Shakespeare' Songs & Sonnets

Few contemporary Elizabethan songwriters set Shakespeare’s sonnets to music. More recently, however, Ross Duffin, scholar and author of Shakespeare's Songbook, has matched some of the best-loved sonnets by Shakespeare to pre-existing tunes from the lute-song repertory. Our artists - Elizabeth Kenny (lute) and Mark Padmore (tenor) - will perform some of these sonnets for the very first time, alongside songs by John Danyel, Thomas Morley and John Dowland, in addition to twentieth-century composers, Benjamin Britten and Alex Roth.