READING & TEACHING A SHAKESPEARE PLAY:
Table of Contents
Reading & Teaching a Shakespeare Play: Getting Started
Resources that support reading and understanding a Shakespeare’s play for the first time Includes defini�ons, as well as both text and theatre-based exercises for improved comprehension and understanding plot and characters/their mo�va�ons.
1 The Basics: Shakespeare’s Words, Krista Apple
A resource for teachers and students alike which introduces some of the noncontemporary uses of language that you’ll find in Shakespeare’s plays.
5 How to Read a Shakespeare Play, Julie Crawford
Close reading practices to get the most out of a first reading of a Shakespeare play
8 Exploring Shakespeare’s Language: Paraphrase & Transla�on as learning tools, Krista Apple
A guide, including exercises, to using paraphrasing and translation as tools to understanding the language in Shakespeare’s plays
10 Exploring Shakespeare’s Language: Paraphrase & Transla�on, Krista Apple
A companion handout to the previous document to practice paraphrasing and translation
12 Exploring Shakespeare’s Language: “Reading” with Punctua�on, Krista Apple
A guide, including exercises, to using punctuation to “shape” thoughts and ideas in Shakespeare’s texts
16 Introduc�on to Scene Analysis, Claudia Zelevansky
A guide to using “given circumstances” (a theatrical term) to understand character and what is happening in a scene
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THE BASICS: Shakespeare’s Words
A primer to reading and comprehension
Krista AppleBelow is a resource for teachers and students alike which introduces some of the non-contemporary uses of language that you’ll find in Shakespeare’s plays. Knowing what you’ll encounter along the way can improve your ability to navigate and interpret the text!
Verb Tenses: Contraction, Expansion & Elision
Since Shakespeare was writing in verse and rhythm, he took liberties with word length. Here are some word forms that were common in Shakespeare’s day, and that you’re guaranteed to come across:
Contraction is when a two-syllable word (“over”; “even”) gets condensed to one syllable (“o’er”; “e’en”).
Elision is like contraction on steroids: two full words that get smushed together into one word and syllable: “On it” becomes “on’t”; “It is” becomes “’Tis”.
(Today, contraction and elision remains in words like don’t [do not], can’t [cannot], etc.)
Expansion is just the opposite: a word gets stretched, and an extra syllable gets added at the end. You’ll know expansion by its trademark: an accent mark over the final syllable.
Banishèd (normally pronounced BA-NISHD; now BA-NI-SHED)
Deliverèd (normally DEE-LI-VRD; now DEE-LI-VU-RED)
Other words you might come across
In addition to contracted, elided and expanded words, here’s a brief list of words common in Shakespeare’s day to become familiar with, along with typical pronunciations:*
Adieu = “goodbye”
uh-DYOO
Ay / Aye = “yes” / word of agreement rhymes with ‘eye’
Doth = “does”, as in “she doth protest” same vowel sound as ’cup’
E’en = “even” one syllable – “eeyun”
Ere (“before in time / when in time”) rhymes with ‘hair’
Err (“to mistake”) same vowel sound as “bird”
Liege (“lord, sovereign” rhymes with ‘siege’
Ne’er (“never”) rhymes with ‘hair’
Sirrah (“sir)
SEAR-uh
Troth = (“truly”) rhymes with ‘oath’
Trow = (“swear”) rhymes with ‘know’
Other pronunciations –
Amen (ahhh-MEN)
Either/neither (EYE-thur, not EE-thur)
I’ll (as in “aisle”)
Leisure (LEH-zur, not LEE-zur)
Our (like “hour”)
Poor (POO-er, one syllable; not like “pour”)
Your (YORE, not ‘yer’
Created by Krista Apple, Associate Professor of Acting, and the TFANA Education Team, 2023 Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & PerformancePronoun & Verb Forms
• [You – your – yours] often becomes [thou – thee – thy – thine]
• The endings [-est, -‘st or -st] often gets added in second person familiar (“you go” becomes “thou goest”)
• The ending [-s] often gets replaced with [-th] in third person singular (“she goes” becomes “she goeth”)
• The articles [a, an, and the] also often get dropped.
• And there are the odd verb forms:
So….
