There's something I would like to say to anybody reading/studying Shakespeare's plays (or any other play for that matter, especially old ones).

DON'T BE AFRAID TO MARK IT UP!

Seriously. Provided that you either have permission to do so or its your own personal copy, don't feel uncomfortable about it. Shakespeare isn't exactly a walk in the park, and it can occasionally be difficult to follow, so if you need to make a note in the margins (ex. "Exhibit A of Iago being a two-faced bitch.") then make them!

If my drama literature teacher (who has been teaching Othello for 10+ years, and Shakespeare in general for longer) then so can you. If you need to make a cultural note, or maybe there's just this one word you don't know and isn't in the side notes. Write that shit in. You'll thank yourself later.

"But Parker," you say, uncomfortably. "Isn't that ruining the book?" No! As long as you're not using a pen or anything with ink, or physically harming the pages, its fine! All marks can be erased if you decide you don't want them anymore.

Grammar is one of those areas that can get really complicated very quickly, so I’ll just cover the basics.

On the whole, early modern English grammar is not so far removed from modern English. The biggest obvious difference you’re going to come across will be a result of the second person singular pronoun ‘thou’, and that’s only because you’re not used to hearing people use it correctly.

But it’s actually pretty simple! You’re only ever going to be using a verb in combination with the nominative case ‘thou’, for one thing (except in the case of ‘methinks’, but that’s an archaism and anomaly even in Shakespeare’s time)… Because, well, you never say ‘me went’, or ‘my goes’, do you? So none of that ‘thee thinkest’ nonsense.

The basic rule is, if you use ‘thou’, stick a -est or -st on the end of the verb (you can also contract -est to -‘st). Some examples:

I think - thou thinks/thou thinkest/thou think’st

I give - thou givest/thou giv’st

I play - thou playest/play’st

Same thing with past tense:

I played - thou playedst

I gave - thou gavest/thou gav’st

There are a few irregular verbs, but those are mostly ones you’ll have come across if you’ve read any Shakespeare. Here’s a list of a few (hint: they’re mostly modal verbs):

The other one that confuses everyone is when the verb inflection for the nominative third person singular (he/she/it) ends in -th, as in ‘it hath’ or ‘it doth’.

This is pretty simple too. It’s just a regional (Southern English) variant of the -s ending, as in ‘it has’ or it does. We just lost the ‘-th’ ending over time is all. It tends to spring to people’s minds when thinking of early modern English because Shakespeare (most likely Shakespeare and not the printers, given the commonness of it) had a preference for the -th ending in most cases. Essentially, there’s no rule here (other than that it HAS to be used with the third person singular, or you sound like you’re saying the equivalent of ‘she do’ instead of ‘she does’). You’re welcome to choose whether you want to use the -th ending or not.

There are lots of little things that you can survive without knowing, such as that the passive perfect and passive progressive forms – e.g. ‘he has been’ ‘he is being’ – didn’t exist (they just used ‘was’), and some pretty confusing stuff about formal subjunctives, but I won’t go into that.

What is interesting though, is that the auxiliary usage of ‘to do’ really started to catch on around Shakespeare’s time. Sentence constructions like ‘Do you think…?’ etc. are pretty central to English now, but it wasn’t always the case (and it still isn’t in languages like French). Before the 16th century, the predominant form was to start with the main verb, like this: ‘Think you…?’ without the auxiliary verb ‘do’, and this is still one of the more common ways of phrasing questions in Shakespeare’s time, which is why you get constructions like

Think'st thou that duty shall have dread to speak, When power to flattery bows? (King Lear 1.1.148-49)

as well as 

Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? (Twelfth Night 2.3.107-8)

So when it comes to questions, you get a mix of the older form without the auxiliary ‘to do’ and the newer form with ‘to do’. When using the older form, you need to conjugate the main verb, e.g. ‘Think’st thou’. When using the newer form, you need to conjugate the ‘to do’, e.g. ‘dost thou think’ where ‘dost’ is conjugated, ‘think’ is not.

I hope that helps!

‘Ye’ is the same as ‘you’ but only in certain circumstances. It’s the nominative personal pronoun for the plural ‘you’ or formal single person ‘you’. Here’s the table of conjugations which is probably easier to understand: 

Nominative means that it’s the pronoun that is the subject of the sentence. So if we take the example sentence ‘I like Shakespeare’, ‘I’ is the nominative pronoun. All of the following would be correct:

We like Shakespeare

Thou likest Shakespeare

He/she/it likes Shakespeare

They like Shakespeare

But also

You like Shakespeare

Ye like Shakespeare

Both of which can refer to either a single person (formal in early modern English) or multiple people.

