How to Read Shakespeare: Where to Start and How to Follow the Language
The first line of Richard III seems straightforward: a winter, some discontent. Then the sentence crosses into the next line and changes the picture:
Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this son of York,
Richard is describing a season of misery transformed into triumph. Stopping at the printed line ending leaves the thought unfinished; the word Made supplies the transformation. Before we have learned anything about the Wars of the Roses, one small reading habit has already altered what the speech says.
Separate the work into three tasks: follow what is happening, untangle the sentence, and listen for what one speaker wants from another. On a first reading, keep the action in view. We can return to a dense image once we know who is threatening whom, which promise is being demanded, or why somebody has suddenly fallen silent.
For a straightforward beginning, choose Macbeth if you enjoy psychological suspense, or Much Ado About Nothing if verbal sparring draws you in. Read one scene in an annotated edition, hear it spoken, then return to the passage that caught your attention. That small circuit is enough to begin.
Examples below discuss situations in early scenes of Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, and Macbeth. They do not reveal the endings.
Which Shakespeare play should you read first?
Start with a story you would want to see onstage. Curiosity about a murder, a courtship, or a contest for power can keep you reading through a puzzling speech.
If you enjoy… | Start with… | Keep track of… |
Murder, fear, and supernatural temptation | Macbeth | What Macbeth wants, what he fears, and how his wife pressures him. The early military reports can be dense. |
Flirtation, sharp replies, and romantic comedy | Much Ado About Nothing | The two courtships. Beatrice and Benedick’s sparring shares the play with a cruel public accusation against Hero. |
Magic, theatrical mishaps, and comic confusion | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | The four young lovers, the fairy rulers, and the amateur actors as separate groups before their stories intersect. |
Political persuasion and public opinion | Julius Caesar | Who wants influence over whom, and what each speaker’s version of events leaves out. |
Disguise, desire, and mistaken identity | Twelfth Night | Viola, her assumed name Cesario, and her twin Sebastian. The comedy also includes harsh treatment of Malvolio. |
My default recommendation is Macbeth: its concentrated central conflict gives a new reader a strong reason to keep going through the compressed imagery. For comedy, I would choose Much Ado and read Beatrice and Benedick’s exchanges aloud with somebody else.
If Hamlet is the play you want, begin there. Its extended arguments and changes of direction reward patience, and a performance can help hold the court’s relationships in view. There is no prerequisite sequence. A chronological tour of Shakespeare’s career can wait until individual plays have given you reasons to care about its development.
Choose an edition you can actually read comfortably
A good first edition keeps explanations close to the passage: unfamiliar words, compressed grammar, mythological references, and the occasional joke whose second meaning has disappeared from ordinary usage. Open a sample scene before choosing. If finding a gloss repeatedly pulls you away from the dialogue, try a layout with facing-page or bottom-of-page notes.
The Folger Shakespeare texts offer a free starting point, with play introductions and online reading guides. Their printed editions add explanatory notes alongside the text. You can begin online and decide later whether you want a physical copy.
Read the cast list and the opening scene’s situation. A short plot summary is helpful if losing the sequence of events makes reading exhausting; choose a scene-by-scene summary when you prefer to avoid learning the ending in advance. Save a long critical introduction for afterward if it begins prescribing what every scene must mean.
A modern-English paraphrase can untangle a sentence. Having recovered its basic sense, return to Shakespeare’s wording and notice what the paraphrase has compressed: a hesitation, an insult with two targets, a comparison that grows stranger as the speech continues.
Read the encounter before decoding every word
At the start of a scene, establish four things: who is present, who can hear the exchange, what has just happened, and what somebody wants now. A speaker list alone cannot tell us who is pretending, who is overhearing, or who has been left onstage to absorb an insult.
Stage directions help, including the small ones. Exit means one person leaves; exeunt means several leave. An aside is conventionally heard by the audience and sometimes a specified character, while others onstage are treated as unable to hear it. In a soliloquy, a character speaks thoughts aloud, often alone; even then, the speaker may exaggerate, rationalize, or change position.
Keep a tiny cast note if names blur: “Lady Macbeth—Macbeth’s wife”; “Cesario—Viola’s disguise.” Add a relationship when it changes. A crowded family tree is unnecessary for a scene involving two people negotiating a promise.
After the scene, try one plain sentence about its result: somebody agrees, refuses, learns a secret, or leaves under a mistaken impression. When the result remains unclear, reread the final exchange before returning to every unfamiliar word near the beginning.
Follow the sentence across the verse lines
In the opening of Richard III, the grammatical core is “the winter … is … made glorious summer.” Read the two quoted lines together, carrying the sentence over the line break. Richard credits the change to a “son of York,” his brother Edward IV; the sound also lets son suggest sun, sustaining the seasonal image.
The word order places “Now” first and separates “is” from “Made.” Rearrange the words in your head to work out the sense, then say the original aloud and hear the turn at Made. This is especially helpful when several clauses intervene between a subject and its verb.
When a passage becomes tangled:
Read through to the end of its sentence, using punctuation to orient you.
Locate the main verb and the person or thing attached to it.
Temporarily set an interruption or description aside.
Reconnect it, then reread the original order aloud.
Punctuation is a guide, and editions sometimes punctuate differently. At a line ending, a slight pause may suit the rhythm even when the sentence continues. Begin with the sentence’s sense; experiment with the line’s rhythm once the words hold together.
Familiar vocabulary can cause as much confusion as obsolete vocabulary. In Juliet’s speech in Act 2, scene 2, she asks:
O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?
Wherefore means why. Her next words concern his father and his name: she is asking why the person she loves must belong to the hostile family. One corrected gloss reconnects the question to the entire speech.
