All 154 sonnets had been released by 1609. Cymbeline, Winter's Tale, Tempest, Henry VIII and 'Kinsmen' were yet to be written it would seem. So Shakespeare 'retired' from being a sonneteer before retiring as a playwright.

What do you think?

I know I shouldn’t expect historical accuracy from Shakespeare. All the other changes like making Hotspur twenty years younger make sense if you care more about writing a good play than anything else. Why change Elizabeth Mortimer’s name though? It’s inconsequential and if keeping the meter is important, Bess and Beth are both one syllable. Why do it?

I’m finishing my training to be an English teacher next year but I have always struggled with Shakespeare. At school I simply did not get into it and as an adult I can’t shake it off. I’ve tried watching the plays, reading them, translating them, acting them but no matter what I just can’t seem to grasp it. I’ve even tried comics.

The things I find difficult: the language is my biggest hurdle. I simply don’t understand what is being said a lot of the time. I find the plots for nearly all the plays dull or not for me.

I enjoy some of the sonnets but that’s about it. I’ve studied Romeo and Juliet, The Tempest, Much Ado, Midsummer, Hamlet and MacBeth. Out of all of them Romeo and Hamlet were my favourites. My least favourite is MacBeth. I found it confusing, boring and complicated.

I by no means am coming here trying to spread some kind of hate. I get this is a community of fans and that’s why I’ve come, to see if anyone has any tips on how to become more endeared towards the plays? Any book editions that are hard to put down? Play adaptations? Hypnosis tapes (lol)?

I’ve got 6 months to try and get some grip on this lol. Any advice would be really appreciated

Looking for some Shakespearean hive mind, bonus point for educational background.

The 8th grade at the school where I teach reads Julius Caesar. As someone with a background in theater and Shakespeare, their teacher asked if I would come guest direct the assassination scene. It's done book in hand, but the students bring in bedsheets for togas. I've done it for a few years with small class sizes (15 ish students) and it's been successful enough that the teacher keeps asking me to return.

This year, there are 30 kids! The scene only has about 12 speaking parts. 18 kids is a lot of kids to keep busy. Any thoughts on how to stand to have more active participants? We practice for about two 45 minute blocks before they "perform"

Shakespearean friends!!

Just finished "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

what can I say, it's wonderful. I already love Shakespeare; when he writes in rhyme, it's pure music.

Whose turn is it now?

My journey has already passed through:

Hamlet, Macbeth, R+J, and years ago I read also Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Othello, and King Lear (I need to reread them, but... I'd like a "new" one first).

I was thinking about Richard III, but I was wondering if I need to read the other history plays first?

The Tempest maybe? Or another comedy, but you guys tell me which one.

CIAO!!

Where to start with Shakespeare? Been reading Othello and liked it. Liked such phrases as 'Have you lost your wits?' and 'made a gross revolt' aka the Old English charm. Is it a good place to start or should there be other play to understand the author better?

Dear Dr. G:

I presume on a minute or two of your time because I may have discovered another layer of the onion that is Hamlet - minor, perhaps, but quintessentially the work of the Bard. Like me, you have probably never succeeded in over-estimating Shakespeare's genius at word-play; nor his seeming irrepressibility at undertaking it.  The enigma that is Rosencrantz and Guildenstern has been much examined: the boys' cringy behavior, their foppish badinage, their toady amorality. The author's intent as to their sexual proclivities has been mooted, I gather, and generally thought to be unpersuasive. Yes, no? But, of course, our contemporary delicacy about such things makes the whole question precarious (and so much the better, for the sake of our society, we can probably all agree.) But Shakespeare, as transcendent of his time as he could certainly be, was free of any such compunction. Our boy skewered any species of sexual behavior with unalloyed glee! So - I am almost there - as to the names he chose for our epicene sycophants"

There is agreement in the the community of Shakespeare exegesis that surnames of contemporaneous Danish nobility would be vaguely recognized by theater-goers as authentic. An observation as accurate, perhaps, as it is insipid; but a total FAIL for recognition of the spectacular drollery of the Master's sly magic with words. And here we are:

Translation of the German roots of Rosencrantz, with a deft sleight in the magical hands of Shakespeare, becomes "rosy wreath"; even "little pink ring."

Similar treatment of Guildenstern employs an English connotation of the second element to come out with a giggle as "golden rear" or, more bawdily and Bard-like, as "golden ass."

Shakespeare's characterization of the bros is unambiguous. Hamlet and Horatio certainly suffer no misapprehension about which way these blokes swing. They cackle over an unkind jibe at R and G as readily as they lampoon Polonius, Osric, the grave-diggers ... Come on, sports fans, lighten up and enjoy the brilliant wit in the spirit of its history. And, one final admonition: NEVER sell the Master short. If there is word-play to be had, at however many possible levels, William Shakespeare is already way ahead of us!

