Let’s be honest about something.
The first time most people open a Shakespeare play — really open it, not flip through it looking for the quotes they already know — something happens that nobody warns you about.
The words are English. Technically. There is no question about this. The letters are arranged in familiar patterns. The sentences begin with capitals and end with full stops. And yet.
The meaning slips away from you like water through fingers. You read a line three times and cannot say with confidence what it is saying. You follow a speech for four lines and lose the thread. You get to the end of a scene and realise you are not entirely sure what just happened, or who was talking to whom, or whether what you understood was right.
And then comes the feeling. The creeping, deeply uncomfortable feeling that you are not intelligent enough for this. That other people read Shakespeare and simply understand. That there is some key you were never given, some frequency you cannot tune to, some fundamental capacity for this particular kind of reading that you simply do not possess.
Here is the most important thing I am going to tell you in this entire post: How to Read Shakespeare Without Feeling Lost
That feeling is not a sign that you cannot read Shakespeare. It is a sign that you are reading Shakespeare the wrong way.
Because Shakespeare was not written to be read. Not in the first instance. Not in the way you read a novel, silently, alone, moving your eyes across a page from left to right, constructing the world of the text in the privacy of your imagination.
Shakespeare was written to be performed. To be spoken by actors who had rehearsed the words until they inhabited them completely. To be received by an audience who was watching bodies in space, hearing voices in the air, following action that was physically present before them.
When you read a Shakespeare play silently from a page — and encounter difficulty — you are not failing to read. You are using the wrong instrument for the job. It is like trying to understand music from a score when you have never learned to read notation.
This guide will give you the right instruments. All of them.
By the time you finish reading this post, Shakespeare will feel different. Not easy — it is not easy, and anyone who tells you it is hasn’t really engaged with it. But accessible. Alive. The way it was always meant to be.
Why Shakespeare Feels Difficult — The Real Reasons
Understanding why Shakespeare is difficult is the first step to overcoming the difficulty. There are four main reasons, and each has a specific solution.
Reason 1: The Language Has Changed
Four hundred years have passed since Shakespeare wrote. In that time, English has changed significantly — in vocabulary, in grammar, in idiom, in the meanings of individual words.
Some words that appear in Shakespeare are simply no longer used: marry (an oath), prithee (I pray thee, meaning “please”), forsooth (in truth), anon (at once), hark (listen).
Some words are used in senses that have since changed: awful meant inspiring awe, not terrible. Brave meant fine or splendid, not courageous. Sick meant longing, not ill.
Some grammatical structures are unfamiliar: the use of thou/thee/thy for singular address (compared to you/ye for plural or formal address); verb endings like dost, hast, canst; the placement of not after the verb (“I know not” rather than “I don’t know”).
The solution: A good annotated edition. The footnotes on every page will explain archaic vocabulary and grammatical structures as you encounter them. The Arden Shakespeare, the Oxford Shakespeare, the New Cambridge Shakespeare, and the Penguin Popular Classics editions all have useful notes. You do not need to memorise archaic vocabulary. You need to be comfortable using the footnotes without feeling like cheating. Using footnotes is not weakness. It is how the text is designed to be read.
Reason 2: The Verse Form Is Unfamiliar
Shakespeare writes primarily in iambic pentameter — lines of ten syllables, alternating unstressed and stressed beats (da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM da-DUM). This is the most natural English speech rhythm, which is why Shakespeare chose it. But reading it as prose — ignoring the metrical pattern — makes the language harder to follow, not easier.
When you read verse as prose, you lose the emphasis the metre provides. You miss the deliberate departures from the metre that indicate emotional stress. You cannot hear when a character is speaking in verse versus prose — a distinction that is almost always significant.
The solution: Learn to scan a line of iambic pentameter. It sounds more technical than it is. Read the line aloud and mark the natural stresses. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” — try it. Shall-I / com-PARE / thee-TO / a-SUM / mer’s-DAY. Five iambs. Ten syllables. The rhythm becomes audible almost immediately with practice.
