Nishant Kumar
Started the club
Plays are scripts, not novels. We read them aloud, in parts, and it changes everything. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
These are performance documents. The verse carries breath and timing; half the jokes only exist in the delivery; the difficult passages become obvious the moment someone says them at speed.
School taught most of us to read them like difficult novels, which is roughly the worst possible way in.
Read one aloud, alone in your kitchen, and report back.
Editorial, with one qualification.
Reading aloud alone helps enormously with the verse and not at all with the staging. Half of what's difficult in Shakespeare is spatial — who is on stage, who can hear whom, who is being deliberately ignored.
Read aloud for the language. Watch it for the rest.
Book Desk: which is why the Arden editions are worth the money — the stage-direction notes tell you who's where, and a surprising number of confusing scenes are just blocking problems.
Aloud for the verse, watched for the blocking. That's a genuinely useful split.