
That is great.
That is so against the kind of obsession with simplifying everything that happens on broadcasting, even in the BBC.
So there was a lot of would you like to develop that a little bit more or not even a little bit more, which I adored.
So it's a real jewel even amidst the treasury that is in our time.
Hello.
In 1609 Thomas Thorpe published Shakespeare's sonnets, never before imprinted, it said, and unlike the plays, they were never again reprinted in the poet's lifetime.
They made their own way outside the main canon of Shakespeare's work wonderful troubling patchy inspiring, but sinister also, and baffling, appealing in different ways to different times.
Most of them are addressed to a young man, which upset many people over the centuries.
One notorious edition even changed the pronouns.
With me to discuss Shakespeare's sonnets are 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.
Emma Smith, where do these poems fit chronologically into the broader range of Shakespeare's output?
Well, that 1609 date that you just gave us puts the sonnets pretty firmly among the plays of Shakespeare that we call late.
So around the time of Pericles, Cymbeline, those post-tragic romances, as they're sometimes called.
But we actually think that Shakespeare was writing these sonnets for a long period before the date of publication came.
In 1598, so that's 10 years, more than 10 years before they're published.
We hear that Shakespeare is circulating what are called sugared sonnets among his private friends.
And the following year 1599, two of the sonnets are published in an anthology which, although it claims to be by Shakespeare, is only very partly by him.
And there's stylistic evidence too that suggests that perhaps the project of writing the sonnets was a career-long one for Shakespeare, so that they appear in print, perhaps at the end of a long process, long interrupted process of gestation and composition.
But what does this 1609 publication signify?
Does this mean he thinks they've got a set, or the bulk of them are written or rewritten at about that time?
What does that date mean?
Clearly, Shakespeare has put together this collection in 1609.
For some people that's because of a very, very quiet period in the theatres because of plague closures.
For others it's a more creative response to the particular circumstances of James's court, the kind of homosocial cultural world of that court.
Perhaps Shakespeare is interested in intervening in that.
That'll be rather gnomic to a lot of people.
You mean that a lot of the poets written in the Elizabethan age when the woman referred to could be called the queen.
And then it was James I where Shakespeare may have changed his attitude to or changed his position on love because of that.
So the Elizabethan sonnet was a really popular form.
Loads and loads and loads of writers have a poppet sonnets in the Elizabethan period.
And part of their popularity is that the ultimate woman on a pedestal, who won't look at you and won't give you the time of day is, in some sense, Queen Elizabeth herself.
Now, that changes and that dynamic changes when James comes to the throne.
But one of the cultural aspects of James's court is a different kind of friendship between men.
James has often been discussed in modern terms as having male favourites, as being perhaps bisexual.
This gave a different sense of what kinds of passions, what kind of love objects could be identified.
And one possibility is that Shakespeare is rebooting, if you like, the sonnet tradition so associated with Elizabeth's court for the new sexual mores of James's court.
How established was a sonnet form when these were published?
The sonnet form in English is really well established by 1609.
And in fact, many critics would feel it's had its boom.
It's had its day in the 1580s and 90s.
And these look slightly belated.
So the sonnet tradition, which began, of course, with Dante in the 13th century and Petrarch In the 14th.
Petrarch saw Laura on Good Friday in church 1327.
And, you know, the rest, as we say, is history or certainly poetry.
Those poems, that very powerful form, comes into English via Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, and Thomas Wyatt in Henry VIII's court.
And it really develops in the Elizabethan court with poems by Philip Sidney, by Spencer and others.
Don Patterson, as a poet, in what ways does a sonnet form a gift to a poet?
What does it enable?
In some ways it's the one poetic form that's really kind of pressured as being from sheer necessity.
I mean partly through the convergence of just physical factors, like you know, the size of type and the size of books, and more neurological things like the term and the ideal length of lines.
It's one of those forms of you know, if we didn't have this on it, it likely appeared in something much like its traditional form.
But
Because in essence, what you're talking about is a small square of text in a page.
It's 14 lines.
That's roughly enough to make that square.
So it naturally tends to use that symbolic symmetry as a way of working out a resolution of some emotional or argumentative tension.
Uh, it's a great way of figuring out a solution to things, and also most sonnets of this weird kind of natural turn about two-thirds of the way through round about where you put the golden ratio, usually between lines eight and nine, which is the point in things where humans generally tend to get bored and need something to happen.
So it's a form that's very fitted to a very common shape of human thought that's very close to a 12 bar blues It's about the same length actually.
You make a statement and there's a development, and then there's a tension, and then there's a resolution.
Mainly for poets.
It provides them with a kind of ideal space to think in and to make sense of things.
It's fairly rigid, isn't it?
It's three fours and a two, and that's it.
It is in the English form.
It's funny, the Italian form is eight and a six and actually that's still lurking there as a ghost behind the English form.
English sonnets tend to turn in much the same place after that, between line eight and nine.
