Shakespeare's Sonnets.

In the early noughties, television producer and writer Daisy Goodwin presented Essential Poems (To Fall in Love With), a series of programmes to coincide with Valentine's Day in which various verses were presented in the form of mini-dramas with a true galaxy of stars (from Christopher Lee to Julie Delpy with Amanda Holden between) characterising them within a cityscape. Shakespeare’s two contributions were Sonnet 129, in which Greg Wise sighed his way through “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame” slumped on a couch and the outcast state of Sonnet 29 becoming Matthew Macfadyen’s musician’s inability to get solid work from a demo he’s passing around.

Framed by Goodwin popping up in some biographical locations sometimes with family members, the idea was to make the poems accessible to audience brought up on television who might find their existence on the page somewhat intimidating. While it was entertaining in its own way, the obvious set back was that the scenes were often at odds with the poet's original meaning and the readers and actors themselves had various levels of comfort in relation to how they should be speaking the words, contemporary poetry fairing better than most. The best interpretations were undoubtedly when the actor simply broke the forth wall and addressed the viewer forcing us to interpret the words ourselves.

That’s precisely the methodology at play in Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the more linear reproduction of the sonnet recordings created for the iPad app produced by Touch Press in association with Illuminations, Arden and Faber. Select “play all” from the menu screen and after Patrick Stewart reads the original title page and acknowledgements, each of the ensuing sonnets is read in turn directly to the viewer by a similar group of actors as the Goodwin project (from Jemma Redgrave to Dominic West with Stephen Fry between). Sonnet after sonnet, face after face appears and the sheer variety of the text and approaches to interpretation even within these limits becomes obvious, especially when Ben Crystal pops up for his original pronunciation of 141.

Shorn of gimmickry, an intimacy is created between actors and viewer which replicates the brief moments in televised plays when a soliloquy has to be addressed to camera. Some performers have a more actorly approach than others, with the younger players often favouring a straight reading over Fiona Shaw or Noma Dumezweni's attempts at providing an emotional context. RSC director John Barton classically utilised sonnets as exercises to help structure the text within performance and it’s certainly the case that actors who’ve been through Stratford provide the clearest readings. But some of the non-professionals are equally impressive, James Shapiro’s Sonnet 138 underpinned by an academic understanding.

Each of the readings is relatively fascinating in and of itself. They beed filmed in a variety of places, in contributors homes and offices, back and on stage at theatres. I imagine director John Wyver and his crew travelling the length and breadth of the country dropping in on the actors depending on their availability and it’d be interesting to know how they were selected. In the main they’re perfectly chosen, some having even appeared in similar sonnet related projects on audio, David Tennant for Naxos’s From Shakespeare With Love (in which he also read “Shall I compare thee …”), Sian Phillips and Fiona Shaw on EMI’s When Love Speaks (different choices).

Watching these sonnets in a three hour block isn’t the best way to consume them and admittedly I didn’t. They were created as part of the app and outside that context they become “just” Shakespeare’s words well read. Perhaps it’s possible for those of us without an iPad to create a low-fi version with this dvd as the cornerstone. The app includes Katherine Duncan-Jones’s notes from the Arden Shakespeare edition which you might have to hand. Fellow contributor Don Patterson has also produced a book on sonnets (and this lengthy article for The Guardian). There are various facsimiles of the 1609 edition of the sonnets at archive.org.

Apart from added interactivity, about the only element unavailable are the additional interviews with experts and given the dvd is more expensive than the app, it’s a shame room couldn’t have been found for those here. That’s not the only niggle. Each of the actors is given their own biography screen which also lists the sonnets their reading, but there’s no play all for these and after watching one of them the viewer’s kicked back to a list of actors rather than the screen they were working from which means they have to go off and find the actor again to see another of their contributions. There’s a similar problem with the numerical list too, which makes the process of wanting to see a sonnet again quickly less efficient. A subtitle option would have been a useful addition.

Otherwise, the presentation is clear and nicely replicates the design of the app judging by screenshots in the accompany booklet (which also includes the actor profiles from the dvd itself). Once you’re used to navigating the menus there’s a definitely an addictive quality to it, wanting to watch one more sonnet, or the same sonnet again. If nothing else, it’s a way of exploring the less well known poems, most of which are generally ignored the face of the mighty 116, 18, 2 and indeed Goodwin’s choices 129 and 29. Few writers can say that 103, read beautifully here by Kim Cattrall, doesn’t capture the desperation of facing something with near flawless qualities and being infected with an inability to write about it.

Shakespeare's Sonnets is out now.  Review copy supplied.

The Sonnets come to iPad, the web and dvd.

Coming soon to an iPad near you, is a new production of The Sonnets produced my all my favourite organisations, Faber, Illuminations and Arden with specially filmed readings of all hundred and fifty-four sonnets by a a mouthwatering cast of Shakespeareans including Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion. James Shapiro, Cicely Berry and Katherine Duncan-Jones (the editor in charge of the text and commentary). are even in there too.

Given that I'm one of those people who doesn't have an iPad and I only tend to write about accessible things, or rather things I can access, I was going to leave the announcement to everyone else, until I noticed that brilliantly, as part of the publicity for the app, the overall publishers Touch Press, have uploaded versions of all the videos along with the texts of the poems to this website for us all to enjoy. Here's Duncan-Jones herself reading eighty-seven.  And for those of us without an internet connection which can cope with the scope of all that streaming, they're also releasing them on a dvd.

Shakespeare's Sonnets for the iPAD

A really exciting project underpinned by a fantastic academic publishing legacy. Here's the press release:

The Arden Shakespeare, Faber and Faber, Touch Press and Illuminations are delighted to announce that they are in the final stages of producing a spectacular edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets for the Apple iPad. The title features specially filmed performances of all 154 sonnets by a stellar cast that includes Fiona Shaw, Sir Patrick Stewart and David Tennant. It also features the complete Arden notes, providing unsurpassed commentary on the poems.

