Episode 318: How to Read Shakespeare

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Today on The Literary Life podcast, Angelina Stanford and Thomas Banks are here to offer some helpful ideas for reading Shakespeare plays and how to approach the Bard. They start off sharing their own stories of first being exposed to Shakespeare. Next, Thomas and Angelina address the idea that Shakespeare is too high-brow for the ordinary reader. Angelina also gives her hot take on whether you should watch or read a Shakespeare play first. She also tells some stories about reading the Bard with her children and students. Some other helpful topics they cover are the different types of plays and their forms, the cosmology behind the plays, and potential problems with some modern interpretations of Shakespearean drama. Scroll down for links to previous episodes we have done on Shakespeare, as well as the books mentioned as resources in this discussion.

Join us back again here next week when we begin our series covering Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë!

You can check out all the latest offerings of mini-classes and webinars, both upcoming and recorded in the past, at HouseofHumaneLetters.com.

Other Episodes on Shakespeare:

Episode 260: An Introduction to Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing

Episode 156: Why Read Fairy Tales

Episode 264: “Much Ado about Nothing” On Screen Adaptations

Othello Series

A Winter’s Tale Series

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Series

Commonplace Quotes:

A little watchfulness over ourselves will save us a great deal of watchfulness over others.

Walter Savage Landor, from Imaginary Conversations

And yet there are people who say that Shakespeare always means “just what he says”! Lady Macbeth’s famous “We fail!” is enough in itself to put that doctrine out of court. He who things that to find over- and undermeanings in Shakespeare’s plays is to take unwarranted liberties with them is like a man to holds that the word “spring” must refer only to a particular period of the year and could not possibly mean birth, or youth, or hope. He is a man who has never associated anything with anything else. He is a man without metaphors. And such a man is no man at all, let alone a poet.

Harold Goddard, from The Meaning of Shakespeare

Books and Links:

Imaginary Conversations by Walter Savage Landor

The Meaning of Shakespeare by Harold Goddard

The Elizabethan World Picture by E. M. Tillyard

The Great Chain of Being by Arthur Lovejoy

The Discarded Image by C. S. Lewis

Guide to Shakespeare by Isaac Asimov

Shakespeare’s History Plays by E. M. Tillyard

Northrop Frye on Shakespeare by Northrop Frye

Shakespeare’s Window Into the Soul by Martin Lings

Juliet’s Nurse

by Walter de la Mare

In old-world nursery vacant now of children,
With posied walls, familiar, fair, demure,
And facing southward o'er romantic streets,
Sits yet and gossips winter's dark away
One gloomy, vast, glossy, and wise, and sly:
And at her side a cherried country cousin.
Her tongue claps ever like a ram's sweet bell;
There's not a name but calls a tale to mind -
Some marrowy patty of farce or melodram;
There's not a soldier but hath babes in view;
There's not on earth what minds not of the midwife:
"O, widowhood that left me still espoused!"
Beauty she sighs o'er, and she sighs o'er gold;
Gold will buy all things, even a sweet husband,
Else only Heaven is left and - farewell youth!
Yet, strangely, in that money-haunted head,
The sad, gemmed crucifix and incense blue
Is childhood once again. Her memory
Is like an ant-hill which a twig disturbs,
But twig stilled never. And to see her face,
Broad with sleek homely beams; her babied hands,
Ever like 'lighting doves, and her small eyes -
Blue wells a-twinkle, arch and lewd and pious -
To darken all sudden into Stygian gloom,
And paint disaster with uplifted whites,
Is life's epitome. She prates and prates -
A waterbrook of words o'er twelve small pebbles.
And when she dies - some grey, long, summer evening,
When the bird shouts of childhood through the dusk,
'Neath night's faint tapers - then her body shall
Lie stiff with silks of sixty thrifty years.

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