So this was a form that was really developed by Henry Howard in order to compensate for the fact that English has very few rhymes.
And the Italian form is very difficult in English.
But that change in the rhyme scheme leaves you with this different form where you get three quatrains and a couplet.
And those closing couplets, those last two lines, can notoriously be pretty bad.
They can contribute just a couple of lines of redundant summary or some neater part conclusion.
And the weaker ones all end.
So, or then, or therefore.
But the best poems, especially of Shakespeare's, will usually start with yet or but, or however.
I'm trying to think of one.
But when your countenance filled up his line, then lacked I matter that enfeebled mind.
So the poem's still kind of twisting and singing its own song right to the end.
What can it give you as a poet that other things can't?
It can give you a kind of a space that has an interior structure that allows you, once you learn the form and get it down to a kind of a motor skill, it can help you make a logic out of pain, I think.
And in Shakespeare's case, I think it...
It allowed him to make a logic out of a love affair, in this case so singularly weird and demented and forbidden, and three-way and obsessive and, in the end, confused with poetry itself.
It might otherwise have been intolerable.
But within this little room of the sonnet, as I say, which was more of a panic room at times, he could make something that wasn't just a gift to the beloved but where he could use things like the Elizabethan conceit as a way of working it through.
You know extended metaphors about money or law or contagion and infection, and substance and shadow that shaped Elizabethan thought.
And so it's continued, you know, as a way of working things out, using the kind of tropes of the age to do so.
We've used it for much the same purpose ever since.
Is it possible to say?
There's something specific that distinguishes Shakespeare's sonnets from those of his predecessors and contemporaries.
Mainly, he was better, you know, which is quite hard to explain, other than to say that, you know, for talent to flourish it needs competition, and he, and he certainly found it in the 1590s.
But um, he wasn't that experimental he, but he extended the sonnet through a kind of brilliant subversion i mean, the likes of michael drayton were writing fairly experimental sonnets at this time but in some sense he played straight to the subject that he inherited from the Italians and from Sidney and Spencer, that of love.
But he used it to write a bit much more than love, about time and about age and history and metaphysics.
And they don't all come off.
I think that's the point, because the other thing that he'd won, since he had to write so many to make the sequence long enough, was an extreme facility.
He gets this down to a motor skill and I think you can kind of bang them out like Bach could a fugue in the end.
This sometimes led to the improvised composition of a few duffers.
But the upside of that is he has this absurd facility where he can work this on it almost from the inside out.
So you find that the compression of the song at the end is a kind of pressure cooker for the language and he ends up doing something very different with the language, which undergoes some weird change of phase state.
It goes from solid to liquid in Shakespeare's hands.
You know, words are multiple in senses.
Suddenly they're bonding in all sorts of different ways.
It's working in space as well as along the line.
He's taking the whole thing vertical as well as horizontal.
So you end up with this beautiful thing where every word's talking to every other word.
It's got harmony as well as melody and it's like this.
It's as interconnected as a single cell animal by the time Shakespeare's done with it.
Thank you, Hannah.
Hannah Crawford, why we touched on this with Emma, but can we go into it further?
Why this on this were published in 1609, way past, as it were, their fashionable date in the reign of James rather than Elizabeth.
Could you develop that a bit?
It is a mystery really why they were published in 1609 especially, as Emma's already mentioned.
We think that many of them were written far earlier than that, about a decade earlier than that.
You've mentioned the change in monarch.
It's possible that...
There was material in the sonnets that Shakespeare might have felt sensitive about publishing during Elizabeth's lifetime.
Critics have sometimes taken the early sonnets in the sequence, the so-called procreation sonnets that urged the lover to have children as being a comment directed towards Elizabeth I, who obviously hadn't produced an heir.
So there may have been sensitivities around it.
He may also, and again, Emma's already mentioned this, never have intended to publish the sonnets.
We think during the years 1607 to 09, there was another outbreak of plague.
There were frequent interruptions, obviously Shakespeare's career.
So he was probably away from London.
It's unclear whether he gave his authority to the publication or whether he was involved in it.
We have 154 sonnets in the collection.
Is there any way there's an overview available, a biographical overview, a poetic overview?
People have frequently turned to the sonnets to understand Shakespeare's life and also look to the poems for a story, perhaps a drama, even thinking of Shakespeare's status as our prime dramatist.
And there has been a... consensus that a story emerges from the sequence of the poems.
Again, I would just repeat that we don't know that Shakespeare intended the sequence, although those early in the collection do seem to be perhaps more deliberately organised than those later.
Broadly speaking though, there is one lover who is the object of affection in the early poems, in fact up to Sonnet 126.
And that lover is male.
Male pronouns are used some of the time, although a lot of the time the pronouns are unclear.
And people have read into the poems of that part of the sequence a love affair between the poet, the speaker and this young man as he becomes known.
There is then another figure who has become known again.
This is not in the poems themselves, but has become known as the rival poet, who supposedly competes for the young man's affection.