This digital edition follows Touch Press and Faber's iPad app The Waste Land that presents T. S. Eliot's great poem in an innovative and widely praised interactive format.

Since this is partly an Illuminations productions, that may explain one the extras on the superb recent release of Simon Callow & Jonathan Bate's Being Shakespeare  (directed by John Wyver) which included Callow reading 18, 29 and 31 directly to camera.

Patrick Stewart and Simon Callow in The Guardian

Patrick Stewart and Simon Callow have a joint interview in today's The Guardian about their competing West End shows, Stewart plays the bard towards the end of his life in Bingo and Callow is performing the latest iteration of his collaboration with Jonathan Bate now called Being Shakespeare:

"There's one thing they do agree on, though: contrary to the conspiracy theories, Shakespeare was definitely Shakespeare, not the Earl of Oxford or Francis Bacon. "It seems so unnecessary to go down that route," Callow splutters. "It's so clear that his is the work of a working writer who dealt with the common problems of life." Stewart shakes his head. "All the reasons that people give that Shakespeare could not have written Shakespeare are, for me, reasons why it has to be him."

Tell that to Derek Jacobi.

Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford at the Liverpool Playhouse

In the programme for Shakespeare: The Man From Stratford, Simon Callow (in an excerpt from his autobiography available in the theatre foyer) offers a rather nice anecdote. Early in his career, he was asked by the National Theatre if he would like to be part of a show that offered all 154 sonnets in a single reading, presented as a kind of autobiographical show. In the “full flush of (his) youthful meglomania” he noted that if this was a single man’s life, it should be presented by one man – him. And so a series of shows ensued culminating in a sell out afternoon performance in which, as he stepped onto stage, he noticed Sir John Gielgud sat prominently, the veteran’s no doubt hawk-like gaze scaring the life out of him.

Instead of the sonnets, The Man from Stratford is, like his earlier The Mystery of Charles Dickens, a mad old mix of biographical lecture and rehearsed scenes, this time written by Shakespeare scholar Jonathan Bate. My admiration for Bate’s work washes over this blog like the waves on Prosporo’s island and in truth if you’ve already read his book Soul of the Age and any of his other writing on the subject you’re not going to find much new here. The script even replicates that book’s device of structuring the chapters of Shakespeare’s life about Jacques’s speech from As You Like It, “All the world’s a stage…”. But like the Bard’s plays and any good story, it’s worth hearing again and especially the capable hands and voice of Simon Callow.

Bate’s mission is to flesh out the details of the great man’s life to an audience who might not necessarily realise how much detail we have on him, from his parent’s years in Stratford to his schooling to his early marriage to London and how he ended up working in theatre to stardom to royal veneration back to Stratford to obscurity again and death. For all his genius, Shakespeare was a working man, pre-eminent certainly, but still one of dozens of writers functioning in that period, not in some ivory tower, his words drifting into the Globe like gold dust, which is the impression that has too easily developed across the century as his reputation has increased at the same exponential rate as our ignorance of his contemporaries some of whom haven't even been granted Complete Works collections.

Bate’s approach to scripting all of this is, like Shakespeare himself, to popularise things a bit. He calls Henry VI a “historical blockbuster” and “franchise” and when he talks about John Shakespeare’s financial problems it becomes an “Elizabethan credit crunch”. That’s smart, offering a vital link between the modern age and what can seem sometimes like a fictional land with little connection. He does fudge the chronology of the plays and often uses generalities like “he collaborated later in life” without always explaining with whom on what. But the writer also cleverly steers clear of the more obvious anecdotes like the destruction of the first Globe via canon during the premiere of Henry VIII in favour of the story of its construction (which I’ll not spoil since its one of the funniest moments in the evening).

What Callow brings as he dances about a relatively bare stage which includes just a chair and a few illustrative props, is his actorly ability to draw the audience in especially to the human moments; the death of Shakespeare’s son, the effects of disease, the glow of success. But its in the moments when Callow becomes a man possessed and enters the lives of Shakespeare's characters that the show is at its most entertaining, as we're gifted with a greatest hits of most of the main characters in the canon with the actor, age, gender and race hardly a barrier.  From Falstaff to Juliet, Callow just about manages, with the aid of some lighting effects and projections to suggest that we’re suddenly seeing excerpts of some other production.

In terms of Hamlet interest, that means the prince’s request for The Murder of Gonzago and extra lines to be inserted helps to explain how it's possible that the whole of Richard II could be revised overnight and an extra scene written ready to “inspire” the Earl of Essex’s rebellion and Polonius’s genre list demonstrates the scope of Shakespeare’s writing. But do not turn up expecting to hear Callow’s “To Be Or Not To Be”; for whatever reason Bate has decided to leave out arguably Shakespeare’s most famous speech which is probably just as well since it leaves room for Shakespeare's contribution to Sir Thomas More and it is a grand opportunity to hear something only recently canonised given a theatrical airing.

Even in these tiny excerpts of plays his whole demeanour changes and he tenses his facial muscles in an attempt to convey the nuclear emotions trapped within Shakespeare's text. He thunders red faced through Claudio’s fearful plea from Measure for Measure “Ah – but to die and go I know not where…” and becomes a symbol of nobility for Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach…”  It's impossible not to get caught up, and I did, almost in tears.  His Prospero is particularly powerful, the stage reduced to the glow of blue light, his Macbeth evoked by a shard of blood red and predictably by the close, amid the partial standing ovation, I was already making plans to dive back into the canon again.