Use it for

First reading of any play, annotation, revision

Works with

Every play and the Sonnets

Keep it

Inside the front cover of your text

Thou and you

Shakespeare’s English had two words for “you”, and the choice carries meaning. Thou is singular and close: used to friends, lovers, children, servants, God, and in anger or contempt. You is plural, or polite and distant. When a character switches from one to the other in the middle of a scene, something in the relationship has changed. It is always worth a comment.

Juliet, alone, asks wherefore art thou Romeo? The intimate “thou” belongs to someone she has already let close.

Verb endings and little verbs

Many contractions are there to keep the line to ten syllables. If a word looks clipped, the metre is usually the reason.

Word order

Shakespeare often moves the verb or the object for rhythm or emphasis. When a sentence will not make sense, find the subject and the verb, then put them back in modern order.

• Read to the full stop, not to the end of the line.
• Find who is doing what. Put it in the order subject, verb, object.
• Skip an unknown word the first time. The sentence often explains it.
• Read it aloud. Actors’ sense of where to breathe is usually right.

False friends: words that have changed

These are the ones that cause mistakes, because they look familiar.

Verse and prose

Look at the shape on the page. Lines that start with a capital and stop short of the margin are verse, usually blank verse. Text that runs to the margin is prose. As a rule of thumb, verse carries formal, public or heightened speech, and prose carries comedy, letters, madness and everyday talk. The rule is loose, which is why a change from one to the other is worth noticing: Lady Macbeth, who commands the verse early in the play, sleepwalks in prose.

Try it

Put each line into modern English. Answers are in the essays linked beside them.

1. O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo? (What’s in a name?)
2. The quality of mercy is not strained. (The quality of mercy)
3. Thou art more lovely and more temperate. (Sonnet 18)

The quickest way to get used to this English is to meet a little of it often. Daily Bard shows one passage a day with a plain-English reading on the back of the leaf, so you can test your own paraphrase against it. For whole plays, start with the study guides, and use the close reading toolkit when you are ready to analyse.