Sonnets & Stuff

Hi all,

Here's a recording of some of the sonnets, read by Scottish actor David Tennant, who is quite famous over in the UK and has acted in a number of Shakespeare plays (most notably, a production of Much Ado last year and Hamlet in 2009.) Beware, he's got a Scottish accent, but it's rather lovely, so.

 

Here's an online edition of Astrophel and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney. It's a wonderful sequence of sonnets, and this version is not too hard to understand, even though it uses Early Modern spellings of some words. Definitely worth one's time!

http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/stella.html

PS. Luminarium is a great resource for anything to do with the Renaissance, we used it extensively last year in our Renaissance Poetry class at Bath Spa, but I'm not sure whether you need a subscription to use it. Try it anyhow.

Here's a webpage that gives a general overwiew of Elizabethan Soneteers:

http://www.sonnets.org/eliz.htm

And this is a short essay on Petrarchian (or however you spell that) sonnet conventions and how they differ from the English Renaissance sonnets:

http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/ren.sonnets.html

And that's all from me now! I dunno if I put in the links properly or not, but I'll eventually learn, innit. Have yourselves a good (reading) week!

-- Idil