What strategy can you use to understand difficult lines in Shakespeare's plays?

Answer 1

The first thing to recognize is that there are difficult lines and easy lines. Many readers make life difficult for themselves by assuming that everything Shakespeare wrote is difficult and so struggle over the meaning of even such simple lines as the first line in Hamlet "Who's there?" or Shylock's exit line "I am not well." Most of what Shakespeare wrote means what it appears to mean. People tend to struggle with the fact that it is poetry (and therefore is careful about rhythm and uses unusual word order and figures of speech) more than with the language. They just fool themselves into thinking it is the language. If you run into a problem passage, the following might help (not necessarily in this order):

1. Watch an actor performing the play and see how he says the line. If possible, watch more than one. The actors and directors know (usually) what the lines mean, and that knowledge informs how they say the words. This can give you a clue.
2. Look in your copy of the play for notes. In most good editions of the play, the editors have included explanatory notes which will help you understand a strange word or a word used in an unfamiliar sense.
3. Make a mental note of common quirks in Elizabethan and Jacobean English, like using "an" for "if" or "a" for "he". Learn the second person singular pronouns (thou-thee-thy) and their verb forms ending in "st". Learn when Shakespeare ends his verbs with "th" (hath, goeth, standeth and so on) and why. Learn the common contractions he uses and why he will sometimes spell a word like "lowered" as "lower'd". This will not take long and you can add to this list as you read along.
4. If you run into a difficult phrase or sentence, look at the context. What would you expect the character to be saying? Look at words and think about other possible meanings for them. Would they make more sense of the passage? Try to find the subject, verb and object and reorganize the sentence in that order.
5. If all else fails, ignore the difficult passage. Some of Shakespeare's lines are difficult even for experienced Shakespeare scholars. Don't worry about it--you can easily understand what is going on in a play without understanding every line. If it is a Sonnet you are working on, don't give up quite so easily: you only have 140 syllables to work with.