Shakespeare's Sonnets & Famous Speeches

You don’t need to have read Shakespeare before. You don’t need to have liked him in school. You don’t need to remember anything about him at all.

What you need is a willingness to listen — to let a line of language from four centuries ago land in your ear and do something unexpected. Shakespeare wrote about desire, grief, jealousy, doubt, the fear of dying, the surprise of beauty, and the strange comfort of friendship. He wrote about all of it brilliantly, in forms short enough to hold in one hand. That’s what we’ll read.

Each week we read one sonnet and one famous speech. Fifteen minutes of text, total. The other seventy-five minutes belong to us — to the conversation, the questions, the moments of recognition.

Come as you are. Bring your curiosity. Leave everything else at the door.

My name is James Mulhern. I’ve spent decades in classrooms — at universities, at Oxford, in seminar rooms with graduate students and in living rooms with retirees. And I can tell you with confidence: the most alive conversations I’ve ever had about Shakespeare have happened with people who came in nervous, who thought they “weren’t literary,” who almost didn’t show up.

Shakespeare doesn’t require credentials. He requires attention. And he rewards it in ways that keep surprising me, every single time.

This course is my invitation to you to find that out for yourself.

This is a free, non-graded, sixteen-week reading group for adult residents of 2601. Each week we will read one Shakespeare sonnet and one famous speech or soliloquy — short, self-contained texts that stand completely on their own. You will never feel lost because you missed a previous week. Every session begins fresh.

We will:

• Read aloud in the room together, taking turns with parts and lines
• Pause on the language and actually listen to what it does
• Use plain-English summaries freely and without apology
• Talk about what moves us, confuses us, or catches us off guard
• Connect what we read to the things we already know about love, doubt, time, and loss

All texts are freely available online. Nothing to buy, nothing to print unless you want to.

• Not a lecture course. I will offer context and background, but this is a conversation, not a classroom.
• Not graded. There are no quizzes, no essays, no tests, no grades. Not ever.
• Not a full-play reading course. We will not read any complete play. Every text we encounter is self-contained — a sonnet you can hold in fourteen lines, a speech you can read in three minutes.
• Not a memorization exercise. You will never be asked to memorize a single line.
• Not a decoding session. We won’t labor over every archaic word. We’ll read aloud, let the rhythm do its work, and clarify what we need to as we go.
• Not intimidating. If it starts to feel that way, say so. That is on me to fix.

1. I will never make you feel foolish for asking a question. Every question about Shakespeare is a good question.
2. Before we read any text, I will give a plain-English summary of what it is and where it comes from. No one starts behind.
3. I will pause on the famous lines. We will not rush past “To be, or not to be” as if it were a transition sentence.
4. I will keep us on time. Sessions begin and end at 90 minutes.
5. If you miss a week, you can return the next week without penalty or awkwardness. Each session stands alone.

1. Read the week’s texts before class if you can — but if you can’t, come anyway. We read everything aloud together.
2. Be willing to take a turn reading a few lines when invited. No performance required. Just your voice.
3. Bring your questions, especially the ones that feel too basic.
4. Extend the same patience to other readers that you hope they’ll extend to you.

Each 90-minute session follows a consistent, unhurried structure:

• 0:00–0:10 — Welcome; brief recap of last week (or, for newcomers, a one-sentence orient)
• 0:10–0:20 — Plain-English introduction to the week’s sonnet and speech: where each comes from, who speaks, what situation prompted it
• 0:20–0:50 — Read-aloud: the sonnet first (usually read twice — once by one voice, once shared), then the speech with assigned parts; pause often
• 0:50–1:15 — Guided discussion using the week’s questions; the conversation goes where it wants
• 1:15–1:25 — Closing reflection; optional writing prompt shared aloud; preview of next week
• 1:25–1:30 — Informal conversation; no one has to leave

You will never be tested on these. They are here as a reference — useful shorthand when we want to name what Shakespeare is doing on the page.

Sonnet — A fourteen-line poem, almost always in iambic pentameter. Shakespeare wrote 154 of them. The English (or Shakespearean) sonnet divides into three quatrains and a closing couplet: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The argument usually builds through the quatrains and pivots or resolves at the couplet.

Quatrain — A four-line unit of poetry. In a Shakespearean sonnet, each of the three quatrains typically develops one aspect of the poem’s argument. Tracking the three quatrains is the simplest way to follow the logic of a sonnet.

Volta — The Italian word for “turn.” The pivot point in a sonnet where the argument shifts direction — often a surprise, a reversal, or a deepening. In a Shakespearean sonnet it usually arrives at line 9 (the beginning of the third quatrain) or line 13 (the closing couplet). When you notice something changing in a sonnet, that’s the volta.

Couplet — Two consecutive rhyming lines. In a Shakespearean sonnet, the final two lines form a couplet that often delivers the poem’s conclusion, paradox, or twist. Some couplets feel like neat resolutions; others feel deliberately unsatisfying — which is itself an artistic choice.

Iambic pentameter — A line of ten syllables following a weak-STRONG rhythm (da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM). It’s the rhythm of a heartbeat, and also the natural rhythm of spoken English — which is part of why it feels both formal and human when read aloud. Shakespeare breaks the meter regularly for effect; a line that doesn’t fit usually means something.

Blank verse — Unrhymed iambic pentameter. The standard form for the speeches and soliloquies in Shakespeare’s plays. It has the structure of poetry without the insistence of rhyme, which allows it to feel more like elevated speech than song.

Soliloquy — A speech delivered alone on stage, directly to the audience. The character is thinking in public — sharing their true inner state, uncensored by social obligation. “To be, or not to be,” “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,” and “Come, you spirits” are all soliloquies. They are Shakespeare’s way of granting access to a character’s interior life.

