This is such a brilliant observation and a tremendously helpful heuristic to bear in mind while reading anything-but particularly Shakespeare! While it dovetails some of the advice in _How to Read a Book_ by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, you phrased it in a much more succinct and memorable manner.
What a brilliant insight Sir !! Thanks.... For the last 2 years I have been reading Shakespeare's plays. And as things progress the plays are becoming easier. I have also been memorizing Shakespeare and keep repeating some of his famous passages in my mind on my morning or evening walks. I am happy, feel fulfilled and feel special as a human. Pardon the general rant.
I remember hearing a method historian talk about her experience of watching a Shakespeare play after spending 3 months living a 16th century lifestyle as part of her research. She said she found she was laughing twice as often as the rest of the audience, and realised it was because so many of the lines referred to small daily things like household chores and daily inconveniences that his audiences would've known well (and she had come to experience), but have since been so lost in time that our 21st century ears don't even register them as a point we're missing. I thought that was super interesting, and also kind of love the thought of a line being picked apart and analysed that is actually a 16th century poop joke, eluding academics for centuries to come.
I used to work for a theatre and you'd always have 'school performances' where high school students studying the play would come. The switch in engagement was amazing. You'd have teenagers who hate reading and hate Shakespeare just have their eyes light up, laugh aloud and understand everything. Even if a school is on a tight budget... I highly recommend splurging to see a LIVE Shakespeare play if you can! The actors breathe so much life into their characters. The atmosphere is incredible - the lighting, the sounds, the costumes, the sets, the props. I remember seeing Macbeth and the whole theatre plunged in and out of total darkness. Even the ones with a modern spin like by Queensland Theatre are terrific.
Fun fact: There's actually a line (can't remember where it is) in the King James Bible where it says something like, "...and he did shake his spear..." which some scholars take as a sly bit of evidence that Shakespeare had a hand in creating the modern Bible.
I really agree. My class was reading Julius Caesar in class before decidedly switching over to watch the Globe theatre production on RU-vid (which is great), and use our books just to follow along. The difference in my understanding and enjoyment was staggering. There were jokes that I certainly would have missed when reading, but found hilarious when they were performed. The drama of Brutus's betrayal hadn't really stuck in my mind until I heard Caesar say "Et tu, Brutus?" aloud. As you said, Shakespeare's plays are meant to be performed. We can sit on our high horses and complain about teenage stupidity while reading Romeo and Juliet, but it's not about that. It's about the drama, and excitement, and the thrill of being young and feeling emotions you've never felt before.
I think I agree with this. Shakespeare is for actors to inhabit his characters and directors to imagine his worlds. We see so many great actors tackle Shakespeare, and so many directors alter the original settings of his plays. That's when Shakespeare really comes alive for me
but for those of us who really like to analyze the heck out of things, Shakespeare can't be beat! I wish I had the guts to perform Hamlet's soliloquy in a park!
I have merchant of Venice for my finals so this was damn helpful Thank you so much:) P.S: if you like the storyline of the merchant of Venice do read the Jew of Malta . Personally I found it more interesting.
I always hated reading Shakespeare in high school, but last summer I actually went saw it performed. It’s crazy how different it is when acted out, much more enjoyable
Recently I've been working on Shakespeare with some students and reading through the script can be quite bewildering - not only does it sound flat but it's hard to know what's going on a lot of the time - you've inspired me to change up my method and use a video of a performance instead!
I actually just wanted to search up how to read a hard book faster but somehow ended up on your video and oh boy I didn't even know these things would be so interesting to me. You make great videos and I love the aesthetic (just the forest and the way you write the journal stories) and I just subscribed
Yeah, plays are definitely a different reading experience than normal prose literature. Modern plays are slightly easier, since most playwrights nowadays use more than just basic stage directions such as "Enter" and "Exit" to describe action. Shakespeare was pretty spartan when it came to that. Eventually I kinda just learned to follow the flow of emotions rather than trying to focus so hard on what's physically happening. I think I would recommend Othello as a good starting point if you wanna read Shakespeare. For some reason I always found that play easier to grasp; the language isn't quite so airy and the emotions are more raw and easy to grasp. I think, at least.
I'm going to make a video about this eventually, but one helpful tip I give is to listen to an audiobook (vs performance, which often abridge) while going through the text.
I've been reading theatrical texts for quite a few years now and must say that during covid it's fun on a Friday night to get into bed a read a shakespeare play, pretend you can go the theater for a while, surprisingly it's true that if you act like reading shakes. is like watching a movie it becomes really fun
I read two of shakespeares works simultaneously in hiigh school. One was for english and I struggled with it the other was in theatre class and absolutely loved it. In english we were trying to analyze every little detail while in theatre we did character analysis and motivations and it absolutely changed how i read it completely and it made me understand how stuff was written with the work I was reading in english class
I had to take an entire course dedicated to Shakespeare for my English Education degree, and I hated it - not because I dislike the plays themselves, but because the academia around him and his works is so pretentious. I came to a similar conclusion - that that is not the lens through which they are meant to be viewed and that a lot of that was retrospectively projected onto his works anyway.
I agree completely. The 5 acts structure, in fact, was imposed on the original playscript by late folios. People miss the point sometimes and forget how down-to-earth and entertaining Shakespeare could be.
I'm taking a class about british plays and the majority of the classes are about Shakespeare. Otherwise, I found myself really enjoying it for my professor follows the post-modernism type of reading and analizing his literary works. Because of that, we do not put shakespeare on a pedestal, but we think of him as being someone not canonical.
watch Vishal Bhardwaj's Shakespeare film adaptation trilogy, one of the best adaptations in the world: Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), Haider (Hamlet)
Id like to add that is it important that Willy Shakes words might have been altered and that the contents of the story still matter even if you shouldn’t take Shakespeare too seriously or read him like an elitist.
I think my way to get it was being in one. I got to play Nick Bottom so might have been a bit lucky since that character is insane. (In a good way), But before you kind of just thought it were long texts about how sad things are
Yo I don't understand a thing you said in this video but I think you a professional in Literature! ❤🎉😊 Congrats Harry Potter!❤🎉😊 (Sorry if I made you feel bad about yourself, it was a joke)
but if you are very new to read any of the plays by Shakespeare for an exam or something, i would suggest getting a book with each page translated into a simpler language along with the original script. i am, at present, studying merchant of venice for my exam and it is actually helping me.
Can you recommend some online book shop to buy collector edition books ? Like the kind you showed a few times in this video, leatherbound Shakespeare and the like. Also, great video mate !
I understand the point about using the manual as "stage instructions" for a performance. That's interesting. What confuses me is the structure of the language. There are entire sequences of narration so full of ancient english "wherefore art thous" and "methinks" , etc. that it's almost worth taking a college course for each play, merely to understand what's being said.
One thing i wanna say: Please stop giving shakespeare book for examinations. Like for real please stop it. Ain't no way that is real english. I mean let the past english be there. Why don't they give us something good. It's so awful man 😢😢
Your advice is terrible. I agree not to read it like a novel but a lot of your advice is just the worse awful. When I was girl of 15 the actual plays were impossible to find and there were no DVDS or VCR etc, so I listened to them on records, following with book but then there were an entire series of his plays on TV and I loved them, but you really really need to learn his language to understand what he was trying to say. For your generation I suggest the Globe plays if at all possible. They aren't that expensive.
you seem to have gotten a reaaallllyyyyy wrong idea about how one should deal with shakespeare. idk who your target audience is, regardless, its hilarious how everyone else in the comments seem to agree with you.
