sonnets
To.The.Onlie.Begetter.
Thomas Thorpe publishes in 1609 a collection of amorous sonnets, apparently by William Shake-speare, containing one hundred and fifty-four poems.
Foreworded by a enigmatic dedication, addressing the book to a mysterious Mr W.H., these Sonnets have never ceased to intrigue and fascinate their readers.
And we grasp them in turn, in a production centred on some of those precisely destined to the young man, reflecting upon the universality of the love or friendship that united him for a time to the Bard who sings it.
For, if we won’t necessarily bring an answer to all the guesses that have been made, we shall strive to have the poems heard. Heard in all their strength, their beauty and their music – some will be declamated in Elizabethan pronounciation, and we shall bring you a new translation attempting to reproduce in French the Shake-spearian verse’s rythm.
The show was first created in 2009, and remounted until 2011 (closing in great pump in the fantastic setting of the Salon Bouvier at the Carnavalet Museum in Paris), in a form with four artists, three musicians from the Obe accompanying the texts uttered by Magister artium noster Charles, confronting them with music by their contemporaries, by Tobias Hume, John Dowland, Francis Cutting, or Alfonso Ferrabosco.
But as we are about to produce the show anew, it seemed essential to tighten and highlight its intimacy, and a new version shall soon be put on, with the narrator all by himself on stage, addressing the poems to the absent beloved, and occasionaly picking up his lute. A couple of texts will also be added to the first corpus; ’tis therefore a whole new show that we soon shall have the joy of presenting.