this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2025
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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.