How to Memorize Shakespeare: Use the Verse, Meter, and Meaning

You got the part. Then you opened the script, and it is three hundred lines of words you half understand, in an order nobody would say them today. Your off-book date is in three weeks, and the modern-play tricks you know (get the gist, say it your way) are exactly what a Shakespeare director will not accept.

Here is the good news. Much of Shakespeare’s dialogue is verse, and verse comes with a built-in alarm. Every line has a shape, and when you add or drop a syllable, the shape breaks in a way you can hear. Modern prose gives you no such check.

The short version: understand every line before you learn it, then learn it out loud with the rhythm, hang each line on its last word, let the contrasts and rhymes carry you from line to line, learn your cues as carefully as your lines, and test yourself instead of rereading. The prose scenes need extra care, because they have no rhythm to catch you.

Paraphrase first: you can’t remember what you don’t understand

The most common mistake is trying to memorize sound. You can drill “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune” by rote, but it will fall apart the first night you are nervous, because there is nothing under it.

Research on how actors learn backs this up. Psychologists Helga and Tony Noice found that professional actors rarely learn by rote. As the APS Observer’s summary of their work explains, actors learn by working out what each line means and what the character wants with it, and the words come along with the meaning. The Noices call this “active experiencing”.

So before you learn a line, write it in your own words. Here are the first lines of Hamlet’s most famous speech, from the full text of Hamlet:

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1, in the public-domain Standard Ebooks text.

A plain paraphrase: “Should I go on living or not? Is it braver to put up with everything bad luck throws at me, or to fight back against all my problems and end them by fighting? Dying is just sleeping.” It isn’t poetry. It doesn’t need to be. Once you know that line 2 asks whether it is braver to put up with things, you won’t swap “nobler” for “better,” because “better” isn’t the thought. That swap would also slip past the meter, since both words have the same shape, which is why the paraphrase matters as much as the rhythm.

Look up every word you’re not sure of, including the familiar-looking ones. Shakespeare’s words sometimes meant something different then, and a good edition’s notes will catch them. The paraphrase is your safety net: if you lose a word on stage, the meaning is what gets you back to the right one. The same habit is the core of our guide to learning lines in a second language.

Use the meter as a spell-checker

Most of Shakespeare’s verse is iambic pentameter: ten syllables in five beats, each beat going da-DUM. Many lines bend the pattern. “To be, or not to be: that is the question” has an eleventh, unstressed syllable at the end, which Wikipedia’s guide to the meter uses as its example of a feminine ending.

For performance, the meter is a set of acting clues. For memorizing, it does something simpler: it tells you when you got a line wrong. Say “Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer” and you’ve added a syllable; the line stumbles. Say “the slings and arrows of bad fortune” and it comes up short. Your ear notices before your brain does.

So learn verse out loud, in rhythm, from the start. Tap the beat on a table the first few times you say a speech. Once the rhythm is in your body, every wrong word feels like a missed step on a staircase. A modern actor running prose lines has no such alarm.

Hang each line on its last word

John Barton, a founding member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, counted “aim for the full stop” among his priorities, which the RSC’s Gregory Doran recorded under the heading “How to make an audience listen.” In practice that means carrying each thought to its end instead of fading. Here is a memory tip of our own that builds on the same idea: the last word of each verse line makes a strong anchor.

Try this with any speech. Say only the last word of each line, in order. For Hamlet’s opening that’s:

• question, suffer, fortune, troubles, sleep.

Those five words are the skeleton of the argument: the question, enduring, bad luck, a sea of troubles, death as sleep. Learn the skeleton first, then fill each line in from its anchor. When you go blank mid-speech, the next line’s end word can bring the line back.

For the next pass, test yourself from first letters. Hamlet’s second line becomes:

W ’t n i t m t s

That is “Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer,” with only the first letter of each word kept.

Too little to read, just enough to jog the exact words. You can turn a whole speech into first letters with our free first-letter tool.

Let antithesis and rhyme carry you

Another of Barton’s priorities on Doran’s list is “go for the antithesis.” Antithesis is one idea set against its opposite, and Shakespeare’s characters think in pairs. For memory, a pair is a gift: once you have one half, the other half is half-remembered already.

Viola’s ring speech in Twelfth Night is full of them. “Alas, our frailty is the cause, not we!” sets frailty against “we.” Near the end comes “O time! thou must untangle this, not I;” time against herself. Mark every pair in your part, and learn them as pairs. If you can say what is being set against what, you won’t lose the line.

