Please note change of location - this talk will now take place in the Painted Room at 3 Cornmarket.

Where do sonnets come from? In this lecture, Dr Robert Stagg (Shakespeare Institute / Oxford) will give a fresh history of the sonnet, arguing for its origins in Arabic poetry outside the Italian mainland. Could Shakespeare have known something of this Arabic history of the sonnet form in which he wrote? How much might he have known about Middle Eastern poetry more generally? Come along to find out.

Dr Robert Stagg is a Shakespearean and early modernist whose principal research interests are in literary form. Robert is currently working on a book provisionally titled Shakespeare’s Worldly Style which rethinks scholarly descriptions of a ‘Global Shakespeare’ by considering the involvement of Shakespearean poetic form with a suite of international poetic traditions, from Arabic lyric to early American writing. This lecture will draw on these themes as Robert discusses the Arabic pre-history of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Members £10 and non-members £15.