Shakespeare’s Poetic Obsession with a Baron of Cardiff

AN ILLUSTRATED SONNET - RECITATION PRESENTED BY JOHN PRIOR

Friday 7th July 3pm - Parish Hall, Llandaff - Free

The identity of “Mr WH” to whom Shakespeare’s sonnets were addressed has been a matter of inexhaustible academic debate for centuries.  In 1981 Dr John Padel made a powerful contribution to this discourse in his book “New Poems by Shakespeare – Order and meaning restored to the sonnets”. He argued that the true addressee of these poems was not Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton,  but young William Herbert, heir to both the Earldom of Pembroke and the Baronetcy of Cardiff. He contended that the published order had been deliberately ‘scrambled’ by Herbert’s powerful family in order to disguise this.

Simon Callow famously recited the whole canon in the order proposed by Dr Padel, at the National Theatre in 1980. John Prior Morris presents this abbreviated version that mixes recitation with narrative and illustrations, in the hope that justice is given to his argument without the marathon effort of reciting the whole canon.