Rhyme helps too, and sometimes it crosses from one character to another. When Romeo and Juliet first meet, their dialogue is a shared sonnet. Romeo’s “hand” rhymes with his own “stand” two lines on, and “this” with “kiss.” Then Juliet answers with her own quatrain, and the couplet that ends the sonnet is split between them: her line ends on “sake,” and his answer rhymes it with “take.” Find the rhymes in your scenes. When the rhyme is yours, the other actor’s line has set it up for you.

If you are learning a whole speech for an audition rather than a role, our guide to performing Shakespeare monologues goes deeper into scansion, antithesis, and breath.

Learn your cues, not just your lines

A role is not a set of speeches. It’s a set of replies, and in Shakespeare the replies are often fast. Look at the moment just after the murder in Macbeth:

LADY MACBETH: I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.
Did not you speak?

MACBETH: When?

LADY MACBETH: Now.

MACBETH: As I descended?

LADY MACBETH: Ay.

Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2, in the public-domain Standard Ebooks text.

After her first line comes a run of questions and answers: ten words, split five ways. If either actor waits to “find” the next line, the scene dies. Play an exchange like this as one rhythm passed between two people.

So learn your cues with the same care as your lines. For every speech you have, know the last few words of the line before it. A cue script, which shows only your lines and the end of each cue, is a long-standing way to drill this, and our cue script maker builds one from any scene.

Give the prose scenes extra time

Not everything is verse. Hamlet’s advice to the players (“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue”) is prose. So is much of the dialogue of servants and clowns. Characters can also switch between the two inside a scene.

Prose is where Shakespeare gets hard to memorize, because the alarm is gone. A wrong word doesn’t break a rhythm, so paraphrase creeps in and nobody notices for a week. Give prose passages more test rounds than verse, and check them against the page more often. Long prose speeches are also where your paraphrase notes earn their keep: learn them thought by thought, not line by line.

Before you start, agree on the edition. The punctuation in a modern text is largely the editor’s: the Folger edition of Twelfth Night, for instance, says its editors modernized the punctuation and spelling of the 1623 First Folio text. Editions differ in small words too. Any edition is fine for practice, but for the show, learn from the script your director hands out.

Test yourself; don’t reread

Rereading a speech feels productive. It isn’t, much. In Roediger and Karpicke’s 2006 study of students learning prose passages, a group that practiced recall remembered 61% a week later, against 40% for a group that reread. The rereaders had read the passage about 14 times, against about 3 for the recall group, and still felt more confident. The study is in Psychological Science.

For lines, recall means: cover the line, say it out loud, then check. Every time you check and find a slip, you’ve learned something. Move around while you do it, too; the Noices found that lines learned with a fitting movement were remembered more readily.

A three-week plan for a Shakespeare role looks like this:

1. Week 1: Read the whole play. Paraphrase every speech you have, and look up every word. Mark verse and prose in your part, and mark the antitheses and rhymes.
2. Week 1, later: Learn the end words of each verse line, then fill in from first letters, one scene at a time.
3. Week 2: Learn your cues. Test every scene from memory each day, with the oldest scenes first.
4. Week 3: Run whole scenes with someone, or something, reading the other parts. Give prose passages an extra round. Check against the page for small words.

Running scenes when nobody’s free to read

The last week is about cues, and cues need another voice. A castmate or friend is ideal. When nobody is free, Offbook can read the other parts: upload the scene, pick your role, and realistic voices read every other character while it listens and plays the next cue when you finish your line. You can hide your own lines or switch them to first-letter cues for the testing rounds, and a full-length play fits.

It lets you drill coming in on each cue in exchanges like the one in Macbeth, instead of finding your line in your own time. Rehearse on your laptop with the full script on a big screen, and listen to your scenes on your phone anywhere. For practice material, our library of public-domain plays and monologue collection include Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, and Romeo and Juliet.

Questions actors ask

Is Shakespeare harder to memorize than a modern play?

It’s harder to understand at first and easier to check once you do. The verse often tells you when a word is wrong, which modern prose doesn’t. Budget extra time for paraphrasing and for any prose scenes.

Does iambic pentameter really help memorization?

It helps you catch mistakes, because a wrong word often changes the syllable count or the stress. It won’t catch a swap of two words with the same shape, and research on verse and memory is limited, so don’t expect the meter to learn the lines for you. Use it as a check while you test yourself.

Do I have to be word-perfect in Shakespeare?

Almost always; most directors expect it. Paraphrase that might pass in a modern play is often easy to hear in verse, because the line stops scanning. Directors and scene partners will notice, and your cues to other actors may change.

Should I learn the First Folio punctuation?

Only if your director works from it. Learn the edition the production uses. Folio punctuation can be an interesting rehearsal exploration, but editions differ and your cues need to match your castmates’ scripts.