← In Our Time
In Our Time
Shakespeare's Sonnets (Archive Episode)
00:53:21
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss some of the greatest and most challenging poems in English
Loading summary
Transcript128 lines
- [00:00]
Don Patterson
This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK.
- [00:07]
Hannah Crawford
Ready to change your life. For just $2 a day, OrangeTheory Fitness delivers one hour workouts that combine strength and cardio to help you burn fat, build muscle and feel unstoppable. Right now, get a full month of unlimited classes for just $62. Don't wait. This offer ends soon. Visit orangetheory.com or your local studio and start your transformation today. Offer ends January 31, 2026. New members only. Premier membership, performance monitor and monthly billing required. Discount applies to first month only. Other terms apply. See Studio for details.
- [00:36]
Don Patterson
Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austen like you've never heard before.
- [00:41]
Emma Smith
From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, experience all six classics in full cast BBC audio dramatizations.
- [00:48]
Don Patterson
Featuring David Tennant and Benedict Cumberbatch, these productions bring Austen's timeless world to life.
- [00:55]
Hannah Crawford
I cannot tell you how welcome your.
- [00:56]
Melvyn Bragg
Words are, how I have wished for them.
- [00:58]
Don Patterson
My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true.
- [01:01]
Emma Smith
That you love me too?
- [01:03]
Hannah Crawford
It is true.
- [01:04]
Don Patterson
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama collection.
- [01:08]
Emma Smith
Available wherever you get your audiobooks.
- [01:11]
Don Patterson
Want to sell your car your way?
- [01:13]
Hannah Crawford
Who wouldn't?
- [01:14]
Don Patterson
That's why CarMax offers a car selling experience designed just for you with online.
- [01:18]
Simon Sharma
And in store options.
- [01:19]
Don Patterson
Want to know what your car is worth quickly? Get an online offer in under two minutes. Want to think it over? Use OfferWatch to keep tabs on your car's value over time. Plus, CarMax offers flexible selling options with express drop off in store or pickup at home. Selling your car is in your control with CarMax. Want to drive CarMax pickup not available everywhere. Restrictions and fee may apply.
- [01:39]
Emma Smith
See carmax.com for details.
- [01:43]
Hannah Crawford
To celebrate Melvin Bragg's 27 years presenting in our time, some well known fans of the program have chosen their favorite episodes. Here's the historian and broadcaster Simon Sharma.
- [01:54]
Simon Sharma
In our time is really a broadcasting miracle. It's the closest thing to 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 as 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 lyrical and mysterious and full of these extraordinary emotional, psychological and temperamental twists and turns. And, you know, 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 Paterson, 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 Tom Paterson 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 Crawfurth and Emma Smith, the other two contributors, were wonderful, really, both about the history of the times, explaining the context 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 tr 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? 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.
- [04:26]
Melvyn Bragg
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 Crawford, senior Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at King's College, London, Don Patterson, 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?
- [05:18]
Emma Smith
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 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, long process, long interrupted process of gestation and composition.
- [06:20]
Melvyn Bragg
But what does this 1609 publication signify? Does this mean he thinks his thorpe, 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?
- [06:30]
Emma Smith
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 Court, the kind of homo social cult of that court. Perhaps Shakespeare is interested in intervening in that.
- [06:55]
Melvyn Bragg
That'll be rather numbing to a lot of people. You mean that a lot of the spirits 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.
- [07:11]
Emma Smith
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 popular 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 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 Court.
- [08:13]
Melvyn Bragg
How established was the sonnet form when these were published?
- [08:17]
Emma Smith
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 the rest, as we say, is history or certainly poetry. The 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 Spenser and others.
- [09:05]
Melvyn Bragg
Don Patterson, as a poet, in what ways is the sonnet form a gift to a poet? What does it enable?
- [09:11]
Don Patterson
In some ways, it's the one poetic form that's really kind of pressured into being from sheer necessity. I mean, partly through the convergence of just physical factors like the size of type and the size of books and more neurological things like determine the ideal length of lines. It's one of those forms. If we didn't have this on it, it likely appeared in something much like its traditional form by tea time. 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. It's a great way of figuring out a solution to things. And also most sonnets have this weird kind of natural turn about 2/3 of the way through roundabout, 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.
