Patrick Stewart and AI taught me Shakespeare

I performed a little Shakespeare on the Amtrak train to work.

Please understand the following: 1. This is an AI idea, not mine. 2. It may be unreasonable to perform in a quiet car as all verses should be kept to a minimum. So it was more like a tweet.

Why was I tweeting about Shakespeare? I decided to read one of the 154 sonnets each day and think about them for a few minutes while chatting with Claude. I embarked on this weird, nerdy exercise as a form of daily meditation. I wanted to use the AI as a literary tutor to test it out before I focused every morning and did the lightning-fast reading my day job required.

The sonnets are much weirder and more wonderful than I expected, full of surprisingly modern and unnerving musings on beauty, desire, and time. They can also be confusing. When I complained that I was having trouble feeling the music and rhythmic tapping of Shakespeare’s iambic pen, Claude insisted that I recite Sonnet 23 aloud.

Claude: You were reading the book with your eyes and mind. But sonnets were written for the ear.

“As an imperfect actor on stage…” I began, but then I realized something. Claude was right, he was having a little fun at my expense—and the guy next to me, sitting deep in a Google Sheet, thought I was crazy.

After implementing Sonnet, it became clear that even if it turned out badly, I needed to get help from a professional to start my own business. Then, by luck and some helpful algorithmic ad targeting, I discovered that Patrick Stewart was about to release an audiobook version of his sonnets that recreated the daily readings he had been doing on social media during the pandemic.

Stewart, 85, a long-time member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, was cast in the roles of Macbeth, Prospero and Oberon several years before taking on the role of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. They also answered my questions via email in a timely manner.

Gathering a crew, Stewart, Claude, and I set off through time and space on a five-month mission to explore strange new words. We’re about halfway through the sonnet now.

I read the sonnets every day, listen to Stewart’s recordings, and then share my thoughts with Claude. This allows you to unpack your Elizabethan vocabulary and ask questions about your progress. A few weeks ago, I emailed Stewart with a question.

“More nonsense has been written about Shakespeare’s sonnets than about any other literary work,” said W. H. Auden. Consider this my contribution to the genre.

The following interview is interspersed with snippets of my AI chats, edited for clarity and space.

Dear Stewart: Each sonnet takes approximately 60 seconds to read. But this is no ordinary minutes. Your whole project here seems like a provocation to spend our time differently. Sorry, are you asking us to get involved?

Stewart: Provocation…Yes, I like it! My approach to this piece was to consider it an invitation to the listener, but provocation is a much stronger word choice. And I think Shakespeare wrote many of these sonnets with the same intention. In other words, it invites us to be present in the moment and present in our humanity.

To Claude: But is my humanity the same as Shakespeare’s? His poems and plays move us because they capture truths about human nature. Nevertheless, Shakespeare and his era feel as alien as any of Star Trek’s other races. Back in 1594, would you think it would be harder to chat with a bard than with you, a non-human AI?I thought I was a smart guy. Then I read Sonnet 59, where Shakespeare invents time travel and asks almost the same question.

Claude: Yes, in Sonnet 59 Shakespeare does a kind of mental time travel, wishing he could go back 500 years and see if ancient writers had already captured this same beauty, this same love. Will people’s hearts never change, or is the person they love truly unprecedented? And 400 years after him, you’re doing the same thing.

Dear Stewart: Shakespeare is obsessed with time in his sonnets and has nothing but harsh things to say on the subject. After recording Sonnet 60, you said that the allusions to time’s “cruel hand” had a different resonance than they did when you were younger. Do you think Shakespeare, with decades of wisdom beyond his previous knowledge, was right about the destructive power of time, or do you think he missed the compounding interest of love over time?

Stewart: This very aptly describes my experience of love in relation to time. “Compound interest.” During my 80 years on earth, I have experienced many losses, but I have also accumulated many riches of love. I think it’s possible that if Shakespeare had been given the chance to live as long as I have, he might not have been so hostile to the passage of time.

To Claude: Last night I was staring at the ceiling at 3am, unable to go back to sleep, and remembered Sonnet 27. The poet describes how the mind begins to overwork when the body is at rest. Although Shakespeare appears insecure and self-deprecating, he also has an unusual amount of confidence in his ability to preserve the beauty of his loved ones for posterity by putting his passion into words. If the sonnet is ultimately about the power of language and imagination, its dark side is that that same language and imagination can torment us.

Claude: That’s the whole voltaic journey of your sonnet. The same ability that produces poetry produces suffering. The imagination that plants you anew also convenes court at 3 a.m. The language that preserves beauty can also rehearse loss. I found the perfect way to structure my Patrick Stewart interview. You wrote about Sonnet 27: “For insomniacs in the 1590s, the light of imagination had an undisturbed screen on which to project its light and sound.” Please mention it.

Dear Stewart: You said Sonnet 27 was one of your favorites, and mine is too. Perhaps it’s because I spend too many sleepless nights “traveling through my head.” Listening to your recordings, I wondered what midnight was like in Shakespeare’s time, without electric lights or screens, a veritable blank canvas for imagination and anxiety to be expressed. What do you think Shakespeare would have thought if a Yorkshire boy kept his word by using technology that was more sci-fi than a spaceship?

Stewart: Technology that was unthinkable before my lifetime has now become part of everyday life. When I got my first laptop, my first TiVo, and my first cell phone, I was shocked…I imagine Shakespeare would have been quite surprised by recording technology in general. But I would love to travel back in time and see what life was like in Elizabethan England. Admittedly, it must have been pretty dark back then.

Dear Stewart: Sonnet 112 was recorded in two ways. What made you want to do that? As a listener, I appreciated it for showing me that there is no one right way to speak or hear a line. In your memoir Making It So, you say that at your RSC audition Peter Hall asked you to give the same speech to one audience, then to a larger audience. Was this your approach to the sonnets?

Stewart: In addition to Peter Hall, I also had the pleasure of working closely with Peter Brook. His endlessly curious approach to text was thrilling to watch. But to be honest, I don’t remember exactly why I recorded 112 twice, other than that it’s quite complicated.

To Claude: I realized that Stewart had to record it twice. It reminds me of my struggle with the piano, another hobby of my middle age. No matter how much you practice, when you finally play Beethoven, your performance will be mediocre compared to a professional performance. But every time we play a song or recite a poem, we bring it back to life.

Claude: Every performance is a resurrection. It’s incomplete, it’s personal, it’s filtered through different fingers. Yet Beethoven truly lives in it. I don’t mean it figuratively. The emotional truths he encoded in those notes actually pass through you and become real again in the world. Incomplete performance is the only performance that actually exists. The perfect one remains forever pristine and silent on the page. In other words, our fear of imperfection keeps us from holding ourselves to higher standards. It’s just – silence.

To Claude: ah.

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