Next month, Audible will release a recording of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets performed and commented on by Sir Patrick Stewart. You’ll need to sign up for Audible, either a free trial or subscription.
Stewart started sharing sonnets on social media during the pandemic. Now, they are collected in an audiobook along with Stewart’s comments and related stories. This should be excellent.
Serious fans of the sonnets may want to compare this recording with that of the Cambridge All the Sonnets of Shakespeare, read by Kenneth Branagh and Lolita Chakrabarti, which will no doubt be more scholarly.
Thanks for this! I have not thought of that Sonnet a Day undertaking in ages. I seem to remember there was also an analogous one with 154 different contributors (or am I imagining it?). You somehow got me curious about what-all reconstructed period pronunciation there’s been, sonnet-wise. A quick YouTube search suggests quite a bit, and I’m tempted to do a fair lot of sampling. Not surprisingly, Ben Crystal – had I heard him ‘do’ any of The Sonnets as well as sonnets built into Romeo and Juliet, before? And A.Z. Foreman has a playlist with quite a few and a note that he was bent on all 154 – but some only for subscribers.