How to Read Shakespeare

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How to Read Shakespeare
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1. Its Verse!

• Do not pause at the end of a line
• Short pause
• Comma
• Long pause
• Period
• Colon
• Semicolon
• Dash
• Question Mark

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2. From Start to Finish

• Read from punctuation mark to punctuation mark
• Periods, semicolons, question marks signal the
  end of a thought

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3. Inverted Sentences

• Verb comes before the subject
• Reverse it back!
• Never was seen so black a day as this.
• A day as black as this was never seen.

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4. Ellipsis

• Ellipsis when a word is left out
• I neither know it nor can learn of him.
• I neither know the cause of it, nor can I
  learn about it from him.

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5. Subject, Verb, Object

• Who did what to whom
• The king hath happily received, Macbeth,
• the news of thy success and when he reads thy
  personal venture in the rebels fight
• Subject? Verb? Object?

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5. Continued

• Keep track of pronouns
• He, she, it, they
• Paraphrase main ideas
• Read it out loud!

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6. Literary Terms

• Metaphor
• I have begun to plant thee, and will labour
• To make thee full of growing.
• Allusion
• Reference to person, place, or artistic work

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7. Contracted Words

• Letter has been left out
• Bet ont wi
• Dot t sblood
• gainst taen i
• tis een
• bout knowst twill
• Neer o oer

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8. Archaic Words

• Thee
• Thou
• Thy
• Thine
• Art
• Anon
• Look at the side notes!

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9. Wordplay

• Pun
• Humor
• Two meanings suggested by same word or two
  similar-sounding words
• Malapropism
• Character mistakenly uses a word for another word

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10. Final Thoughts

• Written for the stage
• Shakespeare loved to play with language
• Shakespeare puts all kinds of people on stage
• Read it out loud!