I went looking for Shakespeare's Sonnet 29 on Google yesterday and stumbled onto something new to me--sonnets on YouTube. Make sense when you stop to think of it: the sonnet form fits nicely with the YouTube form, so no wonder that there seem to be swarms, flocks, gaggles, of sonnets, and specifically Shakespeare sonnets, there for the listening. I got 111 hits on Sonnet 29; not all of them are the thing itself, of course, but I should say that maybe 50 of them are. This being YouTube, a lot of them are awful, mama's basement stuff, but not all. One carries the agonizing label "Do I have a good voice or not?" (I couldn't bear to listen). One is read by a guy who seems it his duty to channel James Earl Jones. One is a tribute to Heath Ledger, go figure. Quite a number are school projects; I thought this quite fine. One is done in American Sign Language. A few are more professional: a number of people who sing for a living seem drawn to the sonnets (no royalties?); Rufus Wainwright seems to have produced/presented quite a few.
In any event--"and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries"--is surely one of the most haunting lines in the English language, not so?
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