We then get a marked turn.
And it was interesting hearing Don talk about the volta in the sonnet itself, in the poems themselves.
We get a sort of turn then within the sequence at Poem 127, and we meet, or at least are introduced in more detail to a new beloved who has become known as the so-called Dark Lady, who is female, seemingly older, sexually promiscuous, and there becomes a complicated triangulation then of emotions.
She is also involved with the young man.
Again, Shakespeare did not necessarily intend the sonnets to tell a story.
They may have been rearranged that way much later.
We think, for instance, that the so-called Dark Lady sonnets, beginning at 127 and going through to the end, were actually probably the first to be written.
So this is a work of assemblage, I suppose, of putting things together in a particular way and of readers and critics kind of reading into the sequence this kind of narrative.
Can we stay, Emma, with the dark lady?
What do we know about her?
Has she got a biographical root?
So we don't know anything about who is referred to here and whether that's the right question to be asking.
Should we be looking for a real dark-haired, dark-eyed woman who meets these rather vague criteria and descriptions that we get in the poetry?
That hasn't stopped us from being very energetic in trying to trace her.
One very prominent candidate is Emilia Lagna, part of a musical Italian origin family around the Jacobean court.
And that's had a lot of currency.
In some ways, the currency of the whole dark lady question might be an attempt to rearrange the sonnets around more obviously heterosexual themes because, as Hannah's pointed out, the majority of the poems are not concerned with a woman as the love object at all.
Dawn, what do you think of The Dark Lady?
I'm not a fan of those poems.
Wordsworth hated them, incidentally.
He found them harsh, obscure and worthless, I recall.
But reading them now is kind of difficult.
I mean, the read is rather misogynistic.
The bizarre sonnet 130.
My Mr Sizer, Nothing Like the Sun is hard to read in a very complimentary way.
I've never really understood its popularity.
It does go on denigrating her, doesn't it?
It goes on for far too long.
And you keep waiting for the.
You know, at the turn one would expect him to pay the woman a compliment, but he really presses on to the end.
And it's just, I find it quite bizarre.
So it's.
There's also the interesting number, you know sort of of the Dark Lady sonnets, which is 28.
And some people have speculated as to whether this might be echoing the month of the menstrual cycle, because certainly it seems like there's a fear of women's bodies that come across in these poems that, to a contemporary reader, is a little unsettling to read, to say the least.
Yes.
I think they are incredibly problematic, especially to modern readers.
And there is a real streak of cruelty running through those poems.
So in 130, for example, the poet does not just say that this woman is basically ugly, but he describes her breath as reeking.
He says that where angels kind of float, you know, she treads on the ground.
And there's almost an implication that, you know, if I didn't love you, nobody would to this.
We also, as modern readers, I think, need to think very carefully about the rhetoric of darkness and how that is treated.
The insinuation that darkness is considered of a par with sinfulness or as a negative value as opposed to the fair Petrarchan ideal is.
It's incredibly problematic and especially in racial terms.
We need to think carefully about that.
Does that lead you on in any different direction from the ones being noted by Dawn?
It does.
And I think for a long time, you know the kind of rhetoric of the Dark Lady, the language of darkness around her was taken to be often metaphorical or to have perhaps a moral valence of some kind.
But I think we also need to remember and scholars such as Kim Hall and Imtiaz Habib have worked really to show this that there was a really significant difference.
Black population in early modern London.
There was a lot of immigration going on.
The slave trade was in force.
And that means this language of darkness, I think would have read differently even within Shakespeare's lifetime, as it obviously reads very differently to us today.
Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austen like you've never heard before.
From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, experience all six classics in full cast BBC audio dramatisations.
Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch.
These productions bring Austen's timeless world to life.
I cannot tell you how welcome your words are, how I have wished for them.
My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true that you love me too?
It is true.
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama Collection, available wherever you get your audiobooks.
Don Patterson, back to you.
What do you make of the first 17 or 18 sonnets?
It's very hard to know what to make of them.
I mean, essentially, it's the same poem over and over again, really.
I mean, it's addressed to this clearly gorgeous young man, and essentially...
It just amounts to variations on.
We want the lovely things of the earth to copy themselves so they don't disappear.
You're a lovely thing, but you're a bit of a narcissist, so you hoard yourself.
So, for everyone else's sake, you have to marry and have children, so your beauty isn't lost to the world.
I think it was William Boyd, maybe someone else, but I think Boyd initially had the idea that possibly William Herbert, who's a good candidate for the young man at this point.
His mum commissioned him the first 17 sonnets, one for every year of his life.
Herbert, being a bookish lad, was a big fan of Shakespeare's, and his mum's ploy was that he'd be flattered into taking Shakespeare's advice seriously.
So this may have been work undertaken before the two had met, but it seems from Sonnet 18 that after they met they'd discovered, shall we say, much in common, and the poems continue in a very different vein.
