The Long Life of Shakespeare's Sonnets

Folger Shakespeare Library: Shakespeare Unlimited

Folger Shakespeare Library

Arts

4.7 • 837 Ratings

🗓️ 14 April 2020

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today, we think of Shakespeare’s Sonnets as a triumph. We read them, puzzle over them, and recite them. We compare our significant others to summers’ days, beweep our outcast states, and never admit impediments to the marriage of true minds. But it might surprise you to learn that in the past, the Sonnets didn’t have quite the same great reputation. We asked Roehampton University professor Jane Kingsley-Smith back to Shakespeare Unlimited for a second episode about the Sonnets’ tortuous history. The author of The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, Kingsley-Smith tells us about periods in the 1600s and 1700s when some readers thought the sonnets were inauthentic, or immoral, or just that they had too many puns. Finally, we pay a visit to the 1800s, when writers like William Wordsworth and Oscar Wilde salvaged the poems’ good name. Jane Kingsley-Smith is interviewed by Barbara Bogaev. Dr. Jane Kingsley-Smith is Deputy Head of the Department of English & Creative Writing at Roehampton University in London. She edited Love's Labor's Lost for the Norton Shakespeare Series Third Edition, and The Duchess of Malfi for Penguin in 2015. She is the author of Shakespeare's Drama of Exile, published by Palgrave in 2003, and Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture, published by Cambridge University Press in 2010. Her latest book, published in 2019 by Cambridge is The Afterlife of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. From the Shakespeare Unlimited podcast series. Published April 14, 2020. © Folger Shakespeare Library. All rights reserved. This podcast episode, “Return to the 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. We had technical helped from Evan Marquart at Voice Trax West in Studio City, California, and Dom Boucher at The Sound Company in London.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Today, they're a fait accompli, a triumph, an early manifestation of Shakespeare's genius.
0:08.1	But there was a time not that long ago when all that was hanging by a thread.
0:20.5	From the Folger Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.
0:23.6	I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folger's director.
0:26.6	You likely think you know something about Shakespeare's sonnets.
0:31.6	They're part of the canon.
0:33.6	They're owed as much respect as many of his plays.
0:36.6	And maybe you imagine that if you can scroll back through history, you'd find a similar level of knowledge and appreciation.
0:45.3	If you did, though, you would likely be wrong.
0:49.3	Professor Jane Kingsley Smith has taken the deepest dive into Shakespeare's sonnets in decades,
0:56.0	and she's come up with an important new book that focuses on precisely how they've been received over the centuries.
1:03.0	Her story winds through the publication of the 1609 Cordo-Edition, which disappeared almost completely after it was published, and the better
1:12.7	selling fake edition that came out 10 years earlier, through all the other editions over the
1:18.2	centuries, and all the discussion they fostered. The book tells us a lot, about the low
1:25.0	esteem the sonnets were held in for more than 150 years. About all the prominent
1:30.2	writers who found them to be no better than average, maybe even below average. They also teaches
1:36.4	how little the world of book promotion has changed between then and today. How the sonnets served
1:42.5	largely as a marketing tie-in after Shakespeare became famous.
1:47.0	In light of how we view the sonnets today, it's all really surprising. And it's why we've invited
1:52.9	Professor Kingsley Smith in for a second time to tell us more. A note before we start, we recorded
1:59.8	this podcast during the very early days of the coronavirus outbreak in the United States.
2:05.5	If you hear anything in our audio quality that's less than what you've come to expect from us, we hope that you'll understand under the circumstances.
	...

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