Before the professionals take to the stage, members of the public are being invited to learn by heart their own favourite Shakespeare sonnet for a mass readathon.
My first attempt involved selecting my favourite 25 sonnets in the idiotic hope that, somehow, most of them would just fit.
Its delimited boundaries put me in mind of one of my favourite Wordsworth sonnets, Nuns Fret Not at Their Convent's Narrow Room, which extols the paradoxically liberating power of restriction.
McCoy's mount, Dubai Sonnet, was the 5-2 forourithefor the concluding race but he pulled far too fiercely and finished unplaced.
Fray Hortensio Paravicino, the head of the Trinitarian order in Spain and a favourite preacher of Philip II of Spain, dedicated four sonnets to El Greco, one of them recording his own portrait by the artist.
Share your favourites in the comments below As you like them: Michael Billington picks his favourite productions of every Shakespeare play Don Paterson on reading Shakespeare's sonnets Simon Russell Beale answers your questions on Lear and more.
Naked She Lay: Classic Erotic Verse, read by Edward de Souza, Stella Gonet and others (2½hrs, Naxos, £10.99) Rummaging through my poetry collection for something vaguely Valentine-related – Burns, Sonnets from the Portuguese, even Classic FM'S 100 Favourite Love Poems – I came across this.
"Shakespeare's favourite subjects are monarchy, monogamy, and monotheism; not coincidentally, his most famous speeches and sonnets are monologues," Taylor and a co-author, the performance scholar Terri Bourus, write in the volume's opening essay.
In addition, the piece starts with the chorus singing a scurrilous sonnet about how Borromini is more fit to be a mason than an architect, and there's also a favourite poem of Leopardi that symbolises, Max says, Borromini's depression.
