Can't we read it out loud? The case for Shakespeare on audio.

The word's been out for generations: American high schoolers will have to study Shakespeare. They meet this requirement with attitudes that span an emotional gamut from enthusiastic to hostile, but they all see it as a rite of passage. Groaning when the teacher distributes the copies of their first Shakespearean play, they may complain louder if they discover that they won't be reading Romeo and Juliet at all or will only be assigned a watered-down prose version.

Teens already know that Romeo and Juliet involves young love, sexual stirrings, peer pressure, intractable, insensitive parents and other issues dear to their own hearts. As a result they leave for home with their new textbook, generally willing to give Shakespeare a chance. Then they are confronted with the opening lines, a prologue in rhymed iambic pentameter. This is followed by the first scene and the sophisticated punning of the Capulet and Montague servants. The challenge begins. Most students will enter class the following day unprepared, and a wise teacher must be more than an immovable object in the path of student resistance.

Let's put much of the blame for this problem squarely where it belongs: reading Shakespeare in print is hard work. Elizabethan English may be technically modern, but compared to our contemporary language it is archaic. And of course, since American English evolved differently from its British counterpart, it's a foreign language to boot. Many of Shakespeare's words and idioms have different meanings today or have no equivalent at all in Standard American English lexicons. Inconsistently applied spelling rules can further tax a reader's comprehension.

Additionally, Shakespeare wrote his plays in verse. Unrhymed iambic pentameter is the metrical form most similar to natural spoken English. However, it is not natural at all to speak only in iambs, and any poetic convention inevitably results in awkward sentence construction with irregular placement of subjects, verbs, objects and modifiers, which must be sorted out to be understood. Elizabethan poetic convention also favored highly figurative imagery while the era's theatergoing public demanded plots and subplots, which were frequently even more convoluted than the actors' lines.

To offer what assistance they can, textbook publishers annotate Shakespeare's plays heavily, but it takes a highly disciplined and motivated reader to work back and forth from a text to a glossary and explanatory footnotes. Most teenagers are just not up to the task.

So typically, when the students file in on the first day they are expected to discuss their reading assignment, the teacher will see a roomful of blank faces. A brave student will raise his hand and sigh, "Why can't we just read this out loud in class?" And, in fact, Shakespeare is usually taught with teachers assigning roles to students who will then read the play aloud, generally with the most resistant kids--usually also the least skillful oral readers--given the larger parts to keep them engaged for the sake of the rest. This does result in the students reading the play, but it's a poor and sometimes painful substitute for a well-performed production and does nothing to make the work memorable.

How much better, and how very easy, to pop a tape or a CD into a portable player instead and hear the play read by professionals who understand the characters and the language! As any parent or teacher can tell you, kids of all ages enjoy being read to, and when an author's words are properly articulated and inflected, layers and levels of meaning readily become apparent that might otherwise go unnoticed. (To see just how actors can differently shade Shakespeare's dialogs, listen to comparative selections from the plays in Media Fusion's Sourcebook series).

Teachers who let their class read Shakespeare aloud try to follow that up with the movie version, to pull the play together. Using audiobooks in the first place makes better use of class time and offers several other advantages over their video counterpart. For one thing, the teacher can keep the lights on in the classroom, which means that without missing any of the action, the students can follow along with their text and learn to read Shakespeare correctly, becoming comfortable with the language, the idiom, the poetry, and the play itself along the way. For another, an unabridged audiobook is the play as written. Movie versions almost always take substantial liberties with plot, characterization and dialog to showcase their stars, who can independently distract from the story line. Finally, audiobooks need not be played on expensive or unwieldy equipment. Since the average school budget doesn't provide for a television and DVD or VHS player in every room, watching a movie in class requires a teacher to compete for and then reserve equipment for a consecutive block of ten days to two weeks, a strategy that frequently goes awry.

Audiobooks stimulate student imagination by making teens visualize the characters and settings from the words of plays themselves. Shakespeare's plays are particularly amenable to audio format. The absence of costumes, props and settings in the Elizabethan theater requires the characters to engage in dialog that continually reminds the audience of who and where they are, and when. (For a wonderful six-minute parody of that, and everything else that's "wrong" with Shakespeare, listen to "So That's the Way You Like It" from the original cast production of Beyond the Fringe, with Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Allan Bennett and Jonathan Miller, available on disk and from EMI).

Today's new breed of Shakespearean actors are young, vital, and less bound to conventional, formal, declamatory readings of the Bard's plays. They speak naturally and easily (see KLIATT's review of the Arkangel recordings of Macbeth, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Othello, or treat yourself to Naxos Audio's electrifying production featuring Kenneth Branagh as Richard III). Modern audiobooks merge their full-cast performances with state-of-the-art technology and sound effects, which enhance theatrical elements that will make students sit up and pay close attention to what they neither expect from nor associate with Shakespeare: music and song, ghosts, fairy spirits, monsters and witches, madness, murder and mayhem, love and lust, jealousy and loyalty, revenge and betrayal, wits, buffoons and wizards, war, swordplay, strange prophecies, unique insults and very contemporary double-entendres.

Shakespeare can be daunting. For that reason, some intelligent adults, educators among them, while in no way denigrating his greatness, feel that his plays are too sophisticated for a high school curriculum and that there are worthy contemporary writers whose works should be taught in their stead. These proponents of "modernization" forget that Shakespeare's productions were mass entertainment, as wildly popular in their own time for the uneducated groundlings standing near the stage as for the gentry seated in the stalls and that, first and foremost, they were written to be performed by trained actors. When the plays come alive, students not only actually understand Shakespeare, they enjoy him. Help is as near as the audiobook section of a library or bookstore.