There are also sentences like ‘I’m pedantic, aren’t I?’ where the nominative pronoun can come (again) at the end of a sentence. It would be correct to use ye in this context too: ‘Ye are pedantic, aren’t ye?’

If you’re an advanced or a native speaker of English you probably know that 

Me like Shakespeare

Us like Shakespeare

Him/her/it like Shakespeare

Them like Shakespeare

Are all incorrect. These are the oblique pronouns and can only be used in sentences where the pronoun is not the subject but is being affected by a subject and a verb. So in the sentence ‘Hamlet wants me to go to a nunnery’, ‘me’ is the oblique pronoun being affected by the subject (Hamlet) and the verb (to go). The following sentences would be correct:

Hamlet wants you to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants us to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants thee to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants him/her/it to go to a nunnery

Hamlet wants them to go to a nunnery

In this instance, you cannot use ‘ye’.

It’s worth mentioning that the use of ‘ye’ in phrases like ‘Ye olde shoppe’ is actually a kind of mistake based on the fact that printing presses didn’t have a thorn (Þ) symbol and (confusingly) ended up replacing them with a y. It’s not wrong to write it as such, but the pronunciation should actually be a ‘th’ sound, not a ‘y’, so it should sound like ‘The olde shoppe’

How to read Shakespeare aloud is mainly in the department of acting. Two seminal books you might look at are John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare, and Peter Hall’s Shakespeare’s Advice to the Players.

But, honestly, my inclination is to tell you to begin by just reading Shakespeare, and preferably reading it out loud. Having tried first will give you a starting point after which, if you still feel the need to develop your understanding, these famous directors’ books might take you further. What you need is a foundation based on your own experience of reading the texts.

As far as iambic pentameter goes, it’s just a style of poetry made up of five (as in pentagon) iambs, which are two syllable units made up of a short(unstressed) syllable followed by a long (stressed) syllable. The word ‘aloud’, for instance, is an iamb. 

This sounds all a little confusing when explained in words, but it really isn’t. All it means is that you have a line of poetry made of five ba-DUH rhythms: ba-DUH  ba-DUH  ba-DUH  ba-DUH  ba-DUH. Or, to give the example everyone uses from Shakespeare’s poetry (sonnet 18),

But Shakespeare’s verse isn’t always made up of straightforward iambic pentameter (sometimes it’s not written in iambic pentameter at all). Take the beginning of Henry V, for instance:

The verse starts with a trochee (which is the opposite of an iamb – it has a long stress followed by a short stress: BAH-da), and the effect is attention-grabbing. The second line is one syllable short.

Knowing about the various techniques Shakespeare uses can certainly help you to understand why his writing sounds the way it does, but it’s not strictly necessary for knowing how to read the plays. Just because it’s in iambic pentameter, it doesn’t mean you have to read it any differently. Part of the reason it’s written like that is because it sounds like the natural rhythm of spoken English, and it’s often counter-intuitive and extremely unnatural to read it emphasising the rhythms and the end of the lines.

So what you do need to watch out for, instead of trying to work out the iambic pentameter in lines, is how to verse flows. Well edited versions are useful: all you have to do is keep reading until you reach a punctuation mark. For instance, in the lines from Henry V I just quoted you can’t stop at the end of the first line, even though the line ends there: ‘O for a muse of fire that would ascend’… Ascend what? It needs to keep going straight onto the next line to make sense: ‘O for a muse of fire that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention’. 

In fact, iambic pentameter is there to help you, rather than hinder you. Historically, Shakespeare’s troupe had very little time to prepare their plays; they did them with hardly any rehearsal, so the language had to do some of the work for them. The rhythmic style of writing forces the actor to speak the lines in a certain way, and often does a lot to convey the emotions of a character (by making the actor speed up and slow down on a verbal level). Iambic pentameter is something that happens rather than something you consciously do or think about (unless you’re doing textual analysis)

So if you’re sensitive to the flow of the language, the rhythm should actually come naturally; you’ll start to hear and feel it. Just let the verse carry you, instead of trying to impose the rhythm you think it ought to have onto it.