# How to Paraphrase a Shakespeare Speech (and Get Back to Every Word) > Your teacher wants your monologue in your own words by Thursday. Why acting teachers assign it, how to write a close paraphrase instead of a summary, a worked example on Helena's speech from All's Well That Ends Well, the Shakespeare Sandwich, and how to climb back to the exact words afterward. - URL: https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-paraphrase-shakespeare - Published: 2026-11-03 - Last updated: 2026-11-03 The assignment sounds easy. "Bring in your monologue in your own words." Then you sit down with the speech, and line three won't come apart. You know roughly what it's about. You could summarize it in a sentence. But writing it out, thought by thought, in words you would actually say, turns out to be the hardest homework of the week. That's the point of it. A paraphrase shows you, line by line, where you think you understand the speech and don't. Done well, it gives you the character's argument in your own voice, and that argument is what holds the words in place once you learn them. The short version: pick your edition and look up every word you're unsure of. Write a close paraphrase, nearly word for word, not a summary. Keep every thought, and keep it as text, not subtext. Say it out loud, alternating your version with Shakespeare's. Then put your version away and learn the original, using the places where your words differed from his as your checklist. Below, we walk one real speech through every step. ## Why acting teachers make you paraphrase It isn't a classroom-only trick. Krista Apple, an associate professor of acting, writes in a [Theatre for a New Audience teaching handout](https://tfana.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Exploring-Shakespeares-Language_-Paraphrase-Translation-as-Learning-Tools.pdf) that professional actors put Shakespeare into their own words as part of rehearsal. Her list of what the exercise does is a good summary of why teachers assign it: it slows your reading down, untangles sentences where the verb comes before the subject, surfaces the important words, and shows the throughline of the character's thought. Rehearsal rooms do it too. For Gregory Doran's *Hamlet*, a [PBS Great Performances page](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/hamlet-media-for-the-polonius-family-activity/966) describes how, in the first weeks, each scene was done twice: first read aloud from the text and discussed for meaning, then paraphrased by the actors in their own words to see what they would discover. There is a memory reason as well. Researchers Helga and Tony Noice found that actors learn by working out what the words mean and what the character wants: breaking a script into beats or intentions, and playing that meaning to another person, which they call "active experiencing" (the [APS Observer summarizes their research](https://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/to-be-or-or-um-line)). A paraphrase is that meaning, written down where you can check it. ## Before you write: the edition and the words Start by fixing your text. Different editions of the same play disagree on punctuation and sometimes on words, and you want to paraphrase the version you'll perform. If your class or production uses a particular edition, use that one. If you're choosing, any good edition with notes will do for the exercise. Then look up every word you're not sure of, and especially the ones you think you know. Shakespeare's familiar-looking words often meant something else, and those are the ones a paraphrase gets wrong without noticing. Read the notes in your edition, and if a line still won't come clear, read the notes in a second edition. Write your glosses in the margin before you start the paraphrase, not during it. Finally, read the whole scene, or better, the whole play. You can't paraphrase a speech correctly if you don't know who the character is talking about, what just happened, and what they want next. A speech that reads as despair in isolation can be a plan when you know the plot. ## Write it close, not short The most common mistake is a summary. A Holy Cross teaching guide by Edward Isser asks students to retype a whole [soliloquy in their own words](https://college.holycross.edu/projects/isp/measure/teachguide/teach_soliloquy.html), swapping words on "practically a one-to-one basis," and warns against "glib, reductive paraphrases" that shrink a line to a phrase. Apple's handout gives the perfect bad example: "He's a big statue" is not a paraphrase of "Why man, he doth bestride the world like a Colossus." A close paraphrase follows four rules: - **Keep every thought.** If Shakespeare says three things, your version says three things, in the same order. Don't merge two images into one. - **Untangle the grammar.** Put the subject before the verb and spell out what each "it," "which," and "that" refers to. This is where you find out who is doing what. - **Say what the line says, not what it means underneath.