I mean, another reading could be that Shakespeare was just getting his hand in, because these almost feel like know apprentice pieces, where you make the same little wooden box over and over again until you perfect it.
Um, but either way this, the sequence proper, the you know the, the love sequence, doesn't really get going until sonnet 18 when he seems just about to finish the appointment.
The same way, just with the same boring couplet about going forth and multiplying.
He's almost teed himself up for it, but he changes in mid-course and he goes.
No, i'm going to declare my own interest here.
It's me, it's my poetry that's going to guarantee your immortality, my love, not your future children.
Which is a kind of a heart-stopping moment if you read it in context.
You mean the couplet so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
That one.
It's nice to hear someone stress it correctly, but that's exactly it, yeah, yeah.
So these you think apprentice works, if you use that word.
Do you think there's any development from being an apprentice to being a master builder?
Yeah, and I think there's a kind of strangely, kind of unhealthy relationship that Shakespeare sets up between love and the development of his art.
And sometimes I suspect him of having artificially extended the length of his sequence in order just to keep writing, because he's getting better and better as he goes on.
As I say, a lot of the poems, the later poems especially, suffer from the kind of facility that he's achieved by then.
It's a motor skill.
But I think these things become so kind of interwoven, he can't tell them apart.
And he's constantly afraid of losing his inspiration, to the point that this becomes the focus of the poems, almost more than The Beloved does, I think.
Hannah, do you want to say more about that poem?
Sonnet 18, yes.
So this is obviously one of the most well-known in the sequence.
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day, thou art more lovely and more temperate.
And it's one of the best-known love poems, really, in our language.
On first reading, it's fairly straightforwardly generous towards the lover.
It emphasizes beauty and virtue.
And it also makes this sort of vow in the final couplet at the end that Don was describing to immortalize the beloved in verse one
As you read it further though, I find there is this edge to it, as there is with so many of Shakespeare's sonnets.
It's almost impossible to find one that is unequivocal about love, I think.
You immediately get the lines about rough winds shaking the darling buds of May.
Autumn is coming, winter is coming, with the implication that the beloved may be beautiful now, but this is not going to last.
That beauty decays over time and eventually there will be death.
And then This proclamation that the poet will immortalise also starts to feel quite different.
I think in that context
It gives a lot of power to the poet over the beloved in this scenario that his.
In this case, though it's not specified in this poem his existence, his continued existence, owes entirely to the poet.
That he will only be remembered after death because of being the poet's lover, and that can be slightly threatening, i think, slightly sinister um, in modern terms, slightly coercive.
Even emma he doesn't use.
His vocabulary isn't vast.
In the sonnets i've read from you three, he makes so many words work so hard and they're different meanings packed into a few letters.
Can you give us an example of that and tell us of the impact that that has?
We've got these words in the sonnets which are, as you say, working incredibly hard, with incredible density, not just rhyme words which already resonate beyond themselves through the poem, but repeated words.
Helen Vendler, one of the sonnet's most wonderful critics, calls these the key words.
And she points out that really they're what string the poem's ideas together together.
The use of the same or a related form of the word, but in different senses, particularly often changing in the couplet.
So, for example, there are some sonnets that pun a lot on the word will.
One that's actually saturated with will.
So Sonnet 135 begins Whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will, and will to boot, and will in overplus.
More than enough am I that vex thee still, to thy sweet will making addition thus.
Wilt thou, whose will is large and spacious, not once vouchsafe to hide my will in thine?
Shall will in others seem right gracious, and in my will no fair acceptance shine.
So we've got all these repetitions of wills, some of which refer to the poet's name, some of which are sexual puns.
Hide my will in thee.
Some are about agency or volition or wanting.
It's a really simple monosyllable that's working incredibly hard.
And that texture, I think, is really characteristic of the sonnets playing on a falsehood and truth.
For instance, I have sworn thee fair, more perjured I, to swear against the truth so false a lie.
You sort of think yeah, I can understand what all those words mean, but these are really knotty and condensed poems.
And that's what's given them their extraordinary life and their extraordinary inspirational quality.
I think
Those Japanese flowers are something that pop open in water.
There's so much packed inside them.
Don Patterson, can you take us to Sonnet 116 and take us through that please, and what interests you there?
It's a very fine poem, but I suppose one of the most interesting things for me is that its popularity is quite bewildering.
I think it's actually down in part to there being very few other obvious contenders for straightforward, all-purpose love poems in a book that's kind of inexplicably acquired that reputation.
I mean, if you're getting married and that's what it's used for it's used as a marriage poem.
Go for Barrett Browning in Sonnets from the Portuguesa, or something.
You know, maybe that's the other great sonnet sequence in English of similar stature, but I wouldn't go for this one.
I mean, especially when you read it in context.
It doesn't really work that well.
The first two lines are definitely meant to put us in mind of the of the marriage service.
You know, let not to the marriage of two minds admit impediments.
You know, if any man can show any just cause, and all that.
But this isn't a union of the flesh, this is minds.
And secondly, and more to the point of two men and this is, I think it's a large part of its tragic frisson is the fact that the church is never going to sanction this marriage.
But I do, I would say it's a killer poem.
I mean it has the most wonderful example of a great Shakespearean trick, which is where he yokes together two words by sound that mean the opposite of each other.
Whenever you find a deep opposition in sense in the sonnets, you often hear a symmetry in sound which is an emblem of what the sonnet's doing.
Anyway, you know.
And when he says it is the star to every wandering bark, it's so effective because you have that strong assonance.
Same vowel sound essentially between bark and star.
And it draws those two words together and it contrasts the star's fixity and the boat's wandering and makes of it a paradox.
But I think when we read this at weddings we tend to forget that wandering in the context of the sonnets at this point really has strong connotations of infidelity, of inconsciency, you know, basically putting it about a lot.
So it's not quite the romantic kind of, you know, physical fidelity that it might seem.
It's only spiritual.
So it's an odd choice for a marriage poem.
Do you think that a lot of the implications in Shakespeare's lines are completely missed by people who just take it all for granted that it's wonderful and sublime?
Not only sometimes do I think people don't read for context, which is understandable.
It's not the easiest read.
I think sometimes one suspects, you know, people only read the first page. few lines.
But the problem with being so gloriously musical is one can revel in the music alone.
I mean, I was just thinking about the way that John Gielgud reads Sonnet 18, which is wonderful and resonant, but read with clearly no understanding of what the poem means at all.
I mean, it's the same cadence in every line.
Whereas if you hear someone like David Tennant, read it.
David Tennant clearly understands every word he's reading.
But the trouble is there's so much seductive intrinsic music to this poetry you could almost be forgiven for not thinking too hard about what he's saying.
And I think for that reason.
You know, poems tend to get used for curious purposes or tend to get badly misread frankly,
One of my favourite poems in the sequence, and one that I just think is a brilliant poem, is 129 The Expensive Spirit in a Waste of Shame.
And that is a poem about lust.
The lines continue is lust in action until action.
Lust is perjured murderous bloody, full of blame savage extreme rude cruel, not to trust, and so on, and so on.
It's really hard to imagine a poem that more effectively kind of skewers romantic notions of love or even give the idea that lust might be a straightforward emotion.
Even that is complicated here by this kind of piling up of words on top of each other, all with slightly different meanings.
The sound, as Don was saying, carries you along there in a really interesting way, really powerful way.
And this is a poem that again has that effect in the final couplet of undermining almost everything that's gone before.
So we get this wonderfully rich, complex portrayal of love and lust in the sonnet.
And then the couplet is basically saying, just to summarise it, that everyone knows we should put lust aside and behave like good citizens.
And, And it's such a lame note on which to end compared to the just glorious poetry that's gone before in the preceding 12 lines.
And it ends up having the effect that we see how vacuous that sentiment at the end is.
And what stays with us is actually the lines that went before, not the kind of thudding couplet rhyme of that final kind of bit of proverbial wisdom.
One of the things that's strikingly different about Shakespeare's sonnets is that he doesn't really pick up what almost all his predecessors do, which is some sort of transfer from physical love to the spiritual.
That's intrinsic to the sonnet form in the hands of lots of his predecessors, that there is an access to something more like the divine or something, through this earthly love.
It's a step to something beyond that.
For Shakespeare, I think these poems are about the physical, the here and now, the earthly.
They don't suggest that this complex and entrapped kind of panic room, as Don put it earlier, they don't suggest that that's a place of transcendence.
Far from it.
Sometimes it's interesting that Shakespeare's honesty sort of comes at the expense of what we might think of him.
And Sonnet 129 is a great example of that.
I mean, this is, you know, sort of an incredibly horribly accurate about the pointless phenomenon of post-coital tree stess in the mail.
And it tells you an awful lot about the fact that he has placed this poem in the Dark Lady sequence.
I'm always struck by the fact that you know, the poem can be, as a piece of literature, utterly admirable.
But nonetheless, it doesn't make you feel warmer towards its author in any way whatsoever.
We take for granted that there's no trace of Shakespeare in his plays.
He disappears from them.
He is other people all the time.
Is there any difference with the sonnets?
Is there a biographical thread that can be tugged out?
There's a great deal of debate around this.
And one can see why many Shakespeare scholars might prefer them not to be biographical or autobiographical.
But I think to pretend that there might be some dramatic excursion or only exist in some allegorical plane would mean readers denying themselves the main pleasure of the poems themselves, which is their human intimacy.
We're aware of Shakespeare as a man here odd man to be sure, but you know someone recognizably human in all these sweaty, agonized and jealous and sexually tormented state.
Um, he's.
But what he's not interesting is is what he is in the plays, which is nothing he's in the plays.
He's like a um, he's like this empty point of negative capability.
