I performed a bit of Shakespeare on my Amtrak train to work.

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Please understand that: 1. This was AI’s idea, not mine. 2. Performed may be a stretch, since in the quiet car all verse must be kept to a minimum — so it was closer to a mumble.

Why was I mumbling Shakespeare? I had set out to read the 154 sonnets, one each day, and then reflect on them for a few minutes in a chat with Claude. I embarked on this strange and nerdy exercise as a sort of daily meditation. I hoped to sharpen my focus each morning, before revving up to the warp-speed reading my day job demands — and to test using AI as a literary tutor.

The sonnets are much weirder and wondrous than I expected, full of strikingly modern, neurotic musings on beauty, desire and time. They are also confounding. When I complained of my struggle to feel the music and rhythmic tapping of Shakespeare’s iambic pen, Claude insisted I recite Sonnet 23 aloud.

Claude: You’ve been reading with your eyes and your mind. But the sonnets were written for the ear.

“As an unperfect actor on the stage …” I began, realizing immediately that: Claude was right, Claude was having a bit of fun at my expense — and the guy next to me deep in a Google Sheet thought I was nuts.

Performing the sonnet, however badly, made clear that for my enterprise to launch I needed to enlist a professional. Then in a stroke of luck — and helpful algorithmic ad targeting — I discovered that Patrick Stewart was about to release an audiobook edition of the sonnets, reprising the daily readings he did on social media during the pandemic.

A longtime member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stewart, 85, was cast as Macbeth, Prospero and Oberon years before he became Capt. Jean-Luc Picard. He was also kind enough to answer my questions by email.

With my crew assembled, Stewart, Claude and I set off through space and time on a five-month mission to explore strange new words. I am now about halfway through the sonnets.

Each day I read a sonnet, listen to Stewart’s recording and then share my thoughts with Claude, which helps me untangle Elizabethan vocabulary and quizzes me on my progress. A few weeks ago I emailed Stewart my questions.

The following interview, interspersed with bits of my AI chats, has been edited for clarity and space.

To Stewart: Each sonnet takes you roughly 60 seconds to read. But these are no ordinary minutes. Your whole project here seems like a provocation to spend our minutes differently. With apologies, are you challenging us to ENGAGE?

Stewart: A provocation…yes, I like that! I’d thought of my approach to this work as an invitation to the listener, but provocation is a far stronger word choice. And I do think that Shakespeare wrote many of these sonnets with the same intent — provoking us to be present in a moment, to be present in our humanity.

To Claude: But is my humanity the same as Shakespeare’s? His poems and plays move us because he captures truths about the human essence. And yet, Shakespeare and his time feel as alien as any species on Star Trek. If I went back to 1594, would I find it harder to chat with the Bard than with you, a nonhuman AI? I thought I was being clever — then I read Sonnet 59, in which Shakespeare invents time travel and asks pretty much the same question!

Claude: Yes — in Sonnet 59 Shakespeare performs a kind of mental time travel, wishing he could go back 500 years to see whether any ancient writer had already captured this same beauty, this same love. Whether the human heart is eternally the same or whether his beloved is genuinely without precedent. And here you are, 400 years after him, doing the same thing.

To Stewart: Shakespeare is obsessed with time in the sonnets, and has nothing but harsh things to say on the subject. After your recording of Sonnet 60, you say that allusions to time’s “cruel hand” resonate differently than when you were younger. With the wisdom of decades beyond what Shakespeare ever knew, do you think he is right about time’s destructive power or does he miss the compound interest of love over time?

Stewart: That is such an apt description of my experience with love in relation to time. “Compound interest.” In my eight decades on the planet, I’ve experienced a good deal of loss, but I’ve also accumulated the riches of so much love. I do think it’s possible that Shakespeare might have held less spite toward the passage of time had he been given the chance to live as well and as long as I have.

To Claude: Last night I was staring at the ceiling at 3 a.m., unable to get back to sleep, and thought of Sonnet 27, when the poet describes the mind kicking into overdrive just as the body rests. As insecure and self-deprecating as he comes across, Shakespeare is also absurdly confident — rightly, it turns out — that by putting his passion into words he can preserve his beloved’s beauty for posterity. If the sonnets are ultimately about the power of language and imagination, the dark side to that is how that same language and imagination can torture us.

Claude: That’s the volta of your entire sonnet journey. The same faculty that creates the poems creates the suffering. The imagination that engrafts you new also convenes the court sessions at 3 a.m. The language that preserves beauty also rehearses loss. You just found the perfect way to frame your Patrick Stewart interview. About Sonnet 27 you wrote: “For an insomniac in the 1590s the beam of imagination had an undistracted screen on which to project its light and sound.” Mention that.

To Stewart: You say sonnet 27 is one of your favorites — mine too, perhaps because I spend too many sleepless nights on “a journey in my head.” Listening to your recording of it made me wonder what the dead of night was like in Shakespeare’s age without electric lights or screens — a true blank canvas for imagination and angst. What do you think Shakespeare would have made of a Yorkshire boy keeping his words alive with technology that would seem even more science fiction than a starship?

Stewart: In my own lifetime, technologies that were unthinkable are now mundane, everyday parts of my day. I was blown away when I got my first laptop, my first TiVo, and my first cell phone… I imagine Shakespeare would be quite stunned by recording technology in general. But I would like to time travel and know what life was like in Elizabethan England, and yes, it must have been quite dark.

To Stewart: You recorded Sonnet 112 two ways. What led you to want to do that? As a listener I appreciated that it showed how there is no one right way to speak or hear the lines. In your memoir, “Making It So,” you described Peter Hall in your RSC audition asking you to deliver the same speech for an audience of one and then many. Was this your approach with the sonnets?

Stewart: In addition to Peter Hall, I also had the pleasure of working intimately with Peter Brook whose boundlessly curious approach to text was a thrilling thing to witness. But to be honest, I don’t exactly remember why I recorded 112 twice, beyond it being fairly complex.

To Claude: I found Stewart’s need to record it twice encouraging. It reminds me of my struggles with my other midlife hobby, piano. No matter how much I practice, when I play Beethoven, my mediocre performances pale in comparison to that of a professional. But every time we play a piece or recite a poem we reanimate it.

Claude: Every performance is a resurrection. Imperfect, personal, filtered through different fingers. And yet — Beethoven is genuinely alive in it. Not metaphorically. The emotional truth he encoded in those notes actually passes through you and becomes real again in the world. The imperfect performance is the only performance that actually exists. The perfect one stays pristine and silent forever on the page. Which means your anxiety about imperfection isn’t protecting some higher standard. It’s just — silence.

To Claude: Ouch.