SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived – Details, episodes & analysis

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

Sebastian Michael

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Frequency: 1 episode/7d. Total Eps: 170

Sebastian Michael, author of The Sonneteer and several other plays and books, looks at each of William Shakespeare's 154 Sonnets in the originally published sequence, giving detailed explanations and looking out for what the words themselves tell us about the great poet and playwright, about the Fair Youth and the Dark Lady, and about their complex and fascinating relationships. Podcast transcripts, the sonnets, contact details and full info at https://www.sonnetcast.com

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Data updated on 17/08/2026

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🇬🇧 Great Britain - Books
17/08/2026
#95
🇫🇷 France - Books
24/05/2025
#91
🇨🇦 Canada - Books
05/12/2024
#90
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Books
03/11/2024
#95
🇬🇧 Great Britain - Books
02/11/2024
#61

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https://www.sonnetcast.com
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Score global : 22%

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Summary & Conclusion

Sunday, November 30, 2025 • Duration 44:00

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 supposition that many of these poems "could be addressed to a male or a female" as one recent edition puts it – to see whether it stands up to scrutiny as we formulate any conclusion.

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Dating the Sonnets — With Miro Roman

Sunday, November 23, 2025 • Duration 01:20:27

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 carried out by Macdonald P Jackson and others towards dating the sonnets.

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The Quarto Edition of 1609 and its Dedication

Sunday, November 16, 2025 • Duration 42:50

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.

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A Lover's Complaint

Sunday, November 9, 2025 • Duration 46:44

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 between a young woman and an elderly gentleman, as the woman relates how she long held out against the charms and wiles of a beautiful suitor but ultimately fell for him.

Also highly unconventional and genuinely surprising is the conclusion the young woman comes to at the end of her lament...

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Sonnet 154: The Little Love-God, Lying Once Asleep

Episode 154

Sunday, November 2, 2025 • Duration 29:32

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 goddess Diana's nymphs – in this version the most beautiful of them all – takes the torch and attempts to extinguish it in a nearby well, and in doing so inadvertently creates a hot bath for eternity.

In both versions by William Shakespeare, this becomes a place where men may go to find relief for their sickness or disease, whereby neither of the two sonnets specifies just exactly what kind of disease may be so cured and leaves it somewhat open to interpretation whether Shakespeare means merely the affliction of a love sickness, or whether he is also alluding, as is widely believed, to venereal diseases, most particularly syphilis, for which hot baths were considered to be a remedial measure, if not exactly cure, at the time.

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Sonnet 153: Cupid Laid by His Brand and Fell Asleep

Episode 153

Sunday, October 26, 2025 • Duration 29:01

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 are sick can go to find relief.

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The Dark Lady

Sunday, October 19, 2025 • Duration 29:39

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?

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Sonnet 152: In Loving Thee Thou Knowst I Am Forsworn

Episode 152

Sunday, October 12, 2025 • Duration 26:22

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 himself by repeatedly, even continuously, saying things about her that are simply untrue; these things, notably, not being slanderous lies but favourable compliments.

The sonnet thus epitomises the form that Shakespeare with his highly unusual series either deliberately or accidentally creates: that of the anti-love poem to someone he just can't resist, even though he knows that in this he presents as deep a character flaw in himself as the ones he perceives in the person or people he professes to love or desire.

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Sonnet 151: Love Is Too Young to Know What Conscience Is

Episode 151

Sunday, October 5, 2025 • Duration 23:23

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 explicit sonnets in the collection and succeeds in leaving remarkably little to the imagination, once unpacked.

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Sonnet 150: O From What Power Hast Thou This Powerful Might

Episode 150

Sunday, September 28, 2025 • Duration 34:06

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 those who, when looked at with a clearer vision and a less feverish mind than his, are objectively much more beautiful and agreeable than she is.

The conclusion it comes to though offers not only a fairly familiar observation that as the lover so enfeebled by your superhuman powers I surely deserve some love and pity from you, but also a surprisingly stark deconstruction, so as not to say demolition, of the lady's character in its entirety.

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SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived – Details, episodes & analysis

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SONNETCAST – William Shakespeare's Sonnets Recited, Revealed, Relived – Details, episodes & analysis

Podcast details

Recent rankings

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Shared links between episodes and podcasts

Other1

RSS feed quality and score

Publication history

Latest published episodes

Similar podcasts and content

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Related Shows Based on Content Similarities

Other1

Apple Podcasts

Spotify