Month: April 2026

A Christmas present: It’s a collection of elegant, artful essays, A Dream of Stone, by Marguerite Yourcenar (2025). She was a mid-twentieth century Belgian-born novelist (1903-1987) whose name I cannot recall ever having heard before opening the package. Each chapter, an artistic piece of writing on its own, discusses some other work. The first, for example, concerns “The dark brain of Piranesi,” building on a nineteenth century poem by Victor Hugo about the architecture and etchings of Giovanni Battista Piranesi a century earlier: one “song” to the “tune” of another, itself built on a third. Another essay concerns the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo’s great creation, a third about how time transforms sculpture, a fourth on a dream that the German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer recorded in his journal.[1]

The book got me thinking about another form of writing, one that takes the words off the page – or off the wall – for the benefit of those who cannot read because they cannot see. Imagine yourself without sight. Now listen to the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” by John Keats. What picture do you see? How does the voice sound? Is it male, female; old, young; with a London accent or a foreign one? Is it foreign to Keats’s accent, assuming we can hope to know how a London accent sounded a century before technology recorded sound?

Art museums in many cities have attempted something like this – precisely for the benefit of visitors with impaired sight. Audio descriptions – a form of ekphrasis – make that possible. In 2024, a dear friend organised a project, called Ensemble, to give sighted people like me a chance to hear various paintings and sculptures at a gallery in south London. Each work of art came with two audio descriptions. One was by the artist, the other by a professional audio describer, that is, a professional writer. Visitors to the gallery could listen in turn to the two descriptions and form a mental picture of the work. But they could not see the work of art, only imagine it. The gallery walls were bare.

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The critical success of the film and of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, Hamnet, was the spur.

Several years ago, I bought James Shapiro’s 2006 Ballie Gifford award-winning book 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, planning to make time to read it, someday, maybe.

Now, I have read and written about the novel Hamnet and found there an imagined version of the domestic half of the Shakespeare family’s story. It was a tale in which William is largely absent and the telling of it didn’t even mention his name. Time to read about the other half.

Shapiro (2005) tells a good story, bursting with facts that even many Shakespeare scholars may never have heard. It reads like good history. Its analysis of Shakespeare’s writing illuminates the craft. It’s a good read, but beyond that, it has a mission.

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Hamnet tells the story of the family of a boy who perishes in the horrible plague year in England of 1596. We readers know a lot of science that the characters couldn’t have known, which might have saved young Hamnet. We have means of communication – of bodies as well as of information – unavailable to these personages. We have knowledge of language – reading and writing – that many of the people of that age lacked and might have helped them to communicate over distances and time. But they too had books and (physical) bookshelves, though fewer in number and more precious than mine, or ours.

But not more precious than life itself, in this case the life of the eleven-year-old Hamnet. …

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