What's out there on audio? Plenty. The following bibliography is only a representative sample:

Shakespeare for Youngsters--You can never start them too early ...

A Storyteller's Version of Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by Jim Weiss. 1 cd. 62 min. Greathall Productions. 1-882513-85-1. For the early elementary grades.

Shakespeare for Children. Charles & Mary Lamb. 2005. Read by Josephine Bailey & Simon Vance. 5 cds. 5.5 hrs. Tantor. 1-4001-0092-5. Ten unabridged tales from the 1807 children's classic. Grade 7 and up.

Shakespeare's Secret. Elise Broach. 2005. Read by Jennifer Ikeda. 4 tapes. 5.75 hrs. Recorded Books. For middle schoolers. (Reviewed in KLIATT, May 2005).

Stories from Shakespeare. David Timson. 2005. Read by Juliet Stevenson and Michael Sheen. 3 cds. 3 hrs. Naxos. (Reviewed in KLIATT, November 2002.)

The Plays

The ARKANGEL series from Audio Partners justifiably prides itself on its accessible, student-friendly, accurate dramatic productions, complete with music and sound effects.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, Julius Caesar and Macbeth. William Shakespeare. 2003. Read by a full cast. 7 cds. 7.05 hrs. Arkangel. (Reviewed in KLIATT, November 2005.) Othello. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by a full cast. 3 cds. 3 hrs. Arkangel. (Reviewed in KLIATT, January 2006.)

MEDIA FUSION presents the plays in print with photos from famous productions. On an included cd, Sir Derek Jacobi invites student listeners to compare notable scenes and guides them towards an understanding of dramatic subtext, using excerpts from classic and contemporary performances. Othello. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by Sir Derek Jacobi. 1 cd. 3 hrs. Sourcebooks. Media Fusion. 1-4022-0102-8.

Romeo and Juliet. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by Sir Derek Jacobi. 1 cd. 3 hrs. Sourcebooks. Media Fusion. 1-4022-0101-x.

NAXOS offers full-cast productions featuring outstanding Shakespearean performers, such as Paul Scofield, Kenneth Branagh, and Ian McKellen, with classical musical accompaniment. Companion guide booklets are included.

Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. William Shakespeare. 1997. Read by Anton Lesser and a full cast. 3 tapes. 3.3 hrs. Naxos. 9-62634-624-8.

King Richard III. William Shakespeare. 2001. Read by Kenneth Branagh, Geraldine McEwan and a full cast. 3 tapes. 3.3 hrs. Naxos. 962634217X. Abridged.

The Tempest. William Shakespeare. 2004. Read by Ian McKellen and a full cast. 3 cds. 2.13 hrs. Naxos. 9-62634-624-8.

The Sonnets

The Sonnets. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by Simon Callow. 2 cds. 2 hrs. High-Bridge. 1-59887-007-6.

The Sonnets. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by Alex Jennings. 3 tapes. 3.2 hrs. Naxos. 9-62634-645-0.

Biographies and reference works for the busy teacher ...

A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare -1599. James Shapiro. 2005. Read by James Shapiro. 6 cds. 7 hrs. Harper. 0-06-082317-7. A close look at a prolific year for Shakespeare, in which he wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It and Hamlet. Abridged.

Shakespeare: The Biography. Peter Ackroyd. 2005. Read by Simon Vance. 16 cds. 19.2 hrs. Books on Tape. 1-4159-2480-5. Shakespeare the playwright, among his friends, colleagues, and patrons.

The Age of Shakespeare. Frank Kermode. 2003. Read by Paul Hecht. 5 cds. 5.75 hrs. Recorded Books. 1-4025-7514-9. (Reviewed in this issue (3106) of KLIATT.)

Will in the World. Stephen Greenblatt. 2004. Read by Peter Jay Fernandez. 13 cds. 15.5 hrs. Recorded Books. 1-4193-0760-6. (Reviewed in KLIATT, May 2005.)

William Shakespeare." His Life and Work. Anthony Holden. 2005. Read by Paul Matthews. 12 cds. 14.5 hrs. Clipper Audio. 1-4025-1015-2 Shakespeare the man and his controversial family skeletons.

Shakespeare by Another Name: The Life of Edward DeVere, Earl of Oxford, The Man Who Was Shakespeare. Mark Anderson. 2005. Read by Simon Prebble. 8 cds. 10.25 hrs. HighBridge. 1-5651-1994-0. Abridged.

Miscellaneous

Great Historical Shakespeare Recordings. William Shakespeare. 2000. Read by Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, John Barrymore, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and more. 2 tapes. 2.08 hrs. Naxos. 962634700-7.

Great Speeches and Soliloquies. William Shakespeare. 2005. Read by Simon Russell Beale, Estelle Kohler, Clifford Rose, Sarah Woodward. 2 cds. 2.11 hrs. Naxos. 9-62634-015-0.

Time's Fool: A Mystery of Shakespeare. Leonard Tourney. 2005. Read by Tony Jay, 9 cds. 11 hrs. Blackstone Audio. 0-7861-7677-6. (Reviewed in this issue (3106) of KLIATT.)

Francine Levitov has a BA in English, an MS in English Education, a Master's Equivalent in Curriculum Theory and Development, and 12 years of experience teaching secondary school English. She is presently retired from a second career as a criminal defense lawyer and spends her days indulging her audiobook addiction.