The new Shakespeare’s Sonnets iPad app, a joint production between Faber & Faber, Touch Press, Illuminations and the Arden Shakespeare, is due for release on Thursday 28th June. Forty actors and performers, including David Tennant have filmed recordings of Shakespeare's sonnets as part of the app, which will be complemented by Arden notes and commentaries. The filmed sonnets will also be made available on DVD.
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare App
London, UK – June 28, 2012 – Touch Press and Faber, co-publishers of the ground breaking literary app The Waste Land, proudly announce release of a new title created in partnership with Illuminations and The Arden Shakespeare. The Sonnets by William Shakespeare for iPad features specially filmed readings of every sonnet by a star-studded cast, as well as beautifully integrating the complete Arden notes illuminating the 154 poems.
The app features:
• Specially filmed performances of all 154 sonnets by a stellar cast including
Sir Patrick Stewart, Kim Cattrall, David Tennant, Simon Russell Beale, Dominic West, Siân Phillips, Fiona Shaw, Dame Harriet Walter, Simon Callow, Stephen Fry, and poets Don Paterson and Sir Andrew Motion.
• The complete Arden Shakespeare text of the Sonnets, including all annotations and critical apparatus, automatically synchronised with the readings line by line.
• Extended interviews with leading scholars including Professors Katherine Duncan-Jones, James Shapiro and Henry Woudhuysen.
• Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets: A New Commentary by Don Paterson.
• A facsimile of the 1609 quarto showing Shakespeare's Sonnets as first published.
• Readers can write their own notes and share sonnets via Twitter, Facebook and email.
• AirPlay enabled, allowing the performances to be streamed full screen to AppleTV.
Henry Volans, head of digital at Faber: ‘We are proud of our continuing work with TouchPress and partners at the meeting point of literature and technology. The Sonnets lays down a new marker for reading - in the widest sense - in the digital world.’
Margaret Bartley, Publisher, The Arden Shakespeare, Bloomsbury Publishing: ‘This stunning app offers readers a dynamic and innovative way to engage with Shakespeare's sonnets. We are used to encountering his plays in performance, now readers can enjoy and explore the sonnets in performance alongside the authoritative Arden text and its expert commentary.’
The Sonnets by William Shakespeare for iPad will be released worldwide on 28th June 2012 and available from the iTunes App Store priced at £9.99 (US $13.99) itunes.com/appstore.
Boyd Tonkin in The Independent reveals that David Tennant will be reading four of the sonnets, including number 18: ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ (see preview below). Stephen Fry reads sonnet 130, ‘My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun’, and Kim Cattrall starts the collection with sonnet 1, ‘From fairest creatures we desire increase’.
For more information about next week’s release, visit the Touch Press website.
The region 0 DVD of the filmed performances of the sonnets is due for release in July and can be pre-ordered worldwide from the Illuminations store, priced £14.99 plus shipping
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