We covered iambic pentameter in detail in [100 Most Important Literary Terms Every English Honours Student Must Know] — go back to that post’s Section 4 for the full explanation.
Reason 3: You Are Reading Instead of Watching
This is the most fundamental difficulty — and the most completely solvable.
Shakespeare’s plays exist in language. But they were designed for performance. The language is the blueprint, not the building. When you read a speech silently from the page, you are reading the instructions for something that is meant to be spoken, moved, embodied, and received in real time.
Many things that seem opaque on the page become immediately clear in performance. The emotion behind a speech — which tells you what the words mean even before you understand their literal content. The physicality of scenes — who is where, who is watching whom, what the blocking tells you about power and vulnerability. The comedy — which almost never reads as funny but almost always lands when spoken by a skilled performer.
The solution: Watch before or alongside reading. This is the single most transformative thing you can do.
Reason 4: You Don’t Know the Story
Reading a play while simultaneously trying to follow the plot and understand the language is doing two difficult things at once. Both suffer.
If you already know what is going to happen in a scene — if you already know who dies, who lies, who loves whom — you can give your full attention to the language of the scene. Which is where all the richness is.
The solution: Read a synopsis first. Not instead of reading the play. Before. Know the plot completely. Then read, watch, or listen to the play itself with that knowledge freeing you to attend to what actually matters.
Deep Insight:
The original audiences of Shakespeare’s plays at the Globe Theatre were not encountering unfamiliar stories. Most of Shakespeare’s plots were taken from existing sources — histories, Italian novellas, earlier plays — that his audience already knew. Hamlet was a well-known story before Shakespeare wrote his version. The audience knew Hamlet would die. They came not to discover what happened but to experience how Shakespeare told it — the language, the character, the theatrical machinery. You should approach the plays the same way.
The Step-by-Step Method: How to Actually Read a Shakespeare Play
This is the practical core of the guide. Follow these steps in order and the experience of reading Shakespeare will be fundamentally different.
Step 1: Read the Introduction to Your Edition
Every good edition of Shakespeare begins with an introduction — typically twenty to forty pages — that covers the play’s sources, its theatrical history, its critical reception, its major themes, and the key debates about interpretation.
Read this before you read a single word of the play itself.
I know it feels like delay. It is not delay. It is preparation that will make every subsequent hour of reading more productive.
The introduction tells you: — What stories Shakespeare borrowed and what he changed — When the play was written and what the historical context was — What the major critical arguments about the play are — What to look for as you read
An hour with the introduction is worth three hours of confused reading without it.
Step 2: Read a Complete Plot Summary
After the introduction, read a complete, detailed plot summary — scene by scene, not just the overall arc.
SparkNotes, CliffsNotes, and similar resources have scene-by-scene summaries. Use them here. This is exactly what they are for.
Know who dies. Know who is disguised. Know the revelation of the final act. Know who betrays whom and when. Know the twist.
This is not spoiling the play. This is preparing to read it properly.
Step 3: Watch a Production — Before Reading
Before opening the play itself, watch a production. Even just the first act, if time is limited.
For each major play, here are the most accessible productions:
Hamlet: Kenneth Branagh’s 1996 film — complete text, four hours, magnificent. Available on streaming platforms. The RSC’s 2009 production with David Tennant — filmed for BBC, available on YouTube. The best Hamlet of the modern era for many scholars and students. The National Theatre’s 2015 production with Benedict Cumberbatch — filmed and released in cinemas; widely available now.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The RSC’s 2016 production directed by Erica Whyman — beautifully staged. The 1999 film with Michelle Pfeiffer and Rupert Everett — accessible, visually inventive. The Globe Theatre’s 2013 production — recorded live, available on Globe Player.
Othello: The National Theatre’s 2013 production with Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear — one of the finest Othellos filmed. Available on DVD and streaming. Oliver Parker’s 1995 film with Laurence Fishburne — excellent for students new to the play.
King Lear: The National Theatre’s 2014 production with Simon Russell Beale — outstanding. Available on streaming. Jonathan Miller’s BBC production with Michael Hordern — slower but deeply thoughtful.
