this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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I am always a little surprised that people are so keen to 'read' the plays. People don't seem to have a similar desire to read film scripts.
To me, the obvious thing to do would be to watch a performance. There are plenty available online and, depending on where you live, stage performances are not too hard to find.
Reading it without seeing a performance lacks about 90% of the impact, I'd say. Reading it AFTER you see a perfomance is another matter: then you can pull out the language and take a deeper dive, but see a performance first.
For Shakespeare and other older works, the footnotes in an annotated copy go a long way. Otherwise you're going to miss a lot of allusions and such. You won't get them in a performance, either.
A decent production will account for the audience's ability to digest the Shakespearean language and allusions. There are limits, but if the director and cast did their jobs, then as an audience member you should understand more than enough of the show to account for any particular idioms that you miss. There are a few mistakes that a Shakespeare production can make along the way.
They can produce a completely uncut script. Most Shakespeare will not benefit from a "100% faithful original" production. There will be a ton of references and jokes that were hilarious and totally known to audiences in the 1600s, but which are utterly lost to a modern audience. Or there might be thematic aspects of the text that the director wants to emphasize or diminish. Or the play might just be unmanageably long in its original form. Any of the above are good reasons to do some judicious cutting.
They can take the material too seriously. Shakespeare wanted to put butts in seats, sell meat pies during the intermissions, and please the wealthy patrons. There may well be some high language, but there's plenty of dick and fart jokes, pratfalls, and silly wordplay, even in the tragedies and serious histories. Any production that isn't entertaining the audience isn't doing its job right.
The actors can not fully understand the material. Some of the most important work actors have to do is to study their own lines, not merely for memorization, but for meaning. They have to understand the historical context of what they're saying, they have to understand the exact jokes they're telling, they have to understand that "wherefore art thou Romeo" is not a question about Romeo's current physical location. If the actors aren't intimately familiar with their own words, then they won't understand them, and the audience certainly won't understand them, either.
A production that gets the above right, along with a number of other considerations, will be accessible and enjoyable for any audience that is at least passing interested in what's going on onstage. Reading the text with footnotes is good, and it can certainly give the reader more time to chew on and digest the text, but it's not how it was originally meant to be consumed. One could just as well read an annotated book of Beatles lyrics without listening to the music itself.
Source: over twenty years of theatre performance, mostly Shakespeare.
If my school teachers had given me meat pies and focused on the dick jokes, I think I would have enjoyed Shakespeare much more than I did.
Countless plays have been meant to be read, though, perhaps even Shakespeare's. Yours is a purist stance that tells people to avoid reading possibly excellent texts for the sake of looking for some ideal staging. And besides, do you really have great performances of Shakespeare in your city regularly available?
The comparison with Beatles is off the mark. The Beatles were musicians who deliberately created one specific version of their songs that will stay practically the same forever. Shakespeare was a dramatic writer, he set his art down in writing; the staging is outside of his control, and recounting the history of theater from Shakespeare up to today would show that what we see on stage now has surprisingly little to do with "how it was originally meant to be consumed". Not that it's inferior or false, but it's different.
Heavy disagree here. It has been completely normal to read plays since forever, many dramatists were aware that their texts will be read - extremely obviously in dramatic texts from late 19th c. until today, and it has even been speculated that the variants in the early editions of Shakespeare's plays are a result of him writing one version for reading and the other one, slightly simplified, for performance. Shakespeare himself most definitely read plays (e.g. the influence of Seneca is obvious in Titus Andronicus, and I don't believe anyone was performing his works back in the 17th c.; Seneca is also believed by some to have intended his plays primarily for reading as well).
As for the experience/impact itself, that's very subjective but I have been as affected emotionally and intellectually by plays as any other sort of literary writing. And if you read plays, you don't rely on what the local theaters decide to produce and how they decide to do it - modernised, cut up, badly or well performed..., with the repertoire limited in language and culture of origin. (And I don't mean this to be a criticism of theater, it's just a different beast, a different art form. A lot of interesting contemporary theater doesn't have a dramatic text as its basis at all...)
If something has a diminished impact, it's recorded performances - they're useful as documents and awkward (IMO - unwatchable) as films, I've no idea how people can enjoy them.
Movie novelizations and published screenplays used to be a lot more popular when I was a kid. I read lots of movies, from Adventures in Babysitting (novel) to Raiders of the Lost Ark (screenplay). And we used to pass around Monty Python scripts like .mp4s.