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Starvard University · Great Books
Meet the plays the way his first audiences did: aloud, in daylight, laughing and gasping, with four great plays to call your own.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
William Shakespeare wrote plays about four hundred years ago, and people are still filling theaters to watch them, which is like a song staying a hit for forty decades. The language can look scary, full of old words like thee and thou, but the stories are simple and huge: young lovers lost in a magic forest, a prince who cannot decide, a soldier who murders his way to a crown, and a wizard giving up his magic. This course explains each play in plain words first, then hands you the famous lines, so the old language starts to feel like music you understand.
The secret to Shakespeare is that the plays were never meant to be homework. They were popular entertainment, performed in daylight in a packed open air theater, and the audience expected jokes, sword fights, ghosts, and love stories, sometimes all before supper. Read them as scripts for a show, ideally out loud, and the difficulty drops by half. This course also gives you a helper: Charles and Mary Lamb retold the plays as plain stories in Tales from Shakespeare, and their versions remain the kindest first map of each plot.
We study four plays, one of each kind Shakespeare mastered. A Midsummer Night's Dream is the comedy, Hamlet the tragedy of a man who thinks too much, Macbeth the tragedy of a man who acts too fast, and The Tempest the late romance where revenge turns into forgiveness. Along the way you will collect the lines everyone quotes, learn to hear the verse, and finish by performing a scene yourself, because a play is only finished when somebody speaks it.
The whole course in brief
What this course will give you
The eight lessons
Lesson 1
Shakespeare's company built the Globe Theatre in London in 1599, a round, open air wooden playhouse holding around three thousand people. Performances ran in the afternoon, by daylight, with almost no scenery and no curtain. For a penny, a groundling stood in the open yard around the stage, eating and talking back. Wealthier playgoers paid more for gallery seats. The plays had to earn attention every minute, and it shows: they open with fights, ghosts, witches, and jokes.
Because the stage was nearly bare, the language does the scenery. When a character says it is night, it is night. Actors were all male, with boys playing the women's parts, and the same small company doubled roles, which is one reason so many Shakespeare scenes need only two or three people.
So read a play the way it was built to be received. Read it aloud, or at least move your lips. Give each character a different voice in your head. Read a summary first if the plot is dense: Charles and Mary Lamb wrote Tales from Shakespeare in 1807 for exactly this purpose. Then let the play itself be a performance you are staging in your imagination, not a puzzle you are solving.
Lesson 2
Most of Shakespeare's dialogue is blank verse: unrhymed lines of iambic pentameter, five heartbeat beats to a line, roughly ten syllables. It sounds like this pattern: da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM da DUM. Hamlet's most famous line rides it exactly: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." Once your ear finds the beat, long speeches stop sounding like fog and start sounding like music with words attached.
The switch of form is itself a signal. Kings, nobles, lovers, and anyone in the grip of great feeling tend to speak verse. Servants, clowns, drunks, and comic schemers speak prose, the ordinary paragraph language of real talk. Watch the switch and you learn things: a noble who slips into prose may be feigning madness, as Hamlet does, and a commoner who rises into verse is being lifted somewhere magical.
Two more tools help. A soliloquy is a character thinking aloud alone, and Shakespeare's people tell the truth in them even when they lie to everyone else. Punctuation in modern editions marks breath, not grammar: a comma is a lift, a colon a pause, a full stop a landing. Read to it, beat underneath, and the lines begin to act themselves.
Lesson 3
Athens is preparing a wedding: Duke Theseus will marry Hippolyta. But young Hermia loves Lysander, while her father insists she marry Demetrius. The lovers flee into the night woods, Demetrius pursues them, and Helena, who loves Demetrius, pursues him. Lysander sums up love's troubles early: "The course of true love never did run smooth."
The woods belong to Oberon and Titania, the fairy king and queen, who are quarreling over a changeling boy. Oberon sends his servant Puck for a magic flower whose juice, dropped on sleeping eyes, makes the victim love the first creature seen on waking. Oberon means to punish Titania and help Helena. Puck anoints the wrong Athenian, and soon both men chase Helena and nobody chases Hermia. Titania wakes in her bower, the bank where Oberon says, "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows," and falls for Bottom the weaver, whom Puck has given a donkey's head. Puck reports in delight: "Lord, what fools these mortals be!"
By dawn Oberon lifts the spells, the right pairs sort themselves out, and Athens celebrates a triple wedding, crowned by Bottom's actors performing their awful play of Pyramus and Thisbe. Love was blind, briefly literally, and morning forgives everything.
Lesson 4
Denmark's king is dead, his brother Claudius has taken both the throne and the widowed Queen Gertrude, and Prince Hamlet is sick with grief and disgust. Then the night watch sees the old king's ghost, and the ghost tells Hamlet the truth: Claudius murdered him, pouring poison in his ear as he slept. Hamlet swears revenge, and a watch officer mutters: "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark."