Check a word when your reading makes the situation implausible, or when the whole exchange seems to turn on it. An unfamiliar adjective can sometimes wait; a misunderstood command, kinship term, or pronoun can scramble the action. Shakespeare’s Words provides a specialist glossary for those checks.
Learn a few recurring forms, then listen for changes
These forms become familiar quickly:
Form | Basic help |
Thou | Singular “you” as the subject: “thou art” means “you are.” |
Thee | Singular “you” as an object: somebody speaks to thee. |
Thy / thine | Forms corresponding to “your” and “yours”; usage varies with the construction. |
Art / hast / dost | “Are,” “have,” and “do” with thou. |
Hath / doth | “Has” and “does.” |
’Tis / ’twas / e’en / o’er | “It is,” “it was,” “even,” and “over.” |
The choice between thou and you can also carry a relationship. Thou may express intimacy, contempt, or an address to somebody of lower rank; you can mark respect or distance and can address one person or several. David and Ben Crystal’s guide to the pronouns supplies examples and cautions about assigning a single attitude to them.
Notice a switch, then test it against the exchange. Has affection become anger? Has a public formality been dropped? Who has the power to speak familiarly? The words before and after the switch help us decide; sometimes more than one reading fits.
Hear verse and prose without turning them into a code
Verse is printed in deliberately shaped lines; prose generally runs to the page margin. Much of Shakespeare’s dramatic verse is blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentameter, built around five units in which an unstressed syllable is followed by a stressed syllable.
Once our ear expects the beat, we can hear where a pause, an extra syllable, or a changed stress unsettles it. Read a passage naturally before attempting to scan it. Forcing every line into the same five-beat march can distort both the sentence and the speaker’s intention.
For a first reading, notice changes you can hear: a rushed accumulation, a pause in the middle of a line, a rhyme that rounds off an exchange, or a line whose rhythm seems unexpectedly interrupted. Then ask what is happening in the conversation. A metrical variation alone cannot establish that a character is frightened or lying.
Verse and prose also depend on the encounter. Social rank contributes to their use, alongside intimacy, wit, ceremony, and shifts of tone. In Twelfth Night, Viola’s speech changes form with her situation and the person she addresses; the RSC’s language analysis offers passages to compare. Read what Viola says before and after the switch, with her listener and purpose in mind.
Work through one speech as an action
In Macbeth, Act 1, scene 7, Macbeth has told his wife he intends to abandon their plan to kill King Duncan. Lady Macbeth answers with a taunt:
When you durst do it, then you were a man;
First recover the literal sense. Durst means dared: she says he was a man when he dared to undertake the deed. The paired words when and then make his manhood depend on his willingness to kill.
Macbeth has tried to end the discussion; she reopens it by making refusal humiliating. In the margin, “shames him into continuing” records the immediate tactic. A broad label such as “masculinity” leaves that exchange only partly explained.
Try two deliveries: emphasize durst, then man. The first taunts him for losing his nerve; the second denies his claim to manhood. Either emphasis must fit the surrounding argument. Reading aloud gives us a way to test how those pressures combine.
Finally, follow his response and the rest of the scene. Does the pressure secure agreement immediately, provoke another objection, or force a new tactic? This keeps a famous line attached to the person answering it. It also prevents us from treating a character’s coercive argument as Shakespeare’s own pronouncement.
The same practice travels across the plays. In a love scene, a compliment may solicit a promise. In a political scene, an apparent concession may make the next accusation more persuasive. Give the speech an action verb—coaxes, threatens, evades, bargains—and revise that verb when the next reply defeats it.
Use performance, then choose your next play
In performance, an actor groups the words, chooses a pace, and reacts to the other speakers; a filmed scene also lets us watch faces and gestures. Read a scene, watch or hear the same scene, then return to the text. Following along with audio is equally legitimate if hearing the sentences first helps you stay with them.
Check whether a production cuts or rearranges the passage before blaming yourself for losing your place. When an actor’s emphasis surprises you, find the words supporting it. Another performance may make a different choice: a joke can be affectionate or cruel, a pause strategic or uncertain. Compare the readings against the scene’s actions and replies.
For your next session, keep the task small: one scene, its immediate result, and one passage worth hearing twice. Consult notes where the action depends on them. Leave a question mark beside an image you want to revisit; finishing the scene may supply the missing context.
After Macbeth, try Julius Caesar if persuasion held your attention, or Hamlet if you want more extended self-questioning. After Much Ado, choose Twelfth Night for disguise and unevenly returned desire; choose A Midsummer Night’s Dream for several groups colliding in a more openly fantastic world. Sonnets offer a separate route into concentrated language, though a short poem can still hold tangled sentences and an intricate argument.
Readers drawn to competing voices can continue with how to read Dostoevsky’s dialogues. For the next Shakespeare scene, carry one question back to the page: what does this person need the next person to do? Follow the answer through the sentence, then listen to the reply.
Sources and further reading
William Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 1, scene 1; Romeo and Juliet, Act 2, scene 2; Macbeth, Act 1, scene 7. Quotations follow the Folger Shakespeare texts, edited by Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, with Michael Poston and Rebecca Niles. Act and scene references remain usable across editions; line numbering may vary.
Barbara Mowat and Paul Werstine, “Reading Shakespeare’s Language: Romeo and Juliet”. Guidance on vocabulary, sentence structures, compression, and wordplay.
David and Ben Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words: “Thou and you”. Pronouns and their social and emotional possibilities.
Royal Shakespeare Company, Twelfth Night: Language analysis, and Macbeth: Language analysis. Speech, dramatic motive, verse, prose, and rhythm.
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