(Re-)Sequencing Shakespeare’s Sonnets /
In 1609, Shakespeare’s Sonnets was published, and over 400 years later we’re still reading this collection of 154 poems and arguing about their order. For the first time, the individual sonnets have been digitally collated and reordered.
SonnetShuffle allows five different modes of reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets:
Random Shuffle: completely randomised, this mode offers 30897696138473508879585646703632404659201907040888820477871589289865505687886666220300447285640952619071680544337494109264649994680187591361311072737951454695525676891035640863743200899694758450943586711068571022031011228320107310612480000000000000000000000000000000000000 different reading experiences.
Structured Shuffle: certain thematic groupings of sonnets as identified by Juliano Zaffino remain together in a partially randomised order.
Zaffino Shuffle: a fixed running order of the poems based on Juliano Zaffino’s anthologising reordering efforts.
Padel Shuffle: a famous example of historical reordering, Padel’s radical, biographical and psychological approach is one of the most well-known, for better or worse…
Stirling Shuffle: a less famous but still convincing reordering that attempts to preserve some of the integrity of the 1609 text while making it easier to read.