** Apple's handout puts it plainly: don't confuse paraphrase with subtext. The character's hidden motive belongs in your notes, not your paraphrase. - **Forget the verse.** Your version doesn't need to scan or rhyme, and a thought that runs across two lines can be one sentence. Seeing where the sentences really end is one of the things the exercise teaches. Write it in the voice you'd use with a friend, not the voice of a study guide. "It is upon us to take action" is still study-guide English. "It's on us" is a paraphrase. ## A worked example: Helena's "Our remedies" Here is the speech that ends the first scene of [*All's Well That Ends Well*](https://www.offbook.com/plays/alls-well-that-ends-well). Helena, a dead doctor's daughter, loves Bertram, the young Count of Roussillon, far above her in rank, and he has just left for the king's court. Earlier in the scene she was hopeless. Now, alone, she talks herself into acting. > Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, > Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky > Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull > Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull. > What power is it which mounts my love so high, > That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye? > The mightiest space in fortune nature brings > To join like likes, and kiss like native things. > Impossible be strange attempts to those > That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose > What hath been cannot be. Who ever strove > To show her merit that did miss her love? > The king’s disease,—my project may deceive me, > But my intents are fix’d, and will not leave me. *William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well, Act 1, Scene 1, from the public-domain [Project Gutenberg text](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1529).* Take it one thought at a time, not one line at a time. Here's a close paraphrase, with the original thought first and our version after it: 1. *Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, / Which we ascribe to heaven:* The cures we give heaven credit for are often inside us. 2. *the fated sky / Gives us free scope; only doth backward pull / Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.* The stars that are supposed to decide our fate give us room to act. They only hold our plans back when we're too slow and sluggish to carry them out. 3. *What power is it which mounts my love so high, / That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?* So what is it that sends my love so high, lets me see the man I want, and won't let me have him? 4. *The mightiest space in fortune nature brings / To join like likes, and kiss like native things.* Nature can take two people with the widest gap in rank between them and bring them together as equals, like things born to belong together. 5. *Impossible be strange attempts to those / That weigh their pains in sense, and do suppose / What hath been cannot be.* Bold, unusual attempts are impossible only for people who measure every effort by common sense and assume what has happened before can't happen again. 6. *Who ever strove / To show her merit that did miss her love?* Name one woman who worked to show what she was worth and still lost the man she loved. 7. *The king’s disease,—my project may deceive me, / But my intents are fix’d, and will not leave me.* The king's illness. My plan might fail me, but my mind is made up, and it won't let me go. Notice what writing it out reveals. "Ascribe to heaven" and "the fated sky" are the same idea, so the first four lines are an argument with fate, not a prayer. Thought 4 is the hardest line in the speech, and you can't fake it: until you know that "space" means a distance in fortune, the line is just pretty sounds. And the dash in the second-to-last line is where the plan arrives. In the plot, her father left her his cures, and the king is dying of an illness his doctors have given up on. Notice the edition point, too. The Gutenberg text and the [Folger edition](https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/alls-well-that-ends-well/read/1/1/) both print "To show her merit." The public-domain [Standard Ebooks text](https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/william-shakespeare/alls-well-that-ends-well) prints "So show her merit," with a comma after it. The paraphrase barely changes, but the line you learn does, which is why you fix the edition first. If you want a scene-by-scene guide and glossary for this speech, our [monologue page for "Our remedies"](https://www.offbook.com/monologues/our-remedies-oft-in-ourselves-do-lie) has both. ## Say it out loud: the Shakespeare Sandwich A paraphrase on paper is half the exercise. The other half is speaking it, because saying a line in your own words shows you where the stress falls and what the line is for. Apple's handout calls the next step the "Shakespeare Sandwich": say Shakespeare's phrase, then your translation of it, then Shakespeare's phrase again. For Helena it sounds like this: > Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie. The cures we give heaven credit for are often inside us. Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie. Do it for every thought in the speech, slowly. The third time through a phrase, the original usually sounds less like a recitation and more like something a person would say, because you've just said it as a person. Apple's handout notes the translation can help you find useful intonation and word emphasis. If a phrase still sounds like a recitation on the third pass, your paraphrase for it is probably too loose. Go back and make it closer. If your class performs paraphrases, play the paraphrase as fully as you'd play the speech. Talk to someone. Want something. A paraphrase delivered like a book report teaches you nothing about the scene. ## Getting back to the exact words Here's the catch. Once you've written a good paraphrase, you have two versions of the speech in your head, and only one of them is the one you'll perform. In Jacqueline Sachs's classic [1967 study of memory for passages](https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03208784), listeners noticed changes to a sentence's wording only briefly, while they went on noticing changes to its meaning. Memory, left to itself, keeps the gist and lets the exact form go. That means the paraphrase is scaffolding. Use it to build the speech, then take it down. Our guide to [how to stop paraphrasing lines](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-stop-paraphrasing-lines) covers word-perfect drills in depth; for a Shakespeare speech, these steps do most of the work: 1. Put your paraphrase away once you understand every thought. Don't read it again while learning. 2. Make a list of the words you replaced: "remedies," "ascribe," "scope," "designs," "dull," "mounts." These are the words most at risk, because your version sits right next to each one in memory. 3. Learn the speech out loud in rhythm, so a wrong word breaks the meter. "Our cures oft in ourselves do lie" comes up two syllables short. 4. Use the rhymes as a check. This speech is all couplets, so if a line doesn't rhyme with its partner (lie/sky, pull/dull, high/eye), you've changed a word. 5. Test from first letters. Line one becomes *O r o i o d l*, too little to read but enough to pin the exact words. Our [free first-letter tool](https://www.offbook.com/tools/first-letter-memorizer) turns any speech into first letters. 6. Check against your edition every day, word by word, until a week goes by without a change. Offbook helps with the last two. Upload your speech or scene, hide your lines or switch them to first-letter cues, and say the speech from memory while it listens. Set line detection to Strict so it listens for lines that stay close to the script, so it is less forgiving of your own wording creeping back in. The video below shows how hiding your lines works. Video: [Hide your lines](https://www.offbook.com/learn/hide-your-lines) (1:07) For the rest of the process, verse, meter, cues, and a three-week plan for a whole role, see our guide on [how to memorize Shakespeare](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-memorize-shakespeare). If the speech is for an audition, [performing Shakespeare monologues](https://www.offbook.com/blog/how-to-perform-shakespeare-monologues) covers what comes after the words are learned, and our [Shakespeare monologue collection](https://www.offbook.com/monologues/shakespeare) has more speeches to try the exercise on. ## Questions actors ask ### Should I paraphrase Shakespeare before memorizing it? Yes, before and not instead. Understand every thought first, then learn the original words. If you start memorizing a line you don't understand, you're learning sounds, and sounds fall apart under nerves. Just don't keep rereading your paraphrase once you start learning the speech. ### Can I use a modern translation instead of writing my own? A modern-English edition can help you check your reading, but don't let it replace the exercise. Apple's handout points out that writing the translation yourself slows your reading down and encourages close analysis, and that's where the understanding comes from. Write yours first, then compare. ### How long should my paraphrase be? About as long as the speech, sometimes a little longer. If your version is much shorter than the original, you're summarizing. Every thought in Shakespeare's version should have its own sentence or clause in yours. ### Do I paraphrase prose speeches too? Yes, and they need it more. Prose has no meter or rhyme to warn you when a word slips, so the understanding you build in the paraphrase, plus extra checks against the page, is what keeps the exact words in place. ### My teacher wants us to perform the paraphrase. How do I make it work? Play it as a person talking, not a student reporting. Keep your character's situation, the person you're talking to, and what you want from them. The paraphrase should sound like something you'd say today, so let it be casual where the thought is casual.