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Podcast Shakespeare


A listening tour through the works, life, and afterlife of William Shakespeare.

Mar 30, 2020

The Sonnet Sessions continue...

You can find me on Facebook, Twitter, or by email at podcastshakespeare@gmail.com. You can subscribe to the podcast at  iTunes, Stitcher, Soundcloud, or download direct from Libsyn.

William Shakespeare, Sonnet V

 Those hours, that with gentle work did frame
The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell,
Will play the tyrants to the very same
And that unfair which fairly doth excel;
For never-resting time leads summer on
To hideous winter, and confounds him there;
Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,
Beauty o'er-snowed and bareness every where:
Then were not summer's distillation left,
A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,
Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft,
Nor it, nor no remembrance what it was:
But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,
Leese but their show; their substance still lives sweet. 

Music clips:
Ralph Vaughan Williams, “Fantasia on Greensleeves“, from Sir John in Love, opera adapted from William Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor, 1928 (Philadelphia Orchestra, Eugene Ormandy)

Joseph Haydn, "She Never Told Her Love", after Shakespeare's Twelfth Night