Aside — A brief remark spoken to the audience that other characters on stage cannot hear (by theatrical convention). Unlike a soliloquy, an aside happens in the middle of a scene — a private disclosure while the social action continues around it. Iago’s asides are among the most disturbing in Shakespeare; he tells us exactly what he is doing.

Dramatic irony — When the audience knows something that a character on stage does not. It generates dread, pity, or dark comedy depending on context. When Othello declares his trust in Iago while the audience already knows Iago is manipulating him, every word of trust becomes painful.

Foil — A character whose qualities contrast with another’s, making each one’s characteristics more visible. Hamlet and Horatio are foils — one consumed by doubt, the other steadily rational. Romeo and Benvolio are foils in matters of love. The contrast sharpens what we see in each.

Pun / Wordplay — Shakespeare’s texts are dense with puns, many invisible without a footnote. He often uses puns at moments of highest tension — comedy and tragedy occupying the same word at the same moment. In the speeches we read, a phrase that seems to carry a second meaning almost always does; the pleasure is in noticing it.

Prose vs. verse in Shakespeare — Shakespeare’s noble and educated characters generally speak in verse (iambic pentameter); common people and comic characters often speak in prose. But the switch is deliberate: when a high-status character drops into prose, it signals intimacy, disorder, or psychological unraveling. Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking speech — the most desperate moment of her arc — is in prose. Hamlet speaks prose to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, whom he does not trust.

An essay by James F. Mulhern

The most common complaint I hear from first-time Shakespeare readers is some version of this: “I can’t understand what he’s saying.” And I always give the same answer: you’re reading it wrong. Not because you aren’t smart enough — but because Shakespeare’s language was never meant to be read silently. It was written for the ear. It was written to be heard.

Here is the single most useful instruction I can give you: read the lines aloud, even before you understand them. Read them again. By the third time, you will understand more than you expected. The rhythm carries the meaning. The meter is a form of punctuation that tells you where to lean, where to pause, where to let the breath go.

Shakespeare writes in iambic pentameter — a line of ten syllables, five beats, following a weak-STRONG pattern: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. It is the rhythm of a resting heartbeat. It is also — and this is the remarkable thing — the natural rhythm of spoken English. Which is why, when you hear a trained actor speak Shakespeare well, it sounds neither stilted nor sing-songy. It sounds like something between speech and music — like heightened conversation.

When you encounter a word you don’t know, keep going. Don’t stop to look it up mid-read. Follow the rhythm and the syntax, the way you would in any unfamiliar language. The surrounding words will often carry you. Shakespeare’s vocabulary is large but not alien. Words that look archaic — wherefore, hath, dost, thee, thy — follow rules as regular as anything you already know. Thee and thou are simply the intimate second-person singular, the way the French use tu rather than vous. Once you understand that, an enormous amount of the supposed foreignness dissolves.

There are common misreadings worth knowing. Wherefore art thou Romeo? does not mean Where are you, Romeo? — an error so widespread it has become its own cultural joke. Wherefore means why. Juliet is asking why Romeo has to be a Montague — the very family her family despises. The entire tragedy turns on that question. One archaic word unlocks one of the most important lines in Shakespeare. This is what happens, again and again, when you get past the surface.

Let punctuation guide you, not line breaks. A line that ends mid-sentence is not a pause. Follow the sentence to its period or semicolon exactly as you would in prose — the thought continues until the grammar completes. Many people pause after every line of verse and lose the meaning entirely. Let the argument finish itself.

Pay attention to when the meter breaks. Shakespeare uses iambic pentameter as a baseline and departs from it deliberately — for grief, emphasis, violence, irony. A line with nine syllables often has a weighted silence at the end. A line that runs long often means the speaker is losing control of their own speech. When you notice the rhythm faltering, something is happening.

Trust the famous speeches. The texts we call famous — “To be, or not to be,” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” “Our revels now are ended” — are famous because they are genuinely extraordinary, not because of inertia. Reading them in the context we build together across this course, knowing something of the speaker and the moment, makes them different than they are on a motivational calendar. Better. Stranger. More unsettling.

Don’t resist emotion. You may not be able to explain precisely what “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep” means — not yet, not in full. But if you read it aloud, in a room with other people, you will feel it. The texture of those words does something. That feeling is not a lesser response than analysis; it is the beginning of understanding. Start there. The analysis will follow.

Shakespeare has been read for four hundred years because human beings keep finding themselves in his pages. They recognize their own jealousy in Othello, their own ambition in Macbeth, their own grief in Constance, their own exhaustion with life’s meaninglessness in Hamlet. None of those recognitions require a literature degree. They require only the willingness to sit with the language, to read it aloud, and to notice what it does to you. That is what we do here, together, week after week. And it is enough.

I am a Professor of English who has taught literature, writing, and Shakespeare at the university level for more than thirty years. I served as Department Chair and was a Writing Fellow at Oxford. I have led seminars for graduate students, senior scholars, corporate executives, and first-time readers in every context imaginable.

But what I care about more than any of those credentials is the moment — the specific, unmistakable moment — when someone who came in nervous encounters a line of Shakespeare and finds it true. Finds it immediate. Finds it about their own life. That moment happens every time I teach Shakespeare to a first-time reader. Every time, without exception. After thirty years, it still surprises me.

This course is for you — whether you live in this building and have always meant to read Shakespeare and never quite got there; whether you read him in school and found him cold; whether you’ve never opened a page; whether you loved him once and want that feeling back. You are exactly the right person for this course. There is no more qualified reader.

I look forward to reading with you.

All course readings are freely available online through public-domain sources. The Poetry Foundation, MIT Shakespeare, and Folger Digital Texts are all free to access without login or subscription.

This course is offered free of charge to residents of 2601, Philadelphia. No registration required beyond showing up.