Doing Shakespeare: Myth #2

Auditions for As You Like It are coming up soon, so I’m writing this series of extremely comforting posts to help you get over your irrational dislike of the works of Bill Shakespeare.

Myth 2: You have to be smart to do Shakespeare.

I don’t even know what this means.

I mean, you have to know how to read, I guess, but no one needs any kind of super brain power or advanced degree to hold a script in your hand and act.

Yes, the language is definitely not Modern English, but neither is it Middle English. We still speak basically the same language as Shakespeare. What language quirks the plays do have are trivial: ‘you’ vs. ‘thee/thou’; specialized vocabulary, particularly for occupations that no longer occupy us; sensitivity to social ranks that we don’t have; et al.

But mostly, it’s just English—super-charged, poetic, soul-thrilling English. You have to do a little more work to make the words flow naturally (see tomorrow’s Myth), but that’s you, not the text. (I think of the modern plays I’ve seen in which the acting is little more than reciting words, so the challenge of deciphering scripted lines is not limited to Shakespeare.)

Do you have to know all about Elizabethan England and its standing in the world at the time? or the facts about Bill’s life? or the Great Chain of Being? or what a ‘cuckold’ is?

Okay, that last one you need to know: a cuckold was a man whose wife cheated on him. The joke was that such a man grew horns that everyone could see but him, i.e., he was the last to know. Horn jokes are endemic to AYLI, so that’s one obscure thing you have to know about.

And now you know about it. You are now smart enough to do Shakespeare.

LESSON: You don’t have to be any smarter to do Shakespeare than you do to do Neil Simon. Doo-bee-doo-bee-doo.

NEXT: Shakespeare is hard to do.