- [10:25]
Melvyn Bragg
It's fairly rigid, isn't it? It's three fours and a two. And that's it.
- [10:30]
Don Patterson
It's in the English form, it's funny, the Italian form is 8 and a 6. 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 8 and 9. 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. It's very, you know, 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 if Sheikh Shakespeare's, will usually start with yet or but or however. Trying to think of one. But when your countenance filled up as line, then lacti matter that enfeebled mind, so the poem's still kind of twisting and singing its own song right to the end.
- [11:32]
Melvyn Bragg
What can it give you as a poet that other things can't?
- [11:35]
Don Patterson
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 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 may 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. 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, it's 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.
- [12:36]
Melvyn Bragg
Is it possible to say there's something specific that distinguishes Shakespeare's sonnets from those of his predecessors and contemporaries?
- [12:44]
Don Patterson
Mainly, he was better, which is quite hard to explain, other than to say that for talent to flourish, it needs competition, and he certainly found it in the 1590s. But he wasn't that experimental. 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, 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 sonnet then 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 taken 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.
- [14:20]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you, Hannah. Hannah Crawford. Why we touched on this with Emma, but can we go into it further? Why the song that were published in 1609, way past, as it were, their fashionable date in the reign of James rather than Elizabeth, could you develop that of us?
- [14:35]
Hannah Crawford
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 or 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 urge the lover to. 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 1607-09 there was another outbreak of plague. There were frequent interruptions obviously to 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.
- [15:33]
Melvyn Bragg
We have 154 sonnets in the collection. Is there any way there's an overview available, a biographical overview, poetic overview?
- [15:44]
Hannah Crawford
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, and 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 organized than those later. Broadly speaking, though, there is one lover who is the object of affection in the early poems, in fact, up to Sonnet126, 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 at 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 poem127, 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 that 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.
- [17:51]
Melvyn Bragg
Can we stay Emma with the Dark Lady? What do we know about her? Has she got a biographical root?
- [18:01]
Emma Smith
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. 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.
- [18:58]
Melvyn Bragg
Don, what do you think of the Dark Lady?
- [19:00]
Don Patterson
I'm not a fan of those poems. You know, it's. I think Wordsworth hated him, incidentally. He found him harsh and 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 mystic eyes are nothing like the sun, is hard to read in a very complimentary way. I've never really understood its popularity.
- [19:25]
Melvyn Bragg
It does go on denigrating.
- [19:27]
Don Patterson
It goes on for far too long. And you keep waiting for the. You know, at the ton, 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 there's also the interesting number, you know, sort 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 it 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.
- [19:58]
Hannah Crawford
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. The poet does not just say that this woman is basically ugly, but he describes her breath as reeking. He says that where angels. Where angels kind of float, you know, she. 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 incredibly problematic. And especially, you know, in racial terms. We need to think carefully about that.
- [20:53]
Melvyn Bragg
Does that lead you on in any different direction from the ones being knotted by Don?
- [20:58]
Hannah Crawford
It does. And that I sent, 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 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. Ready to change your Life? For just $2 a day, Orangetheory Fitness delivers one hour workouts that combine strength and cardio to help you burn fat, build muscle and feel unstoppable. Right now, get a full month of unlimited classes for just $62. Don't wait. This offer ends soon. Visit orangetheory.com or your local studio and start your transformation today. Offer ends January 31, 2026. New members only. Premier membership, performance monitor and monthly billing required. Discount applies to first month only. Other terms apply.
- [22:06]
Don Patterson
C Studio for details Discover the wit, romance and charm of Jane Austen like you've never heard before.
- [22:14]
Emma Smith
From Pride and Prejudice to Emma, experience.
- [22:16]
Don Patterson
All six classics in full.
- [22:19]
Emma Smith
BBC Audio Dramatizations Featuring David Tennant and.
- [22:22]
Don Patterson
Benedict Cumberbatch, these productions bring Austen's timeless world to life.
- [22:27]
Hannah Crawford
I cannot tell you how welcome your.
- [22:29]
Melvyn Bragg
Words are, how I have wished for them.
