SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived

In this, the – at least for the time-being – final episode of his podcast on William Shakespeare's Sonnets, Sebastian Michael offers a brief summary of his findings and also takes the opportunity to examine in a little more detail the view held by some contemporary editors that the sonnets may not principally be about a Fair Youth and a Dark Lady – a contention that is largely based on a suppo...

In this special episode, Sebastian Michael is joined by architect, author, and coder Miro Roman to talk about their experimentation with applying a machine learning approach to comparing the full text of William Shakespeare's Sonnets to the full text of his plays and narrative poems to examine whether such a methodology can confirm the rare word analysis research that has previously been carri...

In this special edition of Sonnetcast, Sebastian Michael takes a closer look at our original source for William Shakespeare's Sonnets, examining in detail the few textual issues it presents, the much debated origin of the manuscript, and the dedication by its publisher Thomas Thorpe to a "Mr. W. H." which has been puzzling readers of these poems for centuries.

Following an established tradition at the time, William Shakespeare furnishes his collection of 154 Sonnets with a poetic Complaint that acts as a coda to the series. Where he departs from common practice is in his deployment of an elaborate but for this no less effective distancing device that has an unnamed narrator set up the scene for us and then allows us to listen in on a conversation betwee...

Sonnet 154 brings to a close William Shakespeare's collection of sonnets, and it does so hand-in-hand with Sonnet 153, of which it is not a continuation, but a reiteration. Like Sonnet 153, the poem borrows directly from an epigram by 6th century Greek poet Marianus Scholasticus, and tells the story of Cupid who falls asleep in a mountain grove with his Torch of Hymen by his side. One of the g...

Sonnet 153 is the first of two poems that round off the collection, both retelling the same story of a tired love god Cupid who falls asleep, having put down his torch beside him. This is taken up by a nymph who dips it in a cool fountain or well with the intention of 'disarming' Cupid, but the flame of the torch is so intense that it turns the pool into a hot bath where ever since men who...

In this special episode, Sebastian Michael summarises the second part of The Sonnets by William Shakespeare in the 1609 collection and examines the questions they present in parallel to those posed by the Fair Youth Sonnets: - Is there a Dark Lady at all? - If so, who is it? - And what, if anything, do these sonnets tell us about the poet himself, irrespective of who she is?

The last poem in the collection to address William Shakespeare's mistress directly, Sonnet 152 conclusively answers some questions, while leaving many old and several new ones open for us to ponder into posterity. It asserts again that his Dark Lady is indeed 'dark', both in appearance and in character, and here makes a stronger than ever point of how he as the poet is perjuring himsel...

The heavily and obviously innuendo-laden Sonnet 151 returns to a struggle the poet purports to experience between what his soul – the 'nobler part' of his being – knows to be right and what his body wants and, with the by implication reluctant permission of the soul, then also gets: sex with his mistress. Although coached in euphemism and metaphor, it is in fact one of the most sexually ex...

The at first glance unspectacular Sonnet 150 sets off from the base laid down by the previous three sonnets and now wonders out loud just how the mistress with her numerous and by now well established flaws and a beauty that could – according to these poems – be most charitably described as unconventional, manages to make our poet love her at all, and apparently prize her above all others, even th...

After establishing in the previous two sonnets that he is possessed of a 'fever' that makes him 'mad' and that distorts his vision, William Shakespeare uses Sonnet 149 to further describe the effect this love for his mistress is having on him. So much is he in her thrall that no-one whom she hates he can love, no-one she admires he may disdain. Just a glance of her eyes, and he wil...

In Sonnet 148, William Shakespeare develops the themes revisited with Sonnet 147 and further elaborates on his realisation that reason has abandoned him and he is therefore incapable of judging properly what he sees. Either that, or his eyes themselves are faulty, since they seem to distort what they are looking at. The conclusion he comes to, much in line with the previous sonnet, is that his def...

In Sonnet 147, William Shakespeare brings together two themes that have agitated him before: firstly the at the time fairly commonplace notion of love – and, more to the point, desire – as a disease that weakens the mind to the point of an irrational madness and afflicts the body in a similarly stark fashion, and secondly the ways in which his mistress deviates from the ordinarily praised ideal of...