The Tempest: Peter Greenaway’s 1991 film Prospero’s Books — highly experimental but visually extraordinary. The RSC’s 2016 production with Simon Russell Beale — grounded and moving.
Macbeth: Justin Kurzel’s 2015 film with Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard — extraordinarily atmospheric. The RSC’s 2007 production with Patrick Stewart — filmed for television. Stunning.
Online resources: The Globe Theatre’s Globe Player (www.globeplayer.tv) has professionally filmed productions of many plays. The National Theatre’s NT at Home platform (ntathome.com) includes many Shakespeare productions. YouTube has complete BBC Shakespeare productions from the 1980s — dated in production values but complete in text.
Step 4: Read Act by Act — With the Text and Notes
Now open the play itself. And read it act by act, not scene by scene.
Read a complete act, using the footnotes for vocabulary you don’t know, then pause and summarise what happened in that act in two to three sentences in your reading journal. (We covered the reading journal method in detail in [How to Make Notes for English Literature Subjects].)
As you read, ask these questions at the end of every scene:
What just happened? (In literal plot terms) What did the language do? (Was there a particularly striking image, a moment of beautiful or disturbing language?) What did this scene reveal about a character? What question did this scene raise that the next scene might answer?
These four questions are a complete close reading framework. They will generate material for essays, seminar contributions, and examination answers.
Step 5: Read Aloud — Every Significant Passage
For every speech that matters — every soliloquy, every major declaration, every scene where you sense something important is happening but can’t quite grasp it — read it aloud.
Not to perform it. Not with dramatic emphasis. Simply to hear it.
The rhythm of iambic pentameter becomes immediately more accessible when spoken than when read. The natural emphases the metre creates become audible. The emotion encoded in the verse becomes available to you through your voice before your analytical mind has had time to process it.
This sounds simple. It is simple. It is also transformative. Do not skip it.
Step 6: Return to Key Passages for Close Reading
After you have read a complete act and understood what happened in it, return to two or three passages for close reading — the kind of careful, analytical attention to specific language that we described in [How to Make Notes for English Literature Subjects].
For close reading of Shakespeare, the questions are:
What is this character saying, literally? (Paraphrase in modern prose) What is the emotional state of the character as they say it? What specific words or phrases are doing the most work? Why? Is the metre regular or irregular at this point? What does that tell you? What images or comparisons appear? What do they suggest beyond their literal meaning? How does this passage connect to the play’s larger themes?
These questions, applied to any significant passage, will generate more analytical material than any secondary source can provide. They are the questions of a genuine literary mind, and they are the questions that examination essays and seminar discussions are built from.
Understanding Shakespeare’s Language — Practical Tools
Beyond the general method, here are specific tools for the most common language challenges.
How to Understand a Soliloquy
Soliloquies are the most important passages in Shakespeare — and, paradoxically, often the most difficult to read on the page. They are a character alone (or apparently alone), thinking aloud, revealing their interior state directly to the audience.
Three-step approach to any soliloquy:
Step 1 — What is the character’s situation at this moment? Before engaging with the language, establish the dramatic context. What has just happened? What decision or problem is the character facing?
Step 2 — What is the argument? Most soliloquies have an argument — a movement of thought from one position to another, or around a problem. Map the argument in rough prose: “First he says X. Then he considers Y. Then he concludes Z.” Even an approximate map helps enormously.
Step 3 — Where is the emotional peak? Find the line or phrase where the language is most intense — where the imagery is most vivid, where the metre is most disrupted, where the feeling is most raw. That is the heart of the soliloquy.
Applied to “To be, or not to be” (Hamlet III.i):
Situation: Hamlet has been told by the Ghost to revenge his father. He has spent months unable to act. He is now alone (or believes himself alone — Ophelia is nearby, and Claudius and Polonius are hiding).
The argument: Is it nobler to endure life’s suffering passively (“To suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”) or to resist it actively (“To take arms against a sea of troubles”)? But death — the logical resolution — is unknown and therefore terrifying. The uncertainty of what comes after death is what makes cowards of us all.
