To mark the 409th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and to celebrate his birthday, Hungry Wolf Press released a brand new series; BARD409.
This series takes Shakespeare’s plays and original dialogue and reimagines them as novels by literary giants such as Charles Dickens and Emily Brontë. Using a customised Large Language Model (LLM) to create an accurate and authentic voice, novelist and applied linguist Richard S. Pinner, composed the novels over the course of several intensive months. He has just finished Macbeth and Othello so far, with Romeo and Juliet set to release shortly!
For any tech-sceptics, do not worry, these books have been heavily edited and worked on by a human, yet we used the technology to assist in creating the vivid styles and voices of other beloved writers.
For each novel, Richard created a customised LLM which approximates the voice of the chosen author for each project. For instance, he chose Emily Bronte (his first ever crush!) for Macbeth, because she wrote so well about love, ghosts and the misty moors. For Othello, he turned to Charles Dickens. Each model is fed custom instructions and background information, as well as broader themes.
As a reader, what you need to know is that these books were made through several drafts and painstaking human edits. The motifs and nuances we’re proud of—like the scorpion symbolism in Macbeth or the chess imagery in Othello—were all inserted by hand or via custom instructions.
Therefore, Richard sees his role in these novels as rather like being a conductor at an orchestra. He worries people may think he merely waved his arms around, but actually the entire product is a result of painstaking practice, rehearsal, custom model training and re-tweaking, multiple prompts and then human revision and overwriting. As a result, we’re proud of the books and sincerely hope that you will enjoy them for what they are.
And of course, I am aware that the use of AI takes a toll on the environment, which is why 10% of all proceeds from BARD409 will be donated to ecological charities. It has been a privilege to work on these books and I enjoyed conducting and composing them immensely, I hope you will enjoy reading them.
