Audiobook · read by volunteers
Shakespeare's Sonnets (version 2)
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Read by Chris Hughes · 15 chapters · 2 h 20
About the book
Love, beauty, time, ambition, jealousy and death: the themes of Shakespeare's Sonnets are as large as the poems are small. Published in 1609, the collection of 154 sonnets has long fascinated readers, partly for its poetry and partly for its mysteries. Who are the young man, the dark lady and the rival poet who appear in its pages? No one is certain. What is certain is the music of the lines, from tender praise to bitter reproach. This recording, a second LibriVox version, offers the sonnets in groups of ten, in fifteen sections. Chris Hughes reads them all in about two and a quarter hours, which gives the listener time to savour each fourteen-line poem in turn. Whether you know the famous ones or are meeting them for the first time, the music of these poems is the chief pleasure.
Introduction
William Shakespeare lived from 1564 to 1616. Though he is best remembered as a dramatist, he also wrote narrative poems and a sequence of sonnets that were published in 1609. They were probably written over a number of years, and scholars still debate their order, their dates and the identity of the people to whom they refer. The first group of sonnets urges a young man to marry and have children, and later poems speak of friendship, desire and betrayal.
A Shakespearean sonnet consists of fourteen lines, usually arranged in three quatrains and a closing couplet, with a rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg. Within that form, Shakespeare is endlessly inventive. He sets argument against emotion, and he surprises the listener with a final turn in the couplet. Many of the lines are among the best known in English, and they have been quoted, adapted and set to music for four centuries.
This LibriVox recording is the second LibriVox version of the sonnets, and it lasts about two hours and twenty minutes. The 154 sonnets are grouped into 15 sections, and the whole collection is read by one volunteer, Chris Hughes. The poems reward both a continuous listen and repeated visits to individual favourites.
Hearing the sonnets in sequence helps to bring out the recurring images, such as time as a destroyer, love as a fixed mark and the poet's own words as a defence against decay. The sections of ten poems each make the collection easy to take in stages, over several days or in one long, rich afternoon.
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