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New app features Jean-Luc Picard, Dr. Who reading Shakespeare’s sonnets

The minds behind the best-selling iPad app adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (and the periodic table of elements, if you swing that way) are now offering mobile users the chance to hear William Shakespeare’s sonnets as they were meant to be heard: as read by TV’s Jean-Luc Picard, Dr. Who, Samantha Jones, and Jimmy McNulty.

Patrick Stewart, David Tennant, Kim Cattral, and Dominic West are joined by fellow Shakespearean actors Stephen Fry, Jemma Redgrave, and Fiona Shaw, among others, in readings of the Bard’s poems for TouchPress’s The Sonnets mobile app. In addition to the video performances, the app includes all 154 sonnets in read-along form and as facsimiles of the 1609 Quarto edition. It also features explanatory notes from the Arden Shakespeare version of the texts, a modern interpretation of the poems by Scottish poet Don Paterson, interviews with Shakespearean scholars, and social media connectivity.

You can check out the star-studded readings at TouchPress’s website before engaging the app.

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