The emotional peak: “The undiscovered country from whose bourn / No traveller returns, puzzles the will” — the image of death as an undiscovered country encapsulates the entire problem in one compressed, beautiful phrase.
Notice: this is not a speech about whether to commit suicide, as it is often misread. It is a speech about whether to act — whether the fear of unknown consequences should prevent action. The entire play is about this question. The soliloquy is its philosophical centre.
How to Read the Wordplay
Shakespeare’s wordplay — puns, double meanings, sexual innuendo — is some of the richest in English literature. It is also the thing modern readers most consistently miss, because many of the puns depend on historical pronunciations or archaic slang.
A few principles:
Expect the puns. Shakespeare’s characters, even in tragedies, play with language constantly. When a word seems slightly odd, or slightly over-emphatic, consider whether it might carry a double meaning.
Use footnotes for sexual innuendo. Much Elizabethan sexual wordplay depends on slang that is no longer current. Good editions footnote this. Don’t be embarrassed by it — Shakespeare’s audiences found it hilarious, and understanding the comedy is part of understanding the play.
Recognise the function of the Fool. In tragedies like King Lear, the Fool’s wordplay is not comic relief — it is the play’s truth-telling mechanism. The Fool says through jokes what cannot be said seriously. Pay close attention to everything the Fool says.
How to Tell Verse from Prose
Shakespeare switches between verse and prose throughout his plays — and the switch is almost always significant.
The general rule: High-status characters — nobles, kings, educated people — tend to speak in verse. Low-status characters — servants, working people, clowns — tend to speak in prose.
But the exceptions are where things get interesting: A character who normally speaks in verse switching to prose signals a change in emotional state — often madness (Hamlet’s “antic disposition,” Ophelia’s madness, Lear in his breakdown). A character speaking in prose when we expect verse signals intimacy, informality, or irony. The mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream speak in prose — except when they perform their play-within-the-play, when their badly-managed verse becomes a comic device.
How to tell them apart on the page: Verse lines begin with capital letters regardless of where they fall in a sentence. Prose does not follow this convention. Verse lines have consistent length (ten syllables approximately). Prose lines run to the page margin.
How to Follow a Long Speech
Long speeches in Shakespeare — Ulysses’ speech on degree in Troilus and Cressida, Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day speech, Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” — can feel overwhelming when you encounter them in isolation.
The paragraph method: Most long speeches in Shakespeare are organised into informal paragraphs — each one developing a distinct point before moving to the next.
Read the speech and identify the turning points — the moments where the argument shifts, where the speaker moves to a new idea, where the imagery changes. Mark these points. Then summarise each “paragraph” in one sentence.
You now have a map of the speech. The details will make more sense with the map visible.
The Major Plays — A Quick Orientation Guide
For each major Shakespeare play you are likely to study, here is the essential orientation: what it is really about, what the central question is, and what one thing to absolutely not miss.
Hamlet
What it is really about: The impossibility of certain knowledge in a world where appearance and reality are perpetually in conflict — and what that impossibility does to the capacity for action.
The central question: Not “will Hamlet revenge his father?” but “can any action be justified in a world where you cannot be certain of what is true?”
Do not miss: The play-within-a-play scene (III.ii). Watch Hamlet’s face as he watches Claudius watch the Players. The entire epistemological problem of the play is concentrated in that moment.
Full guide: [Hamlet Explained: The Prince Who Thought Too Much]
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
What it is really about: The relationship between love, imagination, and reality — and the role of art (specifically theatre) in giving form to what reason cannot contain.
The central question: “Are lovers and madmen and poets all imagining things — and if they are, what is the value of what they imagine?”
Do not miss: Theseus’s speech on the lover, the lunatic, and the poet at the opening of Act V (V.i.1-22). It contains the play’s philosophical key.
Full guide: [A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Magic, Love, and Beautiful Chaos Explained]
Othello
What it is really about: The destruction of trust — and the specific vulnerability of a person who has had to construct their identity in a world that does not naturally grant them belonging.