- [22:31]
Don Patterson
My dearest Elizabeth, can it be true.
- [22:34]
Emma Smith
That you love me too?
- [22:36]
Hannah Crawford
It is true.
- [22:37]
Emma Smith
Listen to the Jane Austen BBC Radio Drama collection, available wherever you get your audiobooks.
- [22:44]
Hannah Crawford
I have some very exciting news about.
- [22:46]
Don Patterson
An ethical phone carrier I just switched to this is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Forget about all these other phone companies.
- [22:52]
Hannah Crawford
Forget about Verizon, forget about AT&T. Forget about T Mobile.
- [22:55]
Don Patterson
There's this new carrier called Noble Mobile and they actually pay you to stay off your phone.
- [23:02]
Hannah Crawford
You can earn real money, up to 20 bucks back every month just for.
- [23:06]
Don Patterson
Putting your phone away.
- [23:07]
Hannah Crawford
If you're like me and you're tired of feeling controlled by your phone, social.
- [23:10]
Don Patterson
Media, or just disgusted by those screen time alerts, this is the answer. Go to noblemobile.com Chelsea and try it for $10. That's noblemobile.com Chelsea. You don't just live in your home, you live in your neighborhood as well. So when you're shopping for a home, you want to know as much about the area around it as possible. Luckily, homes.com has got you covered. Each listing features a comprehensive neighborhood guide from local experts, everything you'd ever want to know about a neighborhood, including the number of homes for sale, transportation, local amenities, cultural attractions, unique qualities and even things like medium lot size and in noise. Score Holmes.com, we've done your homework.
- [23:55]
Melvyn Bragg
Don Patterson, back to you. What do you make of the first 17 or 18 sonnets?
- [24:01]
Don Patterson
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 omits the 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 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 pretty 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 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, you know, apprentice pieces where you make the same little wooden box over and over again until you perfect it. But either way, the sequence proper, the love sequence, doesn't really get going until Sona 18, when he seems just about to finish the poem in 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. But if you read it in context.
- [25:41]
Melvyn Bragg
You mean the couple is so long as men can breathe or eyes can see, so long lives this, and this gives life to thee. That one.
- [25:49]
Don Patterson
It's nice to hear someone stress it correctly, but that's exactly it. Yeah, yeah.
- [25:53]
Melvyn Bragg
So these, you think apprentice works is it so are you. If you use that word, you think there's then a development from being an apprentice to being a master builder.
- [26:03]
Don Patterson
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.
- [26:45]
Melvyn Bragg
Hannah, do you want to say more.
- [26:46]
Hannah Crawford
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 emphasises 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. 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, or autumn is coming, winter is coming, with the implication that, you know, 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 immortalize 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, although 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 in modern terms, slightly coercive, even.
- [28:20]
Melvyn Bragg
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 their different meanings packed into a few letters. Can you give us an example of that and tell us of the impact that that has.
- [28:34]
Emma Smith
We've got these words in the sonnets which are. 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 Wendler, one of the sonnet's most wonderful critics, calls these the keywords. And she points out that really they're what string the poem's ideas 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.
- [29:13]
Melvyn Bragg
1, 3, 5 actually saturated with will.
- [29:16]
Emma Smith
So Sonnet 135, whoever hath her wish, thou hast thy will and will to boot and will in over plus 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 vouchsafed to hide my will in thine shall will in other 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 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 like there's Japanese flowers or something that pop open in water. There's so much packed inside them.
- [30:41]
Melvyn Bragg
Don Patterson, can you take us to Sonnet 116 and take us through that, please? And what interests you there?
- [30:48]
Don Patterson
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 and Sonnets from the Portuguese 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 marriage service. You know, let not to the marriage of true 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 frisa 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 yolks together two words by sound that mean the opposite of each other. But whenever you find a deep opposition and 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 arson, 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 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 is strong connotations of infidelity, of inconstancy, basically putting it about a lot. So it's not quite the romantic hum of physical fidelity that it might seem. It's only spiritual. So it's an odd choice for a marriage point.
- [32:49]
Melvyn Bragg
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?
- [32:59]
Don Patterson
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 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.
