How to Cold Read Shakespeare at an Audition

You did your monologue, it went well, and now the director slides two pages across the table. “Could you read Olivia for us? Take a minute.” The pages are from Twelfth Night. The lines stop short of the right margin, there’s a word in the third line you have never seen, and the speech seems to end in the middle of a sentence.

Cold reading Shakespeare feels harder than cold reading a TV scene, and in one way it is: the language takes longer to decode. But verse also hands you something modern sides never do. The writing tells you where each thought ends, where to come in fast, and where the speech lands. In a minute, you can read those signals even if you can’t read every word.

The short version: read to the full stop, not to the end of the line. Trust the punctuation on the pages you’re given. Jump in on shared lines without a gap. Treat a rhyming couplet as the finish line. When a word stops you, pick a meaning from the sentence and say it like you mean it. The rest is ordinary cold reading, which our guide on how to cold read for auditions covers step by step.

What changes when the pages are in verse

Everything you know about cold reading still applies. Know who you’re talking to, what you want, and where the scene turns, then look up and play it. Casting is watching your choices and whether you take a note, not whether you pronounced every word the way an editor would.

What’s different is where you look in your minute. In a modern scene, you hunt for subtext. In Shakespeare, the text is the map. Laura Wayth, author of The Shakespeare Audition, told the Folger Shakespeare Library that actors should learn to read the verse so they understand the rhythm of each line, and she singled out punctuation as a guide to meaning. Both of those can be read at a glance.

You’ll meet this more than you expect. Festivals and classical companies may read actors from the season’s plays at callbacks: Kingsmen Shakespeare Festival, for example, posted callback sides for its 2026 Hamlet. Sometimes you get them a day ahead. Sometimes you get them in the hallway. Our guide on auditioning for a Shakespeare festival covers the rest of that day.

Read to the full stop, not to the end of the line

A common verse cold-read mistake is reading line by line: a little stop at every right margin, as if each line were its own sentence. It sounds like reciting, and it chops the sense into pieces. Rob Myles, a Shakespeare actor and teacher, warns in his ten things that will save you when playing Shakespeare that pausing on line endings breaks up thoughts. Director Scott Ellis, quoted in the same piece, puts the fix simply: “Finish one thought definitively, then strongly start the next one.”

A thought runs from one full stop, question mark, or exclamation point to the next. It can be half a line or five lines. So the first job in your minute is to find the stops. Run your thumb down the page and notice where each thought ends. That’s where you may breathe and look down for the next one.

This is also how you keep your eyes up. In a modern cold read you glance down for a phrase. In verse, glance down for a thought (or half of one, up to a colon or semicolon), lift your eyes, and say it to the reader. Don’t stop at the end of a line on the way. The line ending still matters (keep your energy up through it), but it isn’t a red light.

Trust the punctuation on your sides (and know it’s an editor’s)

Punctuation is your fastest clue to how a thought moves. A run of commas piles things up. A colon says “and here’s what I mean.” A question mark is a real question. Tatty Hennessy, quoted by Myles, is blunt about that one: if there’s a question in the text, you ask it. Myles adds that there are no rhetorical questions.

Here’s the catch. Much of the punctuation in a modern text was chosen by an editor. Matthew Pauli, writing for the Folger Shakespeare Library while acting in Folger Theatre’s As You Like It, notes that the First Folio is the closest we’ll get to the punctuation the original actors might have used, and that modern editors sometimes “fix” it to make it easier to read.

You can see it in the speech we’ll drill below. In the Project Gutenberg text of Twelfth Night, Olivia says How now? In the MIT Shakespeare text, the same words end in an exclamation mark, How now! One is a question to herself; the other is a jolt of surprise. Neither is wrong.

So in a cold read, play the punctuation on the pages you were handed. Whoever made the sides chose that edition. Save the Folio comparisons for the speeches you prepare at home.

Jump in on shared lines

Look for a line that starts partway across the page, or a speech of just a few words that seems to finish someone else’s line. That’s a shared line. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s learning pages define it as two or more characters sharing one line of iambic verse, and add that a shared line tells us a lot about the relationship between them.

In practice, it’s a cue to come in with no gap. Pauli reads the moment Jaques jumps in on a shared line in As You Like It as a sign that Jaques does not hesitate. Myles’s first rule says the same about cues in general: pick them up, because dead air gives the audience nothing.

That matters more in a cold read than anywhere. The usual cold-read rhythm is “let the cue land, glance down, look up, speak,” and that glance is fine for most lines. On a shared line, glance down while the reader is still speaking, so your first word arrives right on the end of theirs. For a fast run of shared lines to practice on, see the Macbeth exchange in our guide to memorizing Shakespeare.

When a couplet arrives, you’re landing

Two lines in a row that rhyme, at the end of a speech or a scene, are a rhyming couplet. The same RSC pages say couplets are often used to sum up the end of a character’s speech. For a cold reader, that’s gold: scan the bottom of your last page for rhyme, and you know where the finish line is before you start.

Here’s how Olivia ends the scene our drill comes from, in the Gutenberg text:

Fate, show thy force, ourselves we do not owe.
What is decreed must be; and be this so!

Get those two lines off the page. Read them once in your prep minute, then say them looking up. A couplet you land clearly makes the whole read feel finished, even if you stumbled earlier. Don’t sing the rhyme; just let the last word of the second line be the last word of the thought.

What to do with a word you don’t know

It will happen. The Folger’s guide to reading Shakespeare’s language sorts the problem words into two kinds. Some are unfamiliar because we no longer use them. Others are trickier: words we still use whose meanings have changed. In Twelfth Night, the Folger’s notes on its language list validity meaning worth and surprise meaning overcome or capture.