You know who can be anyone he needs himself to be, whether it's a monster or a saint.
You can't really say anything about Shakespeare from the plays, but you can almost say too much from the sonnets.
I'm not sure I agree that Shakespeare is sort of an absence from the plays.
I think in the way that you're describing, Don, that his life is transmuted in the poems.
I think there's a lot of Shakespeare's humanity in the plays, obviously, as well.
His ability to take what he might or might not have lived through and turn that into real life.
Understanding of other people's points of view.
To write from these multiple, different identities and personae.
I think the sonnet craze of the Elizabethan period often played a kind of hide and seek with the readers about who were the real people, the real lovers shadowed by these semi-fictional personae.
It's quite common for a sonnet speaker like Philip Sidney's speaker Astrophil, to talk about himself in ways that suggest he is and isn't Philip Sidney himself the author.
And we talked about Shakespeare's use of will, of his own name.
There's one of the sonnets famously has a pun on Hathaway which some people think it was a courtship poem for his soon-to-be wife.
But these feel like little, almost like a sort of cameo appearance in a way.
The part of the pleasure of reading the sonnets is is spotting those and making sense of them.
And I think that is one of the pleasures of sonnets, the fact that in some ways they are about real people, or they encourage us to speculate about who those real people are, and in other ways they withhold or generalise the experiences.
What was the response to the sonnets in the decades after publication?
We know that in 1640 a man called Benson published them in an anthology and changed the he's to she's and so on.
But what else was going on?
It's really striking that the sonnets don't get reprinted until 1640 unlike say Pericles, a Shakespeare play published in the same year 1609, which gets a number of reprints.
And that attests to a relatively quiet response.
We can look at how the sonnets continue to circulate in manuscript, which is an interesting form.
Because what people are doing then is they're picking and choosing the bits that they like.
They're obviously not copying out the whole sequence and they're not even necessarily experiencing it as a sequence.
And the poem that seems to come to the fore in that process through the 1620s and 30s is sonnet number two.
When forty winters shall besiege thy brow and dig deep trenches in thy beauty's field,
Often, as we've discussed, that's part of the section of the sonnets addressed to the young man.
But in the manuscript transmission of this poem it's very often headed something like to one that would die a maid, or something like that.
So it's made into a sort of heterosexual encounter.
Now, Benson's edition in 1640 is often talked about as the beginning of a sort of baudelarisation what we would later understand as baudelarisation of Shakespeare's poetry work.
In fact, Benson's pronoun changes are rather minimal.
He does organise the poems with some headings that try to clarify that this is an address to his mistress, when that's not the way that we normally would read the sequence.
But Benson's attempt to bring the sonnets, I think back into circulation is again not particularly successful.
And I think what marks the sonnets' transmission onwards is the fact that they are not included in Shakespeare's first folio.
So they're never incorporated into the canonisation of Shakespeare during the 18th century and beyond.
It's not really actually until the 20th century that the combined taste for confessional poetry on the one hand, and the kind of poetic density within formal structures that we've been discussing brings them new and appreciative readers.
But just to go back to the cool reception, he was so famous as a playwright.
And as you said, Pericles, the great selling plays were coming out.
And the publisher took advantage of it by rather unusually saying Shakespeare sonnets.
And yet it didn't take off at all.
It's even more baffling because you comment on his popularity as a playwright.
And obviously that was enormous.
But he was sensationally popular as a poet in this period.
So he'd published two long narrative poems in the early 1590s The Rape of Lucrece and Venus and Adonis.
The latter of those was reprinted, I think, something like 15 times before 1640.
And in the same period, Hamlet was reprinted five times.
So he was an absolute blockbuster poet.
You know, he was well known in the playhouses.
He was obviously enormously successful in the playhouses.
But it's incredibly surprising to me that the sonnets were not taken up more, given the success of those two poems.
And again, to go back to the line of conversation we had earlier about the 1609 publication date, that makes it all the more surprising because there must have been enormous demand for new poems by Shakespeare, given how well Venus and Adonis had sold.
All these publishers had a living to make.
But maybe it was like those theorems of Einstein's that he discarded at the time and 100 years later they were proved to be correct.
Maybe it was genuinely ahead of its time.
Maybe there was simply no audience for this yet.
Don Patterson, what is it about Shakespeare's sonnets that you value most and that you value least?
Opinions have changed over the years.
You read Colonel Rich's notebooks and his 10 best sonnets were the 10 sonnets you least liked.
So what's going on there?
Yeah, that was alarming.
I think, first of all in terms of what were important values.
I think the lesson for for a poet is that poems have to be written in real time.
They have to be written in the heart of the emotion that they try to communicate.
I'm not personally big on emotion, recollected and tranquility.
And I think Shakespeare's sonnets show what can happen to the song of the language when you write out of the feeling that you're actually suffering.
And under those conditions, it gets urgent.
It gets more song-like.
It gets... often very latinate in its articulate anger.
It gets more alive and awake.
