One year at UNH I considered auditioning for a production of Much Ado About Nothing. It would have been the first time I was on stage since high school. The night before the audition I found a passage from Love’s Labour’s Lost I thought I’d recite the next day. I quickly discovered that it takes more than just a couple of silent readthroughs to be able to fully understand one of Will’s soliloquys. I was out on the Hetzel Hall porch past midnight reading the lines aloud and still my effort felt rushed and futile. I didn’t know what many of the words meant. I wasn’t going to have time to flesh out the attitude of the text. I didn’t really know the story of the play it came from so I couldn’t put it in context. In the end, I didn’t even go to the audition. (I know, I know… chicken…)

Will’s words sound goofy the first ten times you speak them aloud. Like when your Spanish teacher makes you read a paragraph from your textbook outloud for the class. It takes years of practice before you can do a cold poetry reeading and nail it.

Do not wait until study hall on the day of the audition to peruse your Shakespeare passage. You can’t even read it aloud in study hall. You might as well be admiring the artwork on the cover of the playbook. Give yourself some time to get down and dirty with Will before you try to be a host to his words.

That said… Good luck, Tom!

I think we need to stop kidding ourselves: Shakespeare is confusing and boring out of context.

I can’t blame people for wanting to share their readings of famous passages from the plays; once you fall in love with these stories you want other people to love them, too, but you know they won’t sit down and read/watch/listen to the whole play so you try to feed them monologues: little kernels of enjoyment from the larger picture, Quality of Mercy or Romeo, Romeo, Wherefore Art Thou. Hell, I’ve memorized a couple of monologues myself and occasionally try to force them on people. But you know what? They don’t care. Because they don’t know what’s going on around the monologue. They don’t know the story. They’re not attached. You can’t enjoy the Saint Crispin’s Day Speech unless you’ve marched to Agincourt with Henry’s hungry men. You can’t enjoy To Be or Not to Be unless you’ve anguished with Hamlet over the death of his father.

I almost tried recording some of The Bard’s monologues and posting them for you to enjoy. But then I realized you wouldn’t enjoy them. No, if I’m going to give you something then I should give you something you can actually wrap your head around.

We’ll see. I’ve got some ideas.

If you’re going to put someone through 90 seconds of Shakespeare, let them hear a sonnet. Those, at least, are meant to stand alone.

How to Speak Shakespeare

Often times puns and alliterations that would have passed you by will pop into plain view when you read the plays aloud, so even if you don’t go crazy and buy a book about reading the plays out loud, try it yourself. It will sound silly at first, but the longer you read, the more you start to “get it.” It was reading Twelfth Night aloud that got me hooked on The Bard.

How to Speak Shakespeare briefly addresses the poetic form of the majority of Will’s works: iambic pentameter. It starts you off by having you read the prologue from Romeo and Juliet in the tedious “da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM, da DUM” pronunciation. Had the book stopped there, I would have chucked it in the proverbial fire. But the reason I like the book, so far, is that it proceeds to explain to you why you should never read Will’s poetry like that. The reason? It’s boring! Predictable patterns aren’t entertaining or exciting. People want to be surprised; shocked; moved. The best way to read Shakespeare is to learn what an “iambic foot” is and then forget it. When you’re reading Shakespeare, forget you’re reading Shakespeare. You can always tell a bad Shakespeare actor when it sounds like they’re reading poetry when they speak.

Here are some things you might to do avoid “bad Shakespeare acting”:

1. Go to Open Source Shakespeare, copy some lines from a play, paste them into a word processor, then remove all the line breaks. Make it all one big paragraph. Then read it. Forget that it’s poetry. Pretend it’s prose.
2. Watch Ken Brannagh’s Much Ado About Nothing and pay attention to how Denzel Washington speaks. Then pay attention to how Keanu Reeves speaks. Denzel sounds like he’s talking to you in your living room. Keanu sounds like he’s reading poetry.
3. Get yourself worked up before you read Shakespeare out loud. If you’re angry or upset you’ll naturally stress the syllables and words you’re supposed to stress.

Have fun!