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March group read from 50

I read Hamlet a little over a year ago. It is one of Shakespeare's most acclaimed plays. Personally I'd rather see Shakespeare performed by really good actors than read him. I have trouble with the archaic language, and hearing the inflection helps a lot.

Buck wrote: "I read Hamlet a little over a year ago. It is one of Shakespeare's most acclaimed plays. Personally I'd rather see Shakespeare performed by really good actors than read him. I have trouble with ..."

I'm hoping to read this this month, but I'm with you, Buck, that it's so much better to see it performed! When my kids were young, we'd read the plays and then go see a production. And that's the best! But not much around here in the way of live productions...

It might help to netflix along with reading. My personal favorite is the Derek Jacobi version, also known by women of a certain age as the cute Hamlet version. The more recent Doctor Hamlet version with David Tennant is pretty entertaining too. Either way you get Patrick Stewart as Captain Pic-Claudius. The language is seriously gorgeous, but it is difficult. Getting the gist of it from an actor does help with getting around the archaisms in the text.

Actually, if you read English prose that was written around the same time as Shakespeare's plays, it's pretty modern. The problem with the plays is that 1) they were written in iambic pentameter, so Will was pinching and squishing and playing around to make things fit; and 2) Shakespeare saw words as plastic and combinable and full of shades of meaning, so unless a Shakespearean word or phrase entered the vocabulary, it may seem completely bizarre or opaque.

I agree with you Buck, when I read Shakespeare at school it was with a cassette in my Walkman (uhoh, my age is showing!) seeing and hearing the dialogue brought it to life.