Full Colour, Hardback, 210 x 148mm, 172pp

BardCode presents Shakespeare’s Sonnets as never seen before, translating them into vibrant visual poetry.

In this visualisation project, Gregory Betts offers an alternative way of ‘seeing’ the formal structures of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Coloured squares in grids of fourteen lines replace the rhymes and potential syllables in each sonnet, before the metrical process has applied elision or syncope. Stripped of meaning, we can, if we want, view these uneven grids as a way in to the still-puzzling, abstract mathematical processes that allow us to compose and appreciate metrical verse and rhyme. Like all good art projects, this is not simply a single redescription of a portion of the world — rather it is an exercise in opening up the world to alternative descriptions, a consideration of constraint, a languageless prompt to thinking about language.

— Jonathan Hope, author of Shakespeare and Language

Who said there is nothing new under the sun? BardCode does the marvellous work of renewing reading itself, as it pushes the sonnets through a freshly conceived synaesthetic process. Sound becomes sight, sight becomes colour, colour becomes form, and form becomes information. Our vantage on the sonnets becomes distanced, the poems become pixelated, and in 2024, we get to squint at another set of values latent in this most familiar source. Betts invites us to hear in living colour, and dance with (and across) our senses.

—Nasser Hussain, author of Love Language

In BardCode, Betts playfully deconstructs language via the lens of Shakespeare’s sonnets, resulting in rhyming patterns of colour. As a synesthete, I am excited to see  canonical literature laid out on the page as bright arrays of ultramarine storms, fuchsia roses, blood reds, forest greens, spectral greys, and sceptre gold.

—Amanda Earl,

editor of Judith, Women Making Visual Poetry