What follows is the most famous delay in literature. Hamlet feigns madness to investigate and torments himself for thinking instead of acting. Alone, he asks the question every audience remembers: "To be, or not to be, that is the question." Is it nobler to endure suffering or to end it, when nobody knows what death holds? His love Ophelia, spurned and used as bait by her father Polonius, unravels in earnest. Hamlet stages a play retelling the murder and watches Claudius flinch: proof at last. Yet still he spares Claudius at prayer.
The end comes in a rush: Polonius stabbed behind a curtain, Ophelia drowned, and a fencing match with poisoned sword and cup that kills Gertrude, Laertes, Claudius, and Hamlet. Dying, he begs Horatio to tell his story truly.
Lesson 5
Macbeth, a brave Scottish general, meets three witches after battle. They promise him a new title, then a greater one: king hereafter. "Fair is foul, and foul is fair." When the first prophecy comes true within minutes, both of them want the second. She taunts his courage until he agrees to murder King Duncan, their sleeping guest. On the way to the deed he hallucinates: "Is this a dagger which I see before me, the handle toward my hand?"
The crown brings no peace. Macbeth orders the murder of his friend Banquo, and Banquo's ghost appears at the banquet, visible only to him. He slaughters the family of Macduff, who fled to England. Lady Macbeth breaks under guilt, sleepwalks, and cries, "Out, damned spot! Out, I say!"
Trusting the witches' promise that no man born of woman can kill him, Macbeth fights on, until an army approaches carrying branches from Birnam Wood: another prophecy fulfilled. Macduff, born by caesarean birth and so not of woman born in the riddle's terms, kills him. Duncan's son Malcolm takes the throne. Near the end Macbeth calls life "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
Lesson 6
A storm opens the play, conjured by Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, who lives on an island with his daughter Miranda and rules it by magic from his books. Twelve years earlier his brother Antonio, helped by King Alonso, stole his dukedom and set him and baby Miranda adrift. Now those men sail past, and Prospero's tempest brings them ashore. His servant Ariel sings the shipwrecked Ferdinand a song: "Full fathom five thy father lies; of his bones are coral made."
On shore, Alonso grieves for Ferdinand, believed drowned, while Antonio tempts Alonso's brother to murder. Ferdinand meets Miranda, and they fall instantly in love. Miranda cries, "How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world, that has such people in it!" Caliban, the island's enslaved native son, plots rebellion with two drunken servants, and Ariel foils it.
Prospero has his enemies in his power, then does the surprising thing. Moved by Ariel, who says he would pity them if he were human, he chooses forgiveness over revenge: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." He frees Ariel, renounces his magic, and sails home.
Lesson 7
You already speak Shakespeare every week. Not in thee and thou, but in lines from these very plays that escaped the theater into ordinary English. When someone calls life empty noise, they are near Macbeth's "full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." When a speaker opens with "Friends, Romans, countrymen" energy aside, when a politician promises honesty, Polonius's advice still echoes: "This above all: to thine own self be true." Polonius also makes the case for saying less, declaring that "brevity is the soul of wit" inside one of his longest speeches, which is the joke.
Some lines became titles of later works. Miranda's "O brave new world" named Aldous Huxley's novel three centuries later. Ariel's song gave us "sea change," now used for deep transformation, from a drowned father suffering "a sea change into something rich and strange." Puck's "Lord, what fools these mortals be" remains the perfect caption for human folly, our own included.
Collect these as you read. A line you recognize in a headline, a speech, or a friend's joke is a small prize, and this course has stocked your pockets with the best of them.
Lesson 8
A play is finished only when spoken, so this course ends on your feet. Choose a short two person scene. Good first choices: Puck reporting to Oberon in the Dream, Hamlet and Polonius trading riddles, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth before the murder, or Prospero and Miranda telling the island's story. Ten to thirty lines is plenty. Print it large. Read it aloud three times before memorizing anything, letting the beat from Lesson 2 carry you.
Then work like an actor. Mark the turns: the line where your character changes tactics, pleads instead of commands, jokes instead of answers. Underline the words to stress, usually verbs and new information. Decide what your character wants from the other person, in one plain sentence, and let every line push for it. Get up and move: his stages were bare, so gesture does the decorating.
Perform it for one friendly audience: a friend, a family member, a phone camera. Nervous is normal; the groundlings were rowdier. If you stumble, stay in character and keep going, as actors have since 1599. The lines understand you back once you have lived in them, and that experience is what Shakespeare 101 is for.
Sources
This course is taught from classic texts that are free for anyone to read. Every method in the lessons traces back to one of these books.
Graduation
You came in, perhaps, a little afraid of the language, and you leave with four plays in your pocket, their plots in your head, and their best lines in your mouth. Keep going the way you started: read aloud, see the plays performed whenever you can, and let Lambs' Tales walk beside any new play you tackle. Congratulations on finishing Shakespeare 101. The rest is not silence, it is applause.
Keep learning
This course is part of Starvard University, striving for greatness.
A note on accuracy: Much of what you read at Starvard was created with help from AI agents, working alongside people. We check what we can, but we cannot guarantee that everything here is true, current, or complete. If something really matters, your health, your money, a grade, a job, please verify it with a trusted source before you rely on it.