Did any professor, director, or teacher ever tell you to speak the lines like poetry? Did they ever tell you the amount of breaths you could take in one of your lines? I'm in the recent production of Twelfth Night and I spent a few weeks memorizing and building up my character and then my director hits me with this bullshit. It's hard to explain what I'm talking about, but doing Shakespeare is ridiculous. I'd leave it with the dead, or someone who doesn't mind letting the actors perform it in a way where it will resonate with a 20th,21st century audience. Fuck this.

I've heard about five different ways of doing Shakespeare.

I've done some macbeth on a school radio project, we read it as poetry and it sounded great.

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Shakespeare is soooo much better when it's spoken in a normal, natural tone. When actors get caught up in the words or the verse, it distracts from what the character is actually SAYING. When done right, you shouldn't notice the verse or the funny words, IMHO. Tell him he's a tool.

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Absolutely. It can be hard to make it sound natural, but simply aiming for the undercutting emotion and letting that guide you is far better than reading it as poetry. We're dealing in archaic language here, so attempting to take it even further outside of the natural just murders it.

I was in a few plays after I finished up with my graduate degree, but I never got to do Shakespeare.

I think that's why the Leo DiCaprio / Clare Danes version went over so well. They didn't over-emphesize the language, and it was done very naturally. I think that makes it easier to understand what's being said, as well. When it's clear someone is upset, joking, happy. . . etc, the meaning of Shakespeare's often made-up words is much clearer.

When I took Shakespeare, the professor said that some of the lines were supposed to be read like poetry, and the others were supposed to be read normally. It is supposed to depend on not only the tone, but also upon who is saying the lines.

However, I think reading it normally makes it clearer as people tend to pay more attention to the rhythm than the actual language.

If I remember correctly, and it's been a while since I read any Shakespear, or Twefth Night for that matter, most of it was written in prose anyway. I'm probably wrong on this, but I do remember a lot of prose over blank-verse poetry with Twefth Night.

The best way that I ever did it (which won me a nice trip to NYC) was to treat the language as a sort of guide to the emotions going on and let the two parts work together. Drive through the more passionate phrases, linger on the tender stuff, etc. The couplets are kind of meant to be recited poetically, at least to me. It's an outside-in approach instead of any sort of internal emotional memory or poetry reading. It sounds good.

There definitely is a "music" to delivering it - this is mostly due to the iambic pentameter Shakespeare used. Compare the recent adaptation of Romeo and Juliet, where DiCaprio and Claire Danes sound like robots, to something done by the BBC and you'll hear the difference.