How to enjoy Shakespeare

What your ninth grade English teacher failed to tell you

An English professor named George Soule at Carleton College (my alma mater) appeared on Jeopardy in the early 1990s. He was astounded when the Final Jeopardy category was Shakespeare. He was a Shakespeare scholar! How could he go wrong?

This was the clue:

“The three word title of this play begins and ends with the same seven-letter word.”

Now, there are only so many Shakespeare plays to choose from, but poor George Soule was stumped. He couldn’t come up with the correct answer before the Jeopardy music timed out. He wrote All’s Well that Ends Well, knowing it was incorrect.

(The correct answer is “What is Measure for Measure?”)

Imagine having to go back to your colleagues on the English faculty after having missed a question on Jeopardy about your area of expertise.

The lesson here: even English professors don’t know everything about Shakespeare.

So don’t feel bad if you don’t either.

Far too many students are forced to “read” his plays in high school. They struggle to make it through Romeo & Juliet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and call it quits after that. What’s the point? It’s hard to read and confusing on top of it.

It’s a shame, because Shakespeare really is wonderful, once you get the taste. Here are some helpful tips to enjoying Shakespeare.

Watch a production by a professional acting company

Shakespeare wrote plays. For performance. Understanding Shakespeare is dramatically (see what I did there?) easier when it’s on stage and produced by professionals. Yes, you might get a bad production, but by and large you will enjoy the play more and understand it better when you see it live.

If you don’t live near a theater with professional actors, then your next safest bet is probably a college production, followed by community theater and high school. Shakespeare is hard for actors and directors to get their heads around. They need to understand the script ten times better than the audience. Professionals are more likely to be able to get it right than volunteers.

Also, don’t just go to the famous plays. Even if you’ve never seen or read Hamlet or Romeo & Juliet, you probably know the gist of the plots to them. But maybe you don’t know the plot of The Winter’s Tale or Measure for Measure. Great! I promise you it will increase your enjoyment when you don’t know the ending.

Watch a movie (that uses the original script)

If you can’t get to a play, then watch a movie adaptation. There is nothing wrong with watching Mel Gibson or Ethan Hawke play Hamlet in a movie. Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello, Richard III, and Romeo + Juliet all have at least decent film adaptations. Again, you’ll enjoy Shakespeare more this way than you will trying to read one of these cold.

Watch a movie of a play

Yes, these exist. Your local library might have them. Some stage versions of Shakespeare by great actors and great acting companies were filmed. Stylistically, it can be hard to get used to these, because the kind of acting on stage is much more exaggerated than what we are used to on film. But you can see some great productions of Shakespeare this way and the text will come alive thanks to some of the best Shakespearean actors of the past few decades.

Fine, read him

When all else, fails… go ahead and read Shakespeare. For all of the above ways of enjoying Shakespeare, you shouldn’t need any notes or reading ahead of time, but it might help here. Wikipedia has a synopsis for each play. Sparknotes has summaries broken up into small, so you can only read ahead a little bit and not spoil the whole plot before you start.

Another good option is reading plays on an iPad or other tablet so you simply tap on a word and get its definition.

All too often students are assigned the plays, read them in class and can’t make heads or tails of them. And then as a treat at the end, they get to see the play performed or watch a movie version. Only then does the fun of Shakespeare open up to them. It’s exactly backwards.

Watch Shakespeare first, and if you are inspired afterward, crack open the text and read it again. Your enjoyment will be much greater.