Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells: All the Sonnets of Shakespeare

In this week's Book Club podcast I talk to Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells about their new book All The Sonnets of Shakespeare - which by collecting the sonnets that appear in the plays with the 154 poems usually known as 'Shakespeare's Sonnets', and placing them in chronological order, gives a totally fresh sense of what the form meant to our greatest poet-dramatist. They tell me what sonnets meant to Elizabethans, why so much of what has been said about 'the sonnets' has been wrong - they're not a sequence, and it's vain to look for a Dark Lady or Fair Youth in these candidly bisexual poems - and how they provide perhaps the most intensely inward view of the poet we have.Become a Spectator subscriber today to access this podcast without adverts. Go to spectator.co.uk/adfree to find out more.For more Spectator podcasts, go to spectator.co.uk/podcastsContact us: [email protected] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.