You are wonderful becomes Thou art wonderful You were the most wonderful
Thou wast most wonderful Give me your hand
You all should return home
Give me thy hand
Thou shouldst return home
My love wast thine, and thine alone I give them all to you
My love was yours, and yours alone
“Words, words, words”
I give them all to thee
When Shakespeare couldn’t find the right word for what he wanted to express, he just made it up! As a result, his plays included many words that had never been recorded in writing before (though many may have been in the vernacular). We believe he coined many of the words and phrases we use today, including:
accessible accommodation
admirable amazement
anchovy arch-villain assassination barber
baseless bubble to cater (as “to bring food”)
catlike to champion
circumstantial clutch
cold-blooded
coldhearted colourful to comply courtship critical day’s work to dishearten to dislocate
downstairs to educate
embrace (as a noun – ‘a hug’) employer & employment engagement
epileptic eventful exposure eyeball farmhouse fashionable fortune-teller full-grown to grovel
half-blooded hint (as a noun)
hostile
hot-blooded to humor to hurry
ill-tempered impartial to impeded inaudible
indirection indistinguishable invitation lackluster lament to lapse
laughable love letter madcap majestic manager marriage bed
misquote money’s worth monumental moonbeam
motionless muddy to negotiate
never-ending noiseless to operate outbreak
Created by Krista Apple, Associate Professor of Acting, and the TFANA Education Team, 2023 Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance
Scholar James Shapiro describes Shakespeare’s process as chemistry: he would smash two existing words together to make a brand new one (“eyeball”; “bedroom”). His tendency to expand a word or smush two words together to fit the poetic meter, as discussed above, was also part of his invention. He was messing with the English language in a way that none of his contemporaries were doing.
Listen to James Shapiro on NPR’s Radiolab (22 minutes into the program): http://www.radiolab.org/story/91728-words-that-change-the-world/
Exercise: Invent a word that doesn’t exist – but should – to describe something about your current day-to-day experience.
References: Shakespeare often references some or all of the following, so be prepared to reference them:
Greek & Roman mythology / Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The story of the Trojan War / Homer’s Iliad & Virgil’s Aeneid
The workings of the natural world – plants, trees, birds
Body humors (considered scientific fact at the time)
Music of the Spheres and the Great Chain of Being
Word Order
A mark of Shakespeare’s artistry was his manipulation of word order. It’s new for us, reading it; and, in ways, it was also new for his time. It was part of his innovation: that the English language of poetry didn’t have to follow the rules everybody thought/said it did.
Manipulating word order served two main purposes:
• It allowed the structure of his plays to mirror the structure of Latin grammar, which was the popular thing to do at the time
• It allowed him to fit the structure of metrical rhythm, while still saying what he wanted to say.
Created by Krista Apple, Associate Professor of Acting, and the TFANA Education Team, 2023 Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance
From Wikipedia’s entry on Word Order:
In Latin, the endings of nouns, verbs, adjectives, and pronouns allow for extremely flexible order in most situations. Latin lacks articles (a/an/the)
The Subject, Verb, and Object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often the verb comes last.[28] Factors such as topic and focus play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question:[29]
• "Romulus Romam condidit." ["Romulus founded Rome"] (What did Romulus do?)
• "Hanc urbem condidit Romulus." ["Romulus founded this city"] (Who founded this city?)
• "Condidit Romam Romulus." ["Romulus founded Rome"] (What happened?)
In Classical Latin poetry, lyricists followed word order very loosely to achieve a desired scansion.
So:
“I saw your son walking early this morning” becomes “So early walking did I see your son.”
“He’s been seen there many mornings” becomes “Many a morning hath he there been seen.”
“Do you mean the king?” becomes “Mean you his majesty?”
“Are you riding this afternoon?” becomes “Ride you this afternoon?”
Exercise:
Describe an event from your day yesterday, intentionally inverting word order for dramatic/linguistic effect.
Exercise: Tell a friend how much you appreciate them, using thee/thy/thine.
Exercise: Find all the unfamiliar language in your text. Make notations in your text as necessary to make it ‘familiar.’
Created by Krista Apple, Associate Professor of Acting, and the TFANA Education Team, 2023 Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance
HOW TO READ A SHAKESPEARE PLAY
Julie CrawfordIt takes at least 3 hours to read a Shakespeare play, and even then you’ll only get the gist. If you don’t mind spoilers, I recommend that you read a plot summary first (although don’t believe it!) and then the play. Read the play once for story and theme, and then once again according to your own readerly sensibilities and noting the following:
1. Each character’s first lines. They often serve as an index of a character. See, for example, Hamlet’s “A little more than kin and less than kind.”
