Audiobook · read by volunteers
Sonnet 023
William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Cori Samuel, Gord Mackenzie, Hugh McGuire, Kristen McQuillin, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), mtl3p, Scott Munro · 8 chapters · 10 min
About the book
As an unperfect actor on the stage who with his fear is put beside his part: so begins Shakespeare's Sonnet 23, a poem about the difficulty of saying what one feels. The speaker compares himself to a nervous performer and to a creature overwhelmed by its own rage, and concludes that his love is too strong for speech. Instead, he asks the beloved to let his written words speak for him, and to “hear with eyes” what silent love has written. It is a small, thoughtful meditation on the limits of language. Eight LibriVox volunteers give you eight readings of it, each emphasising a different part of the argument. The versions are brief and the whole set lasts only about ten minutes, so it makes a lovely lunchtime break or a way to hear how poetry changes with the speaker.
Introduction
William Shakespeare (1564-1616) published his sonnets in 1609, a sequence of 154 poems on love, time, beauty and mortality. Most of them are addressed to a young man or to a woman referred to as the dark lady, and their story has been debated by readers for centuries without a firm conclusion. Sonnet 23 belongs to the first group, the poems in which the speaker addresses a beloved young man. The sonnet is short, and its logic is easy to follow once you hear the poem a few times, so this set is also a good way to get to know the form.
Its theme is the difficulty of expression. The speaker admits that he cannot speak as fully as he feels, comparing himself to an actor who forgets his lines for fear, and to an excess of passion that weakens his own heart. The remedy he proposes is to let his written words, and the silent communication of his eyes, say what his voice cannot. The idea is quietly modern and the imagery is theatrical, which suits a playwright. This recording is a multi-version collection. LibriVox volunteers made eight readings of the sonnet for a weekly poetry project. There are 8 short chapters, one for each version, and the whole set takes about ten minutes. Eight readers took part.
The pleasure of a collection like this lies in comparison. Shakespeare's sonnets are densely packed, and each reader makes decisions about where to pause, where to hurry and which word to stress. Over eight readings, the meaning becomes clearer and richer.
It is a compact and rewarding listen for anyone who loves poetry in performance.
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