The central question: “How does Iago do it? What specific weaknesses does he exploit, and what does that tell us about love, race, and the nature of self-knowledge?”
Do not miss: The handkerchief scene (III.iii) — the moment where Iago plants the first concrete image of infidelity in Othello’s mind. The speed with which Othello moves from trust to suspicion is the play’s most disturbing achievement.
King Lear
What it is really about: The stripping away of everything — title, family, sanity, shelter — until the essential human being is exposed. What is left when everything is removed?
The central question: “Is there justice in the universe? Does goodness have any protection against cruelty and power?”
Do not miss: Lear on the heath in the storm (III.ii). “Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks!” — this is the externalization of a completely shattered self. And the death of Cordelia (V.iii) — “Never, never, never, never, never” — which we explored in [The Most Heartbreaking Deaths in English Literature].
Macbeth
What it is really about: The psychology of ambition — and what happens to a person who achieves what they wanted through means their conscience cannot justify.
The central question: “At what point does Macbeth become irredeemable? Is there a moment where a different choice was still possible?”
Do not miss: The dagger soliloquy (II.i.33-64) and Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene (V.i). Together they trace the arc of the play’s psychological horror — the imagined dagger at the beginning, the real blood that cannot be removed at the end.
The Tempest
What it is really about: The relationship between power, art, and freedom — and the ethics of control.
The central question: “Is Prospero a benevolent artist-figure or a colonial tyrant? Or both simultaneously?”
Do not miss: Caliban’s speech about the island (I.ii.332-344): “This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, / Which thou tak’st from me.” This is the play’s counter-narrative, and postcolonial readings have made it central. Read it as a protagonist’s speech rather than a villain’s.
Romeo and Juliet
What it is really about: Not just young love — but the relationship between love, time, and the social structures that destroy what they cannot contain.
The central question: “Who is responsible for the tragedy? The lovers? Their families? Fate? The city of Verona itself?”
Do not miss: The balcony scene (II.ii) — not for its romance, which everyone knows, but for the speed of the language. Romeo and Juliet speak in sonnets together. Their first conversation (I.v) is a complete Shakespearean sonnet, shared between them. This formal choice is Shakespeare’s most concentrated piece of characterisation through form.
The Merchant of Venice
What it is really about: The limits of mercy — and the question of whether a legal system built on Christian mercy can be applied fairly to those it excludes.
The central question: “Is Shylock a villain or a victim? And why is this question impossible to answer simply?”
Do not miss: “Hath not a Jew eyes?” (III.i.58-73) — the speech that every student of the play must reckon with. It is simultaneously a devastating statement of shared humanity and a prelude to a declaration of revenge. The complexity is the point.
Learning to Love Shakespeare — The Longer View
Here is something that takes time to understand, and that no guide can fully communicate:
The difficulty of Shakespeare is not a barrier to appreciation. It is the beginning of it.
The plays that reward the most reading — the plays that serious scholars, serious actors, and serious readers return to year after year and continue to find new things in — are the difficult ones. Hamlet is difficult. King Lear is difficult. The Tempest is difficult.
They are difficult because they are complex — because they refuse to reduce to simple meanings, because they hold contradictions without resolving them, because they ask questions that have no clean answers.
The ease of the first encounter is not the measure of a play’s quality. The inexhaustibility of a text on the fifth, the fifteenth, the fiftieth reading is the measure.
Every scholar who has devoted their professional life to Shakespeare — and there are many — will tell you that the plays keep opening. That something you thought you understood reveals a new dimension. That a line you have read fifty times suddenly means something you hadn’t noticed.
Deep Insight:
The director Peter Brook, who has staged Shakespeare productions for over seventy years, once said that he returned to the plays not because he had mastered them but because they continued to resist mastery. “Shakespeare,” he wrote, “is always ahead of us.” The goal is not to arrive at a complete understanding. The goal is to keep moving toward it — and to find, in that movement, something extraordinary at every step.
