How To Read Shakespeare
Begin to trust your own intuitions. Shakespeares use of punctuation was very different he used it to signal how each line should be delivered.
His characters run the gamut of.
How to read shakespeare. Shakespeares plays are also the best training ground for actors and performing in one will put your skills to the test and likely help you develop new ones. The di-dum becomes a dum-di. It is due mainly to Shakespeares grammar.
This is not primarily due to the intermittent archaic words or to words which have changed their meaning. The Word and the Action is a great introduction to Shakespeare that will leave you with a better understanding and appreciation of his works and the confidence to begin interpreting them on your own while Comedies Histories and Tragedies examines the greatest plays of the three major genres in which Shakespeare worked devoting two lectures to each play to better grasp the important themes of each. Shakespeare hasnt made a mistake.
Purchase a Well-Edited Edition. Clues in the Punctuation. This video explains how to read a Shakespearean play.
It has however a. This is a common technique where an iamb is inverted. Read it Out Loud.
Read the Play Twice. The historical plays are really like one long series a bit like Game of Thrones so youll get a lot more out of reading them in order. That distinction is accentuated where Shakespeare writes in verse.
One issue often overlooked is that Shakespeares plays were written as dramatic literaturemeant to be performed and heard aloud not silently read. In fact Shakespeares grammar viewed in its entirety is wonderfully precise. My recommendation is to read the Shakespeare plays generally considered his best first but with the caveat that the historical plays will be read in order.
1 day agoListen for meaning over the course of a line. If you are going to be reading Shakespeare outside of a classroom setting you cannot just buy any old edition. The most Shakespeare you absorb the more the plays will resonate and the greater will be your own poetic reach.
Verse allowed Shakespeare to write lines with a poetic rhythm crafted for the stage. Trying to read and understand the work of William Shakespeare can be intense so I made this whistle-stop tour of his sonnets and plays with an introducti. Lines without punctuation naturally seem to.
Punctuation forces the reader to pause and slows down the pace of the text.