- [33:51]
Hannah Crawford
Hannah, one of my favorite poems and 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. 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, 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 one 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 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, 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.
- [35:26]
Emma Smith
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, that 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 transcend, far from it.
- [36:14]
Don Patterson
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 quartal tristes in the male. 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.
- [36:50]
Melvyn Bragg
We take for granted that there's no trace of Shakespeare in his plays. He disappears from them. He hears other people all the time. Is there any difference with the sonnets? Is there a biographical thread that can be tugged out?
- [37:05]
Don Patterson
There's a great deal of debate around this. 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, a very odd man to be sure, but, you know, someone recognizably human in all these sweaty, agonized, jealous and sexually tormented state. But what he's not interesting is what he is in the plays, which is nothing in the plays. He's like. He's like this empty point of negative capability who can be anyone he needs himself to be, whether it's a monster or a saint. You can't really see kind of anything about Shakespeare from the plays, but you can almost say too much from the sonnets.
- [38:03]
Hannah Crawford
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 understanding of other people's points of view. To write from these multiple different identities and personae.
- [38:33]
Emma Smith
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 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 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 reading the sonnets 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 generalize the experiences.
- [39:40]
Melvyn Bragg
What was the response to the sonnets in the decades after publication? We know that in 1640aman called Benson published them in an anthology and changed the he's to she's and so on. But what else was going on?
- [39:51]
Emma Smith
It's really striking that the sonnets don't get reprinted until 1640, unlike, say, Pericles, a play, 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 bit 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 40 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 bowdlerisation, what we would later understand as Baudelairisation of Shakespeare's 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 what, 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 canonization 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.
- [42:06]
Melvyn Bragg
But just to go back to the. To the cool reception, he was so famous as a playwright and as you said Pericles four times, the great, great selling plays were coming out and. And the. The publisher took advantage of it by rather unusual saying Shakespeare sonnets, and yet it didn't take off at all.
- [42:27]
Hannah Crawford
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 Nadonis. 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 the and Adonis had sold. All these publishers had a living to make.
- [43:22]
Don Patterson
But maybe it was like those theorems of Einstein's that he could discard it 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.
- [43:37]
Melvyn Bragg
Don Patterson, what is it about Shakespeare's sonnets that you value most and that you value least? Opinion seems to have changed over the years. You read Coleridge's notebooks and his 10 best sonnets with the 10 sonnets you least likes. So what's going on there?
- [43:53]
Don Patterson
Yeah, that was alarming. I think first of all, in terms of what born values. I think the lesson 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. 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 Latin, and it's articulate anger. It gets more alive and awake. And it shows poets, I think, that 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 is 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 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 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 the marks out of four and only eight sonnets get top marks. But his choices are absolutely bizarre. I mean, I think I found myself in agreement on one of them. And they do tend to, you know, as. As Emma was saying, it's just like tastes change. And maybe it wasn't until the 20th century that we read them properly, but he really goes for the smoothly sentimental Donny 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.
- [46:17]
Melvyn Bragg
Han Eckroth, we're getting towards the end now who. This is probably taking other programme, but who, principally the sonnets. Shakespeare Sonnets influenced.
- [46:29]
Hannah Crawford
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 poetry 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 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. The idea of taking the sonnet form and, you know, 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 Haze does take from Shakespeare and that we continue to owe to Shakespeare.
- [47:42]
Melvyn Bragg
Well, thank you all very much. Thanks to Hannah Crawford, Emma Smith, Dawn Patterson, and to our studio engineer, Giles Aspen. Thank you for listening.
- [47:50]
Hannah Crawford
And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.
- [47:58]
Melvyn Bragg
What was not said that you would like to have said? Who wants to kick off?
- [48:02]
Emma Smith
I think I might have said a bit more about a sort of queer reception history. You know, the. 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 later? And there's some just great moments in that history. It's so striking that Oscar Wilde, whose story of Master W.H. fantasizes 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 Wild Trial is the nature of his letter to Alfred Douglas to Bosie. And he says it's 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 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.
