New Sonnets App

No 15 in a series of reviews of iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad apps useful for English literature and language learning and teaching.


A recent outstanding app is The Sonnets, from some of the team who created another outstanding resource for students and teachers, The Waste Land.

Here, all 154 poems are beautifully-presented, and all performed by a variety of academics and actors. You can follow these performances as video, audio, or simultaneously with the text (each line being highlighted in turn). 'Perspectives' gives both video and text of comments by Don Paterson, James Shapiro, Katherine Duncan-Jones and others on topics such as 'The order of the Sonnets' and 'Shakespeare's Sexuality'. There's also a Facsimile of the 1609 Quarto, the full Arden introduction, and notes from Arden and Don Paterson on every poem (with room for your own notes).

This is a superb production, and immediately becomes the best single resource on the poems for teachers, well worth the cost of €10.99. Next up? Paradise Lost? Great Expectations? The Great Gatsby?


[Above, Sonnet 90 read by Nathan Stewart-Jarrett].