Sonnet 18 - William Shakespeare

Sonnets from the Portuguese was first published in 1850. It is a collection of forty-four love sonnets written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The poems largely chronicle the period leading up to her 1846 marriage to Robert Browning. 

John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester was an English Libertine poet, a friend of King Charles II, and the writer of much satirical and bawdy poetry. He was the toast of the Restoration court and a patron of the arts. He married an heiress, Elizabeth Malet, and had many mistresses, i ...  Show more

To celebrate Melvyn Bragg’s 27 years presenting In Our Time, some well-known fans of the programme have chosen their favourite episodes. Historian and broadcaster Simon Schama has selected the episode on Shakespeare’s Sonnets and recorded an introduction to it. (This introduction ...  Show more

Continuing the "Shakespeare on Thursdays" theme for August, Jacke takes a look at Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds"), another one of Shakespeare's most beloved and well known sonnets. What does the poem say about love? How does it fit into the world of weddin ...  Show more

Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella. Over the course of the sixteenth century English poets experimented with the sonnet form invented by their Italian neighbours, and the Petrarchan conventions that came with it. The goal was a long sequence of many short poems which chronic ...  Show more

William Shakespeare was a poet and playwright who lived in the 16th century. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the history of the English language. You might know him as the author of the famous "Romeo and Juliet."

Many of the English idioms we use to thi ...