And it shows poets, I think, the value of risking allowing your readers hear you think aloud.
This guy isn't presenting you with any wise conclusions on the subject of love.
Instead, he's using poetry as the means where you can work out what the hell's going on, how you can make some emotional logic out of the hell of human existence.
So to overhear a poet think and equivocate and be conditional kind of authenticates their speech.
It makes it more intimate in a way that you can't fake.
And it was really disturbed to find.
It was actually in... in the Wordsworth Trust Library up in Grasmere.
And Coleridge had borrowed a book from Wordsworth, I think, called Anderson's, what was it?
The Works of the British Poets.
And you never lend Coleridge a book because he wrote on them all.
So it came back scribbled with notes, but one of the notes was a point system for the sonnets.
He awarded them marks out of four and only eight sonnets get top marks.
But his choices are absolutely bizarre.
I mean, I think I find myself in agreement on one of them.
And they do tend to, you know, as Emma was saying, you know, it's just like taste change.
And maybe it wasn't until the 20th century that we read them properly.
But he really goes for the smoothly sentimental style.
Tony Bennett numbers here.
But everybody sees themselves in Shakespeare.
I mean, Ted Hughes made a very different selection.
And Ted's choices were all blood and sweat and conflict.
And I'm the only person I've met so far that has much enthusiasm for 118.
But thence I learn and find a lesson true.
Drugs poison him.
That so fell sick of you, which is just a country and western ballad from hell as far as I'm concerned.
But he's a writer capacious enough for everyone else to see themselves in him somewhere.
Hannah Crawford, we're getting towards the end now.
Who had This is probably to take another programme but who principally the Shakespeare sonnets influenced.
Well, I think one thing to say is that it's just surprising, in a way, that they have been so influential and that they have licensed such experimentation and such exciting responses, because it is such a restrictive form.
And also because Shakespeare, as we've heard, is such a giant in this field.
They are such brilliant poems to follow them is difficult.
But I think the fact that Shakespeare takes an established form and does something really new with it gives great license to poets who followed.
And right up to the present day.
So Terence Hayes wrote a collection called American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin.
Poems written on the occasion of the election of Donald Trump.
He's an African-American poet and he was responding really to that message. circumstance.
And he chose to use a modified sonnet form in which to do that.
Now, they are not in any sense Shakespearean sonnets.
Shakespeare is not the prime influence in that collection.
But the idea of taking the sonnet form and pushing against those constrictive walls of the room, I suppose, of remaking and rethinking what a sonnet form could do, is something that I think Hayes does take from Shakespeare and that we continue to owe to Shakespeare.
Well, thank you all very much.
Thanks to Hannah Crawford, Emma Smith and Dawn Patterson and to our studio engineer, Giles Usman.
Thank you for listening.
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now, with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
What was not said that you would like to have said?
Who wants to kick off?
I think I might have said a bit more about a sort of queer reception history.
You know, the sort of one question about how biographical these are is how would a sort of to use modern terms a kind of bisexual or a gay Shakespeare?
What would that do for the politics of sexuality?
And there's some just great moments in that history.
It's so striking that Oscar Wilde, whose story of Master WH fantasises a beautiful young male actor as the addressee and the dedicatee of the sonnets.
And then in his trial in 1895 he describes that the big thing in the Wilde trial is violence, the nature of his letter to Alfred Douglas, to Bosie.
And he says, in the courtroom, he says, it's like a little sonnet of Shakespeare's.
So that moment really brings the sonnets into this forbidden full square, into this forbidden world of male intimacy.
And that's been such an interesting aspect of Shakespeare 20th century responses through W.H.
Auden and Derek Jarman and so on.
So that might have been one thing to put in the mix.
I was just thinking about what Emma was saying about the extent to which the sonnets both invite and kind of refuse at various points any kind of biographical reading.
But I do think they invite them.
And the example when she was talking.
The example I was thinking of was Sonnet 86, which is my own favourite poem.
Because it's very hard to make any sense of it whatsoever unless you read it as a soap opera, unless you read it as sheer biography.
This is from the rival poet sequence.
It's the one that starts.
Was it the proud, full sail of his great verse bound for the prize of all too precious you.
It's highly sarcastic.
And he's become obsessed with the poet George Chapman, clearly, to my mind.
He's riding high in the success of the Iliad, his translation.
And he claims that the ghost of Homer himself had helped him write it.
But Chapman had also dedicated these poems to Henry Risley, who's the best contender for Shakespeare's beloved at this point.
But in the middle of this brilliantly sarcastic poem He says he talks about an affable, familiar ghost which nightly gulls him with intelligence.
And every time I read that line I can't help but see Christopher Marlowe, because Chapman was completing Marlowe's long poem Hero and Leander at the time probably claiming again that Marlow was helping him complete it.
And of course, Marlow was an intelligence or a spy for Walsingham's proto-secret service.
