The Shakespeare Effect: The Sonnets

A brilliant new CD by Peggy Nash Rubin

You are invited to participate in an experiment that demonstrates the Shakespeare Effect.

You may have heard of the Mozart Effect and the enhanced body/brain enrichment that great music provides. Shakespeare makes music and grows minds by using words instead of notes. This CD provides an opportunity to experience the difference that poetry and powerful speech can make in your body, your voice and your spirit, and to grow your brain and memory at the same time.

Simply by listening to these sonnets, even when you’re asleep, or paying no attention whatsoever, you will discover that your expression is becoming more powerful, more poetic, more playful. Your ability to think in images and in metaphors is being greatly enhanced, and your understanding of complex forms, designs, and ideas is also improving.

As you participate in this experiment you will find that the garden of your self will bloom in the enriched foundation of Shakespeare’s language, his creation of new worlds and emotions, his all-embracing humanity and his Renaissance world view.

To more fully engage in this experiment with the language of Shakespeare, the first step is simply to listen to the words. Let the images that those words create resonate through you when you are listening carefully. Or just hear the patterns of the words when not listening with full attention. Even listening while asleep will have its effect. Next step is to read the sonnets from the enclosed booklet and allow the written word to have its own entry into your psyche. Notice how the images change when taking this approach. Best of all, say the sonnets aloud – for yourself and for others. For then the sounds of the words and their image associations reverberate through your tongue, the bones of your face and skull, and all of your body, entering your psyche at a cellular level.

“The Shakespeare Effect transforms the whole being: The heart beats with the rhythm, the ear anticipates the rhyme, the mind delights in the precision of the argument, the emotions rise and fall with the author’s, and the spirit and imagination are stirred by the alchemical combination of all these elements. What better introduction could students have to sonnets—or poetry itself—than the words of the master poet Shakespeare interpreted by the master actor Peggy Rubin?”

—Hilary Tate
Oregon Shakespeare Festival
Writer, editor, teacher of Shakespeare