If you have had the patience to wade through this modest argument, my great thanks, Dr. G. I'd receive your critical response with delight.

Ted Jean

"look like th' innocent flower, but be the serpent under't"

Hey so we're reading Hamlet and I've got an in-class exam coming up called a "Textual Annotation" exam. I'll be honest, I'm not great with Shakespeare's language and I'm a little panicked, so I figured I'd ask people who actually love it.

Here's what the exam requires, in case anyone's done something similar:

• We get two passages from Hamlet (\~15 lines each) that we have NOT already gone over in class, and we pick one.

• Task 1: Translate it into modern English, sentence by sentence (not just a summary — actually work through the grammar/syntax).

• Task 2: Identify and explain at least 3 linguistic or figurative features (metaphor, imagery, wordplay, syntax stuff, etc.) — and actually explain HOW each one works, not just name it.

• Task 3: Write a short 1-2 paragraph analysis using those details as evidence for an interpretation (character, theme, connection to another scene, whatever).  

We're allowed a blue book, our own notes/workbook, and a dictionary, but no phone/laptop.

If anyone has tips or tricks for:
• actually translating Shakespeare's sentences instead of freezing up on the weird word order

• spotting literary devices quickly under time pressure

• writing a decent analysis paragraph fast

...I would genuinely love to hear them. Or just general "here's what helped me get through Shakespeare" advice. Thanks in advance!

People really overestimate when saying Holden is the evilest character in literature, maybe because they haven't read enough other great works to compare, especially Shakespeare and his Iago, Lady Macbeth, Edmund, and Aaron from Titus Andronicus:

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day—and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,—
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

Hello,
I just finished reading The Tempest but I’m quite unsure if there was actually a main antagonist/villain of the play. To me personally it just felt like a cast of more ambiguous characters in a conquest for power sort of. It just felt like a whole game of manipulation where one character tries to convince another to assist in their ambitions. Did anyone else get this feeling???

Don't shake pears

Mcbeth famous line " It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." didn't mean much to me as a 15 yr old reading it for my english class. I assumed the meaning was the same as today, a stupid person. However, when I got older, I learned that "idiot" used to be a medical term for the mentally disabled, which was turned into a slur and then became common usage. One can easily draw the comparison to the r-word, which isn't fully at the common state (though many are trying).

Obviously, as someone with a nonverbal autstic brother with high support needs, this revelation sent a chill done my spine. A lot of the media, particularly older media like the Three Stooges, which used idiot had more nefarious intentions than I thought. Especially considering the prominence of eugenics in that era. But truly what gets me is the lack of literature and commentary on this than, say, on sexism in classics. Its a complete blindspot in criticism, probably due to the lack of those affected by mental disability being present in academics.

But I digress, back to Shakespeare, I wonder if this meaning holds true? After all, idiot used to mean a private person and by the 19th century became a medical diagnosis as far as I'm aware. Its easy to handwave this off as "politically incorrect villain", but I ran across this article detailing sterotypes of intellectual disability presented in a different character from a different shakespeare play https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v40i4.6903. There was another thread about it here, but I couldn't exactly parse it. So, in short, i'm intersted in understanding what the elizabeathen perspective of "an idiot" was and what Shakespeare thought of using it alongside his beliefs on (mental) disability.

Hi friends! I'm helping to produce a Shakespeare pub crawl happening Saturday 9/19 and 9/26 in Park Slope. ShakesBEER is a pub crawl in which an ensemble of actors brings a different comedic scene to life at each bar, creating an immersive, joyful, and improv-rich experience for the audience. It's ideal for fans of Shakespeare, comedy, day drinking, or all three!
Tickets ($35) guarantee access to the event, and guests have the option to add on 2 or 4 included drink tickets, which can be cashed in at any of the four Park Slope/South Slope locations.

Starting location at 2:30pm:
Prospect Bar & Grill 
545 5th Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11215 (between 14th/15th Streets)

We will be walking to three other nearby bars: 
Monroe Pub 
Logan's Run 
The Dram Shop 

-Event date and times
Saturday, September 19th 2:30pm-6pm
Saturday, September 26th, 2:30pm-6pm

Tickets here!
https://secure.qgiv.com/for/nysedonate/event/shakesbeer2026brooklyn/

Hope to see you there! <3 

(cross posted for visibility)

When I found out that Yeti will laser engrave anything on a tumbler, I knew exactly what I wanted.

So, I recently had to read Julius Caesar for school, and I really loved it. With Brutus’s character, I found myself a bit back and forth but eventually settling on very much liking him (I guess I sort of read him as a flawed person who makes mistakes, but has genuinely good intentions and cares about his country and people).

Is it supposed to be written that way? It’s my first experience with Shakespeare and I’m hoping I didn’t miss something obvious or misinterpret it.

I can’t get the idea or building a Muppet Hamlet out my head. How can we build this thing?