If you have done any Shakespeare, how did you like it?

Question:I have done tons of Shakespeare, and I love it. Here are a few tips to help you better understand his plays:

Shakespeare never said in a sentence what he could use a paragraph to say. Sometimes you are tempted to scream "JUST GET TO THE POINT, ALREADY!", but the poetry IS the point. Shakespear was a poet as well as a playwright, which means you gotta get through some high-falutin' imagery to find the main thrust of the speech.

Shaxper loved puns, and some of his puns are not readily understandable to modern readers. Example: anything to do with horns is hilarious, because if refers to a cuckolded husband.

Shakspere also loved the give-and-take of verbal jousting, so many of the exchanges in his comedies (Benedick and Beatrice, Petruchio and Katarina, etc.) resemble a good swordfight.

And now to the famous bete noire: Iambic Pentameter (Dun dun DUNNNNN). Trust me, once you understand this, you are really close to understanding what you are reading.

An Iamb (EYE-am) is a metrical "foot" with an unstressed first syllable and a stressed second syllable (baBUM). Pentameter is five if these "feet" in a line (Penta is Greek for Five). baBUM baBUM baBUM baBUM baBUM.

"So what?" I hear you cry. Let us look at some famous lines:

to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUEStion
now IS the WINter OF our DISconTENT
o ROMeo ROMeo, WHEREfore ART thou ROMeo
(by the way, "wherefore" does not mean "where". It means "why")
yon CASsius HAS a LEAN and HUNgry LOOK.
i've COME to WIVE it WEALTHiLY in PADua

And so on. Not every line in Shagsper's plays is in Iambic Pentameter, however enough are that learning this meter is extremely helpful.

You may have noticed by now that I have spelled the name of the Bard of Avon at least five different ways. Shakespeare (that spelling) is just an agreed-upon convention by scholars. He himself spelled his name many different ways.

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: I have done tons of Shakespeare, and I love it. Here are a few tips to help you better understand his plays:

Shakespeare never said in a sentence what he could use a paragraph to say. Sometimes you are tempted to scream "JUST GET TO THE POINT, ALREADY!", but the poetry IS the point. Shakespear was a poet as well as a playwright, which means you gotta get through some high-falutin' imagery to find the main thrust of the speech.

Shaxper loved puns, and some of his puns are not readily understandable to modern readers. Example: anything to do with horns is hilarious, because if refers to a cuckolded husband.

Shakspere also loved the give-and-take of verbal jousting, so many of the exchanges in his comedies (Benedick and Beatrice, Petruchio and Katarina, etc.) resemble a good swordfight.

And now to the famous bete noire: Iambic Pentameter (Dun dun DUNNNNN). Trust me, once you understand this, you are really close to understanding what you are reading.

An Iamb (EYE-am) is a metrical "foot" with an unstressed first syllable and a stressed second syllable (baBUM). Pentameter is five if these "feet" in a line (Penta is Greek for Five). baBUM baBUM baBUM baBUM baBUM.

"So what?" I hear you cry. Let us look at some famous lines:

to BE or NOT to BE, that IS the QUEStion
now IS the WINter OF our DISconTENT
o ROMeo ROMeo, WHEREfore ART thou ROMeo
(by the way, "wherefore" does not mean "where". It means "why")
yon CASsius HAS a LEAN and HUNgry LOOK.
i've COME to WIVE it WEALTHiLY in PADua

And so on. Not every line in Shagsper's plays is in Iambic Pentameter, however enough are that learning this meter is extremely helpful.

You may have noticed by now that I have spelled the name of the Bard of Avon at least five different ways. Shakespeare (that spelling) is just an agreed-upon convention by scholars. He himself spelled his name many different ways.

HAted it. I mean you know if you like to read alot cool if not ya gonna hate it.

I didn't like it at all. I found it too hard to understand and decoding what it meant was way too much work.

I played Falstaff in Henry IV part one in college. What a wonderful role.

i always seem to hear that every actor waits for their chance to perform shakespeare, how it's their biggest moment on the stage.
i honestly don't know what they are waiting for.
sure, shakespeare was a great writer, a great poet, someone to show your appreciation for, but quite frankly, i cannot stand his work.
unless you have a deep, deep, connection with shakespeare and his works, you will not enjoy performing it. it's hard to follow and extremely difficult to sight read.

biased opinion.

Some of Shakespeare's work does take a while to wrap your head around. Other parts of his work can be tremendously moving. Some parts can be confusing, and other parts can feel just plain dorky.

A lot of the experience the actor has, and the audience has, depends a lot on how well the director and actors understand Shakespeare and the time he wrote in. For instance -- in both MACBETH and in ROMEO AND JULIET there are strange, out-of-nowhere scenes shoved into the middle of the action where it sounds like someone's trying to be funny about something -- in MACBETH, it's an old night watchman who's supposed to be opening the gate to the castle and let someone in, but instead he is going off on a whole monologue about pee; while in ROMEO AND JULIET there's a brief scene with a servant and a couple of musicians that happens after a tense scene where they all suddenly have a conversation about why people say "music has a silvery sound".

In reading, these scenes may sound like they're clunky and out-of-nowhere; but reading up on Shakepeare's time would tell you that those were scenes that Shakespeare threw in for the "Groundlings", which was a not-quite-that-flattering term for "the people in the cheap seats who may not quite get everthing else that's been going on and may be bored right about now".

Shakespeare takes a different kind of level of understanding as a performer -- my acting conservatory wouldn't let us do any scenes from Shakespeare until our 3rd year of classes, because they wanted us to learn the basics first before we tried something where we'd also have to be paying attention to the rhythm of the words and other nuances. It takes a little more homework at times, but there are plenty of fine and fascinating things to be found in Shakespeare. Granted, there are also some not-so-good moments in Shakespeare -- everyone I've read says that his play CORIALANUS just plain wasn't very good -- but he's got some wonderful stuff, indeed.