How Shakespeare’s Four-Hundred Year-Old Sonnets Drove Me To Madness

And How They Tell Me They’re Performing As Intended

Image taken from a sample page of Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

Something magical happened on the evening of the 28th of January, 2012, just shy of four centuries after the Bard’s body had been buried. I brushed dust off some old words with my fingertips, I breathed out their spells as I read, and a real-life Djinn popped out.

Standing Over A Grave

I was halfway through the first semester of the second year of my Master’s in English Literature at the Tel Aviv University (which I left incomplete with only a handful of credits to go, but that has nothing to do with this story) and my lecturer, Dr Noam Reisner, had warned us that his seminar entitled “Sonnets and Sonneteers” would either see us quitting, or losing our minds. While I cannot speak for the rest of the class, let me assure you that in my case his assertion was entirely on the nose.

After weeks covering the history of sonnets, their techniques and their makers, we studied a number of Shakespeare’s sonnets together in the classroom and I’d found myself fixated on an aspect of the first sonnet that I simply couldn’t shake: while reading and re-reading it, it continued to produce a nagging sensation that I was standing over a grave. I could not for the life of me…