Shakespeare’s Sonnets Exposed: Resurrecting The Podcast

Sonnet 32 analyzed after a three-and-a-half year hiatus

A stylized image of a rose, Shakespeare’s metaphor for himself throughout his sonnet sequence. Image created by Mr Cat, the illustrator of the graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare’s Sonnets.

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

Two years ago, I posted an article on Medium explaining my obsession with Shakespeare’s Sonnets, where my obsession comes from and what I’m attempting to achieve. While we have continued to produce more pages for the graphic novel — we’re currently working on page 30*, which is more than halfway through the first sonnet — at that point I was neck-deep in the bureaucracy and stress of emigrating during a pandemic, and the podcast had been stalled for a year and a half already.

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Well, it’s now been three and a half years since I published episode 32, and just under a year since my family and I finally got our citizenship statuses sorted out and were able to start breathing normally again. Last week marks the first time since January 2020 that I’ve been able to really sit down and examine a sonnet with a clear head, and sit down and examine a sonnet I did!

The audio quality’s not amazing (it never has been, one day I’ll be able to afford better equipment and a room of my own), but I’m very pleased with the content and I’m excited to be using tools that make it relatively easy to produce both the audio as well as a video with images so that it’s easier to follow along.

I used ClipChamp, which comes pre-installed with Windows 11. Although I’d finally found a good option for MacOS — OpenShot — I’ve recently switched back to using my Windows machine and I’ve been thoroughly impressed by…