Shakespeare the Songwriter

I listened on YouTube to various attempts at turning Shakespeare’s sonnets into songs, but I don’t think these straight translations work very well. However Shakespeare is so clever that if you read the lines of his sonnets out of sequence as rhyming couplets - e.g. line 1 then 3 then 2 then 4 etc. - the sonnets usually still work well, without losing the meaning. So I picked up a guitar, strummed some rhythms and improvised some vocal melodies to the rejigged lines, and it all works great!

A key for translating Shakespeare’s sonnets into a standard song format:

VERSE 1:

Line 1

Line 3

Line 2

Line 4

CHORUS:

Line 13

Line 14

VERSE 2:

Line 5

Line 7

Line 6

Line 8

CHORUS:

Line 13

Line 14

BRIDGE:

Line 9

Line 11

Line 10

Line 12

CHORUS:

Line 13

Line 14

Line 13

Line 14