Living Will: Shakespeare After Dark

David E. Kemp is professor emeritus of drama at Queen’s University.

Shakespeare’s sonnets are not just the easy love sentiments of
“Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer’s Day.” Many of the poems are
bleak cries of emotional turmoil and spiritual exhaustion. They tell a
story of the struggle of love and forgiveness against anguish and
despair. It is the tragic portrait of human love that makes the sonnets
immortal.

Living Will is an attempt by the author to render Shakespeare’s
sonnets into the language of today. “I have taken the cap off the
sonnets,” Rhenisch says in the introduction. “I have taken the bone
cloak of death off of the man who bottled them.” I have no idea what
that means. In any event, the crudeness of Rhenisch’s interpretations
is made even more painfully apparent by the fact that they are
juxtaposed on the page with the originals. With lines such as “and
even a woman’s snatch can get the clap,” does Mr. Rhenisch believe
that his book is ever going to find its way into any secondary school?
His observation that “[i]t’s a rare child who comes through the
school system caring anything at all for poetry” would seem to suggest
that he expects to find an audience there. And since Rhenisch has
divested himself of the challenge of following the classic sonnet
rhyming pattern, resorting instead to the blankest of blank verse, it is
unlikely that his book will be welcomed into the post-secondary school
system either.

Living Will is sure to send readers running back to the originals,
where they will find the immortal truths and beauty that are wholly
missing in Mr. Rhenisch’s crass renderings.