2. Characters’ entrances and exits. While act and scene breaks are often editorial interventions, characters’ entrances and exits often give us a lot of crucial information about character, plot and theme. Note, for example, Lady Macbeth’s entrances, particularly after Macbeth claims he has “no spur/To prick the sides of [his murderous] intent” (1.7).
3. Embedded stage directions. See, for example, King Lear’s “Give me that map there,” Othello’s “this handkerchief is too little,” Desdemona’s “Why do you speak so startingly and rash?” and Macbeth’s “Look to the Lady!”
4. The play’s prop list, which is indicated primarily through embedded stage directions. The props in Romeo and Juliet, for example, tell a great deal about the arc of the play: a transition from torches and masks to crowbars and poison. (Note for example “Give me that mattock and the wrenching-iron” [5.3.22]). See as well Brutus’s line, “Look, Lucius, here's the book I sought for so;/I put it in the pocket of my gown. (4.2.302-3), which indicates a less-noted theme in Julius Caesar, and the ambiguity of Macbeth’s “Is this a dagger which I see before me,” which opens up a range of interpretive and performance possibilities.
5. The Image sets associated with specific characters or places. Note, for example, the contrast between Macbeth’s “borrowed robes” and Banquo’s organic, vegetal metaphors.
Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities, Columbia University.
Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance
6. Key words. Oft-repeated and thematically-important words in Hamlet include “dispatch,” “kind,” and “matter”; in King Lear, “superfluous,” “poor,” “nothing”; in As You Like It, “brother,” “cousin,” and “even.” Use the Oxford English Dictionary to research words that you sense might have meant something (surprisingly) different in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than they mean now. Examples include “conceit,” “maid,” “effeminate,” “character,” “glass” and “fashion,” “gossip,” and “friend.”
7. When and which characters speak in prose, blank verse and rhymed verse (and what kind of verse. Note, for example, the difference between the verse spoken by Phoebe and Orlando in As You Like It). A great way to teach the differences between verse and prose is via the first scene in King Lear, in which Gonoril and Regan shift from (“glib and oily”) verse to (brutally truth-telling) prose.
8. Metrical completion. When one character completes another’s line of iambic pentameter, Shakespeare is often telling us something about intimacy or enmity.
Note, for example, Kent’s interruption of Lear’s rant at Cordelia:
LEAR As thou my sometime daughter.
KENT
Good my liege – .
Note as well a crucial exchange between Macbeth and Banquo which illustrates their moral differences:
MACBETH If you shall cleave to my consent, when 'tis, It shall make honour for you.
BANQUO So I lose none
In seeking to augment it, but still keep My bosom franchised and allegiance clear, I shall be counsell'd (2.1).
Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities, Columbia University.
Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance
Or this one, between Malcolm and Macduff:
MALCOLM Dispute it like a man.
MACDUFF I shall do so; But I must also feel it as a man (4.3.219-22)
A note on editions. Scholarly editions of the plays are useful for their introduction and notes. Popular ones include Oxford World Classics, Arden, Norton, and Folger. (I have taught using all four. Folger editions are the least expensive.) The Bedford “Texts and Contexts” include primary documents. (They don’t have editions for all the plays, but see their Romeo and Juliet for an example.) You can find all the plays – and all the factual information about Shakespeare’s life –on the Folger Library website, for free. You can examine what is known as the First Folio, the collection of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623, as well as “quarto” editions (referring to the number of times a sheet of paper was folded – four! – to make a pocket-/pamphlet-sized book) that were published as stand-alone volumes, often immediately following successful performances. Some plays, including Romeo and Juliet, King Lear, and Hamlet were published in more than one quarto edition, thus the monikers Q1 and Q2, which you often see in scholarly editions. You can also get a general companion to Shakespeare in book form. (I like this one.) There are also useful reference volumes on topics of particular interest including race and sexuality.
Created by Professor Julie Crawford, Mark van Doren Professor of Humanities, Columbia University.
Inspired by TFANA’s 2022 NEH Institute: Teaching Shakespeare’s Plays through Scholarship & Performance
Created by Claudia Zelevansky, czcoaching.com