Audiobook · read by volunteers
Passionate Pilgrim
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Read by Caliban · 15 chapters · 17 min
About the book
Love, beauty, desire and doubt are the subjects of The Passionate Pilgrim, a small collection of poems that appeared in 1599 under Shakespeare’s name. Its lyrics speak in the voice of the lover who swears and is not believed, who is torn between two loves, and who finds the heavenly rhetoric of a beloved’s eye irresistible. Some poems are brief, others have the shape of sonnets, and all of them carry the music of Elizabethan verse. Fifteen short recordings make up under twenty minutes of listening. If you enjoy the sonnets, or you simply like to hear Renaissance poetry read aloud, this slim volume is an easy and enjoyable discovery. A small book with big feelings, shaped by Elizabethan music and a plain, honest pleasure in love’s ups and downs.
Introduction
The Passionate Pilgrim was published by William Jaggard, who later printed Shakespeare’s First Folio. The first edition survives only as a single fragmentary copy, and its date cannot be fixed with certainty because the title page is missing, though many scholars place it in 1599. Not all of the poems are now thought to be by Shakespeare, and the book is best known as an early and somewhat unreliable anthology.
Several of the poems also appear in more polished versions elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work: some of the lyrics are variants of sonnets, and others occur in his plays. That makes the collection a curious document of the way his verse circulated in print during his own lifetime. For the listener, however, questions of authorship matter less than the pleasure of the language, with its pictures of lovers, shepherds and the changing moods of desire.
The poems are short enough to be heard again immediately, and that is often the best way to appreciate their phrasing. They are well suited to lovers of Elizabethan poetry and to anyone interested in the history of how Shakespeare’s work reached its readers.
Fifteen recordings, about 18 minutes in all, are read by a single LibriVox volunteer. Poems such as Crabbed Age and Youth, Fair Is My Love and Venus With Young Adonis are short enough to hear twice in a row, and the second hearing, when you already know where the lines are going, often brings out the music of the verse. The book rewards that kind of unhurried, repeated listening. As an anthology of its period it also shows how a publisher apparently expected a slim book of love poems bearing Shakespeare’s name to sell.
Public domain
William Shakespeare died in 1616: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text