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Hello and welcome to The Spectator's Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator,

and this week I'm joined by two distinguished Shakespearean scholars, Stanley Wells and Paul Edmondson.

And their new book is called All the Sonnets of Shakespeare. Now you may think that Shakespeare's sonnets have been

published before, but this book's a little different. Paul Stanley, can you tell me why?

The title, in a way, tells it all. It's all the sonnets of Shakespeare, by which we mean not

merely the 154 sonnets, published in 16009, which people usually think of

the Shakespeare solites, but Shakespeare used sonnet for them quite often in his plays, most

famously in the first meeting of Romeo and Juliet, and also in the prologue to that play.

And so what we've done is two original things.

One is to arrange the solutes in conjectural order of composition,

insofar as that can be determined.

And the other is to interspers those, again in chronological order,

with the extracts from the plays. So in other words, there are now

182 solites of Shakespeare. To start with just talking about these ones that appear in the plays,

what would the effect on the audience have been? Would you expect an audience to hear a sonnet

when it appeared in a play and to kind of go,

ah, that's a sonnet, that's something different? I think they were arresting to the ear.

When we'd like to say that audiences of the time went to hear a play, as much as to see one,

you would have quickly spotted a quatrain, A, B, A, B, and then another one, CD, CD, and you'd have thought,

...