The Best Place to Find Shakespeare for Weddings: Hear My Soul Speak

Morin, Duane. Hear my Soul Speak: Wedding Quotations from Shakespeare. N.p.: Kindle, 2010.

---

If a wedding is in your future and Shakespeare is in your soul, you should get this book. In an extremely-personable and enjoyable style, Duane Morin (a.k.a. Shakespeare Geek) presents a wide range of Shakespearean material that will enhance and deepen the wedding experience for all involved.

And "all involved" isn't an exaggeration. If you're the groom, this book guides you toward some excellent Shakespearean material you can use. If you're the bride, you'll find suggestions and advice for incorporating Shakespeare into your ceremony. If you're attending a wedding, this book provides something appropriate to write in the guest book.

Morin's books isn't just a collection of random bits of Shakespeare—though it does have sections filled with carefully-considered quotations. Instead, Hear My Soul Speak provides a laid-back and colloquial encounter with different possible uses of Shakespeare in weddings.

For example, the book starts with a section on which sonnets might be used in a wedding and why. Morin offers good advice, straightforward explanation and annotation, and humorous asides. He examines Sonnet 130 ("My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun") at a level deeper than the typical high school explication does, but he concludes with a precautionary tale:

Looked at from the right angle, [Sonnet 130] might well be the best wedding sonnet of them all. Of course, more than one bride has vetoed it on the grounds that “No one is going to do a reading that says my breath reeks at my wedding!” Your mileage may vary.

Thoughout, Morin makes an impassioned defense for using Shakespeare—and for sticking to the Shakespearean text wherever possible. Certainly, he advises, you can change "your brother and my sister no sooner met but they looked, no sooner looked but they loved" to "your brother and my Aunt Betsy" or "your sister and I," but you should remain as faithful to the text as you can.

Hear My Soul Speak is a great handbook for incorporating Shakespeare into a wedding—whether yours or someone else's. And it's currently available for your iPad, iPhone, Kindle, or .pdf-reading electronic device so you can glance at it relatively unobtrusively during the festivities!

---

Links: Official Site for Hear My Soul Speak.

Click below to purchase the book from amazon.com
(and to support Bardfilm as you do so).