The Long Life of Shakespeare’s Sonnets

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.