How to Read Shakespeare: A Practical Guide

Why Shakespeare feels hard at first

Shakespeare wrote his plays between the early 1590s and about 1613, and four centuries show in three ways. Some words have dropped out of use or changed meaning. Sentences are rearranged to fit the rhythm of the verse. And the plays are thick with puns, classical references and jokes about the London of the day that the first audiences caught without effort.

Two facts make this less daunting. First, it is Early Modern English, not Old English. Beowulf is Old English and needs translating; Shakespeare's English is recognizably the language you speak, with a modest set of differences you can learn in an afternoon. Second, these were scripts, written for crowds who followed the story by ear. Read a play silently and fast, the way you might read a novel, and you lose the voice, timing and gesture that make it make sense. Read it as a script and much of the difficulty eases.

Choose your first play and the right edition

Start with a play whose plot is easy to hold, so your attention can go to the language. Wherever you begin, read a short summary of the whole play first. Spoilers do not hurt here: many in Shakespeare's audience already knew the story, and knowing where a scene is heading lets you notice how it gets there.

For the edition, look for glosses on the same page or the facing page, a summary before each scene, and an introduction to read afterward. Folger editions put notes on the page facing the text; Arden editions carry fuller notes at the foot of the page, which suit closer study. Line numbers vary slightly between editions, so when writing about a play, use your class's edition and cite act, scene and line in the form 2.2.45.

How to read Shakespeare's language

Most of the strangeness comes from a few patterns. Learn them once and you stop tripping over the same things in every play. Watch especially for false friends: words that still exist but meant something different then, like those in the list below.

• “Wherefore” means why, not where: Juliet is asking why he has to be Romeo, a Montague, not where he is.
• “Presently” means at once, not in a while.
• “Still” often means always or constantly.
• “Anon” means soon or right away; “ere” means before.
• “Would” often means wish, as in “I would I were,” and “an” sometimes means if.
• “Soft” at the start of a line usually means wait, or quiet.

Verse, prose and what the rhythm tells you

Much of each play is blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, about ten syllables with the stress usually on every second one, da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM. You do not need to scan every line. You do need to notice when the pattern breaks, because a rough or broken line often marks strain, and when a character changes mode.

Prose tends to appear in comic scenes, letters, servants' talk and moments of real or feigned madness, while rulers and lovers more often speak verse. It is a tendency, not a rule, and the exceptions are telling. Hamlet drops into prose when he plays mad with Polonius. Iago talks prose to Roderigo as he urges him to put money in his purse, then turns to verse once he is alone. A rhyming couplet often closes a scene like a door shutting, and a verse line split between two speakers suggests the second cuts in without a pause.

A scene-by-scene method for reading a play

Keep the five-act shape in view. Act and scene divisions were partly standardized by early editors, but the plays still tend to turn in the middle: in Hamlet the play-within-the-play in Act 3 catches Claudius, in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio dies in Act 3, Scene 1, and in Macbeth Banquo is murdered in Act 3. Our guides to reading Hamlet and reading Macbeth trace those turns in detail.

Then work through one scene per sitting:

1. 1Read the edition's scene summary so you know what happens before you read how it happens.
2. 2List who is on stage and what each character wants in this scene. Entrances and exits are often where the action turns.
3. 3Read the scene aloud once at a steady pace, without stopping for notes, just to hear it.
4. 4Go back speech by speech. Use the glosses, and write a one-line paraphrase beside every long speech.
5. 5Mark the one line that seems to matter most and write a sentence on why.
6. 6Note anything a performer would have to decide: a pause, a tone, who a character is looking at.
7. 7Before moving on, say in two sentences what changed in the scene.

Read it aloud, then watch it performed

Speaking a line forces you to decide where the stress falls and where the sentence ends, which is often how you find out what it means. Read alone, with a friend taking the other parts, or record yourself and listen back. The punctuation guides your breathing, and the verse is easier to follow heard than seen.

Then watch the scene on stage or film, after your first read so you have your own sense of it to compare. Better still, watch two versions. Productions answer differently the questions the script leaves open: whether Hamlet knows he is being watched in his scene with Ophelia, how comic or menacing Shylock is, whether Katherine's last speech in The Taming of the Shrew is sincere or ironic. Those differences make strong essay material, and our guide on writing a literary analysis shows how to turn them into an argument.