All the Sonnets of Shakespeare

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2021

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Over 400 years after Shakespeare’s sonnets were first published in 1609, what is left to learn? "All the Sonnets of Shakespeare," a new edition of the sonnets published in 2020, takes some bold steps to help us look at the poems with new eyes. The book, co-edited by Dr. Paul Edmondson and Sir Stanley Wells, dispenses with the Sonnets’ traditional numbering and arranges them in the order in which Edmondson and Wells believe they were written. It also includes nearly thirty additional sonnets drawn from the texts of Shakespeare’s plays. As a result, the collection is a fresh take on the Sonnets, Edmondson tells us, one that dispatches with the “Fair Youth” and “Dark Lady” narrative and helps us better understand Shakespeare as a writer and thinker. Edmondson is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. The Rev. Dr. Paul Edmondson is the Head of Research and Knowledge and Director of the Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival for the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. All the Sonnets of Shakespeare is published by Cambridge University Press. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast. Published May 11, 2021. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “He Writes Brave Verses,” was produced by Richard Paul. Garland Scott is the associate producer. It was edited by Gail Kern Paster. Ben Lauer is the web producer. Leonor Fernandez edits a transcript or every episode, available at folger.edu. We had technical help from Andrew Feliciano and Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California.

Transcript

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0:00.0	They're moody, they're pensive, some are beautiful, some are downright enigmatic.
0:06.0	And some say they are the very best way to fully understand who William Shakespeare was as a person.
0:18.0	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:24.3	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger's director.
0:26.8	I'm talking about Shakespeare's sonnets.
0:29.8	The sonnet form was one that Shakespeare clearly liked to use a lot.
0:35.0	It's reasonable to argue that 182 of his sonnets were published, either on their own or within
0:40.6	his plays where they're spoken by Romeo and Juliet, Jupiter and Diana, Antiphilus of
0:47.8	Syracuse, the King of Navarre in Love's Labor's Lost, by Helen, by Beatrice.
0:54.1	You get the idea.
0:55.0	There's a new collection of the sonnets just out from Cambridge University Press.
1:00.0	It was put together by the eminent Shakespeare scholars, Sir Stanley Wells, and Dr. Paul Edmondson,
1:05.0	the head of research at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.
1:09.0	Their book ignores the numbering structure that we're most familiar with,
1:12.9	putting everything in what Stanley and Paul think are their proper chronological order.
1:18.2	In their book, the sonnets in the plays appear alongside the 154 poems that were originally published
1:24.8	in 1609.
1:26.9	Listing them this way, they say, gives us a clearer window
1:30.4	into who Shakespeare was as a person. Paul Edmondson joined us from Stratford upon Avon to talk
1:36.8	about all of this in a podcast called He Writes Brave Verses. Paul is interviewed by Barbara Bogave.
1:43.8	So Paul, when you look at the sonnets at all of them, how does Shakespeare compare to other
1:50.0	sonnet writers of his era?
	...

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