The changed words are the dangerous ones, because you won’t notice you don’t know them. Take owe in that couplet. A modern ear hears debt. The linguist David Crystal, writing in Tes, says most of Shakespeare’s uses of the word mean “own, possess, have,” and he cites this very line, reading it as: we cannot control our emotions.

In the room, you can’t look it up, so do three things. First, read the whole sentence; the words around a strange one usually narrow it down. Second, decide what it means, even roughly, and commit to that. A clear wrong guess reads better than a word said with a question mark on your face. Third, keep going. Stopping to apologize turns one unknown word into a broken read.

The Folger guide flags one more speed bump: word order. Shakespeare often puts the verb before the subject (“Goes he”) or the object before the verb. If a sentence makes no sense on first pass, find the subject and the verb and say the words in modern order in your head. Then speak them as written.

Between auditions, build the vocabulary on purpose. When you work through a new scene in Offbook, you can highlight a word or a line and ask Genie, the script assistant, what it means in that moment of the play. It knows the whole script, so the answer fits your scene.

A practice drill: Olivia’s “What is your parentage?”

Here’s a speech to cold read tonight. Viola, disguised as a young man, has just left, and Olivia is alone. It’s from Twelfth Night, Act 1, Scene 5, quoted exactly from the Project Gutenberg edition (our play page uses another edition, so its punctuation differs, which is the point made earlier about editions). Don’t read ahead to the notes below. Set a timer for 60 seconds, look the speech over, then read it aloud once.

OLIVIA. What is your parentage?
‘Above my fortunes, yet my state is well:
I am a gentleman.’ I’ll be sworn thou art;
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit,
Do give thee five-fold blazon. Not too fast: soft, soft!
Unless the master were the man. How now?
Even so quickly may one catch the plague?
Methinks I feel this youth’s perfections
With an invisible and subtle stealth
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.
What ho, Malvolio!

Now work through it the way you would in the hallway:

1. Find the stops. The thought that starts with I’ll be sworn thou art doesn’t end until blazon, two line endings later, and Methinks runs across three lines to mine eyes. Read each of those on one push, with no dip at the margin.
2. Find the quotation marks. Olivia is repeating Viola’s answer to herself, word for word. That’s the whole situation in one clue: she can’t stop replaying the conversation.
3. Find the questions. There are three. Ask each one for real (the first is the question she asked Viola, now asked again in her head), and let the answer change you.
4. Find the brakes. Not too fast: soft, soft! and Well, let it be. are Olivia catching herself. They’re the turns in the speech.
5. Handle the unknown word. If blazon stopped you, the sentence tells you enough: his tongue, face, limbs, actions and spirit (five things, hence five-fold) all announce that he’s a gentleman. (Shakespeare Navigators’ note on the line says a blazon is an official description of a gentleman’s coat of arms.) Commit to that and move on.
6. Read it again, eyes up for every thought, and record it on your phone. Then give yourself a redirect, such as “she’s delighted, not alarmed,” and read it a third time as differently as you can.

Do this with a new speech a few times a week and the minute in the hallway stops feeling short. Our Shakespeare monologues list is a good source of fresh speeches, and the full plays in our public-domain play library give you scenes to open at a random page.

A 60-second plan for Shakespeare sides

When the pages land, spend the minute in this order. It’s our own summary of the advice above, built on the usual cold-read scan.

• Read once for story: who you’re talking to, what you want, what just happened.
• Run your thumb down the page and mark where each thought ends.
• Spot the shared lines, so you know where to come in with no gap.
• Check the bottom of the last page for a rhyming couplet, and get it off the page.
• Decide a meaning for any word that stopped you, then let it go.
• Breathe, look up, and say the first thought to the reader.

If you get the sides the night before, it isn’t a cold read anymore. Paraphrase every line in your own words, then work through scansion and antithesis with our guide to performing Shakespeare monologues. Our free first-letter memorizer turns your first and last lines into cues, so they’re the ones you know cold.

For reps on new material, read scenes with a partner who won’t get bored of your fifth try. In Offbook, you upload a scene, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character, then wait while you read yours aloud. Our guide to practicing cold reads explains how that works.

Questions actors ask

Should I use a “Shakespeare voice” in a cold read?

No. Director Tatty Hennessy, quoted by Myles, puts it simply: if you’re playing Hamlet, Hamlet sounds like you. A put-on classical voice takes attention away from the thought, and the thought is what the room wants to see. Speak clearly, keep your energy to the end of each thought, and sound like yourself.

Do I need to scan the iambic pentameter before a cold read?

Not in a minute. The RSC’s language facts describe the rhythm as being like a heartbeat, a soft beat then a strong one, five times a line. You’ll feel most of it just by reading to the full stop. Full scansion is homework for prepared speeches, where it can tell you which words to stress.

What if the sides are in prose?

If the lines run all the way to the right margin, it’s prose. The RSC calls prose a conversational way of speaking, without a set rhythm. Read it like a modern scene: find the thoughts and the turns, and play the person in front of you.

Can I ask what a word means before I start?

A quick question before you begin is usually fine, especially about how to say a name. What you shouldn’t do is stop mid-speech to ask, or explain afterward that you didn’t know a word. Choose a meaning from the sentence and commit to it.

How do I practice cold reading Shakespeare at home?

Use speeches you’ve never read. Set a 60-second timer, scan for stops, shared lines, and couplets, then read aloud and record yourself. Read it a second time with a new note. A few short sessions a week on new material do more than one long session on a speech you already know.