Showing posts with label Shakepeare. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Shakepeare. Show all posts

Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Shakespeare's Sonnets Performed

After comparing the text of sonnet 116 and sonnet 29 to their performed versions, I found an enormous difference in how I saw the poem when I read it and when I watched it performed. To get the full effect of this difference, read the text of the sonnet before you watch its visual interpretation.
Here is the plain text of sonnet 116:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

And here is the poem's performance in in the film version of Sense and Sensibility by actress Kate Winslet: