Fairly common question, but what, in /lit/'s opinion, are the best tools for doing so, assuming my starting point is struggling to comprehend his use of the English language?
Your best entry point is to simply watch his works portrayed as plays, as they were intended. Then read his scripts dissect how he uses language.If his prose is what your after, then read his sonnets.Yuyuko SEX
>>25281765Picture the voice of hitler or lenin or an old hollywood starlet or someone like that when youre reading it
>>25281765Uuuoooooooohhhhh
>>25281765Watch the Kenneth Branagh Shakespeare movies.The Laurence Olivier Shakespeare movies. His King Lear and The Merchant Of Venice are free on YouTube.Also The Taming of the Shrew 1967 and Romeo and Juliet 1968All are on piratebay except King Lear and Merchant of Venice (Laurence Olivier)Also of course Julius Caesar with Marlon Brando and Antony and Cleopatra by Charlton Heston are on piratebay. Oh yeah and Macbeth 1971.I'd say start with Julius Caesar.
>>25281765I watched hamlet first then I read it many times then I started memorizing the lines I like.
>>25281765Shakespeare uses old English, so it’s better to read something newer, like LOTR, Harry Potter, or any book about something you like.
>>25281806>Kenneth BranaghHack, and the proof of that is that he always casts himself as the lead. Except in Othello where he cast himself as Iago
>>25282078Lol how is casting himself as the lead proof of him being a hack? If you don't like his performance you can say that but I think he did a magnificent job. Olivier I think is better but the Branagh movies are more visually beautiful, especially his Hamlet. And his Much Ado About Nothing is one of the best. Barely noticed that Denzel Washington was black.
>>25281765Oh yes and how could I forget Orson Welles' Shakespeare movies. Get them with subtitles. They were meant to be watched as a performance. Don't read them unless you're really studying them. Ain't nobody got time for that!
>>25281765shakespeare is a writer you reread, not a writer you read. you don't read hamlet once and go "ah, now I've read hamlet," you read, see, watch, listen, etc hamlet for the rest of your life in different forms -- sometimes as a movie, sometimes as a play, sometimes as a modern novel adaptation, etc. to that end, when you read a shakespeare play for the first time, you have three and only three goals: 1. get to the end 2. know who the main characters are and a little about them 3. know the general drift of the plot. if you can do those three things, congrats. successful first readthe rest is repetition in different forms; you'll watch a movie adaptation and you'll pick up that when hamlet's talking about "trappings" and "appearances" he usually means the clothes that someone's wearing. you'll watch a play and see that hamlet genuinely hates ophelia in their last conversation together, the disgust on the actor's face. you'll read the play for the fourth time and see how frequently hamlet draws comparisons to the crucifixion. etc, etc, etcnobody "gets" shakespeare 100% on their first read and anyone pretending they do is lying. now that being said, the more shakespeare you read the easier he gets to read -- you start developing a feel for how he constructs metaphors, how he uses implication and assumptions, how he'll make the same point twice in a row with different language, that sort of thing. reading hamlet when you've never read shakespeare before is hard; reading hamlet when it's your 10th shakespeare play is much easiera good critical edition helps. honestly, Folger is fine for general use. it's really fine. Arden is what you want once you get past intro shakespeare studies, or OWC, but Folger is fine for 90% of cases. if you're looking for one-volume collections of his work, get either the Bevington, Riverside, or Norton, and steer clear of the Arden/Oxford one-volume collections -- they're great for individual plays but atrocious for everything between two coverspicrel is the single best one-volume shakespeare crit you can buy. essays on each play, index for major works of criticism on all aspects of shakespeare/all the plays, recommended film adaptations, you name it. the introduction alone is worth the price of the book
>>25281962>Shakespeare uses old EnglishNo he doesn't. Why do people say this? He uses Early Modern English. This is Old English>Hwæt. We Gardena in geardagum,>þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon,>hu ða æþelingas ellen fremedon.>Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum,>monegum mægþum, meodosetla ofteah,>egsode eorlas. Syððan ærest wearð>feasceaft funden, he þæs frofre gebad,>weox under wolcnum, weorðmyndum þah,>oðþæt him æghwylc þara ymbsittendra>ofer hronrade hyran scolde,>gomban gyldan. þæt wæs god cyning.This is Middle English>Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,>The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,>And bathed every veyne in swich licóur>Of which vertú engendred is the flour;>Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth>Inspired hath in every holt and heeth>The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne>Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,>And smale foweles maken melodyeAnd this is Early Modern English>O, that this too too solid flesh would melt>Thaw and resolve itself into a dew!>Or that the Everlasting had not fix’d>His canon ‘gainst self-slaughter! O God! God!>How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable,>Seem to me all the uses of this world!>Fie on’t! ah fie! ’tis an unweeded garden,>That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature>Possess it merely. That it should come to this!Basically if you look at the text and you can't read it at all, it's Old English. If you can kinda-sorta read it, it's Middle English. If you can read it, it's Early Modern English. "Old English" does not mean "English spoken a long time ago." It's an ancestor of English but it's a separate language. Retard.
>>25282545This is the arden? quick search over at libristo wields hundreds of results
>>25282574That's the Arden Complete Works, which isn't the one you want. Arden is a publishing house that issues individual editions of Shakespeare's work. So there's an Arden Hamlet (three of them actually, every so often they reissue a play with newer criticism/scholarship), an Arden Sonnets, an Arden Midsummer, etc. Like I said, if you're new to Shakespeare, you don't want the Arden. You want the Folger. Arden's too much at this stage
>>25282579Oh got it. When you say you don't want the Arden as a "beginner", what does it mean exactly? Too technical, presupposes prior deep knowledge to get etc?
>>25282591Mostly too technical with some presupposition tossed in. Arden assumes that you're going to be doing serious, scholarly work on the play you're reading, so its apparatus is geared towards that -- dense, small print, layered commentary that assumes you're familiar with the general shape of Shakespeare criticism/Elizabethean England/etc. Folger assumes you're someone who likes to read and is curious about Shakespeare. You'll want Arden eventually, but not to start with. OWC is a good middle ground between the two -- the Henry plays edited by Bevington are particularly good, if you're curious
heaven's face doth glow over this solidity and compound mass with heated visage, as against the doom, is thought-sick at the act.
>>25282573Ironically, when I submitted the translation, it classified Shakespeare as Early Modern English. I put Old English because I thought it wouldn't make a difference; I'm not a native speaker.
>>25281765bump.
Shakespeare for Dummies