And I can't think of anything that would have given Shakespeare more bitter satisfaction than to think of Chapman being fed bad lines, to be gulled or fooled by Marlow with false intelligence to ruin this poem of his.
Now, this may or may not be true, but, you know, that's what poems are.
They're just exchanges between monkeys.
And I think, given the intimacy of their tone, the extent to which these poems involve you in the life of the speaker should be irresistible.
And picking up on that, Don, this relationship of the poems to everyday life.
Every single time I read the sequence.
I'm still surprised by Sonnet 143, which begins low.
As a careful housewife runs to catch one of her feathered creatures broke away.
And it goes on to describe this really endearingly domestic scene.
She sets down her babe and makes all swift dispatch.
She literally sets down her child and runs after this chicken in the farmyard.
It's so sweet, but every time I read it, I think I'd forgotten that one was there.
It's so out of character with the rest of the sequence, the interest in motherhood in that poem, which is notably really absent from the rest of the sequence um the, the kind of um very, uh sort of quotidian nature of the scene the the the, the farmyard and the, the perhaps possible connection to, to a more rural life that Shakespeare would have experienced in Stratford.
Um, I find, I find that poem really astonishing and quite you've used the word weird quite a lot when you're talking about the poems in the first part of the recording and um, You know, there are still moments in the poems that pull me up and that kind of still shock me, even though I'm really familiar with them.
There are a number of sonnets that are not perfect sonnets.
For example, there's one with 15 lines, Sonnet 99.
There are some that have unrhymed lines.
There are some that have repeated couplets.
What do you make of 145, you know, the Anne Hathaway one that's the only one in Tetrameter?
I mean, why is that even there?
And it's in the middle of the Dark Lady sonnets.
Yeah, it's bizarre.
And it's, I mean, there is a theory that this was the first of all of them written, I believe.
So it could just be that he's not yet reached that level of facility with the form that you were describing so beautifully as a kind of muscle memory.
Yeah, that terrible couplet, I hate from hate away she threw. and saved my life saying, not you.
It's so bad.
And of course... But why did he include it?
I mean, if you see the author's hand in the organisation of the manuscript, was he just making up the numbers?
It's remarkable.
I don't know.
I mean, I suppose...
Is it there to try and suggest some connection between the woman of the latter part of the sequence and Anne Hathaway?
I don't think that really holds up, but that's the only reason I can think that it could be there.
I don't know.
Or, as we said repeatedly, Shakespeare just did not license this.
A printer, a publisher.
The publisher had got hold of them against his will or against his say-so, or in an incomplete state.
But the placement of the poems is too weird, isn't it?
Well, I think clearly there are organizing principles, as I was saying in the early parts of the sequence.
I think that feels less, it feels less coherent to me as it goes along.
The kind of connections between poems and the.
You know, efforts to extrapolate a narrative from it become increasingly labored, don't they?
I wanted to ask you both about Stephen.
I think Stephen Booth says that the sonnets drive most people mad or they pull us into.
Most readers have gone kind of mad.
Most critics have gone mad with these sort of gnarled involved contagious sort of rabbit holes of interpretation and stuff.
Do you feel that...
I was thinking that.
That I don't mean that you've gone mad, Don at all but the sort of pressure that we're putting on you know these words to open out these reference points to other people, you know, to particular people.
Yeah, yeah.
No, I think part of it is just that you know we'll hold them in such reverence.
You know just like every word you know is like something that has fallen from a holy text.
And it's just...
And you know, and I don't think people credit, you know, probably more of these poems are rather more extemporary than they could know.
And I do think there's a problem with poetry, which is sometimes, if you read it carefully enough, you will find many things that are not there.
And I think...
It's a product, you know, the concentration of the language.
He weaves the music together in a way that unites the sense most intuitively.
Everything's kind of gathered to that gravitational center of the theme of the conceit.
He's really obsessed with that getting the words with the highest specific gravity.
You know whom I'm trying to quote here Brodsky, you know, in the most effective sequence.
It explains to me why certain critics of shall we say I'd say a cabalistic bent see patterns of key words in the poems that I just don't see at all.
All I see there are artefacts of, you know, an obsessive compositional process, but...
It really amplifies the sense that there's a sort of painting by numbers aspect to the sonnets.
You need these things.
You've already got the form.
You know, really, you could do an algorithm.
You know, the Renaissance equivalent of a bot could do this.
And I think, just as the sonnets themselves are kind of virtuosic and push language to its limits, so they've been an occasion for critics to kind of go to work right.
That's so true.
That's such a good point.
And to show what they can do.
And Emma, you talked in the programme about the 20th century and the way the sonnets speak to the formal preoccupations of the new critics, and this close reading as being the foundations of our discipline.
Suddenly the sonnets get really popular because they are occasions for critics to perform.
Thank you all very much.
That was tremendous.
Thank you.
This episode of In Our Time with Marvin Bragg was produced by Simon Tillotson and first broadcast in June 2021.
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