- [49:20]
Don Patterson
I was just thinking about what Emma was saying about, you know, the extent to which the sonnets both invite and kind of refuse at various points, any kind of biographical reading. But there's. But I do think they invite them. And the example, when she was talking, the example I was thinking of Was. Was Sonnet 86, which is my own favorite 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 the. You know, from the rival poet sequence. It's the one that starts. Was it the. Was it the proud, full sale of his great verse bound for the prize of all too precious you. It's highly sarcastic. And this is. 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 in Leander at the time, probably claiming again that Marlowe was helping him complete it. And of course, Marlowe was an intelligencer or a spy for Walsingham's proto secret service. And I can't think of anything that would have given Shakespeare more better satisfaction than to think of Chapman being fed bad lines to be gulled or fooled by Marlowe 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.
- [51:24]
Hannah Crawford
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 Sonnet143, 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 the chicken in the farmyard. It's so sweet, but it's so. 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, the kind of very sort of quotidian nature of the scene, the farmyard, and perhaps the possible connection to a more rural life that Shakespeare would have experienced in Stratford. 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, you know, there are still moments in the poem that can. 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.
- [52:53]
Don Patterson
What do you make of 145? You know, the Anne Hathaway one that's in. 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.
- [53:05]
Hannah Crawford
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.
- [53:27]
Don Patterson
It's so bad.
- [53:29]
Hannah Crawford
And. Of course.
- [53:30]
Don Patterson
But why did he include it? I mean, it just. I mean, if you see the author's hand in the organization of the manuscript, what was he just making up the numbers? It's remarkable.
- [53:39]
Hannah Crawford
I don't know. I mean, I suppose, you know, 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. You know, a printer, publisher. The publisher had got hold of them against his will or against his say so, or in an incomplete state.
- [54:08]
Don Patterson
But the placement of the poems is too weird, isn't it? Sorry.
- [54:11]
Hannah Crawford
Well, I think. 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 efforts to extrapolate a narrative from it become increasingly labored, don't they?
- [54:30]
Emma Smith
I wanted to ask you both about Stephen. I think Stephen Booth says that, you know, the sonnets sort of drive most people mad. Or they, you know, 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. Reference points to other people, you know, to particular people.
- [55:11]
Melvyn Bragg
Yeah, yeah.
- [55:13]
Don Patterson
No, I think part of it is just that, you know, we'll hold them in such reverence, you know, just like every. You know, every word, you know, it sort of is like something that's 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 extempore 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 intuitively. Everything's kind of gathered to that gravitational center of the theme of the conceit. He's really obsessed with that, getting the kind of. The words with the highest specific gravity. You know, Tuuma trying to quote here, Brodsky, you know, in the most effective sequence, it explains to me why certain critics of, shall we say, who. I'd say a kabbalistic bent, see patterns of keywords in the poems that I just don't see at all. All I see there are artifacts of, you know, an obsessive compositional process, but.
- [56:22]
Emma Smith
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 that. An algorithm could, you know, the Renaissance equivalent of a bot could do this.
- [56:36]
Hannah Crawford
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. And to.
- [56:48]
Emma Smith
Oh, that's so true. That's such a good point.
- [56:51]
Hannah Crawford
And to. To show what they can do. And, Emma, you talked in the program about. About the kind of The. The. The 20th century and. And the way the sonnets speak to the formal preoccupations of the new critics. And this. This close reading as. As being the. The foundations of our discipline, suddenly the sonnets get really popular because they are occasions for critics to perform.
- [57:13]
Melvyn Bragg
Thank you all very much. That was tremendous. Thank you.
- [57:16]
Hannah Crawford
This episode of In Our Time with Melvyn Bragg was produced by Simon Tillotson. And first broadcast in June 2021.
- [57:25]
Melvyn Bragg
At.
- [57:25]
Don Patterson
The BBC we go further so you see clearer with a subscription to BBC.com.
- [57:31]
Emma Smith
You get unlimited articles and videos ad free podcasts, the BBC News channel streaming live 24. 7 plus hundreds of acclaimed documentaries from.
- [57:41]
Don Patterson
Less than a dollar a week for your first year.
- [57:43]
Emma Smith
Read, watch and listen to trusted independent journalism and storytelling. It all starts with a subscription to BBC.com. find out more at BBC.com unlimited.