The Recommended Reading Order for First-Year Students
If you are beginning Shakespeare from scratch, or if you want to build your confidence before tackling the most demanding plays, here is a recommended reading order:
Start here (most accessible): A Midsummer Night’s Dream — the comedy, the magic, and the formal experimentation in a relatively short play Romeo and Juliet — a story you already know; attend to the language Julius Caesar — simpler language than the major tragedies; a clear political argument
Then move to: Othello — psychologically the most straightforward of the great tragedies Macbeth — the shortest and most kinetically driven of the tragedies Hamlet — the longest, most complex, most rewarding
When you are ready: King Lear — the most demanding and arguably the greatest The Tempest — requires everything you’ve developed to appreciate fully Measure for Measure — the most ethically complex and philosophically challenging
A Personal Reflection: The Moment Shakespeare Became Real
I want to tell you about the first time Shakespeare became something other than a text to be studied.
I was seventeen. I was reading Hamlet — or trying to — for the third time, for an examination. I had read the notes. I had read the summary. I had read two critical essays. I thought I understood it.
And then I came to Act V, Scene ii. Hamlet, about to enter the fencing match that he knows might kill him. He says to Horatio: “If it be now, ’tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come: the readiness is all.”
I read it once. I read it again.
And something happened that I cannot fully describe — a kind of stillness. A recognition.
The readiness is all.
Not victory. Not safety. Not certainty about what comes next. Just readiness. The willingness to be present for whatever arrives.
I was seventeen and I had not yet experienced anything that made those words necessary. But I understood, with complete certainty in that moment, that I would. That there would be moments in my life when the readiness would be all I had to offer.
Shakespeare had told me something true. Not about Hamlet. About my life.
That is the moment I stopped trying to study Shakespeare and started trying to understand him.
The two activities are completely different. And this guide is an attempt to move you from the first to the second.
Summary: Your Complete Shakespeare Toolkit
| Challenge | Solution | Time Required |
|---|---|---|
| Archaic vocabulary | Annotated edition + footnotes | Ongoing |
| Verse form difficulty | Read aloud; learn iambic pentameter | 30 minutes of practice |
| Unfamiliar as read text | Watch a production first | 2–3 hours per play |
| Not knowing the plot | Read synopsis before the play | 30 minutes |
| Difficult soliloquies | Three-step method: situation, argument, peak | 15 minutes per soliloquy |
| Long speeches | Paragraph method: map the argument | 20 minutes |
| Wordplay and puns | Footnotes; expect and look for them | Ongoing |
| Verse vs prose | Learn the convention; mark the switches | Developing over time |
| Feeling lost generally | Read introduction first; read act by act | Ongoing |
A Warm Closing from Literary Whispers
Shakespeare is not a monument to be admired from a distance. He is not a test of intelligence that some people pass and others fail. He is not the property of scholars or actors or anyone with a special credential.
He is a writer — the greatest writer in English — who spent his professional life trying to understand what it means to be human, and putting everything he understood into plays that were performed for everyone: the educated and the illiterate, the powerful and the powerless, the young and the old, the heartbroken and the joyful.
He wrote Hamlet for you. He wrote King Lear for you. He wrote the balcony scene and the storm on the heath and Ophelia’s flowers and Shylock’s “Hath not a Jew eyes” and the readiness is all and we are such stuff as dreams are made on — for you. For everyone who would encounter the plays and be willing to stay with them long enough to hear what they are saying.
The difficulty is real. Use the tools in this guide. Watch a production. Read aloud. Know the plot before you read the poetry.
And then be patient. Be willing to encounter something you don’t fully understand and stay with it rather than moving past it. That willingness — what Keats called Negative Capability — is the beginning of everything.
Shakespeare will meet you there.
He always does.
Which Shakespeare play are you studying right now? Tell me in the comments — I’ll point you to everything we have on this site that will help.
Share this post with every student who has ever said “I don’t get Shakespeare” — this is the guide they needed.
With love and ink, Literary Whispers.
Where literature feels like home.