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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

addition even changed the pronouns. With me to discuss Shakespeare's solace are

Hannah Crawford, senior lecturer in early modern literature at Kings College London, Don Patterson, poet and professor of poetry at the University of St Andrews and Emma Smith Professor of Shakespeare studies at Hartford 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,

Simbeline 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 quite how long depends on who you ask,

but certainly 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

...