With his solemn, near pious, Sonnet 146, William Shakespeare for the first and only time speaks directly to his soul and entreats it to look after itself; to stop expending its energy on the pursuit of outward, physical adornments which are all doomed to swift decay – effectively starving and weakening itself whilst feeding and strengthening the gluttonous body that is only meant to house it and t...

Sonnet 145 stands out in the collection for several reasons. Some factual, some conjectural, some somewhere in-between. Most obviously and beyond interpretation evident is the fact that it is the only poem composed in iambic tetrameter: it consists of 14 lines of eight syllables each, in contrast to the iambic pentameters present in all the other sonnets, giving each line of those ten or eleven sy...

With his exceptionally explicit and startlingly revelatory Sonnet 144 William Shakespeare addresses head on the fact that his mistress and his lover are certainly friends, and that he suspects – rather strongly, we get the impression – them to be so with benefits. By identifying the man as 'right fair' and contrasting him with a woman who is 'coloured ill', he confirms what we have...

With his uncharacteristically lighthearted Sonnet 143, William Shakespeare plants a picture in our minds of the poet as a crying toddler placed on the ground while his mother is running after a wayward chicken, and expresses his hope, not unreasonable in the imagined circumstances, that the mother, once she has caught the bird she's chasing, will come back to him and comfort him with her affec...

With Sonnet 142 William Shakespeare picks up on the notion of 'sin' employed in the last line of the previous sonnet, and now juxtaposes this sin or sinful love of his for his mistress with her supposed 'virtue' in rejecting this love for being sinful, while simultaneously undermining any suggestion that she is in fact virtuous by asking her to just take a long, hard look at hersel...

Sonnet 141 is one of several poems in the collection that show William Shakespeare to be deeply ill at ease with his lust and his love for his mistress.  It may easily be argued that  all  of the Dark Lady Sonnets come over with a greater or lesser degree of ambiguity, with her appearance, her comportment, her smell, her touch, her sound, and most certainly her fidelity, all having either been bro...

In this special episode, Phyllis Rackin, Professor Emerita of English from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and former president of the Shakespeare Association of America talks to Sebastian Michael about the position of women in Elizabethan society, about William Shakespeare's relationship with the women in his life, and about what we can and cannot know specifically of the Dark Lady...

With Sonnet 140, William Shakespeare at first seems to set out on some general counsel for his mistress not to try his patience too much, as doing so might drive him mad and cause him, in his madness, to say bad things about her. The damage this could do would be exacerbated by a world that is itself full of mad people who would be inclined to believe him even if what he came out with were but scu...

With Sonnet 139, William Shakespeare finds himself quite comfortably in the domain of the classical Petrarchan sonnet, invoking the themes and poetic tropes that other sonneteers of the period, most notably Sir Philip Sidney in his  Astrophel and Stella  use to speak about their mistress's capacity to captivate and, if they so wish, kill them with their looks. The initial plea with the mistres...

With Sonnet 138 William Shakespeare takes a step back and reflects on how both he and his mistress in their relationship with each other are effectively living a lie which they both actively conspire to maintain: she pretends to be faithful to him although she fully knows that he knows that she obviously isn't, and he goes along with it when she treats him as if he were an innocent young lover...

In Sonnet 137, William Shakespeare draws together two of the themes established by the 'Dark Lady Sonnets' thus far: his mistress's unconventional beauty and her sexual freedom. Following the near-obsessive punning of Sonnets 135 and 136, which lent them a humorous, light-hearted tone, our poet settles back into a more evenly rounded style that is easier on our eye and ear, but no less...

In Sonnet 136, William Shakespeare part develops, part reiterates the 'argument', such as it is, of Sonnet 135, that in amongst an abundance of men whom he suggests his mistress is having sex with, he should at least be one, and that she should think of him as her possibly principal lover, mostly on account of his name, Will, which here as in the previous sonnet is treated as synonymous with 'desi...